Month: February 2011 Page 2 of 3

Looks like Gaddafi is in a bad way: reports of brigades defecting, pilots refusing orders, 3 major tribes coming out against him and a Fatwa for his death.

This is interesting, because the lesson Gaddafi learned from the prior revolutions was clearly “use violence early and hard”.  If it doesn’t work, that’s important.

The lesson is the same as in Egypt: what matters is whether the army will obey orders to kill protesters.  You have to make them choose.  The Egyptians won when they marched on the Palace and presented the army with a choice.

What is required is not precisely non-violence: when attacked in Egypt the protesters fought back, but it is “minimal violence” so that the army is presented with a clear choice.

One shouldn’t assume this always works, it doesn’t. Sometimes the army will fire.  Back during Tiannamen, for example, the real question was what the army would do.  For a time it was in question, one army group looked like they might back the protesters.  But in the end, the army came down on the side of the regime, and that’s all she wrote.

While the so-called Jasmine revolution in China has gone nowhere so far, as I’ve long said, the implicit bargain in China is “economic growth in exchange for freedom.”  Chinese workers riot and strike all the time, villages have fought off police and army units.  Chinese workers work in horrible conditions and they are hardcore, the same way that 19th and early 20th century American workers were.  The potential explosion in China is huge, and the Communist party knows it. Economic growth must continue at all costs in China, because the ruling class knows their lives depend on it.

In America and most of the West, well, the ruling class knows (or believes) that no matter how bad they treat their citizens, they won’t revolt.  Revolting isn’t just protesting: in Egypt businesses were systematically shut down, Egypt was near an economic crisis.  In America, showing up and refusing to leave is good (I’m quite heartened by what’s happening in Wisconsin) but more than that is needed: you must shut the system down.  The French had the right idea when they occupied a refinery.

But, at the end of the day, the question is whether the army and the police will use violence.  If push comes to shove in the US, do you think the military will put Americans down?

And what is the simple demand in the US?  Gaddafi or Mubarak has to go is clear and simple.  What’s the simple change protesters can rally around in the US?  Obama has to go?  Wouldn’t fix the problems.  It would almost have to be a list, and there is no clear ideology on the left for what that list would be.  Protesting to just keep what you already have is all well and good, and even necessary, but it won’t stop the decline, it will only slow it.  Protesting not to keep bargaining rights, but to demand, say, card check union organizing, now that would do something.  And I agree with others that organizing recalls in Wisconsin is a first good step.

It’s nice to see some actual reason to hope in the world, as opposed to all the fake hope we are usually offered.  We’ll see how it turns out.  But notice it requires a lot of people willing to die, be beaten, be tortured or raped, to actually create change.

And, on top of that, citing Catholic moral teachings to do so without mentioning teachings on just war (the Iraq war wasn’t and isn’t) or usury, which tie into your own social classes interests does not make you look honest.  As senior managing Principle and founder of “Sovereign Trends, LLC”, you probably doesn’t need the sort of programs you want cut, but you certainly don’t mention  limits on how much your class can suck from the necks of the poor and middle to enrich themselves and I don’t see you advocating radical tax increases on your own class to pay for such frills as public education.

The citing of subsidiarity is also remarkable, since subsidiarity (making decisions at the level best suited to them) would actually suggest, for example, a federal takeover of the entire US primary education system, since it’s very clear that the current system is unfair,  that municipalities often don’t have the necessary resources and that municipalities and states are ensuring students don’t receive either accurate teaching of history or science: which is to say, they have proved they can’t handle the responsibility.  Likewise, State budgets, which are constrained, clearly cannot even handle Medicaid (health care for the poor, whom Jesus cared about a bit, I’m given to understand), so that sort of thing should clearly be entirely federalized.

A man who can call for the slashing on entitlements without mentioning the military or progressive taxation while citing Christianity as his authority is a man who should spend less time worrying about the public good and more about the state of his own soul.

How’s the eye of that needle looking?

Just read a large piece on strategic defaults in the Huffington Post.  That is to say, walking away from bad mortgages you can’t pay off, especially when the value of the loan is more than the value of the house.  Most of them felt horrible for walking away.

The bottom line is this: there is one morality for masters and one for slaves. Your lords and masters, who have made you or are making you into a wage or debt slave, have one morality and you have another.  The masters don’t just walk away from bad debts, they force other people to pay the master’s debts off or they change the laws so that the masters debts don’t count.

It is, for them, a cold clear business decision. They do what is best for them, no matter what the cost to anyone else.  When dealing with the master class, you should operate in the same cold clear fashion: you do what’s best for you and if it hurts a corporation or a rich person, that’s their look out.

Trust me, that’s the way they do it.  The cost of the financial crisis is a millions of destroyed lives, including many many deaths.  You don’t see any of the people who caused it having moral crises over the fact that they caused a depression, do you?

As the sociopaths on Wall Street like to say, they eat what they kill.  What they don’t say is that what they kill, is you.  If you’ve lost your house, if you can’t afford your medicine, if your interest rates or the cost of your food has gone up, if someone you know has died due to poor or not health care, odds are high that’s because they made that choice, because that suffering pays for their bonuses, for their foie gras, vacations in the Hamptoms and so on.

It’s you or them, baby, and they’re determined it’s going to be you.  So keep acting like slaves, so they can dine off your suffering, misery and death.