I have been both encouraged and inspired to pick up writing on this blog again.  If, only for a little while, it allows me to focus my thoughts and develop insights that I might not have otherwise had, then it will be well worth the effort.

Here's something I'm relatively excited about.  For years on the City Council and Plan Commission, we have been struggling with some mistakes of the past in our downtown design scheme.  It suffers from a schizoid desire to have both a pedestrian-friendly downtown core area and yet have a four-lane highway running through it.  Someone once suggested a compromise to the situation by proposing "speed bumps" on the highway to slow down the traffic to which I snarkily suggested that we already have them and they are called "pedestrians".

Anyway, a new consultant looked at the situtation with a new set of eyes and recognized that we could accomplish the pedestrian friendly goal not by going parallel to the main drag, four-lane highway but perpendicular to it with only one major crossing point on the 4-lane.  It works....at least on paper.

You can read the story here

Well,  I'm back again.

It's going to take some getting used to ....again.... I was gone so long this time that I couldn't even find my old, old password....jeeeeshhhh....that's downright embarrassing......

Some really great insights here...wonder when we'll learn...

When I was in a small, northern Wisconsin city I observed that the economically depressed nature of the community was primarily because the place was so remote that the only industry that could actually be attracted to the area involved extraction of minerals....and the high-profit-get-rich-quick nature of that endeavor.

Here is a remarkable piece that puts our consumer-based, extraction for profit mentality in context...Here's the link:

http://billmoyers.com/2014/01/27/the-two-faces-of-empire-melville-knew-them-we-still-live-with-them/

Gandin knows that almost every literate American knows of Melville's Moby Dick and the infamous Captain Ahab.  He also knows that Ahab has been used as a metaphor for damned near everything in the past 100 years or so...but he says there is more to Melville's story:

But what’s really frightening isn’t our Ahabs, the hawks who periodically want to bomb some poor country, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, back to the Stone Age. The respectable types are the true “terror of our age,” as Noam Chomsky called them collectively nearly 50 years ago. The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet and rationalize the atrocities. They are a type that has been with us for a long time. More than a century and a half ago, Melville, who had a captain for every face of empire, found their perfect expression — for his moment and ours.

The article is by Greg Gandin and here are some of the rather profound observations he offers us.

In comparing Melville's Ahab with Amasa, Gandin writes



Insurgents like Ahab, however dangerous to the people around them, are not the primary drivers of destruction. They are not the ones who will hunt animals to near extinction — or who are today forcing the world to the brink. Those would be the men who never dissent, who either at the frontlines of extraction or in the corporate backrooms administer the destruction of the planet, day in, day out, inexorably, unsensationally without notice, their actions controlled by an ever greater series of financial abstractions and calculations made in the stock exchanges of New York, London and Shanghai.

And he concludes:


With Ahab, Melville looked to the past, basing his obsessed captain on Lucifer, the fallen angel in revolt against the heavens and associating him with America’s “manifest destiny,” with the nation’s restless drive beyond its borders. With Amasa, Melville glimpsed the future. Drawing on the memoirs of a real captain, he created a new literary archetype, a moral man sure of his righteousness yet unable to link cause to effect, oblivious to the consequences of his actions even as he careens toward catastrophe.
They are still with us, our Amasas. They have knowledge of their duty and are disposed faithfully to follow its dictates, even unto the ends of the Earth.

You should treat yourself to reading the whole article...you'll find that it repulses you with the same intensity that it draws you into it.   You will see the face of our current form of capitalism as you have never seen it.

Back again....

I've been extremely careful about posting here...or, for that matter advertising to anybody that I am posting here because I am in the public eye A LOT and don't want to give my political opponents any more ammunition than necessary to compete with me.  So I've been a bit cautious.

What prompted me to post today was the sight of three consecutive posts on facebook reporting quotes from three conservative Presidential Candidate Wannabes that seemed so far off-the-charts radical that I couldn't believe any serious candidate for national political office would publicly speak such nonsense...nevertheless, there they were, http://www.salon.com/2014/01/27/dim_and_divisive_rand_paul_self_destructs_again/ and here: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-obama-should-apologize-obamacare-state-of-the-union and here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/01/26/gov-walker-to-gop-avoid-taking-the-bait-on-social-issues/

So I had to stop and evaluate that for a few minutes.  To whom are these guys speaking?  Exactly who...or maybe more precisely, what segment of American Society are they appealing to? 

