March 16, 2018: Higher Standards, You! You! You! Revolutionary Priest

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“I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all that I can...

At stake is not simply the leadership of our party or even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.”

                            ----Senator Robert F. Kennedy, March 16, 1968

With these words, Senator Robert Kennedy speaking in the very same Senate Caucus Room in which his brother had a short eight years earlier launched his own presidential campaign, began his own short-lived odyssey which, in a mere 82 days, would transform his political legacy as well as a broad spectrum of the country.

It has been a half-century now since that terrible time that transformed America. A year fraught with violence; a year marred by riots and demonstration; a year that began with such promise and ended with the ultimate booby prize: Richard Outhouse Nixon.

We are now as far removed from that time as they were from the Armistice ending the First World War. Many have chronicled those days, but few, if any, have captured the times, the energy, the drama, or the lightning in a bottle. There are, to be sure, records. There are films, videos, books, magazine and newspaper articles. Historians make constant reference to the year in which the foundations underlying the social contract cracked. But these, as any accounts, are secondary. They do not and cannot capture the smell, the moment, the life as it is lived. They are merely and can only be vicarious accounts such as they are.

But to wrap one's arms around the legacy of Robert Kennedy is no easy task. During his lifetime those who drew political cartoons rarely captured the man. He was, simply too complex to easily caricature. The best chroniclers of the time were Theodore White's “The Making of the President 1968”, one in a series of such books on the presidential elections from 1960-1972. Joe McGinness' work “The Selling of the President” about the Nixon campaign's use of media leap immediately to mind, as does Eugene McCarthy's “Year of the People”. None, however, reach the breadth and scope of three Englishmen, foreign correspondents at the time, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page with their opus “An American Melodrama The Presidential Campaign of 1968. In addition, there have been countless biographies from Arthur Schlesinger to Victor Lasky of Robert Kennedy each, in their own way, attempting to plumb the depths of his complexities if not his soul.

Thurston Clarke, who has presented us with perhaps the best effort at capturing the soul of the '68 campaign and, perhaps by extension, the soul of the candidate himself, begins his account with what is clearly the best description of the funeral train carrying the body of Robert Kennedy from New York City to Washington D.C. Chris Matthews, himself recalling those scenes a full half-century later, would note the composition of those that gathered along the miles of railroad tracks: black and white, young and old, protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, inner city residents and rural farmers and farm hands, people from every walk of life standing along the tracks holding American flags, standing in salute, holding signs expressing the nation's grief in a demonstration of reverence that can only be compared to the funeral cortege that accompanied the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet, this man was never elected president.

“What did he have”? Campaign chronicler Thurston Clarke asks repeatedly as he describes these scenes. To ask the question is to seek answers into the ties that bound the soul of the man to millions of his fellow Americans. Clarke takes us on a journey from the steel mills and farmlands of Indiana, to the cornfields of Nebraska, to the Indian Reservations in the Dakota's to the Valley of California in search of his soul. But perhaps the best description of the man that was Robert Kennedy came from the old chronicler himself, Teddy White
:
“The gash that Robert F. Kennedy tore into the story of 1968 aches still—aches in personal memory, but more in history itself. Of all the men who challenged for the Presidency, he alone, by the assassin's bullets was deprived of the final judgment of his party and people. Wistful and pugnacious, fearless and tender, gay and rueful, profound and antic, strong yet indecisive—all these descriptives of him were true. Yet none recaptures what stirred the passions that made him the most loved and most hated candidate of 1968, nor the quicksilver personality who, when pensive, looked like a little boy, or, when hot-in-action, like a prince-in-combat.

For he was more than himself, and he knew it To explain why this was so, and the blaze he lit in the mad spring months of 1968, one must start with the phrase, 'the Kennedy movement.' However difficult it is to define, the Kennedy movement is a romantic reality—and thus one of the hard political forces of America today as it was in the spring of 1968, it exploded at the call of its then-leader, Robert F. Kennedy.

Technically, of course, one can specifically date the transformation of the political resources of the Kennedy family into what is called a 'movement'. It began at the moment when John F. Kennedy's body was buried in Arlington and his memory rose to become legend. One could dissect the Kennedy movement almost as one dissected the anatomy of the grand Rooseveltian coalition: there were the common millions who had come, simply, to enjoy the presence and grace of the handsome young President on the home screen or in their midst; there was the very real gratitude of millions of Negroes, given hope; there was the respect of thousands of thinkers who could not forget a man who had so effectively used talent and ideas; there was the corps of eminent men—executives, writers, diplomats, politicians—who had known their first taste of greatness and responsibility, in the thousand days of the Kennedy administration and remained, a shadow corps of loyalists, yearning to govern again.

But the legend was stronger than this analysis suggests; the legend rested on more primitive elements. The strongest force in the movement came from an atavistic craving—the simple craving of people for heroes. In the remorseless strangulation of American politics by new technologies and infinitely complicated problems, the vent of a personalized loyalty gave millions of Americans who responded to the name Kennedy the same emotional satisfaction felt by those English yeomen who had fought for York or for Lancaster. An indefinable but nonetheless substantial power came to the movement from the equally simple hunger of people for style and elegance. And there was a time element also: when Dwight D. Eisenhower was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, it was as if a generation of fathers had been put aside and a new postwar generation of Americans had taken over....

There could have been no Kennedy movement without John F. Kennedy; but there could also have been no Kennedy movement had not Robert Francis Kennedy been large enough a man to keep it alive. Without the younger Kennedy, the older brother would have been remembered as Tiberius Gracchus might have been by the Romans if Tiberius' assassination had been an isolated episode—as a single glorious moment in the expansion of freedom and opportunity in that republic. It was the life—and violent death—of Gaius Gracchus, his younger brother, that made them remembered as 'the Gracchi,' and identified them with a cause that outlived their time in the forum.” (2)

It wasn't as if Robert Kennedy didn't have his distractors. Nearly every campaign stop was met with those in the crowd who registered their opposition. Placards reading: JACK WAS NIMBLE, JACK WAS QUICK, BUT BOBBY SIMPLY MAKES ME SICK was remembered by White as a particular piece of anti-Kennedy doggerel that stuck in his memory.


