Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Informed Comment: The Great Reagan Pyramid Scheme Comes Crashing Down

Says Juan Cole in his Informed Comment:

The Republican Party that Nixon invented melded the moneyed classes of the Northeast with the white evangelicals of the South. This odd couple went on to simultaneously steal from and oppress the rest of us. The moneyed classes were happy to let the New Puritans impose their stringent morality, since they could always just buy any licentiousness they wanted, regardless of the law. And the New Puritans were so consumed with cultural issues such as homosexuality, abortion, school prayer and (yes) fighting school desegregation that they were happy to let the northeastern Money Men waltz off with a lion's share of the country's resources, consigning most Americans to stagnant wages and increasing debt. The Reagan revolution consolidated this alliance and brought some conservative Catholic workers into it. These domestic policies at home were complemented by wars and belligerence abroad, which further took the eye of the public off the epochal bank robbery being conducted by the American neo-Medicis, and which were a useful way of throwing billions in government tax revenue to the military-industrial complex, which in turn funded the think tanks and reelection campaigns of the right wing politicians. The Reagan fascination with private armies and funding anti-communist death squads contributed mightily to the creation of al-Qaeda, blowback from which fuelled even bigger Pentagon budgets, spiralling upward and feeding on itself. Terrorism is much better than Communism as a bogey man, since you can just intimate that there are a handful of dangerous people out there somewhere, and force the public to pay over $1 trillion to combat them. In fact, of course, less US interventionism abroad would create less blowback, and genuine threats are better addressed through good police work by multilingual FBI agents than by a $700 billion Pentagon budget. As a result of the Second Gilded Age and its serf-like subservience to big capital, most corporations in the US don't pay any income taxes, despite doing $2.5 trillion annually in business. The Reagan Revolution included the stupid idea that you can cut taxes, starve government, abolish regulation of securities, banks, & etc., and still grow the economy. The irony is that capitalist markets need to be regulated to avoid periodically becoming chaotic (as in 'chaos theory,') but the people who most benefit from regulation are most zealous in attempting to abolish or blunt it. What those policies did was create the preconditions for a long-term bubble or set of bubbles that benefited (for a while) the wealthiest 3 million Americans and harmed everyone else. The average wage of the average worker is lower now than in 1973 and has been lower or flat for the past 35 years. That's the condition of the 300 million or so Americans. In the meantime, the top 1 percent has multiplied its wealth many times over and now takes home 20% of the national income, owning some 45 percent of the privately held wealth in the US. The Right keeps promising us growth, but it turns out that "growth" is mainly for them, i.e. for the 3 million (and indeed mainly for about 100,000 within the 3 million). Those 3 million are a new aristocracy, lords of the economy, who reward each other with tens of millions in bonuses for ceremonial reasons that have nothing to do with the jobs they actually perform. Bush has been trying to make them a hereditary aristocracy by getting rid of the estate tax. That is why banks are refusing the government bailout if it restricts the salaries of the top officers-- you don't mess with the feudal lord's prerogatives. The enormous wealth of a thin sliver or people at the top of US society allows them to buy members of congress and to write the legislation that regulates their industries. Congress capitulates to this 'regulatory capture' because its members have to buy hugely expensive television ads to remain competitive in elections. So they fundraise from the rich, and the rich have expectations (as Keating did of McCain). These problems could be fixed with a graduated income tax and a closing of tax loopholes ( after we get out of the recession or crash or whatever this is); by legislation criminalizing regulatory capture; by requiring mass media to run political ads for free as a public service (the public owns the airwaves); and by much shortening the election season (please).

Maybe it's time for Americans to start thinking that the Religious Right, all those New Puritans, are only after power to seek their own agenda, not a gay agenda but their own rising of Armageddon, in their own words, making The Rapture come. And, serious as they are, they're on the way to bomb the earth.

Informed Comment: The Great Reagan Pyramid Scheme Comes Crashing Down

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Globalize This!

Do you think it's worth of opening your feed reader to awake at words like these: "Uganda's controversial ethics and integrity minister who last month called for the wearing of miniskirts to be made illegal said Saturday he believed civilization was being threatened by gays."?

Wait a minute, apart of the miniskirt thingy, where else have one heard about homosexuality being such a civilization threat? Oh, yes, of course!

This guy James Nsaba Buturo went on adding misconceptions over misconceptions such as that of "globalization of homosexuality". Well, signor James, sorry to disappoint you, but there's no such a thing. What happens is that we're living in the 21st century, dear. There's been homosexuality in Uganda for ages. The problem now, for people like you especially, is that globalization in its best aspects such as the Internet, with its quick spread of news, gossips and MySpaces or Facebooks make easier for Ugandan homosexuals to connect and know they're the a rare species of monster you want them to believe they are. Information is the key, and they can surf the web to find out that they are just normal people, that there are places in this world where people with their same feelings are treated with respect, like human beings. And the same happens with homosexuals worldwide: Ugandans, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Indians, Saudis, Moroccans and Americans.

But of course, narrow minded people will always rise up to demand a stupid solution to a problem that only exists in their minds. Hey, forbid miniskirts because there are weak minded people and it can cause accidents. It's not the miniskirt, stupid: it's the weakness of your mind. And you're the real accident.