Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Power

Stop treating monsters as reasonable people

By

On January 17, 2011

Comments

Over the last few years, and in particular in the last couple, I’ve noticed something about myself: I’ve become a lot more rude in my political dealings, including with many people I used to consider allies.  At first this worried me a bit, because I couldn’t quite pin down why, beyond the fact that I was angry.

Now I’m not someone who believes anger is always a bad thing.  I think certain things should make you angry, and if they don’t, something’s wrong with you.  When people are dying, being raped, being tortured, being denied basic rights, being beaten and so on, you should get angry.  You should use that anger as a weapon and as fuel for the fight.

Still, anger isn’t a strategy, or even a tactic, and one has to be careful, because anger can blind you and turn you against those who should be your allies.

And that’s the crux.  Allies.

What I’ve come to realize lately is that I’m not on the same side as a lot of people.  If you’re for the Afghan war, aka. for eternal war, I’m not on your side.  If you believe in indefinite detention or the President’s right to assassinate whoever he wants, I’m not on your side.  If you believe that Wikileaks is evil and that citizens should be kept in the dark as to what their governments are doing, then I’m not on your side.

Through the Bush years opposition to Bush made a lot of people seem like friends, who weren’t.  Sure, we all hated Bush (yes, hated.  I hate people who torture and engage in aggressive war, and I think that’s the appropriate response), but that hatred, that opposition, concealed the fact that a lot of people didn’t really object to what Bush was doing, they just objected to the fact that it was being done by a Republican, or that it was being done incompetently.  They would have been ok with the same policies if they’d worked out, as with all the “liberals” and “progressives” who were pro-Iraq war until it turned into a clusterfuck.

The Wikileas imbroglio was a real turning point for me.  At least half the “progressives” I know revealed themselves as, simply, supporters of authoritarianism; revealed themselves as mushrooms who wanted daddy to keep them in the dark and feed them shit.  Revealed themselves as fools who didn’t either understand or, worse, believe that government exists to serve its citizens, who have a right to know what it’s doing in their name.

But while the watershed, it was merely the latest in a string of horrible behavior from the “left”.  Whether it was teacher’s unions stealing food stamp money to pay for their raises, unions selling out their own members to support Barack Obama’s health care bill, which was bad for most union members or whether it was the progressive caucus promising to vote against any HCR bill without the public option, then folding like wet cardboard, it was clear that there was no spine and no solidarity on the left.  Every little interest group was always willing to sell out everyone else, sometimes for their own interests, but often not even for that: the leadership of organizations was so corrupt that they would sell out their own members interests so they could feel like members of the DC Village.

I have no time for these people.  I have no politeness or kindness for them.  They are traitors and in many cases cowards, and their actions or lack of actions are, objectively, killing or impoverishing people, both in America or abroad.

So screw politeness, and screw reasonableness.  Reasonableness in the current political environment means “willing to sell out the people whose interests she or he is supposed to care about.”

So count me out.  I’m not interested in being reasonable, if reasonable means “a spineless sell out”.  I’m not interested in being pragmatic, if pragmatic means “understands that nothing can actually be done to fix any problem”, and I’m not interested in being polite to people who make their living by destroying lives or apologizing for those who destroy lives.

America is going down, and the world is spiraling into an age of war because everyone wants to be “reasonable” rather than do the right thing for their own people.  Everyone who matters wants to pander to the rich, rather than care for the masses.  And as for the masses, they have treated politics as a spectator sport, allowed themselves to be lied to and made fools of, and have and will continue to reap the bitter harvest.

You not only have only the rights you are willing to fight for, you have only the economic livelihood you are willing to fight for.  Americans, being unwilling to fight for either, will soon have neither.

And I have nothing but contempt for those who have led them to this impasse, and with them, much of the world.

The Kabuki Congress and Presidency

By

On December 15, 2010

Comments

Ok, another edition of pointing out the painfully obvious.

Most votes in Congress are Kabuki.  There was never any chance that Bush tax cuts weren’t going to be extended, and this was obvious far before the election, for example.  Unions were never going to get the Employee Free Choice Act.

Also, stop paying attention to who votes for what.  If a Dem votes against an obnoxious bill, it is almost always because leadership has released them to vote against it.  Close votes almost never really are.

Dozens of Dems in the House promised not to vote for a health care bill without a public option.  Leave aside what you think of it, given that they broke that promise as a group, why would you trust them on anything?

Obama in specific, and the Congressional leadership in general thinks that their problem in 2010 with the base was because they didn’t have enough show votes which failed.  So they’re going to have a lot of show votes.  But virtually everything that passes is essentially what Obama wants to pass.  (For example, the stimulus bill was essentially identical to Obama’s original stimulus bill.)

If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be a “moderate” Republican.  He is not a progressive, not a liberal and neither is Harry Reid.  Pelosi would be liberal in a different world, but she will do what the President tells her to do, she’s a good soldier.  Originally she wasn’t going to pass TARP, for example, unless an equal percentage of Republicans voted for it, but when Obama came out in favor of it, she fell into line.

There is no constituency in Congress for liberal policy.  None.  Even those who prefer liberal policy, like Sanders and Pelosi, will not do anything to actually make sure it happens, or to stop conservative policy.

