What Can We BELIEVE about Venezuela?

It all seems embarrassingly too simple. 

The US government, in association with local elites, is staging yet another coup d'etat in a resource-rich country. Our president* and his national security chief are on public record crowing about "oil". The current administration has even hired Elliot Abrams (a long term operative with criminally bloody associations with rape, torture, and murder in Latin America) to take on a steering role in toppling the Maduro government. 

It's just too obvious!

The New York Time publishes a broadside by the presumptive "interim president" whom the US and its allies have rushed to recognize. And they include an illuminating illustrative photograph! The presumptive president stands (the caption says while attending Mass) tall like a Norman Rockwell avatar of rock ribbed New England democracy.

Maybe this time is different!?

They wouldn't try to propagandize us!  Would they?  Can our consent be manufactured just like that?

Maybe THIS time the US government is simply trying to do the right thing?

There is a galvanizing part of the human mind that craves simplicity: good v. evil, right v. wrong, the New England Patriots v. everybody else . . . (There's also an urgent part of our psyche that craves escapism, fantasy, and whimsy. Sometimes it's just "all too much" to try to sort fact from fiction. This is especially difficult when we're trying to figure out who to "root for" from our captain's chairs as we munch nachos and slurp down beers. And remember that nerdy history teacher? Remember the pranks we played and the names we called? Those were the good old days what with PJ, Bernie Bart, and Squi - and those keggers almost every weekend . . . Oh what barfing!)

The mass media including the hipper segments of the entertainment complex from The New York Times to John Oliver all agree. Maduro is a dictator who has driven his country to the brink of starvation through corruption, mismanagement, and repression. They are the ones "in the know".

Only a few voices like Noam Chomsky (is he STILL alive?) Alan Nairn, and Eva Gollinger remind us in their tireless tiresome way that nothing is truly simple. 

Eva Gollinger is a Venezuelan journalist who practices immigration law in New York. She was a confidante of Hugo Chavez and knows Nicolas Maduro. She is also familiar with the culture and history of Venezuela and has a clear-eyed, unsparing view of the situation. No doubt she should not be considered the final authority, but does the final authority come from the US mainstream corporate media?  Does it come from the US government with its checkered history and which now allows itself to be guided and represented by Elliot Abrams?

What should we believe?

Well, let's have Eva Gollinger remind us about Elliot Abrams.

He’s notoriously known for his work facilitating the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua during the “dirty wars” in the 1980’s as well as arming other death squads and right-wing paramilitary forces throughout really the region of Central America in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Mass slaughter, mass grave sites, torture – this is something that Elliot Abrams has justified as part of a Cold War battle. He’s adamantly anticommunist and is still caught up in that mindset and was actually convicted of, I believe it was two counts of lying, perjury, to Congress specifically about his role and the U.S. government’s role in the illegal arming of these paramilitary forces that directly assassinated thousands of innocent people in Central America in the 1980s.

This is history that we all should know. If we did, so many things here in the US and in the rest of the world might be different.

Here's more:

He actually played a key role overseeing the 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chavez who was president of Venezuela. It was a coup backed by the United States, not as overtly as what we are experiencing now with this current regime change operation. But the naming of Elliot Abrams has conjured up a really dark history of the United States intervening in Latin America through violence, through death, through political assassinations that resulted in the instability and chaos and insecurity and levels of violence in Central America that have carried through to today precisely to this immigration crisis that’s affecting the United States today. We can trace that directly back to Elliott Abrams and the role that he played in destabilizing the region.

By the way, Elliot Abrams doesn't always deny these allegations. Instead, he implies that the alternative to his atrocities was something worse. Socialism!

In case there are any doubts, I am not a neutral observer here. Whatever the faults of Nicholas Maduro and his Bolivarian government, I am against Elliot Abrams and what he stands for. And if Elliot Abrams is against socialism, then I'm inclined to give Socialists the benefit of quite a few doubts.

Venezuela has a long and complicated history with the US - and with democracy at home. It has had bloody dictators who, with the support of US security services, tortured and killed thousands of "socialists" and "communists" in the 1950s. It has had reformist presidents who went as far as to nationalize the oil industry in their country which by most measures has the world's largest proven oil reserves.

But let's let Attorney Eva Gollinger offer some additional explanation.

However, by the 1990s, the oil company owned by Venezuela, the state-owned company Pedevesa, was functioning practically like a private corporation benefiting the elite in power as well as the high-level oil industry executives. 