The first quality that surfaced when Bobby Kennedy was discussed was his 'ruthlessness.'
The tag had been applied to him as he first came to public notice in his brother's Presidential campaign and administration [actually, prior to that when RFK was chief counsel of the Senate Rackets committee interrogating the likes of James Riddle Hoffa and mob figures like Sam Giancanna]. There was no doubt that he had been for his brother the enforcer, the 'rod,' the crack-down man, whether it was against Russian diplomats who lied to the administration, or to politicians who ran out on a deal. If one had to choose an enemy, Robert F. Kennedy was not a man anyone would like to have as an enemy. He fought hard, bare-knuckled, savagely. To break one's word to Robert Kennedy was to put oneself in peril—for a welsher he had little forgiveness. Whether it was a hack politician, book-writer, steel magnate—once a man broke his word to Robert Kennedy, Kennedy's retaliation was certain. He could also be intemperate and impulsive. Robert Kennedy made up his mind on the right-or-wrong of any given issue quite slowly, but once he did he could be the image of wrath—his forefinger pointing, his fist pounding in his palm, his eyes ablaze. His insistence on immediate action, a quality of youth, angered a broad spectrum of Americans. It angered businessmen who never forgave the Attorney General who, they believed, had authorized the FBI to rouse sleeping newsmen [and steel company executives] from their homes during the steel crisis; it angered liberals who felt that no sin of Jimmy Hoffa justified the wire-tapping and relentless pursuit of that corrupt union leader to jail; it angered intellectuals and writers who could not understand Kennedy's quarrel with William Manchester, who have been authorized to write an approved story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and who Bobby believed had broken his word

The rigidity of his convictions was so stubborn that to the outside world he appeared dictatorial. Within the inner circle of the Kennedy administration, however, this rigidity was often an amusement. I [Theodore White] remember a late-afternoon visit to the White House during the Kennedy administration when, sitting in the Oval Office, I tried not to eavesdrop but was unable to resist tilting my ear to a series of important telephone calls that interrupted the President. A Federal judgeship in the Southern states, at the frontier of civil rights, was obviously at issue. President Kennedy was balancing calls between the hold buttons on his desk telephone until he reached the Attorney General, Bobby must have been crisp, tart and emphatically negative. The President flicked his hold buttons and told the Southern Senator hanging on the decision that he would have to get back to him later. Then he noticed I had been listening. 'You know,' he said, 'you know what the trouble with this administration is?' 'No, sir,' I said. 'The trouble with this administration,' continued the President, 'is that the Attorney General has so much higher standards for judges than the President.' it was not quite that, of course, but whatever the Attorney General felt he would express with a vehemence which, in echo, always made him sound like Savonarola.

Thus, 'ruthlessness' (3)

The story goes that when Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother on the same day, he was so stricken that he placed his young daughter Alice in the care of a relative and went off into the badlands of the plains to find himself. For penance, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, would be able to say things to the President that no one else dared. After one open tart retort a bemused Teddy turned to a friend and quipped “I can be either President of the United States or Alice's father; I cannot possibly be both”. Such was the caustic nature of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who lived out her life as a wife of an alcoholic congressman, becoming an American version of Gertrude Stein holding salons in which she would regale the assembled with her caustic wit an commentary. She once said of Robert Kennedy that “Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest”. (4)

Thus, 'ruthlessness'.
Indeed, the “roughest confrontation between Kennedy and Students came when he spoke at the University of Indiana Medical School to the kind of privileged youths who had [earlier in the campaign] angered him at Columbia.”(5) Here gathered were a group of “Boomers” that one would think would have been his natural constituency but were, in fact,  the political larvae that would soon emerge to spawn the “Generation of Swine”. Kennedy spoke for about twenty minutes before a group The New York Times reported as 'generally hostile'. (6) Quoting Aristotle he spoke of health care as being more than a luxury available only to the affluent. He told the audience about what he had seen in the slums of the inner cities, the shacks of Appalachia, the squalor of the Mississippi Delta,
“A student called the neighborhood clinics that Kennedy was proposing needless and costly. Another asked why he wanted to increase social security payments to the elderly. Another questioned why it mattered that ghetto health centers were second-rate since most Negroes did not bother to use them anyway Another raised the issue of funding again saying 'All these programs sound very find and nice and all that, but where's the money gonna come from?'

As at Columbia, Kennedy had finally had enough. 'From you!' he barked, pointing a finger at the student who had asked the question. He pointed at the youth with the Reagan balloon and said 'from you.' then went around the hall, jabbing his finger and shouting 'From you!..You!...You..You!'
Kennedy left, shaking his head saying “They were comfortable, so comfortable”. (7)

Thus, 'ruthlessness'.

But there were other sides to the man. Schlesinger in his two-volume biography takes us with Bobby to South Africa and Latin America, to the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts and Harlem, and countless other places that politicians fear to tread. Kennedy not only went there but took the press corps in tow, taking the nation with him. Thurston Clarke captured best the essence in a chapter called “Brave Heart and Christopher Pretty Boy”. Kennedy, press in tow, had veered off the campaign trail and headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Chandron, Nebraska. There he spent a day on the campaign trail meeting with the tribe and touring the reservation investing precious time at a place with few votes and where he had already huge support. The title of the chapter is about the chance meeting of Kennedy, dubbed “Brave Heart” by the tribe dating back to his days as Attorney General when the cause of the tribes were at the forefront of Bobby's expanding horizons, and Christopher Pretty Boy, a young boy whom Kennedy met among the junk cars. Clarke published among others a photograph of Kennedy sitting on a bed with Christopher Pretty Boy looking like there was no other place in the whole-wide-world he would rather be. Kennedy asked the boy to come and visit him at his home (Bobby was known to do this) but within a year both would be dead. (8)

Again, let us consult historian Theodore White:
“...Missing in this appreciation of Robert Kennedy were several other qualities of personality that had surfaced first in the administration and then, later, in Robert Kennedy's years of displacement from power. They were his sheer, stunning executive ability; his intuitive sense of the use and nature of American power; and his sense of personal identification, unique among American politician, with the victims and casualties of American society.

His executive talent had been noticed only by a small handful of men in the years of his brother's administration, when he was overshadowed in action by the larger transactions of the President. But one should linger over this talent, for his stewardship of the Department of Justice as Attorney General was, without doubt, the ablest of modern times....

Within months of his swearing-in in 1961, black 'freedom riders' were loose on their challenge to ancient racism in the South; and no law, nor any legitimacy, gave the Federal government the right to protect them. One remembers Washington slowly becoming aware of his executive talents during these weeks of peril. What code gave the Federal government the right to act? If the Attorney General did choose to act how would he find the manpower? How—out of the few hundred middle-aged men who bear the title of Marshals of the United States scattered across the country—could he assemble an effective force? Could he legally recruit Treasury Agents, prison guards of Federal prisons, immigration border guards, to pacify the turbulent South? The simple administration and coordination of such bodies was a puzzle; yet it was all accomplished in a matter of weeks. And at the moment of crisis, when white mobs in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened to burn down a Negro church in May, 1961, the Attorney General was ready and presided over every detail of the counterstroke—the assembly of men, the provision of planes, the installation of communications. He was to demonstrate his flair for action over and over again as Attorney General—at the University of Mississippi in 1962, at the University of Alabama in 1963.

This executive ability of Robert Kennedy flowed from the best principles of leadership. He had impeccable taste in men, chose extraordinary lieutenants. He listened; no man seemed more indecisive over longer periods of time than Robert Kennedy as he consulted, consulted again, aired his thoughts with friends and deputies, probed, questioned and re-questioned, trying to find the jugular of his problem. But then, when he acted—decision was his alone. (9)

Contrast this, if you will, with not only what now sits in the presidential seat, but those about him in the agencies and the Congress. A politician with empathy; a politician with experience; a politician with judgment; a politician with questions; a politician in search of new beginnings; a politician who understands the uses of power in the name of the republic. And, let us not forget, a politician who could and did admit mistakes. Kennedy understood power as few others; always the tactician, Kennedy had learned by experience how power enables and how it humbles those who wield it.
It has been half a century now and the wound still bleeds. MSNBC host Chris Matthews has written a book about Kennedy on this the half-century of his passing. He wrote it to commemorate the milestone and in that vein, I purchased a copy this Christmas for my daughter inscribing:

“To My Greatest Creation,
A reminder of what once was and what could yet be.”

