The WAWG Blog

How many wars are today’s neocons willing to promote for the sake of regime change that grows corporate profit?

“The demonizing of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin appears to know no bounds, with the White House and The New York Times going out of their way to mock his request for a meeting with President Barack Obama and then ladling on insults about Putin’s looks and posture”

” … even during Josef Stalin’s brutal reign and during the height of the Cold War, American presidents regularly met with their Soviet counterparts. They did so in a mature and respectful way despite serious disputes between the two nations. From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, presidents recognized the need to coordinate on important geopolitical issues whatever their personal feelings about the Soviet leaders.”

Are these neocons coercing President Obama into publically disrespecting other world leaders?

“Though I’m told that Obama understands how inaccurate this black-and-white depiction is, he feels that he must go with the flow to avoid being denounced by the neocons and liberal interventionists as “weak.” Thus, Press Secretary Earnest was dispatched to describe Putin as “desperate” and lacking good posture.”

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Mr. President,

I really find it hard to understand that you’ve managed to resist the opposition and get the Iran Deal, yet that resistance has tiptoed away as you repeat a very negative, pro-confrontational approach in Syria and Ukraine.

“Conservatives without Conscience,” a minority in America defined by John Dean in his book by the same title, accept the collateral damage of their many wars, including innocent American children and many others taken by mass killings – mass killings that spring from both their war on Ameircans and others not like them, and their denial of limitations on their freedom to punish others, here and anywhere in the world, with our personal and military weapons of mass destruction.

Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children [and children of the world] year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

When will American voters wake up to realize they can change this? Be the change you want to see. Participate in the political process.

We need a “political revolution” in 2016 to promote peace, not punishment for profit and war.

Unsustainable economic growth and its systemic impacts on the wealth gap, human population, and Earth’s climate are enslaving and abusing all Peoples.

• Wage theft, debt slavery, and expanding poverty drive the exponential growth of the income and wealth gap and engender a stealthy form of slavery.
• Lack of universal health care, restricting women’s health care, underfunding of free public education, and growing poverty results in an unsustainable population growth which corporations prefer so as to sell more stuff.
• The release of massive amounts of green house gases to support unsustainable economic and population growth blankets the earth and keeps the Sun’s heat from escaping into space.
• All of this, growth of population and poverty for the 99%, accelerating economic growth for the ONE%, defunding the public wealth, and their combined impact on global warming, take away individual freedoms and threaten to drain both the Earth’s life-sustaining resources and life itself.
• All of this is hidden from us by the wealthiest among us who own the media that are also focused on economic growth above all else, including the TRUTH of unsustainable growth.

(This is based on a new section of Professor Lakoff’s re-released Don’t Think of an Elephant that addresses the systemic impacts of Thomas Piketty’s revelations on the global wealth gap.)

We need a massive and broad “political revolution.”

Henry Giroux re-evaluates the works of Orwell and Huxley compares them to the new American Authoritarianism and proposes actions to reverse it.

Both authors provide insight into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening indication of the unfolding 21st century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control, “Big Brother” intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the punishing state – which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence – and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow, market-driven orbits of privatization – these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.

This is the Big Brother that pushes youthful protests out of the public spaces they attempt to occupy. This is the hypernationalistic Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that has come to resemble an open-air prison for the dispossessed. This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the dark authoritarian universe of the 1% with their control over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, their retreat into gated communities manned by SWAT-like security forces.

Fear and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother. Fear is managed and is buttressed by normalizing the neoliberal claim that it be accepted as a general condition of society, dealt with exclusively as an individual consideration, disassociated from the politics and moral panics endemic to an authoritarian society, and be used to mobilize the individual’s fear of the other. In the surveillance state, fear is misplaced from the political sphere and emergence of an authoritarian government to the personal concern with the fear of surviving, not getting ahead, unemployment and the danger posed by the growing legions of the interminable others. As the older order dies, a new one struggles to be born, one that often produces a liminal space that gives rise to monsters, all too willing to kidnap, torture and spy on law-abiding citizens while violating civil liberties. As Antonio Gramsci once suggested, such an interregnum offers no political guarantees, but it does provide or at least gestures toward reimagining “what is to be done,” how it might be done and who is going to do it.

