The voting has begun.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
Here are my highly partisan votes.
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Just some slight differences, Oui?
Lots of success for the whole gang @BooMan’s Place.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
I voted, just a few diffffffferences, but much the same…:o) Hope you and your site gets lots of votes..hugs
Best Post.
Jewels. Brilliant. I am going to plug Chris’s work – because that’s what I do. Two up for best post.
The Perfect Storm
by Chris Floyd
“The river rose all day,
The river rose all night.
Some people got lost in the flood,
Some people got away all right.
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemine:
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.
“Louisiana, Louisiana,
They’re trying to wash us away,
They’re trying to wash us away….”
— Randy Newman, Louisiana 1927
The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.
Much of this is embodied in the odd phrasing that even the most circumspect mainstream media sources have been using to de
scribe the hardest-hit victims of the storm and its devastating aftermath: “those who chose to stay behind.” Instantly, the situation has been framed with language to flatter the prejudices of the comfortable and deny the reality of the most vulnerable.
It is obvious that the vast majority of those who failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain themselves and their families on strange ground. While there were certainly people who stayed behind by choice, most stayed behind because they had no choice. They were trapped by their poverty – and many have paid the price with their lives.
Yet across the media spectrum, the faint hint of disapproval drips from the affluent observers, the clear implication that the victims were just too lazy and shiftless to get out of harm’s way. There is simply no understanding – not even an attempt at understanding – the destitution, the isolation, the immobility of the poor and the sick and the broken among us.
This is from the “respectable” media; the great right-wing echo chamber was even less restrained, of course, leaping straight into giddy convulsions of racism at the first reports of looting in the devastated city. In the pinched-gonad squeals of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow hatemongers, the hard-right media immediately conjured up images of wild-eyed darkies rampaging through the streets in an orgy of violence and thievery.
Not that the mainstreamers ignored the racist angle. There was the already infamous juxtaposition of captions for wire service photos, where depictions of essentially the same scene – desperate people wading through flood waters, clutching plastic bags full of groceries – were given markedly different spins. In one picture, a white couple are described as struggling along after finding bread and soda at a grocery store. But beneath an almost identical photo of a young black man with a bag of groceries, we are told that a “looter” wades through the streets after robbing a grocery store.
Almost all of the early “looting” was like this: desperate people – of all colors – stranded by the floodwaters broke into abandoned stores and carried off food, clean water, medicine, clothes. Perhaps they should have left a check on the counter, but then again – what exactly was going to happen to all those perishables and consumer goods, sitting around in fetid, diseased water for weeks on end? (The mayor now says it could be up to 16 weeks before people can return to their homes and businesses.) Obviously, most if not all of it would have been thrown away or written off in any case. Later, of course, there was more organized looting b
y criminal gangs, the type of lawless element – of every hue, in every society – whose chief victims are, of course, the poor and vulnerable. These criminal operations were quickly conflated with the earlier pilferage to paint a single seamless picture of the American media’s favorite horror story: Black Folk Gone Wild.
But here again another question was left unasked: Where were the resources – the money, manpower, materiel, transport – that could have removed all those forced to stay behind, and given them someplace safe and sustaining to take shelter? Where, indeed, were the resources that could have bolstered the city’s defenses and shored up its levees? Where were the National Guard troops that could have secured the streets and directed survivors to food and aid? Where were the public resources – the physical manifestation of the citizenry’s commitment to the common good – that could have greatly mitigated the brutal effects of this natural disaster?
“President Coolidge came down here in a railroad train,
With a little fat man with a notebook in his hand.
The president say, “Little fat man, isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?”
Well, we all know what happened to those vital resources. They had been cut back, stripped down, gutted, pilfered – looted – to pay for a war of aggression, to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest, safest, most protected Americans, to gorge the coffers of a small number of private and corporate fortunes, while letting the public sector – the common good – wither and die on the vine. These were all specific actions of the Bush Administration – including the devastating budget cuts on projects specifically designed to bolster New Orleans’ defenses against a catastrophic hurricane. Bush even cut money for strengthening the very levees that broke and delivered the deathblow to the city. All this, in the face of specific warnings of what would happen if these measures were neglected: the city would go down “under 20 feet of water,” one expert predicted just a few weeks ago.
But Bush said there was no money for this kind of folderol anymore. The federal budget had been busted by his tax cuts and his war. And this was a deliberate policy: as Bush’s mentor Grover Norquist famously put it, the whole Bushist ethos was to starve the federal government of funds, shrinking it down so “we can drown it in the bathtub.” As it turned out, the bathtub wasn’t quite big enough — so they drowned it in the streets of New Orleans instead.
But as culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an overarching trend in American society that has been gathering force for decades: the destruction of the idea of a common good, a public sector whose benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and directed by the consent of the governed. For more than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a relentless and highly focused campaign against the common good, seeking to atomize individuals into isolated “consumer units” whose political energies – kept deliberately underinformed by the ubiquitous corporate media – can be diverted into emotionalized “hot button” issues (gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens, drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion, terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten Big Money’s bottom line.
