One of the most insightful articles about the Greek political situation and the future of the euro comes from Robin Wells at The Guardian. Whether her predictions are right is another issue, of course.

Sometimes, just sometimes, economics and politics are like physics — one can recognize immutable forces. One of those times is now, as Greece is inexorably pushed out of the euro. It took no particular talent to have seen this coming, just the recognition that it has always been a fantasy to believe that the Greeks would democratically choose to destroy their economy for the better part of a decade in order to pay foreign creditors.

I don’t know enough about the situation to believe that Greece’s exit from the euro is inexorable. In fact, my knowledge is limited to other areas, which leads me to expect that flexibility from Germany is growing more likely, regardless of what Chancellor Merkel continues to say. Her clout is dwindling both at home and abroad, and the opposition has found its voice in several countries.

As I read further into Robin’s article, I find that we agree on this.

…what has become unavoidably clear is that Germany, the linchpin of the eurozone, has been hopelessly stuck in an attitude that makes the break-up of the eurozone almost unavoidable. If Germany cannot pull itself together to keep Spain in the euro, then the markets can no longer ignore the fact that the lack of leadership and governance is a fatal flaw in the system.

What accounts for this? I would argue that the heart of the problem lies in the political culture of Germany and the mindset of its political and economic elites, which have never been willing to admit to their own voters the sacrifices that must be undertaken in order to be the leader of Europe. Instead, they have led Germans to believe that they can have it both ways: enjoying the fruits of the eurozone while times were good, and lobbing the burden of adjustment onto others when times got bad.

I agree that the German elites bear a disproportionate share of the blame in this case. But they merely represent elites from various countries around the world, prominently including the US, who collectively are attempting to turn back the clock a hundred and fifty years to the days of the robber barons. The great corporations are now much more powerful than governments; witness our lack of progress on climate change, population growth, health care, transportation, and so on.

Yet I have to admit to a secret suspicion that these elites are less powerful than they want us to think. They talk big:

Chris Towner, director of FX advisory services at currency traders HiFX, said: “The Greeks seem to be playing a game of chicken here, first of all putting party politics above sovereign interests and secondly in the bigger picture questioning whether the European Central Bank are bluffing when it comes to not offering them bailout money if they fail to form a government.”

…Read on

On We Are Respectable Negroes, Chauncey DeVega considers whether a military coup could occur here, and finds the question to be not at all hypothetical:

I have mentioned this essay from Harper's a few times here on WARN. I assign it in my introductory American Politics courses as a way of getting students to think about our country's cultural, social, and political institutions. Could there be a military coup in the United States? What would it take to be successful? Would the officer class go along with it? What of the average rank-and-file soldiers?

My answer has always been as follows: why does the military need to have a coup when they effectively run the show anyway? Moreover, the United States is a thoroughly militarized society from the bottom up (and has only seen the walls between the military and civilian life become thinner and thinner with the post-Cold War up-gunning of local police departments, and Patriot Act national security era).

Thomas Friedman had no idea that corporations are taking over and subverting every aspect of our lives:

PORING through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”

I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ ”

Sigh. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to head out to the woods like Thoreau and spend the rest of my life living in a log cabin. It’s not the complete corporatization of America. I’ve already developed psychological defense mechanisms to protect myself from that, and when those fall short there’s always booze. No, I’m referring to the absolute cluelessness of Thomas Friedman, a pundit that our increasingly misguided nation has chosen to make influential.

Here is a major apostle of free markets, which in reality means corporate hegemony, just now waking up to the fact that his pet system has many unsavory aspects to it, such as turning our entire culture into little more than a series of advertisements. This stuff is old hat to anybody with two eyes and the rudiments of a forebrain, but to the great Thomas Friedman it’s an epiphany.

Tellingly, he had to learn all this from a Harvard professor who, he informs us, was also his boyhood friend. Apparently, the shrill voices of the out-groups who’ve decried corporatization for years don’t reach the lofty peaks where Friedman and Co. live. You have to be in the inner circle to be heard. An idea is not a bad idea until one of the elect says so. Until that happens, columnists like Friedman and his colleague David Brooks will wander Mr. Magoo-like right past the wreckage they’ve helped create, smugly believing in the correctness of their biases.

When it becomes professionally safe — or should I say professionally necessary? — to change opinions they look around at the damage, seemingly aghast, and exclaim, “I had no idea!” Then they change direction as swiftly as a herd of ungulates and race off to pursue some new folly.

…Read on

I begin to understand the Obama strategy on coming out for gay marriage just before the election. It may or may not yield an increase in November votes for the Democrats; that remains uncertain at this point. I’m not endorsing Tony Perkins’s statement on CNN that “I think the president this week took six or seven states he carried in 2008 and put them in play with this one ill-conceived position” by any means. But it’s not obvious to me that this was a great play on the offensive end of the political court.

True, even one of their own pollsters is telling Republicans to get with the program on gay marriage, a position the public is clearly moving toward. And it’s also true that Obama probably didn’t lose many votes by his declaration, since (1) it doesn’t actually mean anything in any practical sense, and (2) almost all the folks for whom gay marriage is an activating issue were already against him. And he may have convinced a few skeptics that he is capable of making a brave and principled move.

I remain unconvinced on that, given his history as mentioned by Gary Younge but originally described by Ryan Lizza in the famous New Yorker issue with the controversial cartoon on its cover. The furor over the cover helped to distract from the content of the article.

This leaves me looking for a motive for Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage. I strongly doubt Biden was over his skies, as the President apparently said; more likely it was a trial balloon. In any case, reading TPM today led me to a new understanding: instead of an offensive play, this is a defensive one.