In spite of his vivid imagination, “Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.” …

… Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression whereas Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions, diversions and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and sensational performance for public display. …

… Corporations use new technologies to track spending habits and collect data points from social media so as to provide us with consumer goods that match our desires, employ face recognition technologies to alert store salespeople to our credit ratings, and so it goes. …

… the most dangerous repercussions of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted collecting of information by the government: We must also be attentive to the ways in which being spied on has become not only normalized, but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure quotient for consumers who use new digital technologies and social networks – not least of all by and for simulating experiences of community.

… Just as we can envision Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopian fables morphing over time from “realistic novels” into a “real life documentary,” and now into a form of “reality TV,” privacy and freedom have been radically altered in an age of permanent, nonstop global exchange and circulation. That is, in the current moment, the right to privacy and freedom has been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism’s unending desire to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of both government and corporate regimes of surveillance.

… Each day, new evidence surfaces pointing to the emergence of a police state that has produced ever more sophisticated methods for surveillance in order to enforce a mass suppression of the most essential tools for democratic dissent: “the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.” …

… It is worth repeating that Orwell’s vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state look mild next to the emergence of a corporate-state surveillance system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country and potentially use that data to repress any vestige of dissent.

… Aided by a public pedagogy, produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption and public relations tactics, a growing regime of repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market to support the widespread embrace of an authoritarian culture and police state.

Relentlessly entertained by spectacles, people become not only numb to violence and cruelty but begin to identify with an authoritarian worldview. As David Graeber suggests, the police “become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view.” …

… Violence has become the organizing force of a society driven by a noxious notion of privatization in which it becomes difficult for ideas to be lifted into the public realm. Under such circumstances, politics is eviscerated because it now supports a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the idea that social values, public trust and communal relations are fundamental to a democratic society. This violence against the bonds of sociality undermines and dissolves the nature of social obligations as freedom becomes an exercise in self-development rather than social responsibility. …

By integrating insights drawn from both Huxley and Orwell, it becomes necessary for any viable critical analysis to take a long view, contextualizing the contemporary moment as a new historical conjuncture in which political rule has been replaced by corporate sovereignty, consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship, and the only value that matters is exchange value. Precarity has replaced social protections provided by the state, just as the state cares more about building prisons and infantilizing the US public than it does about providing all of its citizens with quality educational institutions and health care. The United States is not just dancing into oblivion as Huxley suggested; it is also being pushed into the dark recesses of an authoritarian state.

The co-existent lack of interest in the loss of privacy, citizenship redefined as obedient shopping, individual greed and responsibility suppressing social responsibility and caring for others, the indifference to violence against the 99% in the context of a “war on …” mentality, and the lack of citizens participation in the political process, expose the growing authoritarian state in America.

The situation is dire when people no longer seem interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom, which lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dream world of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance-punishing state that merges Orwell’s Big Brother with Huxley’s mind-altering soma.

Giroux suggests five actions to ignite a new resistance to put a stop to America’s growing hybridized, authoritarian, dystopia:

First, there is a need for what can be called a revival of the radical imagination. This call would be part of a larger project “to reinvent democracy in the wake of the evidence that, at the national level, there is no democracy – if by ‘democracy’ we mean effective popular participation in the crucial decisions affecting the community.” Democracy entails a challenge to the power of those individuals, financial elites, ruling groups and large-scale enterprises that have hijacked democracy. At the very least, this means refusing to accept minimalist notions of democracy in which elections become the measure of democratic participation. Far more crucial is the struggle for the development of public spaces and spheres that produce a formative culture in which the US public can imagine forms of democratic self-management of what can be called “key economic, political, and social institutions.”