This is why I generally don’t write about legislative fights any more. There is no point, the outcome is usually determined long before the actual vote, and everything you see is just theater for the rubes.

We are past the point where legislative actions matter.  At this point, assuming the political system can be reformed at all, you require new leadership, capable of holding legislators to principles.  You require outside groups who will hold legislators responsible, which means not micro-politics groups.  Virtually ever micro-politics group, that is any group which looks after one interest or one constituency, will sell out liberal interests.  So you have teachers unions accepting wages paid for by cutting food stamps (ie. starving the children they teach) and you  have the auto workers endorsing the Korean-US trade deal which is bad for everyone but them.

A movement of the left made up of self-interested groups is no movement at all.  The first, second and last rule of movement politics is solidarity.  Any movement made of people or groups which will sell out the rest of the movement is not a movement, and they will be played off against each other to give cover for the worst sort of policy.  If you are interested only in your own issue, whether that is environmental, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, trade, unionization or whatever, then you are part of the problem and your willingness to betray is why the left fails over and over again.

Hang together, or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said.

The left has chosen to hang separately.

Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round

By

On December 8, 2010

Comments

The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.

The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:

Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres.  If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.

Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration.  Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free.

To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small.  Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?

This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website.  As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially.

While there is no comparison between what Assange has done and what happened on 9/11 (his actions are those of a free press), the rabid and indiscrimant overreaction of the the US in particular and the West in general is similar.   And what it has done is make Assange into a martyr, an icon for freedom of speech and a symbol of politically motivated repression.  It has done the same for Wikileaks and made Wikileaks a cause celebre.

It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war?  No big deal.  Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty?  We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions!  Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly?  We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do.

Which leads us to the rape charges against Assange.  Given what we know right now about the case against him, it appears that is going to come down to he said/she said.  Unless the Swedish prosecutors have a smoking gun, even if Assange is convicted, most of his supporters will never believe the case wasn’t at the least heavily tainted by political pressure, and at worst, a set up.  And if he is extradited from Sweden to the US to face some sort of charges, the howling will reach the high heavens.  He will be a martyr for the cause.  The more he is persecuted, the more many will rally around both him, and his child, Wikileaks.

Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the case against him is completely tainted.  He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.

And so he has won.  Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round.  He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.

Of Course Politicians Don’t Listen to Ordinary Citizens. Why Would They?

By

On July 18, 2010

Comments

So, apparently 68% of Americans think that the political class doesn’t listen to them.  After TARP, where calls were running between 100:1 to 1200:1 against, passed, the failure of Congress to get out of Iraq after 2006, the failure of the 70%+ supported public option, and on and on, the only mysterious thing is why it’s only 68%.

But why should the political class listen?  They get the majority of their reelection funds from corporations and the rich.  Their spouses and children are given good jobs by such donors, and if ordinary people do actually ever vote them out for not looking after their interests, well, as long as they went down doing what they were supposed to, they’ll still be very well taken care of.

Get elected, do what your corporate masters tell you to, and you’ll never ever have to worry about money ever again.

Only a sucker or an idealist would do anything else.

This is the fundamental problem with the US.  There is no accountability for the political class.  They and those who take care of them have made sure of it.  Go to war with a nation which has never attacked the US based on a big lie propaganda campaign, or spy on millions of Americans, or torture, or deregulate the economy so that Wall Street can cash in and crash the economy, and hey, so what, there’s no cost for you.

And as long as there is no cost for them, they’ll keep doing it. Just like Wall Street, having been bailed out after crashing the world economy, will do it again.  They got rich doing it, why wouldn’t they do it again.

They’d have to be suckers or idealists not to.

Why Can’t Progressives Lobby Or Fundraise Effectively?

By

On July 29, 2009

Comments

In response to my post on American politicians actually being pretty cheap to bribe compared to how much money the acts they past give those who pay them, DavidN asked:

Since politicians can be bought so cheaply, why is it only the big corporations that play the game?  Why don’t progressive groups, say, tell America that, if every American were to chip in $1, they could have more bargaining power than all of the big corporations? ($300 million > $283 million)

I know the big unions do it too, but why not more?  Why are all the progressive fundraising outlets seemingly focused on giving money to politicians’ election campaings with few, if any, strings attached?

Then, in a double whammy, Lord Mike said:

Act Blue DESPERATELY need s lobbying arm especially since so many of our candidates are turning their backs on us!

Y’know, both of these things are true.  Progressives need an effective lobbying arm, and to the best of my knowledge, other than perhaps MoveOn and unions (by which I mostly mean SEIU), we don’t have one.  And while I love my union friends, they have their own priorities, which while they often match up with progressives, don’t always.  As for MoveOn, well, let’s say that they can’t do everything.  The whip effort from FDL, Kos and others on healthcare which is going on now is doing yeoman work, but I’m sure they’ll agree that more money and full time lobbyists would make a huge difference.

So I’m genuinely throwing this out there.  I don’t know why we don’t have really effective fund-raising which is sufficient to do effective lobbying.

Why?

Page 14 of 14

Previous

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén