Politics of Fear – Page 39 – The Wrongologist

Thoughts Before Tonight’s SOTU

Mr. Obama will make the State of the Union (SOTU) speech tonight. Much of what he is likely to outline as his program for 2015 has been leaked, and pundits have focused on the tax cut for the middle class and tax increases for the 1%. Given that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, this is never going to happen, so why now, and not in 2009 and 2010?

On Sunday, the Wrongologist wrote about Mr. Obama’s appalling coattails. Among the reasons his party lost 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats and 11 Governorships since 2010 is that Dems think they can win as “Republican Lite”. In the case of Democrats, they became the “less taste, less filling” brand.

It’s a lot easier to propose these tax policies when there is absolutely no prospect that these policies will ever be enacted. So, the real significance of these proposals will be how it sets up the eventual Democratic nominee for the contest against Bush 3.0, or Romney 3.0, or whoever winds up with the Republican nomination in 2016. But, will the electorate care that the president proposed something that the Republicans laughed out of town over the weekend? Probably not.

Political scientists point out that the 2016 congressional elections will be more favorable to the Democrats than the 2010 or 2014 elections were, because of the higher turnout in the presidential elections and the makeup of Senate seats that will be contested in 2016.

So, why won’t Democrats turn out for off-year elections? Think about it: Voters seem to be perfectly capable of finding their way to the polls in certain years and are motivated enough to take the time to do so. Yet, these same people consistently lose either their motivation or sense of direction, two years later. Democratic pros say that turnout is all about how to “message” better, which for Democrats means how to say the same old things in new ways. But, Democratic candidates, and their messaging have lost credibility, or are no longer relevant to the day-to-day issues of average people. So voting for Democrats is no longer a priority.

Nor is election turnout the only answer. In 2006, Democrats did extremely well with a 37.1% turnout. Yet, Democrats did poorly in 2010 when turnout was 37.8%. Turnout was higher in 2008 than it had been in any Presidential election year since 1968, probably due to the Obama factor. But, turnout in 2002 when Republicans did well, was only slightly off from 2006 when they did badly, at 37.0%.

Strategically, Republicans may not have much left in the potential electorate to motivate, if demographics are now really tilting towards Democrats. Thus, the R’s have no choice but to repress (or suppress) unenthusiastic and unmotivated Democratic voters.

The R’s got a huge assist in 2014 from Democratic candidates that didn’t stand for much, except the meta-message of “we suck less.” Even if a majority of the electorate sort of agrees with that, a certain portion also says, “Yeah, but not enough to care who wins.”

The issue is what strategies will work politically. The bind can be explained simply: to be successful, Democrats must convince the electorate that Washington can and should do things to improve their lives, but the Republicans have enough firepower to ensure that the D’s premise is a loser. With Hillary, Dems won’t beat them badly enough in 2016 to change that.

It’s clear that electing Democrats (usually) leads to better outcomes than electing Republicans. Change came in bunches: in 1933-1945, 1961-1973, 2009-2010. Think about it, in that 35 year period, Dems passed financial regulation, FDIC, SEC, Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights Act, Equal Opportunity, Voting Rights Act and Obamacare.

If you doubt this, look at the 50 states. Each has its own set of policies. In many cases, states have adhered to a generally consistent policy for decades. So the economic conditions in the states is a strong indicator of the effects those policies. To see whether the economy performs better in red states or blue states, simply look these 2014 statistics for red vs. blue states. The differences in that regard are stark:

Or, you can look at poverty by red vs. blue state:

Or, per student education spending by state:

This may suggest a strategy on the state and local levels, based on: “Why can’t we have the success the blue states have?”

On the federal level, Democrats have not received credit from voters for proposing popular policies that never came to pass. In fact, the entire success of the Republicans in the 2014 elections was predicated on the idea that the president would receive more blame for gridlock and dysfunction in Washington than they would for causing it.

They were correct. And there are zero reasons to believe that the same playbook won’t work again. You can already hear Republicans decrying the “Obama/Clinton failed policies” of the past 8 years.