Second, young people and progressives need to create the institutions and public spaces in which education becomes central as a counternarrative that serves to both reveal, interrogate and overcome the common sense assumptions that provide the ideological and affective webs that tie many people to forms of oppression.

Rejecting [Massive] Criminalization [through wars on drugs, poor, women, minorities, and youth.]

… individualization of the social is one of the most powerful ideological weapons used by the current authoritarian regime and must be challenged.

Under the star of Orwell, morality loses its emancipatory possibilities and degenerates into a pathology in which misery is denounced as a moral failing. Under the neo-Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest, the ultimate form of entertainment becomes the pain and humiliation of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, who are no longer an object of compassion, but of ridicule and amusement. This becomes clear in the endless stories we are now hearing from US politicians disdaining the poor as moochers who don’t need welfare but stronger morals.

Lastly, any attempt to make clear the massive misery, exploitation, corruption and suffering produced under casino capitalism must develop both a language of critique and possibility. It is not enough to simply register what is wrong with US society; it is also crucial to do so in a way that enables people to recognize themselves in such discourses in a way that both inspires them to be more critical and energizes them to do something about it.

Orwell and Huxley saw America “devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice” but over the last 4 decades America has devolved into a despotic authoritarian state that neither “Orwell nor Huxley could have imagined.” Reversing this violent, corporate lead, course will take many “spirited forms of collective resistance willing to reclaim the reigns of political emancipation.”

For Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for Orwell, optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope. Only time will tell us whether either Orwell or Huxley was right. But one thing is certain: History is open and the space of the possible is always larger than the one currently on display.

From Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist, but what does that term mean?:

There are essentially two types of socialists in modern Western democratic politics. Social democrats are effectively what the left is in nearly every Western European and North American country. They might find socialism laudable, but have made peace with enacting changes to capitalism to make it more equitable. Social democrats enacted policies typically referred to as the mixed economy or welfare state, such as Social Security and universal health care. While U.S. Democrats don’t use these labels, social democrats generally define the center-left of the political spectrum in the West.

The above article makes some other points that are worth commenting on.

1. What the author calls “libertarian socialism” is also called Democracy at Work, by professor Richard Wolff, a self-taught marxist economist.

2. The author of the article indicts the profit-centric media by claiming they would be harder on Sanders than on Clinton. Thus Sanders would supposedly lose even though he represents the values of more Americans, than all the Republican candidates combined. This was not only self-contradictory but did its part in promoting a self-fulfilling prophecy that is applied to populists by both Reps and Wall $treet Dems.

To add to the above article on socialism is this one, by Richard Wolff, that reviews the history of socialism definitions and redefines it for the 21st century:

… Doing so culminates in new definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on democratizing the workplace – at the micro-level. That is the key change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for privately owned means of production and substituting planning for markets. …

Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in clear distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism. Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which socialist goal to set and pursue.

#FeelTheBern …

Back in January, 2007, as The Shrub, GWB, began his final year in office I wrote a blog post titled Bush’s Administration has Neocons Everywhere According to Bush and Rumsfeld. In September of last year, I wrote another posting called, Neocons Left Over from Reagan and Bush II Using ISIS Crisis to Expand Right-wing Authoritarian Regime Change Policy.

This last article was written with information from Consortium News and journalist Robert Parry, who is known for exposing the Iran/Contragate of President Reagan. Well, with all the talk of war in Ukraine and Syria here is a new article from Robert Parry on the neocons and “Liberal interventionists” who strive for “regime change” for the sake of democracy, freedom, and the expansion of the American empire. And of course, these war mongers are supported, not questioned, by our profit-centric media.

Liberal interventionist Samantha Power along with neocon allies appears to have prevailed in the struggle over how President Obama will conduct his foreign policy in his last months in office, promoting aggressive strategies that will lead to more death and destruction.

…

Today, Power is a leading force opposing meaningful negotiations over Syria and Ukraine, again staking out moralistic positions rejecting possible power-sharing with Assad in Syria and blaming the Ukraine crisis entirely on the Russians. She doesn’t seem all that concerned about impending genocides against Assad’s supporters in Syria or ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Growing the American Empire has deadly consequences for America’s sons and daughters, and many others.

• Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
• Communicating Our American Values and Vision
• Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain
• The essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic

The above list provides the subtitles for four books. Books on understanding how the brain works and it’s effects on winning in politics.  I’ve read three of them and am reading the fourth.

Winning political campaigns is a lot of hard work. It’s about building/training a team, access to voter databases, tools for identifying likely supporters from those databases, making phone calls, knocking on doors, getting funding for a non-profitable endeavor, and inspiring your supporters to get out and vote.

Republicans are wining elections because they do all of the above. Democrats have been failing and their main weakness is inspiring the supporters to go to their polls and vote. Facts and policies alone don’t inspire. Vision and what’s morally right for America do.

The four books above discuss how and why Democrats are in this situation of losing the messaging/persuasion game. What does it take to inspire supporter to vote? Here is a partial list:

• Inspiring supporters requires a communication network for the party’s moral messages. Democrats don’t have one.
• Inspiring supporters requires moral value messages that reach the hearts and basic beliefs of your supporters. Democrats mostly communicate facts.
• Inspiring supporters requires respecting fellow Democrats and not dismissing their efforts to further the cause.
• Inspiring supporters requires consistency in the moral message.  Getting Democrats to be consistent and unified is like herding cats.
• Inspiring supporters requires that you frame your message around your moral values. Democrats would rather just negate Repub values.  I’m not him/her.
• Inspiring your supporters means understanding what inspires your opponents supporters and why.
• Inspiring your supporters means avoiding frames and moral values used by Republicans. Democrats need to learn how to reframe the debate and avoid inspiring votes for their opponent.
• Inspiring you supporters means knowing both your moral values and the moral values of your opponent, and why your moral values are right for all Americans and theirs are only right for a few Americans, about 22% of the population.

All four books discuss the above list and much more.

Some might say that learning about how the brain works, and framing and reframing are too academic for the average Democrat. However, until we learn what the Republicans know about inspiring voters, Demcrats will continue to lose political races. We have something to learn and we have a teacher to teach us!

Also, as a college grad, my greatest difficulty with reading the one technical book in the bunch was that it was my first attempt and I found I was having to re-learn what my basic moral values and basic beliefs were. What was the right set of moral values for America? What were the moral values of America as written in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and what do my moral values say about the moral values I want for America? So, I don’t recommend the first book I read, The Political Mind, as a staring point. Instead, I suggest that if you are going to run as a Democrat for any office, or you know someone who intends to, you should read the updated version of Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff.

Professor Lakoff is a cognitive linguist. In other words, he studies how the brain works with respect to language. Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America inspired Lakoff’s research into the workings of the brain as it responds to words and phrases. As a progressive, and as an expert on language, he was puzzled that he didn’t understand why a large group of people would respond positively to this document. What was it about the brains of the individuals for whom this document made sense, but made no sense to him.

One last point. President Obama’s campaigns made good use of reframing and reaching out to the hearts, moral values, and basic beliefs of his supporters. He did more than build and train a team. He did more than find supporters and contact them. He did more than just list facts and talk about his policy. He was inspirational.  He was pursueasive.

Here is a list of typical “pro TPP statements” with my cons.

“free trade has boosted American commerce more than it has hurt.” On a macro scale, I’ll stipulate to that. However, that benefit has not been fairly distributed across our economy. Just look at income and wealth inequality – that gap, that began growing in the 80s, has become excessive during the life of NAFTA and other free market fundamentalist (neoliberal) policies.

” … the deal that would eliminate tariffs and other financial barriers to trade, create reliable cross-border supply chains, harmonize trade and investment regulations, and protect intellectual property. Sounds like a no-brainer.” Sorry, something as unknown and complex as TPP can never be a no-brainer. Anything this complex needs more eyes looking it over than just the eyes of those who stand to benefit the most.

