Two Old Debates

.

We have not written much about the current political season in the United States because the subject — it seems to us — calls more for the artistry of Fellini than any rational analysis.  Hillary (Armani) Clinton calls to mind The Ecclesiastical Fashion Show whereas Donald (Blowhard) Trump makes us think of Trimalchio’s Banquet.

The United States is clearly in its political decadence and that is the only fact that is really important.  The rest is a point de détail. 

Idling on details, we have wondered over the past month which analog from the ancient world best suits the present season.  Didius Julianus and Flavius Claudius perhaps?

“After the murder of Pertinax (28 March 193), the Praetorian assassins announced that the throne was to be sold to the man who would pay the highest price. Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, prefect of the city, father-in-law of the murdered emperor, being at that moment in the camp to which he had been sent to calm the troops, began making offers, whereupon Julianus, having been roused from a banquet by his wife and daughter, arrived in all haste, and being unable to gain admission, stood before the gate, and with a loud voice competed for the prize.   Julianus outbid his rival.  The guards immediately closed with the offer of Julianus, threw open the gates, saluted him by the name of Caesar, and proclaimed him emperor."

The difficulty with that analogy, though, is that, in the current season, the determinant is which candidate receives the most money from the Praetorians of the Economy.

So our mind ruminated on two dialogues from Thucydides.

Thucydides

Language, Aristotle observes, is what enables politics because it is through words that men can “decide between the expedient and the inexepedient; the just and the unjust.”  (Politics, Bk. 2.)

Future historians will no doubt trace the decline of U.S. politics to the advent of cereal ads.  For those ads, like some horrible narcotic, aimed to reduce the hard edge of critical faculties to mush.  And in this they succeeded.  What passes for “discourse” in the United States is simply the howl of appetite and the shriek of fear.  Animals, Aristotle would say, can do as much.

The progression from dialogue to howling was something that afflicted Athens during her convulsive decline.  Thucydides noted the points on the graph.

What is known as the Mitylenean Debate was the first of these points.    Mytilene was an island city state allied to Athens in the Delian League - a kind of Athenian NATO, composed of tributary democracies.  An exception to the rule, Mytilene was ruled by an oligarchy and was a non-tribute paying member of the League.  In short, Mytilene was a truly independent state.

It is important to bear in mind that what is called the Peloponnesian War was as much a war between classes (and their political systems) as it was between states, as such.   For reasons which can only be conjectured, the oligarchs of Mytilene decided that an alliance with Sparta would be more to their benefit than remaining in the Delian League.  So they “revolted” (as the Athenians considered it).

Athens besieged Mytilene and starved it into surrender. The Spartan general on the scene was taken prisoner and executed on the spot. Ambassadors of the oligarchy were taken to Athens where they were allowed to plead for mercy before the Athenian Assembly.   The Assembly was tone deaf.

Whipped into a fearful fury by the populist Cleon (“the most violent man in Athens”), the Assembly passed a sentence of death on the entire city.  All the men were to be killed, the city razed to the ground and the women and children sold into slavery.  A naval ship was dispatched to carry out the orders.

The following morning, as if with a hang-over, the Athenians suffered doubts about what they had done. They convoked a second assembly to reconsider the matter.

Cleon berated them with being soft, bleeding hearts, more interested in fancy words than in sticking to their real-politik interests.  “No one state has ever injured you as much as Mitylene,” he cried. Theirs was a "deliberate and wanton aggression; an attempt to ruin us by siding with our bitterest enemies!"      As for the people of Mytilene, “they thought it safer to throw in their lot with the aristocracy and so joined their rebellion!”    If Mytilene was not punished, who would be the next to revolt?    "We meanwhile shall have to risk our money and our lives against one state after another."

"No hope, therefore, that rhetoric may instill or money purchase, the mercy due to human infirmity must be held out to the Mitylenians. Their offence was not involuntary, but born of malice and deliberate; and mercy is only for unwilling offenders. I therefore, now as before, persist against your reversing your first decision, or giving way to the three failings most fatal to empire—pity, sentiment, and indulgence. Compassion is due to those who can reciprocate the feeling, not to those who will never pity us in return."