Impeach and Imprison.

______________________

1. Clarke, Thurston. “The Last Campaign, Robert Kennedy and
   the 82 days that Inspired America” Henry Holt and Company
   New York, New York 1968. 321 pages;
   
   
   `(2) White Theodore H. “The Making of the President 1968” Atheneum Publishers New York, New York. 1969. pages 150-151

(3) Ibid.151-152
(4). Op. Cit. Page 109

(5). Clarke page 186

6. Clarke Page 187
7. Clarke Page 187-88
8. Clark Page 153-165

(9) White. Pages 153-154

January 13, 2018: Nature of Wisdom, Hollowing Out Our Institutions, Ignorance Reigns Supreme

“The sum total of individual ignorance”....This is the specter that haunted the founders and haunts us today. To guard against mob rule, the passions of the people, the founders not only set about creating a fragmented government and established a “Bill of Rights”, but went about through the passage under the Confederation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 in which provisions were made not only for the inclusion of the territories into the union but for the education of these populations. A provision under this law set aside a square mile in each new county the proceeds from the sale of which would go to the establishment of public schools. Later, Jefferson would cite his greatest achievement not the Declaration of Independence, nor his presidency, nor his inventions, nor his authorship of the Virginia laws establishing religious liberty. No, what he wanted as his legacy was the establishment of the University of Virginia, the first public university in the United States. It would be, Jefferson and his generation held, through the establishment of sound public schools that ignorance, while always prevalent, would not always be controlling.

Today the great Vandal in Chief presides over an administration that is hollowing out not only the State Department but virtually every federal agency. He has failed to make appointments to over 600 major positions. The Justice Department is hemorrhaging, ambassadorships have gone unfilled. Currently, we face a crisis on the Korean peninsula with no ambassador in place in Seoul. With the hollowing out of the bureaucracy, institutional memory is lost, replaced by an intentional and willful ignorance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the selection of Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education.

Educated at Holland Christian High and attending Hope College in Holland, Michigan, DeVos, sister of Eric Prince—the founder of the mercenary Blackwater Corporation—and married to the son of the SCAMWAY heir, DeVos had never attended a public school. She has, using the millions available from the family fortunes, spearheaded a movement to plunder the public domain by taking taxes raised for education and funneling them to private schools—mostly religious ones. She has also been out front in the campaign to saddle the public schools with useless and damaging performance tests and to strip the teachers of union representation so as to lower teacher's pay. The result has been to materially hollow out public education and nowhere is this more evident than her home state of Michigan. Michigan in my youth ranked in the top ten states in educational performance. Today it ranks down with Alabama with Mississippi not far in the rearview mirror.

DeVos, of course, demands layers and layers of standardized tests (mostly state administered) which has caused the schools to teach not the subject but to teach to the tests. She steadfastly refuses to hold her private schools to any such standards. The result is that Michigan has the worst private school system in the country but, nevertheless, over a billion dollars of state money goes into these worthless institutions. I have one of them right across the street. A 'High School' that has no teachers, no schedule, no compulsory attendance. A 'school' where only computer's teach. It is a joke but someone is making money from it. That's the point. If those in this administration cannot get the government out of the business, they privatize it so as to plunder the public domain. This isn't new to tRUMP, but Caesar Disgustus has returned to the theme with vengeance ensuring, among other things, that ignorance reigns supreme.

This vandal destroys everything he touches. That's what joins the likes of the Mercer's, the Prince's, the DeVos', the Koch's and Putin in the enterprise. Indeed, a very useful idiot.

Impeach and Imprison.

January 11, 2018: Back to the Farm, Contradictory Assumptions, Protection from Themselves

“A republic rests upon the assumption that the sum total of individual ignorance equals mass wisdom; capitalism rests upon the assumption that the sum total of individual greed equals the greater good. Both assumptions are contradictory; both assumptions are false.”

                             ----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

The year 1776 gave us two of the pillars of our republic, the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations”, the third being the Constitution of the United States 13 years later. While still mired in a slave economy, these documents served to lay the framework from which the United States would lay claim to both the emerging industrial order and the dawning democratic age.

It was during one of my visits to the 'farm' (1) that, confronted by my great uncle, my horizons concerning our often blind assertions, even our basic assumptions, began to be stretched.

I'd like to take credit for the inspiration of the above quote but it was during a conversation with my great uncle Lionel that my comfortable certainties were abruptly brought up short.

“Do you believe in democracy?” he asked.

“Of course I do”, was my predictable reply.

“What makes you think that the sum total of individual ignorance equals mass wisdom?” was his reply as he once again flashed his toothless smile.

To this query, I could muster no acceptable answer.

Here my ageing uncle would, in a short exchange, teach valuable life lessons; for not only did he succeed in jarring the foundations of a world-view that had been handed down by countless schoolmasters, but he taught me to question the very foundations of our common misunderstandings. It was a skill I quickly began to put to use as I would engage my peers and sometimes my elders in robust debates. It was a skill that led, in time to likewise question our fundamental economic assumptions leading, by degrees, to the quotation above, the first part of which is a variation of the question put to me by my great-uncle; the second is mine alone.

However, it would be years and much reading before I could fashion an answer to his direct question for the query put to me at the old farmhouse set me out in search of new answers to what were clearly fundamental contradictions. The journey would take me through countless history books, biographies, philosophers, and political economists. From Rousseau to Feuerbach, from Plato to Galbraith, from Jefferson to Roosevelt, from Marx to Nietzsche, and, finally, Madison's Federalist No. 10.

It was professor Lynn Mapes who put me on to “The Federalist Papers” and my friend Larry Hamp who, disgusted that in the wake of a marital separation and pending divorce found that I had given up reading, presented me with a boxed copy of the work. Therein I discovered that the founding fathers were indeed aware of these implicit contradictions and were clear-eyed and without illusions as to the difficulties involved in compensating, if not overcoming, them. The “Papers” opened my eyes to the degree to which those who met a Philadelphia were aware not only of the difficulties involved in determining, in Rousseau's words, “the will of the people”, but likewise the necessity of protecting said people from the “passions” that would inevitably sweep the country; in a word, protecting the people from said “will”, protecting the people from themselves. Accordingly, they set about establishing what they hoped would be certain safeguards to keep the population safe from the public's presumed “right to err”.

They did this by fragmenting governments, first fragmenting government vertically by creating a federation in which state and local governments were clearly distinct and, in some measure, independent of the national government and, secondly, horizontal in that the national government would be divided into three equal branches, the Legislative, the Judicial, and the Executive, each with distinct powers, each depending upon but separate from the others. In this way, it was held, no one man would be able to grab all the reigns of power and establish a tyranny.

