When we think of what governments should legitimately do —- provide police and fire protection, build roads and lighthouses, defend borders —- the idea of sanctioning marriage immediately sticks out as an anomaly, all the more so for those who wish to keep government’s activities to a minimum.
…
Unlike religious bodies, however, governments need to tread cautiously. That fact is especially true in America, where religious and moral commitments are widely viewed as private matters. This is not a partisan claim: Conscientious members of both parties would surely reject the idea that we can use the state to foist our deeply held beliefs on our fellow citizens.
And yet, affirming through law the sanctity of heterosexual marriage does just that. In essence the state is anointing an “American way” of intimacy, and it is difficult to imagine how the real American way could be any more imperiled.
No, no, no. You don’t get it. Conservatives like to Claim they’re in favor of limited government, but as we’ve see for the past eight years, when they’re in power that’s not exactly the kind of government you get.
This isn’t rocket science. All it takes, is a little historical perspective. Conservatives started yap, yap, yapping about limited government, around the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. More to the point, around the time the hated Warren court started knocking down racial segregation laws.
That was when limited government gained their favor. When government was busy telling black people where they could and could not eat, where they could and could not live, what schools they could and could not get an education in, and who they could and could not marry, big, invasive, intrusive, all powerful government was just fine with them.
You look at the old guard today and what do you see? If they’re old enough, you usually see a segregationist. That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact. They’re the ones who fought tooth and nail against racial equality, and when Johnson signed the civil rights act, bolted in droves to the republican party. The young bloods of the movement grew up after those battles had been fought, so none of them have a history of standing in front of school house doors or ranting against race mixing. But scratch most of them and you’ll find the same pusillanimous attitudes toward race their philosophical fathers had. And the grass roots are still living back in the segregated fifties.
Isn’t it staringly obvious that if none of this were true, republican party conventions wouldn’t be so goddamned white? The joke at the last convention was that you only saw black people on the convention floor after the show was over and the clean-up crew came out. All this rhetoric about limited government came about, after the federal government stopped being their race cop, and started tearing down all the "whites only" signs. Then they suddenly saw the value of limited government. Or more specifically, government that was too weak to assure that the darkies could share in the American Dream too. When they say they want to get government off the people’s backs, what you have to understand is by ‘people’ they mean white people. Rich white people.
Ronald Reagan didn’t begin his campaign for the white house in the town where three civil rights workers were murdered, with a speech on "state’s rights" accidentally. And what Reagan began once he got into the white house, George Bush devoted himself to with gusto. George Bush Was the climax of the American conservative movement. The government he ushered in, of privilege, theocracy and cronyism, was Exactly the government they had dreamed of, ever since Earl Warren’s supreme court issued Brown v. Board of Education. It wasn’t what they’d advertised to the rest of the nation, but by the time Bush was ushered into power by enough conservative supreme court justices, they figured they had a racket going whereby they could mouth platitudes about limited government for the rubes, while dog whistling to the grass roots and that would keep them in power indefinitely. It was going to be Karl Rove’s permanent republican majority. The only problem was, the morons had eaten their own dog food about deregulation.
Deregulation was never about freeing up the potential of the marketplace. Like everything else about their limited government rhetoric, it was about getting government off the backs of the greedy so they could pillage to their heart’s content. The sense of divine retribution here, comes from seeing how thoroughly they’d bamboozled themselves into thinking it would actually work…that a marketplace with no rules would actually have a different outcome then an implosion of worthless paper, backed by even more worthless paper. The shock of seeing it all come crashing down in a whirlwind of fraud and deceit is pitifully real. They seem to have forgotten for a moment, that they’d set out to line their own pockets with other people’s retirement money, not grow an economy.
So…you’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives voted to write gay couples out of one state constitution after another are you? You’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives want to enshrine their religious and moral beliefs in the constitutions of every state in the union are you? Wise up.
Wise up.
The republican bubble popped last election day, because it was always hollow inside. They never wanted limited government. What they wanted was an America where they were king and the rest of us knew our place and how they liked their shoes shined. When government started treating all Americans equally, they set out to deliberately wreak it. Limited government was their hatchet, by which they meant to do that.
The Mormon Amendment To The California Constitution
The more people look at what happened in California, the more the vast scope of Mormon involvement in anti-gay politics, both in terms of money and organizational prowess, becomes known. In this article in Today’s New York Times, the bottom line is made perfectly clear: without the vigorous support of the Mormon church, Proposition 8 would have failed. The Mormon church wrote its will into the constitution of the state of California though lies and stealth, and lots and lots of money that its members were ordered to contribute…
As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.
“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”
…
Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.
The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.
Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.
But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead…
…
…the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”
To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little further explanation.
Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.
“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.
They lied through their teeth and they threw a torrent of hate and Mormon church money into it and they steamrollered over the rights of devoted loving couples so they could become gods in their own universe someday. And now they’re upset that people are taking the fight back to them.
Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”
And just what would you do, you gutter crawling bigot, if someone cut your ring finger off? Laugh it off? Shake the other guy’s hand? No you wouldn’t. But you expect us to roll over and play dead because we’re homosexuals and homosexuals don’t have feelings, and homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. There is no reason for us to be angry with you, because you didn’t take anything sacred away from us, because we don’t feel love the way you do, because we’re not human like you are. We’re Satan’s followers, and we don’t have human emotions like you Future Gods In Training do.
