One More For This Guy

So I’ve taken up the guitar, which kind of explains why I’ve been absent for the past few weeks.

Politics, the election, the economy, the climate, it’s all gotten pretty depressing. Everyone is really tense all over Left Blogistan, nerves are frayed, Democrats are trying to destroy each other, and things are just generally bad right now. So I figured I’d take a cue from George Leroy Tirebiter and cut the soles off my shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the guitar. I came across this video during my obsessive search for anything related to guitars.

Maybe I’ve gone too deep, I don’t know, but one thing I do know; I’d buy this guy beer all night long.

It’s Wake Up Time

by Stephen Fleischman

We don’t have nightmares asleep any more—we wake up into them.

An endless war. An imminent crash. An election campaign in which the three contenders are corporate candidates. High crimes and misdemeanors that go unchallenged.

The perfect storm.

This is the United States where the America Dream, at one time, could become a reality. This is the America of Franklin Roosevelt who built a safety net under his people. This is the America of Watergate that forced accountability on its leaders.

No more. We’ve wakened from the dream into a nightmare.

The Iraq war must go on, says John McCain, Republican presidential candidate, who thinks it will take a hundred years to achieve victory. No one has yet come up with a definition of victory. Democratic candidates talk about ending the war with a variety of timetables that everybody knows will never happen. Big Oil calls the shots.

We’re all getting along just fine with the war as a background hum, so why rock the boat? The anti-war movement of 2003, that seemed so promising at the time, has evaporated into a feel-good miasma.

There is no draft. Your son or daughter will not be affected. They’ll probably go on to college. It’s only those invisibles down there, America’s new underclass that provides the cannon fodder. So why bother? The corporate owned mainstream media has joined the parade with colors and lies flying, eating out your brain. The hype of the “surge” has become a dirge. Better wear that lapel flag pin to prove you’re patriotic!

Everyone is waiting for that other shoe to drop. The Bush-Cheney gang is down to its last nine months. In January of 2009, something new happens.
It’s a long wait. The joisting has been going on for almost a year.

While Barack Obama is a favorite boy of Wall Street, Hillary not only does well on the “street”, but is also the darling of the defense (war) industry. Obama picked up a respectable $474,428 from Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs as well as anywhere from a quarter million or more from Time Warner, Citigroup, Inc, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase & Co among others.

Hillary did better with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics who gave Democratic candidates $103,900, Hillary getting the lion’s share of that.

According to the Federal Election Commission, Republican John McCain raked in a whopping $58,950,601 as of March 1st, $684,294 of it coming from PACs.

The oligarchy always hedges its bets. One way or the other, it gets the man (or woman) it wants.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, whose rating are in the gutter, continues to decimate this country with impunity. While Dick Cheney is on a fishing trip to Iraq, baiting the waters for an attack on Iran, Bush continues to tweak Ahmadinejad. The two war criminals are trying to squeeze another war into their repertoire before they leave a desecrated stage of history in January of 2009. One war isn’t enough. Or is this just another “wag the dog” strategy; a political move to get Republican John McCain elected—your Commander-in-Chief for the hundred years war…?

Wars are usually started to pull the economy out of recession. With Iraq, we have a recession and a war going on at the same time. As Ike warned, beware the military-industrial complex. Now we have a military-industrial-contractor complex.

Notwithstanding the 160,000, or so, US military troops in Iraq, there are about 180,000 private contractors, including up to 50,000 employed in military functions. Blackwater, the leading mercenary contractor, has made deals with both the State and the Defense Departments. When top brass come to visit, it’s the Blackwater mercenaries that protect them. Apparently, they don’t trust our American troops; another good reason for them to go home pouting.

There is a world economic collapse in the making and the US is in the eye of the storm. The Fed inflates the money supply to stave off recession which drives prices up as wages fall due to the off-shoring of our manufacturing plants.

You can count on this government to do the wrong thing. The Bush administration gives tax cuts to the rich when they should be soaking them, as Roosevelt did to help the nation climb out of the last depression. What we need is a new New Deal, putting people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, instead of a stimulus package handing out $600 checks. The money will mostly be used by debt-loaded Americans for paying off overdue credit cards. No shot in the arm for the economy there.

Our two-party system is broken. That will become evident at the Democrat’s Denver convention, in August, when a choice has to be made between their squabbling candidates, Billary and Obama. Early primaries were a disaster. Enmities have hardened after months of cloying, boring debates. If super-delegates have to be used to decide on a candidate, the Democratic Party might as well fold its big tent and disappear into the night.

The beginning of another bad dream?

Our Economy Explained

Hat tip to Fat Charlie the Archangel for this hilarious and definitive explanation of why “The Markets” are FUBAR.

Where Have All the Profits Gone?

by Stephen Fleischman

The stock market has been bouncing around like a yo-yo on steroids.