See what YOU think after the SOTU tonight.

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Although it was first observed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Day wasn’t recognized by all 50 states until 2000. It isn’t simply a day about the man; it’s a day about a Dream. MLK remains the hero of a certain generation of Americans for whom activism was a building block of their personal journey to adulthood.

In most ways, our nation has lost that sense of can-do, that all things are possible if you follow your Big Idea, because sadly, we no longer have people who can rally us to make Big Ideas happen. And isn’t it fascinating that the three men of the 20th Century who had big ideas and brought them to fruition, Gandhi, Mandela and Dr. King, all faced “it can’t be done” opposition, often violent, from the white power base in their countries. All three modeled non-violence for their followers, and all three lived to see their Big Dream become a reality in their own country.

Since it is Wake Up Monday, here are 3 songs that pay tribute to Dr. King, his ideals and his relentless drive for equality. It is important to remember that he was just 39 when he was killed.

First, “Glory” by Common and John Legend from the soundtrack of the current movie “Selma”:

50 years later, we are far from completely erasing our race-related issues, except on TV, where all day, every day, commercials show people of all races having fun together while shopping for fast food.

Let’s work together to make it a reality outside of TV before too many more MLK days come and go.

Next, U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)“. From their 1984 album, “The Unforgettable Fire”:

If listeners have any doubt that Martin Luther King Jr. is the subject of the song, these lyrics drive the point home:

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride.

But, MLK’s assassination took place in the early evening, rather than the early morning. That didn’t matter, everyone loves the song, and the Edge’s guitar at the start is one of the most recognizable riffs of the 1980’s.

Finally, the Wrongologist’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we now know as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech for their song “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why should we focus on that part of the speech? Because one day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, and how whatever remains of their rights came to be.

They won’t know anything about the intellectual foundations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, today, teach a child about why MLK is important.

Transformative Ideas, Part II – Reestablish Compulsory Military Service

This is Part II of a continuing series in 2015, bringing forward for your review, ideas that have the potential to transform and end the ossification of our country. Part I was about ending our love affair with the unregulated free market.

In Part II, we argue for re-establishing compulsory military service. In response to the anti-military opinion during the Vietnam War, Nixon replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973. This facilitated our ability to make decisions about conducting wars without worrying about who fights them.

Registering for the draft (as differentiated from compulsory service) is still the law for young men in America. If you were born in 1996 or earlier, that means you’re potentially on the hook if America runs out of professional military during wartime.

There are two problems that compulsory military service will help to ameliorate. First, the permanent state of war that our politicians and defense contractors have fostered in the past 40 years. Charles F. Wald, retired Air Force general who oversaw the start of the air war in Afghanistan in 2001 told the WaPo in September:

We’re not going to see an end to this in our lifetime.

Second, a professional military has dangerously skewed the demographics of our professional military compared to our society at large.

We have a permanent state of war because the price we pay is opaque, or meaningless to most citizens, despite some estimates that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan cost more than $4.4 Trillion, including future obligations for the disabilities of American soldiers. Reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have “skin in the game” for the wars we fight. James Fallows in a very important article for The Atlantic gives us some perspective relative to when we had the draft and what goes on today: (brackets and parenthesis by the Wrongologist)

At the end of World War II, nearly 10% of the entire US population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve).

[Today] the US military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.

(Out of a population of 310 million, or about three-quarters of 1%, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many, many of them more than once)

Since 1970, the population of the US has grown by about 50%, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50%, from 3 million to 1.4 million. Fallows quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military…I would sacrifice some of [our military’s] …excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.

Moving to the demographic differences between the professional military and American society at large, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who is at the Duke Law Schools says: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves…In the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts…They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’

Dunlap told James Fallows: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The military is] becoming increasingly tribal…in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.

Making Dunlap’s point, Danielle Allen, of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Military Service wrote about the political implications of a professional military in the WaPo:

By the end of the draft in 1973, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.

