April 29th, 2008
Oh dear.
It does seems Butch & Sundance (D.C. & Tel Aviv) are assembling their case for Mo Bigger Wo.
Yesterday, Exhibit B: a passel of glossy photos to justify war upon Iran.
And now Exhibit C: US allegations of Iran training lebanese Army of God soldiers.
West Texas Intermediate crude’s working the $120 mark these days, $116 this morning.
It seems to me Mo Wo helps McCain (sorry to say) defeat the Donkey in November, whoever (s)he may be.
It seems to me the world has returned to where it was 100 years ago — a state of war between its ears. A philosophical embrace …
It’s a movement which Bush-Cheney have led. But its possibility, in the US, rests on the spiritual (non) foundation — Abgrund — mislaid in the 80s, during the Reagantime. Materialism. Egoism. The notions that everything is just business, and greed good, and that self-improvement means going to the gym not the library … One could go on. There was a distinct cultural revolution, led by television advertising, that in retrospect may have undermined the polity.
The result is an increasingly shallow impassive apolitical body politic, upon which something as eccentric and destructive as Bush-Cheney might rest and feed.
The great banking crisis of 1907 — cured by JP Morgan and a few friends, and which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank to keep such things from recurring — came back last year on the century mark precisely.
And it’s plain that the police state ethos has been on the rise in America as the currency has been collapsing … New York often feels like Berlin circa 1928 (where and when Walter Benjamin penned One Way Street).
But if we’re currently having our 1907, when may we expect our 1914?
I exhibit FDR at Chicago in 1937, brooding upon the Japanese invasion of China and Germany’s participation in the Spanish civil war, and calling upon the civilized world to gather in alliance to quarantine the aggressors:
The present reign of terror and international lawlessness began a few years ago.
It began through unjustified interference in the internal affairs of other nations or the invasion of alien territory in violation of treaties; and has now reached a stage where the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened.
The landmarks and traditions which have marked the progress of civilization toward a condition of law, order and justice are being wiped away.
Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air. …
Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm.
Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others.
Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane considerations.
It is, therefore, a matter of vital interest and concern to the people of the United States that the sanctity of international treaties and the maintenance of international morality be restored. …
I am compelled and you are compelled … to look ahead. The peace, the freedom and the security of ninety percent of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining ten percent. who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law. …
Surely the ninety percent who want to live in peace under law and in accordance with moral standards that have received almost universal acceptance through the centuries, can and must find some way to make their will prevail.
The situation is definitely of universal concern. The questions involved relate not merely to violations of specific provisions of particular treaties; they are questions of war and of peace, of international law and especially of principles of humanity.
It is true that they involve definite violations of agreements, and especially of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Briand-Kellogg Pact and the Nine Power Treaty. But they also involve problems of world economy, world security and world humanity.
It is true that the moral consciousness of the world must recognize the importance of removing injustices and well-founded grievances; but at the same time it must be aroused to the cardinal necessity of honoring sanctity of treaties, of respecting the rights and liberties of others and of putting an end to acts of international aggression.
It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.
When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. …
It ought to be inconceivable that in this modern era, and in the face of experience, any nation could be so foolish and ruthless as to run the risk of plunging the whole world into war by invading and violating, in contravention of solemn treaties, the territory of other nations that have done them no real harm and are too weak to protect themselves adequately. Yet the peace of the world and the welfare and security of every nation, including our own, is today being threatened by that very thing. …
War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. …
If civilization is to survive the principles of the Prince of Peace must be restored. Trust between nations must be revived.
Most important of all, the will for peace on the part of peace-loving nations must express itself to the end that nations that may be tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from such a course.
One can see and hear the entire speech here.
Vladimir Putin quoted and recapitulated in good part the argument of FDR’s speech in February 2007 — substituting, however, for Japan and Nazi Germany, the United States.
Continuing, then, to expect things to get worse before they get better.
April 24th, 2008
Dr Seuss brought to bear:
The time has come. The time is now. Just go…. I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now?!
April 24th, 2008
As we pack our lives into pickup trucks and head down the dusty road of dearth for Depression, the Times is good to point out that by at least one measure of socioeconomic production the US is still number one.
An old friend who was raised to hate the Soviet Union always refused to grasp that since the advent of the War on Drugs the US has a higher rate of incarceration than the Reds at the height of Stalinism.
(One angle: Seems we freed the slaves then put them in jail.)
Do we live in a Sane Society?
There are other measures. Suicide rates. The now fairly well entrenched fad of adolescents massacring fellow students.
I’ve never, at least since the passing of Santa Claus, been a faithful Christian. But since that same time it has also been clear, in the bones if not between the ears, that the American Civilization (as certain stodgy Brit historians insist on calling it) or, better, the Scientific Civilization, which in the west succeeded Christendom immaturely when the latter blew its brains out in 1914, is off its rocker.
Ungovernable. At odds with the Kind-of-Being-that- is-Human. Chronically mass murderous. And (the most Inconvenient Truth of all) suicidal.
But the new Grand Theft Auto is dynamite. And there’s always Second Life when your first one gets snuffed. (Or …? How does that work?)
April 21st, 2008
If I were a free man, I would live in Italy.
But the dollar/euro is killing that pipedream.
Silvio Berlusconi, too, just won a third tour as prime minister, atop a right-center coalition led by the erstwhile recessionist Northern League (which, generally thinking, considers the poverty and corruption of the South un-Italian and, at least in bygone years, wanted out of the rather abstract republic cobbled together by Cavour (brain), Mazzini (heart) and Garibaldi (sword), not so long ago).
But Italian societies, throughout the peninsula and down into Sicily, are so strong that it seems to matter much less what goes on in the state capital.
Vuolo una vita nuova, dolce e simpatica — c’e un sogno, vero. Pero, io sono uomo, devro [dream] … Triste — ventri anni fa, io parlatto la lingua comme un matto etruscano ….
April 15th, 2008
If trying to figure out whether to buy or sell (stocks, houses …), probably best to grit your teeth and read Ann Pettifor’s latest at the Guardian.
Among other things, she has a remarkable speech from Churchill that seems to describe our credit crisis with perfect accuracy.
If the precedent were to perfectly pertain … Cash would be cool (as opposed to deflating assets).
April 11th, 2008
Aha, a new interview with Carl Oglesby:
– former head of Students for a Democratic Society.
– author of one of the best conversations about US politics of the postwar era — The Yankee and Cowboy War (1977) — which tries to make sense of the domestic terrorism the US experienced from Dallas November 1963 through Memphis and Los Angeles 1968 to Watergate, and is wonderfully written.
Also turns out he was tight, man, with Hillary back in the day:
Oglesby: It was a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close. I always liked her. I thought she was bright and had a lot to say. A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me. Especially given this lie that I was a “Maoist.” I mean, no way! I was the last thing from a Maoist!
Reason: Did you see her when she was first lady?
Oglesby: I wouldn’t begin to be in touch with her now. I know what her enemies would do with a piece of information like that. They would defame me and defame her. There’s no point in it.
Reason: Is there today within her a trace of New Left anti-imperialism?
Oglesby: You got me. I don’t know much about her positions. What I think I know about Hillary Clinton is that she is honest and she’s good-hearted. She’s smart and she has lots of energy and she’s tough. I’m all for her. It’s too bad she and Barack Obama are having a faceoff. Both are good people. But she’s my guy.
Cool.
Hey man, it looks like maybe he read my 9/11 requiem. Here’s me last September:
George W. Bush is an emotionally disordered son of a famous man who found some ground beneath his feet when he was turned into a millionaire by some Cowboy financiers from Texas and told he could ride with them and wear a Stetson.
And here’s Carl last week:
Oglesby: He’s tried to adopt the Cowboy look. He is a Yankee, went to all the Yankee schools, had Yankee money in his blood. He goes to Texas, buys himself a pair of cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and tries to speak with a bit of a drawl.
Cool.
Oglesby: He’s a phony. He’s a bad actor. He’s no more a cowboy than you or I—probably a good deal less. But his handlers grasped that there is a basic collision between the neo-Union and the neo-Confederacy.
Solid.
Oglesby: The Civil War is not over. Its issues continue to echo. Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy, as I use that term, and represents the movement of the Confederacy from the East to the West.
Right on.
April 8th, 2008
As dust tries in vain to settle upon the latest fiasco in Bush’s War (?) and peacemaking terrorists gather garlands from grateful Iraqis, this story looks like the invitation so anxiously awaited by the Likud to go ahead with long anticipated airstrikes on Natanz:
Iran has begun the installation of 6,000 advanced centrifuges in its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, according to state media reports quoting the president.
The announcement on Tuesday marks Iran’s “national day of nuclear technology”, commemorating the day in 2006 when Iran first produced uranium sufficiently enriched to make atomic fuel.
Hard to imagine how even the spoofsters at Psy Ops Mossad could have come up with a more provocative script.
What’s that cheshire cat got up his sleeve?
A response in kind?
Meanwhile Martin & Lewis, err, Rowan & Martin, err, Petraeus & Crocker were treated to polite applause and a few catcalls in the Senate, but jolly jowls were absent on both sides of the aisle.
Neither McCain nor Hillary said anything to stir the typesetters. (If Obama was there I missed him in the bathroom.) Bush-Cheney & Co have contrived to make Iraq one big Improvised Explosive Device and nobody on the Hill wants to touch it in the run up to the November sweeps.
Yet it has never been more clear, as poor Maliki totters, that Pottery Barn Rules rule.
And yet … even the White House seems to have gone dark. Perhaps as the script gets rewritten to make room for the shocking victor in the GOPher beauty pageant.
(Then again, Little Jimmy Grimaldi sez don’t put it past the Dark Side to slip some sugar into McCain’s Gulfstream gas tank. Romney the Robot is the Real Raygun and if Israel got permission from Cheney to Go and Big John goes down in fame and flames, Mitt’s the Man, a shoe-in come November.)