The term “subprime” that most of us hadn’t heard before, has become a household word.

Household mortgages have been avalanching and foreclosures piling up. Banks are locked in a credit crunch.

Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s biggies, had to be bailed out by the Fed.

Banks, like bookies of yore, are laying off bad bets. The government is dancing as fast as it can, printing $600 checks to send out to everybody, hopefully creating some purchasing power for people to go out and buy stuff.

Yet, despite the stimulus package, and other fables being told by George W. Bush, reputable economists and dour newsmen are predicting a deep and long recession ahead.

According to Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, a recession is a decline in a country’s gross domestic product for two or more successive quarters. Recessions may be associated with falling prices, called deflation, or rising prices, called inflation, in a process known as stagflation.

A severe or long recession is referred to as an economic depression. A devastating breakdown of an economy is called economic collapse.

Is that where we’re headed?

It’s got to be somebody’s fault. Who are the villains of the piece? Capitalists? No. Entrepreneurs? No. The working class? Well, maybe.

It’s the profit motive, Stupid! In the end, you know, every crook gets caught.

Where does profit come from? That is the question.

It took Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) Prussian philosopher, political economist and revolutionary, to find out where profit came from. It was a discovery that ranked with Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud’s ego, super-ego and the id.

Profit, Marx found out, is the gain capitalists receive by paying workers less than the full value of their labor. It’s called “exploitation” of one class by another—an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets.

What! This whole capitalist system that has taken over the world is based on out-and-out thievery! The capitalist steals the surplus value of the labor the worker puts into the commodity being produced! What a discovery!

Well, it’s better than slavery where the slave owner stole 100% of the slave’s labor power, except for what it cost to keep the slave alive. It’s also better than feudalism where the serf was allowed to keep only about 50% of his produce, while the feudal lord took the rest for allowing the serf to work on his land. It was called share-cropping in this country and continued for quite a while after slavery was abolished in 1865. So some progress has been made.

Another landmark discovery of Marx and his collaborator, Frederick Engels, was the concept of the “class struggle”. As expressed in the “Communist Manifesto”, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of ‘class struggles’”

Marx believed that capitalism, like previous economic systems will lead to its own destruction. Capitalism cuts from under its own feet the very foundation on which it produces and appropriates products. What it creates, in the process, is its own grave-diggers.

Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism, itself, will be replaced by another form, be it communism or some form of socialism allowing for a public and private sector in the economy.

There were few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxist ideas in the course of the twentieth century.

Of course, the most prominent of these was Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution which led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR). We don’t mind talking about that. You’ve got to look at these things in the long sweep of history. It took capitalism a couple of hundred years to shake itself out. Since the Industrial Revolution in England, in the late 1700s, there have been many panics, booms and busts and experimentation. Capitalism leads to monopoly and war and today we’re in the stage of empire building and globalization.

Now, new forms of socialism are taking the world stage. The Soviet Union was a failed experiment. China seemed to be using revisionist Marxism to transform itself from communism to a new form of aggressive capitalism, Cuba is continuing in the old tradition with Castro and his brother Raul barely keeping the old form of classical Marxism alive. But there is a new wind blowing over Latin America, with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and socialist ferment in the rest of the South American continent.

The United States today is reaching a stage of critical mass. With an un-winnable war in Iraq costing an estimated 3 trillion dollars of borrowed money, an infrastructure showing signs of wear, a wobbly stock market, a bloated defense budget and a military force falling apart and Congress authorizing tax cuts for the rich, isn’t it time we considered making some changes in our economic system before changes are thrust upon us?

George W. Bush and the US capitalist oligarchy backing him up, must be a part of the grave-digging team.

Saturday Morning Blog Roundup

I’ve not done this before, but I’ve been thinking that it might be fun.

If you read nothing else today go here and read Julia’s beautiful essay on why NO ONE must “sit out” November, whether your candidate is nominated or not. It is one of the best things I’ve read on this election yet.

If you’re ready for some rudeness you can go over to The Rude Pundit, where I found this little snippet this morning:

Sure, sure, Ohio was clearly a Clinton victory. But that Texas win? Well, let’s hear from rude reader CW:

“I can tell you that Clinton did not *win* the popular vote in Texas. We are the state of the 19-percenters, Huckabee-lovers and Hagee. Republicans knew that McCain would win Ohio and since in Texas we have open primaries, the RNC, Texas Repubs and Rush had been telling all their zombies to vote Clinton because they think they can beat her. My own mother, who hasn’t voted for a Democrat for 40 years, told me that she voted for Hillary because ‘you know, I support McCain, so I voted for her like everyone else up here.’ My mother wasn’t our only contact to verify our suspicions. All those rural counties with few votes…Republicans to the core and they HATE Hillary with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Although I live in an Obama county near the George HW Bush Presidential Library, we must have had a huge number of crossovers ourselves because Huckabee nearly beat McCain here.”