But at the same time, the foreign companies that were heavily invested in Venezuela’s oil industry, primarily U.S. based ones like Exxon, Chevron, and others, were not subject to the rules and laws that were in place in Venezuela throughout those years. For example, they weren’t paying royalties, they weren’t paying taxes. There were lots of commissions that were given to state officials. There was corruption and also in general, Venezuela wasn’t profiting as much as it should have been from those relationships. So when Chavez was elected in 1998, Pedevesa was on the verge of being privatized. That’s what was going on, and poverty had grown to nearly 80 percent in the country. So one of his main goals was to sort of take control again over the oil industry. It wasn’t to nationalize it because it was already nationalized, just to ensure it wouldn’t be privatized.

Seems like when Hugo Chavez took power he worked to make sure more of the benefits of Venezuela's oil riches flowed to the people.  Oil wealth financed access to healthcare and education which the capitalist system had never gotten around to providing. 

For his efforts, the US overthrew him in a 2002 coup. But the people of Venezuela demanded and supported Chavez's return to power. (Am I oversimplifying? Almost certainly. Google is your friend! Don't you believe THAT? Hint: Chavez was also involved in some other military coups . . . )

Hugo Chavez cavorted with Fidel Castro and sent oil to help poor people in New England. 

And Hugo Chavez was a socialist!

Hugo Chavez was certainly no saint. Neither was Nelson Mandela. And of course neither were the majority of associates and key supporters who helped run their regimes . . . er, governments. Luckily in the US we always have the best and the brightest serving in our high offices and in every president's cabinet! (Just to keep it fair we should try NOT to think about our current president* and his comrades . . . er, associates.)

Then Hugo Chavez died without establishing good institutional roles at the top or designating and grooming a successor.

Here is Eva Gollinger again:

[Maduro] is someone who has risen through the ranks of Chavismo, who began, even though he came from a humble background as a bus driver, very much connected with those deep workers rights and the union rights roots, grassroots movements. He was very connected in that sense to communities, which is the fundamental support system of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. And then he became a deputy and a legislator in the National Assembly, president of the National Assembly – the roll currently of Juan Guaido – and subsequently foreign minister for six years. So he was one of the more experienced and likable members and he was the one that Chavez eventually selected to be his successor. He wasn’t as charismatic or likable and certainly wasn’t as prepared. He always saw himself as more of one of Chavez’s soldiers rather than a leader himself of the country. He didn’t aspire to be president and wasn’t prepared. 

[Maduro] is heavily influenced by circle of advisors around him, amongst them his wife, who is a very powerful figure in the government party and who also has links to a lot of corruption and illicit activity networks throughout the country, including white-collar crime but also extortion and things that are highly problematic, especially for the first lady of the country. At the same time, there are also a lot of other advisors around him that influences his decision-making. Initially, there were some that were more experienced but that’s been weeded out as his paranoia has grown because of the increasing threats around him. And the key sort of ring around him has been tightened and been reduced in terms of people who have direct access an influence over his decision-making.

So Maduro is not the Venezuelan Abraham Lincoln. This is true even if we remember that when Washington DC was hemmed in on three sides by Confederate forces, Honest Abe instituted martial law in Maryland, suspended Habeas Corpus, and arrested private citizens. But that was history, - and this is now when Venezuela is hemmed in by Brazil to the south and Columbia to the west. Columbia is stocked with US special forces, and the US has military bases on Caribbean islands to the north.

Things are bad in Venezuela now. The collapse of oil prices forced the Maduro government to cut back on healthcare and education spending. This has weakened Maduro's support among the poor. 

US sanctions are also major contributors to the hardships of the Venezuelan people who are used to rioting in the streets but who are now fleeing across the Columbian border. Though (apparently) nobody is starving, there are food shortages. The economy is in tumult and there are hoarding and black marketeering by both private citizens and large distributors. The country is rife with conspiracy theories.

According to Eva Gollinger:

The healthcare system has deteriorated dramatically in the country, and that’s why we’re seeing millions of Venezuelans leaving the country and migrating, mainly out of the economic crisis and a need for opportunity.

What can we believe?

Before the [1973] coup in Chile that brought [the bloody dictator Augusto] Pinochet to power, Henry Kissinger famously said the US was going to “make the economy scream.” -- Bryan Bowman

Whether it's the United States, Great Britain, France, Nicaragua or Venezuela, Democracy is not a straight and narrow road. It's a steep, stony path filled with treachery, misdirection, and sometimes with bloody work. Democracy has, in some places, restrained itself with the self-controls of modern liberalism (limited government, rule of law, and countervailing powers). So far liberalism has been what has guaranteed liberal rights (free expression etc), but Democracy is really about people power. And people power demands additional rights including the rights to food, shelter, rewarding work, dignified leisure, healthcare, and education. Democracy has a long way to go. Some people call it "Socialism".

Whatever happens in Venezuela during the next weeks and months, north of the Mexican border it's all soon bound to swirl down the memory hole the way beer's flushed away during station breaks in the Stuperbowl.

But some of us might try to remember. Might try to understand.

Oh and, Elliot Abrams. I was torn between voting for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. But now thinking about you and if Bernie runs, I'm bound to vote for him. Because he calls himself a socialist!



Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)

The Idiot Elite and Mass Misery

When people are optimistic and doing well, they are more generous and more open to the abstract ideas of liberalism (rule of law, limited government, and countervailing powers). When people are pessimistic and feel like they are falling behind, they are more “conservative” and more tolerant of hate, threats of violence, disruptions, and authoritarianism.

Governmental power in the United States is divided and checked by constitutional limitations, the checks & balances of Federalism, and other forms of institutional separation of powers. Private power in the United States is highly concentrated in very few hands and is increasingly irresponsible and dangerous. The idiot elite (0.1%) have a vested interest in keeping the majority of us miserable, insecure, and bitterly divided. They depend on keeping us ignorant and pessimistic about government, and when they can, they stock government offices with incompetents and grifters so as to demonstrably discredit the idea that governments can serve the people.

The private power of the very rich needs to be countered and reduced by the forces of government and other institutions including labor unions. Otherwise, the idiot elite (0.1%) will destroy our planet’s ability to support organized human life.

It's that bad.

Luckily, it is not required that the 99% unite in some shared belief system.  It is only required that all of us (to the best of our ability) do our best to understand the complexities and urgencies of our times.  This means recognizing the vested interests of those who set themselves against the needs and the human rights of the majority.



Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)

Not ALL Capitalists are Idiots

Socialism is nothing but economic democracy. Economic democracy is just what we need to allow human societies and individuals to develop and express capacities stunted by a system where a tiny (0.1%) idiot elite monopolizes the vast majority of capital resources.

In order to function sustainably, Democracy (“Socialism”) must be subject to the institutional constraints of liberalism (rule of law, checks and balances, divided and countervailing powers). It must develop, support, and strengthen these institutions of self-regulation by investing them with intergenerational popular support.

 Freedom is self-control

The forces of greed and selfishness (idiocy) will never be totally vanquished. But neither will they be allowed to prevail. The forces of greed and idiocy can never guarantee the rights humanity will not be denied. These rights have been articulated by many throughout the millennia but were spelled out in stark, honest American terminology by Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union Address. These rights include food, shelter, the opportunity for productive work, dignity and freedom in leisure, healthcare, and a good education.

Anti-socialist, anti-democratic capitalist (0.1%) elites are forced to fight tooth and nail to deny these basic rights to humanity. They have nothing to offer us but lies, savage punishment, and threats of punishing savagery.

But, just as all workers are not saints and seers, not all capitalists are idiots. As they take the lead in globalization and automation, they are helping to lay the framework that will allow them to be replaced even as we work together to free everyone from unnecessary forms of drudgery and domination.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TazBIiAJtb0&feature=youtu.be&t=24

We Have The Picture

They had a holy cause.

The kids were there to protect the most vulnerable population they could imagine. They were there to protect the unborn, to affirm unborn humans’ rights to personhood. They wore caps expressing fealty to the temporal ambitions of a roguish man some believe to be anointed by divine authority to advance their holy cause. They had been sent, with chaperones, by their school and their diocese. They were waiting for a bus to take them home.


They had a hoody cause.

The kids were there to assert their own personhood: their right to be noticed but not shot down in the streets. They did it their own raucous way without chaperones or sponsorship, relying on their wit, their cool, their ability to puncture the presumption and the composure of any who would insult them - or ignore them. They could assert themselves, name themselves, take care of themselves. Their way.


Kids.

Not totally dependent, but not fully developed in terms of education, experience, or myelination.

Adolescent boys.

How do they ever learn if not given some freedom to make mistakes?

But apparently unsupervised adolescent boys engaging in disturbing displays (exchanging taunts, testing nerve, asserting dominance) are often unsettling to others including dogs, small children, girls, other adolescent boys, and most adults.


They had a human cause.

They were there because this was once their land. Citizenship was imposed on them in 1924; full voting rights had not been recognized for some of them until 1957. They were representing those struggling against isolation and despair, fighting to forge an identity that afforded hope and dignity in the land of their conquerors. One of them, a veteran of one of his savage conqueror’s many savage wars, noticed the two boyish tribes in their incipient fracas.

People prattle about understanding. But nobody understands.

The old man stepped in. He stepped in with his own best version of sternness, and of gentleness. He wanted to distract them. He wanted to charm them. He wanted them to understand.


