Liberation Theology

Posted on March 14, 2013 by camelotkidd

The 1960’s brought momentous changes, both to the US and to the third world. Fledgling democratic governments were formed in the wake of European colonialism, and reform was the order of the day. Hierarchy and status quo were on the defensive.

The Catholic Church was strongly influenced by this reform movement. In 1962, hundreds of Catholic leaders convened in St. Peter’s Basilica in a massive display of solemn ecclesiastical pomp. It was the start of a historic three-year assembly that would change the Catholic Church in numerous ways.

“It does not seem accidental that Vatican II  took place both in the wake of, and during the time which the liberation movements in Africa and Asia brought about the dismantlement of the old empires, followed by the creation of new nation states, in which surged visions of freedom and development for the newly enfranchised populations which had previously experienced oppression, deprivation and dispossession under the yoke of colonialism.”

Catholic bishops, priests and nuns sought to integrate themselves into this changing world, and minister to their newly liberated congregation.

With Vatican II, the Catholic Church sent out the message that it was part of the modern world, said Thomas Ryan, director of the Loyola Institute for Ministry. “Not against, not above, not apart, but in the modern world,” he said. “The church sought to engage, not condemn.”

Out of Vatican II came numerous reforms to Catholicism.

“The men and women in religious orders started taking on causes, even risking arrest, when they spoke out in favor of civil rights and workers’ rights and against the war in Vietnam.”

One of the most momentous reforms to come out of Vatican II was liberation theology.

“Liberation theology is a political movement in Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It has been described by proponents as “an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor’s suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor, and by detractors as Christianized Marxism.”

Liberation theology was instantly controversial within the Church. Since the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church had been the state religion, supporting wealth and power, but suddenly Vatican II reformers were advocating Jesus Christ’s teachings, supporting the poor and powerless instead.

“The nature of the Church had changed with Constantine’s declaration in 324 A.D. that the Catholic Church would be the official Church of the Roman Empire, thereby making it the “persecuting Church,” with the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and complicity with Nazism among the numerous crimes which flowed from this.”

Many of the conservative church hierarchy bitterly opposed liberation theology. They viewed it as little better than Marxism. One of the foremost critics was German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now recently resigned Pope Benedict XVI.

“Liberation theology, by exposing and critiquing the concentration and control of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the top of the political, economic and social pyramid, showed how the structures and institutions of capitalist society resulted in both a dispossessed, impoverished, oppressed and powerless rural peasantry and the creation of an impoverished urban proletariat. Using Marxist tools of analysis, these studies revealed that these social conditions of poverty were the deliberate and predictable results of the structures and institutions of capitalist society, and not mere accidents. That is to say, that human destruction and suffering produced in these economies was was both intentional and unavoidable, and not merely an undesirable by- product of their functioning.”

Despite conservative Catholic leaders opposition, liberation theology was embraced by many third world Catholic priests, and made great inroads in Latin America. Unsurprisingly, the US viewed liberation theology as a grave threat to its interests, and depicted it as part of a world-wide communist conspiracy.

“Liberation theology led to an empowerment of the poor, and thus had the potential of confronting the rich and powerful to demand a change in the institutional structures. Given that South America’s economies were dominated by a capitalist United States, working in cohorts with local powerful wealthy ruling groups and manipulating political power in their favor, it is not surprising that such socio-economic critiques of Central and South America would cause more than one confrontation: with the local ruling powers, with the upper hierarchy of the Church, and not far behind, the United States government, which represented big business interests.”

Sensing their opportunity, conservative forces within the Catholic church acted to halt the spread of liberation theology.

“Two historical events occurred in the Church to bring to a halt the spread of liberation theology and its political concomitants: the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, and his appointment, in 1981, of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly referred to as the Holy Inquisition. Both men were intractably anti-Communist and identified Marxism with the communism of the Soviet Union: the Pope from his experience living in Communist Poland, and Cardinal Ratzinger as a result of the student uprising in Tübingen University in 1968, an experience which indelibly affected his approach to life, placing him firmly on the right in the conservative camp. Here the term “conservative” means the conservation of those structures of power that already exist for the sake of order.”

Pope Benedict XVI, the recently resigned Pope, played a huge part in the reversal of liberation theology. Coincidently, he also oversaw the ongoing coverup of the child molestation scandal presently engulfing the Catholic Church.

“The pope continues to appear uncomfortable and embarrassed by the pedophile scandal, unable to grasp the scandal’s full moral and legal consequences. While Benedict has, up until recently, appeared to take seriously sexual-abuse charges against the clergy, he is ultimately a faithful follower of the traditions of the Inquisition. His primary duty seems to be to protect those who adhere to Church dogma even if they break secular laws. As such, the indiscreet actions of loyal servants of the bureaucracy are hushed up, offenders shifted to another parish and abusers permitted to continue to serve the Church. Sadly, it appears the neither the pope nor his loyal minions really comprehend (or care about) the institutional failure at the heart of the scandal: where Vatican II sought to open the Church to its faithful, Benedict seeks to limit accountability to only those who accept faithful obedience.”