Oh, and I just found this:

In this exclusive extract from his new book, Philip Shenon uncovers how the White House tried to hide the truth of its ineptitude leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Also, over at the UH Union Blog Justine Bateman writes about the upcoming SAG contract with the AMPTP and how it’s relationship with AFTRA may affect that negotiation. It’s a good read.The video is Tony Furtado, who is an artist that I was just introduced to this morning and who I hope to see perform live one day.

“It Smells of Sulfur”

by Stephen Fleischman

The FARC— the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—is in the news, again.

The FARC has been a thorn in the side of the Colombian government since the 1960s when it was organized after a period of political violence in the country called “La Violencia”.

The organization has grown stronger since those days and now is considered to be a terrorist, Marxist, guerrilla group threatening the Colombian government. It is accused of financing its activities through cocaine trafficking and kidnappings.

This week, the Colombian military invaded Ecuadorian territory and killed Raúl Reyes, FARC’s international spokesman and considered to be FARC’s second-in-command. In this operation, at least 24 guerrillas were killed. It is believed that Raúl Reyes was in Ecuador negotiating the release of some kidnap victims they had been holding, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

The action led to a breakdown in diplomatic relations between Ecuador and Colombia, and between Venezuela and Colombia. Both Ecuador and Venezuela massed troops on the southern and northern borders of Colombia and for a while it looked grim.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who called George W. Bush “the devil” at the UN General Assembly in 2006, and said the podium still smelled of sulfur after Bush spoke there, claimed that Colombian policies are made in Washington.

The US is hip deep in this mess since it has taken the Colombian government under its wing in 1999 with what has been called “Plan Colombia”—a way to give the Colombian government $1.3 billion dollar a year to fight the war on drugs, the lion’s share of which goes to the Colombian army to fight the FARC guerrillas.

Somebody got the bright idea, probably the Monsanto Company, the world’s leading producer of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as “Roundup”, that by fumigating the coca plants with this herbicide, they could stop the flow of cocaine into the United States.

The glyphosate spray not only kills the coca plants but also just about everything else growing around them including agricultural crops. There is evidence that the spray causes lesions and other ill effects in children and adults. It was a boon, of course, for Monsanto, but did little to alter the price of cocaine on the streets of America.

Coca plants are not immune from the economic laws of supply and demand. If the supply of coca leaves goes down, the price of cocaine, across the world, goes up. Enterprising entrepreneurs rush into the market, disperse and grow more coca to take advantage of the higher price. This has been the experience of coca spraying for the past thirty years. There is more coca being grown in more places than ever before.

I went to Colombia, a few years back, as a member of a human rights delegation sponsored by the Colombia Support Network of Madison, Wisconsin, to investigate the effect of fumigation on the farmers or campesinos where the spraying was taking place.

In the southern province of Putumayo, where the heaviest concentration of coca is grown and where the FARC is strong, we interviewed dozens of campesinos and compesino leaders. We saw the devastation of the countryside caused by the fumigation and saw the effects of the spray on children and adults in the region.

Back in Bogotá, we went to the US Embassy to show our evidence to then US Ambassador to Colombia, Anne Patterson. At the meeting, we showed the Ambassador a flyer put out by the US Department of State telling the people of Putumayo that “Roundup” was perfectly harmless to one’s health. Wasn’t this flagrantly misinforming the Colombian people? The question wasn’t answered but an extensive dialogue ensued about the relative toxicity of the various chemicals involved. Dueling scientists had divergent opinions on the subject. It brought to mind the debate that raged over the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

The Ambassador’s bottom line was that US drug policy aimed to reduce the amount of cocaine smuggled into the US by cutting down the amount of coca leaves grown. Also, a standard answer, “We were invited in by the Colombian government to do this.”

Feeling ran high at meetings of the Organization of American States (OAS) in regard to the current crisis caused by Colombia’s violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty last Saturday.

Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, said the killing of the rebel leader may have ruined chances for the release of 12 hostages held by his rebel group. Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Maria Isabel Salvador, said that Colombia’s apology for the incursion was insufficient and that the organization should send a special commission to investigate.

The Los Angeles Times reports that a US intelligence official in Washington said he could not confirm reports that American spies had tipped off the Colombian authorities that Raúl Reyes was using a satellite telephone that allowed him to be tracked.

Only George W. Bush rushed to the defense of his only ally in Latin America. On Tuesday, Bush told reporters that he telephoned Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, and told him that “America fully supports Colombia’s democracy, and that we firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region.”

By Wednesday, the OAS approved a resolution declaring the military raid into Ecuador a violation of sovereignty in a move aimed at easing a diplomatic and military crisis. The resolution was approved in Washington after talks in which the United States was the hemisphere’s only nation explicitly supporting Colombia.

You could smell the sulfur.