A picture was taken.

A picture was taken, the smirking features of one boy eerily reminiscent of the smirking features of older boys in another photo taken years ago as they menaced other young men protesting silently by trying to order coffee at a lunch counter. Woolworths.

A picture was taken while our government is shut down and a struggle for power is escalating in ways that threaten to careen out of control.

A picture was taken of a smirk.

Many saw the smirk as a chilling symbol of the menace from those ever willing to suspend law, order, and every respect for human decency in their determination to sustain traditional forms of injustice and domination.

But others saw something different.


They had video.

They had a video which they thought should discredit those who fight for personhood and human dignity. “Ah Ha!” they crowed. “See, you have no cause! You have no rights! You are fools! What a bunch of noise you make over nothing! Pictures, you know, can be deceiving!”

Anything can be deceiving. Everything can be deceiving.

We have a president* who has built a career on deception, and who has called forth a dangerous political following based on deception. But not only on deception. We have a president* who has built up himself and his followers based on hatreds, fears, bullying, disparagement, and the nullification of others. The smirking boy proudly wore the obscene president’s* cap.


We have the picture.

The picture doesn’t really tell the whole story. What single picture could?

The picture doesn’t really tell the whole story of how churches and congregations (some very old, some exquisitely venerable) have cast their lot with their new Cyrus. (Their new Cyrus is a colossal buffoon of unmeasured criminality, treachery, and menace.)

The picture doesn’t really tell the whole story of how entire churches with all their ancient and preternatural symbolism have invested their authority in a president* who symbolizes the power of the state to tear infants from their mothers’ breast and build triumphal walls to exclude the despised.

The picture doesn’t really tell the whole story of how legions of churches marching behind a colossal Cyrus could threaten the rights, personhood, and dignity of every soul walking wearily through this broken world.

But some people want personhood for the unborn. Others want their wall.

They have their churches. They have their Cyrus.


We have the picture.




Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)
​

To Hate Socialism is to Hate Democracy and Human Rights

The unreasoning fear and hatred of socialism are more than simply the hatred and fear of democracy. Such unreasoning hostility is nothing other than the fear and hatred of basic human rights.

These rights include access to decent housing, medical care, and support in times of dependency, childhood, sickness, accident, unemployment and old age. These rights also include access to a good education. All this is too often damned as “socialism”. But perhaps such condemnation has finally lost its bite?

ALL of these rights and more were actually included in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Speech delivered in the throes of World War II while NAZI Germany still raged, undefeated. All these rights were fought for by the Democratic Party in the 1930s, 40s 50s, and 60s. And during that time period (when America was Great?) the Democratic Party made progress in institutionalizing these rights with no little support from many right thinking and far-seeing Republicans.

The Democratic Party’s subsequent retreat from these commitments was partially a response to the burgeoning prosperity of the 1960s when regulations were intact, the highest marginal income tax rates were much higher, and deficits were insignificant by today’s standards. The Democratic Party's retreat from these fundemental commitments was also partially a response to the growing power of concentrated wealth which was fortified by each successive tax reduction and the gradual elimination of market regulations designed to maintain a level playing field for competition and innovation.

Since the 1970s Republicans have been selling us tax cuts for the rich, falsely claiming they would not increase debt and deficits. But this was always a ruse to make the promise of America seem an impossible dream for all but a tiny few. There is a clear historical pattern demonstrating that as soon as Republicans drive up debt and deficits, they renew their screeches to cut back on protections for workers, the poor, women, consumers, old people, communities and the environment. (It’s their planetary destruction policy based on destroying jobs, hope, and our faith in each other.)

For too long establishment Democrats have been complicit or helpless in the face of the Republican passion for tax cuts craftily designed to appeal to those who feel most crushed by a system which then becomes even more crushing and ever more unfair with every tax cut that disproportionately benefits the very wealthy who can then find nothing productive to do with their accumulated wealth but “invest” it in frippery and casino capitalist speculations that only help to destroy the foundations of our economy and our society.

But the Democratic establishment may well be changing. “Becoming more ‘EXTREME’ and more Socialist!” cry the corporate pundits.

• The right to a decent income.
• The right to decent healthcare
• The RIGHT to a good education
• The RIGHT to all these things and more without the sense that any of them are “handouts” dangled before us in ways that diminish our freedom, pride, and dignity.

This is Socialism?

If this is Socialism, a new generation of Democrats may be preparing to make the most of it.

Populism is, in part, a generalized revulsion against so-called “experts” and “leaders” who have failed to regulate the system in ways that seem fair, honest, and effective. Populism is a commonly held frustration - and even disgust - with “the establishment.” The current US surge of populism includes Tea Party trimpulists but also Bernie style Democratic Socialists. What is frequently overlooked about both of these populist “wings” is that each is actually dominated by upscale and relatively well educated “whites”.

