GOVERNMENTS LIE - August 5, 2010

Years ago, I learned from my friend I. F. Stone that governments lie. Not that they always lie, or even most of the time, but they have no strong tendency to tell the truth. In fact, the only thing that we can conclude from a statement of fact from one of them is that they would rather we believe it than not. This injunction applies especially when they give us a reason for undertaking fierce action or even going to war. When we remember the Alamo or the Maine, we are very likely to be seduced into doing something that we would otherwise not do. In more recent memory, that applies to the sinking of the Lusitania or the USS Maine, or the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin or the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Today, we are being told of the long chain of events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which up until now had apparently escaped the notice of the US or UK governments. And to the extent that the leak is not exactly what the government in question wants us to believe, the revelation in question is claimed as a government secret, and we are told that deep consequences would follow if the facts in question were known. Thus is a democratic populace denied the facts on which its welfare, or even survival, is dependent, we are told. Today the issue is how we view our ally Pakistan who are, according to what we see, either supporting our needs in Asia or plotting with the Taliban to murder our soldiers there. And we have been told that that the facts in question are so dangerous for us to know that no official body can be told them without endangering us from who knows what. And this about an allegation that could engage us in a war, even an atomic one. I do not know when we shall know the truth about this, or about so many stories that have led us into a century of world wars, but we vote every so often based on what we have been told.

TERROR - July 29, 2010

This weekend, I went to see Danton’s Death by Georg Buechner. It was a scorching play by a contemporary and supporter of the French revolution who was highly critical of the Reign of Terror, like Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson before him. It lasted 3 years and claimed the lives of 2500 people. Mark Twain, in A Connecticut Yankee, called it the little terror, comparing it with the Great Terror which lasted over 1000years, taking the lives of many hundreds of thousands and consuming those of many millions more. Still, many compare its excesses to the beastliness of a dog that has been turned wild by prolonged extreme mistreatment and whose behaviour is the result of its suffering , possibly not in its deep nature. Buechner obviously felt deeply for the agonies of the revolutionaries and even more for the suffering of the moderates for whom he spoke. It was hard not to see comparisons for our own time, as we move ever closer to the possibility of devastating war with Pakistan, with claims of virtue on both sides. The American and French revolutions were testing grounds for the theory of the Enlightenment, with the American managing to keep it alive and the French going overboard in what must have appeared to their ideologists as an excess of zeal. It never made sense to me, but in a speech from the play about Marat and Sade, Peter Weiss gives us some understanding of why it failed under the rubric of “Everybody wants to bring something with him through a revolution, a souvenir of the time before.” It has appeared to me for a long while that a society in which the ruling caste feels itself secure against revolution becomes steadily worse to those who are thought to have no option, while an actual revolution consumes all civility in its path. I fear I am about to live through such a time. Again!!

TAXES - July 22, 2010

In last week’s Times, Paul Krugman alerted us to a change in polemic on the part of GOP. Abandoning their fixation on the debt, they have decided that it is more important to re-enact the Bush tax cuts for the rich. By the time this comment reaches them, they will have in their heads in their argument that the debt is unimportant, and will be pressing for the recovery potential of the tax cut. They are so deep into their hubris that they cannot see what a wonderful opening they have left for the Dems. I recommend that Obama and co. should go for a tax cut themselves, but in the form of a cut in 5G of taxable income from the bottom of the tax table. It would be a straight out tax cut for every taxpayer as against a restoration of the Bush giveaway to the rich. It would mimic the action of the Tories in GB in a simple act of money for the rich against money for everybody. And as recovery it would be surer that the taxes saved would go into consumer goods than into stock market gambling. It would be easier to enforce and cost less in income manipulation. In addition, it would be on a field where a simple veto could block the GOP move if it failed to persuade the ordinary voter that they would rather have the saving for themselves than pass it on to the banksters and their gang. If the Dems will not take this initiative, then there is 0 to be said for them, and if the voters will not respond to this choice, they become the authors of their own victimization. It has always been easy for slick lobbyists to get the voters to support the fat cats rather than themselves, but in this plan, it is tax cut against tax cut, us against them, and if the Dems will let this opportunity get away from them, then they would be as worthless as some of my left-wing friends tell me. I hope that Tammy Baldwin will take up this stratagem and pass it on to Sen. Feingold.

ENDLESS WAR - July 8, 2010

For over 60 years, we have been hearing about war syndromes, as though these were in some sense individual and accidental errors, all different. Actually, they are all aspects of the same problem, which has been haunting US for the past 6 decades, and as it reappears, we act as though it were unique, something we had never seen before except for the fact that the most perceptive among us see it as a reflection of the past immediate instance, but not as a chronic weakness that threatens to afflict us until it finally brings the US experiment to a crashing ruin. In capsule, it arises from the belief that US military and diplomatic superiority is so huge in comparison with the resources of underdeveloped countries and movements that it is required only to rattle the saber to bring compliance from a force that DC considers inimical to their orders. It reflects what we imagine was the history of the late XIX and early XX centuries as we see it was still in effect. That was a history in which the disjunction between the advanced countries and their colonial servants was settled by confrontation between Gatling Guns on one side and sharpened sticks on the other. Them days is gone forever, and good riddance. Even the Spanish Empire was easier to confront than the Philippine guerrillas that fought for independence when the European masters were gone. And we have been learning over and over what it means to be arrayed against a domestic resistance movement that swims like a fish in the sea that is the population. After the Greek resistance and Tito’s Croatian socialists, there was the armies of Peru, Chile and Argentina against their people, the conquest of Guatemala by its colonels, the overthrow of the elected governments in Iran and Chile, and always the same script with new antagonists, always at a disadvantage our rulers never imagined.