...and....assuming there is a political market for this kind of crazed rhetoric, what does this say about our county?

No definitive answers at the moment...just questions.

Wow.

Am I ever stupid!

I saw this happening and never figured it out until now.

Okay, I guess it’s time to explain what I’m talking about.

It’s about Wisconsin’s infamous Act 10 that stripped public employee unions (except protective services) of their bargaining rights and put such stringent restrictions on them that it didn’t pay for them to “recertify” annually like the bill required.  Hence, most public unions simply ceased to exist.

Like almost everybody else, I figured that the proper reaction to Act 10 was to fight the process and when that failed, to take to the courts to undo this injustice.  I always believed that Act 10 was both the ways and the means for the Republican Party and Scott Walker to cut off the Democratic Party’s prime source of campaign finance and to assure the Republicans a free hand in punishing the unions (primarily the teacher’s unions: WEAC and WTA) for voting for Democrats.  As an extra benefit to the Republicans, they used the “savings” to cut aid to local school boards and governments saying that they had the “tools” to make up the difference: by cutting local salaries and staff members.

It was a real “two-fer” as far as Republicans were concerned.

But I just realized that Act 10 wasn't the end of the Republican strategy.  It was just the beginning.

I mentioned a long time ago that I had read Shock Doctrine! BY Naomi Klein.  I was horrified and angered by what she wrote and although, in some circles, Klein's writing have fallen into controversy, I still believe she was on to something.

...and when I stopped to think about Act 10, it dawned on me that it was part of a "shock doctrine" strategy for Wisconsin.

Filling the vacuum of the loss of Unions was a private enterprise that has done some 40+  "Empoyee Compensation Plans"  ...one firm doing that many...the plans have been sold to local communities under the guise of filling the gaps created by Act 10.  Indeed, local units of government have believed that they "have no pay plans" now that all the Union Contracts are null and void (by lack of re-certification of the unions).

The new compensation plans are said to be meeting the requirement that public wages be more in line with private wages. They were all “cookie cutter” in their approach in that the lower skilled positions be “weighted” to 75% private comparables and 25% public comparables because a government agency was more likely to recruit these positions from local sources and therefore from comparably paid private positions; and conversely, the upper level management positions were to be weighted exactly the opposite (25% private sector; 75% public sector) because the government agency was more likely to have to compete on a statewide level for the specialized government management positions.

Those compensation plans all share one rather startling characteristic: All the wages for the so-called lower skilled and former UNION POSITIONS are “overpaid” and the upper level Management Jobs are “underpaid”. Surprise!

Act 10 was the vehicle to enrich private consultants, freeze public employees pay, kill the unions and give the savings to "business"....

An added bonus?  All the Union Salary Scales are now replaced with these new scales.  If the Wisconsin Supreme Court ever overturns Act 10, those new, lower scales will be the starting point for any new negotiations.

Remember Governor Walker's proclamation?  

WISCONSIN IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS!  

...paid for by cuts to pay for union workers.

All you need to know about Conservatives....

Are you pissed off about Newt's demand to repeal Child Labor Laws?

Are you confused by Romney's slavish devotion to corporate profits?

Can you simply not grasp the "vision" of America that the Republican Candidates are trying to sell?

Here's something that will set you straight. In plain, 6th grade level English, Naomi Klein wrote the consummate explanation of Conservative Theory in this article published in Harpers in 2004. It tells us all we need to know about what the "perfect" conservative nation would look like....and why it will never happen.

Enjoy.

http://harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good.* Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society.* The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course,have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.*

* My emphasis has been added.

The truest words...."the blame rests with the plan itself." Indeed. The modern conservative vision of America is the vision of corporate greed; of the perfect union of corporations and the state. It is, in my opinion a hellish, nightmarish vision that I pray never comes to pass.

Some thoughts about that "Republican Clown Car"

Can you believe it?

Hardcore, conservative, dyed-in-the-wool Republican Senator Danforth called the republican presidential candidate field, "...embarrassing, they're terrible, just terrible for the party."

