Liberal Democracy Cannot Survive Undefended.

Since the advent of the neoliberal era, the reign of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, liberal democracy has been left to its own devices. The warning sign, the red flag, was the extinction of any meaningful vestige of progressivism from the body politic.

The last defender of liberal democracy we knew in Canada was Pierre Trudeau who bequeathed to us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that, coupled with a courageous Supreme Court, thwarted the worst undemocratic instincts of subsequent prime ministers notably Stephen Harper and even Justin Trudeau.

The decline of neoliberalism was marked by the evolution of a corporate media cartel, a wholesale shift in the balance between labour and capital, and the development of the corporate state whose leaders preferred to operate in the boardrooms rather than the livingrooms of the nation.

Harper may have dragged Canada's political centre far to the right but both the Liberals and the New Democrats followed complacently in his wake. The Liberals became 'conservative-lite' while the New Dems positioned themselves as 'latter-day liberals.' What Harper had wrought they chose not to undo. In the process the Liberal Party of Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau became untethered from the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. The New Democrats of Layton and Mulcair strayed from the party of Douglas, Lewis and Broadbent. In so doing all three parties pulled the rug out from under liberal democracy.

Across the political spectrum, liberal democracy flourishes in a smallish band located at the centre, neither hard right nor hard left. Picture in your mind a circle. At the very top you have totalitarianism. At the very bottom you have liberal democracy. As you move from the bottom, whether to the right or left, liberal democracy is gradually displaced by authoritarianism of the sort we're seeing in today's emerging nationalist/populist movements. Today we're heading mainly to the right, a path that sees democracy steadily displaced by plutocracy and then oligarchy. Beyond that, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote of this movement in Europe and the United States. The article was titled, "Is the World Done with Liberal Democracy?" He makes the case that it is.

At the risk of inviting howls of scorn and derision, I mention today's column in The Globe by John Ibbitson, "Ontario has lost its political centre."

The political centre is collapsing in Ontario, polarizing between social democrats and populist conservatives. We thought it couldn’t happen here. It’s happening here. And it poses a grave threat to the Liberal Party, both provincially and federally.

No party has plans to balance the provincial budget, align new spending with available resources, seek practical, incremental change. For both parties, the centre is the enemy. 

Such a polarization between well-to-the-left and populist right challenges the electoral base of the federal Liberals. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be able to work with an NDP government, the PC’s plans to eliminate the carbon tax flies in the face of a core federal commitment to fight climate change.

Maybe a year and a half of Doug Ford would make Mr. Trudeau look good to Ontario voters. Or maybe things would become so toxic that polarization infects federal politics as well. 

Is the social democratic/populist conservative schism in Ontario permanent? That’s impossible to say. Had the PCs chosen a more conventional conservative as leader, had Ms. Wynne stepped aside when there was still a chance for the Liberals to renew the party, we might not be talking about schisms.

It seems odd to read Ibbitson lamenting developments that he and his kind have done so much to nurture and empower.

Here’s the big question: Would a Ford government enable the haters, even though he espouses no such hatred himself? Would the alt-right interpret a Premier Ford as carte blanche to demand an end to immigration, to target visible minorities, to proclaim that Ontario is Christian and white?

We’ll find out the answer if Mr. Ford wins. Ms. Horwath is determined to stop him. All we know for sure is that, at least in Ontario, at least for now, the centre no longer holds.

Ibbitson is beginning to sound much like the NYT's David Brooks' day-late laments about Donald Trump soiling of the Republican Party. A pox on them both.

Yet more disturbing is the notion of Justin Trudeau as the essential gatekeeper of liberal democracy in Canada. There's a huge difference between setting out to destroy liberal democracy and doing anything meaningful to defend it. Trudeau is no Stephen Harper but that doesn't mean that liberal democracy is safe in his hands.

My father planted in his young son's mind the reality that we didn't have a right or freedom that hadn't been paid for, often more than once, in blood. Over the years I came to understand that every right and freedom we hold has a greater value to those who might deprive us of it than we ever perceive it to be worth. Here we are.

A Fitting End to a Country Grown Too Old

Remember when North America was called the New World? Well, in some ways, it's rather old, very old. The United States boasts of being the world's oldest constitutional democracy and, even if that means brushing a few other nations such as Switzerland under the carpet, it clings to that claim.

These are, however, technicalities. The United States has not been a functioning democracy for a good many years. The gang that launched this enterprise, the Founding Fathers, weren't fond of democracy. (see Louise Isenberg's, "White Trash, the 400 Year Untold History of Class in America.") And it's not surprising that today's Ruling Fathers are following so closely in their footsteps.

In 2014 two American professors, Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Ben Page (Northwestern) published a paper entitled, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens." Their study, published by Princeton, revealed how America's Congress had fallen under the control of narrow, monied interests to the exclusion of the public interest. Congress no longer served the American people. It served the emerging oligarchy, the Donor Class. Democracy, at least liberal democracy, was over, extinguished.

Even senator Lindsey Graham recently exhorted his Republican colleagues to back the hopelessly corrupted tax bill by openly warning that if it failed, "the financial contributions will stop."  In other words, Congressional Republicans had taken the King's shilling, had grown dependent on these wealthy donors, and now must do their bidding. That is nothing less than a blatant confession of utter corruption.

In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote of how America was now broken, perhaps irreparably, by the Republican Party.

If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Trump is the culmination of a rancid corruption that goes back several years.  I can remember when then Republican House leader John Boehner strolled the floor of the house depositing white envelopes on the desks of his party's members. Inside were cheques from the tobacco industry and they arrived just as the House prepared to take up that year's tobacco subsidies.