Pope Benedict XVI spent his professional life working tirelessly to place the Catholic Church back where it belongs: the loyal servant of empire and protector of hierarchy. This powerful hierarchy within the Catholic Church, rather than following the path of reform, instead collaborated with the US to undo attempts at democratization, and then cover up their complicity.

The outpouring of vitriol expressed by our elite media in response to the demise of Hugo Chavez demonstrates the continued hatred of liberation theology. Chavez, more than any other Latin American leader, represented the living, breathing incarnation of liberation theology, with his concern for the poor and powerless of Venezuela and his willingness to use oil revenues to affect real improvements in their lives.

As we can see, the end of the Cold War and the demise of communism did not diminish the US’s antipathy towards liberation theology. Communism was always a pretext. What the US opposes is any sort of alternative to capitalism and empire that liberation theology represents.

In fact, examining Wikileaks materials, it is obvious that the US views liberation theology exactly like terrorism, as an extreme threat to be eradicated.

“In short, the U.S. very much views Liberation Theology, and those that adhere to it, as enemies.  And, it views itself as aligned with the Vatican in their mutual efforts to destroy this philosophy.”

Let’s face it. The US is waging war against true Christianity. For all its ballyhooed rhetoric about being a Christian nation, the persecution of liberation theology demonstrates that the US prefers a Christianity that remains a loyal supporter of capitalism and empire, rather than one that ministers to the poor and downtrodden.

Can I get an Amen?

Update: A new pope has been chosen. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

“Indeed, the predominant role of the Church hierarchy – from the Vatican to the bishops in the individual countries – was to give political cover to the slaughter and to offer little protection to the priests and nuns who advocated “liberation theology,” i.e. the belief that Jesus did not just favor charity to the poor but wanted a just society that shared wealth and power with the poor.”

 

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The Empire Strikes Back

Posted on March 7, 2013 by camelotkidd

I discuss neo-feudalism at CK a fair amount. Okay, a lot.

Going forward, I want to explore how Neo-feudalism came to be our reality. My decades of research have convinced me that this was no accident; shaped by benign, external forces. No, it was a very conscious plan from the beginning, involving a host of individual, corporate and intellectual actors. Economic, political, ideological, cultural, educational, legal and religious theories, all played their part in the great reversal: from a more democratic and egalitarian society, to more plutocratic and concentrated one.

“Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.”

The Empire Strikes Back, is going to be a hugely complex series of posts examining how the neo-feudal plan was hatched and carried out. And, like any good crime drama, the narrative begins in the middle of the action–the 1960’s.

The 1960’s, featured student protest in academia, antiwar protest against US foreign policy, and consumer protest against corporate power. Worse still for established authority, was the moral protest occurring in religion. Especially problematic was liberation theology. Liberation theology is a political movement in Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions.

That’s where we’re going to start.

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The Road to Neo-Feudalism

Posted on March 1, 2013 by camelotkidd

Every single day I read articles that solidify my belief that we’re headed at full speed towards neo-feudalism, with the American people asleep in the back seat. Fasten your seat belts.

“The President’s “sequester” offer slashes non-defense spending by $830 billion over the next ten years. That happens to be the precise amount we’re implicitly giving Wall Street’s biggest banks over the same time period.”

“We’re collecting nothing from the big banks in return for our generosity.  Instead we’re demanding sacrifice from the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the young, the middle class – pretty much everybody, in fact, who isn’t “too big to fail.”

“That’s injustice on a medieval scale, served up with a medieval caste-privilege flavor. The only difference is that nowadays injustices are presented with spreadsheets and PowerPoints, rather than with scrolls and trumpets and kingly proclamations.”

During the feudal era peasants paid a tribute to their lords. Think of the money we  hand over to the banks as a neo-tribute.

“In this case the tribute is made possible, not by military occupation, but by the hijacking of our political process by the corrupting force of corporate contributions.”

Thanks to these campaign contributions, both parties are all in for austerity. This economic version of bleeding the patient, goes against 80 years of established economic theory and follows the disastrous path of Europe. But, hey, all the cool kids are down with austerity. They are convinced that the American people simply must take their medicine.

President Obama is proposing to end the Sequester by cutting non-defense spending almost a trillion dollars over ten years. This offer includes cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which should come as a surprise to voters who backed his reelection. To be fair, he has asked for some increase in revenues as well.

“But if we start reintroducing cutbacks just as the US economy is beginning to show faltering signs of recovery, all of the recent gains on the budget deficit will go by the wayside. Why? Because fiscal austerity deflates economic activity, causing tax revenues to plunge and social welfare payments – unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps – to explode.  The perverse impact, then, is that deficits get larger – precisely the opposite of what the “austerian” brigade desires, but which is happening in earnest in places like Greece and Spain.”

The Republicans would really like much deeper cuts to non-defense spending. But, truth be told, there is only one thing Republicans care about deeply.