In recent days, more Republican pundits have referred to the Republican candidates transversing Iowa in search of conservative votes as the equivalent of a "clown car". I don't think I've ever seen such a violation of Ronald Reagan's "11th Commandment" (Thou shalt not speak ill of thine fellow Republican") as I have this year.

The phenomenon has puzzled me for a couple of weeks and I'll have to admit I've been absolutely dumbfounded by the inability of the most organized, well-disciplined, well-financed political machine in history to put forth a candidate capable of defeating a badly-wounded Democratic President like Obama. Fortunately, we had a light snowfall last night and instead of pulling out my beast of a snow blower, I took the time to shovel the porch and sidewalk. Fortunate? Well, actually, yes. Because shoveling a light snow allows the mind to wander and, if necessary, to focus on facts that are not immediately apparent otherwise.

So I started thinking about the "clown car" comment. On the surface, it is pretty factual. The candidates jumping into the fray are trying desperately to "out-crazy" one another. They are for the most part trying to "out-conservative" the other guy (or woman, because Bachman is still technically in the race).

Watching these people trip all over themselves to claim the crown of the "real conservative" in the race is like watching a Marx Brothers Comedy. It's so far over-the-top that you've got to believe that it is actually being done more for the laugh track than any serious political objective.

At least twice this year, MSNBC pundit Rachael Maddow has referred to certain Republican Presidential Campaigns as "performance art". She has been one of the few to recognize that this whole process seems more geared to mass entertainment (and distraction maybe?) than any serious attempt to elect a leader of the free world.

It occurred to me that the problem isn't that each of the candidates is clown-car-crazy but the agenda they are desperately trying to embrace is what is really clown-car-crazy. That would also be why no moderate, sensible Republican is in the race. Because in today's Republican Party, it's all about appeasing the Tea Party Crazies who parlayed a national recession and thinly disguised racism into a pseudo-political movement that (in turn) got hijacked by America's Oligarchy for fun and profit. No respectable Republican wants to be a part of this mess.

Let me be clear about this: The clownish, almost buffoonish cast of characters seeking the Republican nomination for the Presidency is not a function of the quality of the candidates available to the Republican Party, but, instead a function of the agenda the Tea Party has forced them embrace. The agenda itself is the clown car. The candidates are just trying to hop on it and ride it to the White House.

It gets even worse. The money needed to get elected is behind the Tea Party and the Republican Party cannot survive without that money so they have to buy into the clown car agenda.

Is there a bright spot?

Maybe.

Maybe in some dark, smokey back room somewhere, some brilliant Republican Strategist has this all mapped out. Maybe the master plan is to allow the Tea Party to pick the candidate for 2012 and to crash and burn so badly that it even wipes out the Republican Majority in the House of Representatives, thereby cleansing the Republican Party of the the stench of the Tea Party in time for the 2016 elections where they can run against a pure, Democratic agenda.....

I can only hope.

Yeah...that's sort of like it....

It's Christmastime

A "rocking Toucan" for Christmas? Doesn't everybody?

It sort of sneaked up on me this year.

I've been hearing people talk about it...I've watched as a bunch of good-intentioned people have turned the park and zoo into an electric-light extravaganza for the purpose of stocking the local food pantry...I've watched the frenzy of Christmas shoppers in the retail stores as well as grocery stores...but...somehow I never felt Christmas would actually be here.

It's all, I don't know...anti-climatic?

I'm not going to do my annual rant about the commercialism of Christmas. I'm also not going to rant about the divergence between what Christianity ACTUALLY says about Christmas and the myths that have grown up around it....although I cannot resist mocking the sight of a lawn decoration that had Santa Claus in the Manger scene....I think my soul is far too callused to feel anything about those issues anymore. I have no delusions that society will suddenly come to its collective senses and start addressing the real problems that face us as a country, as a society, and hell....even as a species!

I think I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the company of the few members of the family who have gathered here and savor the time together. There will be good food, companionship and celebration of our common heritage and that....that should be enough.

To all my friends, I'll repost this ...just for you.