Consider: the Republican party is now split. There’s the Tony Perkins purist camp that conceives of the issue as the defense of the family; imagine what you might be willing to do if you thought your family and the whole concept of family was under attack. Then there’s the Mitch McConnell realist camp that unabashedly represents the super-rich and the big corporations, which needs by whatever means necessary to be close enough to the levers of public power to prevent their use. Being that close requires a minimum number of votes, and the realist camp realizes that gay marriage has become a losing issue for the party. The purist camp consists mostly of Right-Wing Authoritarians in Bob Altemeyer’s terminology, while Social Dominators constitute much of the realist cohort.

…Read on

Even Reuters, which I usually think of as a less ideologically oriented source, is talking about conservative parties much more than leftist parties with many more votes. Pointing out that North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is Germany’s most populous state with more people than the Netherlands and a larger economy than Turkey, the article talks about today’s elections there which turned a fragile minority government into a solid majority for the major parties opposing Merkel, the Social Democrats and the Greens.

While she remains popular at home because of the strength of the economy and her steady handling of the euro zone debt crisis, the sheer scale of the defeat in NRW leaves her vulnerable at a time when a backlash against her insistence on fiscal discipline is building across Europe.

According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.9 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) saw their support plunge to just 26.3 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.

“This is not a good evening for Merkel,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “The SPD is strengthened by this election, which will stir things up in Berlin.”

This leaves me wondering how the Greens did, since they’ll be the junior partner in the NRW government. I know how the top two parties did, how about the third?

The Free Democrats (FDP), a pro-business party that rules in coalition with Merkel’s conservatives at the federal level, scored 8.3 percent to make it back into the state assembly.

The party ended a string of humiliating regional performances in a state vote in Schleswig-Holstein last week and it hailed the NRW result as proof of a renaissance after a slide in national polls over the past three years.

The upstart Pirates, a party that campaigns for internet freedom and shot onto the national stage last year, continued a strong run at regional level, making it into the fourth straight state parliament with 7.8 percent of the vote.

The Greens scored 11.8 percent. ($1 = 0.7726 euros)

And here the article ends. I don’t know why a dollar-to-euro conversion factor is included, particularly given the volatility of that market arising from political events such as the one being reported in this article.

…Read on

New elections in Greece seem almost inevitable at this point. Since the inconclusive vote last Sunday, the three parties with the largest vote totals have each tried to form a coalition government and failed. Today the country’s president met for 90 minutes with the leaders of the three parties in a last-ditch attempt to cobble together something that would prevent new elections next month. Next the president will meet with leaders of the smaller parties who got enough votes to enter parliament.

While US press outlets promote the idea that conservatives won the election, the fact is that conservatives got mashed. Of course that depends in part on having a reasonable definition of “conservative”. In this context, it appears to me that conservative and establishmentarian are synonyms: those parties enabling and supporting the status quo are working for the bankers and the rich and against most of the population. In this context, then, not only is New Democracy, the top vote-getter at 19.7%, a conservative party, so is the former governing party, the Socialist party Pasok. It was Pasok that agreed to implement the memorandum with the European Union and its central bank to gain the loans it needed to keep the country going. To get those loans it had to agree to a punishing austerity program typical of those that central banks impose when permitted to do so.

One measure of how Greeks feel about this austerity program is the difference between the Pasok vote this time, which was 13.6%, and the proportion that made them the governing party in 2009, which was thirty points higher. They lost more than two-thirds of their support. Another measure is that New Democracy and Pasok have between them governed the country for over forty years, and both parties supported the loan program that made austerity such a prominent idea in Greece. They have totalled about 80% of the vote in past elections; in this one they got 33%.

As a result, conservative parties are about to lose their grip and new ideas are coming to the fore. Those in power struggle to hold on everywhere and at every time, and quite often such struggles are humiliating in their transparency and ineptitude. Basically they’re chessplayers in a dead-lost position hoping their opponent, who’s roundly mashed them, will blunder before the inevitable takes place. Chessplayers look with disdain on people who lose in that fashion; just resign, and go on to the next one. But politicians who’ve been crushed can’t do that; they may not have a next one.

…Read on

It’s fascinating and instructive to watch the people of Greece searching for effective methods of combatting the terrorism of the finance industry.

Anxiety in Athens is palpable. In an increasingly electric atmosphere dominated in equal part by fear and loathing — of EU ejection and EU-dictated austerity — many worry that Greece is not only heading for the euro exit door, and with it years of desperation and poverty, but tumult of a kind not seen since the restoration of democracy in 1974.

True enough. After all, “With Greece deeply divided after an election that effectively demolished the country’s political landscape the stakes could not be higher.” Either the Greeks buckle and accept years of grinding austerity in return for making the rich richer, or they can expect desperation and poverty caused by the rich folks they spurned. Why don’t they just submit? Because that’s not what people do when they understand the situation. Submission was something one might expect from the masses in the past, when information could be more strictly controlled. But nowadays, when anybody with a mobile phone can find out what’s going on in the world, it’s no longer possible to ensure that the public remains uninformed. Witness the Egyptian uprising.

The whole mess reminds me once again of Robert Anton Wilson’s wonderful essay The Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy.

It is characteristic of the primitive conditions on this backward planet that virtually nobody knows any of the basic facts about how the human race is actually governed. For instance:

1. Governments are not nearly as important as most people think. Since we live in a post-barter economy — a money economy — those who control the money supply effectively control the planet. Governments gave up all attempt to coin or control money in the 19th Century, mostly because they did not trust one another, i.e. no nation had faith that the coinage or currency of another nation was really worth what it claimed to be worth. The great International Banks stepped into this vacuum and, by demonstrating more fiscal rectitude than governments had in the past, became the creators of money in the modern world.

After the banks had control, they no longer needed to be quite so prim in their fiscal rectitude. Nobody could challenge them.

This means that governments cannot do anything — good or ill, wise or foolish — unless the banks first lend them the money for the project. The power is in the banks. The governments survive on the permission of the banks. If the banks cut off their credit, governments die. Any government that resists has its credit cut off and dies.