Tellingly, changes to the map of military service since 1973 align closely with today’s red and blue states. Montana, Alaska, Florida, Wyoming, Maine and Texas now send the largest number of people per capita to the military. The states with the lowest contribution rates? Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. What’s clear from the data is that a major national institution, the US military, now has tighter connections to some regions of the country than to others. The uneven pattern of military service is not an insignificant reflection of the cultural differences that characterize different regions of this diverse country. This has broad ramifications for our future.

Heidi A. Urben, a Lieutenant Colonel, studied the attitudes of the officer corps, and found that about 60% said they identify with the Republican Party, and that 70% had not changed their party affiliation, despite two long wars.

The Pentagon reports that bringing back conscription would be costly at a time when the US Army is drawing down its forces. It might cost billions to reinstate the draft, while maintaining the present quality of armed forces. But it may be the only way to wake up a detached and nonvoting public that has depersonalized military service. The additional cost of managing a draft and training all Americans for some kind of government service would pay dividends:

• A draft would ensure that government decision-making regarding military involvement would be undertaken only after the fullest debate — a debate today that seems to not be part of the national consciousness and hardly registers any interest by the public.
• A draft would narrow the gap between people in power in Washington and the men and women at peril in fighting our nation’s battles.
• A draft could re-balance the skewed demographics of the military.

A draft could mean that voting on Election Day would be more important in our now-fragile democracy. It could mean that going to war is worth having every citizen sacrifice, or it isn’t worth any soldier’s life.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 11, 2015

This was a week when cartoonists and free speech came under assault. The cartoonists died. Free speech will survive. From cartoonist Tom Toles, whose work appears here often:

The one response I saw to the Paris murders that I didn’t care for is that they were killed for ‘just cartoons.’ The event proves the opposite. Amidst the floodtide of ‘content’ that contemporary communications are generating, it was precisely the cartoons that stood out as having so much power that someone felt they needed to be silenced. They still have that kind of power.

Free speech is the single most important aspect of what makes a “free society” free. As a free society, we can debate what is a wise use of our free speech rights. But, we have just been reminded in the most terrible terms, how important and vulnerable it can be. Cartoonist David Horsey, whose work also appears here often, (including today) said this week:

Not only can freedom not exist without truth tellers, freedom cannot exist without obnoxious expressions of opinion, no matter who is offended.

Ted Rall, a cartoonist who also appears here occasionally, said this on his blog:

There could never be a mass shooting of staff political cartoonists in the United States, because American newspapers and magazines have fired almost all of them.

He estimates that today, there are only 30 or so cartoonists employed full-time by American newspapers and magazines. The declining number of cartoonists has made curating Sunday cartoons for this blog more difficult over the years.

How do we move forward? The Wrongologist does not usually quote any Catholic Pope, but this from Paul VI seems appropriate today:

“If you want peace, work for Justice”

What does that mean in practical terms today?

• Work toward achieving economic equality everywhere
• Include the topics “Understanding Cultures” and “Promoting Cultural Integration” in school curriculums. This could help reduce fear of “The Other”, a common human trait
• Encourage moderate Muslims living in the West to root out the extremists among them
• Ask Muslim countries to do more than to offer condolences to France

On to cartoons. If you stop cartooning, the terrorists win:

Their real motivator wasn’t Allah:

In other news, we had a semi-favorable jobs report:

Republicans took over the Congress:

The NYPD continued their soft coup:

NYPD Job Action continued:

Democrats Have Lost America

Members of Congress will formally take their oaths of office on their respective chamber floors when the 114th Congress convenes at noon today.

But even as the new Congress gets sworn in, and Democrats dutifully take up their positions in the minority, It is important to realize that Democrats have taken their collective eye off the ball in the states for the past 6 years: Not only do Republicans control Congress, they control an overwhelming majority of state legislatures as well, including 100% control (legislative and executive) of 24 states.

Despite the Democrats’ obsessive focus on holding the Senate and winning the presidency, DC was not the only battlefield; there was a huge battle for control of the states. The WaPo reported this week that the battle is over. Republicans now control 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers.

Before Election Day 2014, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers (most states have two chambers, some only one) across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record, set twice after special elections in 2011 and 2012.

Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to 7.

While pundits everywhere are talking about what is going to happen in Washington in 2015, we should spend a little time preparing for a new wave of conservative state laws. Republicans plan to launch fresh assault on:

• Common Core education standards, the national standards adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. Opposition on the right has led three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina — to drop out of the program. Some states will attempt to join those three in leaving the program altogether. Others will try to change testing requirements or prevent the sharing of education data with federal officials.
• Abortion regulations: Measures to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy will advance in Wisconsin, South Carolina, West Virginia and Missouri.
• Corporate and personal income taxes: Arkansas, Arizona, North Carolina, and North Dakota will prioritize cutting personal or corporate income tax rates.
• The power of labor unions: Republicans in nine states are planning to use their power to pass “right to work” legislation, which would allow employees to opt out of joining a labor union. 24 states already have such laws on the books, and new measures have been or will be proposed in Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Missouri.
• Environmental Protection Agency: A dozen states have challenged proposed EPA regulations on power plants in federal court.
• Challenges to State Pension Programs: Many states will try to deal with underfunded pension plans, which threaten to swamp state budgets over the long term. In Illinois, where the state pension is funded at less than 40%, Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R) made pension reform a cornerstone of his 2014 campaign, while fights are brewing in Kentucky and in New Jersey.

All of the above is partly the result of a sustained campaign by Republicans to reduce voting. It is also partly the result of Democrats deciding that Congressional and state political campaigns can be won even without addressing the real issues or the real record of the two parties.

Democrats are facing a long, brutal slog in the states and in the Congress. Mr. Obama gets elected twice, and by a greater margin the second time, yet his party loses control of almost everything else, now politically controlling just 7 states.

What does this say about 2016? Will Hillary have enough coattails to move some legislatures or Senate seats, or will she be the second coming (politically) of Mr. Obama?

Finally, the next time some moron tells you that both parties are the same, remind that person what is about to happen in the states, specifically, the undoing of the social contract that is about to take place. The next time somebody tells you one vote doesn’t count, tell them it doesn’t count unless you cast one.

Maybe Democrats need to get off their duffs and do something about this.

Transforming America, Part I

For the past few months, this blog has featured this quote:

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time, comprehend –Hubert Selby Jr.

Let’s start this year with a meditation about one transformative idea. Not something that is peddled by the DC think tanks, but an idea that lurks just below the surface.

All of us have wondered, like the characters in Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” (and maybe, with increasing frequency) “hey, something is wrong here”. Maybe you accept mainstream logic, but now you’ve come to realize that things are getting out of control, despite the constant messaging from your ideological god of choice that tries to pull you back to conventional thinking.

Here is the transformative idea for today: The free market isn’t a beautiful self-correcting machine. Instead, it is consuming our society and our environment for the benefit of a very few.

And it isn’t an orderly process; the trajectory is more like a slow free-fall in which the market system moves downward devouring everything, unless it is met by real opposition. In fact, the globalized version of the free market makes life horrible for lots of people, creating a constant need for intervention.

For a couple of examples, you don’t get the Russian Revolution(s) without the Czar trying to play ‘catch up’ with the West. You don’t get the Cuban Revolution without the crimes of the Batista regime.

When there is a backlash against corporatism, especially on the periphery, capitalists come up with a solution. Anyone is better than a bunch of reformers who want society to pay attention to people’s well-being rather than to profits.

With globalization, local thugs became very useful. Folks like Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, Mubarak in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, and Hussein in Iraq. Most of the time, these folks did the job big business wanted done (even if it was messy). And the American government protected US corporate assets in-country, and propped up the compliant local politicians. The profits got privatized, and the losses socialized, since our taxes paid for the military aid to the dictators, while the corporates skimmed the profits. And much of those profits remained offshore, out of reach of our taxing authorities.

Today, the useful thugs working on behalf of the American Empire are in Washington DC. They have made our political system a self-replicating support system for free market capitalism. We have retained only a veneer of our democracy, while moving rapidly in the direction of an authoritarian business-state combine, an improved version of Mussolini-style corporatism.

