All Too Familiar

The folks over at Naked Capitalism are hosting an interview series conducted by Andrew Dittmer entitled Journey into a Libertarian Future.  Before I talk more about the interview, let me provide a little background on my home state of New Hampshire.  In 2002, our then governor, Craig Benson, invited a group of libertarian-thinking folks to select NH as the target of their Free State Project.  Essentially, and without wasting a lot of your precious time, the aims of this project were to get like-minded, libertarian-thinking people to move to a state en masse in order to influence (or take over) local and state government.

The founder of this movement, Jason Sorens, has written and said some very radical things.  Radical to me, anyway.  The Free State Project itself understands that explaining and persuading the masses of their righteousness is a lost cause, which justifies their efforts to infiltrate the NH GOP, disguise their ideology, co-opt issues, and push an extreme agenda.  Foolishly, I mostly ignored these folks when they first started, and mocked them when I wasn't ignoring them.  It's pretty hard to read this: Once we've taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day. Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them. Once we've accomplished these things, we can bargain with the national government over reducing the role of the national government in our state. We can use the threat of secession as leverage to do this.  and not mock the movement.  A big mistake, as they have been quite successful at pushing the extreme agenda here in NH.  It will take us years to undo the damage done in the past year, and we have another 12 months left before we can make any electoral changes.


So, back to Mr. Dittmer and his interview.  I no longer ignore the Libertarians who hold these contrarian views because I now realize that with their true intentions hidden or disguised, they are quite able use the system against those unwilling or unable to spend the time needed to wade through and see them for what they are.  Here in the second part of Dittmer's interview, his subject (using a pseudonym) lays it out (text in red indicates exact quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”:

ANDREW: Even if you do it secretly, convincing the masses that they are inferior sounds tricky.

CNC: That’s true, but you don’t have to convince Joe the Plumber that he is a brute. You can convince him instead that he is a hardworking, productive individual, and that other people are brutes who are making it so Joe has no control over his life.

ANDREW: I see.

CNC: Still, you’re right. Convincing the masses of the superiority of the natural elite is not the most important part of our communications strategy. The central task of those wanting to turn the tide… is the “delegitimation” of the idea of democracy… [103] It is not enough to focus onspecific policies or personalities… Every critic and criticism deserving of support must proceed to explain each and every particular government failing as an underlying flaw in the very idea of government itself (and of democratic government in particular). [94]

It's been my position that the idea of delegitimizing government is dangerous to democracy.  Little did I know that that is exactly the point.  

Rats Jumping Sinking Ship

The SS Herman Cain is taking on big water.  New allegations of a long-term affair with the married Cain are sinking him in the eyes of moral GOP primary voters.  Say what you want about the GOP value system, they don't like philanderers.  And who can blame them?  If you cheat on the single-most important relationship in your life, how can anyone else trust you?  


In related news, in the wake of the new allegations against Cain, two NH representatives have switched endorsements to Newt Gingrich.  One of the reps, William Panek, said that Cain's infidelity was the proverbial straw:


Panek said he initially "didn't take [the] allegations at face value," but that once the woman presented evidence of the affair "I pretty much just had had enough."


Apparently, for Panek anyway, there is somewhat of a scorecard when tallying affairs and harassment charges.  "It was bad enough when it was 1 or 2 women," although not quite enough to get Panek to drop Cain at that point.  After all, all Cain did was gently push a female employee's head towards his crotch.  We all have our own ideas about fun in workplace, don't you know.


We haven't touched on the outrageous hypocrisy of the reps switching from one philanderer to another, but it has the makings of a great Monty Python skit.

Speaking of Tragedy

This news story from Vermont is distressful.  Apparently, a hunter accidentally shoots his friend (while hunting) who dies.  Distraught, the shooter then turns his rifle on himself and, well, you know how that ends.  Amping up the tragedy of all this is that the 18 year-old daughter of the shooter was killed in a freak snowmobiling accident just last year.

The family must think they are cursed.  I just can't imagine.