But equally important the founders, remembering their English ancestry, quickly passed a “Bill of Rights” guaranteeing certain personal freedoms. Today Americans like to see these first ten amendments as rights protecting the individual from capricious governance but they are more than that, far more than that. For by protecting the Press, by protecting the Churches and prohibiting the state from the interference thereof, the amendments served to establish and protect institutions what would be and were intended to be, in professor John Kenneth Galbraith's term, 'countervailing powers”. Institutions beyond the reach of governments acting as independent checks upon the 'popular will'. Likewise protections against self-incrimination, unlawful searches and seizures and so on. The founders knew quite well the capricious nature of Rousseau's 'popular will' which can all to easily degenerate into a type of lynch mob.

They put other measures into place as well, the Electoral College, a feature we have become painfully re-acquainted within recent years. The Senate elected by the state legislatures of the several states, a feature that was changed in the early twentieth century as well as a senator's term of office lasting two years longer than that of a sitting president and only 1/3 of the Senate up for re-election during an election year. This would provide some greater measure of stability, further safeguards against the “passions of the moment”. The government was intended to be cumbersome, inefficient, slow. It was intended to be so as to protect the people from their passions, and, hopefully, give greater stability and therefore longevity to the experiment for the founders knew how short-lived republics tended to be. To protect the people from themselves...

Likewise with the emerging economic order. Federalist No.10 is a long essay by James Madison arguing for the adoption of the constitution. In it he forthrightly addresses Montesquieu's critique, citing historical examples such as the Greek City-States, Venice, and the Hanseatic League, that a republic covering a vast territory cannot long endure. Madison responded in No. 10 with the argument that precisely because the United State traversed so much territory that a certain stability would be ensured, arguing that such a republic would be too large and too complex, having too many interests for one group, one cabal, much less one man to dominate. In this document, Madison laid the foundations for what would become our “interest-group democracy” in which the various major interests would contend and, in the process, neutralize each other. It was a concept put to the test with sectional disputes leading to civil war in the 19^th century and the dominance of cartels during the 'Gilded Age' and our own. Moreover, Madison argued in another essay, the single most important reason to adopt the constitution was to regulate the economy. The constitution gave Congress broad power to do so. What became known as the 'commerce clause', gives Congress all the power that is 'necessary and proper' to regulate. The founders had no illusions crafting the best structure they could to protect the public from capricious and arbitrary rule as well as economic exploitation and rapine. To protect the people from the likes of Caesar Disgustus.

The lessons taught so long ago bear fruit.  To disagree and to know why is a mark of intelligence; but, perhaps more importantly, to agree and to know why is a mark of wisdom.  Setting one free of one's acquired certainties sets one on the path to understanding; for any 'truth' can only be discovered alone. Thank you my mentor. 

_________________

1. see December 15, 2010: Northwest of Custer, The Farm, Damn Democrats as well as November 5, 2011: Return to Custer, A Word about The Word, Pigs Breakfast.

November 10, 2015: Weeper of the House, True Believers, The Price of Power.

“There is something dangerous about orthodoxy in the hands of a true believer”

                        ----From “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

John Boehner has resigned from the House of Representatives and in so doing relinquishing his post as ‘Weeper of the House”.  In his place the scum have elevated Congressman Paul Ryan, otherwise known as little Eddie Munster, to the position of presiding officer of the United States House of Representatives and 3^rd in line to the Presidency. 

Boehner (pronounced boner) by all accounts had a miserable time of it, trying as he did to weave a line between the forces of responsible governance and the newly-minted base of the Rescumlican party for which political responsibility and good governance are anathema.  It proved a treacherous path indeed, a Faustian bargain, reducing a once promising leader to a mere weeping caricature. 

The crazies, it would appear, are emerging from the woodwork. This is not, however, a recent phenomenon, nor should we understand it as a product of purely Republican malignancy.  The movement that has masticated into what we now refer to as the ‘teabagger’ movement began a long time ago, traceable originally to the disciples of Ayn Rand and the followers of Barry Goldwater.  But they, alas, were few and full of labor.  What gave the movement real impetus was the Supreme Court Decision in Roe v Wade

In which the court for the first time declared a zone of personal privacy extending to reproductive rights.  This mobilized the religious fundamentalists who, seeing abortion as an abomination, mobilized in large enough numbers to become the foot soldiers of an emerging political movement.

The principle culprit, the man who led them unto the national stage, was none other than Jimmy Carter.  It was Carter who, through the albeit temporary alliance of the Black and White southern Baptist conventions, found in these ‘foot soldiers’ a ready army of campaign workers ready to do the tedious and mundane tasks necessary to launch and win a national political campaign.  Winning the presidential election of 1976 with their support, Carter gave legitimacy to what was heretofore a largely marginalized and silent segment of the electorate. 

But, alas, what was to become known as the ‘Religious Right’ could find no home in the party of Ted Kennedy, Bela Abzug, and Eleanor Smeal. (1)  By 1980 American religious ‘fundamentalism’ had transformed itself from a mere adjunct in support of a single issue, and of a particular presidential candidate, into a ‘movement’.  In the hands of Jerry Falwell, and dubbing itself the ‘Moral Majority’, Christian Fundamentalism emerged as a national political ‘movement’, moving as it did beyond not only single-issue politics but to the conservative political ‘right’, embracing Ronald Reagan and the politics of unfettered capitalist exploitation.  In the hands of these practitioners it was held, with a straight face, that it was the will of the Lord that not only should the social safety net be shredded but that personal and capital gains taxes be cut in half.

Over the ensuing decades it only got worse.  As the Republican party of our forefathers transformed itself into the Rescumlican party of today it opened its doors and embraced with wholesale enthusiasm the likes of the heretofore banned John Birch Society, crypto-fascists, not a few remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and Southern racists, but more recently the corporate-sponsored Teabaggers, libertarians, and other eternal malcontents.  It has become, by degrees, a reincarnation of the old 19^th century ‘Know-Nothing’ Party, denying science and climate change, evolution, and universally observable fact.  

The problem is that, given the religious veneer over which this caldron of intolerance and ignorance is presently covered, the “Political Right” or, as I prefer, the “
Idiot Wrong” has not only gone over to the ‘dark side’, but in so doing has exhibited such a marked degree of belligerence and intolerance as to threaten the very concept of republican governance.

There is something about conducting oneself in the public square with the firm conviction that one has god on one’s side.  If one is convinced that through political action one is working god’s will then compromise becomes damn near impossible.  If one assumes that good, however ill-defined must rest in one’s own hands and must, in the end, prevail then all other centers of political power are either suspect, evil, or illegitimate.  A certain self-righteousness emerged on the political wrong manifesting itself as a continuous stream of righteous proclamations, political obstructions and, when the electorate had the temerity to turn them out of office, temper tantrums.  Consider the record in recent years of conservative behavior:

* April 2011: House Republicans threaten a government shutdown unless Democrats accept GOP demands on spending cuts.

* July 2011: Republicans create the first-ever debt-ceiling crisis, threatening to default on the nation’s debts unless Democrats accept GOP demands on spending cuts.

* September 2011: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* April 2012: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* December 2012: Republicans spend months refusing to negotiate in the lead up to the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

* January 2013: Republicans raise the specter of another debt-ceiling crisis.

