Friday, May 27, 2016

The Rand Rebellion



I picked up this book some time ago when Rick Perlstein was attempting to identify the Trump supporters' ideology and what the short-fingered vulgarian himself believes. This was before the violence at Trump rallies became commonplace, before the "lion guard" brownshirts spontaneously assembled, and before the ur-fascism of this gaggle of nutballs was completely fleshed out. Perlstein argued that what Trump represented was a herrenvolk democratic tradition of white people getting preference and privilege, while nonwhites get the shaft. This was a new concept for me so after some searching I found George M. Fredrickson's comparative study in American (South) and South African history that promised to demonstrate historical aspects of the phenomenon.

It has been very instructive, but not exactly what the incoherent mass of idiots breathlessly parrot from their dear leader about making America great again. However I found this incident that I thought would be worth passing on. (pp. 232-4)

A major confrontation between white workers and the mining industry became inevitable when the immediate post-war period fround the mines in an economic crisis because of a combination of rising costs and declining gold prices. An effort by the Chamber of Mines to abrogate the "status quo agreement" led to the extraordinary series of events that became known as the Rand Rebellion. In December 1921, the Chamber proposed to limit the color bar to skilled work strictly defined and to displace about 2,000 semi-skilled whites by lower-paid blacks. Despite the refusal of the unions to agree, the industry announced plans to go ahead with this reorganization of the labor force beginning on February 1, 1922. In an effort to head off this action the mine unions were already out in protest against wage reductions. The strike escalated into an insurrection, partly because Afrikaner unionists (who by now constituted the great majority of the white miners) organized themselves into para-military "commandos." In the words of Fredrick A. Johnstone, "the traditional fighting formation of the Afrikaner farmers" was adapted "to a new setting, that of urban, industrial class conflict." The commandos were used to enforce the strike, drive away scabs, and eventually to resist the government troops called out by Prime MInister Jan Smuts. After the strikers had taken full control of the Rand, called for a general strike of white workers to support them in their demands, and begun to launch sporadic attacks on African miners, the government declared martial law on March 10 and moved in 7,000 troops, backed by bombing planes, tanks, and all the paraphernalia of modern warfare. Armed conflict raged for four days, during which between 150 and 220 people were killed and 500-600 wounded. The strike was finally crushed and its leaders arrested; eighteen were condemned to death anf four actually executed. The Chamber of MInes then proceeded with its reorganization of the work force by lowering wages and laying off a substantial number of whites. In 1923, a court decision declared the legally enforced color bar ultra vires, or contrary to common law, thus providing the industry with a free hand to make further retrenchments in white labor.
The white workers and other defenders of a rigid industrial color bar had lost a battle but not the war itself. In the parliamentary election of 1924, a coalition of Afrikaner Nationalists and the South African Labour Party drove Smuts's South African Party from office by capitalizing on the backlash inspired by the government's fierce repression of the Rand Rebellion and its general record of insensitivity to white working class demands for iron clad protection against African competition. The resulting "Pact Government" under Nationalist Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog re-enacted the mining color bar in a more explicit and definitive way in 1926. Addressing the long-festering "poor white problem" more directly, it also inaugurated a set of policies that included displacing black workers