Since Boehner's walk on the House floor we've had the US Supreme Court decision in Citizen's United, as fine a piece of corporatist corruption as perhaps any in America's history, and now the culmination of the America's transition to transactional government, the Republican tax bill.

In an act of sublime stupidity, Trump's Gullibillies believed they were voting to "drain the swamp." The stupid fools could not see they were instead electing a government of swamp creatures who would strip them of everything from their democracy to their health care and burden them with even more debt that they and their kids and grandkids will be left to shoulder. Fools, damned fools.

In today's Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli sees the same moral and intellectual perversion in the Republican tax gambit as in the GOP's policy on climate change.

The parallels between the Republican Party positions on taxes and climate change are striking. Both are morally appalling and reject the available evidence and expert opinion.

The Initiative on Global Markets’ panel of economic experts was recently asked about the Republican tax plan. Among the experts who took a position either way, there was a 96% consensus that the plan would not substantially grow the economy more than the status quo, and a 100% consensus that it would substantially increase the national debt.

...

Economists also agree that we should be paying down the debt when the economy is going strong. When the next recession inevitably strikes, governments need monetary flexibility to respond. That’s when it makes sense to run a deficit (for example, see the 2009 stimulus package, which helped pull the US out of the Great Recession and cost less than the Republican tax plan).

These Republican economic contradictions make no sense, but they’re familiar to those of us who follow climate change news. The only consistency in climate denial is in its contradictions – deniers claim global warming isn’t happening, but it’s a natural ocean cycle, and caused by the sun, and galactic cosmic rays, and Jupiter’s orbital cycles, and it’s really just a Chinese hoax, and in any case it’s not bad.

And the Gullibillies, fed a rich diet of lies, keep faith with the faithless. They're taking it up the arse and they don't even realize it.

A 2012 survey found that Americans who only watch Fox News are less informed than Americans who watch no news at all. At the time, 55% of Americans including 75% of Republicans reported watching Fox News. The network is powerful – a recent study found that Fox News might have enough influence to tip American elections – and on the whole it prioritizes ideological messaging over factual accuracy.

Trump’s attacks on the so-called “fake news” media have further eroded Republicans’ trust of news sources that lack a conservative bias. As David Roberts wrote for Vox:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening … the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem … “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”

Because so many conservatives rely on right-wing media sources for their news, it’s easy to misinform them through a constant stream of lies.

For example, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin promised that his department would produce an analysis showing that the tax cuts will pay for themselves. One economist in the department leaked to the New York Times that such an analysis doesn’t exist and Treasury staffers weren’t even asked to study the issue. It was a lie. Mnuchin also claimed the plan would only raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $1 million a year – the exact opposite of reality and another blatant lie. In fact, the entire Republican case for their tax plan was based on lies.

Similarly, climate denial is based on endless myths and misinformation – Skeptical Science has catalogued and debunked about 200 of them. And recent research showed that these myths are quite effective at misinforming their audience.

This brings to mind Kevin Phillips' 2005 book, "American Theocracy." In one chapter of the book, Phillips explores how previous global hegemons rose to dominance and then fell again.

...conductors of the orchestra of American hubris wave star-spangled batons and the chorus resounds: Washington rules, the world manufactures for the United States, and our current-account deficit reflects nothing more than global anxiety to invest in U.S. prosperity. Who knows, the Treasury may even be planning a statue of an American consumer supporting the world on his back.

However, if pride goeth before a fall, cocksureness about the manageability of U.S. public and private indebtedness may as well, given threats that range from debt crises to currency humiliation. Crippling indebtedness is like the ghost of leading world economic powers past, a familiar Shakespearean villain come to stalk the current hegemon.

...None of these hegemons [Holland, Spain and Britain] started with well-developed finance. They began with simpler vocations. Castile, the heart of Spain, was a culture of high-plateau wool growers and skilled soldiers who had spent centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula from Muslim emirs before conquistadores found gold and silver in Central and South America. The Dutch, as we have seen, had a unique talent for vocations having to do with ships, seas and winds. The English pioneered coal development and superseded the Dutch as masters of the seas. But after several generations of success in soldiering, seafaring, or manufacturing, these peoples, in their respective heydays, were drawn farther in the direction of globalism, financial services and capital management.

...Excluding the unusual case of Spain, the leading economic powers have followed an evolutionary progression: first, agriculture, fishing and the like, next commerce and industry, and finally finance. Several historians have elaborated this point. Brooks Adams contended that 'as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital.'

In 1908, ...Winston Churchill, then president of the British Board of Trade, vented a similar historical interpretation in finding 'the seed of imperial ruin and national decay' in 'the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor' and 'the swift increase of vulgar jobless luxury.'

...The word "rentier" - meaning a person living off unearned income - comes from the French, as do so many other words connected with money and plunder: financier, profiteer, buccaneer. Over the last four centuries, however, it was first Spain, then Holland and Great Britain, and now the United States that created the most notable rentier cultures. Each ultimately became vulnerable as a result.

...Because intermittent high debt ratios were so central to the evolution of each of the leading world economic powers, each became comfortable - too comfortable - with debt as a long-standing experience, practice, and tactic. Particular overconfidence was instilled by memories of how often previous debt problems had been surmounted, even at extreme levels (100 to 200 percent) of GDP or GNP.