Fruit…did you say? Fuck you Ashton. I’ve got your fruit right here. You sow poison in the earth, you get poison back out of it. Now eat it. Or as another gay man, James Baldwin once said…
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
Baldwin wouldn’t have been allowed in one of your churches, even if he wasn’t gay, because according to your…prophets…black people were cursed by God and that’s why their skin is black. Your church has been elevating the cheapshit prejudices of its barstool prophets into holy writ for generations and now and a reckoning is long overdue. This isn’t your private universe, it’s the United States of America and it belongs to all of us, not just you White And Delightsome Gods In Waiting. The United States of America is not your private universe, and you are not gods, however highly you might think of yourselves. So fuck off.
If you think it’s only marriage they want to take from us, you are sadly mistaken. Note this exchange in the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, buried within a legal debate about monuments in public parks…
WASHINGTON — The hypothetical questions were flying at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, and that was not a good sign for Summum, a small church that wants to place a monument to the Seven Aphorisms of its faith near a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah.
The questioning suggested that the justices were finding it hard to identify a principle that would compel the city to accept the Summum monument without creating havoc in public parks around the nation.
The justices start tossing out various examples of what can and cannot be excluded…and then this comes up…
Would it be all right, Justice John Paul Stevens asked, for the government to exclude the names of gay soldiers from the Vietnam memorial?
This was rhetorical on Stevens’ part. Stevens is one of the sane justices on the bench. But its prime fascist jumped on it gleefully…
Mr. Joseffer had to be pressed to answer the question about excluding the names of gay soldiers. In the end, he said the First Amendment’s free speech clause, at least, places no limits on whom the government chooses to honor.
Justice Scalia agreed. “It seems to me the government could disfavor homosexuality,” he said, “just as it could disfavor abortion.”
This wasn’t even about homosexuality. This was just an aside from Scalia…nothing more. But dig it. If the government wants to exclude the names of gay soldiers, who gave their lives for their country, from the Vietnam memorial, that would be fine by Scalia. And never doubt it, this would also be fine with Roberts, Thomas and Alito.
There is no bottom here. There is absolutely no bottom here. You could say that gay people are to the religious right, as Jews were to the fascists…but that would be ignoring history. In fact, gay people died right alongside of Jews in the concentration camps. There were not as many of us, and it was harder to systematically round us up because gay is not an ethnicity. We have always been, and always will be a diaspora…many of us hidden from view. But we were just as hated back then, and clearly, sickeningly, frighteningly, we are just as hated by them now.
If the day ever came when these modern day fascists achieve enough power to do with us as they have always wanted to, it will be a race to the bottom of the human gutter, and there is no bottom.
Hundreds of people rallied outside a theatre in Sacramento today in support of the artistic director who resigned over his stand on Proposition 8.
After 25 years with California Musical Theatre, Scott Eckern, a BYU graduate and distinguished alumnus, has left his position as artistic director because of how he voted.
Ticket holders, donors and friends rallied outside the theatre supporting Eckern.
"Freedom should be respected, and they haven’t respected his freedom to do what he would with his funds," said supporter Jaynie Dufort.
Freedom? Like…freedom to marry? That freedom?
Look…it’s simple. You kick me in the face, I will not work with you. I will not shake your hand. I will not walk in your door. I will not patronize your business. I will not give you my hard earned money, just so you can take it and buy a knife to cut my ring finger off. Don’t kick me in the face one day lady, and then expect me to forget you did it the next.
"This is a witch-hunt," said Lance Christensen, who says he’s a regular patron of the theater and took off work to show his support for Eckern.
Witch hunt…did you say? Witch hunt? Like telling everyone that homosexuals are going to storm the schools and start recruiting everyone’s kids? That kind of witch hunt? Like telling everyone that their ministers will be thrown in jail if they don’t marry same sex couples? That kind of witch hunt? Witch hunts like this …?
The woman continued to poke at my face with her sign and call me "nasty." Genuinely disturbed by the complete lack of rational behavior I’d seen up to this point, wanting to look into her face and possibly connect on some level with her as a fellow human being, I pulled a corner of the sign down away from my eyes and asked "why are you calling me nasty?"
That’s when she attacked, clawing, grabbing and then shoving. I didn’t fight back; she was much bigger than me. Calling me a "nasty fucker" and threatening to kick my ass, she pried my phone out of my hand and tried to break it in half while her friends egged her on.
Please note that I never touched or threatened her in any way (unless you want to consider my pulling the edge of her sign out of eye-poking territory a threatening gesture).
As she grabbed at my phone, I stood there stunned, not really sure what to do. One of the counter-protesters (the woman who you see saying "No on Prop 8" towards the beginning of this clip) quickly intervened and calmed the attacking woman down enough that I felt safe enough to try to take my phone back. After a second or two of grappling, she let go and went back to screaming at cars from a lawn chair near the side of the road.
(Big love and gratitude to the kindly counter-protester who pleaded for calm. I don’t think my phone would have survived without you!)
I stood there for another minute or two, checking the phone’s applications for damage. One of the other sign-wavers, a teenage boy standing nearby, leaned over and whispered "fuck you, dyke."
Even though I wasn’t hurt besides a small scratch on my hand, and my phone was okay, being attacked definitely shook me up. I was a bit tearful. Call me naive, but I never thought I’d actually be in physical danger just for shooting footage of their activity and pulling the edge of a person’s sign out of my eyes. Verbal insults, sure. But attacked by an anti-gay activist? In one of the most queer-friendly neighborhoods in the bay area? Yikes.
The man holding the "Vote No" sign noticed that I was in tears and approached me. We hugged to a chorus of jeers, exchanged some reassuring words, and I turned to leave. Someone called after me: "keep crying, and keep walking."…
James Dobson dedicated his radio program today to explaining his sudden decision, which we mentioned earlier, to go to California this weekend to join Lou Engel, Tony Perkins and others for a massive "The Call" rally of prayer and fasting in the name of saving "traditional marriage."