Of course, these upscale well educated “Socialist” Democrats (who are as willing to embrace the “S” word as they are the “L” word) are much younger than their authoritarian counterparts. They are more likely to be female, and they also include large cohorts of Asians and Hispanics. They are also new voters who, as they age, are somewhat likely to maintain higher levels of participation in electoral politics including voting for (and contributing funds to) candidates in off-year and primary elections. And knowing that doing so might help nudge the United States closer towards European style “Socialism” will only encourage them to maintain such commitments. Out of concern for their own future, the future of their children, and the future of the planet, these new Democratic voters harbor a certain amount of skepticism toward "establishment" Democrats who quail at the idea of being "too extreme."

Voters who do not participate in primary and off-year elections consign the fate of laws and regulations to a crusty, out of touch, minority. Citizens sell their future, their democratic rights, and the future of their children to a privileged elite when they do not support their candidates and causes with small donations of time, attention.

Citizens who do not participate in off-year and primary elections are sullenly surrendering their right and the rights of their sons, their daughters, their nieces, and their nephews. They are signing away the future of today’s generation of students.

And what are these rights?

Here they are in the words of FDR in a State of the Union speech delivered in January of 1944.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

• The right of every family to a decent home;

• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Notice the reference to “monopolies at home and abroad”. Remember that FDR advocated a top marginal income tax rate of 90% to help prevent the accumulation of wealth that crushes opportunity and hope for the vast majority.  Today we know that in order to protect human rights and democracy, powerful corporations will have to be reoriented so that their obligations to society represented by workers, consumers, and communities cannot be disparaged, ignored, or subsumed into more selfish and irresponsible ends. 

This will not be easy, but the complexities involved should not daunt us. Systems can be designed to protect the rights of property and individuals in ways that encourage even more vitality and innovation than the bitter and destructive state capitalism we suffer today.

FDR know how to design systems to stay protected against the insidious influences of concentrated wealth and the potential for general slackness. Note how the “pay it forward” aspect of the Social Security system has, so far, been able to fend off the attacks of casino capitalists and purveyors of financial snake oil.

• The right to basic income and amenities
• The right to healthcare
• The right to an education

All these rights are now being claimed by a new generation of populists, progressives, and Democrats inc. But will we have the will and persistence to not only “claim” these rights but “institute” them such so that they may withstand the wily attacks of corporate wealth and the deadening complacence of future generations who may forget our current and future struggles?

Here are more words from that same wartime State of the Union address:

This Nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world's greatest war against human slavery.
We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule.
But I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
We are united in determination that this war shall not be followed by another interim which leads to new disaster- that we shall not repeat the tragic errors of ostrich isolationism—that we shall not repeat the excesses of the wild twenties when this Nation went for a joy ride on a roller coaster which ended in a tragic crash.

Today the greatest threat of “gangster rule” is not emanating from the destructive terrorism of those who delude themselves about an Islamic caliphate. We are also in little danger of being enslaved by Russians or the Chinese. The gravest dangers to our institutions of freedom and security are coming from the irresponsible greed and complacency of those who are illegitimately positioned to have an inordinate influence in the design of a globalized economy and the automation of our production processes. FDR knew these types very well and did not hesitate to call them out as “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth.”

They, in turn, called FDR a “Socialist”!

Let the greatest of American presidents speak out for himself:

There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense.

* * *

However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole.

There are always those who will demand “special favors for special groups”. And then there are rights that belong to all people though we have not yet had the will or the resources to institute these rights in a sustainable way.

These basic rights include

• The right to food
• The right to shelter
• The right to dignified freedom and recreation
• The right to healthcare
• The right to an education

The post-Watergate generation of Congressional Democrats which included Joe Biden slacked off in their commitment to instituting those rights. For some of them, it was only a strategic retreat. For others, there may still be time for them to redeem themselves as honorable fighters for the cause of universal human rights. But we must depend on a new generation to learn from old mistakes.

One thing we can all agree upon is that to institute necessary rights for all humanity the right way, it must be done within the context of the greater system of liberal democracy where even the will of the people is subsumed under the rule of law as we seek to counter, balance, divide, and control illegitimate forms of concentrated wealth and power.

Good old American Socialism. Let’s do it right this time!

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass)

Kamala Harris is a COP!

This is one part of a series which has also highlighted Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden

Kamala Harris is a cop!

Kamala Harris is a cop who has sent zero bankers to jail.

Kamala Harris, an Asian Indian African American, is the “female Obama”.