But this couldn’t happen here. Oh no. We wouldn’t put up with it.

It came out this week that Mitt Romney was an asshole back in prep school, too. The hijinks cited in the Washington Post article include assault and battery, and whimsically tricking a vision-impaired teacher into walking into a door. Romneybot’s empathy simulation protocols were malfunctioning even then. In short, our Willard was something of a bully.

Oddly enough, that’s okay. Or it might be. Sort of.* People do stupid things when they’re young, and some of them are egregiously, even criminally stupid. Part of growing up is learning that those things were stupid or wrong. Part of being a grownup is to be able to acknowledge one’s mistakes, and what one learned from them.

I’ll let Steve Almond explain that part that is not and could never ever be by any stretch of the imagination even sort of okay:

I don’t mean to suggest that Romney is without compassion. I believe, for instance, that he loves his wife and his children, and that he believes in God and the flag. But there is something in his character that I am starting to get frightened about, an unwillingness, or an inability, to feel remorse, to simply own up to a moral failing, to apologize not just if “somebody was hurt” but because you know, deep down, that you hurt someone.

Think about it: here are these half dozen men who took part in a savage act nearly fifty years ago. It has haunted all of them. And the ringleader, the guy who made the plan and led the mob and cut the victim’s hair off remembers … nothing?

It’s just bullshit, total fucking sociopathic bullshit. And it makes me sad that such an episode comes to light and all Romney can do — a guy who wants to be elected to our highest office — is nervously lie and make excuses, as if this were political problem.

Nicely put. And it got me to asking a very simple question: What is Romney afraid of here? Is he afraid to admit to having been cruel and thoughtless as a teenager? Or is he afraid to admit that he is no longer cruel and thoughtless as an adult? Frankly, it’s pretty clear that he’s still thoughtless, if not cruel, as an adult. But hell, even George W. Bush knew enough to pretend to care. Even George W. Bush could declare, however glibly, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.”**

…Read on

Jamie Dimon explains why JP Morgan Chase lost $2 billion and is likely to lose even more. I’m not impressed:

What Dimon lacked in information, he more than made up for in assigning blame — to himself and JPMorgan employees. “There are many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment,” he said, as JPMorgan’s stock sank in after-hours trading. “These were egregious mistakes. They were self-inflicted.” He called himself and his colleagues “stupid.”

This is textbook language that elites use when they fail or get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s the same thing our political leaders say after every foreign policy disaster, “mistakes were made.” It’s as if admitting to being incompetent, as opposed to deliberately corrupt, somehow makes everything okay.

The only thing left for Dimon to do is step up and, in a cheap, mock imitation of Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, “take responsibility,” which in a modern American context means nothing. “Taking responsibility” is just an empty rhetorical ploy our leaders use to escape any real consequences for their misdeeds. It’s an advertising slogan, and if the actor who says it feigns enough contrition, he is magically exonerated from all blame. He gets another high paying job, collects exorbitant speaking fees and maybe gets a book deal. His kids have warm seats in the Senate waiting for them, their campaigns fueled by Daddy’s dirty money. This is what living under an aristocracy looks like.

We’re also hearing another stock phrase that is often used when things go awry: it was just a few bad apples. In this case, dark “rogue traders.” The system itself is fine, you see, it’s just those dastardly rogue traders who keep slithering into the machinery and mucking it all up, and they’re even more evil in this instance because they’re foreigners — the London Whale!

Coming up next: none of this would have happened if we had more de-regulation!

Back in December, Jeb Bush wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Capitalism and the Right to Rise,” which came from a phrase by Paul Ryan. I know, I know, hearing Jeb Bush, Wall Street Journal, and Paul Ryan in one sentence creates a uniquely degrading kind of pain, something along the lines of being sodomized with a broom handle. Nevertheless, there was a passage in his article that has particular relevance today. This is it:

We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks.We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck. [italics added]

Let’s just ignore for the moment that Jeb Bush has never had to compete for anything in his life, nor has he ever been made to suffer for any of his bad decisions. This kind of hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. It’s just part of the landscape these days, something that’s become as American as high fructose corn syrup and predator drones. No, we’ll be good sports and let that slide. There will be plenty of time to call Jeb an asshole later. What I’m interested in is how Jeb and his tribe of free marketeers are going to respond to the news that JP Morgan Chase has lost $2 billion because of ‘risky’ (i.e., fraudulent) trading, the same kind that crashed the economy in 2008.

Their CEO Jamie Dimon himself admitted that “egregious mistakes were made.” That doesn’t leave much wiggle room, does it? Is the cult of capitalism going to insist that he pay for these egregious mistakes as the free market demands? After all, we need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions, right?

Yeah, right.

Move along. Step lively. This way to the Worst Little Show on Earth! There’s still room for you in our damp and claustrophobic tent. Get ready! Get set! Prepare to be distracted, offended, annoyed, disgusted!

Look! It’s the Amazing Talking Head. No arms, no legs, no body! Just a mouth that never stops. It rants, it raves. It sneers, it smirks. It babbles, it badgers and it never, ever shuts up. Astonishing, daunting, frightening.

Gaze in wonder at the Bulimic Woman. She stuffs herself with food; she throws up; she stuffs herself with more food; she throws up. Gut-wrenching! Surprising! Phenomenal!

Gasp at the decrepitude of the Weak Man! He’s not strong; he’s feeble. Watch him fail to do a single chin-up. He cannot lift a Volkswagen on his back, much less an anvil with his tongue. Until he removes his wristwatch he can barely lift his arm. Incredible! Wondrous!

Here come the House Cats! Better than leaping through rings of fire, they will do… anything they want. They will rip up furniture, cough up hairballs, hide for days in closets, and mark pillows and cushions in a way that will make them forever unusable. Amazing! Astounding!

Meet the Stupefying Business Bores! Watch their paralyzing Power Point presentations about business models, return on investment, market trends, and other excruciating topics. Watch them tap out useless twaddle on laptop computers. What a spectacle! Electrifying!

Believe your eyes! Make way for the Pierced and Tattooed Teenagers! These girls and boys have implanted hardware in noses, navels, eyebrows, ears, tongues, and in every recess and on every protuberance of their stained, revolting bodies. Startling! Horrifying! Nauseating!

Marvel at the Incredible Shrinking Candidates! Watch middle-aged politicians rail at each other and grow smaller with each lie and distortion. Tiny men and women leap about and vie for your attention. Egomaniacs the size of mice! Amazing! Not to be believed!

Listen to the Dauntless Telemarketing Parrots! Exotic tropical birds repeat the same dinnertime sales messages over and over again. Insensible to insult or rudeness, no amount of cursing or threatened violence will discourage them. Disturbing! Mesmerizing!

Thrill to the antics of the Disobedient Dogs! Tell them to fetch, they will roll over. Tell them to stay, they will run away. Tell them to lie down, they will sit. Watch these intractable creatures ignore their master’s every command. Maddening! Frustrating! Extraordinary!

Gape at the Anorexic Woman! Watch in horrified fascination as her neurosis consumes her and she withers away before your very eyes. Chilling! Not to be believed!

Behold the astounding I-Heads! Actual human beings who have evolved into telephone/camera/computer thingamabobs! Watch them takes videos of each other as they talk to each other as they download uploads while getting driving directions to hotels and airports. Unbelievable! Mesmerizing!

Feel the wrath of the Road Warriors as overpowering road rage compels them to drive as if possessed. Experience the thrills of an automotive duel of death! Disturbing! Irresistible!

Meet Vitamin Man and the Jogger, the healthiest and least interesting man and woman in the world! Watch them consume countless vitamin tablets as they run in place for hours and hours while debating the relative merits of vitamins C, D, and E. Invigorating! Informative! Stupefying.

Share the pitiable fate of the mail-order dieters! Eat food that tastes like the Wall Street Journal as you grow weaker and sicker with each nutritious delivery. Challenging! Inspiring!

Recoil in horror from the Spoiled Child Mutants! Whining, hopelessly pampered children run roughshod over their feckless, indulgent parents. Watch in amazement as small children turn into monsters of sociopathic selfishness. Thrilling! Incredible! Sickening!

And there is more, much more at the Sideshow for Today and Tomorrow. It’s all awaiting you under the not-so-big tent! Hurry, folks! Hurry! The show’s about to start!

As predicted nearly everywhere, the French have elected a member of the Socialist party as President, replacing the man who earned the sobriquet of President of the Rich. As The Guardian’s article says, “French president François Hollande promises ‘a new start’ for Europe”. The subtitle reads, “After victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, Socialist says he will fight back against German-led austerity measures”. John MacArthur wrote a helpful background post at Harper's but I think it's behind a paywall; I subscribe so it's hard for me to tell.

Here in the US, the attitude to this momentous change in Europe seems to be that this does not bleed, therefore it does not lead. In addition, it does not lead in power-structure enhancing directions for Americans to contemplate what other people are doing to the governments trying to enforce austerity measures designed to solidify the hold of the 1%. (Of course we’re really talking about a small subset even of that 1%, but it’s an evocative name and useful where precision isn’t of the essence.) In the States we have a government doing the same thing with hardly an interruption over decades, yet we keep going back and forth between one faction of the 1% and the other, unable to get off the seesaw. In France there are enough political parties that 80% of the voters found someone to vote for in both the first and second rounds. Eighty percent! Has any US national election had an 80% turnout? Because everyone knows that both parties represent the rich, and the differences between them are based less on actual policy and more on style and philosophy.

Hollande’s manifesto is based on scrapping Sarkozy’s tax breaks for the rich and levying more from high earners to finance what he deems essential spending, including creating 60,000 posts in France’s under-performing school system. He has pledged to keep the public deficit capped but for his delicate balancing act to work he needs a swift return to growth in France, despite economists warning of over-optimistic official growth forecasts that need to be trimmed.

Downing Street said David Cameron had called Hollande to congratulate him. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said: “This new leadership is sorely needed as Europe seeks to escape from austerity … He has shown that the centre-left can offer hope and win elections with a vision of a better, more equal and just world.”

That last bit is hilarious coming from the Labour party, whose Blair/Brown combo was known more for poodle-ism and illegal wars than for equality and justice. But when you’re on the sidelines it’s as easy to find fault as to see firm support in shadows.

What I want to see more of is discussion here in the US about the issues that the French and Greeks have voted on today.

In parliamentary elections in Greece, governing parties backing the EU-mandated austerity pact were on course for a major drubbing as hard-hit voters defected in droves, according to exit polls.

In a major upset that will not be welcomed by the crisis-plagued country’s eurozone partners, the two forces that had agreed to enact unpopular belt-tightening in return for rescue funds appeared headed for a beating, with none being able to form a government.

After nearly 40 years of dominating Greek politics, the centre-right New Democracy and socialist Pasok saw support drop dramatically in favour of parties that had virulently opposed the tough austerity regime dictated by international creditors.

We need more political choices. As Nader says, we don’t need a third political party, we need a second one.

The difference in coverage of tomorrow’s French elections between US sources and others continues to interest me in a perverse way. It’s not like I’m surprised by the right-wing slant of news outlets here; I suppose I just like seeing my prejudices confirmed.

For example, although CNN’s article was bland but politically neutral, MSNBC introduces the likely next French president as Monsieur Caramel Pudding, and speaks of his complicated love life based on his two partners over the last 25 years. However, a Christian marriage (or any other, for that matter) during those years is conspicuous by its absence, which is enough to activate the Republican base. More importantly, of course, Sarkozy has kowtowed to the super-rich, alienating for most voters but endearing for the super-rich. And of course the corporations they own and the media outlets those corporations own in turn.