Oswald Spengler, who’s “Decline of the West” argued in the 1920’s that the urban culture of Northern Europe was a “Faustian” world, (his term for one of 8 global cultures) characterized by bigness and rationality, eventually to be dominated by the soldier, the engineer, and the businessman.

Doesn’t that seem particularly relevant to today’s America? Spengler thought that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and that the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. Importantly, he said:

The ‘tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers’ is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

So here we are. One day, it was 2014, the next day, 2015. What has changed? Nothing. What will change? Nothing, unless you begin a process of thinking about one transformative idea:

The free market doesn’t self-correct. Therefore, it is an ideology that must be changed.

The struggle between market forces and societal needs has always existed. In the 20th Century, we evolved a series of social democracies that kept the rights of the people balanced against the rights of the corporations, with some of the pushback actually coming from businesses themselves.

But today, well-funded efforts to roll back New Deal and New Society social welfare programs are well advanced. And there are only so many times that this blog and others can point out that many Americans have been unemployed since 2008.

The political question is what happens to this great new underclass in America? An underclass that has grown large because of the past 7+ years of economic disparity. Since the free market system that is grinding up our society is a utopian fantasy, we should be able to turn to our democratic system to help solve the real failures of our economic system.

But, our democratic system has been co-opted by the free marketers. So, who can ordinary people turn to for help AGAINST the market?

The corporatists and their captured politicians have a term, “there is no alternative” or TINA. It has come to mean that “there is no alternative” to free markets, free trade, and globalization, if our society is to prosper. They stress TINA to keep ordinary people from seeing that we need to constrain the worst of free market excesses.

The unbridled free market has to die.

Where are We Going in 2015?

2015 got off to an early start here at the Global Headquarters of Wrong, when the smoke alarm system went off at 5:45 am. Naturally, our guest revelers were still tucked in their beds, trying to sleep off too much Vueve Clicot and caviar, and there was no smoke. It fell to Wrongo to disarm the system, change a smoke detector battery, and subsequently explain to the human who called from the central alarm call center that indeed, there was no fire.

So, despite Wrongo’s plan to avoid posts until his company leaves, here, for your amusement is a quote that describes a point in the past, and that might yet be prophetic for 2015:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The opening paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. The two cities referred to were London and Paris during the French Revolution that lasted 10 years, from 1789 to 1799. The book was written in 1859, seventy years after the start of the revolution.

Today, the two cities could be Washington DC and any one (or more) of the following: Teheran, Beijing, Moscow, Mumbai, or Riyadh.

But the domestic problems and burgeoning turmoil in the US today is loosely analogous to what France was going through in the 18th Century.

What are the chances that the outcome will be similar?

Two Police Killings, Two Different Reactions

A few more words about the killing of two NYPD officers. It was and is a tragedy. No one should think otherwise. The harsh reaction that blamed Mayor de Blasio and the Eric Garner and Ferguson demonstrators should be viewed through a lens of that tragedy, The statements made by the PBA, and Commissioner Bratton were over the top, but under the circumstances, we can let go of them.

It was different with the professional politicians. On Sunday, Ray Kelly, who was the police commissioner during the Bloomberg administration, said that in his view (and in the view of many officers), that Mr. de Blasio ran on an “anti-police” platform.

He wasn’t alone. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani attributed the killings to the protests that broke out across the city following a grand jury’s failure to indict a police officer for killing Eric Garner. But Rudy being Rudy, went over the top on Fox News on Sunday:

We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.

OK, that makes the killings Obama’s fault. Then, it was Ex NY Governor George Pataki (R) who weighed in, blaming de Blasio and Attorney General Eric Holder for inciting the kind of anti-police fervor that led to the murders:

Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of #ericholder & #mayordeblasio. #NYPD

— George E. Pataki (@GovernorPataki) December 21, 2014

(For those who receive this blog in email via FeedBurner, the tweet will not display properly. Pataki said):

Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of #ericholder & #mayordeblasio. #NYPD

This, just days after Pataki said that he was thinking of running for President in 2016. Pataki seizes an issue and runs (literally) with it.

