One Problem With Opinion Shapers

They Warp and Mislead Themselves as Much as They Confuse Everyone Else

In his latest NYT column, the normally astute Thomas Edsall is confusing an already tangled set of issues with his focus on "trade" and his misuse of that term.

It's extremely important to recognize that VERY few people (rich or poor, from red states or blues states) object to trade when it means exporting "our" goods and services. This has simply never been the case. US policy, going back even to before there was a US (which means before there was an Alexander Hamilton), has always been about promoting exports and blocking (to the extent possible) many forms of imports.

But the fake "trade" deals (NAFTA, TPP, etc) are only marginally about reducing barriers to US exports. As Edsall points out, the "Blue" areas are already doing very well.

The situation with "imports" is where everyone's thinking gets more discombobulated. The US is still highly protectionist in many areas (one of the privileges of imperial firepower). But these so-called (actually fake) "trade" deals are more concerned with a special kind of "import" which is more like an internal corporate transfer of goods (or their components) between different locations of one business that "coincidentally happen" to be on different sides of the US borders (or on different sides of the Pacific Ocean).

Thus these "trade" deals are really about facilitating the export of JOBS and PRODUCTION. The majority of people who live in "Blue States" are only temporarily insulated from the corrosive effects this will eventually have on their well being, incomes, and security. And their major benefit from these high powered scams is the temporarily "low everyday prices" made possible by the beggaring of their relatives in "Red States" and the grinding exploitation of workers (often children or prisoners) on the wrong side of the borders/oceans.

We all need to be more careful about our terminology. What we (too often) call "trade" deals are really part of a long term, well-financed, highly propagandized program to reduce the bargaining power of US workers and to dilute the political power of US voters. 

Columnists, politicians, and corporate mouthpieces who (through their mischaracterizations) collaborate with the predatory global 0.1% against the interest of the US population should be called out - or educated.

Are Democrats Bad for the Country?

Being the lesser of two evils can never earn whole hearted support from honest people.

Stanley and Anna Greenberg ask if Obama was "Bad for Democrats". Their column points to how the party lost seats in the off-year elections and failed to win a majority large enough to offset the vagaries of the Electoral College in the context of strategic FBI and Russian meddling.

The Greenbergs never acknowledge structures of white supremacy and attitudes of racism that certainly "colored" every interpretation of Obama's actions and demeanor. This obviously wore heavily on the man, and enabled his (our) enemies to largely keep him in check.

But the Greenbergs' most deleterious omission was any direct reference to the negative power of concentrated wealth. FDR was the only modern presidential politician who could call out "the malefactors of great wealth" and publicly mock them, defy them, attack them, and "welcome their hate". But FDR, of course, was not only "white", he was a born and bred member of the opulent classes.

Obama played a careful game in the constraints of a shattered and still fragile economy. Yes, he "failed" to venture into the risky territory of naked class warfare. That means he was more calculating than bold. But the story of ObamaCare puts all that into its correct perspective.

The Affordable Care Act was barely passed despite a Democratic Congressional majority. Not a single Republican offered any support despite the fact that the bill's provisions had been largely cooked up in Conservative and Republican circles. And his reward? A devastating setback in the next off-year election.

Obama may have been bad for Democrats. But the Democrats (as currently constituted with their dependence on corporate$) are bad for themselves - and bad for the country. Being the lesser of two evils can never earn wholehearted support from honest people.

Scowl

Unseasonably warm now, it's nearly December, the month before a looming Gogg of Maggnoration, but it chills to remember April will be yet more cruel / knowing there must be so many to cross - with as many or more unwarming winters.

Through many dark moments difficulties will deliberately be made for you so you might forget the elevation you decry is for one who has sure-footedly forfeited all leadership rights to allegiance, faith - or honor. 

Repeatedly you’ll be be asked what you’re fighting for, queried mockingly, dismissively, and provocatively by those who sneeringly and seemingly wish to wither your resolve and youth.  And in dark moments you are certain to forget.

If you ever knew what you are fighting for - instead of warring against - you will forget.  

You will forget because your interrogators seemingly want that: because they appear intent on forcing you to falsely realize and confess you never knew - that there may be nothing behind you or inside - except perhaps puerile histrionics, naive outrage, infantile entitlement, and childish spite.

Across unnumbered Aprils you will forget your struggling motives because it will shock and hurt to sense your inquisitors merely pretend not to know.  And well they might.  You'll forget because it will horrify and chill to imagine their ignorance is unfeigned.  You will forget because such deadening forgetfulness seems all numbing and silencing.  And you'll forget because your tormenters will appear convincingly correct about the void they fear you're dragging them towards. 

It's said winter burial brings comfort.  So lonely and bitter, the deep dark cold dulls each urge to stretch and sprout - freezing life spurring rains against frozen crusts far removed. Such dead comfort pulls coldly as if, like gravity, it were inexorably woven in time's fabric.  It will pull you hard, and make you forget why you must resist.