The real question French voters appear to be pondering is whether the austerity programs exemplified by Sarkozy in partnership with Germany and Angela Merkel should continue to be followed. Unemployment in France is at a twelve-year high, one credit agency has downgraded the country’s AAA credit rating, and Sarkozy is identified with the plan of shutting down more production, reducing equality, and reducing government responsibility, thus increasing profits. Hollande pledges to renegotiate the situation with Merkel and the European Union, and as a long-time supporter of the union he has some credibility in this regard.

The real reason that US sources don’t report more realistically is that they’re hoping the right-wing corporate tool wins, and they know he won’t. If Americans start thinking about this sort of thing, we might begin to consider changing our own government. A sea change, that’s what we need. As The Guardian says:

If François Hollande claims victory, expect a sea change in European politics at a time of crisis. The European left has been in the doldrums for years. A President Hollande will act as a tonic. He will inherit a miserable economic situation and possibly face a few test missiles fired from the financial markets, limiting his room for manoeuvre. Within weeks of winning, he should be at his first EU summit, either sparring or compromising with Chancellor Angela Merkel over the German-scripted fiscal pact for the eurozone, austerity, fiscal stimulus, and how to shore up the euro.

If Nicolas Sarkozy confounds the pollsters and wins a second term, expect business as usual on the euro crisis, while he pursues a more Eurosceptic line at home to court the Front National, through a tough line on immigration and stepping up the campaign against the Schengen free travel regime in Europe.

Decent article here about the link between the financial crisis and suicide. As you might expect, suicide rates have risen since 2008, and they are highest in those countries hit hardest by the recession, like Greece. They are up ten percent in Britain. It’s just one more symptom of the poisonous dysfunction at the root of our system, just one more entry in the catalogue of horrors our civilization is creating. Like all the others, it will inspire nothing more than a tired yawn in all of those most responsible for the problem. It certainly won’t be discussed at the World Economic Forum next year at Davos, Switzerland.

“Suicide,” the author declares, “starts to seem a strangely rational measure of life’s cheapness in a monetized society — people’s logical response to a loss of control over their destinies.”

That sounds about right, although I would argue that that condition prevails at all times and in all places. I’ve always quibbled with the notion that people who kill themselves are crazy. I think the opposite is true. They are the rational ones. Those of us who choose to stick around are the ones who need to have our heads examined!

Nevertheless, assuming that widespread suicide is indicative of some deep, underlying social pathology, how will American elites respond to it? That’s too easy, isn’t it? We know exactly what they’d do. The would respond to it the same way they respond to all human suffering, tough shit. There are winners and losers in life. They were the losers. They couldn’t hack it so they offed themselves. Big deal. Not my problem. Now shut up and cut my taxes.

If anything, they would use it to affirm their own superiority. In the Darwinian scramble for survival, they, the CEOs, bankers, hedge fund managers, trust fund babies, and rich heiresses have proven themselves to be the strong. To hell with all the rest. Screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Those poor dumb bunnies who put bullets in their heads should have learned how to become better thieves. It’s not our fault they couldn’t adapt.

It would probably be worse than that. I can see the topic being discussed on Fox News right now. Some right-wing boy wonder, barely old enough to shave, would inform us that suicide actually helps the remaining workers. “It decreases the labor supply, which leads to higher wages.” All of the Fox News blondes would twitter with glee at the profundity of this new soundbite, and the wicked Charles Krauthammer, ensconced in his wheelchair like Dr. Stangelove, would rub his hands together and nod his sinister agreement.

Meanwhile, in serious presidential circles, Mitt Romney would shrug his shoulders and wonder, “Why didn’t they borrow twenty grand from their parents and start a business?”

This is from the suicide note of one Dimitris Christoulas, who publicly killed himself in Athens:

I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.

All the wrong people are killing themselves.

I’m about to leave for a week or so down south, scouting locations for a book. I’m in the process of relocating Tom Bethany, the hero of a mystery series I wrote some years ago. He used to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts; now I’m relocating him to St. Marys, a coastal village in southernmost Georgia.

More when I get back…

Try not to read the rest of this story. Couldn’t do it, could you?

“I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions,” Anna Mackowiak, 34, told the Austrian Times. “But when I saw him lying there I just thought, ‘What a bastard’ and decided to take all his teeth out.”

Not to be too much of a word Nazi or anything, but I propose that we junk the following terms, permanently. Furthermore, I recommend that anyone caught using them should be pelted with dung and rotten vegetables. Here they are: ground zero, line in the sand, in harm’s way, zero tolerance, and thank you for your service. Maybe we could include two more that are particularly relevant right now, using the term job creators to describe corporations that offshore jobs, and whining that a very slight increase in taxes among the wealthy is punishing achievement. In light of today’s economic reality, these last two are a sick joke.

While we’re at it, let’s jettison these as well: first responders, health care professional, peace officer, and person of interest.

I also wish we’d drop the habit of calling our soldiers warriors. This is both sinister and silly, and it doesn’t jibe with the values of a supposedly free and independent people. Why should a bunch of soft, credit card wielding civilians, and, let’s face it, that’s what we are, adopt the language of a military academy or boot camp? It’s about as ridiculous as Mitt Romney claiming to know what it’s like to be unemployed. On a darker note, it’s one more way that we’re being militarized in order to accept permanent war as the normal state of things.

