The Great Satan better think it through

The President of Iran is a dangerous idiot, but he may well hold on to power for a while. He seems to be trying to stay on top by uniting his population -- previously riven by factional disputes, many of those factions opposing his rule -- against the foreign Satans who deign to tell Iran what kind of weapons it may have (a la Fidel Castro).

He is dangerous in at least two very serious ways. One, he plainly wants the weapons, to use or to threaten to use. Iran is capable of developing them, and he may well be capable of using them. Two, he saw what happened after 9-11, and he knows that he can do a lot more damage to the West in general, and America in particular, by leading them to bleed and bankrupt themselves in even more neocon folly of stupid, proud, imperial overreach.

Indeed, many of those who led us over the cliff into Afghanistan and Iraq have not learned a blessed thing. Today President Obama released with much fanfare further evidence of Iran's perfidy with regard to its nuclear plant and already Senators Kyl, Lieberman and McCain can hardly contain themselves in their rapt anticipation of American or Israeli bombers swooping over Iran, presumably eliminating any and all "threats" to the US, Israel, ethnic minorities, liberal democracy, Western business interests, country music and good posture.

But even without a direct American or Israeli attack on any labs or factories, Iran is in position already to exponentially escalate the costs of everything going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. With some kind of attack, the region could well and truly explode. And its President knows that it is an open question whether America's War Party has the leverage left to force an expansion of warfare to Iran, ahead of American public opinion which is rapidly solidifying in favor of deescalation in both Iran and Afghanistan.

Can there be any doubt that he is right about that last point? The neocons all over the world see their window of opportunity closing, and the pressure is on President Obama, in particular, to act now or to allow Israel to act, the consequences be damned. They sense, correctly, that they have just about worn out their welcome in American public opinion, and they day is coming when they will have to relinquish most of their influence in Washington as well.

Nuclear proliferation is a serious issue and Iran is a rouge state. It may be that some kind of military action is indeed called for. But the neocons are not to be trusted on this or any other matter. This is a great opportunity for President Obama to repeat his message to the UN on Monday that the US can not be expected to do the heavy lifting by itself. A real coalition of the states in the neighborhood -- in particular Russia and China -- plus the US, equitably sharing the costs, the risks, and the diplomatic heat, would go a long way towards spreading a good message about why nuclear weapons are not worth it. Failing that, the risks and the costs outweigh the benefits of any kind of attack by the US or Israel.

And even more fundamentally, how hard is everyone trying to resove this peacefully?

If the neocons have their way the US will borrow more money from China to wage war on Iran in order to teach them how to be good. That would likely do more damage to the United States in the long run than anything a nuclear armed Iran could do. That must not be allowed to happen.

Too much righteous indignation

The smart thing would have been to do what President Obama did after Joe Wilson threw his tantrum on the House floor: keep your mouth shut and do nothing to take attention from his bad behavior. Let people draw their own conclusions -- those conclusions will mostly be the right ones. But the Republicans have figured out something very smart. Not only is there reverse racism in the world, there is reverse race-baiting. And so, in this case, the impulse of the House Black Democratic Caucus (and a few others, like Jimmy Carter) to get on their high horse was irresistible. Some number of hours of the House of Representatives, some amount of political capital, some amount of precious energy and effort, will be spent not on the health care debate or on other serious, high-priority matters but on what looks a lot like cheap moralistic scolding. This helps no one but the insurance companies and their villainous Republican henchmen. It is not what Obama wants or needs. It will come back to bite the Dems in the rear. It accomplishes nothing. It has been done before, with negative results.

Please figure it out, guys -- the clock is ticking.

Thank You, President Obama.

Can this really be happening?

President Obama's decision to slap real, substantial punitive tariffs on Chinese tires imported into the USA is only a start, but it is an awfully good and promising start.

After thirty years or so of the toxic fraud of free trade and the "global economy," the chickens have come home to roost in every corner, town and hamlet of our once-affluent land. For lo these many years and years, the people of this country in increasing numbers have demanded the government cease and desist its perverse, corrupt and unpatriotic campaign to help the international corporate hegemon bleed America dry of its wealth and self-reliance. The bill of particulars reads like a primer on treachery and cynicism as written by the Borgias: Tax subsidies for the export of American jobs and factories; the progressive elimination of American tariffs while tolerating the protectionism and economic nationalism of our trading "partners;" creeping neglect of any meaningful standards of environmental, child labor, workplace health and safety, and product liability; unfair and destructive wage competition; and on and on and on.