* September 2013: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* October 2013: Republicans actually shut down the government.

* February 2014: Republicans raise the specter of another debt-ceiling crisis.

* December 2014: Republicans threaten another shutdown.

* February 2015: Republicans threaten a Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

* September 2015: Republicans threaten another shutdown [over Planned Parenthood]. (2)

 There is something dangerous about orthodoxy, be it religious, political or economic, in the hands of a “True Believer” (3).  When they are not wreaking havoc upon the national political consensus, undoing the work of centuries, and shredding the social safety net, they are, when voted out of power, about the business of obstruction and nullification. 

Make no mistake about it.  When one is guided by the ‘light’; when one sees ones actions in the political arena to be a manifestation of the ‘will of god’, then there is small room for political debate and no tolerance for political opposition.  Accordingly, one sets about the business of restricting the franchise (voter ID, Gerrymandering, restricting access to polling places), overturning elections (Bush v. Gore, the mess in Ohio in 2004), and vilifying the political opposition (Faux News, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter et. al.)  By these means the ‘light of the world’ has been, by degrees, transformed into a political abyss, a cauldron of darkness.  Christ, it is now earnestly held, was a confirmed Capitalist, nearly two millennium before the advent of Capitalism.  Facts?  What are mere facts in the hands of a ‘true believer’?

The Faustian bargain that Boehner forged with the forces of darkness has, at last come undone.  It remains to be seen, now that he is free of the constraints of power, what his commentaries will be on the state of our union but others, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke among them, have vented their frustration at the intolerance and ignorance boiling on the political surface of the political cauldron.  A veritable witch’s brew, balking at the elevation of little Eddie Munster, protesting that even he was not ‘conservative enough’ to lead this rabble.  Ideological purity has its limitations, and its price.

____

1.  Ted Kennedy is well known.  Bella Abzug was a renowned liberal congresswoman from New York City and avid supporter of reproductive rights.  Eleanor Smeal was chair of the National Organization of Women, also a strong supporter of Roe V. Wade.

 2.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/26/1425070/-The-Dark-Truth-Of-John-Boehner-s-Resignation?

3. See Hoffer, Eric. “The True Believer” Perennial Library, Harper and Row Publishers, New York. 1951. 160 pages.

August 13, 2015: Where is the Justice Department, a matter of Anti-Trust, Cabals and Cartels

 

In the wake of the decision handed down last month by the Supreme Court that the Federal Government has the constitutional authority to establish public insurance exchanges, thereby driving the final nail into the conservative arguments concerning the validity of the Affordable Health Care Act, the insurance industry immediately began an orgy of mergers.  Economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich had this to say:

“Now that insurers know the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, they’re merging like mad. Today Aetna announced it will spend $37 billion to buy rival Humana in a deal that will create the nation's second-largest health insurer. Yesterday, Centene announced a $6.3-billion deal to acquire Health Net. Blue Cross-Blue Shield carrier Anthem just made a $47-billion offer for giant insurer Cigna.

We’re rapidly on the way to having a handful of giant health insurers. The only difference between this outcome and a government-run single payer, such as Medicare for all, is that revenues will go into executive salaries, dividends, and advertising and marketing rather than into lower premiums and health care.

When will we learn?” (1)

 

It is a poignant question and one that should be troubling to every Progressive Democrat in America.  When will we learn?  The answer, as it pertains to the elites in this country, is that—like the Commanding Generals on the Western Front a century ago—they will never learn.  But the question runs deeper, when will we—we the people—learn?  Not since George W. ‘Ol Two-Cows’ Bush upon assuming the presidency dropped the anti-trust suit against Microsoft, a case that the government was incidentally winning, this government has not brought a significant anti-trust action. For nearly a generation there has been a veritable orgy of mergers and acquisitions as the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals and other major players have merged and joined forces in an erstwhile effort to further concentrate economic and political power.  Now, with the ACA firmly in place the major players in the Health Insurance industry are wasting no time in going about the business of strangling competition. 

The consequences cannot be good, for the concentrations of economic power into fewer hands, and the concentrations of the political power that follows will mean that the long anticipated benefits resulting from the creation of public insurance exchanges as well as the requirement that all participate in the system will be strangled at birth by the attempts of the industry to further eliminate competition.  Whatever ‘savings’ anticipated by the Act will soon be undone as the industry morphs into a cartel with less than a handful of companies commanding the markets.



Economists have long recognized that the behavior of Capital is to concentrate itself into fewer and fewer hands.  Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that however the capitalist lauds competition, the fact is that he hates competition and will do whatever it takes to rid himself of it.  The classic example of this, dating back to the nineteenth century heyday of the modern capitalist experiment, was the railroads.  Financiers like Gould and Fiske would buy up railroads, like the old Erie Railroad, not to invest in them and improve them, but to close them down and eliminate the competitor.  Similarly, General Motors famously bought the old trolley companies in Los Angeles in order to close them and render the population dependent on the automobile.  Surveying the American experience Professor Galbraith observed that when confronted with competition the Capitalist will soon scurry for cover, seeking government protections by way of tariff restrictions, favor by way of government contracts, and the manipulation of the marketplace by the elimination of competition by way of restricting or eliminating government oversight and regulations. 
 

Governments also have long recognized this behavior and began immediately after the Civil War, with the passage of the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts to address these unwelcome tendencies.  But it has, historically, fallen upon the People to insist on a remedy.  In fact, by 1905 Anti-Trust laws were being applied by the courts not to Capital but Labor.  After having decided in “United States v. E.C. Knight Co… that the Sherman Act could not be applied to a virtual monopoly of the sugar industry because the manufacture of sugar was not in interstate commerce”, the court had “(f)or all practical purposes…virtually set aside the Sherman Act”.  This action by the court was soon followed in the 1905 decision in Swift and Co. v. United States in which “the Court held that a combination of meat packers (union) was an illegal monopoly under the Sherman Act on the ground that its activities were transactions in interstate commerce”(2)  By the early years of the last century Capital, ensconced in power, had co-opted government and, with the aid of an ideologically compliant Court, set about making a mockery of not only free enterprise but the will of the people.

It took a ‘revolt of the masses’ in the form of a ‘prairie fire’ of grass-roots protest in the form of the Greenback and Progressive movements to right the ship.  With the election of Teddy Roosevelt and later Woodrow Wilson the Progressives, able to influence first the Republican and then the Democratic Party would compel government to not only protect the people from the worst ravishes that Capital is prone but to empower workers to improve not only pay but working conditions as well.   Finally, with the coming of the New Deal and the passage of the Wager Act, Fair Labor Standards Act the enforcement of Anti-Trust laws and the institution of a long overdue regimen of Federal Regulation, the People, acting through government, were able to not only establish a system of relative economic justice but a large and thriving Middle Class as well.

There has been a great unravelling of this in the last 40 years, the greatest example of which is the destruction of the Labor Movement as well as the inability of this government to enforce the laws on the books, particularly Anti-Trust laws.  Trends that increasingly see no improvement with the election of Democratic Administrations, leaving one to ask: Where are you Mr. President?  Where is the Justice Department?