Here’s another one: tell our military personnel to stop declaring ipso facto that all our enemies in a war are “bad guys.” How arrogant and presumptuous is that? Is an Afghan farmer who’s defending himself from foreign invaders a “bad guy”? It’s unfortunate but, I suppose, somewhat understandable in a war zone. What’s not forgivable is when police officers refer to suspects the very same way. Last I checked people are innocent until proven guilty. The cops don’t know they’re bad guys until they’ve been convicted of a crime, right? Nevertheless, it has become routine for police to speak this way. After all, it’s easier to justify tasing a bad guy that a mere old suspect, who, as the word itself suggests, may be innocent.

Whether we realize it or not, this kind of language has the effect of making us more servile to authority. It pushes us into a kind of childish hero worship. It grants our supposed protectors and superiors, i.e., the warriors, peace officers, and first responders, an elevated and heroic status that places them beyond criticism, and it simultaneously disempowers us. To say anything critical about them is a form of soft-core blasphemy. It produces passiveness and obedience, the results of which are all around us to see. Unprovoked invasions and Wall Street bailouts wouldn’t be possible without it.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that this dime store deification of our authority figures is happening when our authority figures are proving themselves totally unworthy of any such thing? Is this accidental, do you suppose?

And that’s my unsolicited rant for the day.

What would we do without Al Arabiya News, which gives us this:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper…

The controversy about a husband having sex with his dead wife came about after a Moroccan cleric spoke about the issue in May 2011.

Zamzami Abdul Bari said that marriage remains valid even after death adding that a woman also too had the same right to engage in sex with her dead husband.

And elsewhere these further details:

One of the weirdest and most controversial fatwas in 2011 was one issued by an Islamist preacher who lives in Europe. According to this preacher, women are prohibited from eating phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables like cucumbers, bananas, and carrots. Touching or consuming those, he argued, are bound to turn women on and make them engage in sinful fantasies.

In Morocco, the head of the Moroccan Association for Jurisprudence Research stirred both outrage and controversy when he issued a fatwa allowing Muslim men to have sex with their just-deceased wives under the pretext that nothing in Islam prohibits sex with corpses. This fatwa followed a series of sex-related ones issued by the same cleric.

Hold the outrage for a moment, as you remember the multitude of vaginal probe and “personhood” laws being pushed by the mullahs of our own Christian right. All done? Now consider that many of those fatwas have a good chance of being enacted, and others already have been. Unlike those of Zamzami Abdul Bari, who would at least extend to both sexes the joys of necrophilia.

The RNC, long known for its deft use of humor, is at it again:

The Republican National Committee is out with its first explicitly pro-Mitt Romney web ad, which mocks President Obama for “slow jamming” Tuesday on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.”

The video, entitled “A Tale of Two Leaders,” intermingles clips of Obama’s appearance on the show, in which Fallon calls Obama the “Preezy of the United Steezy” as the president stands in the background, with cuts from Romney’s general election kick-off speech the same day.

Pay special attention as Richie Rich tells the cheering crowd, “I see children even more successful than their parents — some successful even beyond their wildest dreams — and others congratulating them for their achievement, not attacking them for it.” Nobody loves a whiner, Mitt. Didn’t your less successful father ever tell you that?

In A People’s History of the United States, 1492 - Present Howard Zinn excerpts an article I wrote for the New York Times in 1973. I always figured these few paragraphs would turn out to be my only durable literary legacy, and in an odd way this seems to be coming true.

Chasing down my old op-ed piece earlier today on Google, I discovered that Zinn’s brief excerpts have gone viral in the flourishing world of ghost-written student essays. The following paragraphs are the ones being heisted from Zinn’s book, repackaged, repurposed, and resold to student plagiarists as nuggets of original research. For whatever further service I may be to scholars, a pdf of the full text is here. The map below (you can steal that too; I did) shows where our bombs fell on Laos between 1965 and 1975.

The Pentagon’s most recent lies about bombing Cambodia bring back a question that often occurred to me when I was press attache at the American Embassy in Vientiane, Laos.

Why did we bother to lie? When I first arrived in Laos, I was instructed to answer all press questions about our massive and merciless bombing campaign in that tiny country with: “At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, the United States is conducting unarmed reconnaissance flights accompanied by armed escorts who have the right to return if fired upon.”

This was a lie. Every reporter to whom I told it knew it was a lie. Hanoi knew it was a lie. The International Control Commission knew it was a lie. Every interested Congressman and newspaper reader knew it was a lie....

After all, the lies did serve to keep something from somebody, and the somebody was us.

It’s interesting as usual to compare US news outlets with reasonable ones. You can scroll half-way down the New York Times web page and find a mention of today’s French elections in the world news section, and it’s similar at other sites. Each of them has a story, almost invariably accompanied by a more-or-less flattering photo of the current president. Like the one at MSNBC they concentrate on the surprising result obtained by Marine Le Pen, one of the far-right candidates. The secondary story everywhere is Sarkozy’s poor showing in placing second. The supposedly liberal Talking Points Memo, which might be expected to pick up on left-leaning politics, currently devotes an entire paragraph to the election.

On the other hand, Reuters, the BBC, and the Guardian concentrate on the two candidates who move on to the second round. In the event, the soft-socialist candidate Hollande placed first at 28.6%, one and a half percent ahead of Sarkozy. Given the actual politics of the real situation on the ground, Hollande has to screw up pretty badly to lose. As the Beeb’s Europe editor Gavin Hewitt says, “Whereas Francois Hollande can tack to the centre, President Sarkozy must appeal to the right.” The left has united around the memory of a past election in which its disunity set up Le Pen’s more famous (and equally far right) father to enter the second and final round of voting against a center-right candidate. Le Pen herself has pointedly failed to endorse Sarkozy, while the leftist candidates, including a Communist-supported one, have openly thrown their support to Hollande.

The result, for those willing to look, is a right wing that’s fracturing into a relatively content pro-1% group and a pissed-off populist group. Sound familiar? But here we soothe our raging anger by talking about the threat to the divinities of the Market posed by someone who calls himself a Socialist though true socialists are embarrassed to vote for him. Those same divinities are fine with exaggerating the vote for Le Pen (what’s the difference, after all, between 18% and 20%?), ignoring the majority of French voters and the 80% turnout for the election, and carefully screening out the information that in other civilized countries people are rebelling against control by the 1%.

The truly big threat, understood by every US media outlet, is that Americans might start to do the same. Therefore the traditional media ignore the story.

Did you think that all they made behind those walls was license plates? Let Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman disabuse you. An excerpt:

The Kansas Wagon Company, for example, signed a five-year contract in 1877 that prevented the state from raising the rental price of labor or renting to other employers. The company also got an option to renew the lease for 10 more years, while the government was obliged to pay for new machinery, larger workshops, a power supply, and even the building of a switching track that connected to the trunk line of the Pacific Railway and so ensured that the product could be moved effectively to market.

Penal institutions all over the country became auxiliary arms of capitalist industry and commerce. Two-thirds of all prisoners worked for private enterprise.

Today, strikingly enough, government is again providing subsidies and tax incentives as well as facilities, utilities, and free space for corporations making use of this same category of abjectly dependent labor…

“Now,” means our second Gilded Age and its aftermath. In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn. This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market. On the supply side, the U.S.holds captive 25% of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people. It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president. As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production. Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers.

As a consequence, those back home — disproportionately African-American workers — who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by, began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country’s rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn’t take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor — and better yet, close by.

What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states. And here’s the ultimate irony: our ancestors found convict labor obnoxious in part because it seemed to prefigure a new and more universal form of enslavement. Could its rebirth foreshadow a future ever more unnervingly like those past nightmares?

If Mitt Romney becomes president, this is the kind of thinking that will have made it happen:

“We need a president who has a business background, and Mitt Romney’s business background is tremendous,” Michael Larson, 55, a salesman and independent voter from Minneapolis, said Wednesday in a follow-up interview. “He has a vision that will bring the country back to economic strength.”

“I want to give the business guy a chance,” said Craig Lemoine, 47, a Republican from Las Vegas who drives a U.P.S. truck. “No one wants to put the C.E.O. in there. Everyone thinks he’ll just make the rich people richer and the poor people poorer. But how do you know if you don’t give him a chance?”

Well, here’s a suggestion, you might try leafing through his budget proposals to see if President Romney will make rich people richer and poor people poorer, I dunno. I’m no psychic, but I will make the following bold prediction: UPS drivers won’t be getting richer in the Romney years.

This, from a different source, is perhaps even more depressing:

Yesterday Politico broke the news that Mitt Romney’s planned $12 million expansion for his oceanfront property in San Diego, California included “car elevators” for his four-car garage. The news is being used to again portray the Republican Presidential front-runner as being “out of touch” and “unable to connect” with the working man. That’s ridiculous. The truth is the working man probably thinks car elevators are awesome. Because they are. But it’s unfair to say that Romney’s “out of touch” with average folks for wanting a car lift. Frankly, I think most average folks would want a car lift if they had the money to pay for them.

That’s because they’re cool and they give you more room to store cars. I mean, come on — who wouldn’t want more space in their garage?

Who wouldn’t want more space in their garage? Hmmm, maybe people who don’t have garages since their homes were foreclosed on? Maybe people who don’t have homes, cars, garages, or jobs, or anything else since hard working outfits like Bain Capital rolled through town? Just tossing that out there.

The trouble is, the last guy is right. Your average middle-age male shlub won’t put Mitt’s gaudy over-consumption into any meaningful context. He won’t question why a presidential candidate is building a car elevator in his mansion while the country is in a recession and he, our average middle-age shlub, is sinking inexorably into poverty. Instead he’ll be dazzled by the shiny new toy in Mitt’s garage and say, “Cool! I wish I could have one of those.”

I know many, many, many people (and many more after that) who think exactly like those quoted above. Decent, honest, regular blue-collar types who work hard, take care of their kids, play by the rules, and get shit on all of their lives. To the extent that they are political at all, they are reflexively conservative. They will go to their graves thinking that government waste is at the root of our economic problems, government employees are lazy and incompetent parasites, and illegal aliens are stealing our jobs. They may have liberal-ish views on any given topic, but as a general rule Republican rhetoric falls very softly on their ears.

More disturbing, I think, is that it’s impossible to argue them out of any of their positions. Conservative soundbites have become the densely compact sediment at the base of their brains, the bedrock, as it were, that produces all the rough gravel that crumbles out as a result. Nothing you or I can say will change that. Attempting to do so only gives you high blood pressure or, as I’ve learned on a couple of occasions, gets you perilously close to a fist fight (racists don’t want to hear that Mexicans are victims of the system just as much as the rest of us. No, they don’t want to hear that at all).

It’s not an exercise in futility. It is futility, personified and made flesh in all of its gray hopelessness. Let’s knock each other’s teeth out while Mitt Romney goes to the bank and laughs at us both.

These are people at the bottom of the information chain, the people whose views are composed of random, contradictory snatches of information that they’ve picked up through mainstream news sources in ten minute increments. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan know that if they scream about deficits long and loud enough, it will filter down to the peasants, artisans, and servants in exactly the manner they want. It’s the same with tax cuts. The lumbering beast of the people hears the term “tax cuts” and thinks, “Oh, goody, more money for me!” oblivious to the fact that any little pittance of a refund they get is going to be immediately devoured by the bigger players in our economy, and that this is not an accident.

I bring this up because there is a definite movement afoot to make Mitt Romney mainstream, or at least palatable to the mainstream. We’re already hearing, ad nauseam, about the last Gallup poll showing that Mitt and Obama are running in a “statistical dead heat” and that Mitt is “shoring up the base.” The media is going to twist and distort things in any way they can to ensure the election becomes a horse race. Mix that with the thinking of the people mentioned above, and we run the very real risk of having Romney in the White House. That’s another way of saying that we run the very real risk of having plutocracy permanently institutionalized in this country.