with higher-paid whites on government-owned railroads, subsidizing municipalities to permit hiring of white laborers at "civilized" wages, and utilizing minimum-wage determinations and tariff adjustments to force employers in the growing manufacturing sector to increase the proportion of whites in their work force. The industrial color bar and the "civilized labor policy" completed the basic pattern of government-supported discrimination in the South African economy. Whites were to be guaranteed jobs, artificially high wages, and exclusive access to skilled work--all at the expense of African aspirations. The foundations of industrial apartheid were laid.
To put this conflict and its resolution in proper perspective, it is essential to recognize that neither side wanted a free-labor market; hence it was not a contest between equal opportunity and legalized discrimination. The mine-owners and other capitalistic interests were responsible for the the primary act of discrimination when they combined forces and called on government support to hold down African wages and bargaining power. They thereby set the stage for a virtually unavoidable conflict between a disfranchised, semi-servile, and ultra-cheap class of workers and another segment of the labor force that had the capacity to organize and exert political influence. As in the case of the Chinese-exclusion movement in the United States, white labor had the one crucial advantage in this struggle. Although their position was not inherently more discriminatory than that of employers who took advantage of the vulnerability of nonwhites to hire them on terms that "free workingmen" would never accept, the struggle inexorably took a form that allowed spokesmen for white labor to identify their cause as that of white supremacy and thus tap the deep wells of prejudice existing in the larger white or European population. If the labor movement in California could appeal to middle-class xenophobia, spokesmen for white workers in South Africa could draw upon the rural Afrikaner's traditional conviction that the white man's privileges and security must be absolutely guaranteed. hence the immediate material interests of organized labor coincided with traditional racial prejudices in a much more direct and obvious way than those of the employers.
South African industrialists found they could live with the legal color bar--which was eventually extended from mining to other forms of industry--because it turned out to be compatible with their primary concern for maintaining a cheap supply of ultra-exploitable African indentured workers. The surplus of unskilled whites in the 1920s and 30s was only temporary (ending completely with World War II and the subsequent growth of the South African economy) and was largely channeled into state-owned enterprises like the railroads or the iron and steel industry (ISCOR), which could pay "civilized wages" because they did not have to compete directly with private capital and maintain a high rate of profit. Hence there were never enough whites available to displace Africans in low-skilled jobs within private industry. Furthermore, the bar to African advancement into skilled jobs helped rationalize the migratory labor system and denial of African bargaining rights. If blacks had no chance of advancement into the skilled occupations, not much was really lost by shuttling them back and forth in a way that limited their ability to acquire advanced industrial training. The transformation of the entire white working class into a "labor aristocracy" that shared with businessmen and farmers an interest in holding down and exploiting Africans diminished the possibility of class conflict among whites and may have served the interests of South African capitalism better than either a genuinely free labor market--which might have enabled workers to organize across racial lines--or a split, competitive situation that could breed the kind of dangerous and divisive conflict that had erupted on the rand in 1922.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Trump will not be President

This may be a bold assertion, I certainly hope I can believe it. If there is any justice in the world then the second week of November will be filled only with easily quelled riots by old white republicans and a collective sigh of relief from the majority of non-insane Americans. But I admit to having checked to make sure my passport is still valid. Trump has gotten this far in violation of every bit of received wisdom about how elections are carried out in this country. I predict though that when the dust settles, the short-fingered vulgarian and the party he hijacked will lose in a landslide. Maybe the Democrats will even grow a spine and start the process of decontamination on our politics and media, and have a somewhat easier time working through the backlog of badly needed reform. A sea monster can dream right? But this election will be a treasure trove for intellectual historians and political scientists alike. So much has been written and said about what will have been our brush with fascism that I feel like getting a head start on the analysis.

What prompted the title and motivation for this post was an article in Salon by Anis Shivani, who according to his bio is a fiction writer, poet, and critic based in Texas. The text is rather dense, his word choices sound like that of an overeager graduate student for whom English is not his first language. But the thesis, roughly, is that Hillary Clinton cannot win because she is so closely connected to neoliberal corporate capitalism that is completely detached (or disembedded) from society and the laws that govern that society. Donald Trump is also part of capitalism but remains tethered to society because he "builds" things and his capital is therefore visible, unlike the vulture predation by the previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The electorate is fed up with abstraction, writes Shivani, and Hillary Clinton somehow embodies this abstraction despite all of her years of public service so the voters will punish her in the entirely symbolic act of not supporting her.
When Trump’s masses see Clinton tacking to the middle—as she undoubtedly will, rather than go for the surefire path to victory by heading left, by picking Bernie Sanders for example—the more they will detest it, which will push her only further in their direction, not in the direction that can bring victory. Clinton, because of her disembodied identity in the placeless global economy, cannot make a movement toward the direction of reality, because the equations would falter, the math would be off, the logic would be unsustainable. And that is the contradiction that the country can easily see, that is the exposed front of the abstract market that will bring about its supposed reckoning in the form of Clinton’s defeat.
First off, the primary campaign has been all about pushing Hillary to the left, so I'm not sure how Shivani thinks that she will now move towards Trump's bloodthirsty masses' positions. What equations? What math and logic? Hillary is very consciously campaigning as the successor to Barack Obama, she served in two administrations that were hamstrung by having to clean up the mess of a guy named Bush and then fight like mad to simply run the Federal Government and the country against incredible obstruction and sabotage. The Obama administration did competently get the country and the economy back on track, despite absolute opposition. Sure there is a minority on the left with unrealistic expectations about governing and wanted Obama to be the anti-Bush, waving his magic wand to give them everything they wanted, but most Americans outside the drooling idiots and professional fear-mongers understood that fixing things and building things take time.

Secondly, take a look at the electoral collage map; the only votes that actually count. Hillary, the Democratic nominee, has a hefty advantage before even examining the swing states. Trump has experienced a small bump from securing his nomination that has superficially given him a small lead over Clinton in a few scattered polls. This lead will subside as the veneer of Trump assembling the support of the Republican establishment, you know the one he was squawking only recently about as hopelessly corrupt, is secured and fades from the news cycle. Then we will see that Trump was counting on the desiccated corpse of that party to do the hard work on the ground in swing states, because he is utterly lazy and completely reliant on the pliant disembedded corporate media structure to do the work for him. Sure, twenty five years of relentless attacks on her character and manufactured scandals have taken their toll on Clinton's image but Shivani seems to argue that the really existing disgust among voters for Trump will have no effect, for crying out loud states like Utah, Arizona, and Georgia might be competitive this year because of Trump's crassness. So whatever you make of Shivani's argument about the abstract market and disembedded capitalism, his conclusion is a major reach:
I expect Trump to take a national lead shortly and never relinquish it until the end. It will be easy if he keeps the libertine and destructive aspects of himself in perfect balance, seesawing from one to the other, as he has so far, appealing to an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding.
 "Perfect balance"? Has Mr. Shivani ever even watched this fool who makes an ass of himself practically daily? No, the real abstraction is the fiction built by the corporate media that the two sides are somehow equally at fault. The economy, society, and politics are separate entities. Yes, there is a canopy economy (h/t James Galbraith and Charles Ferguson) that can swoop in and destroy communities and even entire nations at a whim but society can, with enough force, get the government to step in and regulate it. The damage was done in creating this predatory capitalism in the 1980s, Bill Clinton tried to stem the tide in the 1990s and failed, George W. Bush threw gasoline on the fire, and now Barack Obama has tried to put out the fire. Rome was not built in a day, nor was it rebuilt after the Visigoths sacked it and what we face in America today is a roving band of Visigothic "conservatives" constantly sacking what took almost two centuries to build. Trump is one of the Visigoths, crude, vulgar, and utterly incompetent; a reality TV star who has not actually built anything in decades. With the tiniest bit of spine Democrats from Hillary Clinton on to local offices can knock down the bullshit mountain of propaganda and corporate malfeasance of these Visigoths.

We can try, independent media is stronger now than it has been in years, or we can resign ourselves to next level defeatism like Mr. Shivani. The complex argument he laid out about Hillary representing abstraction can and should be turned around and laid at the feet of Trump, Republicans, and the corporate media structure and predators they shelter.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

American Chivalry


It has been a long time since I reviewed a film on this blog. And this is kind of a shame because I love movies, and so did one of the principle intellectuals I studied for my MA thesis. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. loved the cinema the way George Will loves baseball, Reinhold Niebuhr loved God, and the way Driftglass loves to tell every member of the beltway's pundit class that they are full of it. Schlesinger felt that cinema was the American art form, more than jazz or rock and roll, and though he did not shoehorn a film reference into his writing very often, when he did it was to make a strong point. So in that vein I will try to make the point strongly that historical movies are fun and usually entertaining, but no substitute for real knowledge. What movies can do, however, is inspire our better angels to be better than we are. It is important that we aspire to an ideal.

Though I cannot hold a candle to the ways Rick Perlstein works movie references into his writing and successfully frames serious historical study with the tool of the theater. The way he seamlessly does here to immerse the reader who may otherwise be have no reference point for the crime wave of New York City during Trump's formative years with clips to Death Wish, Taxi Driver, and Serpico. I believe this to be one of the proper uses of film for historical purposes, to give atmosphere or big picture perspective to the past in a comparatively easy medium but not for real detail. Another way is to tell timeless tales of human struggle as allegories or even idealized notions of what our national character is. An example is our concept of chivalry. Chivalry in the Middle Ages was an ideology certainly, one that was almost universally impossible to live up to, but an idealized standard to strive for. Google defines the word as "the combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, especially courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak." 

So what is the American interpretation of Chivalry? My wife and I recently watched Trumbo and Bridge of Spies, and I believe we can extract from these two films some combination of qualities expected of an ideal American. At least from a liberal point of view. While I do not always buy into the notion of Hollywood being peopled exclusively with bleeding hearts, see the above films that Perlstein cited to support his idea of avenging angel conservatism, the unthinking, reflexive brand of conservatism that I often deride as authoritarianism is rightfully cast as the bad guy in Trumbo. While in Bridge of Spies the Cold War is a character in itself, with characters and institutions reacting to the boogieman. This film also, to its credit, really helps recast the confrontation between East and West as the nuanced exercise in statecraft that it was.

Americans have an ideal vision of our republic as the home of freedom, where we have the right to say and believe what we choose. We have often fallen from that ideal state of being. Only a few short years after the passage of the Bill of Rights, the government was passing laws abridging the freedom of expression and most aspects of the first amendment in the Alien and Sedition Acts. Antebellum Southern politicians passed all sorts of laws restricting the postage of anti-slavery pamphlets through the mail. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and violated many civil liberties during the Civil War. And A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up and either jailed or deported thousands of aliens after World War I in the first Red Scare. These are just a few examples of what Schlesinger called "political delirium tremons" where the proverbial "we" acted rashly and felt bad about it afterwards. Well maybe not in the case of southern slave owners.

These are official violations of the first amendment, "congress shall pass no law", but how many popular movements in American history have also violated our ideals of freedom? We had all sorts of anti-Catholic, anti-masonry, know-nothing groups in our past who discriminated, intimidated, and blacklisted anyone who didn't fit their idea of Americanism. To say nothing of the dirty and often violent tactics of corporations against their own workers. 

In Trumbo, there was a combination of official and popular repression at work. Helen Mirran's witch-hunting columnist character, Hedda Hopper, was certainly vile and much of her vitriol seemed personal, as though she were simply jealous of Trumbo's success and talent. And then J. Parnell Thomas the poster child for the separation of powers. You can just pick an adjective for why people dislike politicians and he fits the bill. Grandstanding, pandering, self-righteous, vindictive, and corrupt Thomas really was the perfect warm up act for both Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Whether apocryphal or not, Trumbo's snappy comeback upon seeing Thomas in prison was so perfect, "the difference between you and me is that you actually committed a crime."

I know that I am usually the first to get bent out of shape over the movies taking liberties when recounting an historical episode, but as chivalric tales of what America is meant to be I am willing to suspend my disbelief as it were. Now it will take a lot more research than that necessary for a movie review to examine the historical Trumbo's ideology, but I suspect the filmmakers softened his communism to make it more palatable for audiences and highlight both the injustice and Trumbo's triumph. The way he explains what he believes to his daughter sounds just like a run of the mill New Deal liberal. Louis C. K.'s character Arlen was a lot more believable as the humorless true believer constantly trying to insert digressions about the plight of workers into scripts that were so out of place even pig-headed Republicans could spot it. I'm not sure who's interest that angle of the story served. Perhaps just a reminder that there were communists who were serious, but just as Arlen was a pitiable and pathetic character, so were the actual American communists. In her account of the Red Scare titled Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman talked about how silly the communists she knew were and how they were about as dangerous to American liberty and democracy as the Greens are today. 

The point of it all was that McCarthyism was largely a partisan, grandstanding affair by Republicans, a half-assed attempt to smear Democrats and anyone on the left. The FBI, though fallible and not above political chicanery, was perfectly competent to weed out any actual Soviet agents and dangerous domestic communists. As Bridge of Spies showed. Though this film never made it plain what the spy Rudolf Abel was up to or if he was actually dangerous he was clearly working for the Soviets and was rightfully arrested. Now, nations have been spying on each other since the dawn of time. That is not really the issue of American chivalry addressed in the film, but how we behave in the great game of espionage. So, the next time your Trump supporting uncle goes off about the Muslims or whatever, ask him about this film. Do you want to behave like any other barbaric nation? Do you identify with the anonymous asshole drive by shooters trying to intimidate Tom Hanks? Or would you rather be the true American who believes in our laws and our rights, even when extended to people you don't like? That is basically what it comes down to.

All we are is what we want to be. Perhaps these two films can help some of us remember that fact. We want to be the best that we can be. We believe in justice and democracy. We believe in law. We believe in protecting the individual and we rejoice in our pluralism and tolerance for difference. That is our chivalry. That is our ideal. It's about time we start living up to it.

Saturday, May 7, 2016

No Monopolies

Oh man Jeff, you are the last person I expected to hear a self destructive purity tantrum from. You and Capper are two of the people who helped motivate and inspire me to get into blogging. I have lost a lot of respect for you with this self pitying rant. I was being generous and charitable in my comments, but I don't have to be here because I know that you both stopped reading me. The thesis of this article on cognitive dissidence is that progressive media no longer exists because two writers in two publications failed to live up to your standards. Thus Jeff Simpson proclaims "the end of progressive media" without acknowledging that there exists a great deal of it even within The Nation and Mother Jones. Also anyone, even a nobody like me, can start their own blog or YouTube channel, etc to express and defend progressive ideas. Jeff, neither you nor I are the sole arbiters of what constitutes progressivism.

I know I am just too Niebuhrian in thinking about humility, tolerance, and pluralism when applying them to liberalism. But no one person should get to decide what liberalism or progressivism means. That is why we are the big tent party that can never get its act together, there are just too many issues and schools of thought to hammer out one distinctive definition. Instead we put together a loose, working definition subject to continuous updating, but no one owns progressivism. This primary season has been grueling, but the discussion has been vibrant and voters have gotten a clear choice.  It was grueling in 2008 and 2000 as well (though the real trouble in 2000 was in the general between Gore and Nader, at least this time the conflict is in the primary) but somehow most of us came together with some humility to accept differences and be the pluralist party of tolerance. Will the wounds of this primary fight heal in time to defeat the biggest, boldest monster ever to head a major party ticket? Is the bad blood between the supporters of these two eminently qualified, capable, and experienced candidates (Hillary and Bernie) going to cause a permanent schism as Jeff really seems to want?

It is a real problem in American politics that the perceived party of liberalism (Democrats) has been forced into the role of conservatism and trying to conserve the New Deal programs of government. While the perceived party of conservatism (Republicans) is utterly reactionary while trying to present itself as a force for reform that will bring back the good old days. The latter is utter bullshit of course, and just about every problem in the country can be laid at the feet of the Republican Party, and the hateful media and regressive business interests that support it. I am the first to admit that being forced in this position has caused some real schizophrenic tendencies in Democrats, but too many voters seem to think that once people are put in office that they can just ignore politics again. Then the electorate gets pissed because Democrats didn't do enough.