Are such descriptions of career prosecutor and first-term Senator Ms. Harris more damning or reassuring?

Perhaps the answer depends on your stance toward establishment liberalism, and whether you suspect any such thing might be moving somehow closer to democratic socialism.

Kamala Harris takes the heat for Joe Biden and other corporate Dems!

So far Ms. Harris, whose website is remarkably light on policy, is forgivably reliant on her biography and demographic affiliations in her early efforts to build name recognition and to differentiate herself from announced and potential rivals in her party’s primary race. Given her MLK Day announcement it would be (cruelly?) ironic if her candidacy became emblematic of the type of liberalism decried by Dr. King:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.  

 Martin Luther King (Letter from a Birmingham Jail)

On a rhetorical level at least, the upcoming (ongoing?) Democratic Presidential Primaries will be (are!) a plebiscite on establishment liberalism. This will, no doubt, be the case whatever the fate of the candidacy of Ms. Harris.

I mean the term “establishment” here it’s broadest possible sense so that the term includes corporate democratic lobbyists and officeholders as well as Democratic Socialists (New Dealers) like Bernie and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. This is because, like it or not, all Mayors, Attorneys General, Governors, Senators, and Congresscritters are part of the “establishment” almost as much as are all major bankers, corporate executives, and those who own enough stock in major corporations to get their calls answered.

But if the “establishment” means “what is”, it can also be used to incorporate the responsibly held belief systems of those who do not hold office or wield power. The term “establishment” can, in this sense, be applied to almost anyone who might hesitate before supporting a bullying, lying, chiseling, cheating, money laundering, racist stooge of the Madison Avenue Kremlin to “shake things up” by becoming the actual President of the United States of Atomic America. In this sense, the term “establishment” includes all of us who have ever anguished when forced to select some balance point between “justice” and “order”.

Ms. Harris is right to reject being boxed in by ideologically contrived “false choices” such as any notion our only options are the abysmal wastelands created by stark unregulated Capitalism vs the hellholes of Stalinist dictatorships. But whether we own up to it or not, we are all inescapably confronted with frequent decisions where we must weigh idealism v pragmatism or order v justice - and in the immediate clutch of circumstance it avails us little to recognize such choices have been fabricated for us as much by deceptive ideological interests as by the harshness of historical circumstances. Of course we, who do not control significant swathes of resources or who do not hold offices of trust, can indulge ourselves in opinionated fantasies about our clear-eyed realism or in vague whimsies involving Dumbledore’s Hogwarts politics.

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

Pericles of Athens.

In my course I have known and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the persons who took the lead in the business. 

Edmund Burke

Whatever happens regarding the current abomination of a presidential* administration, we will all be called upon to make grave choices regarding whatever is to replace it. With looming threats of climate change, nuclear war, rising inequality, and crumbling legitimacy of institutions, we can only try to fortify our understanding and judgment for the choices sure to follow.


Joe Panzica (author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass)
​

How "The West" was Bull Sh*tted

The west? The West? The WEST?

With the US government rudderless and Great Britain surrendering its preeminent position in international finance, there was bound to a resurgence of farcical hand wringing about "The West".  Today its Bret Stephens in the New York Times worrying is "a moment of civilizational self-negation."

Western Civilization? The West?

The most charitable interpretation of these code words is that they telegraph allegiance to "liberal democracy" where even the will of the people can be checked (especially when that "will" is more willful than well-considered).

When circumstances justifiably prompt us to fret about the fate of liberal democracy, it’s too bad so few of us can resist injecting easy nonsense or deceptive toxins such as “free markets” into our discourse. “Free market” is another overused code word overladen with many more dubious associations than legitimate links to either “liberal democracy” or “Western Civilization".

To be sure markets "free" of government protected monoplies were an essential component of early liberalism which later became associated with its much ruder and older cousin "democracy". But it should be a matter of common knowledge that there is no such thing as as a "free market" because markets have virtually always been totally established, guaranteed, and maintained by all manner of sovereign laws and regulations - as well as by crucial social norms (which both mold and are, in turn, guided by rule of law).

It should be a matter of common knowledge that protections afforded by government to certain markets are only ONE important component of the project to advance “universal liberty and opportunity”; a project which is best labeled “liberal democracy”.

But “free market” is also a code word which is very useful for discrediting necessary protections for workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. This may be why the term is so often mindlessly and ritualistically invoked by so called “conservatives who really ought to know better. These same “conservatives”, too genteel for the dirty “street work” of social media politics, rely on the lumpen legions of “freedom celebratin’” anti-socialist true “Muricans to shout down polite protests against their lazy prevarications. “Don’t blame me,” they shrug. “Blame populism.” But by populism, they really mean “democracy” divorced from its essential protector: “liberalism”.