...Understandable as this cockiness might be, history teaches a crucial distinction: nations could martial the necessary debt-defying high-wire walks and comebacks during their youth and early middle age, when their industries, exports, capitalizations, and animal spirits were vital and expansive, but they became less resilient in later years. During these periods, as their societies polarized and their arteries clogged with rentier and debt buildups, wars and financial crises stopped being manageable. Of course, clarity about this develops only in retrospect. However, even though war-related debt seems to have been part of each fatal endgame, the past leading world economic powers seem to have made another error en route. They did not pay enough attention to establishing or maintaining a vital manufacturing sector, thereby keeping a better international balance and a broader internal income distribution than financialization allowed."

This history was written, repeatedly, over several centuries. Phillips, a Republican stalwart, penned these passages in 2005. Here we are on the eve of 2018 with America staring down this very same gun barrel. The insanely stupid Gullibillies don't realize their predicament or that it's the Republicans' finger on the trigger.

America is Broken, Probably Beyond Repair

The sad fact that America's Congress is "bought and paid for" is well known. America has long lost any notion of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." It is instead government of the people by a few people acting for the benefit of a select, privileged and small segment of the people.

The corruption that is so rank within the House and Senate is something that the Republicans don't even bother to hide any more. The Republican tax reform law was a consummate act of political corruption. Even stalwart senator Lindsey Graham tweeted last month admitted that the "donor class" now gets what it has so richly paid for.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday became the latest Republican to admit the GOP is trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the rich to satisfy its wealthy donors, telling a journalist that if the party’s tax push fails, “the financial contributions will stop.”

Lindsey Graham says “the financial contributions will stop” if tax reform fails.

— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) November 9, 2017

David Sirota, reporter with the International Business Times, responded by noting that it is both “laudably honest for Graham to admit this” and “a repulsive glimpse of how politicians see so many public policies as private financial transactions between them and their donors.”

In today's New York Times, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein lament how the Republicans "broke Congress."

What is astounding, and still largely unappreciated, is the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause. If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

Even today, many people like to imagine that the damage has all been President Trump’s doing — that he took the Republican Party hostage. But the problem goes much deeper.
...

First, beginning in the 1990s, the Republicans strategically demonized Congress and government more broadly and flouted the norms of lawmaking, fueling a significant decline of trust in government that began well before the financial collapse in 2008, though it has sped up since. House Republicans showed their colors when they first blocked passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, despite the urgent pleas of their own president, George W. Bush, and the speaker of the House, John Boehner. The seeds of a (largely phony) populist reaction were planted.

Second, there was the “Obama effect.” When Mr. Bush became president, Democrats worked with him to enact sweeping education reform early on and provided the key votes to pass his top priority, tax cuts. With President Barack Obama, it was different. While many argued that the problem was that Mr. Obama failed to schmooze enough with Republicans in Congress, we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic. The Senate under the majority leader Mitch McConnell weaponized the filibuster to obstruct legislation, block judges and upend the policy process. The Obama effect had an ominous twist, an undercurrent of racism that was itself embodied in the “birther” movement led by Donald Trump.

Third, we have seen the impact of significant changes in the news media, which had a far greater importance on the right than on the left. The development of the modern conservative media echo chamber began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in the late 1980s and ramped up with the birth of Fox News. Matt Drudge, his protégé Andrew Breitbart and Breitbart’s successor Steve Bannon leveraged the power of the internet to espouse their far-right views. And with the advent of social media, we saw the emergence of a radical “alt-right” media ecosystem able to create its own “facts” and build an audience around hostility to the establishment, anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment. Nothing even close to comparable exists on the left.

Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.

This is a far cry from the aspirations of Republican presidential giants like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as legions of former Republican senators and representatives who identified critical roles for government and worked tirelessly to make them succeed. It’s an agenda bereft of any serious efforts to remedy the problems that trouble vast segments of the American public, including the disaffected voters who flocked to Mr. Trump.

The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy. A few Republican senators have spoken up, but occasional words have not been matched by any meaningful deeds. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.

The "Bought and Paid For" Tax Reform Bill

The menacing face of Congressional corruption is being exposed in the Republican's tax reform bill. They can't hide it any longer. They've stopped even trying to deny it. They're bought and paid for, have been for some years, and now they have to do their patrons' bidding.

Even Senator Lindsey Graham admits the Republicans are at a 'fish or cut bait' moment with their affluent owners.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday became the latest Republican to admit the GOP is trying to ram through massive tax cuts for the rich to satisfy its wealthy donors, telling a journalist that if the party’s tax push fails, “the financial contributions will stop.”

Lindsey Graham says “the financial contributions will stop” if tax reform fails.

— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) November 9, 2017

David Sirota, reporter with the International Business Times, responded by noting that it is both “laudably honest for Graham to admit this” and “a repulsive glimpse of how politicians see so many public policies as private financial transactions between them and their donors.”

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) has made a similar comment recently, complaining that his donors are pressuring him to pass tax cuts or “don’t ever call me again.”
Critics had the same response to Graham as they did to Collins: “Dude, you’re not supposed to actually admit that out loud.”