"Being Irish,

he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."  W.B. Yeats

I guess we're all Irishmen these days.  People often don't believe me when I inform them about how much money the Fed/Treasury has used to backstop the global financial system since the onset of the financial crisis.  It's a staggering number, and sometimes to even type it causes me second thoughts.  Just the other night, as I was talking to a friend about this, he looked at me like I had two heads, one of which covered in tin foil.

When you point people to the General Accounting Office website and to the audit of the Fed/Treasury, eyes begin to glaze over.  Bad enough that the report is long and tedious, but then you have to wade through the appendices to tally up the all the money lent/spent/guaranteed since 2008.  How much, you ask?  Try $28 Trillion.  It's almost unbelievable.  Yet it's true.

Keeping this in mind, you can imagine my delight to see former Rep Alan Grayson talking about this very thing on Monday evening.  Via Mike Norman Economics, here's Mr. Grayson:  

SEC Smackdown

Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration to sweep the financial crisis under the rug (along with trillions of dollars in aid to the banks) there are still officials who care.  Judge Jed Rakoff slapped the SEC silly with a ruling on Monday refusing to sign-off on a cozy arrangement between the SEC and Citibank.  The judge was sweeping in his remarks, reminding the SEC that "of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances…. for otherwise, the court becomes a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts, while the public is deprived of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.”

Sometimes the deck seems so stacked against us that I just don't see a way out of this mess.  I remain convinced that we've reached the limits of three critically important systems that rule our lives - the environmental system is teetering, the economic system is completely corrupted, leaving billions of people in abject poverty, and the political systems are woefully inadequate to deal with any of it.  But, just when I think we are doomed, along comes someone like Judge Rakoff, although it remains to be seen if these objections are straws that break a camel's back, or if they are simply nuisance speed bumps on the road to serfdom.  

This post also gives me the opportunity to share a video of Matt Taibbi, who explains the ruling to Keith Olbermann's viewers.  Matt is an interesting guy - he's a terrific writer doing pretty good investigative journalism for Rolling Stone magazine.  His profanity-laced pieces push him to the peripheral of accepted journalism, however, and as much as I dig that about him (see my post about Winnebago Man!) I think he'd be doing the cause a service to limit his vocabulary to the parlance of the day.

Mostly Dead

You have to give the GOP credit.  Only the GOP and their echo chamber can make several news cycles out of Newt Gingrich being endorsed by the Manchester Union Leader.  The only state newspaper in NH has an unearned reputation for driving the agenda in NH politics, and their endorsement set the national media atwitter.

In the final analysis, I'm not sure what it means, if anything.  Newt still has no money, no organization and it's pretty difficult to see him more than just a traveling sham artist.  If Gingrich had been born 150 years ago, he'd be traveling the country with a large suitcase filled with Dr. Newt's Elixir, cure for everything.

So, what's next?  It seems obvious that nearly a majority of GOP voters are rejecting Romney.  So obvious, in fact, that it's hard to overlook the cartoon characters that they have embraced atop their preference list instead of the former governor.  Michele Bachmann has spent time surging and then imploding her way down the charts.  Then we had Rick Perry, for whom I'm convinced the question, "Is he as dumb as he looks?" was crafted.  Perry, btw, is referred to in Texas as "GW without the brains."  Low standards in Texas.  Then we had the pizza CEO, Herman Cain, who likes to say outrageous things to distract folks from examining his unethical and possibly illegal treatment of female employees.  It was only a matter of time for Cain, as I suspect he has the same birth certificate problem with GOP crazies that Obama has.

Now we have the Newt.  It's inconceivable to think that he could win the nomination.  The GOP establishment has done a fairly efficient job of knocking off Romney challengers, one at a time.  But the chore was quite simple - give each of the previously mentioned challengers enough time and exposure and they basically do the job for you.  Gingrich presents a more difficult challenge.  He's been around long enough to know where the bodies are buried and he can express himself in complete sentences.  That's not to say he won't say something really stupid - last week he said the CBO was a reactionary institute - but I think that the GOP is going to have to get real personal, real soon, to knock Gingrich back a peg or two.