Again deliberately, with smear, spin and sham, they have sought – and succeeded – in poisoning the well of the democratic process, turning it into a tabloid melee where only “character counts” while the rapacious policies of Big Money’s bought-and-sold candidates are completely ignored. As Big Money solidified its ascendancy over government, pouring billions – over and under the table – into campaign coffers, politicians could ignore larger and larger swathes of the people. If you can’t hook yourself up to a well-funded, coffer-filling interest group, if you can’t hire a big-time Beltway player to lobby your cause and get you “a seat at the table,” then your voice goes unheard, your concerns are shunted aside. (Apart from a few cynical gestures around election-time, of course.) The poor, the sick, the weak, the vulnerable have become invisible – in the media, in the corporate boardroom, “at the table” of the power players in national, state and local governments. The increasingly marginalized and unstable middle class is also fading from the consciousness of the rulers, whose servicing of the elite gets more brazen and frantic all the time.
When unbridled commercial development of delicately balanced environments like the Mississippi Delta is bruited “at the table,” whose voice is heard? Not the poor, who, as we have seen this week, will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the overstressed environment. And not the middle class, who might opt for the security of safer, saner development policies to protect their hard-won homes and businesses. No, the only voice that matters is that of the developers themselves, and the elite investors who stand behind them.
“Louisiana, Louisiana,
They’re trying to wash us away”
The destruction of New Orleans was a work of nature – but a nature that has been worked upon by human hands and human policies. As global climate change continues its deadly symbiosis with unbridled commercial development for elite profit, we will see more such destruction, far more, on an even more devastating scale. As the harsh, aggressive militarism and brutal corporate ethos that Bush has injected into the mainstream of American society continues to spread its poison, we will see fewer and fewer resources available to nurture the common good. As the political process becomes more and more corrupt, ever more a creation of elite puppetmasters and their craven bagmen, we will see the poor and the weak and even the middle class driven further and further into the low ground of society, where every passing storm – economic, political, natural – will threaten their homes, their livelihoods, their very existence.
“Louisiana, Louisiana,
They’re trying to wash us away
They’re trying to wash us away
They’re trying to wash us away
They’re trying to wash us away”
___________________________
Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic
by Chris Floyd
So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?
There is no third way here, no other option, no wiggle room, no ambiguity. The much-belated exposure of George W. Bush’s warrantless spy program has forced the Bush-Cheney Regime to openly declare what they have long implied — and enacted — in secret: that the president is above the law, a military autocrat with unlimited powers, beyond the restraint or supervision of any other institution or branch of government. Outed as rank deceivers, perverters of the law and rapists of the Constitution, the Bush gang has decided that their best defense — their only defense, really — is a belligerent offense. “Yeah, we broke the law,” they now say; “so what? We’ll break it again whenever we want to, because law don’t stick to our Big Boss Man. What are you going to do about it, chump?”
That is the essence, the substance and pretty much the style of the entire Bushist response to the domestic spying scandal. They are scarcely bothering to gussy it up with the usual rhetorical circumlocutions. The attack is being led by the fat, sneering coward, Dick Cheney, who has crawled out of his luxurious hidey-holes to re-animate the rotting husk of Richard Nixon and send it tottering back onto the national stage. Through the facade of Cheney’s pig-squint and peevish snarl, we can see the long-dead Nixonian visage, his grave-green, worm-filled jowls muttering once more the lunatic mantra he brought to the Oval Office: “If the president does it, it can’t be illegal.” This is what we’ve come to, this is American leadership today: ugly, stupid men mouthing the witless drivel of failed, dead, discredited, would-be petty tyrants.
But not even Nixon was as foul as this crew. When he was caught, he folded; some faint spark of republican conscience restrained him from pushing the crisis to the end. He was a vain, stupid, greedy, grasping, dirty man with blood on his hands, but in the end, he did not identify himself with the government as a whole. He did not say, “l’etat, c’est moi,” he had no messianic belief that the life of the nation was somehow bound up with his personal fate, or that he and his clique and his cronies had a God-given right to rule. They just wanted power and loot — as much of it as they could get — and they pushed and pushed until the Establishment pushed back.
It has long been evident, however, that Bush and Cheney do believe their clique should by all rights rule the country — and that anyone who opposes their unrestrained dominion is automatically “anti-American,” an enemy of the state. For them, there is no “loyal opposition,” or even political opponents in any traditional understanding of the term; there are only enemies to be destroyed, and herd-like masses to be manipulated. They believe that their dominion is more important than democracy, which they despise as a brake and hindrance to the arbitrary leadership of an all-wise elite — i.e., them. They are the state; a police state.
Elections are just necessary evils, a way to manufacture the illusion of consent, shake down corporations for big bucks and calibrate the loyalty of courtiers. Democracy is simply another system to be gamed, subverted, turned to factional advantage — in precisely the same way that Enron gamed the California electric grid. This accounts for the strange, omnipresent tang of unreality that permeated the last three national elections, in 2000, 2002, and 2004. It’s because they were unreal: the results were gamed, sometimes in secret, sometimes in plain sight; the “issues” and rhetoric were divorced from the reality that we all actually lived and felt — and the outcomes were as phony as an Enron balance sheet.
