Georgia GOP Culture War Watch: Its about Power.

So I just caught some comments from Ta-Nehisi Coates in response to the  DOMA ruling that I had to share:

 It must never be forgotten that in America, the right to marry is the right to protect one's family. Certainly the pictures of same-sex couples embracing and hugging warm the heart and are a powerful weapon in country that prides itself on fairness. But, if I may be so bold as to heterosplain, there is a danger here cousin to the one we see in people who think segregation was a matter of Colored Only water fountains. I think the case at the center of the DOMA suit, explained here by The New York Times, is telling:

The case on the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, concerned two New York City women, Edith Windsor and Thea Clara Spyer, who married in 2007 in Canada. Ms. Spyer died in 2009, and Ms. Windsor inherited her property. The 1996 law did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse, and she faced a tax bill of about $360,000 that a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage would not have had to pay. Ms. Windsor sued, and last year the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, struck down the 1996 law.

The state repossessing a couple's wealth because it finds them icky is wholly unjust. It recalls a particularly horrible aspect of slavery -- the assault on the families of people deemed to be outside the law. There is a particular war here, which better people than me can speak to. But power is at the core of the long war which began sometime in the mid-17th century with the passage of the first slave codes. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are not simply about withholding the right to be pretty in a dress or dashing in a tux (though I would deny no one their day). It is about ensuring that only certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of families, are able to amass power, and, with that power, influence over the direction of our society. 

It is wrong to strip people of wealth because you are bigot. It is wrong to strip people of the right to name their caretakers because you are afraid. It is wrong to make war on people because you can not get over yourself. And though today we may say that we have advanced, through much of this country, the wrong continues unabated.

This puts into better conext Phil Kent's call for a culture war here in Georgia in response to the DOMA ruling   

Its not about traditional values.  Its about power... and using religion as a way to mask a power grab that is quintessentially southern.  But sorry boys you've done lost that war.  

It also a reminder of why so many Christians do support the right to marry--they are more concerned with love and compassion, not power and exploitation.

Robert Kuttner wants to know: where are the pitchforks?

Robert Kuttner wants to know where are the pitchforks?  He points out this geneartion is getting screwed. Seriously people.

"The Greatest Generation" had massive government intervention in the economy--basically creating the middle class with a hodge podge of Government spending and expenditures.

Then the Babyboomers then went on a cocaine and tax cut binge during the 80's and 90's crashing the economy around late '06-07.

Now we arrive with degree in hand only to find the new normal sucks.

The 1% is making a killing by killing off your prosperity. Where are the pitchforks?

Room for hope and hopelessness--3 key challenges we face....

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” 
                   ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

So I've been a bit hopeful of late (see moral monday's) and also hopeless (see about everything else) on the political front.

I've caught some good links today to check out

Teamster Nation: How about restoring taxpayer control over public assets?

 Now We Are Way Too Excited About Campaign Finance Skepticism | Next New Deal 

Economic Policy Institute: Government–Not Business–Has Been the Source of Breakthrough Innovation  

Secret government: America against democracy | The Economist  

 Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs 

Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot? | TomDispatch 

 A Very Brief History Of The American Left  

From massive unemployment, to the national security state effort to spy on US citizens; the fact that people don't have their pitchforks out speaks to the massive political demobilization of working people in this country.

The number of Obama supporters who aren't batting an eye at something that would likely have them up in arms if Bush had gotten got in Snowdens snares disappoints me, scares me in fact as it speaks to an inability within the political party that I more often than not dwell to understand that those with power need to have checks and balances on their power.  I tend to believe one shouldn't need reminding of this fact.  But far too many are okay with exploitation of power and usage of imperialism and Empire when "the right team" is in charge.

But I want to go back to basics of the challenge in front of us rather than dwell in apathy and thunderous fist tweeting.

What are some of the key challenges I see in front of us?

1.  Most people are not well versed in the issues facing us 

2.  The ability of individuals to act collectively to influence power has vanished

3.  Failure to hold policymakers accountable for the economic despair facing most of America

Recognition that the economic and social challenges we face before us were not inevitable, they were not due to immutable acts of nature, but came about through policy choices (3) is the one that sticks with me right now.  

The fact that we have people who made bad choices means that we have political leaders with whom one can point at and hold accountable.  But this holding to account that should be taking place is not taking place.

I think the elect Hilary Clinton movement is a perfect example of this.  The Clinton team have their fingerprints all over the economic decline--the policies which handed the keys to Wall Street and corporate America.  They also have their fingerprints all over the war in Iraq (the run up to the war under President Clinton where Iraq was made a hobgoblin and further isolated from the world; the unquestioning/failure to check the power and reach of the Bush administration via oversight under Clinton herself in the Senate).
This brings us back full circle to my (1)first point; according to the Facebook posts and conversations I have with friends (a very nonscientific dataset to be sure), people do not spend a lot of time learning about the background and history of the issues facing us--they simply have the talking heads and political leaders they trust, whom they eat and spit back out unquestioned the bullet point arguments provided to them via cable news and email.