DUMB WAITER – June 24, 2010

Barely a month into the new coalition, the Tory government has shown its true colors, and the Liberal Democratic leader is being exhibited as bought off for a wooden medal in the form of the title of Deputy Prime Minister. The price for this empty title seems to be a total jettisoning of the entire Liberal Democratic agenda, including the items whose inclusion in the Government’s promises were an integral portion of the ostensible agreement founding the present ruling majority. The Liberal leader says nothing while the Tories rake over the earnings of public servants and working people generally, taking their past earnings in the form of their pensions, and their present and future earnings in the form of cuts in salaries and wages, essential welfare support and public benefits, and the continuation of programs in housing, education, and health, including even the costs of school lunches for indigent children. These are all things that New Labour had predicted and which the Tories had sworn to protect, though in truth the New Labour scammers would have done also, but not as much and not as blatantly, rather like the New Democrats in USA. Housing is understood by its supporters as destined for the lowest level of public support since 1924, university tuition caps are understood to face increases from 3G/year to 5G or 7G, and even 10G is mooted in the press. The children of working people would be largely excluded’ with the places being “sold off” to those who can afford the tariff, with much less emphasis on proven academic ability. And the dumb waiter sits in silence, delivers the votes when those are called for, taking the worthy defeat of Gordon Brown as full payment by the party always representing the interests of the rich and powerful. And short of a denunciation by the Liberal Democratic Party, these will have tolerated their full political castration.

BANKSTERS AGAIN - June 17, 2010

For the past few years, the quiet resentment that thinking US have carried in the direction of the banks, the large corporations, and enormously wealthy robber barons have displayed have all boiled up as the people who used to love to call themselves the “masters of the Universe” carried this nation to the very brink of another Great Depression and quite possibly over it into ruin have wrung all believability out of the pernicious lie that “greed is good”. As long as there appeared to be much prosperity around, it was easy to bury one’s doubts and fears, but we are now at the beginning of the avalanche and we can hear the call to save the people if not the system. Yet some of our political leaders are still dancing to the tune of their corporate owners, and these include at least one Democrat whom so many of us had desperately hoped to see elected as President. They are still at bat to preserve the unjustified tax loopholes for the richest plunderers of the economy, even holding hostage the desperate needs of unemployed US to maintain their form of highway robbery. It is no wonder that those of us who do not worship the gospel of greed and predation have lost essentially all of the unjustified hope we had carried for what was once the party of FDR. And the faint expressions of distaste we get from Obama are no match for the terrible signs on the road ahead. We have no place to look for hope in the next six years, certainly not from the possibility that the false representatives of the “little people” might be replaced four years hence by the minions of the US version of the Tories. There is no hope to be obtained from the possibility of revolution, and equally little from the knowledge that nothing short of it will end the permanent robbing and impoverishment of the People.

OIL - June 10, 2010

It seems like decades that the US populace has been pummeled by nonsense out of the mouth of Grover Norquist. He is amply paid by the corporate Robber Barons to deliver the line that the US citizen can spend his money (which would otherwise go to taxes) better and more wisely than the Government can. As for emergencies, the very rich would be able to afford them out of their tax avoidance. Among the most enthusiastic disciples of this vicious doctrine have been the substantial majorities in the Gulf states. Not all as vociferous as the gun-slinging imitation cowboys of Texas, but the others are not far behind in their attachment to the doctrine of tax-free self reliance. And they have also been devotees of drilling for oil in the oceans, down to about a mile below sea level and contemptuous of those who have argued the tremendous risk. But as some have said, it is easy to be cavalier about the Government until one suddenly needs a Big Favor, like keeping one’s job or business or not being evicted from one’s home. And suddenly, the dark cloud on the horizon turns out to be BP slipping out from underneath their obligation to make good on the costs of their negligence as a rogue oil well on the rampage threatens to wipe out the life’s investment of thousands in those same Gulf states. And suddenly we hear all kinds of unfamiliar voices demanding that Uncle Sam make good in case the corporations they have always trusted as more upstanding than the hated Government squeeze out of the responsibility by quoting laws their lobbies have paid to have enacted. And not even a word of “oops” or contrition for having participated in leading he electorate astray. Suddenly out of the rat-holes come the hirelings of the trusted corporations demanding that the taxpayers of the nation cough up hundreds of billions to secure the security of welfare that the tax avoiders voted against time after time after time.