As Goldman-Sachs staffs the Treasury, no matter who which party assumes power; as Paul Volker advises a Democratic Administration on economic Policy; as the likes of Alan Greenspan would be found commendable by both a Jimmy Carter and a Ronald Reagan, a George Bush and a Bill Clinton; and as no administration since Carter has lifted a finger to aid and protect the workers on the shop floor; and as no recent administration has seriously enforced anti-trust, it is clear that cabal having seized the levers of power now owe their allegiance not to the people, but to the cartels they have empowered.

As the Middle Class writhes in agony, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush wait in the wings.  Nothing more need be said.  No matter who wins, we lose.  The Calvary isn’t coming.  When will we learn?  Good question Dr. Reich, it’s been nearly half a century now.  One thing is certain though, our ancestors were never such fools.

Meanwhile the Republicans have moved in Congress to eviscerate the Pell Grants making higher education unaffordable to much of the Middle Class.  You see they don’t want us competing with their kids in school either, they fear the competition.

_____
(1). Robert Reich, Facebook post 7-15-15
(2). Tresolini, Rocco J. “American Constitutional Law” The Macmillan Company
                    New York, Collier-MacMillan Limited, London. Pg. 265

 

June 24, 2015: Another Tragedy, Confronting Revisionism, Get Over It

 

“No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.”

                         ---Senator Robert F. Kennedy April 5, 1968

 It’s the same old story, another tragedy involving guns in America, this time with a hefty dose of overt racism.  Last week a deranged little punk sat in a prayer meeting in a black church in Charleston South Carolina.  As the meeting was drawing to a close, he stood up, pulled out a revolver and shot and killed 9 people, including the pastor and state legislator. The NRA, with its usual knee-jerk justifications said through a spokesman that the fault lay with the dead pastor and legislator who voted against allowing citizens to carry guns in public places, including church services. 

The young man said he wanted to kill some black people and start a revolution.  What he started was a revulsion in which the country recoiled at yet another senseless act of violence; in this instance a racial hate crime.  In the aftermath, calls have gone out to take down the confederate flag from public buildings, a reaction I’m sure the psychopath had not anticipated.  Not only the Southern Law Center, but the Republican Governor of South Carolina and the Republican Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives have called for the removal of what has become a symbol of hatred, racism, and oppression.

I’ve been following developments as they take their usual course.  Faux News, pandering as usual to the unwashed and the racists in this country has accused liberals of using the tragedy to further an agenda, some denying that the crime was racially motivated.  While Mitt Romney has called for the removal of the ‘stars and bars’ others, including most of the candidates for president in the Republican field, have moved to defend the symbol of racism. Still others have chosen to remain, for the time being, silent. 

On the internet one encounters the usual palaver regarding the use of the old confederate standard.  Here is one such post:

“You liberals just look for people's lives to mess up don't you? Why not let everyone live how they want too and accept us southerners and our passion our our heritage? This is so heartbreaking and a is a blatant attack on one group of people because of their beliefs. Why can't you just let us live in peace”.

To which I replied:

“To be against the slave republic is not liberal or conservative. These swine have been the only people to mount an armed rebellion against the republic of the United States in our entire history and as such should have been tried as traitors not 'honored' as patriots. In fact, if you study the lead up to the civil war you will discover that it was largely through gerrymandering that states like Virginia and North Carolina seceded from the Union. The residents in the mountain regions of Virginia in fact seceded from the state in outrage over the rigging of the vote to secede. Every state in the confederacy had a military contingent in the union army except South Carolina. Instead of celebrating the morally indefensible 'heritage' you claim, admit defeat. You lost, it was in all the papers, get over it.”

Not content to leave it there, he issued a summary clarification:

“Joseph, I take it that you have not read the Confederate constitution. They outright prohibited foreign slave trade in an attempt to lower the enslaved population (eventually to zero). The war was not over slavery. Abraham Lincoln said it himself when he was interviewed in a newspaper article, simply saying, "If I could have preserved the union and freed all the slaves, I would have done it. If I could have preserved the union and freed some and left others alone, I would have done it. If I could have preserved the union without freeing one single slave, then I would have done it."

The war for the north was about preserving the union, and the war for the south was about protecting their states from an overly powerful government.

Also, the Confederacy did not invade the United states. It was not an armed rebellion, but a peaceful session until the union invaded the Confederacy.

And may I remind you that the only flag that flew over slave ships as they were imported to America was the American flag. America itself was the "slave republic" and somehow gets away with it. I still love America and honor both sides who died in thar war. I love the history and I love where my heritage came from. What about the black people now who are protesting across the country and flying the Panafrican flag, a country who still practices slavery?”

To which I responded:

“There is no doubt that the war was about slavery. Why else did the south secede? It was because the country elected a president committed to preventing the spread of the 'peculiar' institution into the newly acquired territories taken from Mexico. In fact both Lincoln and Alexander Stevens (vice-president of the confederacy) opposed Polk's war precisely because they feared that conflict over the issue of slavery as it pertained to any newly acquired territories would threaten the 'balance' of slave vs free states and tear the union apart. The fact is that the South, when confronted with election returns that they didn't agree with chose to revolt.

 

 It was Steven Douglas' idea of 'popular sovereignty’ that is opening up the question of whether a state would be free or a slave state that rekindled the conflict and brought Lincoln back into politics.

 

 I have read the confederate constitution and there is no provisions in it for, as you suggest, lowering the slave population. Limiting or ending the slave trade was a fait accompli by 1860 since the British, headed by Wilberforce, had outlawed the trade, as had the United States by that time. There were about 4 million enslaved in the U.S. in 1860, more than enough to sustain population growth. In addition more money was invested in slaves than all the industry, banking, and railroads of the north. To suggest a speedy end to slavery under a regime established and committed to the institution is defy both history and logic.

 

 Lastly, I would suggest you read the works of John C. Calhoun and his leadership during the 'nullification' crisis of 1832. The conflict was long in the making, threats of nullification and secession longstanding, and finally came to a head when the south was presented with an electoral outcome that threatened their 'peculiar' institution.” (1)

I left it to others to point out that ‘Panafrican’ is not a country and has no national flag, it is a twentieth century political movement attempting to unite the continent much as the European Union is working to unite Europe but with less success.

My point here is that in nearly every political discourse one confronts a version of ‘revisionism’, in this case that the civil war was about anything other than slavery and that somehow the slave system was either ‘on its way out’ or somehow benign.  None of these points are valid.

To be against the display of the old ‘stars and bars’ is neither liberal nor conservative; it is, simply, patriotic.  To oppose the symbol of the only armed rebellion against the duly constituted authority of this government is patriotism by definition.  In fact a true ‘conservative’—defender of established institutions-- would abhor the very thought of armed insurrection.

________

(1).  http://fusion.net/story/155373/help-us-map-the-last-remaining-monuments-of-the-confederacy/.  See comments section.