Yet, de Blasio said on the night of the killings, while standing next to Commissioner Bratton:

It is an attack on all of us; it’s an attack on everything we hold dear.

Isn’t it interesting how the shooting of two NYC cops became politicized, not just in NYC but throughout the country. Bratton blamed, in a roundabout way, the protests and so it goes. All of these guys looking for political advantage on Sunday. Then, on Monday, the headline in NYT said:

Officers’ Killer, Adrift and Ill, Had a Plan

Ismaaiyl Brinsley was a gang member who spent time in jail, who hated cops, who shot his girlfriend before he took the bus to NYC. He necessitates shutting down demonstrations, suggesting we recall the mayor, and blaming the White House.

Yet, in Pennsylvania, in September, Eric Frein, a white guy kills one cop and wounds another. But that story isn’t about how we should end marches and protests, or play the political blame game. He was just a loner with authority issues. This is typical of the coverage of the PA killing: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Police have not spoken about a possible motive for the crime, other than that Eric Frein has talked and written about hating law enforcement. Authorities have said a review of a computer hard drive used by Frein shows that he had planned the attack for years.

NO motive?? The same story says that Frein claimed to have fought with Serbians in Africa. That he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives list. And that when they found him, he had two fully functional pipe bombs.

Clearly, Ismaaiyl Brinsley was the real threat to democracy, not Eric Frein. Two guys, two different plans, two different attacks on police, and two different reactions by the police and Republican pundits.

No surprise here.

Let’s move on to more music for the season with something to make us forget that the America we knew is disintegrating in front of us.

Here is an old Irish song that dates from the 12th century, “The Wexford Carol”. Take a listen to the melody and beautiful words. This version has Allison Krauss performing along with Yo Yo Ma. That’s the amazing Natalie MacMaster backing them on the fiddle:

First verse:
Good people all, this Christmas time,
Consider well and bear in mind
What our good God for us has done,
In sending His belovèd Son.

Monday Wake Up Call – December 22, 2014

RE: Sony. The twist in this case is the trope that North Korea is suppressing our Freedom of Speech. And, the suppressed “Freedom of Speech” is a shitty Hollywood movie. So the public is getting spun about an invisible, but somehow tangible, “attack” on our freedoms. The Wrongologist has no skills to determine who hacked Sony, but when the mainstream media jumps on something with both feet, you know it supports SOME government theme.

Is the plan to convince the American people that there are “threats” everywhere and that only the State Security Apparatus can protect them from Evil? The usual pun-holes on the Sunday tube talked about how big the threat is, and how vulnerable we are.

America has become a Factory of Fear. Fear the Muslims, fear Putin, fear China, fear immigrants, fear criminals, fear the national debt, fear detente with Cuba. Trouble is, once again, the only thing we’re being urged to do is muster up the courage to go shopping. Authoritarians need their subjects to be afraid. Their bet is that people will submit to bullying if they believe that the bullies are the only thing standing between them and their terrors.

Things have to change. Killing brown people for peace is not working. Our empire is bankrupting us, and has not made us any safer. Unfortunately in the US, our domestic politics, plus our failures in military adventurism, have created ever greater violence and lunacy, further feeding the rolling disaster.

As an example, take New York City. Two police were killed in their patrol car. NY’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the police union, reacts by declaring that the NYPD has “become a ‘wartime’ police department, and we will act accordingly.”
Wartime, really? Are these the union’s marching orders to the 35,000 armed members of the biggest police department in the US? The NYPD seems to be asserting their superiority to the NYC executive branch. This has the earmarks of an attempted coup.

As a former military, the Wrongologist respects the absolute need for a chain of command with an elected civilian at the top. As a former military, he knows that many in the military only respect the authority of civilian leadership if the civilian happens to be a conservative.

The NYPD seems to be ready to strike out at their civilian leadership because they have deemed it to be unworthy of leading their “honorable” police force. Their attitude of superiority should scare the living daylights out of all of us. This attitude is not amenable to any evidence to the contrary, or to self-reflection and examination. It will brook no doubts about the moral purity of the NYC police.