And what do we have to show for it? On the one hand we certainly can enjoy the spectacle of very happy, fat, rich multinational corporations who have -- surprise! -- been the leading cheerleaders and financial backers of this high-minded national suicide. Good for them. But on the other hand, the rest of us have the reality of a rapidly vanishing middle class, an evaporating tax base, a rotting and shrinking public infrastructure.and manufacturing capacity, the greatest concentration of wealth in our national history, untold mountains of private and public debt, global financial and economic instability, declining expectations and indices of national well-being, and God only knows what kind of negative implications for social order.

Our capacity to produce wealth and govern ourselves has been whittled away, piece by piece.

We have been engaged in the process of exporting our golden eggs and the geese that laid them, and the people who made that happen got rich on the deal.

Worse, the US government enabled it even as its people increasingly demanded an end to this madness. Our leaders in both parties have been proudly complicit and in fact, until recently, treated opposition to free trade with condescending pity. Ross Perot ran for President in 2000 almost solely on the issue of opposition to globalization as represented by NAFTA, and on that account was hooted and derided as, variously, a kook, a yahoo, a nutcase, a Know-Nothing, or a psycho (Having done a great deal of this deriding at the time myself, I speak with authority on this. I know a little better now.) Pat Buchanan, whatever his other views, is absolutely right on this issue and has been banging this drum very effectively since he run for President in 1988; his views on trade are routinely marginalized and dismissed because, well, they come from Pat Buchanan. But Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan have been right all along, and both Bushes, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, John McCain, and the rest of them have been not only wrong, but very expensively so. And in addition to being wrong, it is astonishing how much ignorance of American history they have revealed with this platform. Do they really not know of the tariff based trade policy of our Founders that nurtured our industries, funded our government, built a continental market, protected our workers and developed a self-sufficient national economy that was at once the rival, the envy, and the engine of the world? Have these people never heard of Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures? Or do they just not care?

Free trade and globalization are preposterous scams to transfer wealth upwards, to enable thinly disguised slavery all over the world, to evade environmental regulations and despoil the planet with impunity, to escape taxes, regulation, oversight, supervision, legal authority, and independent investigation, to undo the New Deal and to degrade and reshape American society.

Free trade and globalization are bad for America, bad for the people of the world, and represent a cutthroat betrayal of any civilized values.

So here comes Barack Obama to slap tariffs on Chinese tire imports in the context of their export subsidies, which violate the spirit and the letter of longstanding agreements. The President has upset an apple cart that has long deserved upsetting. It seems a small step, but choosing to do this to China -- our competitor and reluctant financier -- signals that is is a well thought-out and almost inevitable policy change that heralds more to come. It calls to mind Reagan's firing of the Air Traffic Controllers which ushered in an era of union-busting, or LBJ's fight for the relatively weak 1964 Voting Rights Bill as a prelude to the more far reaching 1965 Civil Rights Act. It has the air of a high-profile, self-consciously serious act of state that has noticeably little hemming and hawing in it.

It also suggests a willingness to fight. It tool backbone for the President to do this. He will reap political reward at home, but this is not what the Chinese Ministry of Trade wanted -- nor what any of the free-trade bandits can afford. There will be pressures from abroad to retreat, to strangle the baby in the crib. They will talk of the risk of a trade war -- as if they have not been waging a trade war against us for years.

If there is to be a trade war let it be two-way. And all hands on deck.

In contrast to his predecessors, the President has been listening. Obama is saying that corporate profits and the welfare of foreign workers are not the primary concerns of the US government; the interests and future of American citizens and the American Commonwealth are. If he sustains this in policy, we are in a whole new ball game in this world.

What is remarkable is how little vocal opposition this decision has generated domestically. That is evidence that for the American people, the jury is in on free trade.

Free trade and globalization may have worn out their welcome in American political discourse.

Thank you, Mr. President.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

With trillions of dollars at stake, the plutocrats of the healthcare-financial complex can be forgiven the impulse to go to any length to control the outcome of the current insurance debate; or, at least, that impulse can be understood. They are not the first nor will they be the last incarnations of the self-styled Masters of the Universe to have to scramble to stay on the gravy train at the expense of everyone else; nor is their confidence misplaced. This is an old, old story, and throughout most of history, their side has won. This time, however, the evidence suggests that the MOTU might have a fight on their hands. America has a wonderful opportunity for deep, meaningful, lasting change.