That leaves....I think by default, Romney.  But I'm convinced that Rick Perry is only mostly dead.

Winnebago Man

Chances are that if you're reading my silly blog, you're on the computer enough to have caught the Winnebago Man on YouTube.  This is the guy who channels his frustration through a profanity laced stream of consciousness while filming an industrial video for Winnebago.  There's something quite entertaining about the video - watch for yourself, and remember, this isn't a family blog, and I did say the video was profanity laced:



This clip was interesting enough to grab the attention of a young film maker, Ben Steinbauer, who wondered what ever became of Jack Rebney.  So Ben begins a journey to discover who and where Jack Rebney is.  The result is a tug of war documentary where the more young Ben probes into Jack's persona, the more the cantankerous pitchman resists with his quick acerbic tongue.

Interestingly, Jack holds a very low opinion of his YouTube fans, of which there are legions.  In Jack's words, he expected these folks to be of "room temperature intelligence, with the IQ of a refrigerator."  In the final scene, Jack meets his fans during a Found Film festival and happily discovers that they are more like him than he could have expected.

This is an excellent documentary - I was riveted.

SuperFail

It's bothered me from day 1 that we assembled a committee to study and fix a problem that does not exist (debt) while we ignore the problem that does exist (no jobs).  Many are seeing the failure of the committee (I refuse to call this group of idiots "super") in cutting $1.2 Trillion from the US budget as a sign of political gridlock.  I just don't see it that way.

Remember, if the committee could not come up with their own plan to cut $1.2 T, the automatic cuts would kick in.  This means that there will still be $1.2 T cut, but from a pre-set list of cuts, including about half from the Pentagon.  Of course, I'll believe that when I see it.

The GOP knows full well that they can bludgeon the country into submission the minute we begin cutting the military.  In fact, the gnashing of teeth has already begun, with SecDef Leon Pannetta already screaming about how vulnerable the US will be if we cut defense.  The Russians are getting in on some of the action, threatening to deploy missiles to target the "missile shield" in Europe.  It's almost a Monty Python farce at this point.

I'm betting a dollar to a doughnut that not a penny gets taken from Defense.  Takers?

Post Thanksgiving Blues

There's a bit of a buildup to Thanksgiving for me.  It's my favorite holiday for all the same reasons as it is yours.  The expectations are pretty low - enjoy time with family and remember what it is you should be thankful for.  You don't need to stop by your local Lexus dealer on the way to dinner - it really is a holiday that corporate America hasn't completely co-opted quite yet.  Although it seems like it's just a matter of time.

This year, Black Friday began on Thursday as the big retailers pushed to provide a new experience for crazy fucking shoppers.  It must have worked because I read this morning that a woman out in California used pepper spray to gain a competitive shopping advantage at WallyWorld.  She must be related to one of the cops up at UC-Davis.

The day after Thanksgiving signals that the Festival of Unholy Consumption is indeed upon us.  The entire month of December is essentially lost to a craze of materialism - my sister-in-law and nephew left their house last night at 11p to go to Best Buy.  When they arrived, the line to enter was around the building.  This makes me sad for so many reasons.

What's happening?

Nearer to poor

The Census bureau began a new method to identify the poor and near poor in the US this year.  It's a bit controversial but it takes a wide variety of demographic and geographic information into consideration.  For example, $18 per hour might be enough to keep you out of the poor house in Fargo, ND, but you better have a second job to make it in San Francisco.

The data points to more than 100 million Americans who are either poor or near poor.  That's 1 in 3 Americans who struggle on a daily basis to put food on the table and pay for medical care and life-saving prescriptions.  The GOP answer:  How bad can it be when they own a TeeVee?

What if?

I mentioned that I'm reading Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63.  The plot revolves around the main character who discovers a time portal that transports him back in time to a September day in 1958.  He takes it upon himself to prevent some local catastrophes and discovers how difficult it is to change history.  As King writes throughout the book, "History is obdurate."