 

 

 

 

 

April 17, 2015: Taking Umbrage, A Question of Ours, Fool’s Errand

The following is an exchange set off by a posting on "Facebook" by my counsin Marah Kucaj-Oseland, in which someone she has befriended on the social website took umbrage with my reaction. The exchange was as follows:

Marah Kucaj-Oseland shared Marie Osmond's photo.
It's just that time of year!

MarieOsmond'sphoto."

Joseph Camfield: Perhaps, but it means "Ours". It is money we are investing in ourselves.

Mark: A very small percentage of the money spent by the government could be considered an investment. Investment implies return. What is the return on that investment? Your outlook basically gives them a license to steal. Wouldn't you rather keep most of your money and invest it yourself?

Joseph Camfield:  Mark that is complete nonsense. Tax money goes to educating the young, building the roads, bridges and infrastructure, providing for the national defense and yes as charged by the constitution providing for the 'general welfare'. These are investments in ourselves. Take the Howard Jarvis experiment as a case in point. California had the best school system in the world until the idiot real-estate broker turned tax guru pushed through his tax limitation proposal. Today California ranks among the 10 worst school systems in the United States. What happened to California has happened to America where for the last 40 years the only serious increases in investments have been in military hardware and prisons. The rest of the public domain has either been left to wither on the vine or has been open to exploitation by corporate interests. We had a much higher tax rate 50 years ago, the rich were getting richer, the middle class was growing and the poor were being lifted out of poverty. There is nothing demonstrable in the historical record that giving massive tax breaks to those who are already well to do increases either wealth or employment for those who are creating, through their labor, the real wealth of this country.

Mark:  Spending is not investment.  Of coarse spending is necessary, but spending is spending, not investment. If spending was investment our government would be the richest entity on earth, when in fact it is the most in debt entity on earth; your type of thinking created that debt. Open you eyes and think for yourself, quit listening to liberal politicians that tell you different. Question what they say. Spending per pupil does not equal better education. Ever since the federal government got involved in our schools, their performance has declined. Schools no longer teach how to think, they teach what to think, which is called indoctrination. You use California as a case in point, so I will too. California's massive welfare program has attracted those that wish to suck off of it, and drove away those that fund it, and now California has one of the worst financial positions in the country, along with New York and Illinios; all massive "blue" states. That is not a coincidence. Willful ignorance of the meaning of words and human nature by million of people is how we got in this mess.

Joseph Camfield: Mark, your first lesson in economics was sufficient for your confusion. Everyone from Adam Smith to Karl Marx (with the exception of that idiot Milton Friedman) agrees that labor creates wealth. From this it is reasonably deduced that wealth is created not by the individual acting alone (I can invest in everything better than the society acting through government can) but by individuals acting in concert with the greater society. Wealth, if follows, is socially produced measured in social medium, i.e., money. Now there are certain things that I or you cannot invest in but must be invested for us. Roads and bridges immediately come to mind, as does education, police and fire protection etc., The Friedmanesque mantra that we are using 'someone else's money' when we tax and invest in ourselves is popular poppycock persuasive only to the improperly initiated and the unwashed.

We are the greatest debtor nation on earth it is true. We are so in large measure not because we have spent, but because as I stated before, following the Jarvis model we have refused to tax ourselves. We once had a much more progressive income tax, and were the largest creditor nation in the world. We also were at the vanguard of technological innovation and, importantly, industrial production. We had the best schools in the world, and a rising and vibrant middle class. The last half century has seen a hollowing out of the American industrial base, the exodus of both jobs and capital out of the country and the savaging of the safety net not because we have taxed ourselves but because we have made a fetish of cutting taxes, deregulating industries, and allowing the importation of foreign goods and the exportation of labor and capital, all in the name of 'free markets'.

Secondly the Federal government has long been involved in education and, even today, does not constitute the lions share of resources on education. That is left mostly to the states. To accuse the Federal government of lowering education is laughable. The problem with schools is first the growing option of privatization given a huge boost by the 'voucher' movement, and the underfunding of the public domain that results. Second is the insane mandates, mostly by the states, that require that the schools teach to mundane standardized tests. Third, the schools have always been about teaching certain facts common to our collective experience call it what you will. I would remind you that the greatest threat to 'free' thought is not the federal government but the Texas State Board of Education which determines the content of textbooks, because it uses the same textbooks throughout the state and therefore constitutes a huge market. Texas, you will recall, just edited its history books in order to misrepresent among other things the causes of the civil war, the McCarthy era, and the civil rights struggle. In any case, back in the 'good old days' there was precious little in our books and still is about the great railroad strike of 1877, the anti-abolition riots of 1837, the race riots of 1917-1919, 1943, 1964-68; nor the Pullman Strike or any of the great struggles in the labor movement. History has always been sanitized. You were, as I was, no doubt taught in our history class that we freed the Philippines from Spain and established a beneficial protectorate until that country could raise itself up and become like us. The facts are otherwise, I discovered reading Mark Twain's "The Damned Human Race". In fact the Philippines had freed themselves before Admiral Dewey steamed into Manila Harbor and snatched their newly won freedom from them. Additionally more than a million people died on the islands in the ensuing struggle by the United States to subdue the Islands. I use this as a case in point that, as Voltaire once observed, "history is the lie commonly agreed upon.", and I point this out to demonstrate that we hardly needed 'federal interference' to reduce our civics lessons to the level of our common misunderstandings. The local board of education proved quite sufficient for that purpose.


Finally, it is the so-called 'red' states, principally in America's Southeast and plains that draw most per-capita from the public trough. The 'blue' states have larger populations and, accordingly, larger budgets.


I don't gather information from the speeches of politicians, liberal or otherwise, nor have my views been formed by the likes of Faux News or MSNBC. I read, books mostly, ones that have no pictures, and have been taught through rigorous History and Political Science classes to tell the difference between authoritative sources and popular nonsense. If you would, I would suggest you begin by reading the works of Kevin Phillips "The Politics of Rich and Poor", "Arrogant Capital" among others. Phillips was no wild eyed leftist but the author of Richard Nixon's 'southern strategy' in the1968 campaign, and later worked in the Nixon Justice Department. A died in the wool Republican, until recently, Phillips as early as 1988 began publishing the economic returns on the Jarvis inspired 'Reagan Reaction", and the effect it was having on the middle class in this country. In these works you will find, quite clearly delineated, the effect of the changes in the tax code, the movement from taxing wealth to taxing work, and the results of shifting the base of the economy from industrial production to finance has had on the decline not only of the contemporary United States but also the historical precedents in Argentina, Holland, Spain, and Great Britain. Those who refuse to learn history are damned to repeat it and we are doing our level best to repeat the examples of the aforementioned nations. The conclusion is inescapable that the implementation of breathtakingly myopic public policies since Great Actor became President has squandered the national trust to the point where for the first time since U.S. Grant was President the United States is no longer the world's largest economy. For this we can thank our conservative friends and the Democratic Leadership Council and the other Dems that went along and are currently going along with them.

No doubt I have not heard the last of these responses but I fear that I have been, by degrees, drawn to play the fool. For it is a fool’s errand indeed to try to inject some degree of enlightenment into the dark recesses of willful ignorance.