You will forget.  

Again and again.

You will forget even in the branded shadows of towers, even trumping aside glistening ribbons of tolled highways, even huddling miserably under corporately leveled arching spans, even swallowing metered measures of privatized water from walled rivers, sealed wells, and padlocked springs.

You will forget when you succumb to illusions your torturers are foes.   Red face, ursine workers with regained Sinatra swagger heaving twinkied lunch pales under country music strains are made as uneasy by you, the true hopes and fears for their own small starting futures they have pledged to better life.  Desiccated scholars of war, embalmed in repartee and sly allusion, scurrying always to cover feigned life tracks, fear faltering and swooning to the wide alluring openness of your still soft eyes.  Page five scribes and hydrogen jukeboxed Pharisees seep their false selves in white whine and angry gin worrying whether and how your like will remember their sad, scattered, bewildered bits and bytes.

You will forget, but need not remember why never to yield.  Reasons will be your your creation, torn painfully from the timeless, selfless whirlwind where all creation returns.

You are not bound to heed counsel from elders who'll rightly spy the Moloch in your battered eyes - and with fiendly voice, proclaim fears groundless.  Institutions, our tawdry legacy, need much scrubbing, fixing, fortifying and testing.  

Though respect is not something earned - like allegiance, deference, fear, or hatred, / distrust most those who, naively or vulpine, claim rights and properties.  Foxes facilitate ingratiatingly for wolf packs and lion prides to whom rights are only what are seized, or held, or pried away from the young, the lame, the wounded, the old, the sleeping, and the fallen.  Raise your dreams up high in the light of moon and sun to wave into hard twisting winds.

Give everyone their due, and keep the circle open.  

Why not dance and sing?  

But if, holy or not, with shoes full of blood, in some Standing Rock or makeshift Paradise Alley kitchen, one haughty, high-spirited, or humbled Hillary offers true lamb stew, buffalo lung tortillas, or unpure hot frybread, shut your Von Trapps one moment and eat.

But just remember.


Remember.

When someone asks for what you’re fighting, it may just be they’ve lost the words. You may not have them either. Not for them. Those go far back to the first words ever - well before being writrn on clay, or stone, or skin. You can find - or read them when you need. So can anyone - to ape, or state, or sing.

Words web knowledge, dreams, and lies. Stern experience, well thought and felt, are webbed - and sad seductive reveries, stuck and sweated, are woven. But words are traps far more than those.

Right wrought words are not enough even if they’re really yours - and irony rings alarming from their exchange.

Words are also holders, open, waiting to catch or be filled - which no one has. Not that we’ve failed - or that they’re empty. The right ones overflow more than they beg. Right words are much more than tools - and so are you. Remember that when you are quizzed.

There’s the response your quizzers crave even more than they might fear.  Giving it with words or hands or heart might be more than you should do. Working it right could stab in panic too - for lashing out or shriveling in.

Remember.

To each other we are wolves - and so are you with no right to despise those whose wounds, beneath hard beaten hides, still gape.

To each other we are wolves and exchanging wounds is what, older than words, still weaves us together.

To each other we are wolves, and from the moon of Aprils' borrowed light is where songs can be chosen.

It Takes a "Bitch" to Stamp Down on "Twatitude"

"Bitches get stuff done," is (or should be) a central generative theme for our culture, our politics, and our economy in the coming decades.

Claiming and reframing such "derogatories" will definitely escalate culture wars and possess the stark potential to explode well beyond the "verbal".  Of course, this will further divide and silo us - and drive many more of us into novel versions of "safe spaces" for incubating new strengths and insights while also generating myriad forms of personal and social pathologies.  This is intoxicatingly inevitable - and rich with brave possibilities for forging new perceptions and connections our so brittle world.

"Bitch", of course, is now only one of the milder derogatories directed at women by males - and by other females.  And, regardless of the outcome of our current hyper-gendered presidential sextravaganza, females will need to steel themselves in ways that are still relatively unprecedented in our lamentably primitive public arena.  Underlying this is the increasing feminization of the workforce and its abandonment by a growing number of males.  The rise of transgender, non gender, "non binary" youth is likely both a desperate symptom AND a hopeful response to these self shredding tensions in our culture.

We will all need to steel ourselves while also cultivating new versions of self and mutual nurturing.  Failure there means we're trapped in deadly patterns of exploitative irresponsibility.

State capitalism, wage labor, and neo-imperialism may be hard-won advancements over the serfdom and slavery that blighted so many generations into the all to recent past, but we should all pray (and work to guarantee) that these are merely transitory historical stages well on their way to obsolescence.

Otherwise, the cockroaches are poised to overrun the wreckage left behind by our benighted species.