I'm going to try to do some more blogging--which I've always thought of as "thinking outloud"--to unravel both my own disappointments, as well as confusions, and figure out stronger ways forward.  


Only by way of thinking outloud---making mistakes of logic, figuring out confusions of fact, fuming the pathologies of human frustrations; and then realizing one is wrong, misguided, or merely being childish--can I hopefully find more coherent positions and build a stronger foundation for understanding the world.  But not just should we be working to understand the world but work to build a better future via acting collectively with others within the social networks we dwell in.


If you've made it this far in my ramble you might as well watch Chris Hedges talk on Sheldon Wolin....

"The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" by T S Eliot

Prufrock and Other Observations.  1920.

Hannah Arendt had the bad taste to put truth above tribe

Thomas S. Harrington in response to Margarethe Von Trotta’s new film reflects on what Hannah Arednt can teach us...

At Nuremberg, the victors of a terrible war decided that the best response to evil was to reinforce their belief in the rule of law, and in the broader sense, putatively universal  principles  of justice.

The Eichmann Trial, which was set in motion by an illegal kidnapping (or rendition, as we’d call it today), represents a very different impulse: the desire of the aggrieved to localize, personalize, and in the end, tribalize the problem of evil that in our midst.

Whereas the Nuremberg trials called on the world to remember and punish, but to also direct the gaze of the human beings–all human beings–toward what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature”, the trial of Eichmann was about circumscribing the limits of suffering on one hand, and inhumanity on the other, making each, if not the exclusive property of a particular group, certainly the de facto possession or marker of one particular group above all others.

Like all spectacles designed primarily to elicit or stoke strong emotional reactions, and from there, enhance the attractiveness of nationalist projects, this one used heavy doses of theatricality (like having Eichmann speak from a glass cage while flanked by armed guards) to achieve its desired effects, techniques have been seamlessly adopted adopted by the stage managers of today’s similarly Manichaean and simplistic “War on Terror”.

Did the Israeli court really believe the unarmed middle-aged German, like the heavily shackled and guarded “defendants” in the kangaroo tribunals of today’s Guantanamo, posed a physical threat to anyone in the room?

Of course they didn’t.

But by putting up the glass barrier—a sort of moral cordon sanitaire—and flanking him with uniformed guards, they were graphically conveying exactly what they wanted to convey: the idea of evil as a sort of virus that provokes epidemics of cruelty in certain morally defective national groups  in certain moments of history

As a universalist, Arendt could not fully accept the underlying premises of the morality play being staged by the state claiming to speak for the ethnic group of her birth. In Eichmann, she saw a man who, like so many others in an age of totalitarianism, had simply lost what she viewed as essential: the ongoing moral dialogue with the self.

You know, someone just like the drone pilot who sits at a console at Creech Air Force Base and “eliminates” or “wastes” several human beings during the course of a day and then goes home and eats Chinese take-out and watches ESPN.

For Arendt, the problem of Eichmann was not primarily about Jews and Germans, but rather mechanistic modernity’s ability to blunt the basic moral impulses of large swathes of mankind.

She also made the “mistake”, which one can never make if one wants to retain a respectable place in a collective defined—as is reflected quite clearly in Israeli law– more by notions of kinship than by voluntaristic concepts of social cohesion, of muddying the distinction between the supposedly ever-righteous “in-group” and the supposedly ever-evil “out group” by pointing out what appears to be quite true: that certain leaders of the Jewish community facilitated the demise of their own people through their active cooperation with Eichmann and the Nazis.

In short, Hannah had the bad taste to put truth above tribe.

Which gets us to an interesting question.

As it is becoming increasingly clear, even to the most willfully obdurate observers, that the US, far from being the force for good in the world they told you it was in school, regularly subjects whomever it wants whenever it chooses to espionage, torture, kidnapping, blackmail and assassination, what do you put first? ….The truth or the tribe?

How we respond individually and collectively to that question will go a long way to determining not only what kind of lives our children will have, but also quite possibly the fate of the world as we know it.

The real reason why Google killed their RSS Reader

Barry Ritholtz sends us over to Marco Arment:

RSS grew up in a boom time for consumer web services and truly open APIs, but it especially spread like wildfire in the blogging world. Personal blogs and RSS represented true vendor independence: you could host your site anywhere, with any software. You could change those whenever anything started to suck, because there were many similar choices and your readers could always find your site at the domain name you owned. 

The free, minimally restricted web-service-API era has come and gone since then. AsJeremy Keith wrote so well a few weeks ago (you should read the whole thing), those days aren’t coming back:

But [Facebook] did grow. And grow. And grow. And suddenly the AOL business model didn’t seem so crazy anymore. It seemed ahead of its time.
Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to emulate. Startups stopped seeing themselves as just one part of a bigger web. Now they wanted to be the only service that their users would ever need… just like Facebook.
Seen from that perspective, the open flow of information via APIs — allowing data to flow porously between services — no longer seemed like such a good idea.

(He also addresses RSS. Read it. I’ll wait here.)

This isn’t an issue of “openness”, per se — Twitter, for instance, has very good reasons to limit its API. You aren’t entitled to unrestricted access to someone else’s service. Those days are gone for good, and we’ll all be fine. We don’t need big web players to be completely open.