From Jill Lepore’s chilling article on gun laws in this week’s New Yorker:

This issue has been delivering voters to the polls since 1970. Conservatives hope that it will continue to deliver them in 2012. Keene, in his lifetime, has witnessed a revolution. “It’s not just the conservative political victories, the capture of the Republican Party, the creation of a conservative intellectual élite,” he said, “but the whole change in the way Americans look at government.” No conservative victories will last longer than the rulings of this Supreme Court.

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Very little indeed. George Carlin once wrote, “Living in the South was never an option — the main problem being they have too much respect for authority; they’re soldier-sniffers and cop-lovers.” And now, with a big boost from Osama bin Laden, the South has at last won the Civil War. Local police, the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the military, the courts, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security (Heimat Sicherheit in the original German), the prison industry, Blackwater and its mercenary ilk, all have joined hands in the great work of penning us in for our own good. It’s going remarkably smoothly: turns out most of us welcome the barbed wire and feel safe inside it. Turns out we are a nation of bottoms.

From Robert Stein, at Connecting.the.Dots:

After morphing into a Tea Party zealot to win nomination, the GOP choice is in the kind of tricky transition described by JFK while running against Nixon in 1960: “It must be hard getting up every morning trying to decide who you’re going to be that day.”

Nixon lost then but won eight years later by virtually erasing himself to edge out disorganized Democrats. Covering his campaign, Gloria Steinem wrote: “When Nixon is alone in a room, is anyone there?”

Einer Elhauge, writing in The New Republic, reports that while this Supreme Court’s Originalists may oppose federal mandates, the Originals themselves didn’t:

…In 1790, the very first Congress — which incidentally included 20 framers — passed a law that included a mandate: namely, a requirement that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. This law was then signed by another framer: President George Washington. That’s right, the father of our country had no difficulty imposing a health insurance mandate.

That’s not all. In 1792, a Congress with 17 framers passed another statute that required all able-bodied men to buy firearms. Yes, we used to have not only a right to bear arms, but a federal duty to buy them. Four framers voted against this bill, but the others did not, and it was also signed by Washington. Some tried to repeal this gun purchase mandate on the grounds it was too onerous, but only one framer voted to repeal it.

Six years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another founder, President John Adams…

This is one of the choicest specimens of pure, unadulterated hackery I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s from the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, a writer I seldom read for reasons that will become obvious to you in a moment:

Among the attributes I most envy in a public man (or woman) is the ability to lie. If that ability is coupled with no sense of humor, you have the sort of man who can be a successful football coach, a CEO or, when you come right down to it, a presidential candidate. Such a man is Mitt Romney. […]

I watched, impressed. I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best. His technique is to explain — that bit about not knowing what was in the ads — and then counterattack. He maintains the bulletproof demeanor of a man who is barely suffering fools, in this case Gingrich. His message is not so much what he says, but what he is: You cannot touch me. I have the organization and the money. Especially the money. (Even the hair.) You’se a loser.

Let me get this straight. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar who looks down on people (doesn’t suffer fools) who have less money, worse hair, and a weaker organization than he does, and this is attractive? Mitt Romney is a dishonest prick, and I love him for it! Wow, a male pundit with battered wife syndrome. Somebody with the proper credentials should investigate this.

Good God. I hope he had knee pads on when he wrote that, otherwise he might be in for some major soreness and swelling. This really worries me. When big media pundits get man crushes, the results are horrific, vide the Bush presidency. This could be the opening smooch in the coming Mitt love fest that the mainstream media will undoubtedly conduct in order to make the election a race. You might wanna keep a bucket handy.

Nobody gets out of here with their minds intact.

…who took the picture?

Every time I think wouldn’t it be nice if more young people voted, something like this comes along. (Thanks to young person Jason Shure for the link…)

One of my old drinking pals had been a political science major at Berkeley. We were sitting at a bar hoisting a few one night, and I asked him why he never got into politics. “The truth is,” he said, “ I just don’t like political people very much.”

It called to mind some experiences of my own. At one point, I seriously considered going into politics, but, like my old friend (now deceased), I just don’t like political people very much. There is a slick, reptilian sleaziness to a lot of them that’s quite unseemly. Their minds typically don’t extend beyond the results of the latest Gallup poll, and they can contemplate bombing other countries with psychopathic aloofness. I knew one guy who was planning a run for the House of Representatives (after law school, of course), and he had that shallow, meretricious charm that successful politicians possess. I asked him what his politics were. “Probably Republican,” he said, and I knew I was staring at every foreign policy disaster of the last fifty years dead in the face.

These are the kinds of people who migrate to the summit of our politics. These are the kinds of people who make life and death decisions for the rest of us with adolescent insouciance. Probably Republican, maybe Democrat, who knows, who cares? Political philosophy is an afterthought. Scanning poll results and winning elections is all that matters. It’s the main desideratum.

These are the people who drink mineral water, go to the gym, monitor their cholesterol, and breezily wonder how bombing Iran will play on Main Street. The reality of the suffering they create just doesn’t figure into their “metrics.” They are moral dwarfs, gnat-like Paul Ryan types who spout conventional wisdom as if it’s received truth and think Atlas Shrugged is great literature.

The truth is, I just don’t like political people very much, ha ha.

I don’t know whatever happened to the guy. He and his girlfriend had some very bizarre sexual proclivities that they were quite open about sharing. Question: What’s the only thing worse than a shallow young Republican couple? Answer: a naked shallow young Republican couple who get their jollies by engaging in simulated rape. Throw in an excessive fondness for the word “anal” and I’m reaching for the Pepto-Bismol, my friends.

“I tremble for my country,” Thomas Jefferson said, “when I remember that God is just.”