In my little corner of Wisconsin I have friends who are proudly of the Jewish faith. I have friends who are various denominations of Christian faith. I also have dear friends who are equally proud pagans. (I once politely demurred on joining them to dance naked around the bonfire on the solstice) and I have some friends who are vocally and proud atheists. The point is they all celebrate the season in different ways (or perhaps not at all) but that doesn't diminish my respect for them in any way. I want to wish them well on this season and sort of struggled on how to do it. I've worked hard to make Christmas/greeting card to them all and here's what I came up with:

Soooooo...from our house to yours.......may all the joys and happiness of this season belong to you and yours and may you truly enjoy celebration of this season according to the richest traditions of your faith or belief.

About that "war" on Christmas

I tuned in to a local radio talk show today and heard the host promoting tomorrow's program where he will have a guest on to discuss the "war on Christmas" and, in general a "push back against Christianity" because of the current Tebow craze.


To be fair, he made a very interesting distinction. He said that most of the effort to assert either position, either Christian or Secular was that it is a two-part proclamation. The first part establishes you as either secular or religious..and the second part is the implied, "I am christian/secular and you should be too." He claimed that it was this second part to which people seem to object.

Well.....yeah...there is that...but my take on it is slightly different...

I think that we should remember why we greet somebody with "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" or even "Happy Hanuka " we are doing it with a sincere expression of good will and joy of the season to THEM....NOT to elevate ourselves or to show them our "brand".

What we should be doing is recognizing the beliefs of that person and wishing them happiness within the context of their beliefs, NOT OURS. If I am in the home of some of my atheist friends, I won't wish them a Merry Christmas. Not because I don't want to offend them, but because I want to wish them the best of the season within the context of their belief, not mine. I want them to enjoy the blessings, happiness, rewards WHATEVER of the season according to whatever set of beliefs they might subscribe to.

I suspect there are some who wish to do the evangelical duty and use the greeting as a way to proselytize for their own religious belief. If your particular brand of religion instructs you to proselytize and you are being true to that faith, fine. Go ahead and do so but don't whine about persecution if somebody rebuffs your evangelical attempts. That is as much their choice to rebuff as it is for you to witness or recruit. But again, you're thinking of yourself and not others.

There are indeed some who go around wearing their religious beliefs on their sleeves not as a matter of being proud of their faith but to try to insinuate some sort of moral superiority over others because they believe that they are somehow or another chosen and you're not. There is no reason for that other than pure selfishness. Again, you shouldn't complain if you are shunned or rebuffed in your efforts because you have taken the unwanted step for your glorification and not honored or given true best wishes to the friend, associate, or acquaintance you insinuated your religion upon. It's not a rejection of your religion. It's a rejection of you.

The other side of the coin is equally true....that other side being that people who take offense at the carelessness of either religious or non-religious people in aggrandizing themselves as opposed to making a sincere wish for joy and happiness of the season. Those people need to consider it an INDIVIDUAL act of selfishness and not a condemnation of the entire faith. Just because some idiot comes up to me and asks (warning, silly example ahead) if I "have heard the good news of the flying spaghetti monster." I'm not going to condemn the whole faith...just the idiot who thought more of his own need to aggrandize himself and feed his own frail ego.

There is one place where I personally will ALWAYS draw the line.

I do not want any religion of any flavor endorsed by government, sanctioned by government, favored by government, taught in government schools or mandated in any classroom anywhere in this nation.

In short, I believe in the absolute separation of church and state....that put me in the same category as two radically different American Icons: Thomas Jefferson and Senator Barry Goldwater.

I have some friends who are directly involved in religious activities (they are called Ministries btw) and several of them hold the same view as I do. They don't want government mandated prayer in government meetings and they don't want government mandated prayer or religious devotions in public classrooms. To these friends I offer my sincerest thanks for their thoughtfulness and scholarship

But there are a few of my more zealous friends who still maintain that all the ills of society can be blamed on the fact that "Children can't pray in school anymore." (In fact Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry has been running an ad saying exactly that!) First...kids can pray all they want in school...it's just that a teacher cannot force them to pray or ascribe what prayer the child can or cannot say in school. The restriction isn't against prayer...it's against government inserting itself into a preferred religion or faith. Such claims are pure political propaganda; the likes of which Senator Goldwater warned the Republican Party against in 1963.

This is almost turning into a rant....and I didn't want it to be that.

I've been pretty busy lately and next week promises to be a true "hell week" for me as each unit of government tries to cram the remaining schedules of the month into the first two days of next week. I mention this because I probably won't be able to post much until after the holidays.