“What matters to congressional Republicans is low taxes for the wealthy, period. They’ll take cuts to spending for the poor, and they’ll accept cuts to middle class programs if they can blame Democrats for them, but given the choice they would much rather have upper-class tax cuts than cuts to Social Security and Medicare.”

The sequester and the embrace of austerity by both parties, is just the beginning of a rough ride. If you need an example of what we’re in for, check out the nightmare that’s occurring in Europe right now.

“If we had no evidence of how to solve a debt crisis equitably, we could perhaps regard the policies of Europe’s leaders as misguided. But we have the positive example of Germany 60 years ago, and the devastating example of the Latin American debt crisis 30 years ago. The actions of Europe’s leaders are nothing short of criminal.”

If it’s austerity for us, it must be bonuses for our ruling class. Because, you know, they stole it fair and square. And, they’re not finished.

You remember who our ruling class is don’t you? Just when you thought that it couldn’t get any better for Wall Street, Jack Lew gets Senate confirmation to be our next Treasury Secretary. I thought little Timmah was horrible. Lew may be worse.

“Take a guess who will lose out as Washington decides who is going to get stuck with the bill for the drastic cuts being considered in the sequester?  No matter how much money or how many jobs Wall Street loses for the US, they still will always get their man in Washington.”

I don’t know what the tipping point will be. Do the American people retain the capacity for outrage? Or are we serfs, keeping our heads down and hoping we still have a job?

You know my answer. But I certainly don’t know what will happen going forward. We are rapidly exhausting the working within the political system options.

As President Kennedy warned:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

This is not rocket science. We did this before after the stock market crash of 1929, and the suffering of the Great Depression. The neo-liberal notion that markets are self correcting has been proven to be ideological rubbish. We need to reenact regulations and laws to prevent this sort of banana republic scale of corruption. And we must do something about the revolving door between government and the private sector. How about a tax of 50% on all income earned the first 5 years after leaving government to discourage this type of legalized bribery.

All this was known to the Founders. James Madison presciently wrote.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

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It’s Pee

Posted on February 27, 2013 by camelotkidd

Republican’s want to immediately privatize government. They hate the thought of the government doing anything for “those people.” Ever since the New Deal, Republicans have made the intellectual argument that a welfare state saps American’s freedoms, and have mounted a decades long moral crusade against the basic idea of government. In a large part, they are ideologues who view the beneficiaries of public-sector programs as takers who need the harsh lash of austerity.

“Within the US, the grotesque failure of socialism in China and the Soviet Union became a propaganda weapon in the neoliberal war against the public sector in its most innocuous forms and a core argument for the privatization of just about everything.“

The Democrats used to believe in government as a solution to our problems. Today, not so much. Now their solution is Public-Private Partnerships(PPP’s) PPP’s are basically public infrastructure that the government will sell off to the ruling party’s major campaign contributors for pennies on the dollar.

“The pretense is that privatization is more efficient. But privatizers add on interest and financial fees, high executive salaries and bonuses, and turn the roads into toll roads and other infrastructure into neofeudal fiefdoms to charge monopolistic access fees for people to use. This is what has happened in Chicago when it sold off its sidewalks to let bankers finance parking meters in exchange for a loan. Chicago needed this loan because the financial lobbyists demanded that it cut taxes on commercial real estate and on the rich. So the financial sector first creates a problem by loading the economy down with debt, and then “solves” it by demanding privatization sell-offs under distress conditions.”

President Obama has especially enabled Wall Street–his biggest campaign contributer–to enrich the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.

“The man whom Obama asked to be his mentor when he joined the Senate was Joe Lieberman. He evidently gave Obama expert advice about how to raise funds from the financial class by delivering his liberal constituency to his Wall Street campaign contributors. So the problem is not that President Obama is well meaning but inept – an idealist who just can’t fight the vested interests and insiders. He’s thrown in his lot with them. In fact, he really seems to believe the right-wing, pro-Wall Street ideology – that the economy can’t function without a financial system that guarantees “savers” (the top 1%) against loss, even when the bottom 99% have to pay more and more.”

So how do we change the American economy to make it more fair and participatory, free from the distortions of the financial sector?

“The classical idea of a free market economy was radical in its way – precisely by being natural and thus getting rid of unnatural warping by special privileges for absentee landlords and banks. This led logically to socialism, which is why the history of economic thought has been dropped – indeed, excluded – from today’s academic curriculum.”

Simon Patten, the first professor of economics at the Wharton Business School, believed that there was a fourth factor of production (alongside, labor, capital and land). The forth factor is public infrastructure investment, which takes its return not in the form of profits, but in the degree to which it lowers the economy’s cost of doing business and living.

This idea is fundamentally at odds with PPP’s. Patten believed that by subsidizing public infrastructure we the people could create the conditions where a free market could flourish. Patten, like other Progressive Era economists, wanted to minimize “rent seeking.”

“The Progressive Era that emerged from classical economics understood the economic benefits of taxing unearned wealth (“rent extraction”) at the top of the economic pyramid, provide basic infrastructure services at cost rather than creating fiefdoms for privatizers to install tollbooths and make their gains tax-exempt. Radical neoliberalism has reversed this.”

This neo-liberalism is what the Democratic Party is offering. If you listened to the President’s speech and stripped away the soaring rhetoric, he talked almost exclusively about public-private partnerships as his solution to the problems we face as a nation. From health care, to education, to construction of new public works projects, it was all PPP’s.

“This is leading to debt peonage and what really is neo-feudalism. We are seeing a kind of financial warfare that is as grabbing as the old-style military conquests. The aim is the same: the land, basic infrastructure, and use of the government to extract tribute.”

How do we maintain a system of public infrastructure? And, on related note, what can we do to maintain and strengthen our democracy?

 “The proper role of government is that of preserving the public commons. To make a commons work, there needs to be some system in place to monitor the state of the commons, assess how changes will impact it, and prohibit those things that will cause harm to it.  On a purely local level, as Elinor Ostrom showed, a self-regulating commons is easy to establish and easy to maintain, since it’s in the direct self-interest of everyone who benefits from the commons to prevent anyone else from abusing it.” 

“The problem here is precisely that of centralization. The research for which economist Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize a few years back showed that, by and large, effective management of a commons is a grassroots affair; those who will be most directly affected by the way the commons is managed are also its best managers.  The more distance between the managers and the commons they manage, the more likely failure becomes, because two factors essential to successful management simply aren’t there. The first of them is immediate access to information about how management policies are working, or not working, so that those policies can be adjusted immediately if they go wrong; the second is a personal stake in the outcome, so that the managers have the motivation to recognize when a mistake has been made, rather than allowing the psychology of previous investment to seduce them into pursuing a failed policy right into the ground.”

Pay attention to the policies that are rolled out in the near future by the Democrats as a solution to our problems. It’s like the old joke about someone pissing on your head and calling it rain. Except, it’s not rain, it’s pee.

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Mars Bitches

Posted on February 24, 2013 by camelotkidd

The documentary, “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” recently aired on MSNBC to mark the tenth-anniversary of the selling of the Iraq War by President George W. Bush’s administration.

Sometimes I wonder if American’s even remember this shameful period.

Thanks to Netflix, the wife and I have been re-watching the Dave Chappelle Show, that ran during the invasion of Iraq. While still funny as shit, the show is a reminder of the non-stop propaganda that accompanied the war. In one of his skits, Dave plays Black Bush, and adroitly demonstrates the absurdity of the Bush Administration’s numerous, ever changing, justifications for the invasion. At the end of the skit Black Bush changes the subject from the illegal invasion and instead talks about space exploration, exhorting–Mars Bitches.

It was very funny, but on a more serious note, it reminded me just how easy it is to lie to the American people. Gore Vidal always said that USA actually stood for United States of Amnesia. It’s true. Americans are clueless about history. They barely remember what happened yesterday. And, of course, there’s always American Idol, and Honey Boo Boo on the TV.

This recent historical amnesia is a feature not a bug. US media focuses on celebrities and trivial events, eschewing historical content and connection.

Both the MSNBC documentary and the Chappelle Show, also reinforced how subservient and craven the media were during this period. Then, as now, being pro-war is always good for ones media career. If you have any doubts, compare how pro-war and anti-war pundits fared, both during this period and in the present day.

“Pressures subtle and blatant were brought to bear. Phil Donahue’s nightly MSNBC talk show was virtually the only program of its type that gave antiwar voices a chance to be heard. Donahue was canceled 22 days before the invasion of Iraq. The reason was supposedly low ratings, but the New York Times intercepted an in-house memo in which a network executive complained: “Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time, our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Our media exists largely as an amazing system of propaganda, selling war the same way they sell neo-liberal economic policies that benefit the elite at the expense of everyone else.

Numerian examines the way that the media treats President Obama today, as he continues Bush’s policies of war, torture and drone assassination.

“Very little of this has been of interest to the US media. Perhaps they know something we don’t know. Perhaps they know the United States is well past the point where anything can be done about an imperial presidency that operates in almost complete secrecy, and that can intimidate both the Congress and the press into acquiescence and silence on any matter deemed to be highly classified and in the interest of national security. Perhaps they know that only the implosion of the national security state, as a result of reckless over-expansion and the ruinous financial drain it represents on the Treasury, can finally put some constraint on the military-industrial complex.”

Obama, like all other presidents, has one overarching task–maintenance of the US empire. Anyone who still has hope for a different foreign policy during Obama’s second term has not been paying attention.

This American empire is the reason for the imposition of neo-feudalism here at home. And, the propaganda used to sell empire is also used to sell the neo-liberal economic policies leading to neo-feudalism. The two are mutually reinforcing.

Americans used to be well versed in all this. Writers such as Mark Twain, made the connection between capitalism and empire.

“Mark Twain despised The American Empire. In fact, he was a founder and vice president of The American Anti-Imperialist League. It was pretty common knowledge among educated Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He wrote about it…sarcastically and vitriolic as usual…but with especial venom and passion. However, the most cutting and incisive of his loathing about the hypocrisy of Americans in their lust for wealth and imperial power.”

Capitalism needs new sources of raw materials, energy and markets. Twas always so.

“You can call it what you want, but America needs a war to pull the people together and expand into new resource rich areas. That’s what it has always done from Mexico on. And that is what it needs now.” 

This knowledge of capitalism and class used to be more widespread. Unlike today, American workers and farmers in the late 19th century understood that industrialists, bankers and railroad owners: the Carnegie’s, Morgan’s and Rockefeller’s, were their implicit enemy. Back then the bankers and industrialists of the day made no pretense about the unequal state of affairs. They used force to maintain control. Private armies, such as the Pinkertons intimidated, beat and killed workers who dared protest or strike for better working conditions.

“In the late nineteenth century, labor disputes often erupted into violent riots, and a cottage industry sprang up to serve the paramilitary needs of the modern industrialist. Local sheriffs were usually too poorly equipped or too sympathetic to labor to put down strikes. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, on the other hand, staked its reputation on crushing labor actions. Between 1866 and 1892, Pinkertons participated in seventy labor disputes and opposed over 125,000 strikers.”

Today, the elite are much more sophisticated in their approach. Instead of force, advertising, public relations and propaganda are employed to keep American’s complacent. As Alex Carey Australian writer and social psychologist who pioneered the study of corporate propaganda, described it as Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.

“The 20th century, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy.”

So, when you watch TV or read the paper, remember what the brilliant comedian George Carlin said.

“It’s all bullshit, folks and it’s bad for ya.”

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How it Works

Posted on February 22, 2013 by camelotkidd

You’ve heard me pontificate about propaganda enough, that I think a real life example is in order.

My wife, a health care worker, is sick and tired of co-workers and patients referring to the Affordable Care Act as Obamacare. And, who can blame her when the complaints she hears are based on a basic misunderstanding of the ACA.

The dominant narrative about President Obama’s signature health care reform, is that it is a socialist expansion of big-government. Of course, this narrative is completely at odds with reality. The intellectual underpinnings of the health care reform originated at the Heritage Foundation and it was first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was governor.

The ACA, rather than aiding the American people, was primarily set up to benefit the health care industry.

“Is it any surprise that the woman who wrote the Affordable Care Act is now leaving the White House for a job with health care giant Johnson & Johnson? Liz Fowler worked for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) during the drafting of the ACA and had the primary responsibility for authoring the legislation. After its passage, she migrated to the White House to help with implementation. Seems reasonable enough. However, it is important to note where she was before joining the staff of Senator Baucus. Yup, you guessed it…she was a bigwig at WellPoint, the nation’s second leading health insurance company with nearly 54 million policyholders.” 

Now that the ACA is becoming a reality, many of its defects are starting to become apparent. Employers are cutting back on employee hours so they don’t have to fund their health care. Republican governors are refusing to expand their Medicaid rosters–a crucial step in the implementation of the ACA. And health insurance companies are already raising rates.

Reporter, David Dayen outlines some other potential problems with the ACA as we move towards its implementation.

“Will the states and the federal government sufficiently create exchanges that automatically determine eligibility for anyone who accesses them? Will the feds, not expecting to have to take over the exchange process for the majority of states, prove up to the task (and find the funding)? Will the subsidies get delivered to insurance companies in a seamless way? Will we still see efforts at denying coverage or rescinding policies? Will eligible beneficiaries even know that they’re eligible for subsidies? Will the states with partisan leaders predisposed to fight Obamacare seek to sabotage the whole effort? Will Congress shift more costs onto individuals and states in ways that will cause states in particular to resist coverage? What if drug pricesstart to rise in relative terms, and the cost of health care overall expands in ways that the ACA cannot keep up with? Will the inevitable failures in implementation sour the public on the program? Will there ever be an opportunity to improve or tweak this program, given the political realities?” 

Ask yourself a question. Why didn’t President Obama push for an expansion of Medicare, a government health insurance program with a proven track record and low costs?

And, here we are at the heart of our propaganda system. The big lie of conservative media: Obama and Democrats are socialists, out to enslave American citizens in a vast web of government programs, like the ACA, that will sap their freedoms.

Obama didn’t push for single-payer or even a public option, because he’s not liberal or a Democrat in the traditional sense. And, the modern Democratic Party is anything but socialist. A more appropriate description would be corporate.

“Corporatism, of course, is a vague label, but in Democratic politics it typically refers to helping campaign contributors bust unions and dismantle environmental regulations, with the expectation that servile labor and environmental leaders will sit by as their movements are decimated.”

The Democrats get to pretend that they are liberal in order to get support and money from real liberals. Democrats are only liberal in relation to social issues. On economics and health care, not so much.