If someone really cares about “liberal democracy” and how it is threatened by authoritarian populism, why would they then bleat about illusory “free markets” unless their agenda is to continue denying American citizens access to decent healthcare and education? And why muddy thing more by murmuring mundane inanities about “Western Civilization”?

Western Civilization? The West?

Who the hell are they talking to?

Certainly not to non Europeans who understandably associate the term with crusading and colonizing marauders, slavers, strafers, napalm bombers, and spooky CIA inspired torturers, murderers, and rapists. 

Non Europeans also probably associate “The West” with Hollywood, Coca Cola, the Beatles, and Hip Hop . . . with “free markets” probably only a tiny italicized footnote to a footnote of some forgotten item near the bottom of a very long list. 

Of course the abstract obscurity of “protected and well regulated markets” and the mendacious awkwardness of the term “free market” is one reason why there is an ideological imperative to incessantly and brutally impregnate our tired minds with this limp lie.

We, who actually live in The West here and now, need to be talking about "the rule of law", "separation of powers", "checks and balances", "accountability", and "countervailing powers". That’s the liberal democracy which our forebears have painstakingly built into “our” institutions which are now being shaken and rattled by unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power (mostly in the hands of “Westerners” by the way) as well as by processes of automation, global economic integration, climate change, and migrations. All of these processes, by the way, are rife with opportunities for private "profit" by some paragons of "Western Civilization" who happen to be blessed with certain measures of boldness and fortuitious connections.

In this sense, the depredations of stumpy digit trimp, our ever more temporary president* may well be part of a larger process conducive to world wide liberal democracy. The US’s near monopolization of “superpower” has, overall, been a lamentable example of wasted opportunities and opportunistic malfeasance. Brexit is another example of a self inflicted injury that may well strengthen international financial markets extending well beyond Berlin.

People who wanted trimp or wanted Brexit wanted to "shake things up".

There's a WHOLE LOTTA shakin' going on . . .

But the US (never mind Western freaking civilization) does represent immense power with all its potential for good. Our failures on this score are certainly the result of the failures or our leaders who are only partially represented by elected officials. And our failures are certainly the result of the failures of those who, without democratic accountability, control vast accumulations of toxically managed wealth. 

But our failures are mainly the result of our own collective failures (as US citizens) to take our responsibilities seriously so that we are equipped to engage with facts and arguments in a more organized way.

Can we ever stop conflating democracy with "free market" capitalism, and look (with help from people such as Senator Professor Elizabeth Warren) at how markets can be structured to play a more equitable role in promoting prosperity and efficacy in our society? And isn’t it possible to decouple the concept of "market" from "profit" if “profit” means an inordinate flow of benefits and power to a tiny irresponsible few? And, while we're at it, can we ever stop conflating "America" with "whiteness", "white supremacy", and military triumphalism"?

"Only from our cold dead hands!" say the gun-totin' "protectors" of "Western Civilization"

When discussing "the rule of law", "separation of powers", "checks and balances", "accountability", and "countervailing powers", it’s not totally wrong headed to consider our current challenges as having a "civilizational" level of vital significance. And yes, Classical Atherns, the Roman Republic, the French Revolution, and the American Constitution are products of "Western Civilation", but they are not "our" only legacies - nor do they belong exclusively to "us". If we want to claim (or reclaim) some justifiable association with “liberal democracy” we'd better start taking the idea seriously on its own merits and not cripple it with racist and oligarchic insinuations.

But we can't do this as long as we continue to awkwardly (or intentionally) muddle ourselves. We don't know the ultimate limits to our cognitive (or any other human) capacities, but we know we can do better. Whatever those limits are, they are inextriccabley linked with the limits of our capacity to maintain and build upon liberal democratic institutions. That's why we need a commitment to worthwhile, life long, educational opportunities for all - with schooling in classrooms only one aspect of this. 

Every tired educator knows how challenging this is. How can they help younger minds or those with minds molded by variant experiences to organize and dissect terms and arguments with mutually verifiable facts and well reasonable counter arguments when these capacities are effectively despised and neglected by too many main streams in our culture?

A liberal democracy needs a liberal education as much or more than it needs markets protected and governed by accountable laws and institutions. And a liberal democracy needs every citizen to cultivate and nuture their own built in bullshit detector along with some means to provide effective countermeasures to the confusions and distractions of those who profit from purveying such waste material.

​Joe Panzica  (author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass)

Unce Joe Biden and the Sad Establishment Blues

There's a whole lotta shaking goin' on!

