"From x to y" or x + y + ?

So, as I continued to think this past week about the article for Lignes, I came up with the title, “From Terror to Crisis,” which I promptly inserted in the old c.v. under “work in progress. But “from … to” doesn’t quite articulate the two terms correctly: we’ve never really left our state of terror. We’ve only internalized it further, much the same way that spontaneously naming “Ground Zero” proved how inadmissible the truth of our own propagation of terror is to the collective unconscious.

But we are in a state of crisis, while the effects of terror – the propensity of which everyone by now should know were imposed and maintained primarily by agents of the State and not by al-Qaeda – have not left us. So where does that leave us? I think it leave us in a position that is worse than the present crisis of capitalism in that it includes not only all of the fallout of that crisis in the lives of working-class and middle-class people – not to speak of other precariously employed (if employed) people – but it is compounded by our unwillingness (and, hence, incapacity) to face the twin cancers of undereducation and ethical degradation and the atavistic consequences thereof. In short, a lumpen mentality is infinitely susceptible to the fiction of terror and the reality of crisis. The result is everything aberrant: racism, delusion (in the form of rampant “conspiracy theories”), and generalized fundamentalism.

In the meanwhile, it appears to me, as I write, that the Obama administration has rather suddenly come to lack all the conviction and fortitude necessary to push through the elements of a progressive agenda. That entity appears (appearances, once again) to be willing to compromise on a whole range of issues, from the domestic (e.g. universal health care) to international (war, human rights, the Geneva Convention, etc.) in order to stockpile victories to rattle off at Obama’s first State of the Union address.

Here’s what I responded one day this past week to one blogger on Organizing for America – the current avatar of the Obama campaign’s website. The individual – presumably an Obama supporter and not a “troll” – is convinced, nevertheless, that rendition, torture, indefinite detention, that whole syllabus of the Bush Doctrine, was (and is) the reason why the U.S. has not been attacked again on its soil since 11 September 2001. I begin by quoting this “true believer” in Barack Obama:

"'Thousands of U.S. lives were saved' by torture and other illegal interrogation techniques only in the twisted imagination of Dick Cheney, John Woo & Co. The day of reckoning has hopefully come. Will the U.S. now rejoin the community of civilized nations that adhere to the Geneva Conventions and *not* laws of exception (whose theoretician was the Nazi, Carl Schmitt)? We hopefully will soon find out. This is a moral question of far greater consequence even than health care reform (which I hope will move forward as well ... gotta work on all of it)."

There are many well-thinking individuals who blog on OFA, but many remind me of Clamence, the “penitent judge” in Albert Camus’ The Fall: some strange, ineffable, unfathomable guilt seems to move them to reject any deviation from cheerleading for the candidate for HOPE now ensconced all too comfortably (seems to me) in the White House. This fundamentalism for Obama (I’ll refrain from the temptation of forging a portmanteau word) has the effect of giving the nod to or, still worse, feigning to ignore the worst of the horrific crimes committed in our name under Bush-Cheney.

In sum, the front section of Tuesday’s New York Times presented me with an anthology of items that sum up the composite effects of terror + crisis + ethical bankruptcy. The front page announces that finally an “Investigation Is Ordered Into C.I.A. Abuse Charges” and shows a page of the egregiously redacted document that the prosecutor, John H. Durham, is now charged to work from. I wish him good luck in finding out what’s under the blacked out portions, that appear to be more than 50% of the document. HOPE: those interrogated publicly (without waterboarding, I presume) will “name name’s” way further up the chain of command. One can always hope, right?

Then, on the penultimate page, there’s good old Bob Herbert’s “The Ultimate Burden,” in which he points out to mostly deaf ears that the bottom 1% of the able-bodied economic population is fighting these two totally foundationless wars. And that a draft would change that pronto. We can always hope for change, right?

Finally, back to the front page, there’s a fine article on how “China [is] Racing Ahead of U.S. in Drive to Go Solar,” which is a bit of misspoken understatement because, in fact, the purport of the article is how China is racing ahead of the U.S. in the drive to help the U.S. go solar! Yes, folks, while lunatics spin their lunacy, OFA bloggers wring their hands, and the Obama White House becomes more befuddled, the People’s Republic of China (whose capital [Capital, people!] has propped up this economy) is setting up factories on U.S. territory to sell us the solar panels we so desperately need. Vive le communisme capitaliste!

Discipline & Legislate

So, I’ve got this article to write by mid-September for Lignes. They’re doing a second special issue on “crisis” or “The Crisis” – how ever the contributing authors wish to approach that. Lignes attracts a left/extreme left, sometimes anarchist audience. Some of its regular authors are Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Martin Crowley, Daniel Bensaïd, etc. It’s the brainchild of Michel Surya, founding editor. Their publishing house too Hélène and my book on USA PATRIOT Act, when no one in the U.S. would touch it.

Anyway, in asking me for a contribution, Surya suggested that I might write about the current crisis of capitalism – a.k.a. “the recession” – from the U.S. perspective. My challenge is that far too few potential readers outside the U.S. realize the profound truth in Obama’s “misstep” statement picked up during the campaign and used against him – as the far right will do at any moment, in any circumstance – when he described the boneheaded conservatives in this country as people who in crisis “cling to their guns and religion.”