 “From the Democrats you get back-door privatization, like Obama’s Health Care act. Ask yourself — why didn’t Obama just offer a bill that expanded Medicare to everyone in the country? Answer: Because he wanted to shovel money into corporate (meaning, billionaire CEO) hands with a “public-private solution” to a public policy problem. This is always the Neoliberal “solution” — starve the government along with the Republicans, then sell public-private “deals” that screw the public while offering pretend or partial solutions.”

So what can we do?

We need to press for single-payer health care, or at least a public option. Look, good policy is good politics. Americans are acting negatively towards the ACA because instinctively they recognize that it will make their life harder, with its corporate mandate and paucity of actual coverage.

I’ll leave the last word to Avedon Carol.

“We can argue some about which is the biggest, most important issue, but it has to be understood that none of that matters as long as we don’t have democracy. The public has been pretty clear about what it wants, and the Hill has been pretty clear that it doesn’t care what we want. If we can’t figure out how to turn back into a democracy, this train is going to run right over us.“

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Think Globally, Act Locally

Posted on February 15, 2013 by camelotkidd

Air pollution horribly afflicts our western valley in the winter. For the past month, we’ve had the dubious distinction of having the worst air in the nation. Hurray!

But, this situation is also fraught with possibilities for change–the hacking, coughing, foul odor, and lack of visibility contribute to an acute and obvious problem. It should be a non-political issue that transcends traditional Republican/Democratic framing. A family values issue. In fact, a local mom was so concerned about the health affects of pollution on her daughter that she started Utah Moms for Clean Air.

“Mothers are in a special moral position to advocate for clean air. Our intent is simple: to ensure that our children, whose lives are entrusted to us, have a healthy environment in which to grow and flourish. Cooping them up indoors to avoid toxic air outside is not the solution.”

Utah Governor Gary Herbert has touted the Utah Clean Air Partnership as his voluntary solution to the dirty air.

Other groups, such as, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, are pressing for mandatory measures such as cutting industry emissions, more mass transit and bikes, working to eliminate wood and coal burning and battling destructive land use practices–sprawl.

Our local air pollution is also linked to the larger issue of global climate warming, caused by burning fossil-fuels. Hence, by acting to alleviate our own problem we can help the planet. Right?

Not so fast. Just because we have an obvious problem does not mean that we have the wherewithal to fix it. Like every other urgent crisis in our country, air pollution is ultimately a political problem. And like all the other political problems we face, there are powerful economic forces that do not want to change. The oil and gas industries, the coal industry, nuclear power, and land developers all find the status quo to be quite profitable, thank you very much. And, of course, our state legislators are much more responsive to these powerful economic actors than to we the people. Imagine that.

And, it’s not just powerful economic actors. There are ideological opponents. Our local Madame Defarge, Gayle Ruzicka, president of the conservative Utah Eagle Forum, said her study of climate change on the Internet led her to conclude “everybody disagrees” that the changing climate poses serious risks.

Ah, the Internet. Where everything you read is true. With Gayle, or other conservatives, if there is an issue that liberals are against, she must be for it, or if liberals are for it, she must be against it. Go team Red.

Global warming is also seen by conservatives as a backdoor assault on capitalism. Therefore global warming is a liberal plot to bring about Marxism. Or something.

However, change is afoot. Renewable energy, funded by federal and state subsidies has the potential to radically change the traditional fossil-fuel economic paradigm. This potential for radical change makes renewables threatening to the fossil-fuel status quo.

“Right-wing groups funded by the fossil-fuel industry and the billionaire Koch brothers are rolling out a nationwide assault to repeal state Renewable Electricity Standards (RES), a key component, along with such federal tax incentives as the wind production tax credit (PTC), in driving renewable energy growth in the United States.”

To have this sort of new economy based on renewable energy, you need government subsidies and government regulations.

“Having the standards is what enables the market to grow rapidly,” said Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute. He said that if states were to overturn these renewable standards, they would be “shooting themselves in the foot” because wind is roughly already at cost parity with coal and “a huge market opportunity.”

But, you know how much conservatives and corporations hate government regulations. Almost as much as they hate environmentalists.

“Pollin said that the standard argument from the right is, “Well, if you do these environmental things it’s bad for economic growth, it’s bad for jobs.”

“The tactic, is to pay for a bogus study that shows that the costs are prohibitive and it’s actually a job killer rather than job creator. Then find a champion in the state legislature who is more interested in supporting fossil-fuels and keep hammering away at that message.”

So, what can we do?

We have to participate. By acting locally to reduce our air pollution, we have the capability to help minimize global climate change. Ride your bike, utilize public transportation, and carpool.

Get involved. Visit: Utah Moms for Clean Air and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. And call the Governor.

Utah Governor Herbert Contact Information: 800-705-2464

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Modalities of Control

Posted on February 12, 2013 by camelotkidd

Why are American’s so docile in the face of persistent unemployment, record levels of foreclosure and a banana republic system of inequality?

One word–Debt.

“Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant. Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control.”

Think about it. Your credit report is used to determine everything from a job prospect, to getting a security clearance, to even finding dating partners. For many young adults, starting out after college means hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans to service, even if they can’t find a job.

“But with the reward for a college degree falling and default rates sky-rocketing, many students and their parents will end up as the student loan debt slaves.”

In the last 40 years wages have remained flat. To maintain a middle-class lifestyle, American’s have become trapped into a Web of Debt. And, it’s not just American citizens, but the US government as well.

“The United States is legally bankrupt, defined in the dictionary as being unable to pay one’s debts, being insolvent, or having liabilities in excess of a reasonable market value of assets held. By October 2006, the debt of the U.S. government had hit a breath-taking $8.5 trillion. Local, state and national governments are all so heavily in debt that they have been forced to sell off public assets to satisfy creditors. Crowded schools, crowded roads, and cutbacks in public transportation are eroding the quality of American life.”

Written by author Ellen Brown, Web of Debt, is a fascinating history of the banking cartel’s control of America and the world. Their aim was to control the political systems of respective countries through their control of the central banks.

“The key to their success was that they would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.”

The dirty little secret of finance, is that our money is loaned into existence by banks. But the US government could do this just as easily.

 “At one time, the right to issue money was the sovereign right of the king; but that right got usurped by private moneylenders.” 

The United States has created its own money before. During the Civil War, President Lincoln created “Greenbacks” to finance the war.

“These federal dollars were first issued by President Lincoln when he was faced with usurious interest rates in the 1860s. Lincoln had foiled the bankers by funding the government with U.S. Notes that did not accrue interest and did not have to be paid back to the banks.”

As you might remember from your history book, he was assassinated, and the US reverted to a gold backed dollar, controlled by the bankers. I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

“The bankers countered that allowing the government to issue money would be dangerously inflationary. What they failed to reveal was that their own paper banknotes were themselves highly inflationary, since the same gold was “lent” many times over, effectively counterfeiting it; and when the bankers lent their paper money to the government, the government wound up heavily in debt for something it could have created itself.”

As we debate austerity, and listen to Republican congress critters caterwaulling about how any day we’ll turn into Greece, it’s useful to remember that we have alternatives to this system of private finance.

“If governments everywhere are in debt, who are they in debt to? The answer is that they are in debt to private banks. The “cruel hoax” is that governments are in debt for money created on a computer screen, money they could have created themselves.”

We the people, in order to create a more perfect union… You know how that goes. As a representative democracy, there is nothing more important to sovereignty than control of the money supply.

“The dollar is a national resource that belongs to the people. It was an original invention of the early American colonists, a new form of paper currency backed by the “full faith and credit” of the people. But a private banking cartel has taken over its issuance, turning debt into money and demanding that it be paid back with interest. Taxes and a crushing federal debt have been imposed by a financial ruling class that keeps the people entranced and enslaved.”

Read Web of Debt and tell your friends. We have a choice going forward. To either become educated and organized, or to become serfs. And, you know how I feel about becoming a serf.

Fuck you. I won’t do what you tell me.

Update: “First, it is impossible to justify the conventional view that fiat money should operate almost exclusively via today’s system of private borrowing and lending.” 

Update: David Dayen has a great idea–bring back postal banking.

 

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Dollarocracy

Posted on February 6, 2013 by camelotkidd

A friend asked me a great question the other day: Is neo-feudalism just fascism?

According to the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary, fascism is:

“A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, in “No, Actually, This Is What a Fascist Looks Like, explain fascism’s historical significance.

“Fascism originated in Italy, and Mussolini claims to have invented the word itself. It was actually his ghostwriter, Giovanni Gentile, who invented it and defined it in the Encyclopedia Italiana in this way: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

“In other words, fascism is corporate government – a Libertarian’s wet dream. It’s a government in which the Atlas’s of industry are given free rein to control the economy, just how they’re regulated, how much they pay in taxes, how much they pay their workers. “

So, how did I define neo-feudalism?

“Neo-feudalism is the resort to a private-public structure of governance, where the wealthy and corporations use the government for their own devices.”

Fascism and neo-feudalism sound very similar. But, because we’re talking about America, land of the free, home of the brave, we can never describe it in those terms. Nor would most Americans entertain such a concept; we have an amazing system of advertising, p.r. and propaganda to largely obscure this reality.

Contrary to this pro-business propaganda with its ode to free markets, and hostility to government regulations, American corporations have long welcomed the “dead hand of the state,” strongly advocating for federal government intervention to address the problems of economic downturns, depressions and, crucially, plunging profits due to cutthroat competition.

“Government involvement in the accumulation process was inescapable, and was to be secured only by deliberate class-concerted mobilization aimed at securing the state for the interests of big business.”

It has only been when the federal government has intervened in the interests of workers that there has been hostility to regulation and a corresponding outbreak of rhetoric about the evils of “big government.”

“When the New Deal-Great Society period 1949 – 1973 evidenced an influential labor movement, several large-scale labor actions and the first and only 40-year downward distribution of income from the top 1 percent to the rest in the nation’s history, elites perceived this as a major crisis and mobilized in the mid-1970s to seize control of the state in order to undo the social programs and business regulations of the Golden Age, paving the way for the neoliberal macroeconomic reconfiguration superintended by Reagan, Clinton, Bush pere, Bush fils and Obama.”