Perhaps enough by now to gratify those calculating "souls" who lauded trimp as "the lesser of two evils" in 2016, perhaps on the undisputed basis that the donald had no credible connection to chains of pizza eating child molesters. Those same types are surely pleased as pinch with the government shutdown threatening to become an endless grind spinning off enough essential workers, skilled or otherwise, to render the dismantled capacities of everyday governmental functioning unrestorable in the foreseeable bleakness. 

Most of those plodding sloggers are Dems anyway, ain't they?

In the meantime, previously mild-mannered reporters are sparking the temerity to ask a sitting president* of the United States of Murica whether he is now or had never been a paid agent of the Russian Kremlin oligarchic mattress sniffing conspiracy. 

Dasvidanya Azul! (That means you, trimp!)

This all came about because something happened in the 1930s when the Federal Gubmint in its infinitesimal wisdom decided it was time to start treating (white) workingmen like persons instead of shooting them down in the streets as was the bloody custom between 1870 and 1937.  All THAT nonsense got outta hand when, by the early 1970s, unskilled assembly line workers could pull in today's equivalent of $50 per hour and afford to take vacations and maybe send their kids to college. But then when neoliberal Dems and Reaganites had been dismantling the New Deal for several decades, the children and grandcritters of those workers started getting sullen, putting the blame on brown-skinned immigrants and the libtards who run the deep state from their Social Security Administration offices, the Library of Congress, the Center for Disease Control, and the Consumer Protection Agency.

Clearly, our established systems for getting things done had been failing the majority of us for quite some time and something had to be done about it. 

So chaos.

And now the New York Times is pleading with Joe Biden to toss his cap into the frayed body politic.

Well, actually the call comes from columnist David Leonhardt who quite reasonably wants to encourage our only responsible nationwide party to have a wide-ranging field of diverse viewpoints and skillsets. Biden, for all his charm and hard earned "gravitas" (the guy is a mensch who has weathered unspeakable loss and tragedy), may be too closely tied to Wall Street and corporate America for him to serve as a truly credible agent of change or systemic preservations. My personal opinion is that Biden's best option in the upcoming presidential primary is for him to be the “lead laughing attack dog”. He has the rhetorical chops to eviscerate trimp and any trimpulist who debates him with derisive aplomb and to then abruptly pivot into a soulful solemn jeremiad about a “president”* who can credibly be accused of being a Russian agent while teachers have to go on strike to get enough notebooks and pencils for their overloaded classrooms.

Is Biden really too corporate? Fairness (and in his case, decency) requires an open mind.

And corporations for all their tyrannical sins are bound to be an integral part of our economy and society for generations as they have been for well over a century now. Hopefully, they will play a responsible role in a 21st century Green New Deal which will overall our transportation and utility infrastructures as well as retrofit all our public and private buildings for energy efficiency and structural sustainability. Hopefully, corporate America will see how it will profit from a universal healthcare system untethered from employment. Hopefully, they will offer wholehearted support to a life long educational system which emphases democratic responsibility and critical thinking as much as it does in developing "their" workforce.

Hopefully.

Can Uncle Joe help them see the light and lead the way for corporations to be committed institutional protectors of citizens and not immortal greed soaked people monsters with soulless limited liability?

Can he?

We will be fooled again. Of that, there is no doubt. But we need to be as serious and as generous as we are shy of being repeatedly chumped and plucked like the pigeons we are.

Tell us it's so, Uncle Joe

Joe Panzica (author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass)
​

Why Not Warren?

Morons and troublemakers wanna claim Warren has no appeal to middle America, but she was raised and formed in Oklahoma.

Idiots and lazybrains bleat Warren is too "extreme", but all she wants to do is make our complex systems work for ordinary people.

We need a Green New Deal (renewing our energy and transportation infrastructures to offer sustainable jobs, redistribute income, and combat climate change).

We need a commitment to Universal Healthcare and lifelong education to offer citizens some basic security while also bolstering the habits of mind required for a functioning democracy

We need predistribution of wealth to make sure the markets are level playing grounds. And we need Corporate Accountability to reverse the dangers to democracy (as well as to human freedom and dignity) caused by irresponsible concentrated wealth.

If someone else can credibly claim they will do their best to advance these goals, I'll consider voting for him or her. Bernie is still in the running. But Warren, being younger and female, has more potential (I think) to mobilize the most active elements of the Democratic Party base while also bringing in younger and minority voters who are so turned off by ClintonObamaBiden politics as usual.

It's time for politicians and leaders who have taken their stand a decent distance away from the snares of Wall Street and our oligarchic overlords (the ones who destroy jobs, misinvest our wealth, and wreak our economy while supporting the most dangerous forms of anti-democratic extremism).