In the clip below, Dobson has just explained that he received a letter from Rev. Jim Garlow, one of the leading organizers of the "yes on 8" movement pleading with Dobson to attend and, after reading it, felt God’s hand on his back telling him to attend "The Call." Dobson chokes up explaining that despite having been on the go for weeks and being exhausted, he knew God wanted him there. Dobson had to call his son to tell him he couldn’t babysit for his grandson this weekend as planned and his son Ryan then confirmed that God wanted him in California instead. Dobson could barely keep it together when he explained that "the Lord must be involved in this" and then hands over the program to Garlow, who also gets choked up and speaks of their level of spiritual desperation and their constant "crying out to God" to save California because they are "watching the destruction of Western civilization."
The destruction of Western civilization. The destruction of Western civilization. The destruction of Western civilization. You people spewed a torrent of venom on people whose only crime was being in love and wanting to get married, and now you’re complaining that we’re angry. Bullies always complain when their playthings start fighting back don’t they? It’s so…unfair. We’re supposed to just accept our station in life, as their punching bags.
I know…I know… We were supposed to just keep crying and keep walking, weren’t we? You didn’t think there would be any hard feelings the morning after, because homosexuals don’t have any feelings. We’re all so…flighty. We were supposed to just go back to cutting your hair, redecorating your homes and waiting on your tables. Fine. Hello…I’ll be your server tonight. My name is Fuck You.
No doubt we will be inundated by the religious right who will wax about evil intolerant gay folks but please spare us your usual twists in logic.
You are the same folks who boycotted McDonalds and Ford Auto because of their supposed support of the "gay agenda."
Nail. Hammer. Bang. And…Disney…and Kraft…and many others, especially sponsors of gay friendly TV shows. Every goddamned time some corporation steps forward as a friend to the gay community the gay haters are all over them threatening boycotts.
Fine. You don’t like our boycotts? Fuck You. You think our boycotts amount to religious persecution? Fuck You. You want us to respect your deeply held religious beliefs? Fuck You. Welcome to the morning after. I’ll be your server tonight. My name is Fuck You.
Via Atrios… I’m going to be like a damn broken record for the next couple of years telling people that their gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing all this for decades already. I just know it …
I used to have an idea of what a "good faith debate" was; that was in 1999. My general feeling now is that a liberal who says "fuck" a lot is one who got mugged by a conservative who pretended to be interested in a "good faith debate."
Now you know why this blog contains a lot of cursing.
I am going to insist here upon the grouchy perspective: I do not believe that there is any such thing as a "conservative intellectual," never mind one who is "thoughtful" or "sane." I contend that "conservatism" in its 21st century incarnation is nothing more or less than a particularly ill-conceived social formation based upon pernicious doxa. Or to be blunt, it is stupid identity politics. Sound unfair? Well then. To be a conservative nowadays and not be Cast Forth from the Tribe, you need to believe:
1. Anthropogenic climate change is a Lie.
2. The "Main Stream Media" has a partisan bias in favor of Democrats.
3. The invasion of Iraq was based on an honest appraisal of the evidence.
4. Torture is acceptable, and also, we do not torture.
I could go on, but these will do to make the point. To be a conservative in the 21st century American sense, you need to believe things that are not true, and you need to tie yourself into knots to pretend otherwise.
You could go on? Oh…get me started… How about:
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
The average homosexual relationship only lasts a few days.
The average homosexual has thousands of sexual partners in a lifetime.
Homosexuality is a mental illness. The APA only removed it from the list of mental illnesses because of protests by militant homosexuals.
Homosexuals have more money then everyone else.
Gay Liberation caused AIDS.
The Nazis were all homosexuals.
So were the communists.
No society that tolerated homosexuality ever lasted very long. Homosexuality caused the fall of Rome.
No society has ever allowed same sex marriage.
Same sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to stop getting married.
If same sex marriage is legalized, churches will be forced to marry homosexuals.
If same sex marriage is legalized, people will be jailed for speaking out against homosexuality.
If same sex marriage is legalized, the human race will die out.
If same sex marriage is legalized, homosexuals will be allowed to recruit children in kindergarten.
All homosexuals are pedophiles.
Homosexuality is the result of being molested as a child. All homosexuals were once molested.
Homosexuality is the result of poor parenting.
Male homosexuality is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Lesbianism is the result of failure to bond with the father.
Poor Fathering is the cause of all homosexuality.
No…wait…it’s overbearing mothers.
No…it’s godlessness…
…and so on. Get me started. And here’s the thing…It doesn’t matter that none of this is true. The point is, this is their Belief. Beliefs don’t have to be true. Accepting the Belief identifies you as being part of their tribe. That’s what’s important. Not that the Belief is true, but that you are either in the tribe, or an outsider. To put it into gang terminology, these are their colors. Wearing them identifies you as a member of the gang.
This is why rational discussion with these people is impossible. It’s not about what is true and what isn’t. It’s about defending the tribe against outsiders. We in the reality based community are always wrong, because we are outsiders. Their colors have to be stronger then our colors, because the most important thing on earth isn’t what is true and what is not…the most important thing on earth is defending the tribe against outsiders.
But when true and false stop being your guide to right and wrong, then you just walk eyes wide open into a pit. Why did the bottom fall out of the economy all of a sudden? Why did the splendid little war in Iraq that was only supposed to take a few days drag on and on and on and kill thousands? Facts, as it so happens, matter more then Belief after all. And came election day 2008, a lot of people were looking at their 401k quarterly reports, and seeing possibly for the first time, what kind of world you get when people think Belief is more important then facts, and decided it was time to kick the bums out. Facts matter.