January 11, 2011: A House Divided, The Center Gives Way, From Transcendence to Triangulation

“War on the middle class is war on the republic itself”

---The Quotations of Chairman Joe


The term “Banana Republic” became part of our political lexicon in the twentieth century. It has quite a specific meaning. The nomenclature emerged from several and repeated failed experiments in representative government originating in Latin America where the United States, in an effort to gain legitimacy for its hemispheric hegemony, engaged in repeated attempts to impose its form of government on its neighbors to the South. The result, with rare exceptions, was throughout the last century largely disappointing. There were furtive attempts at establishing Republican forms of government throughout central and South America usually ending in the overthrow of these governments by indigenous forces or, as in the case of Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, at the instigation of the United States itself. What became clear, from these experiments in social engineering, was that the establishment of representative government in countries with severe maldistributions of wealth proved to be problematic. A pattern began to emerge. The landless and impoverished masses given the vote would in due course elect an assembly that would move to redistribute wealth. The moneyed interests, screaming communist plot, would then call out the military and, either on their own or painting the populist movements as pawns of the “international communist conspiracy”, excite the ever virulent strain of paranoia that lurks just beneath the surface in the United States to enlist American aid and gain legitimacy for the ensuing repression. Let’s be clear about this. In Nicaragua the entire country was but a plantation for the Samoza family. In Venezuela the top 10% owned nearly 90% of the country. Other countries, like Mexico, presented a democratic tradition in which the PRI, which took power with the revolution in 1910, held sway for over 80 years. Many of the noble experiments quickly degenerated into one-party rule or outright dictatorships. Again what would happen is that the people would gain voice through the various parliaments and would move to redistribute land and/or wealth. Wealth would first seek to buy back power and, failing to effect a favorable outcome, call out the military bringing a swift end to the “democratic” experiment. In those countries wherein the military proved insufficient or reticent to crush its own people, the elites would then turn to the United States to destabilize, help overthrow, or simply send in the marines. Here in this political Petri dish the conditions necessary for the establishment of stable representative government came fully into relief. These experiments in making the entire hemisphere over in our own image demonstrated a political principle our forefathers understood: that representative government can only be established in a society wherein there is an equitable distribution of wealth. If the gulf between the have’s and have not’s is too wide the foundations of the republic will not hold. As Lincoln would say in a different context nearly a century later “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.

What distinguishes us from the classic Banana Republic is that advanced democratic societies are characterized by a large, vibrant and controlling middle class. This is no accident. It is necessary for the Middle Class to be strong enough to counter the weight of the extremes of poverty and wealth whose interests stand diametrically opposite one another. If wealth is concentrated in too few hands then it will simply buy power, as is becoming more evident in each election cycle. If the poor begin to outnumber the Middle Class and society becomes bifurcated into two camps—the wealthy few and the impoverished many—then the democratic experiment is bound to fail as in the classic example of the Banana Republic wherein wealth wins; or the French Revolution where wealth loses. Without a strong and pervasive middle class to act as a referee, to stand as a “middle ground” for which the polar opposites must compete, then there is no “buffer” there is no compromise.

Benjamin Franklin, so the legend goes, was stopped on the street as deliberations ended on the new Constitution. A woman walked up to him and asked, “what kind of government have we, Mr. Franklin?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it”, replied the old inventor.

If we can keep it…the founders knew this was an historical experiment. They knew their creation was a fragile one and many did not expect the republic to outlive them. As Arthur Schlesinger points out in his “Age of Jackson” many not only distrusted the Eastern Mercantile interests but understood from their reading of history that a true republic must be born of a large and controlling class of middling station. So in the 19th Century Jefferson’s yeoman farmer became the Bulwark of the Republic so to speak.

Lets be clear about this. The middle class is not a product of great wealth, it is not something handed down to us from above as a manifestation of philanthropy or even enlightened self-interest. The middle class has always been the creation of political will. The idea that the wealthy will, out of some exaggerated sense of “noblesse Oblige” or out of their own economic interests, create and defend a social middle class is laughable on it’s face. Nothing in the history of man demonstrates this. In fact the moneyed interests have forever been found kicking and screaming and standing foursquare against everything from banning child labor, unionization, the eight-hour work day, the forty hour work week, the minimum wage, social security, health care, civil rights (read about the “anti-abolition riots” in New York City in the 1830’s and the business community’s support of the rioters) environmental and consumer protections, to name but a few articles of reactionary litany.

Let’s get back to this: the middle class is a product of political will. If the last three decades demonstrate anything it is that with the reduction of taxes and the growing share of the national economic pie taken by the wealthiest Americans almost none of that money has found it’s way into the middle class. In fact, left to their own proclivities, the wealthy have done what they always do…pocket the money. In the last decade they have commandeered two thirds of the tax cuts and fully three quarters of the wealth produced by the increases in worker productivity. Nothing is “trickling down” to the next social rung as evidenced by the stagnation of incomes, and the absolute decline in purchasing power of those of ‘middling means”.

The middle class in America was and is a creation of political will. Whether it was through the outright rejection of the attempt to transplant European aristocracy to the new world during the colonial period, the expansion westward as a way of insuring the survival of the yeoman farmer, the institution of income and estate taxes early in the last century, the breaking up of trusts and other economic combinations, the passing of education, and home mortgage programs in the postwar era, to laws making it easier for workers to organize (until Reagan that is), to minimum wage, unemployment and worker’s compensation insurance, to Medicare and Medicaid these were political acts taken by the people’s representatives assembled. As a case in point: before the passage of Social Security being old was almost synonymous with being poor. In fact as late as the early 1960’s over 30 percent of the elderly lived in poverty. With the passage of Medicare and Medicaid and other such programs that level has been reduced to nearly 10%.
The passage of this legislation and the institution of these programs not only served to create a ‘fairer’ distribution of wealth but served the more important function of shoring up the modern American Middle Class and, by extension, the foundation of the republic itself.

I have not been understood. The middle class is itself a creation of political will designed to give stability to the republic. Without a middle class, in a representative society, one has contention, strife, war, revolution or repression. Only an all-powerful middle can insure against the extremes and for that reason war on the middle class is war on the republic itself.

In November last year, the center gave way. The ship of state was ripped loose of it’s moorings and cast to sea piloted by a ship of fools. Losing over 60 seats in the house to the modern “No-Nothing” party, the Speaker’s gavel was handed over to John Boner of Ohio who, upon taking the dais, announced that the first act of the new Congress will be the repeal of the Health Care law. Obama, with the opposition in control of committees, investigations and spending, will now be forced to do what Clinton had done, become the buffer between his own party and the newly re-emergent troglodytes. “Triangulation” it was called then; a strategy of positioning the President in the middle in which he becomes not an advocate of his agenda but an architect of a series of miserable compromises. The promise of ‘transcendence’ becomes the reality of ‘triangulation’. The last time we found ourselves in this position, we witnessed so-called ‘welfare reform’, trade agreements that savaged manufacturing jobs, cuts in social spending, the further dismantling of New Deal banking regulations, and the continued decline of the share of national wealth controlled by the Middle Class. If recent history is any example, it means the resumption of the war on the middle class and, by extension, the Republic itself.