The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks). 

Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4 The escalating three-way war between Google, Facebook, and Twitter — by far the three most important web players today — is accumulating new casualties every day at our expense. 

Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.5 While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance. 

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople. 

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory. 

Well, fuck them, and fuck that. 

We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.

The price-system, the need for a better labor market, and you....

My wife wasn't too impressed with my incite about Karen Handle deferring to state coercion rather than using the price system to inspire better behavior.  See:  Karen Handle for Senate Platform: Erode Wages and Destroy Jobs.   And...  GOP Campaign Platform 2014: Erode Wages/Destroy Jobs (Its not just Karen Handle) 

Which was a good reminder of why I was never a good politician---policy nuances don't excite people like silly youtube videos.

But the fact that a major Republican in Georgia really doesn't have faith in the price system to properly allocate resources is a really important reminder that not only are the GOP only concerned about their political donors.  Its also a reminder that a major Republican figure in Georgia thinks the labor market is so horrid right now that we have to resort to coercion and immiseration of our citizens in order to get the outcomes we as a society desire.

We should be focused on improving the labor market because the new normal in our economy sucks.

We should be growing the minimum wage, mandating paid sick leave for all, ending right to work free-rider laws where they exist.  We should take new steps to reinvestment in our infrastructure; reform how we pay to educate the next generation of Teachers, Doctors, and Scientist.  The list of things that need to be done to improving quality of life for everyday people is pretty long.

Its up to other smart folks to figure out silly youtube videos and find crystal clean politicians that are liked by the average Joe to make that case to average voters on these points.  Lots of organizing of everyday people stands before us as a society.  I've got my hands full with about 100 people in metro Atlanta in my workplace.  Beyond that I have to pass the baton to you; as each of us can only do so much networking, education, and engagement--if you don't have a group of people you feel like you are organizing and mobilizing then you aren't doing your part.

I'll wait...

At least some people are standing up for Snowden... now who will stand up for us?

At least some people are standing up for Snowden...

Denouncing US 'Empire' South American Leaders Step Up to Protect Snowden 

Two South American nations, Venezuela and Nicaragua, indicated Friday that there may be some relief for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who for the past 14 days has unsuccessfully sought political asylum from a number of nations, all the while remaining trapped in the purgutory of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport.

"As head of state of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela, I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young Snowden [...] to protect this young man from the persecution launched by the most powerful empire in the world," Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said—alluding to the United States—during an independence day speech in Caracas on Friday.

"I announced to the friendly governments of the world that we have decided to offer this international human right to protect this young man," he continued, adding that several other Latin American governments have also expressed their intention of taking a similar stance by offering asylum for the cause of "dignity," AP reports.

The speech followed an earlier statement by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega during which he announced: "We are open, respectful of the right to asylum, and it is clear that if circumstances permit it, we would receive Snowden with pleasure and give him asylum here in Nicaragua."

"We have the sovereign right to help a person who felt remorse after finding out how the United States was using technology to spy on the whole world, and especially its European allies," Ortega added.

Remember kids---spying doesn't make you safer.  I'll outsource to Chomsky:

In response to Obama's claims that spying is crucial for protection against terrorists, Chomsky scoffed, "If we had anything like a free press, there would be headlines saying this is a bad joke," in an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv.

Chomsky told the Guardian—the publication that initially broke the NSA secret spying story—that the snooping itself constitutes a wrongdoing on a wide scale:

Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population.

Chomsky insisted to the Guardian that the close partnership between the U.S. government and corporations that specialize in spying technologies exposes a political structure that does not represent the interests of the U.S. people:

They [governments and corporations] take whatever is available, and in no time it is being used against us, the population. Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

Now if only we can get some national leadership in this country on protecting citizens from a security state.

Your Friday night Marx post....

I am Jack's unemployment check. I am Jack's new McJob.

So maybe the new normal isn't a dystopian nightmare after all?

Of late I've been pondering the new GOP agenda here in Georgia to: Erode wages/Destroy Jobs 

And about how the new normal for employment/job quality really really sucks.

But maybe I've being too cynical? Maybe the 49% Mitt Romney line is on to something.  Maybe the Keynesian Utopia is upon us and the GOP is freaking out if we all figure it out--hence they are lecturing us for working less because we realize we don't need them.

What would that mean?

It would mean we nationalize health care since at this point the US health care system sucks, and the privatized system is just a way to suck extorted profits from people until it finally implodes upon itself. This in itself would explain why Republicans have rejected implementing the health care reform agenda they created and Obama stole from them--they think a privatized system won't work!

It would mean an increase/expansion of Social Security payments.

It would mean at least 2-4 weeks of mandated Paid Sick Days/paid vacation within large firms.

It would require people to work fewer hours (providing more hours to those without jobs) and spend more time enjoying life.

Okay, okay.  I've been reading How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life and it may be rubbing off on me.

CEO's shouldn't be the only ones able to rig this collective system of production and consumption.

Maybe we are closer than we think to taking back what we are creating?