When I began thinking about this Wednesday’s entry, I never would have guessed the extent to which the Obama Administration, in just one weekend, could bungle their chances of instituting the now infamous “public option.” But then, I should have remembered Barack Obama’s idealism, his pipe-dream of bipartisanship.

And Barack should have remembered that truth about undereducated bumpkins, their guns and their religion that he uttered in San Francisco. If he had, he would have realized that to waver one iota at the present conjuncture could create the Waterloo of his presidency. What’s needed right now is absolute focus, a take-no-prisoners determination, and the demand of unequivocal party loyalty from Democrats in Congress. Without these three things, the will of the U.S. people will not be heeded.

Everybody talks about how complicated the O’Administration’s health care reform is. What’s the “public option”? –Simple. 85% of us are insured for health care either through our employer (principally, that is; with us paying a percentage, whether we know it or not, in a payroll deduction) or we buy it ourselves. The “public option” would be a cut-rate, federally-run insurance program – very much like Medicare and Medicaid – for the uninsured, for that remaining 15%. And, as a bonus, its lower rates might actually cause the rates for the other 85% of us to level off or even diminish! Oh, did I mention that we 85% are insured by rapacious private insurance companies who richly pay off Republican and Democratic Congresspeople to keep the status quo?…

Some 65% of the U.S. population wants what I just described (I just saw a survey that says 83% are for it; but let's be "conservative"). That’s actually pretty amazing, considering the profoundly conservative bent of this nation. Yet this proposal appears menaced and, with it, any meaningful health care reform for the foreseeable future. Why? Because the will of 65% of the at-large population isn’t getting translated into 65% of the action of the voting legislators in Washington. And Obama and Sebelius wavering over the weekend, saying that the public option really ain’t that important doesn’t help at all. (Notice the understatement.)

The Democrats call themselves a “party,” but they seem to me to be utterly incapable of the discipline that normally characterizes a party. Nothing initiated from a Democratic majority can be achieved with any support from the Republican Party as it exists today – in all its desperation. Democrats should have learned a long time ago that the only response to desperate hysteria fed by corporate payoffs is to run rough-shod over them. Bernie Sanders, for one, knows this. Few others do.

The only way to mirror the will of the population that favors the “public option” is for Obama, first and foremost, and the rest of the party leadership to demand party unanimity or expulsion. Obama owns this party now. He’s got to direct it. A little Robespierre and less Jimmy Carter! Wouldn’t be bad to throw in a bit of Machiavelli too.

Fausse naïveté

How jejune can the good consciences of the U.S. be? All I can see today is reactions ranging from satisfaction to elation over the release of illuminato John Yettaw from the maw of the Burmese dictatorship. He claims he was "sent by God" to visit Aung San Suu Kyi. –Bullshit (or delusion): he was undoubtedly paid by the Burmese junta to pull his stunt in order to prolong Suu Kyi's house arrest. What is crystal clear is that the Burmese thugs hope she'll die before her "legitimate" release date arrives. Meanwhile Mormons (and others) must be delighted with Sen. Jim Webb and John Yettaw returns to the U.S. a free man. He ought to be tried, convicted, and jailed for being an accessory to human rights crimes.

Putschist Town Halls

There are so many parallels between the disruptions and the mechanics of Hitler’s rise to power circa 1923-1933 and the cultural, societal & political rifts of today’s U.S. that my fingers tremble as I type this, my blood boils, I am afraid for us and for our children. Instead of being over and done with, the Bush-Cheney years all too eerily appear to have been just a prelude.

Headless and heedless white panic is expressing itself in every copy of Obama’s face transmogrified to look like The Joker, in every claim of the inauthenticity of his Honolulu birth certificate, in the generalized resuscitation of the “jungle bunny” epithet and abject protestations that it’s not meant derogatorily, in the accusations of racism launched at one of the wisest judges this country’s seen since Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Ginsberg. One single non-white makes one single reference to her ethnicity or skin color in a hypothetical sentence and every fat little red neck squeals that he is being discriminated against. Is this a classic case of blaming the victim or are we on the verge of civil war?

Melissa Harris-Lacewell was on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown the other night making sense, as she always does, about the “cultural anger” behind the Brown Shirt tactics being deployed at town hall meetings across the nation. The Nation – Harvey segues – has the clip. She invoked the argument made by Karen Stenner in her book, The Authoritarian Dynamic. That’s why, being even less polite than Melissa and Keith, I’m taking my rhetoric and my choice of terminology a step further and employing “Brown Shirt” as closest approximation from the past for the tactics of these knuckleheads: the tactics are no different than those of the storm troopers who facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler and whom I mentioned in my letter to editors posted last week.