” … granting President Barack Obama fast-track authority to close a deal … ” Checks and balances, a founding element of this nation, keeps those with power from becoming abusive with that power. This is “trust but verify,” but without the verify.

” … that is good for the American economy.” Again there is the macro view for America’s economy, but how fairly is this “good” shared with the workers of America? Won’t TPP just widen the income and wealth gaps across the world?

” … we do know that trade between the three countries [NAFTA] has accelerated.” And again, was this good for everyone in these countries or just those at the top? Avoiding corporate limits may be good for business, but is unfettered business good for citizens?

” … Mexico now exports more vehicles than Japan to the United States …” Is that because Japan moved their manufacturing jobs to Mexico for the lower labor and shipping costs? Good for a few Toyota executives and major shareholders, but bad for many Toyota workers.

“Manufacturing has doubled in Mexico, slowing illegal immigration by Mexican citizens to a virtual halt, ” Illegal immigration is another complex situation and attributing a near-term slow down to just manufacturing is ignoring other near-term factors like the Great Recession, the border fence, the increase in Border Patrol staff, failing to pass immigration reform, and fear of ranting racist politicians. What does illegal immigration look like during the life of NAFTA (12/8/1993)? Here are a couple of graphics that answer this question.

NAFTA became law on 12/8/1993 …

” … workers have moved into more advanced manufacturing and service jobs.” An important descriptor is missing: “low paying.”

” … companies can’t get enough skilled workers, and the unemployment rate is well below the national average.” And the reason for the lack of skilled workers is excessive tax breaks for corporations and thus lower funding for the public education systems. The American free market fundamentalist economy is good for business but not for educating school children and skilled workers.

” … 38 percent tariff on beef exported to Japan [will be eliminated] …” What’s good for the cattle and corn industries is not necessarily good for the ranchers, farmers, or the health of the Japanese people. Also, won’t increased demand coupled with strains on our ability to produce mean higher food prices for Americans?

” … international consumers can afford to buy more American goods.” This is probably especially true compared to other countries where wages and citizenship dues are higher. However, these reduced tariffs will never result in increased wages for workers, only increased corporate profits and more excessive executive compensation.

“The argument for free trade is that it lowers prices to the consumer and provides more options.” No. Free trade lowers corporate costs and the savings will accrue to corporate executives and major shareholders – not lower product prices. Also, with more and more mergers and acquisitions, there are fewer producers and fewer options for consumers.

” … reauthorize Trade Adjustment Assistance, a federal program helps people and businesses that lose out in these deals to move into new businesses.” Does anyone think that the anti-government Republican controlled Congress or a pro-TPP President will even dream about reauthorizing this “federal program?”

“The one thing that will squelch the genius of commerce is putting limits on it, …” This goes totally against our founding principle of checks and balances! Those with unrestrained power are prone to abuse that power. International mega banks without limits are now too big to fail, or prosecute. They know no limitation and fear no retribution for their past or future transgressions. In fact, trying to limit international commerce will result in governments getting sued by corporations with the ratification of TPP:

The chapter covers agreements on investments from one TPP nation to another, including empowering foreign firms to “sue” other states’ governments, as well as regulations around investor-state dispute settlements and tribunals.

If our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” then empowering corporations to sue the only entity, whose moral purpose is to protect and empower its people, makes our government of the corp, by the corp, for the corp. Then protecting and empowering corporations is the moral purpose of government and people are disposable.

With every responsibility, there are consequences. Hopefully, lessons learned from the consequences result in more responsible future actions. Also, every freedom must come with some limitations. These limitations prevent abuse of the freedom and will require laws where self-restraint fails and society suffers.

TPP will have unfortunate consequences for most citizens, and corporations will never be held responsible for the abuse of the new, anti-government, freedoms granted by TPP.

TPP is not what most people and the earth need, now or ever. It will amplify the externalized, harmful, costs of free market fundamentalism from the past 4 decades and assure the destruction of life as we know it, except for the extremely wealthy who can afford their own protection and empowerment.