Soooooo...from our house to yours.......may all the joys and happiness of this season belong to you and yours and may you truly enjoy celebration of this season according to the richest traditions of your faith or belief....

from a friend

"I was never a religious person but I was once a libertarian.

Ayn Rand was the sacred prophet
Atlas Shrugged was the gospel
Ronald Reagan was a demigod
The invisible hand of the market was God who would reward everyone with prosperity if appeased
Government regulation was a devil, corrupting the proper order
Heaven was a utopian society in which government regulation was unnecessary because the markets would take care of all problems with flowing abundance and prosperity for all.

So the evangelical movement and Randianism is just two religions that have joined together in a common interfaith cause."

I think he's right....and I am afraid for my country.

We're watching the end-game of a generation long assault on America. God help us.

Shock and awe ...

Let's start with two premises:

First you are a "free market economist" and believe that the New Deal was a betrayal of the American Dream and it must be reversed, eradicated, and totally obliterated from American History.

Second, you believe that the American People have become "spoiled" by the New Deal entitlements and will never willingly give them up.

So what do you do?

If you're the noted Economist Milton Friedman, you hypothesize that only a disaster, natural or man-made will cause enough shock to the public where they will accept return to "free market" principles as the least objectionable alternative to all other alternatives. In the process of "creative destruction" you create a "blank slate" for new economic rules to be written upon....and once the "shock" subsides, the Conservative Utopian FREE MARKET complete with rainbows, sunshine and unicorns (and ponies too!) will magically appear. In short, a society must be SHOCKED into the perfect free market. With a little help from the IMF (International Monetary Fund ) , the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the World Bank countries finding themselves in financial crisis could be blackmailed into becoming laboratories for Friedman's theories. (Pictured at right, Ronald Reagan with Fredrieck Hyek, founder of the "Austrian School" and mentor to Milton Friedman)

The first laboratory for Friedman's Shock Doctrine was Chile and it gave the world Pinocet.
It was followed by Bolivia, Argentina, and the so-called "Horn of South America". The Chicago School of Economics, inspired by the "Austrians" ...the school of economics that preached the end of the new deal like the Sermon on the Mound...quickly instituted their holy trinity of shock principles: PRIVATIZATION, DEREGULATION and ELIMINATION OF SOCIAL PROGRAMS.

It failed everywhere it was tried and instead of being "shocked" into submission, the populaces reacted with rebellion ...which in most cases was quickly put down by brutal, murderous methods...(remember reading about the "disappeared" in Argentina?) In one case, to avoid repeating the mistakes of Pinocet, the dictator sent the army into the Ford Motor Company plant to arrest union stewards. The army was joyfully assisted in arresting the union officials by the managers of the plant. The union officials were sometimes tortured in rooms provided by management on the site itself or, sometimes, taken to the back of the site and shot. Shock and awe indeed.

These "failures" didn't deter the Friedman faithful. The tried it in Poland, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and eventually in the Pacific Rim during the Asian Crisis in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan. (As I type, the IMF and World Bank are imposing the same formula on Greece and it is being met with fierce resistance)

The Conservative wet-dream laboratory was IRAQ. Here, they could literally destroy the entire economy with the force of weapons and dismantle a functioning economic system in days. Once this was done it could be replaced with what Coalition Provisional Authority leader Paul Bremmer called, "the world's largest free trade zone." No Iraqi citizens need apply; Iraq's infrastructure and indeed its entire economic system was sold off to the highest foreign bidder in order to maximize profits. Bremer famously said, "Iraq is OPEN FOR BUSINESS".

NOTE: DID YOU NOTICE THAT GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER SAID THE SAME THING AFTER HE DID AWAY WITH THE PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNION BARGAINING RIGHTS?

We all know how well Bremer's petri dish of capitalism in Iraq worked.

But as with all conservatives, the failures are never their fault. They take no responsibility for anything. Chile failed because Pinocet was too brutal. Peru, Bolivia failed because the reforms weren't instituted fast enough. Russia failed because there was too much corruption inside the market. Poland failed because Solidarity didn't act fast enough.

So they tried it again.

In 2004 in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. Didn't work there either

In 2005 in New Orleans. Didn't work there because there was too much corruption.

And what about now?

In Ohio, Maine, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin we are told we are in a "fiscal emergency" and we must....ready for this?....PRIVATIZE, DEREGULATE AND CUT SOCIAL SPENDING!

If it all sounds familiar to you its because it is the same SHOCK DOCTRINE being used on the people of the United States. Written, produced and directed by the same Republican Think tanks that brought you the Austrians and the Chicago Boys with the same dream of creating a capitalist utopia in every state in the union. Under the mantra "A rising tide raises all boats!" it is claimed that helping the "producers of jobs" by cutting their taxes, deregulation of their businesses and cutting out the "leeches" of society (poor, elderly, unions etc) eventually everybody's "boat" will rise.

Paul Volker said that the shock doctrine would be like an elevator to the top of a 50 story building. Everybody starts out at the bottom and the elevator takes a small amount of people to the top on each trip until eventually EVERYBODY gets to the top floor.

People of Poland, Russia, the Southern Horn have been waiting for that elevator your decades. The people of Iraq haven't seen even the first load of people go to the top. The displaced (permanently ) from New Orleans will never see the elevator nor will the humble fishermen of Sri Lanka whose beach property was confiscated and sold to developers of luxury resorts.

We, in each of the states are waiting for an elevator that exists only in theory.

And those at the top who told us to wait are laughing at us.

Read SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Kline....you'll be glad you did.

The Failure of Liberalism

The Failure of Liberalism

I was surprised to see the name "Happy Rockefeller" on this post but it's a great read and I highly recommend it.

Thank you Henry Clay

I'll have to admit that my blood pressure soared recently when an acquaintance called to my attention that I had been "raked over the coals" by a political opponent on his blog site for what I considered to be a highly successful "Listening Session" for people in my ward.

Against my better judgment, I gave the opponent's site a "hit" and read his post.

It was polemics at its worst and the equivalent of a long "hiss" from him as an audience.

Then I stumbled across this anecdote from the famous abolitionist, Henry Clay.

While giving an abolitionist speech one day, Henry Clay found himself struggling to be heard above the incessant hissing of a number of slave-owners.

"Gentlemen," he finally exclaimed, "that is the sound you hear when the waters of truth drop upon the fires of hell!"

Thanks Henry...I feel much better.

I'm getting closer...I think

I just finished reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? and I have to say that it has given me a clue (I think) to the quandary I have been in about our current state of affairs in this country. Let me restate this in a practical way:

How in the hell can people be supporting the Conservative agenda which is so clearly, unequivocally, blatantly in direct opposition to their personal interests? Or, more bluntly, Why the hell would anybody want to join the Tea Par-Tay?

The first few chapters of the book dealt with the term "backlash" which I associate in a way far different from how he meant it. I remember "backlash" in terms of the Southern Conservative Democratic Party's reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and I didn't immediately see the connection Frank was trying to make.

As I read on I began to understand that what had happened in Kansas, the backlash, was organized by pretty much the same cast of characters who have been active in the current
conservative revolt or Tea Party movement and it fit a very, very similar pattern. And when I got to the end of the book, I found that Frank realized, after the 2004 election, that he wasn't witnessing something strange about his home state but something that was a petri dish for a conservative movement across America.

He had no idea how right he was.

Here are some quotes:

"American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation."

Okay....here's how it works according to Frank. Conservatives have painted the liberal democrats as elitists, you know, the "latte-sipping, Birkenstock-wearing INTELLECTUALS, who want to impose their values on the good, old, Christian, salt-of-the-earth working man by poisoning movies and TV and all other popular culture and (most importantly) killing babies in abortions. The Democratic party has helped this along by trying to become more "business friendly" and making Democratic Economic policies only slightly less conservative than Republican Economic Policies. So if there's no difference in economic policies, then VOTE VALUES. But by doing so, you are making the true beneficiaries of Republican Economic Policies wealthier and playing into the hands of the true elites.

Frank goes on:

"As a social system, the backlash works. The two adversaries feed off of each other in a kind of inverted symbiosis: one mocks the other, and the other heaps even more power on the one. This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world."

Frank recognized in 2004-2005 that this could spread:

"Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. May what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading."

Wow! Ya think so????? I did head this way. The same corporate players involved in turning Kansas into the "reddest of red" states have been at play all over the country...Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida...13 states in total. All using the same formula and all having the same degrees of success.

I haven't figured out how to counteract this on the local or even state level yet but What's the Matter with Kansas has given me some insights into the techniques, tactics and motivation of the conservative movements. I'll figure out the rest after I read, study and inwardly digest more on the subject. One thing I do know, however, the Democratic Party needs to return to its roots...right now it's just a slightly less conservative Republican Party.

much more later

"...not with a bang, but a whimper...."

My hero of olden days, T. S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men, the famous lines:

this is the way the world ends
THIS is the way the world ends
not with a bang
but a whimper.

And that is how the local campaign to recall our State Senator ended on Monday.

After all the bluster, bravado, and hoopla, the campaign led by a former friend of mine gathered only a little over 6,000 signatures of the required 15.800 needed to force her to stand for recall. It was heralded as something just short of the second coming and accompanied by calling her a "union thug" and saying she was "worse than Hitler"....because she was one of the Wisconsin 14.


Well, it's over....the organizers have gone underground to try to figure out how to spin this epic failure...

and me?

I'm "waxing poetic" again...


To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.


Shakespear, McBeth

Talk about coincidence....

This is strange....I spent a good part of the afternoon blasting plastic golf balls around the back yard and arguing with an imaginary...(don't call the guys in the white jackets yet, please keep reading)..opponent about economic theory...(put the phone down and listen)...Before you think I'm totally insane, I'll explain: I often test out my beliefs, my political positions and arguments by arguing with a well-schooled but nevertheless imaginary opponent. This way I can call BULLSHIT on myself by discovering flaws in my reasoning before I publicly air those arguments and make a complete fool of myself. So it's therapeutic and practical.

I am not insane....really...
photo by Getty images...

I was developing my thesis on the absurdity of current conservative economic premises and having trouble calling to memory those economists who posited those same positions...when I came back in to check through the blogosphere, I happened to click on a long-forgotten bookmark called "The Baseline Scenario" which happens to be written by one of the more prominent economic theorist of the current era, Simon Johnson...and he turned me to this link. It was as refreshing as a sip of water from a desert oasis.

Here's the gist of it:

My opponent is a firm ( firm? try DEVOUT) believer in the theory of free markets. He believes all government interference in ANY market is wrong. He is a true follower of Adam Smith in that he believes the "invisibile and unerring hand" of the "market will take care of everything. This borders on Randian or libertarian beliefs but we won't go into that....

The article I stumbled upon is an interview with Peter Temin, a noted Professor of Economics at MIT. This interview gave perfect voice to my positions...here are some examples:

"In my opinion, macroeconomics has lost its way. The kind of models that many people use—general equilibrium models—start from assumptions of perfect competition, omniscient consunmers, and various like things which give rise to an efficient economy. As far as I know, there has never been an economy that actually looked like that—it’s an intellectual construct."

The "free market" never has and never will exist. It is an economic construct used to build a theory of macroeconomics that has never worked anywhere in the world. There's more...

But many people claim that the outcomes of that economy are natural outcomes. When you say “natural,” you already have an emotionally laden term. Deviations from the “natural”—say, like, minimum wage laws, or unions, or governments that give food stamps, or earned income tax credits—are interferences with the natural order and are therefore “unnatural."

This is where the current union-bashing, public employee basing, anti-social welfare and anti-government sentiment itself is coming from...

And this part has a troubling overtone to it:

The general equilibirum (sic)view tends to lend support to those who want to make the economy more efficient in the sense of having fewer “distortions”—you know, all of these neutral economic words—from taxes, from labor unions, from minimum wages, and so on. Now, what has happened in the last thirty years—and this is what Hacker and Pearson note in their book [Winner-Take-All Politics]—is we have gotten ourselves into a feedback situation. As people have gotten richer, conservative people have funded organizations which generate economic research promoting their political views.

Like...maybe the Koch Brothers? Like maybe what has happened at Florida State University?

And he has something to say about Wisconsin too....you should read the whole article. It's short and too his credit, it is one of the most easily understood economic essays I've read in a long, long time...

I'll quit arguing with myself now...

n.b. My golf swing still sucks...