It’s nice to see Republicans in Congress looking out for the people who really matter: their wealthy donors. pic.twitter.com/BfS5TyaTGt

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 9, 2017


This is
(A) true
(B) an incredible thing for so many Republican lawmakers to say out loud this week. https://t.co/jTmHzYxyDA

— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) November 9, 2017


In a heroic effort to save the middle class, @GOP will pass #TrumpTaxScam because their wealthy donors will stop bankrolling their campaigns if they don’t. https://t.co/j3zIGb797Q

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) November 9, 2017


They keep saying the quiet part out loud https://t.co/VjJ4ohBsA7

— Sam Stein (@samstein) November 9, 2017


Republicans are literally out here warning each other that their big donors will stop writing checks if they don’t do their bidding. https://t.co/7kheh52bzA

— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) November 9, 2017

Will this ever sink in with Republican voters. These guys are saying, "We're on the take, we're on the pad, we're on the payroll and we're not working for the voting public. We're in service to the guy with the chequebook."

It's interesting that the decline and collapse of Rome and its empire were also marked by the rise of transactional democracy. If you were rich enough you could buy pretty much whatever you wanted from the Senate. Today, if you're rich enough, you get to buy pretty much what you want from the Congress of the United States of America. And one of the things those rich folks expect for their money is that tax reform bill that will see 80 per cent of the benefits flow to the top 1 per cent.

The GOP War on Working Class America

Freshmen GOP - 2010

Paul Krugman recently questioned the sanity of Congressional Republicans who, he contends, have inflicted such a level of dysfunctionality on the federal government as to leave America ungovernable.

Robert Reich, however, seems method in the madness of the "Party of No."

The real answer, I think, is they and their patrons want unemployment to remain high and job-growth to sputter. Why? Three reasons:

First, high unemployment keeps wages down. Workers who are worried about losing their jobs settle for whatever they can get — which is why hourly earnings keep dropping. The median wage is now 4 percent lower than it was at the start of the recovery. Low wages help boost corporate profits, thereby keeping the regressives’ corporate sponsors happy.

Second, high unemployment fuels the bull market on Wall Street. That’s because the Fed is committed to buying long-term bonds as long as unemployment remains high. This keeps bond yields low and pushes investors into equities — which helps boosts executive pay and Wall Street commissions, thereby keeping regressives’ financial sponsors happy.

Third, high unemployment keeps most Americans economically fearful and financially insecure. This sets them up to believe regressive lies — that their biggest worry should be that “big government” will tax away the little they have and give it to “undeserving” minorities; that they should support low taxes on corporations and wealthy “job creators;” and that new immigrants threaten their jobs. 

What Reich is claiming is that the House and Senate Republicans are waging a covert war on working class Americans, blue and white collar, - the masses - for the direct financial benefit of their richest of the rich patrons - the few.

Does Reich's take sound extreme to you?  Maybe you've got a better explanation for the insanity Krugman describes as a willful effort to render America ungovernable.

There's a coup underway in America, one that will oust democracy and install a fascist corporatism in its place.  Congressional Republicans are the spear carriers of the plotters and, so far at least, they appear to be winning.

For a deeper insight on the coup that has befallen America, read Paul Craig Roberts' "In the Grip of Tyranny."

Waging Class War is One Thing, Winning It Before the Other Side Knows About It is Everything

Bad news for working class America, white and blue collar - the class war they never really understood had been waged against them for the past three decades is over and they lost.

A team of researchers from the U.S. government and Brookings Institute pored over 350,000 tax returns from 1987 to 2009. The exercise led them to conclude that income inequality is not merely vast but, far worse, permanent.

"For total house-hold income, the large increase in inequality over our sample period was predominantly,though not entirely, permanent. For this broader income category, both the permanent and the transitory parts of the cross-sectional variance increased, but the permanent variance contributed the bulk of the increase in total." 

America's massive transfer of unearned wealth (the very thing those Tea Partiers are sure some socialist bastard is planning to spring on them the moment they drop their guard) has already happened while they were looking in the other direction, away from the sneak thieves.   The wealth they fear losing is already lost.   The future they fear will be denied is already foreclosed.   They have been manipulated, duped, bamboozled well enough and long enough not only to fix their fate but to seal it permanently and for generations to come.

That ugly flushing sound you hear is American democracy swirling down the drain, making way for the ascendant corporatist oligarchy, a term one of this blog's readers pointed out is now called "inverted totalitarianism."   You should follow the link and read the Wiki entry and then go on to the source material for, as America goes, too often does Canada follow.   Inverted totalitarianism is one of those systems that is rigid, authoritarian, and of course politically, economically and socially suppressive, the very thing that used to creep us out about the Nazis and Commies.  Welcome to the Precariat.   You're a member in good standing and they're already calling us "dangerous."

Living in Automated Times

We are steadily, inexorably it seems, leaving the world of manual labour.   Even the Chinese are beginning to turn to robotics to replace low-wage workers.  So, how do entire societies live when machines have taken their work?  An interesting problem that invites interesting solutions.

During the Industrial Revolution, working hours increased by 20% as factories replaced feasting. With our post-machine standard of living, we can afford to shed some of the Puritan guilt that has, for centuries, kept our noses to the grindstone.

Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poor countries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of available work go around. Economists call it "disguised unemployment".

If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of "spreading the work" that still has to be done by human labour.

If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.

And, make no mistake about it, we are on the cusp of a revolution in social thinking.  18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics - the forces that have been the template of our societies for generations - are rapidly losing their social utility.   They provide few answers for the real problems of the day and of tomorrow - climate change, resource depletion and overpopulation.   They can merely provide responses, not solutions, and, unfortunately, the time for mere responses is long past.

Our old institutions can't offer much beyond the sort of authoritarian oligarchy that is taking hold today and that can only progress to a sort of neo-feudalism leading to revolt and likely chaos.  The alternative is for a revolution in social thinking that leads to a new, orderly society that serves the many, not merely the few.