So while I quite respect Hilzoy, I think she is dangerously mistaking the nature of movement conservatism. To go back a bit to the Tim Burke post she cites:
But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.
Tempting, but absolutely wrong. In the 1990s this was a fashionable attitude towards the crazy anti-Clintonoids — against whom the best and the brightest on the left failed to mobilize. This failure occurred because Clinton was, well, not really very far to the left, so why defend him? But it was also because it was assumed that Clinton could take care of himself. Which he could. But what happened underneath…? Well, the foundations were laid for the Bush administration, that’s what. The media in particular had their own institutional biases manipulated, with almost no pushback from liberals, who should have known better, but let themselves by and large get rolled. Where did the 21st century wingnuts come from? The 1990s. The case rests. And then throws up.
It seems to me that there is a powerful, but foolish, desire on the part of certain liberals, especially academic liberals, to want to engage in a nice, friendly, open debate with "conservatives." This is an error. You will always lose a game you do not realize you are playing.
Bingo. They are not about debating anything…they’re on a mission from God. They’re fighting a culture war where right and wrong are measured in terms of what is good for the party. It’s way past time to call this for what it is, and fight it for what it is. Assuming good faith only allows the other side to keep pretending they’re something they aren’t. What we are up against are theocrats and other sorts of totalitarians who think the "radical individualism" of the American Dream must be defeated by any means necessary. We can all just stop pretending now, that the divisiveness of the past few decades is about two different visions of America…one liberal, one conservative. It isn’t. We are fighting an enemy as old as the first tyrants, and just as bereft of scruples. At rock bottom, these people are thieves, who want to steal everything precious from our lives, not so much to fatten their own, as to make sure we never feel the joy of life more then they ever could.
Bitterness generated by the bruising battle between Betsy Markey and Marilyn Musgrave apparently lingers days after voters decided the winner of the 4th Congressional District.
Incumbent Republican Musgrave, who lost to Democrat Markey by a 56 to 44 percent margin Tuesday, has yet to call and congratulate Markey on her win.
Musgrave also hasn’t conceded the race, said Markey spokesman Ben Marter. "She has yet to admit defeat," he said. "It’s a little bizarre."
Calls to Musgrave’s campaign and congressional office went unanswered Friday.
In what the Washington Post called "perhaps the most ill-timed press release of the 2008 campaign," the California Republican Party announced that they’d filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Sen. Barack Obama had illegally funneled funds from his campaign account for his personal use.
The use? Visiting his dying grandmother, whose passing was announced this afternoon.
The GOP sent the release at 1:30 pm ET, a few hours before Obama’s grandmother’s death was announced.
"Obama for America violated federal law by converting its campaign funds to Senator Obama’s personal use," the release stated. "Senator Obama recently traveled to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. This was the right thing for any grandson to do — at his own expense — but it was not travel that his campaign may fund."
Federal law prohibits campaigns from using campaign funds for personal travel. Obama’s campaign said beforehand that they had reviewed the trips with their lawyers and believed it was allowable. Republicans, meanwhile, contend that because Obama did not campaign in Hawaii, it should not have been budgeted as a campaign expense.
We have our far right nutcases here in Maryland, but I rest easy at night knowing my brother can go about his day with absolutely batshit wingnuts like these babbling in his face constantly and still keep a mellow attitude.
Nutball Congressman Chris Cannon (R-UT) tried to hire an Oxford don to use his special computer program to prove that Obama’s memoir was actually written by Bill Ayers. The program "can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." Apparently, he got cold feet after the he learned that the Oxford academic, Dr Peter Millican, would release the results publicly no matter what they showed.
No sense in letting the voters know something if it isn’t something you want them to know. The soul of a political movement isn’t the faces at the top of the ticket, or the rhetoric of its intellectuals. Its soul, its heart, resides in all the people who do its day-to-day grunt work. The grass roots. The rank and file. The True Believers. It’s not the headline grabbing crimes that reveal the character of an ugly movement…it’s in all the little moments of casual mendacity by its grass roots. There is where the people are. There is where the movement is.
Via Pam’s House Blend… Janet Porter says if you don’t vote for McCain God is going to cast you into hell for all eternity. Can we just stop pretending now that the religious right wants anything to do with democracy…?
To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning. Not only is our nation in grave danger, according to the Word of God, so are you.
Insert the usual antiabortion, anti-gay rhetoric here…
Be forewarned: If you willfully disobey God on life and marriage because of race or false hope for the economy, you will usher in the kind of change that brought the Soviet Union to collapse.
But the warning goes far beyond that. To those who think that God’s grace gives them license to willfully disobey Him without consequences – think again:
Not everyone who says to Me, "Lord, Lord," shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, "Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?" And then I will declare to them, "I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!" (Matthew 7:21-23)
That deals with your eternity. Matthew 7:26-27 says if you don’t obey God, prepare for a crash even sooner that that:
But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash (Matthew 7:26-27).
I just hope you won’t take the rest of the nation with you.
If the word of God matters more to you than your perception of personal gain, Joel 2:12 issues a call to repentance I pray you will heed:
"Now, therefore," says the LORD, ‘Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning’" (Joel 2:12).
Then obey Him in the voting booth and out of it. If not, do us all a favor and quit calling yourself a Christian.
Right. I get the message…
I get it all right…
The America where everyone has a right to their own life, their own bodies, their own conscience, is something you couldn’t have any less use for. The American Dream of liberty and justice for all is apostasy as far as you’re concerned. America belongs to fundamentalist Christians. The rest of us just live here. Conditionally.
America’s biggest sin isn’t abortion is it Janet. It isn’t same sex marriage. It isn’t pornography. America’s biggest, most unforgivable sin is this…
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
There’s where it all went wrong, isn’t it Janet? Justice? Domestic Tranquility? Common defense? General Welfare? Blessings of Liberty? Makes you sick to your stomach to read it, doesn’t it Janet? And this…this must make you positively livid…
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The Golden Door. The Golden Door. Does that make you want to laugh Janet, or puke? The people who fled the old world and its state churches and religious wars didn’t found a new nation dedicated to freedom of worship just so babbling Darbyite pre-millenial nutcases like you could build a theocracy over their graves. Do us all a favor and stop calling yourself an American Janet. You are a Christian Nationalist, and the United States of America is to you as a cricket is to a digger wasp.
The Long Dark Night Of My Empty Soul…Let Me Project It On To You…
It’s been…interesting…to watch the reactions of the heterosexual mainstream to the gradual unraveling of the Bush republican mask. Wow…these people really are Nuts! And…they really Do live in their own separate reality… Yes. Yes they do. And now comes the dawn, that they not only live in their own separate reality, they project their own private demons onto everyone who doesn’t live there with them. This from David Krutz Talking Points Memo…
Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.
The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. In this piece at The Corner, Mark R. Levin, bristling over normally rational conservatives like Colin Powell and Charles Fried falling under Obama’s demagogic spell, pushes ajar the door to his inner psyche, where the horrors are of the communist-cum-Nazi variety. Levin doesn’t go in much for the Obama as closet Muslim nightmare. I’m sure it’s just a failure of imagination.
Emphasis mine. Re-read that sentence again… The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. Ya Think? And here, via Sullivan, is Eric Martin over at The Poorman…
Anyone familiar with the history of communism knows enough to be terrified by utopian visions. Equally frightening is the staggering breadth of the Moonbat Messiah’s ego. Not long ago, Obama told Sunday worshipers in Greenville, South Carolina that they don’t have to wait for any Second Coming:
“I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”
Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. had ambitions on a similar scale, although I don’t recall them comparing themselves to God. For the messianic aspect, you normally have to leave politics for cults like Heaven’s Gate.
Obama isn’t the first to mix Marxist utopianism with cult deification. Jim Jones did it with his Peoples Temple. Fortunately Jim Jones never had access to the USA’s nuclear codes.
A bit of a misstep here, comparing Obama to Jim Jones, rather than the more evocative Charlie Manson. True, Jones brewed the original Kool-Aid, and did go to darkest Africa swarthiest South America. But Charlie Manson was much scarier, was all about the class and race war, and – and this is critical here – was from the Epochal and Very Scary Late Sixties, rather than the Forgettable and Mostly Embarrassing Late Seventies. Now, one could construct a perfectly serviceable Culture War narrative based on late-70’s resentment – in fact, I can think of 3 without even trying:
Obama as secret (black, gay, urban, coastal) disco partisan opposed to salt-of-the-Earth (white, suburban/rural) Eddie Money fans;
Obama as secret (London/NYC, jobless, stoned, callow) anarchist punk rocker/reggae listener opposed to John McCain’s steady, hard-working Frank Sinatra-listening establishment type;
Obama as creepy glam transsexual Ziggy Stardust Bowie vs. coked-out fascist but sensibly-tailored Thin White Teuton Duke Bowie;
The last one made more sense when it was in my head – substitute some kind of scary forced-busing liberal Negro vs. punk-killing “Death Wish” Charles Bronson narrative here. It’s not hard. But once you’ve made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it – you can’t just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can’t decide in chapter 2 that he’s also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.
This is the problem. It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem – although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable – it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from – wait for it! – the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined.
But Sullivan should have at least recognized all this. Consider the Militant Homosexual: If he’s male he’s a contemptible, mincing, swishing, girlie-boy faggot with limp wrists and a high pitched voice that giggles a lot. He cowers pathetically and hides behind his purse at the first sign of trouble. But he’s also a dangerous psychopathic killer lurking in the alleyways, waiting to pounce out a rip the liver out of you and eat it. Lesbians are male haters who just need a real man but are so ugly they couldn’t get a real man if they wanted one, which they all secretly do. But lesbian are hot…especially when they’re having sex so real men can watch them and get off.
Gays are a weak and pathetic minority of very sick and mentally unstable individuals. They are a powerful gay mafia that controls Hollywood and the news media. They lurk in back alleys and dirty slums and engage in petty theft and prostitution to support themselves. They’re a rich and powerful elite who control congress and the courts. Their minds have been completely destroyed by sex and drugs and AIDS. They are clever and scheming and secretly manipulate governments and the media. They are narcissistic. They hate themselves. They have sex with hundreds of partners every night. They are lonely. They engage in every kind of filthy, sadistic, sexual perversion known to man, and invent new ones every day. They are delicate prissy dainty little fairy boys. They have no friends and are incapable of emotional connection. They occupy in a vast secret subculture with its own code words that they all know and recognize. They lurk around schools looking for children to molest. They lurk in public restrooms trying to seduce men into having sex with them…
The long dark night of the bigot’s soul. When I was busy growing up, black men…negros…coloreds…were shiftless shuffling lazy stupid servents. When they weren’t big and powerful criminal thugs that went around raping white women. The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. But doesn’t it always, no matter whose face the nightmare has?
Because in the end, it is the world that is their nightmare. The world they cannot cope with. The world that doesn’t need them. Every time we tell them to get the fuck off our backs, we remind them that they need us far more then we need them. And so they despise us a little bit more. And so the nightmare, the demon, the destroyer of worlds, has our face.
That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.
Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.
But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.
All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.
And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light. But NBC isn’t just a television network. It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation. In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about. So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits? They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.
Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole. But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA. They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line. No more. The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.
Your staff plants a recording device on your opponent’s podium prior to your debate, so they can record any off the cuff remarks he makes while the mics are off. Your opponent finds the device and erases the tape before giving it back to them. Do you: a) Apologize and assure your opponent that the responsible parties will be punished? b) Deny everything and point to your opponent’s support for the militant homosexual agenda? c) File criminal charges against your opponent for destruction of property for erasing the tape?
I guess you file this under the heading of Deep, Late Election Comic Relief. And not surprisingly it comes from a Senate Republican who should have been coasting but now finds himself with a real chance losing his seat.
Last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) squared off in a debate with Democratic challenger Bruce Lunsford. But on Lunsford’s podium a GOP operative had placed a small voice recorder, presumably to pick up some off-mic comments Lunsford might make — apparently a violation of the debate rules.
(The recorder itself — sans recording — was eventually returned.)
Now, from here the accounts differ. According to the Lunsford campaign, Lunsford actually didn’t see the recorder. But since it was nestled in among his papers it was included when he handed his papers off to his staffers after the debate — staffers who say they later erased the recording since it violated debate rules to have a planted recorder on the opponents podium.
According to the McConnell staffers, however, Lunsford did see the recorder during the debate and essentially confiscated it. Richard St. Onge, II (who, in a separate story, may have absconded with his name from some neo-gothic southern novel) is the GOP operative who planted the recorder. And according to St. Onge, when he went up to Lunsford after the debate to demand his recorder back, Lunsford said, "No you won’t get it back."
And now St. Onge and the chairman of McConnell’s campaign have filed a criminal complaint against Lunsford for petty larceny and destruction of property — because of the erasure.
To be included in The Updated Book Of Virtues by William J. Bennett: It’s Not Cheating If You Do It To Win …or… Extremism In The Defense Of The Party Is No Vice…
Via SLOG… Oh look..the wingers are all going to go live on a commune…
From The National Review, we have the Republican version of “I’m moving to Canada if their side wins”:
Canada or Galt’s Gulch? [Lisa Schiffren]
So, what happens if McCain really does pull it out and win? After the urban riots, might this be the year that all those libs with Bush derangement syndrome actually make good on their threat to leave the country? What if Canada had a special policy to lure them in? (Win-win-win situation —them/us/Canada )
…
Of course conservatives don’t threaten to leave the U.S. as a rule. However, on more or less the same subject, I haven’t heard so much about John Galt since …well, ever. (And objectivists were thick on the ground in D.C. during the Reagan administration.) I suppose, with all the projections of the Obama administration and its confiscatory tax rates on people and businesses, subordination of the productive to the dependent, public schools turned into training camps for radicals and legions of speech/thought police — i.e. — the end of liberty as we knew it — it might be time to start thinking about the mechanics of Galt’s Gulch. Actually, this is probably a great time to buy property in the Rockies. Love to see the video for that…
For those of you who are unaware, Galt’s Gulch is where all the world’s libertarian intellectuals flee to in the novel Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. In the novel, the resulting lack of intellectuals and competent businessmen causes the rest of the world to nearly die in an apocalypse of mediocrity. I’m willing to take the gamble that it’s not going to work out that way in the real world, and I implore the conservatives to move to the Rockies and start working on their conservatopia. I’ll even donate to a fund in their honor.
Rand’s idea of a strike against totalitarianism by society’s business and engineering elite only works if you believe that only completely moral and rational people excel in business and engineering and that isn’t true. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were full of engineering geniuses who happily worked for them, and in Nazi Germany corporations thrived. Totalitarian states can eventually collapse for a lot of reasons, but a lack of smart people willing to lend their minds to the Omnipotent State isn’t one of them. Werner Von Braun happily worked for both Adolph Hitler and John F. Kennedy.
Rand simply had no curiosity, and it severely limited her imagination. She was a romantic in the worse sense, the ivory tower sense, not the enraptured by life sense. And you really see that, in the Galt’s Gulch chapters of Atlas Shrugged. Question: in the utopia of the mind that is Galt’s Gulch…where are the laborers…?
When he put her plate before her, she asked. "Where did you get that food? Do they have a grocery store here?"
"The best one in the world. It’s run by Lawrence Hammond."
"What?"
"Lawrence Hammond, of Hammond Cars. The bacon is from the farm of Dwight Sanders – of Sander’s Aircraft. The eggs and the butter from Judge Narragansett – of the Superior Court of the State of Illinois."
The Country Club set puts down their golf clubs and takes up farming. Except these aren’t hobby farms…they’re trying to be self sustaining here. So the automobile executive, the aircraft company CEO and the Superior Court Judge also happen to be able to run production farms too because…well…because they’re The Men Of The Mind and farming really isn’t all that hard after all. You just get a few pigs and chickens and cows and the whole operation pretty much just runs itself…right? I mean…how hard could running a farm be anyway…all those country bumpkins manage to do it after all. And we are Men Of The Mind. This is, seriously, Rand’s thinking here.
And it gets worse. A couple pages later the two heroes of the novel, Galt and Dagny Taggart, encounter the former CEO of Sander’s Aircraft, who says he can fix her small airplane…the one she crashed and nearly totaled. On his pig farm. In between slopping the hogs I guess…
He pointed across the road. Glancing through the tops of the pine trees, she saw the concrete rectangle of an airfield on the bottom of the valley.