I have not yet finished the book, but that hasn't stopped me from wondering how the world would be different today had Oswald missed the president that fateful November day in 1963.  Oswald's wife, Marina, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald was the person who attempted to assassinate the bigot, segregationist, jingoistic, John Bircher General Edwin Walker in Dallas in April, 1963.  He missed - and from a range much closer than his shot at the president a few months later.  What if?

What if Oswald had succeeded in killing Walker?  Surely he could not then have shot at President Kennedy 7 months later in Dallas, right?  What if he had missed both times?  How would the world be different today?

Would Kennedy have escalated the war in Vietnam as Johnson did?  How many lives hung in the balance of those shots that Oswald took?  Surely, RFK would not have been running for election in 1968, right?  How would the world be different if he had lived?  And how did Kennedy's death affect the arc of MLK's life and death?  And the impact on our country?

Gently Weeping

Great cover of Harrison's great hit, While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Tom Petty and friends.  I was surprised by the appearance of, and then the performance of Prince.  An amazing guitarist.  Period.

Pre Revolutionary

Regardless of how you feel about the Occupy protesters, it's quite clear that the establishment is mishandling the assemblies.  The Cal Davis campus police indiscriminately beat and pepper sprayed student and faculty protesters on Saturday.  Many were hospitalized for exercising their Constitutional rights of free assembly.  There have been numerous calls for the chancellor's resignation and it's hard to see how she survives this with her job.

Professor Michael Hudson discusses the latest poverty figures and OWS with RT News.

11/22/1963

I'm reading Stephen King's new novel about a guy who can enter a time portal that takes him back to a September day in 1958.  From here, the fellow can do any number of things that can change the course of history.  There are historical references throughout the book that allow you to think back on an era past and wonder how we ever made it through a day without cell phones or our google machines.

The story line is pretty good, although I get a little hung up on probability and paradoxes.  King's writing is adequate, but, really, it's the story that is carrying the book.  So far.

More later - it's a chore of a book.  Almost 900 pages.

Military State

It's frustrating trying to get accurate information about the protests taking place here in the US.  The corporate media is bending over backwards to skew the coverage or not cover it at all.  The UK Guardian, on the other hand, has had excellent coverage.  Non biased and detailed, even, in my opinion, outclassing the NY Times, which one could find hard to believe given that the OWS New York protest is in their backyard.

The Guardian ran a story about Dorli Rainey, an 84 year old activist who was pepper sprayed by police who viewed her as a threat.

We're rapidly approaching a tipping point with the protests as the establishment continues to overreact to the movement.  Every attempt to break up the protesters is met with a larger group soon after.  The establishment continues to use tactics from the 1930s to battle peaceful citizens demanding redress in the 21st Century.  It's not working.

NH IS NUMBER 1!

At drinking alcohol.

According to this report, we double the national average in alcohol consumption.

What state came out on top of the tap? New Hampshire had the most widespread booze consumption in the poll. The average adult in that state doubled the national per capita average, gulping an average of 6.7 gallons of wine each and 3.8 gallons of liquor in 2010. Some in the health industry attribute this to the state’s popularity for both winter and summer vacations.

Popularity for both winter and summer vacations?  I always knew that tourists annoyed the hell out full-time residents, but never would have guessed the extent of it.

There is no national debt.

I get a kick out of all these US debt clocks.  I mean, jumpin' jeebus, what do people think these folks used to buy the US Treasuries that they are holding?  They used US dollars.  What's the difference in debt obligation to a holder of dollars compared to a holder of Treasuries?  Nothing.

The US has a sovereign, fiat currency.  Our federal government is an issuer of currency and, as such, can never go broke.  Ever.  We simply print the money we need to pay the debts.  Couldn't be more simple.  If you want to discuss the inflationary concerns about this, that is a different topic entirely.  Let's first all agree that the US can never go broke.