Thursday, July 23, 2009

infants and business

What is it with this culture that needs to commodify everything? Having just went through the big business wet dream that is marriage, now my wife and I are in the process of having our first child. There is no aspect of our culture that hasn't been exploited for profit is there? The wedding at least was primarily an orgy of small capitalism, as most of the transactions were with local businesses but babies require vast amounts of, uh, stuff. Makes you wonder how people reproduced before the modern corporation, somehow they must have though because we're all here. Huge numbers of gadgets, movies, books, classes, accesories and every one gets a healthy slice of profit for this company or that one.

What has really got my goat today though was the realization last night of just what the corporate establishment will do to punish parents for not depending on their wonderful products like formula. I remember reading once that Nestle was able to weasel their way into IMF structural loans and convince African mothers to stop breastfeeding in favor of Nestle's brand powdered formula. Only unsanitary local water supplies ended up poisoning lots of babies, ugh. Here however, propaganda and the extremely family-unfriendly American workplace have convinced an awful lot of Moms to use formula instead of breast-feeding like nature intended. As yet, American water supplies are still pretty safe (for now) due largely to the legacy of socialism in the early 20th Century that meant many municipal waterworks were owned by the public.

The lousy privatized water service I am stuck with will have to wait for another entry. We went to the breastfeeding class last night and got the standard shock lesson, this time about pumps. Apparently, commercial breastpumps are made in such a way that "they cannot be reused" because of the possibility of contamination. However, the rental pumps used by the hospital have a filter to prevent this. So, if new Moms refuse to cough up the huge outlay for artifical formula, corporate America will punish you by forcing a big outlay for a brand new pump. My first thought was, "what could the excuse possibly be for not putting filters into these things?" I mean, my friggin' aquarium air pump has a filter! Every baby gets a brand new pump, or you can cough up money for a rental, or just give in and buy formula.

No opportunity for profit goes unexploited. Until now, I had no idea of the immense shadow economy that revolves around strollers, cribs, carseats, MOTHERF%CKINGNONBIODEGRADABLE DISPOSABLE DIAPERS and so on. I wonder what the punishment will be for using cloth diapers?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

trolls a plenty

So, now the story is that President Obama is losing ground in polls and support for his agenda is sinking. Suprize suprize, reality sucks doesn't it? These bankers act like they really run the country and as long as no one pushes back, they de facto are in charge. To say nothing of the rest of the business community, do they really believe that even the token reforms the admin-istration is contemplating are somehow a threat. Or have el rushbo and his clones really "gone rogue"? Here is the reason that the president's poll numbers have dropped; most of us on the left have realized that he and the Democratic Party have either been bought off or do not have the guts to face the real enemies of America. The rump of republicans have displayed complete intransigence and all of the angry white guys out there continue to oppose anything rational and sensible.

It takes an almost inhuman state of conditioning to persist in believing that the "policies" of bush and company, which are almost entirely responsible for wrecking everything good about America, need to be continued and strengthened to fix what they broke in the first place. But, the propaganda machine has done such a good job of breaking the spirit of that weird brother-in-law of your's or the guy no one likes at the office that they continue to spout unthinking diatribes against anything different. I mention this because you can go to just about any political blog and find at least one troll who will parrot something that the feces chucking monkeys on talk radio has said, completely distracting the rest of the herd from the topic at hand.

Two things about these guys, what exactly are they getting out of their subsurvience to power and why do they throw their heroes under the bus whenever someone calls them on plagerizing wingnut talking points? Fighting tooth and nail against your best interests is something I just cannot understand, is it simply shadenfreude? The same trolls who swallow everything their leaders tell them also have an almost fanatical desire to appear independent in their thinking. So one will rant about taxes, spending, illegal immigrants, socialism and when you say all the things you'd like to say to rush or hannity, right away it's "I don't believe or side with them". Absolute horseshit! And at every turn, anyone who is not 100% in lockstep with the conservative movement is automatically a communist and branded with the same vitriol that trolls reserve for Nancy Pelosi and Michael Moore.

ENOUGH! It really is past time to fight dirty and treat these people and the feces chuckers who hide behind the first amendment like cowering mice like the enemies they are!

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Hope, but not holding my breath for good health reform

So President Obama is taking a page from my hero LBJ on getting the sausage made, good to hear. I often think that if 'ole Lame Brains, as my Dad used to call him, was still around we wouldn't be facing right-wing delusions of relevence, or the polarizing influence of vast wealth and income inequality of today. I do want to believe that President Obama is as tough and crafty as george will and others allege, actually willing and able to deliver on progressive, reality-based reform.

It has to be noted that LBJ's Great Society fell far short of what he really wanted, and due to the some of the same issues we face today. Johnson wanted to make people's lives better but did not want to fight a real fight with the business community. Medicare and Medicaid are tremendous programs that would work even better if republicans didn't constantly try to sabotage them, these initiatives had a definite positive effect on quality of life for seniors and poor Americans. In the 1960's there was a residue of regulatory cops on the beat, protecting the public purse from corporate greed and therefore good private health insurance could be had for most of us. Unions had fought for decades to achieve the social contract inch by inch from corporations and didn't want to lessen the need for continued organizing.

Now, if it weren't for class loyalty, the business community outside of the insurance companies would be screaming for single-payer health care for the simple fact that it is far too expensive for even big companies to deliver on what they had once provided for employees. The right-wing succeeded in gutting any limits on ripping us off, business responded by deskilling and outsourcing as many jobs as possible while forcing, little by little, those left to make concessions on their share of the income work generates. Consequently, economic expansions in the eighties and nineties meant skyrocketing corporate profits while workers just got to keep their jobs.

Right now, the best thing about the public option as it appears is that many of the people kicked out of private plans for actually needing coverage will actually get the care they need while executives can maintain their "gold-plated" coverage. In this guise, Obama and Johnson are similar as Medicare was intended for people who simply couldn't get private insurance anymore either. As it stands, the insurance industry will probably come out ahead with this plan despite howling from the loonies on fox, et al. And maybe for a change the US won't be the laughing stock of the industrialized world.

But, I'm not holding my breath.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Reason #3924 why hannity is a tool

I have a bad habit of turning on am radio from time to time and listening to whichever Goebbels wannabe happens to be yelling at that moment. And there was a doosy yesterday, sean hannity the Irish ape/college dropout, was getting all holy about Michael Jackson's funeral ceremony. It was an interesting tack, the "liberal" media was being horrible by covering it and not the deaths of American servicemen in Afghanistan that day. I agree, only I was also concerned about that years ago right through yesterday. All during that time hannity would baselessly attack the same media outlets for trying to read the names of fallen soldiers on the air, you see, because it was a propaganda stunt then to try and turn the squishy Americans against the war.

You know, we are at war with East Asia, and allied with Eurasia, we have always been at war with East Asia and always been allied with Eurasia.

It is a political show, but how is it that every event somehow can be molded to fit hannity's strange worldview that the media (of which he is regrettably a part of, and prominent at that) wants to destroy "his" America. Apparently this is such a minor smear that Media Matters for America doesn't have a entry for it. But I feel that a man who savaged John Kerry for "flip-flops" really should be called on this, shameless and contradictory attempt to grandstand on a funeral. I mean, at this point the half-dozen or so fans he still has will believe he can fly if he proclaims it on our airwaves. But it is more likely this is simply cynical propaganda to keep up the lie of hannity's "watchdog" status, at least in his own mind. Thank God we have this honest and intellectually forthright champion of the truth to do our thinking for us.

I suppose hannity would play the victim at this point and whine with self-righteous fury about the big, bad gloomy historian bullying him. LOL. It must be asked though, how do the die-hard conservatives who eat up his every word deal with a case of doublethink this blatent?

The truth of course is that at some point in the recent past, stories about the war dropped procipitously. I think most people are just exhausted, especially people who opposed invading Iraq and/or Afghanistan from the beginning (like me) and tuned out. The fighting continues, blood and treasure are still being wasted upon the sand but it seems so far away and unconnected from our daily lives. I wish we could get the same kind of large-scale, coordinated protests against the war today as there were when bush dismissed them as "focus groups", that might get the Obama Administration moving on actually withdrawing.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

America's Eichmann?

Amid the hubub of celebrity deaths, one may have been overlooked. While certainly not a celebrity in the conventional sense, Robert McNamara was known to the public during the 1960's. He was Secretary of Defense during both Kennedy's and Johnson's administration and architect of the military attack on Vietnam. McNamara was a brilliant statistician and employed his talents equally to both achieve a measure of standardization in the US military and perpetrate great war crimes. Serving in WWII, he analysed the effectiveness of bombing raids on Axis cities with coldly calculating efficiency in a clean office. This service arguably shortened the war but caused vast harm to innocent civilians in Japan, but when repeated over targets in Vietnam was as ineffective as it was criminal.

These actions were analogous to Hannah Arendt's famous thesis of the banality of evil, the inevitable by-product of a highly specialized division of labor in modern states. The pilots and aircrews dropping bombs on "enemy" targets took comfort in knowing that they were just following orders while the planners were safely ensconsed far from the destruction, not seeing the results of their decisions. McNamara could have easily declined to participate in the devestation in Vietnam, instead remaining at Ford Motor Company and employing his skills for production of useful products. Division of labor means that others were in charge of propaganda to lure talented individuals into service to harm mankind. We did lose in Vietnam despite dropping more bombs on that little country than in all of WWII, as a result, nothing happened.

McNamara had a counterpart in Nazi Germany, a similarly skilled statistical manager named Adolf Eichmann who made the trains to Auschwitz run on time. It is a useful comparison and very telling in how war criminals are treated in America. Eichmann was captured, tried and executed despite never actually pulling the trigger. McNamara lived a long life and died comfortably in his bed. I don't want to play hindsight gotcha, McNamara was doing what he felt was his duty for his country but had WWIII occured and the US lost, he almost certainly would have been executed. At very least he was a very intelligent, dedicated public servant who actually felt some connection to something beyond profit.

How about the current crop of war criminals that were (are) responsible for vast death and destruction in Iraq? There is nothing banal, dedicated or even competent about either dick cheney or donald rumsfeld (the memory hole has claimed the former's role in the 1991 war). McNamara did what he perceived as necessary to protect his country from the existential threat of world communism, the contemporaries may claim that islamic fundamentalism is equally threatening but there is no way they can actually believe it. In fact, the irresponsible and callous actions of the bush administration may in time lead to America's collapse.

That is a story for another day however, the passing of Robert McNamara harkens back to a day when the US actually took aggression seriously, instead of simply manufacturing a threat to destroy for fun and profit. I imagine McNamara would view the outsourcing of military functions, rebuilding efforts and all of the completely insane moves of the bush criminals for what they are. It really goes without saying how far we have fallen.