"We have a few planes here and it’s my job to take care of them," he said. "I’m the hog farmer and the airfield attendant. I’m doing quite well at producing ham and bacon, without the men from whom I used to buy it. But those men cannot produce airplanes without me – and without me, they cannot even produce their ham and bacon."
Okay…first of all…who poured the concrete for that airfield? And…where did the concrete come from? The town brain surgeon?
Hey…it’s just concrete. Anyone can pour concrete…right? I mean…look at the low class dimwits who do it for a living. And we’re The Men Of The Mind. We can do that…piece of cake. We can pour whole runways and taxiways and parking pads of concrete level enough for aircraft to safely use that won’t crack apart here in the Rocky Mountain winters because we’re The Men Of The Mind. Hell…just mix and pour and it’s done. Er…who makes the cement mixers around here? And those…things…concrete workers use…trowels I think they’re called. Who makes that stuff. I know…the town philosopher! No…wait…he runs the diner…
Hey…same thing with raising pigs. Anyone can raise pigs. No…wait…even pig farmers can’t raise pigs without help from The Men Of The Mind…
But wait…there’s more. Are you wondering where the tractors come from for all these farms The Men Of The Mind are running? Well wonder no more…
"…Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor. I mean one – I tooled it by hand – no mass production was necessary. But that tractor has cut an eight hour workday down to four hours on" – the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside – "the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett" – his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of the canyon, then to a band of violent green – "in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan" – his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves – "in the orchards of Richard Halley."
Behold Moses showing the promise land to the faithful. No wait…that’s a Royal Scepter there. Never mind where he got the tools to work the steel to make tractor motor, let alone a tractor. Hey…this guy’s not only an aircraft maker and a hog farmer. He’s a lathe maker and foundry operator…And a tool and die maker. And a tire maker. He can build motors and transmissions and differentials. From just the simple everyday raw materials you find just laying around in the middle of the Rocky Mountains for the taking, Dwight Sanders can make gaskets and seals and sealing compound and springs and rubber. He can manufacture gauges and radiators and hoses and belts. Or someone else there can. Possibly the town dentist. But look at it closer. Rand here seems to think that running a farm or an orchard, consists of running a tractor back and forth all day long and if you build a better tractor you can cut the farmer’s workday down by half.
I mean…because farmers work an eight hour day just like everyone else don’t they? When they’re not running the local airport. Ask a tobacco farmer how long their day is.
But it’s gets better. A page or two on and they meet the man who produces the oil for Galt’s Gulch. And presumably, the gasoline, the kerosene, the motor oil, all the lubricants, and the petroleum-based plastic grocery bags for the grocery store Lawrence Hammond runs…between building the automobiles the folks in Galt’s Gulch drive…
There were two other men working with him: a big muscular roughneck, at a pump halfway up the wall, and a young boy, by the tank on the ground. The young boy had blond hair and a face with an unusual purity of form. She felt certain that she knew his face, but she could not recall where she had seen it. The boy caught her puzzled glance. grinned, and as if to help her, whistled softly, almost inaudibly the first notes of Halley’s Fifth Concerto. It was the young brakeman of the Comet.
She laughed. "It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn’t it?"
"Sure," he answered. "But do you think I’d tell that to a scab?"
"A what?"
"What am I paying you for?" asked Ellis Wyatt, approaching; the boy chuckled, darting back to seize the lever he had abandoned for a moment. "It’s Miss Taggart who couldn’t fire you, if you loafed on the job. I can."
"That’s one of the reasons why I quit the railroad, Miss Taggart," said the boy.
There is so much there to unpack, not the least of which is the delicately beautiful, artistic youth in a book by the notoriously homophobic Rand. Who…ah…quits his job on the railroad so he can work where common laborers have absolutely no legal rights. I hope you like working for 1/10th of a living wage in Galt’s Gulch kid. Maybe Lawrence Hammond gives him a place in the alley behind his grocery store to spend the night after he sweeps the floors. Or maybe he has a night job cleaning the hog pens at Dwight Sanders’ farm.
But wait…there’s more…
The roughneck was watching them from above, listening with curiosity. She glanced up at him, he looked like a truck driver, so she asked, "What were you outside? A professor of comparative philology, I suppose?"
"No, ma’am," he answered. "I was a truck driver."
Oh look…a touch of humor in an Ayn Rand novel. But wait for it…
He added, "But that’s not what I wanted to remain."
Because…you know…only a looter would want to earn a living as a truck driver. So…who transports the goods in this Utopia Of The Mind? I know, I know…! Dwight Sanders runs goods around from all the farms to Lawrence Hammond’s grocery store on his new super tractor. In half the time. When it’s not saving Judge Narragansett time on his chicken farm, and Midas Mulligan time on his tobacco patch and Richard Halley time in his orchard. Between working on his hog farm and running the town airport.
So. Who is growing the cotton here, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, for the textile mill that somebody is running, to produce the cloth that somebody who is making everyone’s clothes there needs? Who made the textile mill? Who made the tools to make the textile mill? Who made the lumber but build the textile mill? Who made the saws for the lumber mill to make the lumber for the textile mill? Who transported the lumber? Wait…Sanders again… Who makes the soap that the blond-haired delicate of face artistic but not gay really he isn’t gay no way is he gay kid uses to clean himself off after working in Ellis Wyatt’s oil field? Assuming he can afford the luxury of soap on the slave labor wages Wyatt is perfectly free to pay him? Or maybe soap isn’t needed in Galt’s Gulch, because the Men Of The Mind just will their bodies not to get dirty.
