Last Thursday I wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking that she not endorse Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) in his effort to become Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet (CTI). The reason is simple — Congressman Rush has been a leading Black voice against net neutrality since 2006, maintaining that net neutrality is a “solution in search of a problem.” The position he seeks to occupy — if his record is any clue — would mean an advantage for corporations and a disadvantage for everyone else when key decisions about the Internet are made.
The Congressman’s response? Avoid everything I’ve said, ignore what more than 60,000 of our members have said, along with that of literally millions of other everyday people across this country. Congressman Rush relies on the fabricated notion that ColorOfChange is “Silicon Valley funded” and “controlled.” I’d like to know what the Congressman means and where he got such a bizarre idea. I personally led a successful protest on behalf of more than 600,000 people in which we called out Google for proposing a framework in collusion with Verizon that would undermine net neutrality — it’s not the kind of thing you do if you’re funded or controlled by Silicon Valley. Further, we don’t have a single major donor representing the interests of tech companies in Silicon Valley — not an individual, a company, or a trade association. Maybe it’s the fact that our offices are in the Bay Area?
Here’s an ad submitted by the Palm Center, a Santa Barbara-based research center that produces research and conferences on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
The ad was rejected by FOX News. Here’s Palm Center Director Aaron Belkin:
“I am surprised that Fox News would reject an ad featuring allied Generals, given that host Bill O’Reilly and guest contributor Liz Cheney have both expressed support for open gay service. This is an important time for input from all sides on this issue, and I hope Fox will reconsider.”
Actually, I’m not surprised at all, and the spiral continues. The rejection only further demonstrates they are a right-wing institutional cog, something we all know, yet the response to that is- guess what, swell the corporate profits of FOX and buy some advertising. Hmm.
And I certainly see the counterpoints, those being (a) reaching conservative audiences, say the audience in the office of a Senator who is a swing vote, at this point is useful (b) marginalizing FOX is too. But there are any number of other ways to accomplish these goals, and the response to an institution being a terrible actor cannot be to monetarily support that institution.
I came across these stunning statistics in a Matt Taibbi piece the other day: the top 1% in our country has had its percentage of the nation’s wealth leap from 34.6% in 2007 to 37.1% in 2009, while the median net worth for an American household has gone from $102,500 in 2007 to $65,400 in 2009. Changes in numbers that dramatic in a two year period are astonishing, almost unfathomable. In the massive economic crisis we have just experienced, the home prices, savings, pensions/401(k) funds for the middle class took a beating like nothing most of us have seen in our lifetimes, while the top 1% have actually done okay after the initial hit on stock prices: corporate profits and stock prices are back up, corporate bonuses and dividends and executive compensation is in good shape, and the top 1% has more of the country’s wealth in its back pocket than it did before. We still have high unemployment and stagnant wages and a terrible housing market, but the guys at the top are floating along pretty well right now.
As I was writing that last paragraph, my eye was caught by this headline and story from today’s NYTimes:
Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.
This story, those statistics from my opening paragraph, paint an incredible picture of an economy and country in bizarre juxtaposition: corporate profits at record levels, big banks quarterly bonuses and profits at record levels over the least couple of years, while the rest of the country in economic meltdown.
Democrats are still reeling from our political losses, and the DC political class is still obsessed with the re-positioning dance, but at the heart of everything else, at the center of everything that matters, are these bleak economic facts driving our politics. The sooner Democrats stop worrying about being center or left, and start focusing on how to get the middle class out of its economic black hole, the sooner our politics start getting fixed. Period. End of story. The heart of our political darkness is the heart of the middle class’ economic darkness.
History is likely to judge Bush most harshly for two things in particular: Launching a war against a country that had not attacked us, and approving the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques.
And that’s why the two most essential lies — among the many — in his new memoir are that he had a legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and that he had a legitimate reason to torture detainees.
Neither is remotely true. But Bush must figure that if he keeps making the case for himself — particularly if it goes largely unrebutted by the traditional media, as it has thus far — then perhaps he can blunt history’s verdict.
It may even be working. Extrapolating from the response to the book, former vice president Dick Cheney on Tuesday told a crowd gathered for Bush’s presidential library groundbreaking in Dallas that “judgments are a little more measured than they were” and that “history is coming around.”
This is not merely an idle, theoretical concern, as should be obvious from Obama’s recent acquiescence to continue the doomed war in Afghanistan at least until 2014. The lies of the past continue to shape the future. It was always thus.
It’s important that Froomkin has assembled such a thorough debunking, but the Bush/Cheney strategy has always relied on the fact that bald assertions are more easily assimilated than masses of fact. So in the interests of making a case that just might stick, here’s perhaps the most powerful tid-bit from Froomkin’s vast arsenal of facts and arguments to the contrary of Bush’s lies: There was no decision about whether to invade Iraq, and hence no “Decision Point”!
Last night, sitting in for Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes articulated the perfect meme for what the Republican Party is now up to, in sharp contrast to the deluded “center” of Versailles. He described their antics in opposing ratification of START and raising the debt ceiling as “”An entire political party engaged in a dramatic high-stakes game of chicken…. Republicans right now are behaving like adolescent nihilists, willing to drive the family’s Country Squire station wagon off the cliff in some negotiation with their parents. Not people interested in the well-being of this country.”
