Archive for the 'A Culture of…' Category
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
“Nearly Any”
The New York Times today headlines an interpretive piece, the main claim of which is this:
Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter.
Translation: The overclass, as always, prefers Great Depression to a pro-labor shift in the distribution of power. This society remains entirely capable of employing all its able-bodied workers and thereby ending the present economic cliffwalk. What it lacks is a left coherent enough to demand what the elite won’t mention.
Friday, August 27th, 2010
TweedleRep and TweedleDem in Oregon
In the Age of Obama, a.k.a. the supply-side Reagan Revolution that was actually started by Carter, it keeps getting easier and easier to practice my SMBIVA pledge.
Here in Oregon, a state that has always been a net exporter of dollars to the Pentagon and has also never summoned the nerve to economically live up to its reputation as an “alt” place, we have a “race for Governor” happening this year.
It could not be more comical or less meaningful.
On one side stands an ex-NBA basketballer, Chris Dudley, Republican, whose supposed qualifications for the job are a Yale diploma and enough money and name-recognition to have purchased himself the primary.
Dudley, as clunky with words as he was with a free throw, presents himself in the TV ads through which this campaign, like all other major campaigns, takes place, as a competitor and an outsider, who will bring — wait for it — “new ideas” to Oregon. The “new ideas” in question?
I’ll get state spending under control, without raising taxes.
I’ll do everything in my power to help small businesses, instead of punishing them.
I’ll focus on jobs.
What else could one say to this hoary package of discredited claims, or to the spectacle of a proud Ivy Leaguer selling them as “new”? ROFLMFAO.
And what of the inevitable TweedleDem?
He, an ex-Governor who called the state “ungovernable” at the end of his last turn as Head Babysitter, and whose girlfriend is now under investigation for graft as a contractor who receives money from the public on the theory that what she does is “helping the state attract green jobs,” wants to “ask Oregonians for their help” in reversing the Great Depression III in the state. How?
Now, there’s a radical new plan of action, no? Maybe we Oregonians could all become six-figure consultants on how to run the world on vaporware…
If it’s possible: ROFLMFAO even more!
Market totalitarianism: It’s what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and, of course, FourthMeal.
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
ROFLMFAO of the Day
The New York Times today features a book review of Denial: A Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, pictured at left, a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
It isn’t directly related to big business marketing, but in this review, Ms. Stein utters one of the most remarkable lines I’ve read in a long time, a line that speaks volumes about the totalitarian, Big Brotherian nature of this society and its elite-training institutions.
After attributing terrorism against “us” to a string of psychological and cultural factors she apparently doesn’t connect to politics or history or the distribution of world power (such are the requirements of maintaining Harvard and NSC connections), here is Stern’s epic howler:
“Harvard is a humiliation factory, and yet we don’t produce a lot of terrorists.”
OMFG. I mean, really? WOW! I almost fell out of my chair. Seriously.
I won’t waste your electrons reciting the marathon list of torturers and war criminals trained and housed at Harvard. You can do that yourself with a bit of internetting.
But permit me two items, won’t you?
1) Neo-Harvard-Man poster-boy Barack Hussein Obama is presently commander-in-chief of two wars, both pointless, one patently illegal. He has substantially increased the rate of drone bombings and military assassinations in both these festivals of mass death.
2) From Wikipedia:
Henry Kissinger received his B.A. degree summa cum laude at Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. In 1952, while still at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. His doctoral dissertation was titled “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich).”
Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. He became Associate Director of the latter in 1957.
Kissinger played a key role in a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to disrupt PAVN and Viet Cong units launching raids into South Vietnam from within Cambodia’s borders and resupplying their forces by using the Ho Chi Minh trail and other routes, as well as the 1970 Cambodian Incursion and subsequent widespread bombing of Cambodia. The bombing campaign contributed to the chaos of the Cambodian Civil War, which saw the forces of dictator Lon Nol unable to retain foreign support to combat the growing Khmer Rouge insurgency that would overthrow him in 1975.
The CIA provided education for the military officers directly involved in the coup against Allende,[33] and funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973; during this period, Kissinger made several controversial statements regarding Chile’s government, stating that “the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves” and “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”
On September 11, 1973, Allende [was overthrown in a US-backed coup led by] Army Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet, who [appointed himself] President. A document released by the CIA in 2000 titled “CIA Activities in Chile” revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it made many of Pinochet’s officers into paid contacts of the CIA or US military, even though many were known to be involved in notorious human rights abuses.
On September 16, 1973, five days after Pinochet had assumed power, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:
Nixon: Nothing new of any importance or is there?
Kissinger: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
Nixon: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.
Kissinger: I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
Nixon: Well we didn’t – as you know – our hand doesn’t show on this one though.