Dominion seized on such sinister and cynical terms will almost certainly be defended — and extended — by any means necessary. That is the great danger. The Bushists have already pushed on further than Nixon ever dared; will they “bear it out even to the edge of doom”? This is the crux of the matter; this is the crossroads where we now stand. Will the American Establishment push back at last? Will they say, This far we will go, but no further; this much we will swallow, but no more?
Click Read More… Some of us have been writing for years about Bush’s piecemeal assumption of dictatorial powers. We have watched in rage and amazement as the Establishment meekly accepted Bush’s repeated, brutal insults to democracy. Time and again, I’ve quoted the words of the Emperor Tiberius, after the lackeys of the Senate grovelled to do his bidding: “Men fit to be slaves.” In one sense, then, the Rubicon was crossed long ago. Yet “we live in hope and die in despair,” as my father always says. In the back of the minds of many an embittered dissident, there has been a spark of hope that somewhere down the line, one of the many, many Bush outrages would somehow take hold, gain critical mass, and force the Establishment to act, to rein in the renegade, break him, box him in if not remove him from office.
For let’s be clear about this: only the Establishment — the institutional powers-that-be — can break an outlaw president. Millions marched in the street against Nixon and the system; whole city quadrants went up in flames in those days; but none of this was decisive in the corridors of power. (Nor to much of the American public, to be frank; after Kent State, after My Lai, after Cambodia, Nixon was still re-elected in a landslide.) It was his insult to the institutions — the Watergate break-in of Democratic headquarters, the subsequent cover-up and subversion of the legal system, the defiance of Congress — that led to his downfall. He pushed too far, tried to grab too much — and the Establishment pulled him short.
And it will have to be the Establishment that breaks Bush — or he won’t be broken. All the blogs in the world won’t bring him down, no matter how much truth they tell, how much bloodsoaked Bushist dirt they expose. Yes, perhaps if we had millions of outraged citizens marching in the street day after day across America, a sustained mass movement and popular uprising for liberty and democracy, this might obviate the need for Establishment action. But we all know that such marches are not going to happen. If there was sufficient fire for liberty and democracy in America, there would have already been a popular uprising — and Bush would never have garnered enough public support to keep the election results close enough to be fudged. No, it will be the Establishment — or no one.
That’s why the spy scandal is so pivotal. Because it is a direct, open and unignorable challenge to the institutional life of the American Establishment. In it, the Bush Regime is saying to the various powers-that-be, especially in Congress and the courts, but also to centers of power and influence outside government: you no longer have any power. All real power is now in our gift. Your laws, your institutions, your traditions, the whole complex infrastructure of checks and balances that have sustained society are now essentially meaningless. As in ancient Rome, we will keep the old forms, but the life of the state has now passed into the hands of the autocrat and his court. His arbitrary will can override any law — although of course, strong law will still be applied to his enemies, and to the riff-raff in the lower orders.
How will the Establishment deal with this direct challenge? The past few years give little grounds for hope: the Democrats spineless, conflicted, co-opted and corrupt; the Republicans slavish, bellicose, cruel and criminal; the media timorous, witless, corporate-controlled; big business absolutely rolling in gravy from the autocrat’s larder; academia cowed, silenced, ignored, demonized; the military acquiescent in criminal aggression, top-heavy with time-servers currying autocratic favor. Only the courts provide some stray sparks of hope, although they too are now loaded with political sycophants, corporate bagmen and knuckle-dragging throwbacks produced by the Right’s decades-long devolution of American jurisprudence. Prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and Elliot Spitzer “keep hope alive,” but their efforts will mean little in a system where lawlessness at the top has been countenanced by the rest of the Establishment. And in any case, the outcome of their work lies ultimately with the Supreme Court — the same court that shredded the Constitution in awarding power to Bush in the first place, and which is now led by a Bushist apparatchik.
Still, you don’t go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you want; you go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you have. And this sad, sick crew, ladies and gentlemen, is all we have. If they swallow the spy scandal, if they don’t push back now — and I mean really push back, not just make a lot of harrumphing noise or hold a few toothless hearings or get a couple of underlings offered up as ritual sacrifices to save the Leader — then we will have well and truly and finally lost the Republic that Franklin, Jefferson and Madison gave us so long ago.
The next few weeks will show us if there is still some hope of restoring the Republic through the old institutions, or if we will have to follow the course laid out by Bob Dylan some 40 years ago: “Strike another match, go start anew.” Who knows? Maybe we can make a better republic next time: one not born of blood, greed and fury — those all-too-common elements of human organization — but made from a new compound of mercy, justice, communion and liberty. Still imperfect, of course, still corrupt — because that’s our intractable human nature — but with our worst instincts restrained by enlightened, ever-evolving law, and the predatory ambitions of the rich and powerful reined by elaborate checks and balances.
It’s just a dream, of course; probably a vain one. But we will need some vision to guide us if, as seems likely, we must soon set forth into the unknown territory of an openly declared American autocracy.
Thank You.
Good luck Boomans!!!
I had had had had to vote for RubDMC’s Series
Iraq War Grief Daily Witness
Maryscott has really got her troops out in force. I think she has a real chance to win.