When we hear hysterical shouts of “I want my country back!” or “I’m afraid of Obama!” or “He’s not American!” yes, we are hearing expressions of anxiety. Maybe we’re even hearing unrehearsed, unscripted translations into spoken language of some people’s deepest fears. Just as “Obama’s an elitist” is code for “He’s an uppity nigger,” “Obama’s a socialist” is code for “Let’s lynch him.” These seemingly innocent cries of white anxiety are as intolerable as they are odious. They may be protected by the 2nd Amendment, but they have their roots in Reconstruction racism. I’m talking about the worst of all the already bad periods of U.S. history, from 1865 (the end of the Civil War) to the Civil Rights Movement a century later. That was when Southern Democrats, the KKK, and various other white supremicists in this country stoked these very fears in crackers. Divide and conquer: that was their strategy. Why? Because if poor whites couldn’t cling to the last resort of blaming blacks for their economic and social misery, then they might begin to think that misery was caused by the real and the only divide: the haves versus the have-nots.

Let me be perfectly clear: we are at a crisis moment in our history. Either we purge once and for all and thoroughly the abscess of white on all others racism or we stand to fall far deeper into the inhumanity prepared in by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld & Co. As with the enabling of Hitler’s beer hall thugs, the real culprits are the corporate sponsors and the perfectly immoral greedy ones who ally themselves with one or two psychotic hate-mongers.

Or maybe we’re just living one of those “opposite days” that Melissa’s daughter told her about…

For the "Public Option"

So, here's my first go.

I wrote this today and sent it to The New York Times op-ed people as well as the local paper, The Village Herald. The latter might carry it, the former probably not. So I'm sharing it with you this way. (I hope my mild concessions to Kapital will be well understood as rhetorical.)...

Two questions are really bugging me these days: Where has our belief in the virtues of free-market competition gone? What are modest income people doing defending the rich more than they defend themselves?

A few years ago, I slipped on a wet curb in Paris, dislocated my foot and broke my ankle. I wasn’t a French citizen so, naturally, I had no insurance coverage there. Nevertheless, the nearest ER took me no questions asked. I received excellent treatment: x-rays, cast, crutches for when I started to hobble around again a week later. After a second set of x-rays when they took the cast off, I was billed for the full price: the equivalent of $350. Back home, my primary care physician told me that with no insurance here, someone would have paid $3,500 at least … provided that person got lucky and landed at a hospital that would treat him. And that was a few years ago!

Every single French citizen is covered by what we call a “public option.” Some of them supplement this with private insurance. Any U.S. citizen who is insured for medical treatment gets it from private insurance companies. Meanwhile, 15% of us have no medical insurance at all. And in times of precarious employment anyone who loses his job usually is bound to lose his medical coverage with it. The “public option” presently proposed is meant to cover that 15% who are out in the cold and at risk, literally, of dying there.

But there’s another, equally important purpose in the “public option.” We Americans hate monopolies just as we abhor greed. Right? One of the most rapacious sectors of our economy is the medical insurance industry. Just look at how much your copay has increased in the last couple of years! Just look at how many redundant tests you’re sent to have by various physicians! Just look at the families going broke or appealing to charity because they have a paraplegic daughter or an Alzheimer father! Just look at how much I would have paid in the U.S. to care for my broken ankle if that had happened here and I didn’t have insurance.

So, how do we diehard free-market fans achieve regulation? By creating competition! That’s precisely what the “public option” would introduce. A far lower priced alternative in the medical health arena (one that, by the same stroke, insures those who are perennially uninsured), the “public option” would create the kind of competition that would put the insatiable insurance vultures on a long overdue diet.

Now is that socialism? Certainly not! Quite the opposite. Breaking up monopolies by creating competitive markets in which affordable goods are sold is capitalism at its best. That’s what is being proposed. But the opponents of the “public option” in Congress know just how to distract and keep people uninformed: say the word “socialism” and everyone’s terrorized. But pay attention, people: those opponents the recipients of most obscene of the obscene amount of kickback money from the health industry!!

So, getting a grip, let’s review: Who would pay for the “public option”? Simple and clear: Taxpayers – don’t stop reading – whose net annual income is greater than a quarter of a million dollars a year. Period. It is their federal income tax that would be increased.

So what are all of these people attending town-hall meetings to shout and threaten shouting and threatening about? I bet not one single one of them makes over $250,000 a year. (That’s an understatement, in case my reader didn’t notice.) They won’t be charged a “red” cent! And if the worst should occur and any of them lose their job, guess what? They’ll continue to be insured for any health-related issues.

By shouting out the devil’s word, “socialism,” all these people are accomplishing is a wall of protection around the bags of gold that the bank executives, insurance CEOs, mortgage moguls, etc. have amassed at their expense. The truly threatened middle class is protecting the fat cats who have robbed them blind. They just sit back in their Wall Street offices and laugh. By ranting and railing against legislators who are trying to bring sanity back to capitalism, those who might tomorrow lose their health insurance and truly need the federal government are protecting legislators whose million dollar houses were bought with insurance lobby gifts.

Regulation of capitalism was flushed down the proverbial toilet during the Reagan presidency. Over the years since then, the rich got a lot richer, the poor remained poor, and the middle class was brought to the brink of total loss. Yes, the effects of “Reaganomics” accumulated until the dam finally burst last fall. And while we waited from November to January for a president who would begin to save capitalism from itself, Nero fiddled.