Kissinger: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them.
Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile when the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, toppled the democratic government of Isabel Perón in 1976 and consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and “disappearances” against political opponents.
During the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002). Kissinger supported FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) insurgencies, as well as the CIA-supported invasion of Angola by South African troops.
The Portuguese decolonization process brought US attention to the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies within the Indonesian archipelago and declared its independence in 1975. Indonesian president Suharto was a strong US ally in Southeast Asia and began to mobilize the Indonesian army, preparing to annex the nascent state, which had become increasingly dominated by the popular leftist FRETILIN party. In December 1975, Suharto discussed the invasion plans during a meeting with Kissinger and President Ford in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Both Ford and Kissinger made clear that US relations with Indonesia would remain strong and that it would not object to the proposed annexation. US arms sales to Indonesia continued, and Suharto went ahead with the annexation plan.
In an April 3, 2008 interview by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, Kissinger re-iterated that even though he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq he thought that the Bush administration rested too much of the case for war on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Insofar as it produces historic personages, Harvard produces almost nothing but terrorists.
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Culture of Death
In a world of illegal wars, rampant poverty, and dying ecospheres, this is what people come out for:
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Education, Public and Commercial
Diane Ravitch is an honest and thoughtful person. After decades of advocating the official bi-party line on “educational reform,” Ravitch has examined the evidence and concluded that testing, school choice, and “race to the top” are not just bogus, but harmful.
Well, of course. Who in their right mind believes that our overclass actually wants the most educated possible population? Quite the contrary, for the all-too-obvious reason.
In fact, Ravitch herself provides a useful lens for seeing exactly how screwed up our elite schooling is. At age 72, Ravitch, a Wellesley graduate, is just now thinking her way through the very first tuft of weeds stymieing acknowledgment that excessive public knowledge is seen as a grave danger by the primary beneficiaries of our market-totalitarian society. Ravitch now writes like my Sociology 101 students, or like a 6th grader would in a society that actually took these words seriously, rather than as window dressing:
That an Ivy-educated professional school-policy expert is, at the end of her career, just beginning to ponder what this really means speaks volumes about what passes for the top in our educational efforts.
And, despite her bravery in coming out against the status quo and its cynical trickery, Ravitch remains importantly wrong in at least one core area. She complains that the teaching of history and literature are “so frequently politicized.”
Well, once again, duh. They are politicized by structure and design, for the same all-too-obvious reason. The real history of the United States and the world radicalizes most people who learn it. Hence, it is forbidden. The best you get in K-12 is distant hints.
This systemic ban on truth-telling is why my 14-year-old son, presently a student in one of the richest and most liberal-minded of the nation’s public school districts, while studying for his 8th grade social studies final, asked me, thinking I wouldn’t know, “Who founded the NAACP?” When I told him it was W.E. B. DuBois, he said, “Oh, yeah.” When I added that DuBois was a socialist, my son was floored that that fact was absent from his lessons. This, despite the undeniable fact that DuBois himself would have insisted being a socialist was the #1 fact of his own life, the very first thing later people ought to remember about him.
The day we become serious about education (a day that will probably never arrive, given the continuing dictatorial power of our business elite and their ongoing breakneck squandering of the planet’s resources) will be the day we mandate that our spending on schools must always equal or exceed the sums corporate stockholders spend on commercial indoctrination, a.k.a. big business marketing. At present, that latter sum is probably more than $2 trillion a year in the USA alone.
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The Pushers’ Excuse
Crude oil is not the only pollutant gushing faster than usual into our biosphere these days.
Check out the copious flow of op-editorializing to the tune of “If BP Is Evil Then So Are We All.”
The core thesis of this familiar crapola is the claim that “we demand the oil they are forced to take these sorts of risks to get.”
This, of course, is the same excuse you get from elite war criminals and drug dealers. It’s purpose is also the same: to prevent careful thinking by spreading the blame to everybody and therefore nobody. “The people demand ___. I merely give them what they want.”
But is it anywhere close to true that “we” — meaning all of us, co-equally — have had and do have the same degree of control over the sources of our collective oil-appetite? Or have “our” corporations, working on behalf of their primary beneficiaries, seized and retained effective command over the large-scale political and economic decisions that determine the petro-intensity of modern life?
I am presently completing a book that argues that the latter is where the body is buried.
But, either way, this is a question that needs real asking and honest answers.
To instead burp out faux-thoughtful poses like “I couldn’t help but wonder how much I should hate myself, too” is to foreclose, not raise, the question, the debate, and, if it’s true that unequal wealth and social power exist, the realistic answers and remedies.
If you care about what’s going on, falling for rote, sponsored verbal gestures of self-blame is actually worse than not thinking at all.