One segment on cable tv is not going to change the world all by its lonesome, but it is a striking note of sanity in the midst of a sea of mindless babble. And just to provide some serious reality-based ballast to his rhetorical argument in the first half of the segment, Hayes had Dean Baker and Bernie Sanders on to discuss nitty-grittty facts in the second half:
The role of projection in conservative politics is a theme I’ve long taken notice of. When conservative try to steal an election, the first thing they do is accuse liberals of trying to steal an election. When they organize a conspiracy to deceive the public about global warming, they accuse the entire world community of climate scientists of forming a conspiracy to deceive the public about global warming. And so it goes. But now we’re getting down to the most basic level, where, after decades of attacking liberals for wanting to destroy America, conservatives are now boldly right out there in the open with their own boldly stated plans for destroying America, just like they tried to do before back during the Civil War.
In a way, it’s refreshing, really, to have all the pretense stripped away. “Nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists? No, we don’t give a damn about that. Let them blow up half of Manhattan, for all we care. Democrats will never win another election again. Drive the US into bankruptcy now to “save” the US from maybe someday going into bankruptcy (which of course it would never do, except for us)? That’s our version of “fiscal responsibility!” Bernie Maddoff said it was “genius!”
These are the lunatics running the asylum. Any pretense to the contrary is itself a form of lunacy as well.
Over the weekend, I played catch-up with a couple of DVRd episodes of Bones, classic nerd show that it is. If you don’t know the show, it’s centered on a forensic anthropologist (“Bones”) and her team at a Smithsonian Institute knock-off–the “Jeffersonian Institute”, in crime-fighting partnership with an FBI agent. In one of the episodes I watched, a sunken slave ship has been recovered, and the remains are brought to the Jeffersonian to be analyzed. The lab’s supervisor, Dr. Camille Saroyan (“Cam”, played by Tamara Taylor) is black, and why I’m writing about this is the way her co-workers responded when they first learn about the ship.
Although dealt with quickly, it was a complex mixture of shared revulsion and horror over the past it represented and special solicitude for Cam, who, it turns out, had a family ancestor on board. On one level, they all respond as one at a common human level, reacting as horrified as if they themselves were black, while on another level, because Cam is black, they know it’s much more intense for her, even before it’s known that she has an actual personal connection. They are simultaneously drawn together as a group and aware that Cam is naturally feeling isolated as well. It struck me as a typically liberal group response, intensified by their pre-existing relationships.
They are, of course, a team of scientists (primarily) and the tensions between scientific observation and analysis on the one hand and life its own self on the other are a constant presence in the show. The slave ship instantly cuts through the customary scientific detachment for all of them, and yet that scientific perspective in a way is what makes them take it seriously in a way that others might not. They know that they are part of the same historical and cultural fabric as the slave ship, those who owned it and those who drowned in it. Their shared professional identities serve to reinforce their shared cultural identities as racially integrated contemporary urban Americans. Their sympathies naturally transcend race out of lived experience, yet remain conscious of it. Both tensions and unforced sympathy are part of the mix.
Now, I’m quite aware that many conservatives might respond the same way. But it would not be similarly typical and consonant with their political ideology. Thinking about it further, thinking about Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Partiers, I was struck by the thought that Limbaugh is just fundamentally uncomfortable with black people, at a level just as deep and uncontrollable as the level at which Cam’s co-workers are comfortable with her specifically and blacks in general. Of course, Limbaugh is uncomfortable with blacks because he’s uncomfortable with himself, they aggravate all his inner uncertainties, all the doubts he does not allow himself to consciously recognize, much less entertain, examine, and act to do something about. Liberalism–reinforced by science–is about critical reflection: on ourselves as well as our social surround (Kegan’s level 4). Conservatism–traditional conservatism–is not. It is unreflective, defined by the social surround (Kegan’s level 3).
But movement conservatism is reactionary, it is not just unreflective, but anti-reflective, and dominated by level 2 thinking, which sees the world in terms of durable categories (Kegan’s term), or natural kinds, one of which is race. Now, not all conservatives are reactionaries. Not all are racists. But they recognize Limbaugh as one of their own–indeed as one of their cultural leaders. And they are as comfortable with him as Cam’s co-workers are with her. And though not all Tea Partiers are racists, they are comfortable with racists in their midst. As comfortable as Cam’s co-workers are with her. This is what it comes down to, I think: who, exactly are you comfortable with? Who do you look at and see as basically like you? Who is “us”?
You choose who you identify with. And in so choosing, you choose who you are.
A perfect counterpoint to these thoughts was provided by The Simpsons this Sunday, and noted by Chris Hayes, sitting in for Rachel Maddow last night:
Following my earlier diary today, “The GOP’s ‘id’ card”, which drew on a couple of items from Think Progress last Friday, a couple of more items from Think Progress give a glimpse at the losing battle being waged by Republicans who haven’t quite gone off the deep end to preserve a few shreds of sanity on their party’s behalf.
Allowing for debate over policy, Boehlert said he finds the GOP’s “dogged determination” to deny the actual science “incomprehensible”:
Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn’t help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.[…]
Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.
I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.[…]
There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution.
Boehlert’s problem is that he’s simply delusional. Ronald Reagan couldn’t even win a GOP senate primary nowadays. Probably not even a house one. That party is gone, baby, gone.
But Think Progress also calls attention to Joe Scarborough in a segment with John Kerry in a roundtable, where Scarborough joins Kerry in bemoaning the lack of GOP support for investing in the clean energy future. If only Barack Obama were as enthusiastic as Scarborough on the subject! But John Boehner? Give me a break!
The second piece concerned GOP judges calling on senators to stop obstructing Obama’s judicial nominees. It began:
