The Great Trucker Blockade Hoax?

 This was going to be the biggest thing since idiots in tri-corner hats held temper tantrums all over the country at town hall meetings with Democratic members of Congress. "Thousands, millions of truckers from all over North America" were going to descend on Washington, D.C. and block the beltway. Four actually did show up yesterday and tried driving around abreast at fifteen miles per hour, but they did not last long.

Foolish trogs. now the supposed "organizer" of the so-called "event" says it was all a sham.

From the Washington Post:

 [T]ruckers from across the country (and possibly Canada) planned to come to the nation’s capital Friday and bring traffic to a standstill on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway zinged across the Web and were picked up by outlets ranging from Fox News to the Huffington Post. The rally was dubbed “Truckers for the Constitution.”

But it is a hoax. 

“The comments to U.S. News were designed to do one thing and one thing only: stir the feather of the mainstream media,” said [Earl] Conlon [to U.S. News and World Report]

Riiiiiiiight.

Within the epistemic fishbowl of authoritarianism, the huge following tea party types have in their own little world led this little band of dittoheads to think they could pull something massive off.

It is nice to see continued evidence that the energy right wing authoritarian followers put into all their anti-democratic demonstrations is really drying up. I first noticed things were changing at the Fourth of July celebrations in my little red corner of Wisconsin. In a town that shall remain unnamed but previously crawling with signs and bumper stickers displaying the unbridled ignorance and bullying only the lame, over-the-hill baby boomer assclowns would proudly decorate their gas guzzlers with, this past Independence Day festivities saw nary a divisive image or gesture. It was a good day, almost felt like an American again.

Seems the only teabaggers with any fight left are unfortunately the ones elected to Congress. Maybe we will get lucky and some of them will be put to pasture soon as well.

UPDATE:

WaPo reported that the desperate 'wingers are now circulating a picture supposedly showing all the trucks bottling up DC traffic, but as usual the evidence is fake.

The photo was actually taken in May at a Make-a-Wish Foundation fundraiser in Lancaster, Penn.

SAVE THE LIE!!!!! Who cares that it was raining during the supposed blockade? The same loudmouths that make family gatherings such a pain will undoubtedly haul this PROOF of how mad real 'murika is with the "democrat shutdown" and the existence of a black president.

What is real and what is pretend? It all depends on how loud you can shout.

Reagan: The Problem

I was hoping for more from the title: A Short Breakdown Of How Reagan Broke Our Economy, Killed Jobs, And Rewarded Greed A little more history perhaps, at least an explanation of how political polarization led to Reagan's election and subsequent policy ransacking. But no, all we get from Sarah Wood is an analysis of the symptoms and effects of monopoly on the American people.

Reagan’s abandonment of antitrust laws and the refusal of policy makers even today to start enforcing them again is what collapsed our economy and rewarded greed.

While this is true, there is much more to it and simply stating that the reaganites gave business the green light to make their greediest dreams come true ignores the context of the times. For example, there were republican presidents before Reagan, why did Nixon or Ford not take their hands off the wheel and allow big business to rip apart the social contract? Events outside the US? Or recent history of that time? History is rarely a simple "A alone causes B." Looking at the 1980s from the perspective of what followed is a fallacy. While you will get no argument from me that non-enforcement of antitrust laws played a great role in the economic polarization of the contemporary US; it is a major source of the vast inequality of wealth and income, the stagnation of the economy as a whole, and ever-growing poverty, one cannot argue that this phenomenon occurred in a vacuum.

What follow in Wood's essay is a fairly standard recitation of the collapse of civil society, the result of economic ruin for the middle class and ever-deepening chasm swallowing working people into poverty.

Here is the salient point of Wood's thesis:

consolidation of industry has stifled our growth. Jobs grow through small business, individual entrepreneurship, and actual competition. However we need laws to allow this to happen which keep markets and wages fair. This doesn’t make me a socialist, this makes me a person in favor of capitalism who appreciates competition, but also appreciates laws that protect the small from being devoured by the large. These laws also protect us from these giant monopolies dictating laws that may potentially harm us (food safety, etc.) so they can increase profits by cutting corners. (Emphasis mine)

 Ahhh, let's not even pretend to understand the difference between socialism and varying forms of capitalism. Make sure you don't think of any white elephants while reading her essay. Funny how inoculation only works one way, when the Children of Light try it they only end up activating the Children of Darkness' frames. However, somehow anytime a progressive CoL brings up Reagan or God help us George w. bush the wailing of trolls begins. "Oh, of course it is all dubya's fault." Those knee-jerk schmuck declarations that dare you to agree, but reflexively we know what is out-of-bounds. It is the same reflex that all but forces liberals to defend small businesses as bastions of goodness.

Indented and italicized for no apparent reason and with no supporting source is this gem:

Industry consolidation also cuts down on workers’ rights. This is why Republicans hate and demonize unions. Workers having a voice cuts down on the ability to be greedy. 

The trouble is, and obviously there are exceptions, but most big business prior to the Reagan "revolution" had made peace with organized labor. Consolidated industries, like steel, or energy, or manufacturing were too vulnerable to workers' resistance in the days before subsidized outsourcing. The treaty of Detroit, where management finally conceded labor's right to bargain, meant high wages but no say in how business was run and compared to the days before the treaty had brought relative labor peace.

It was small businessmen who irrationally feared and loathed anything that smacked of bargaining with "the help." It was the NFIB that freaked out so hard about the Clinton administration's healthcare reform proposals in 1993, over a portion that required providing bare bones insurance for all employees at a cost of about 10 cents an hour. Twenty years later the fight is still joined at that level. The so-called tea party, if it has any real existence beyond Astroturf, is a rogue's gallery of small business types so it does not matter how dead unions really are this merry band of idiots and racists are frightened beyond belief that their busboys and stockers are just waiting for their fellow minority in the White House to give the word to agitate for fair treatment. This of course will cause utter chaos, the ruin of tea partiers' cult of self-importance, and possibly the violation of our white women.

Sorry folks, but race is, was, and probably will ever be America's original sin. Reagan did not kick off his campaign by memorializing and standing by 'states' rights' in a southern town that murdered several civil rights' activists during the 1960s because he himself had Klansman hoods in his closet, but he knew how to play the game for those that did. Reagan did not let loose his many counterfactual descriptions of "welfare queens" without the certainty of what images these fairy tales would conjure up in the minds of his supporters.

There is so much more to the wrecking of the relatively stable, fair, and equal America built by the Greatest Generation and refined by well-meaning Americans for a half century. But that will have to wait... because dang, that is a big, big story. Historians and lots of very smart people are still in shock that America unraveled this quickly and how far we will continue to fall. I don't mean to knock Sarah Wood or Political Shake for printing her piece, monopoly is a huge problem, but to pretend that there is a silver bullet which can undo all the damage of the last three decades is just naïve.

Founding Fathers, misquoted.

Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's, takes teabaggers to task for mythologizing quotes from the Founding Fathers to suit their agenda.

I share a sentiment with the Tea Party movement, and it's not a trivial one: Historical illiteracy is a threat to the health of the republic. Our ignorance of the key events and basic concepts of the nation's development is a matter of statistical fact, and despite years of warnings we continue to show little interest in how the past determines contemporary choices.

Where we differ, the Tea Partiers and I, is on the question of what historical literacy looks like. For them, it is strictly a matter of everyone else acknowledging that the Founding Fathers would take their side in the present-day debates; that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington were "rightwing extremists," as a popular T-shirt puts it. At Tea Party rallies, quotes from Founding Fathers are emblazoned on protest signs and declaimed from podiums; audiences recite them right along with the speaker; and, of course, there are always a few people on hand who feel such a surge of enthusiasm that they are moved to dress up in the manner of late-eighteenth century Bostonians.

Historical ignorance is bad for several reasons, first of which is that rewriting history to suit the needs of the present is a horrible fallacy. But more than that is how the manufactured quotes invented by the right-wing have taken on a quality of gospel. "Bible bullets" is how a professor of Christian history I know put it. Gospel quotes are used by uncritical thinkers to shut down and get shut down in debates over scripture. Manufacturing quotes by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington create a secular version of bible bullets, ready to be aimed at anyone who disagrees with the teabagger crowd.

Frank, a Ph.D in history, analyzed two telling phrases used by teabaggers to gain historical approval from the revered founders. It does not matter how mangled the intent of the founders has become in modern America, the point from an authoritarian view is to win, period.

The first is from Franklin, Dr. Frank pulled this one from one of his favorite teabagger authors, but it appears all over the place. "Benjamin Franklin said, 'The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."' Sounds good right? Only thing is that it is the Declaration of Independence that produced the non-legally-binding "right to pursue happiness," and that was only because TJ did not like the idea of a "right to property" as why the revolution was carried out. Frank then traces the history and finds that the "catch it yourself" comes from 1970s self-help books.

The second was from Jefferson himself. "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." This quote is so popular it makes facebook regularly. Trouble is that while Jefferson did rail against tyranny, this "quote" is actually the interpretation of TJ's work by a law professor in 1980. The teabag movement has a very different understanding of elitism than say, anyone who has ever had a job and stepped back even for a moment to critically examine why bosses are such jerks. But beyond that, these secular bible bullets have only the amount of power as we give them. This is the reason bible bullets hold such sway over fundamentalists, and why teabaggers are so eager to believe them. Quoting founders to support their authoritarian vision is a simple way to shut down debate. Outsiders hold the founders in high regard as well, transferring "truth" of tradition to narrow interpretations gives them inordinate power over popular beliefs.

"One reason these quotations have multiplied is that they seem true to Ben and Tom as we all know them through their appearances over the years in movies, musicals, and schoolbooks: the earthy Founder, cracking wise; the rebel Founder, seething against tyrants. Those who use the mysterious quotes do not mean to deceive. In nearly every case, they are merely repeating something they've read numerous times in what appear to be authoritative works. All journalists, myself included, have made similar mistakes.²
On the other hand, when you set the Founders up as infallible oracles of democracy, when you claim clairvoyance with their political spirit, when you dedicate yourself to remedying the nation's historical illiteracy, you put yourself under a special obligation. And given that it is only a little more difficult to use the Internet to check fake quotes than to reproduce them, one wonders: Why don't the guardians of Founder purity take that step? Why do fakes proliferate instead of disappear?"

My hat is off to Dr. Frank for diving into this novel subversion of our freedom to make our own destiny.

It can't happen here

A poignant book review written when I was still but a small fry. That's sea monster humor son, get with the program.

Fascism in America: an all-too real work of fiction

            In Sinclair Lewis’ novel It can’t happen here, totalitarianism overthrows our constitutional government in the guise of down home traditional values. Set just before the 1936 election, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a fictional Southern Democratic Senator with a demagogue’s flair and team of cynical operators behind him, sweeps into power on the promise of redistributing wealth to all the workers of America. Oh, and he has a 15 point platform to subvert Congress and the Supreme Court, throw unemployed people into camps and specific plans for all of the enemies of our country, namely Jewish bankers, communists and African-Americans among other things. This story sends a chilling message to Americans that benign, liberal government is not written in stone and the constitution is just a piece of paper unless good people stand up for what’s right.
          Sinclair Lewis was “the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature”; he wrote novels critical of rural America, the dreariness, materialism and perils of ambition found there. (The Sinclair Lewis Society) “His concern with issues involving women, race, and the powerless in society make his work still vital and pertinent today.” (SLS) His wife was instrumental in this book’s inspiration as she had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and discussed European political developments at that time with her husband, who was at the same time seeing, “the irrational demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the proliferation in America of fanatical political groups” (Tanner 57) “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights… with Lionel Barrymore cast in the lead role, but early in 1936 the film was abandoned… for fear of international complications and the displeasure of the Republican Party.” (Tanner 58) The objection of the GOP is odd, in my view, since the leader of the resistance is a Republican. In any case, It can’t happen here would have to wait until 1983 to be brought to the small screen as the mini-series “V” in which the fascists are recast as extraterrestrials. (Wikipedia)

            The reader sees events mainly through the eyes of a small town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, an educated, intelligent man of sixty years who sees through the façade around Buzz. Nestled away in an archetypal small New England town called Fort Beulah, Vermont; Doremus feels that even if the insanity surrounding the Windrip candidacy doesn’t subside, he figures that life will go on. Personally, Doremus is a “small-town bourgeois Intellectual”, “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal”. (68-9) None the less, his editorials often took a position considerably to the left of his readers and when “[h]e got named Bolshevik… his paper lost a hundred and fifty out of its five thousand circulation” (69) Life does go on, but with horrible consequences for Doremus when his gardener, Shad Ledue, becomes the new county commissioner and takes revenge on his former employer for perceived past slights.

          If Doremus is the hero, the villains are played by a remarkable coterie of individuals and organizations committed to wrenching the reins of power into their own hands.  Buzz himself was a powerful orator, after hearing him speak in New York City and being deftly moved by it; Doremus remarked to himself “[b]ut what Mr. Windrip actually had said, [he] could not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.” (140) Bishop Paul Peter Prang was a radio preacher whose “League of Forgotten Men” delivered to the senator votes in order to win, these are characterizations of the late Huey Long and Father Coughlin that Mr. Lewis was so concerned with addressing. (60-1) Muscle was provided by Colonel Dewey Haik and his paramilitary Minute Men, “a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs… the shock troops of Freedom!” (129-30) Intellectual power was provided by Lee Sarason and Dr. Hector MacGoblin, who coined the phrases and songs used by the campaign to more or less distract people and persuade them to vote the right way. The new regime’s ideology was called “corpoism” after the United States was renamed “The American Corporate State” with Windrip soon becoming “The Chief” instead of the president. (142, 214)
            The country was reorganized into Provinces, Districts and counties; with the old geographical distinctions being discarded. The unemployed were rounded up into “enormous labor camps” to work on state projects or hired out to the private sector. (216) Political opponents (like Doremus and most of his friends, eventually) were eventually interned in concentration camps for torture and often execution when “caught trying to escape” (422) The corpos preferred method of torture was a combination of flogging with a “steel fishing rod” and forcing the victim to drink caster oil. (423) Eventually Doremus escapes to Canada and joins the resistance, which does invade and take control of a large area of the US. However, the counterrevolution bogs down and the book ends in a stalemate, even though it is clear that corpoism is largely a spent force due to overreach.  By the novel’s finish, much intrigue has occurred at the top leaving Buzz exiled, Sarason assassinated and Col. Haik as the new Chief.
           This book was written in 1935, before Americans fully understood what totalitarianism was and it was subsequently turned into a play for the WPA theatre, perhaps as a reminder to stick with the mostly moderate policies of Franklin Roosevelt. I feel this novel is overshadowed by George Orwell’s 1984, also warning against totalitarianism of the Stalinist formulation, which was published after the full horrors of World War II were revealed. But Lewis predicted quite a few of the horrors of fascism, right down to concentration camp inmates betraying each other to get out. (430) I believe this story, told on the stage and on the page, helped inoculate America against fascism and in that way played a small part in saving the world from fascism during the 1930’s and 40’s. Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Doremus comments that: “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.” (258)
            The author’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, “was an expert on European fascism” and no doubt a major source of research, however the edition I read contained no acknowledgements. (Tanner 59) The edition also lacked a preface and I was left somewhat unmoored at the beginning of the story, with only a passing knowledge of the content it took a while to orient myself in this world. Mr. Lewis mentions so many real-life individuals mixed with his fictional characters it was sometimes hard to differentiate them, a reader without historical knowledge of the period and the several references to the Civil War era that Doremus draws strength and reflection from. The book paints a lucid picture, with most of the good guys in the story unable to believe what has happened and even less able to protect themselves from the madness; a representative example is Dr. Fowler Greenhill, who attempts to rescue his father-in-law Doremus from jail and give the local corpos a piece of his mind as though freedom of speech and due process of law still existed and is summarily shot on one corpo’s whim. (269-72)
            Although I could hardly put this book down I did find it overly detailed, with too many simultaneous plot-lines going on at once and far too many characters. I can imagine that this chaotic style helped to reinforce the chaotic events described; and the extensive character development certainly helps the political discussions in the book seem less like the author arguing with himself. “In a remarkable burst of creative energy in 1935, [Lewis] wrote It Can’t Happen Here in a matter of weeks, and his publisher rushed it into print.” (Tanner 57) As such, it is a remarkable effort and great public service, relevant to all Americans interesting in preserving the rule of law in our nation. Above that it is valuable to a college course on this time period because it does an excellent job of relating what life was like in the 1920’s and 1930’s; mentioning the technological innovations, political atmosphere and above all translating the rise of  home-grown fascism for people who think that revolution and dictatorship can only happen elsewhere.