Sorry, kids, but we can't pretend we're still in the 80s any longer.

They Are Not Of Us

An interesting essay from George Monbiot today on the grooming of oligarchs and why, even though they govern in our name, they don't rule on our behalf.   They rule as they were born and raised to rule.   An excerpt.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France "did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots".

Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: "the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact, it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its frontbench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Ignatieff was clearly of this ruling caste.   He never demonstrated a real grasp of the country or our people.   Harper, despite his more middle-class upbringing and his fondness of hockey and cats, may not be a member by birth of the ruling caste but certainly shows himself its eager water-carrier and thereby may hope to earn his rightful place among them.   Such are the aspirations of those who govern a petro-state.

To the Big Picture, Does the White House Matter?

A substantial majority of Canadians want to see Barack Obama re-elected.  Why?

To be sure, the Republican offerings of late have been unpopular here and pretty much around the world, Israel perhaps excepted.  It could be that Ike was last truly popular conservative president of the United States on the world stage.

Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II - slim pickings at best.  Anyone believe that gang left the world a better place than they found it?  (Hint - if you do, seek help)

The other team put forward Kennedy, Johnson (don't undervalue his civil rights achievements), Carter, Clinton and Obama.  Of course they struck out often enough but, remember, you're comparing them against Team Republican.   Enough said.

The comparison plainly justifies Canadians' preference for Obama over the slash and burn Republican contender but does it really matter?  To my mind, that's a clear "no."

Why doesn't it matter?   Because we're using the wrong metrics, that's why.   We measure one side against the other and that's like choosing one dwarf over another in Olympic high-jumping.   You have to look at the bar first.   Only once you see what they have to clear can you get a real measure of the contenders.

It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.   It's not just what's going on in Washington.  It's a global problem.  It's a Canadian problem.

In the six decades of the post-war period, politics has atrophied and become the preserve of "baby step" technocrats.   They're tweakers at best.   They tinker with tax rates and trade arrangements and they sometimes launch small (or even large) indecisive wars that everyone quickly enough tries to forget.   They're stuck in economic, social and geopolitical models that often pre-date manned flight and are of increasingly marginal utility in a world of 7+ billion human beings en route to 9+ billion.

Liberals used to contend this this sort of technocratic backwardness was an affliction of Conservatives.   Liberals still like to think of themselves as progressives.   They're not.   Don't get smug, Dippers.  You're in the same boat.   You're not progressive if you still believe in a future of economic growth.   You're not progressive if you believe in a petro-economy.   You're not progressive, you're something else.   You're obsolete.

Progressives don't fixate on the dwarfs.   They study the bar and try to figure just how they might possibly clear it.   They know what's at stake if we don't clear that bar and they know that only progressivism can do it.

The bar has never been higher.  It has risen and risen and risen steadily over the past several decades but we didn't notice because, well before then, we stopped bothering to try to jump over it.  We were too busy tinkering, tweaking, and taking the measure of our equally diminutive rivals.   We adopted the baby step as our mode of conveyance.

The bar today represents all the challenges our civilization faces that will determine how mankind and how many of us get through this century.   The Big Three - global warming, overpopulation and the freshwater crisis - have to be met and mastered as best we can.  The dwarfs no longer get to set the agenda for us.   Their agenda can no longer be ours because it remains immersed in 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics.

Which brings us back to Obama versus Romney, the contest to determine who will be the mightiest dwarf on Earth.   In these presidential elections we delude ourselves that one of the candidates will soon chart a new course for his country, for the world.  It's a preposterous chimera, something last seen, albeit imperfectly, in the 40's.  Democracy has yielded to corporatism and oligarchy.   Of the vaunted three branches of government, at any given time, each seems mainly preoccupied with fettering rather than balancing the other two.

Does it matter whether we have a dysfunctional president Obama or a dysfunctional president Romney beset by an even more dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress and a shamelessly corporatist Supreme Court?   It is a plateau fit solely for dwarfs that will never clear the bar.

The challenges of the 21st century will not be met by political progression because the dwarf beast cannot evolve nearly fast enough for that.  The very nature of these challenges - rapidly growing in size and power, intractable, destructive - defies solution by our outmoded institutions locked in the past.

The last twenty years, the last ten in particular, have revealed that change in this 21st century will not be had from baby-steppers no longer capable of clearing the bar.   If there is any sign of life coming from today's political class it is the sound of shoveling as they dig in to try to preserve their privileged past. 

Soon enough today's youth and the generation that follows them will realize the party apparatus of Republicans and Democrats; Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats; is tightly integrated in a broken machine that itself has to be swept aside if they're to stand much chance.   And so they will. 

We give them no other choice.  We continue to advance an agenda tailored for dwarfs even as events rapidly overtake us.   Our agenda is to preserve our comforts from the past.   Their agenda, the one we quite wilfully ignore, is to survive into an increasingly unpredictable future.   You cannot reconcile the two.

Amerika Exposed

We can thank Chris Hedges and his colleagues for this. They had the guts to sue Obama and Panetta to challenge the constitutionality of the National Defence Authorization Act and, at least in the initial ruling, they beat the government. Hedges provides a look into today's America that we should all find dark and disturbing.  

We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned. 

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government’s claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won’t last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this. 

The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.

...This law was, after all, not about foreign terrorism.  It was about domestic dissent.  If the state could link Occupy and other legitimate protest movements with terrorist groups (US Day of Rage suffered such an attempt), then the provisions in the NDAA could, in a period of instability, be used to "disappear" U.S. citizens into military gulags, including the government's offshore penal colonies.  And once there, stripped of due process, detainees could be held until, in the language of the law, "the end of hostilities."  In an age of permanent war that would be a lifetime.


Human existence, as I witnessed in war, is precarious and often very short.   The battles that must be fought may never be won in our lifetime.  And there will always be new battles to define our struggle.  Resistance to tyranny and evil is never ending.  It is a way, rather, of defining our brief sojourn on the planet.  Revolt, as Albert Camus reminded us, is the only acceptable definition of the moral life.  Revolt, he wrote, is "a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity.  ...It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope.  That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.'"

I think Hedges' and Camus' beliefs speak well of the challenges that face us and, particularly, our children and grandchildren in this 21st century.   Institutions we have too often taken for granted, including our very democracy, are suffering as such things inevitably do when taken for granted for too long.   Our perceived indifference to our rights and our freedoms is seen, in some quiet corners, as licence to deprive us of them, opportunity to replace them with alternatives not of our own choosing, not in our interests.   This underlies the decline of democracy and the ascendance of oligarchy marked by the fierce suppression of the middle class and the relentless expansion of the gap between rich and poor.   It is the hallmark of the evolution of corporatism and the corporatist state.   What we believe to be our rights and freedoms and what is emerging in their place cannot co-exist.  It will fall to today's young people and their children in turn to either repel these advances or else submit to them.

The Goldman Technocrats Take the Throne in Europe

Did Goldman Sachs play a key role in Europe's fiscal meltdown and are Goldman Sachs alumni now moving into top positions in the most unstable Euro nations?  Apparently so.  This one's a true eye-opener.


"According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

"Draghi was Goldman Sachs International’s vice-chairman for Europe between 2002 and 2005, a position that put him in charge of the the “companies and sovereign” department, which shortly before his arrival, helped Greece to disguise the real nature of its books with a swap on its sovereign debt.

"Monti was an international adviser to Goldman Sachs from 2005 until his nomination to lead the Italian government. According to the bank, his mission was to provide advice "on European business and major public policy initiatives worldwide". As such, he was a "door opener" with a brief to defend Goldman’s interest in the corridors of power in Europe.


"The third man, Lucas Papademos, was the governor of the Greek central bank from 1994 to 2002. In this capacity, he played a role that has yet to be elucidated in the operation to mask debt on his country’s books, perpetrated with assistance from Goldman Sachs. And perhaps more importantly, the current chairman of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency, Petros Christodoulos, also worked as a trader for the bank in London.

:Two other heavyweight members of Goldman’s European network have also figured large in the euro crisis: Otmar Issing, a former member of the Bundesbank board of directors and a one-time chief economist of the European Central Bank, and Ireland’s Peter Sutherland, an administrator for Goldman Sachs International, who played a behind the scenes role in the Irish bailout."

"...In Europe, on the other hand, Goldman Sachs has worked to accumulate a capital of relationships. But unlike its competitors, the bank has no interest in retired diplomats, highly placed national and international civil servants, or even former prime ministers and ministers of finance. Goldman’s priority has been to target central bankers and former European commissioners.

"Its main goal is to legally collect information on initiatives in the near future and on the interest rates set by central banks. At the same time, Goldman likes its agents to remain discreet. That is why its loyal subjects prefer not to mention their filiation in interviews or in the course of official missions.

"These well-connected former employees simply have to talk about this and that secure in the knowledge that their prestige will inevitably be rewarded with outspoken frankness on the part of those in powerful positions. Put simply they are there to see "which way the wind is blowing," and thereafter to relay exclusive information to the bank’s trading rooms."

Just keep telling yourself that nothing's changed, the oligarchy hasn't taken over, they don't really hold the levers of power, we don't need protest movements like Occupy.

Der Spiegel Says the "O" Word

Spiegel Online has come right out and asked whether America has been transformed into a true oligarchy?

It's an perfectly legitimate question and the answer is plainly "yes."

"Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those fortunate enough to belong to the 1 percent, made up of the super-rich, stand on one side of the divide; the remaining 99 percent on the other. Even for a country that has always accepted opposite extremes as part of its identity, the chasm has simply grown too vast.

Those who succeed in the US are congratulated rather than berated. Resenting other people's wealth is viewed as supporting class struggle, which is something very frowned upon.

Still, statistics indicate that the growing disparity is genuinely overwhelming. In fact, the 400 wealthiest Americans now own more than the "lower" 150 million Americans put together.

Nearly two-thirds of net private assets are concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of Americans. In comparison, the upper 5 percent of Germany hold less than half of net assets. In 2009 alone, at the same time as the US was being convulsed by mass layoffs, the number of millionaires in the country skyrocketed.

Indeed, if you look at the reports it compiles on every country in the world, even the CIA has concluded that wealth disparity is greater in the US than in Tunisia or Egypt.

...The major economic expansion under President Ronald Reagan benefited only a few, and the problem only grew worse under George W. Bush.

At least since the beginning of the millennium, it has no longer been a simple matter of two societal extremes drifting further apart. Instead, the development is also accelerating. In the years of economic g.rowth between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of the income gains went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. Likewise, although the productivity of the US economy has increased considerably since the beginning of the millennium, most Americans haven't benefited from it, with average annual incomes falling by more than 10 percent, to $49,909 (€35,184).

...Indeed, as [political scientists Jacob] Hacker and [Paul] Pierson see it, the United States has developed into a "winner-take-all economy."

The political scientists analyzed statistics and studies concerning income development and other economic data from the last decades. They conclude that: "A generation ago, the United States was a recognizable, if somewhat more unequal, member of the cluster of affluent democracies known as mixed economies, where fast growth was widely shared. No more. Since around 1980, we have drifted away from that mixed-economy cluster, and traveled a considerable distance toward another: the capitalist oligarchies, like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, with their much greater concentration of economic bounty."

...Larry Bartels, one of America's leading political scientists, also believes America has entered a new Gilded Age. Bartels' 2008 book on the subject, "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age," has drawn a great deal of attention and even been quoted by President Barack Obama.


"The really dramatic economic gains over the past 30 years have been concentrated among the extremely rich," Bartels writes, "largely bypassing even the vast majority of ordinary rich people in the top 5 percent of income distribution." He doesn't see this fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth as having resulted from market forces or drastic events, such as the financial crisis. Instead, he believes they are "the result of policy choices." 

...recent research indicates that the economies of countries experiencing periods of pronounced inequality often show considerably less growth and more instability. On the other hand, it also finds that economies grow faster when income is more evenly distributed.

In a study published in September, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also concluded that: "The recent global economic crisis, with its roots in US financial markets, may have resulted, in part at least, from the increase in inequality" in the country.

...Differences between rich and poor are tolerated as long as the rags-to-riches story of the dishwasher-turned-millionaire remains theoretically possible. But studies show that increasing inequality and political control concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elite have drastically reduced economic mobility and that the US has long since fallen far behind Europe on this issue. Indeed, only 4 percent of less-well-off Americans ever successfully make the leap into the upper-middle class.

It is disgraceful - disgraceful and telling - that the Liberal Party has avoided tackling Canada's income inequality head on.   Between the inequality problem and the LPC's rank ambivalence to tackling climate change the party and its leadership just keep showing how far it has fallen since it was last fit to govern Canada.

An American Goes to Europe and Discovers America

An interesting item today from AlterNet via the Daily Kos.  It is written by an American ex pat living in Europe who had to travel abroad to see America as it really is.

 ...the British Guardian newspaper says that the so-called American middle class lifestyle for most people was fake and that was financed by three decades of a debt bubble which has now gone bust. The credit ride of working class folks living a middle class lifestyle is dead and gone. Is this article stating bluntly that it's over? The only remaining question is, will it ever come back? I mean, how long can people ride a wave of endless debt before the ride is over, all while pretending to be middle class? Is that what this British Guardian newspaper article is saying?

" In the midterm elections politicians have promised to " do something"  for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit. And it's over.

In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.

The writer then draws on this item from the International Business Times:

The nation that once gloated over its ability to feed the entire world is seeing an explosion of poverty: The number of people surviving on food stamps is rising as biting unemployment refuses to abate, personal incomes have been falling while the debt bubble is inflating with each passing day and, in a more startling representation of the grim reality, tent cities are mushrooming as more and more people are pushed out of their ‘underwater’ homes.

And this passage from The Daily Mail: 

A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.

Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as ‘food insecure’ which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat. Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.

The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.

This is an important article because it reveals not only the delusions so many Americans have of their own country and the world at large but also the smoldering social upheaval that is building across the United States.

A couple of years ago a friend and I rode our motorcycles along the coast down to southern California.  At one point we wound up in Monterey which is one very upscale town.  As we were enjoying dinner at a fine restaurant I saw my friend gazing at the splendour of the area.   I suggested that she soak it all up because she was looking at the very zenith of America for it was all built on borrowed money, debt.

The decline, some say near-extinction, of America's middle class is profoundly disturbing.   Yet this is the result of outsourcing industry by the elite, rentier class in search of short-term, maximized returns at the expense of their nation's long-term health and viability.

The middle class serves so many functions without which democracy itself falters.   A healthy, robust middle class spanning the range from the trades to the professions creates social cohesion, provides a buffer between the rich and poor, thwarts political extremism of all sorts and is the very ladder of merit-driven social advancement and the hope of the poor for a better life.  Destroy the middle class and you tear that ladder down.  Social mobility in the United States today is lower than it has been for a century or more.   Radical rightwing politics have taken hold.  Perverse ideologies are nurtured by a dissembling media.   The gap between the rich and the poor is burgeoning.   Social cohesion is dissolving as, one by one, the myths of prosperity are shattered.

With all the damage done it's very difficult to imagine a middle class restoration.  How do the powerless go about dismantling the super powerful oligarchy when the organs of the state have been put in harness to service of that elite?

Why the Right Hates Democracy

It's a "Made in America" disease but it could readily turn infectious and cross our own border.  It's the evolution of a powerful oligarchy within American politics.   Put simply, today's hyper-rich are flexing their fiscal muscles to subvert democracy and manipulate the Right's gullible supporters.   These saps are so stupid that they don't even realize they're being buggered.   They're fed a rich diet of fear, anger, indignation, even racism - engorged until they lose their ability to discern reality.   Let's face it, people who consider FOX a news agency rather than a propaganda service have lost their minds.   They've become insensate, automatons.   They're North America's North Koreans.
In yesterday's New York Times, Krugman cited the Politico observation that every contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 who isn't a sitting politician, with the exception of Mitt Romney, is on the FOX News payroll.   Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee and Santorum are all receiving FOX paycheques.   How nice, they're being fed by Rupert Murdoch.   When a competing news organization wants to interview one of them, they're told they first must ask FOX for permission.
Other notable oligarchs are the multi-billionaire Koch brothers and the descendants of Adolph Coors.  These types have a lot to gain by derailing action on climate change, dismembering environmental protection and skewing America's tax laws.   But the Koch boys only have but two votes and Murdoch can't even muster one so they need a cooperative Right and legions of really gullible, borderline moronic voters.
Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare
that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.
As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch
is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.

Think this could never happen in Canada?  Think again.  Read Nikiforuk's Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.  We're already exhibiting all of the signs of a true petro-state.   And don't for a minute think it's just the Conservatives who are in on it.   There are plenty of Tar Heads wearing the red jerseys on Parliament Hill.  They're the same bunch who consistently fail to stand up to Harper's despotic abuses of Canadian democracy.   They're the team who, perhaps unintentionally, contribute so much to Harper's political longevity.

Drawing a Clear Line In The Sand (or Snow)

At least when the Enron/Worldcom scams erupted, culprits were rounded up and sent packing to jail. The little people - folks like you and me - thought the Oligarchs had been taught their lesson about honesty and decency and social responsibility.

It seems the fiscal autocrats did learn a lesson but maybe it wasn't the one we wanted them to get. How many of the Wall Street titans who masterminded the greatest scam ever seen on this planet are under arrest? How many of these agents of the influence of affluence who were the toxic pushers of Asset-Backed Commercial Paper and Credit Default Swaps have been run out in disgrace, reduced to poverty? None. In the U.S., they were even able to find a bit of loose-change in the trillion-dollar taxpayer relief package to ensure they didn't have to forego their annual bonuses.

The Oligarchs who, for years, amassed enormous wealth from greed-driven activities plainly detrimental to their countries and to their societies, have achieved a level of economic power to rival, at times supercede, the power of democratic institutions to control their state. They can't take your vote, at least not yet, but they can undermine the power of your democratic franchise.

With Bush and his henchman Cheney in command, the Oligarchy embarked on a ruinous plan to cut taxes for the rich while spending America into abject, crippling penury. It wasn't just an effort to defund the federal government and force it to jettison social programmes they didn't like (as a lot of us so benignly thought at the time). It was a wholesale transfer of economic and political power from the blue and white collar working classes to the rentier class. Wealth steadily concentrated in the top few percent of Americans while the gap between rich and poor rapidly widened and middle class incomes stagnated as the government debt for which they would be held accountable skyrocketed. It was undeclared class warfare on multiple fronts waged by the agents of the Oligarchy who wangled their way into power by any means necessary.

Even as their reign is coming to an end, Bush and Cheney are furiously introducing regulations to damage America, its people and their environment. As Graydon Carter put it in the latest Vanity Fair:

"Bush and Cheney have been working feverishly to write as many as, by one count, 130 new regulations undermining federal laws protecting not just our environment but also our civil liberties and personal safety. And with the nation's attention ping-ponging between Obama-mania and Dow-phobia, the White House is hoping we won't notice. ...The New York Times and the Washington Post have been particularly diligent in shedding light on these final, grasping acts of an administration that can be described only as a widespread criminal conspiracy."

The time has come for a renewal of democracy and the democratic franchise. Part of that will come from burying Cowboy Capitalism in the deep, deep grave it deserves. Part of it will require paying a bit of respect to our democratic freedoms once again because if we don't defend our democracy and make it paramount, the Oligarchs will surely win.

Is Bush Just Reagan Without Restraints?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes the case that George W. Bush is little more than a reiteration of Ronald Reagan. He notes that Reagan could have been like Bush if he'd had the same advantages - control of both houses of Congress, no pesky rival superpower, and an event like 9/11 that traumatized the nation and allowed an enormouse power grab.

I sometimes think that the shroud of nationalistic myth has done more for Reagan than it ever did for George Washington. Americans positively revere Reagan and that takes a willingness to ignore an awful lot of his true record.

For a notional conservative, Reagan transformed the US in just two terms from what had been the world's largest creditor nation into the world's largest debtor nation. He genuinely served the rich and powerful at the direct expense of the middle and lower classes. It was Reagan who drew the line between America's "haves" and "have nots". He violated his nation's laws, trashed its constitution and supported terrorism in Central America, South America and Africa. Reagan's hands were sopping with innocent blood by the time he left office. That this man should be revered rather than despised is quite phenomenal.

The Reagan miracle was that he knew what sold. He made America appear powerful again and, to its people, he restored their self-image as dominant and tough. With that parlour trick, Reagan was able to get a blank cheque for policy.

To draw comparisons, Krugman cites a 1993 article in The American Prospect by Johathan Cohn in which the author, "...described how the Interior Department had been packed with opponents of environmental protection, who 'presided over a massive sell-off of federal lands to industry and developers' that 'deprived the department of several billion dollars in annual revenue.' Oil leases, anyone?

"Meanwhile, privatization had run amok, because 'the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.' Holy Halliburton!

"Not mentioned in Mr. Cohn’s article, but equally reminiscent of current events, was the state of the Justice Department under Ed Meese, a man who gives Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell serious competition for the title of worst attorney general ever. The politicization of Justice got so bad that in 1988 six senior officials, all Republicans, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.

"Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

"In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

"If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be 'loyal Bushies.'

"The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy."

Krugman shows that modern conservatism is indeed "movement conservatism" a far-right wing ideology stripped of any progressive tendencies. It is a movement that advances by dividing, by exploiting wedge issues. It confounds and deceives the center so that it can serve its real constituents on the far right. It strives not for democracy but for oligarchy.