This seems to be coming to a head, and seems that it will only get uglier.

Monday’s Wake Up Music: On a much lighter note, some seasonal music. Here are the Capitol Steps with a seasonal song about Guantanamo:

Next, a semi-seasonal tune by The Firemen. Sounds obscure? It is. The Firemen are a duo of Paul McCartney and Martin Glover, who performs as Youth. There are some doubts about whether or not “Dance ‘til We’re High” is a real Christmas song, even though it has lyrics about “winter coming”, “snow falling”, “bells ringing out” and a catchy tune. But, it’s way better than McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”:

Your Monday Linkage:
Tanks that won’t go away. The CRomnibus funding bill includes $554 billion for defense spending. This lines up almost exactly with President Obama’s original request, but Congress made considerable changes to where this money is being spent. According to analysis by Defense News, 10% of the FY15 defense appropriations budget—and 30% of all line items—were changed in the logrolling process. The biggest ticket items include $120 million more for M-1 Abrams tanks, despite Army protestations (for the third straight year) that no additional tanks are needed.

Oops. On July 3, Homeland Security, which plays a key role in responding to cyber-attacks, replied to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a malware attack on Google called “Operation Aurora.” Unfortunately, DHS officials made a grave error in their response. DHS released more than 800 pages of documents related not to Operation Aurora but rather to the Aurora Project, a 2007 research effort demonstrating how easy it was to hack into US power and water systems.

Ars Technica calls the Sony hack a “software pipe bomb.” Analysis by Cisco of a malware sample matching the signature of the malware that was used in the attack on Sony Pictures, reveals that the code was full of bugs and was anything but sophisticated.

Our frequent commenter, Terry McKenna, has a great post about Cuba and our Constitution. Go read it.

Bill O’Reilly said this on his show:

It’s easier to believe in a benevolent God — the baby Jesus — than it is in some kind of theory about global warming. It’s just easier, is it not?

O’Reilly was making the point that literal belief in the story of the virgin birth as it appears in the gospels is easy, while believing that burning fossil fuels causes climate change is hard. Another way of putting this is that O’Reilly thinks it is easier to believe that a woman can be impregnated without sperm than it is to believe the consensus of the scientific community on an issue he apparently doesn’t understand.

Friday Music Break – December 19, 2014

Today, a little more about Cuba. In January, while on a US government-sanctioned trip to Cuba, Wrongo met and became friendly with an award-winning author who also teaches at a local college in Havana. He is not a member of the Cuban Communist Party. Yesterday, I sent him a congratulatory email. Here is his reply:

What a great day for the future of this country, thanks to everyone´s support. We are starting a new path and I hope the future is prominent for all who genuinely dreamt of this great opportunity. Personally I will keep up the fight to bring both countries even closer. We all deserve it.

He is representative of many of the people I met during the week in Cuba. Many struggle to put food on the table, many are entrepreneurial, holding down 2 and sometimes 3 private sector jobs. And all were optimistic about the future, despite most being cash-poor.

A diplomatic thaw is a hopeful opening for both countries. Time will tell if the governments can match the willingness of their people to create an atmosphere of peace and cooperation.

Wrongo was a freshman in college when JFK gave what some call the “scariest speech ever”. We were playing cards in a dorm room, using a bed for a table as Kennedy spoke. Everyone in that room was frightened, and subsequently, all were drafted, or volunteered for military service after graduation.

Here is a short reminiscence about the times and the reactions in Washington and the Kremlin in 1962:

To help celebrate the end of belligerence between our two countries, here is Phil Ochs with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” from 1965. It was about Vietnam, but it works for our 55-year disagreement with Cuba as well:

Sample lyric:
Now the labor leader’s screamin’
when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it “Peace” or call it “Treason,”
Call it “Love” or call it “Reason,”
But I ain’t marchin’ any more,

Phil, we could really use your voice now. The fight isn’t over.

See you Sunday.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Politics of Fear