See the Powell Memo for more on how elites plotted their comeback.

I first observed this dichotomy between anti-government propaganda and reality when in college I discovered historian Gabriel Kolko, and read his masterpiece, The Triumph of Conservatism. It has been illuminating to re-read it.

“Although specific conditions varied from industry to industry, internal problems that could be solved only by political means were the common
denominator in those industries whose leaders advocated greater federal regulation. Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, It was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”

It’s time to acknowledge frankly and honestly that the United States Government is run for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy. We have an all-American synthesis between government and business, that while not quite fascism, could rightfully be called a dollarocracy. Or maybe, neo-feudalism. And like fascist states, the US maintains this system through belligerent nationalism, expressed through a War on Terror, that shows no sign of ending, ever.

Look, I’m not a utopian. I’ve undertaken this neo-feudalism project at CK with the goal of illuminating the real political economy of the United States. Lord knows, the mainstream media isn’t doing it. They’re busy fellating the plutocracy, or showing the latest Honey Boo Boo freak show.

“The historical unfolding of American capitalism has put the class character of the State squarely on the political agenda. It has been the plutocracy’s top priority for a long time. It is clearer to more Americans than ever that the entire political establishment is unprepared and unwilling to manage the economy and the State in the interests of working people. The ruling-class concerns of the neoliberal State homogenizes policy options and renders standard Party politics otiose and obsolete. An effective Left political program must make available to its constituency a radically revised conception of what it means to do politics.”

Mea Culpa:
Don’t know what I was smoking last week when I said to eschew national politics. We have to get involved at every level. The elite has captured the US government to the detriment of everyone else. We have to take it back.

That is all.

 

 

 
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Not a Serf

Posted on January 30, 2013 by camelotkidd

Neo-feudalism is on the march in the United States. The US Government has been largely captured by the financial industry, and is operating against the rest of us. This business/government alliance is the 1% that Occupy Wall Street railed against. If you need a face to attach to this nefarious cabal, think of “Little Timmah” Geithner.

One of the key methods that the 1% uses to enslave the rest of us is debt.

“Today, we have entered a new phase.  What might be called capitalist underdevelopment and once again debt has emerged as both the central mode of capital accumulation and a principal mechanism of servitude.  Warren Buffett (of all people) has predicted that, in the coming decades, the United States is more likely to turn into a “sharecropper society” than an “ownership society.”

“In our time, the financial sector has enriched itself by devouring the productive wherewithal of industrial America through debt, starving the public sector of resources, and saddling ordinary working people with every conceivable form of consumer debt.”

This all sounds hopeless, I know, but, how do we fight back?

1) Don’t be a serf. Resist this imposition of neo-feudalism. Take charge of your life. You are a citizen, not just a fucking consumer. In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau argues that citizens should not permit governments to dull their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing their consent to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.

2) Avoid “rents.”

“As Lenin and others predicted, industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. Finance capitalism does not finance or create new real investments such as manufacturing facilities. Instead, finance capitalism functions as a rentier. It leverages debt and extracts interest payments (and today taxpayer bailouts for its over-leveraged gambles). Finance capitalism flourishes by converting more and more of society’s resources into payments to itself…the result is that bankers now receive the rents (a form of unearned income) that once flowed to the landed aristocracy. Unlike the aristocracy, who were dispossessed of their rents, the bankers have not been.

Take your money out of the bank, especially if it is one of the “too big to fail” banks. Join a credit union. And, it’s not just banks, our country is overrun with rentiers: Comcast, Microsoft, Walmart, AT&T, etc. Find alternatives.

3) Take part in a community. Humans are communal, act like it. Remember, the powers that be would like nothing better than to have us all alone in front of the TV. Turn it off.

4) Plant a garden. It’s a small step, but it gives you a measure of control, and there is nothing better than fresh tomatoes and basil with dinner in the summer.

5) Exercise. Not only will you get in better shape and be healthier, but it offers the best anti-depressant. And it’s empowering.

6) Learn a sport. It will provide a entertaining way to exercise. If you chose an extreme sport, like this, or this, or this, you can risk your life, like I do. Risking your life is exhilarating, but it also puts some of the petty things we stress about into perspective.

7) Get involved with local politics. Notice, I didn’t say get involved with national politics, where Team D is almost as bad as Team R, and they are both down with neo-feudalism.

8) Stay positive. Understand what is going on without becoming cynical.  Cynicism is paralyzing. Again, that is what the powers that be would like.

9) Don’t become spiteful. When you are spiteful of your neighbors, it feeds into the divide and rule paradigm. Find what Alex Cockburn calls your “pure hatred.” By that, Cockburn means, hate the real villains that are turning this country into a “banana republic.”

10) Love someone. I’m starting to sound like Dr. Phil, but having a partner makes life so much more enjoyable. As the saying goes–Live, Laugh, Love.

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