This "what have you done for me lately" attitude showed up among the left in 2000 and Republicans were able to sow enough discontent to steal what should have been a cakewalk for Al Gore. Then there was the "shellacking" in 2010, when enough Democrats were disappointed that Barack Obama wasn't the anti-Dubya to stay home and hand a bunch of states and Congress over to them. Simply being the party of reform is not enough for the far left, the kind of liberal activists who could be out organizing and pushing the conservative Democrats to enact the reforms we so desperately need instead push these ridiculous purity tests and refuse to work with anyone who isn't perfect.

Angry hyperbole and breathless recitations of the right wing caricature of Hillary Clinton does not make it so. Republicans have been throwing mud at Clinton for almost twenty five years, the critiques of her from the far left always seem to eerily echo those. So it might be time to forgive all the Democrats who voted for her in this primary if they did not fully believe the legend of Hillary the devil figure. At the same time, for all his passion about income inequality and big plans to radically shake up the economic structure of America, Bernie is not a messiah. They agree on so much, does Hillary just not speak in a tone you approve of?

I'm sorry Jeff, but you just did a poor job of demonstrating that somehow progressive media has ceased to be because two columnists failed to back your horse. I certainly do not want to support anyone who would claim to have the one true way by making this coarse and vindictive conclusion:
Despite all of this,the people that we thought were progressives, the people who were given the responsibility of being the voice of the people, have disappeared in order to blindly support Hillary.

We here in the heartland, and progressives all over the country, have to realize that we are on an island with no reinforcements.  Luckily for us, there is strength in numbers if we use it correctly.

Do not give your business, votes or support to people who do not give it back to us.  I have unsubscribed to both magazines and unsubscribed from every email list where the person is a Hillary supporter.   Any support or dollars from now on coming from me, will go to those who support us.

For me, this is a bigger fight than the November election.
 I wanted so badly to believe that bernie or bust was a myth, an outlier, but I keep getting proven wrong. It is too much to even ask, "hey maybe we could put our purity tests aside long enough to stop Donald Trump?" Or, "hey, maybe we could work together with the common goal of kicking the goggle-eyed homunculus out of the governor's mansion in Wisconsin?" Making enemies for no good reason, ostracizing yourself and your followers still does not give you a monopoly on progressivism. I guess the rest of the Democratic Party will have to try and soldier on without you.


Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Ga Ga for Radio


Back when I used to work in a factory, we were allowed to have radios at our presses to help pass the time. Working in a factory is tedious, mind-numbing, and exhausting at times and being able to listen to music or talk helped a lot. This was before iPods and all of the digital media that we take for granted these days. So it was compact discs and old fashioned radio of the FM or AM variety. Over an eight hour shift that would be a lot of switching CDs so often I would just put on a radio station and occasionally turn on a disc. This was the midnight shift, so there was not a whole lot of interesting things on and our machines interfered with radio signals but I got enough to really come to an appreciation of the idea of broadcasting. I have been cataloging stories for a while on my Facebook page about the troubled evil empire of iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel) and the king of hate radio, Rush Limbaugh. While no one will be cackling with more glee than I when these two pillars of what is wrong with media in America finally collapse, I instead want to explore a future after the downfall of Rush and iHeart because there could be a very bright one.

Clear Channel is the mutant abomination of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the company grew like cancer to take over radio stations all over the country. By 9/11/01, the rotten effects of this consolidation appeared in the form of playlist censorship, it was time to tamp down on the rebellious side of rock and roll. This list of unethical and tyrannical business practices is detailed Here and elsewhere, but the point is that they are a clear case of bad people with too much power. The biggest crime against democracy and music or media is something they can't be put in jail for. Clear Channel hollowed out broadcasting and homogenized music by taking over stations and sacking the staff, then centralizing playlists and computerizing/automating what we hear on the radio. Meaning that what you hear in one part of the country is the same as what you hear everywhere else. Because nearly all local content has been removed and nearly all programming is national. Finally the squares had tamed rock and roll!

This was what I objected to strenuously as well when I first started listening to talk radio. Our local station had only one program that was actually produced at that station, everything else was nationally syndicated. And that station was not even Clear Channel. No wonder so few people participate in local politics, there's so little media attention given to it. TV, newspapers, and all sorts of other media are very similar. And all for the same reason, there's no money in it. While it appears that Clear Channel's downward descent was already secured a decade ago with it's sale to Mitt Romney's vulture capitalist buddies in Bain and elsewhere, Limbaugh is still limping along, four years after his disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke. I found it funny that Rick Ungar at Forbes jumped the gun by writing: "Has Rush Limbaugh Finally Reached The End Of The Road?", two years the three days he spent slavering over the possibility of demanding all women who want birth control be taped while having sex, for el rushbo's blathering about CBS declaring war on the heartland by naming Stephen Colbert as David Letterman's replacement.


No single event has caused the gasbag Limbaugh to finally drop dead, it is a slow and agonizing decline but the end is in sight. As Leslie Salzillo reported on Kos: "Limbaugh’s eight-year $400 million dollar contract with iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel) is up in December." Although Limbaugh finally getting booted off the public's airwaves will be a victory for progressives even if we didn't have much to do with it, the win will be hollow as hate radio's bench is deep with Rush clones. 

No, the real prize will be when the big radio station owners start to crumble. As stations go to the auction block, progressives should be ready. It will finally be time to do what Air America could never do, buy in to broadcasting. It doesn't matter if we can't all coordinate like a progressive network, the point will be to wrest control over radio from the big corporations and propagandists. I will save the reasons for a subsequent post, I just want you to think about the possibilities. Owning a little piece of your local station and having a say in the music they play and the talk shows they produce or syndicate. Rush's audience is literally dying off, there is a whole farm team of well-produced and high quality podcasts out there, the trouble is how new digital and online media is financed. Tying non-corporate radio stations that can actually produce revenue could really broaden the types of voices on the radio. Just breaking the stranglehold of giant corporations owning everything and getting some local voices back on the air, even if they are conservative, could really make a difference in how Americans get informed. 

At least you could hear something other than the "top ten recycled pop songs played over and over until you relent and like them and start singing along because you have no other choice on the free public airwaves." I mean I look at this chart and there is nothing there, I'm not that old, music has just gotten worse. Same thing goes for the "latest right wing screaming asshole old white man from far, far away from where you live!"

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Still not having this fight. Eyes on the prize.

Sometimes I cannot believe that it was only a few short months ago that I did not even believe Bernie or bust people existed in the wild. But I have become educated in the meantime. Okay, yes, they exist. And yes, they are not all paid trolls or any other kind of trolls. Short-sighted rebels making perfect the enemy of the good, immature children throwing a purity tantrum, and instant gratification-seeking dilettantes with no memory of the bush crime syndicate perhaps, with their heels securely dug into the ground far, far from where the rest of the Democratic party is but sincere in their principles. Unfortunately their principles may include letting Donald Trump or Ted Cruz become president, just to teach the rest of us corporate sell-outs a good lesson

Oh to be young and irresponsible again! I have already written about the time I was young and irresponsible during the 2000 election, and that I will never do that again. Anyone older than I am and this passionately committed to teaching Democrats a lesson by monkey-wrenching the first succession of Democratic administrations in my lifetime is deeply irresponsible and unable to put their ideology behind the public interest. After all, that is what it is, a rigidly held belief system that assumes you know best. That just like in 2000, it is time to shoot the moon and leave behind the "good enough" for the "revolution".

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Bernie or bust movement, what makes you think this country even deserves your version of "revolution?" You may be riding high in this primary season, and you may retain that pompous prestige as useful idiots for the right for a bit but if the republicans ever got power or even had to face your revolution in a general election it would be wholesale slaughter. 

This is all on my mind because somehow a Bernie or buster found the meme below that I shared to my Facebook page at the beginning of March, right around the time I wrote the "Getting the House in Order" post in the first link above. She left this lengthy comment on something that has been buried for almost two months on the Facebook page for a blog that has a relatively small audience (not that I don't keep plugging away), that is unlikely to be read by anyone but me. I can't imagine how much effort it took to find this post for one, for another why would someone spend time writing this much about Merrick Garland in a place that will have no impact?

Don't lose sight of the goal. The next President will appoint as many as FOUR Supreme Court Justices. Think of what will happen to civil rights if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is responsible for those nominations.

Remember to LIKE Winning Democrats and VOTE BLUE in November!
Now, I admit that this meme is just an appeal for party unity and the public interest with no sources of evidence. And yes, it is meant to head off the kind of division that Ms. Owen is presenting and that is exactly why I shared it. If I had made a meme like this (which after several postings ranting against memes I would probably never do) it would include something for further reading to try and back up the claims. I assume the Winning Democrats page or site has something like that. But this meme also displays my priorities, I am willing to compromise, accept the good enough over the perfect, and work for incremental change in order to keep from going backwards.

So let's take a look at her comment. I have not looked hard before starting this post but I suspect that this is a series of USUNCUT or MOVEON talking points, which is fine but would explain why she bothered to put on my page; no effort needed, just cut and paste. 


People say that the Supreme court is a reason to vote for Hillary instead of Bernie or any independents, and here's why that's wrong. Merrick Garland is Obamas choice for the supreme court, Hillary Clinton has already said that she will NOT ask Obama to withdraw his pick, which means that she would support Garland. Sure, Obama picked Garland, he's gotta be a good choice, WRONG, Garland has cited Citizens United in multiple decisions, and he generally sides on the sides of corporations in his decisions, you can almost guarantee that if an opportunity to overturn Citizens United that Garland will vote pro-Citizens United, instead of against it (the reason Dems say Clinton is the better choice), so there really is no reason to support Hillary over Bernie. Would a republican pick someone more conservative? Probably, but Merrick Garland sure as hell is NO defender of liberal values, in fact he is very pro-business, anti-union, and has some unclear views on socially liberal opinions, so he is a terrible choice for Supreme Court justice and ONLY Bernie has said he will ask Obama to withdraw his choice.
#BernieorBust

Given that Driftglass encountered and knocked down an insufferably long attempt by a political dilettante to paint all liberals as smug, I will try and emulate him. Because there are several similarities in this argument. 

First, who is Merrick Garland? He is a 63 year old Judge with a great deal of experience on the bench, is a Democrat, and is eminently qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. He is significantly to the left of the man he was chosen to succeed. Meaning he is a good choice and acceptable to possibly the vast majority of Americans outside of the tea party or Berniebro fringes.

Second, he was nominated after the republicans under Mitch McConnell had already defiantly proclaimed that they would never consider even holding hearings on anyone Barack Obama nominated. Therefore, simply stating that he is "a terrible choice" because he doesn't pass your litmus test (without providing any evidence, yes, if you make the claim it is up to you to provide evidence to support it) without considering the larger picture is irresponsible.

Third, there are numerous logical fallacies in this argument. "People say" is a weasel phrase, which is then used to construct a straw-man argument of "the Supreme Court is a reason to vote for Hillary instead of Bernie". Then a series of unsubstantiated assertions attempt to demolish the straw-man. All the while attempting to manufacture false equivalence between a SCOTUS nominee of Hillary Clinton and a Republican nominee. There is more than simply Bernie's pick and all others being bad. The false dilemma of Garland as being the only choice by cutting off the possibility of the pick being political maneuvering by Obama and solidarity with the leader of the Democratic Party by Hillary Clinton. Finally the No True Scotsman that only a pick by Bernie could meet your approval and would be acceptable for SCOTUS.

This is why I replied only that your argument was unpersuasive.