American populism is thriving, on both the right and the left, and from the bottom up. People are as mad as hell and they don't want to take it any more, and they have awfully good reasons for that point of view. Wages and income continue their prolonged collapse, living standards decline and degrade, debt and destitution threaten to finally hollow out the remaining shards of America's self-respect and no element in society seems to deserve confidence that it will function as expected or will help to solve any problem. And in many ways, right-wing and left-wing populism are overlapping and coming to the same conclusions from different directions: that the people responsible for our predicament, broadly speaking, are actually profiting off the collapse of America . As the squeeze gets worse, the anger will rise If a real coalition could develop, populist change would fall from the tree.

The next time you see coverage of a teabag party, look at the faces in the crowd and consider how those people would answer the following questions: Do we need more free trade, or less? Should the government carry out more bailouts for companies "too big to fail," or not? Do Wall Street and Corporate America need more regulation, oversight, and prosecution, or less? Do we have too many, too few, or just the right amount of jobs being outsourced? Should America have more or less manufacturing than it does now? Should we have more, fewer, or the same number of foreign obligations that we do right now? Are CEOs overpaid, or not? Should the government privatize and outsource its contracting, or not? Are corporations paying their fair share of taxes, or not?

It is only a guess, but my guess is that a majority of them would answer these questions the way that I and many, many non-conservatives would answer. Soak the corporations, and break them up if you have to. Reacquaint the CEO class with real fear of prison, scandal, ruin, poverty, and humiliation, when appropriate. Bring the jobs, the factories, the cash, and the troops home where they belong, and mind our own damn business for a change. Restore the regulatory regime and trade and labor policies that built the most affluent nation in the history of the world.

There is no doubt that such a point of view would find a welcome in the hearts of many -- on some issues, perhaps a majority -- of those attending the teabag rallies, throwing the tantrums at the town hall meetings,and shouting Hosannas to Rush and Michael Savage, even as they agree, incidentally, with Bernie Sanders, Thom Hartmannn, and Howard Zinn. And me.

In other words, populism has a right-wing an a left-wing accent. But is it more than just an accent? Do the differences outweigh the similarities? And why the fight?

The better question is who does the fighting benefit. As long as the American populists can be divided, they can be marginalized and conquered. And that serves only the interests of those who got us into this economic quagmire in the first place -- the globalist, free-trade, neocon, tax cutting, supply side, open border, deregulating Chicago School MOTUs who even today disdain the reality of the consequences of their own irresponsible, indulgent narcissism, and their celebrity lickspittles. (Henry Paulson, anyone? Alan Greenspan? Robert Rubin?) The suicidal and inane policies put into place by these and others are held in place, principally, by a sort of ongoing low-level cultural combat which makes effective opposition highly problematic.

Populists of either wing who really want to get something accomplished should find a way to look beyond stupid stereotypes about the other wing. Many liberals take pride in dismissing conservatives as toothless racists one generation away from outdoor plumbing. Many conservatives think liberals spend their weekends on ecoterrorism during the day and dressing up like Barbara Streisand at night. To the extent this divides them on issues they otherwise agree on, this is mighty expensive humor. To the extent that political leaders, talk-show hosts, and journalists feed this divide -- and for many of them, it is their stock in trade -- they are complicit in our deadly stalemate.

There is a wonderful documentary called Pumping Iron about the 70s subculture of competitive bodybuilding. The star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, demonstrates vividly the dynamic at work here. He managed, through a combination of humor, arrogance, and out sized success, to make himself the focus of his competitors in such a way that they could not focus on their own efforts -- they were thinking of him and not their own best. Similarly, today, a lot of conservatives are more interested in saving America from tree-hugging hairies than in solving any problems, and the energy of a lot of liberals is spent tendentiously denouncing the evil fascist lurking in the heart of every Republican, at the expense of real attention to the larger good. In both cases, the only result is division, isolation, and political irrelevance.

As long as right-wing and left-wing populism continue to scream and shout inane plattitudes at each other, they dismiss the possibility of effective political coalition. But if the America of George Wallace, Merle Haggard, and Barry Goldwater can make strange bedfellows and common cause with the America of Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King, and Ted Kennedy on the issues on which common ground is possible -- and those issues are many and significant -- the political momentum would be almost irresistible.

Let It Be

I have chosen to begin to blog. This blog will involve my individual responsibility as a citizen of this constitutionally limited republican representative democracy. Let a hundred flowers bloom!!!!! Let a hundred schools of thought contend!!!!!