The right wingers yap, yap, yapping now about starting their own Galt’s Gulches are the same hypocrites who are fond of saying "There is no free lunch." Meanwhile, Atlas Shrugged is about a man who invents a motor that’s powered by atmospheric static electricity. Hey everyone…free energy! Its pivotal moment is when the heroine discovers Galt’s Gulch, and sees for herself that the work of producing the basic necessities of life that modern civilization depends on is so easy even the CEO of an aircraft company can do it…in his spare time. And machine an entirely new tractor out of raw materials with the rest of his spare time. Who needs actual farmers? Or truck drivers? Some day, the heartlanders, the blue collar workers, the Joe The Pumbers, should really take a look at the depth of the contempt the brains of the republican party view them with. Nobody really needs you worthless morons…er…now give us your votes praise Jesus or the homos will sodomise your children…
Rand claimed to idolize New York City. Pity she never actually took a stroll through its streets to watch what makes it all work.
So…I’m with Paul Constant on SLOG. Let them try it. By all means. Every little upper middle class rebel child needs their go live in a commune period. Who knows…when they come straggling back ragged and hungry from their adventure, maybe they’ll consent to give the people who pick their cotton, keep their grocery store shelves stocked, make their clothes and keep their floors clean a livable wage then. Yes, as a matter of fact, there is no free lunch. So pay your server enough to make them want to keep feeding you.
Welcome To Planet Earth Mr. Greenspan. And How Was Your Stay On Planet Rand…?
In my college years I succumbed to the rhetoric of Ayn Rand. So did a lot of folks, some well before me. Alan Greenspan for one, who was at one time a member of her inner circle. I became a Libertarian. Fiercely so. But to my credit I think, I never let my new found ideology interpret reality for me. Eventually Ronald Reagan showed me what sort of people make money synonymous with morality, and the kind of government we were likely to end up with with them in charge. So I shrugged…and left both Rand and her bastard child, the Libertarian party. Is it so insufferably arrogant of me to say that I’ve been waiting for the rest of them to wise up ever since?
For years, a Congressional hearing with Alan Greenspan was a marquee event. Lawmakers doted on him as an economic sage. Markets jumped up or down depending on what he said. Politicians in both parties wanted the maestro on their side.
But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
I had my Damascus moment twenty years ago you drooling moron and it was called the Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal. You could have seen then if you’d just taken a look at it, that what happens when financial institutions are deregulated is a mad rush to stuff other people’s, mostly working people’s money into their pockets. Self interest after all, is about Self, not about the institution you work for, let alone the communities they serve. It doesn’t matter if the whole shitpile collapses if you can get out of it with enough cash to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of your life, does it? If self-interest is all there is to it, then you’ve done pretty good haven’t you…even if thousands of other people had to loose everything so you could live high on the hog.
Greed is, contrary to Randian dogma, Not Good. Ambition is good. But ambition is self actualizing. You want to become something. Something better. Greed is just wanting what someone else has. There was a time when I believed that Rand’s attempt to redefine Greed as Ambition was just an artifact of her not knowing English natively. But no…she knew what she was doing. It was from the beginning, all about raping the working class for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Her revenge for the communist appropriation of her father’s pharmacy. If she couldn’t stick it to the Russian proletariat, she could at least help the rich here in America carpet their mansions with the life savings of working Americans. She raised a generation on her Greed Is Good religion. And when they got the power they craved, they put her ideas into practice. The only practice they could have been put to. The only practice they were ever meant to be put to…
Along with the rest of America, Rep. George Miller has watched the value of his retirement investments plummet in recent weeks.
"I’ve lost 30 percent like everybody else. This hits home with the Miller family, too," the California Democrat said in a recent interview.
In recent years, Congress has promoted the dramatic movement in corporate America away from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s with policies encouraging automatic enrollment and raising contribution limits. Under 401(k) plans employees contribute to their own investment accounts and assume the risks and rewards that go with them. Lately, with the crisis on Wall Street and across the globe, it’s been more risk than reward.
Earlier this month, Miller’s House Education and Labor Committee found that Americans’ retirement plans, pension plans and 401(k)s included, have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months– about 20 percent of their value. At a committee hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, Miller cited new research suggesting that the losses might be as much as double that.
And they almost got Social Security during the Bush administration too. Remember that? They were going to let individuals "invest" their retirement money. Basically, give it to Wall Street to play with. It was going to be better then Social Security…just like our 401ks were going to be better then real pensions. When the butcher’s bill for decades of Randian inspired market deregulation is added up, a lot of folks are going to be Real Glad they didn’t get their hands on that trust fund too.
In the coming years, as the folks who lined their pockets during the past few decades with other people’s life savings are made to pay some of it pack, there is going to be a lot of bellyaching from the high and mighty about class warfare. As though they haven’t been engaging in it themselves. Once upon a time the robber barons lived by the simple maxim that might makes right. If they thought of it at all in moralistic terms they saw themselves as a kind of Darwinism in action…survival of the fittest and all that. Then Rand came along and told them that anyone who isn’t rich is a leach on those who are. Capitalism, by which she meant the unrestrained greed motive of the rich and powerful, was not only the best economic system, it was the only Moral one. Now in the higher echelons of wealth, raping the rest of us isn’t merely something you do because you can. Now it’s your moral obligation.
But no amount of apologetics can make what is essentially a pillage and conquest based economic model work for very long, now that we’re not living in caves anymore. Cooperation is necessary. Trust is necessary. For there to be rewards for industriousness, there also need to be guards against perdition. The marketplace needs a cop on the block, or it simply degenerates into gang warfare and shear thievery and collapses. Preying on other people, trusting people, naive people, weaker people, is not made into a workable, sustainable economic model simply by calling it good. Greed is not good.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
