How’s the weather?
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.
19 Comments
GORgeous! Low 70s, sunny and bright with a light breeze. The trees are in full flower and the petals are blowing around like snow. Neener.
Very nice here. 67 degrees, partly cloudy with a slight breeze. The high should be 83 and it is great weather to work on getting delegates to the county conventions this weekend in Texas for Obama!!!!
Texans For Obama
I am so thrilled to see people blogging and reporting on “corporate socialism’ in the last several months. Weeee! It’s about time people woke up to what our Congress has been doing since the late 1940’s — starting with the military-industrial complex, and now, with all large monied business entities — Wal-Mart, etc.
We are waking up. Our lives aren’t about our ideals any longer, they are about the economic lives we now find ourselves in.
I don’t remember where I read it yesterday, but I stumbled on a great phrase. It was something along the lines of “Why do we embrace taxpayer funded wealth care, but not taxpayer funded health care?”
Socialist wealth care. What a great way to put it.
The public, whether poor, middle class or wealthy, drenched in the gentleness of middle class living, have let the wealth of this nation disappear from our view. The millions and billions of our tax dollars, collected fairly or unfairly, have disappeared from our grasp via the hands of the Legislative and Executive, like the 8 billion in cash “missing” in Iraq in 2003.
The money goes to enrich the 1% and their lackeys, who do the work to keep these greedy small-minded people propped up. Corporate socialism is real. It has been created by the Democratic and Republican parties, and embedded in our laws and financial directives. We have less of a government than we have a vehicle to shell out favors and advantages.
For an instance: Medicare Part D drug re-form. Re-form, that’s for sure. Congress, in it’s great complicity to provide socialist benefits on the few, not the many, codified into law that there could be no negotiation of drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. That’s anti-competitive, dare I say, communistic in it’s nature. But really, it’s feudalistic, to create such a blind monopoly for pharmaceutical firms.
The top .01%, the giant money axis in this nation and globe, salivate over the autocracy of Saudi Arabia, and long for feudalism. Cheney is our defacto regent-king, and Bush the front man king, and they conduct business and provide favoritism like a feudal kingdom. Maybe corporate socialism is too gentle of a term?
The precise terminology for what’s apparent probably depends on your viewpoint (or cost/benefit analysis); one man’s socialism is another man’s fascism.
Precise meanings for any & all terms related to ideology are clear as mud anyway, under BushCo Media Inc.
There’s actually already a term for “corporate socialism” — it’s fascism. The spectacular horror of the Nazi genocides tend to divert attention from the underlying economic model, which was essentially a merger between corporate and state interests. It’s much clearer in the original Italian model, so much so that I often wonder just how much unacknowledged influence Benito Mussolini has on the thinking of American right-wing intellectuals.
Race, as we understand it today, is not really the main focus of fascism. Instead, it’s the Volk — the people as a undifferentiated mass. (Race was prominent in German and Italian fascism because Germany and Italy were largely ethnically homogenous states; American fascism, while hardly color-blind, has more of a religious and cultural focus.)
The value of the individual is essentially nil; he or she is merely an interchangeable party of the collective whole. (You can hear this in typical fascist speeches in key phrases like “the will of the German people”, or in recent years, “the American people want…”) In fascist ideology, the institutions of state and industry are the organs of the body politic, built from the uniform cells of the people. The people exist not for themselves, any more than the cell exists independently of the body, but for the sake of those national organs. From amongst these, an organic leader arises who is considered not to be a representative of the national will, but the expression of it. If that sounds a bit mystical, it is. Leader-worship is an integral part of fascism.
It’s unfortunate that fascism has been conflated with genocide as a result of the Holocaust. I don’t mean to say that the Holocaust is insignificant by any means, but from the point-of-view of fascism, it was incidental. You won’t spot proto-fascists by looking for groundbreaking ceremonies at concentration camps. That comes later, after the takeover is complete, as an inevitable by-product of the main thrust of fascism, which is the subordination and organization of individually insignificant citizens into a unified machine of state that exists for its own sake. It’s the resulting obsession with purity that leads to viewing dissidents and minorities as infections in the body politic.
We are living in a fascist state now. The symptoms that everyone is looking for as signs of approaching fascism are actually characteristics of a mature fascist state. A young fascist state is too busy starving the poor to glut the endless appetites of political and economic leaders to bother with concentration camps. Only once the poor are sufficiently desperate to submit totally can they be divided and turned against each other to commit unspeakable acts.
Beautifully stated & absolutely correct. Thank you.
It was partly cloudy overnight with 20% chance of rain. You should have bet on no rain. Sun’s not quite up over the hill. The creaky old dog is sitting outside, looking in that general direction.
Booman:
Did you see my question back in the Pelosi-Letter thread? I really would like to know what some of you local guys think of that situation. We can discuss it at DL sometime if you’d rather not write it up.
Thanks…
Drizzly goodness. 🙂
Obama’s major speech on the economy this morning-damn it’s good to have him back, introduced by Bloomberg, smart pointed analysis-followed up by a speech by Bush who is so out of it I could swear he is drooling on the mike.
So Bloomberg for VP? Sure be interesting.
And that weather thing – does anyone else that Yahoo weather lives on another planet? This morning we’re supposed to get 2″ of snow. Well, sun is out not a cloud in the sky and balloons are up!
light snow, sleet, mist and rain with a light wind…it was in the 60º’s yesterday.
spring’s having a hard time getting started at altitude.
The weather is blue & gives me a sore ass.
It’s disgusting, 35 degrees and there’s somehow still a blizzard. I love Wisconsin springs.
Two questions. Why does CNN still show the Texas caucuses as only having 41% reporting? And does anyone know of a good Wisco political blog/site?
mid 80s today, the desert wildflowers are in bloom
It was awful last night. Not quite snowing but a very cold rain, almost like sleet.
This morning I heard there was snow up toward the Canadian border, but I don’t think it’ll come down this far.
Trust me, sister living close to border said there’s lots of snow, the crappy kind where even her dog won’t go out.