A speaker called Diodotus reminded the Athenians that "haste and anger are... the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel....    He began by addressing Cleon’s egg-head ad homs.

The Pynx

"As for the argument that speech ought not to be the exponent of action, the man who uses it must be either senseless or interested: senseless if he believes it possible to treat of the uncertain future through any other medium; interested if, wishing to carry a disgraceful measure and doubting his ability to speak well in a bad cause, he thinks to frighten opponents and hearers by well-aimed calumny.  ...  Thus it is that plain good advice has thus come to be no less suspected than bad."

As for the fate deserved by the Mityleneans,

"Though I prove them ever so guilty, I shall not, therefore, advise their death, unless it be expedient; nor though they should have claims to indulgence, shall I recommend it, unless it be dearly for the good of the country. I consider that we are deliberating for the future more than for the present; and where Cleon is so positive as to the useful deterrent effects that will follow from making rebellion capital, I, who consider the interests of the future quite as much as he, as positively maintain the contrary...

"All, states and individuals, are alike prone to err, and there is no law that will prevent them; or why should men have exhausted the list of punishments in search of enactments to protect them from evildoers  ... The penalty of death has been by degrees in most cases arrived at, which is itself disregarded in like manner. Either then some means of terror more terrible than this must be discovered...

"We must not, therefore, commit ourselves to a false policy through a belief in the efficacy of the punishment of death, or exclude rebels from the hope of repentance and an early atonement of their error.

"Only consider what a blunder you would commit in doing as Cleon recommends. As things are at present, in all the cities the people is your friend, and either does not revolt with the oligarchy, or, if forced to do so, becomes at once the enemy of the insurgents; so that in the war with the hostile city you have the masses on your side. But if you butcher the people of Mitylene, who had nothing to do with the revolt, and who, as soon as they got arms, of their own motion surrendered the town, first you will commit the crime of killing your benefactors; and next you will play directly into the hands of the higher classes, who when they induce their cities to rise, will immediately have the people on their side."

On this morning, the counsels of Diodotus won the day. The Athenians repented their rashness and revoked their previous resolution.  Oh, but woe!  Such had been their fury and haste that the death-bearing ship had already set sail.

Thucydides relates: "Another galley was at once sent off in haste, for fear that the first might reach Lesbos in the interval, and the city be found destroyed; the first ship having about a day and a night's start. Wine and barley-cakes were provided for the vessel by the Mitylenian ambassadors, and great promises made if they arrived in time; which caused the men to use such diligence upon the voyage that they took their meals of barley-cakes kneaded with oil and wine as they rowed, and only slept by turns while the others were at the oar. Luckily they met with no contrary wind, and the first ship making no haste upon so horrid an errand, while the second pressed on in the manner described, the first arrived so little before them, that Paches had only just had time to read the decree, and to prepare to execute the sentence, when the second put into port and prevented the massacre. The danger of Mitylene had indeed been great."

On of history's biggest "wheeeww's"

What is noteworthy, though, is that Diodotus did not make a Christian argument founded on humanity and tempered justice. Such arguments are entirely absent in Thucydides’ work.  There was, I am sure, some protean sense of horror at the thought of genociding the Mityleneans, but the argument Diodotus made was grounded entirely in political expedience.   It was actually Cleon who was making the “justice-based” argument. 

In the Republic, the then prevalent concept of “justice” was recited by a young man called Polus.  “Oh, Socrates,” he replied when asked, “that’s easy: justice is doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies.”

That was exactly what Cleon was demanding.  The only determinant here is measuring the degrees of “tit” and “tat.”  In Cleon’s view the revolt against the peace and (most importantly) against the dignity of Athens was the ne plus ultra of all offenses which required (in the name of justice) the ne plus ultra of all retaliations.

Diodotus’ counter-argument — that death penalties don’t work; that killing your friends to spite your enemies doesn’t make sense — made practical sense but they were not grounded in what are today commonplace concepts of a justice based on shared humanity and humility as in "what shall I be pleading when the just are mercy needing?" (Dies Irae)

It would behoove all the anti-christians in the crowd to stake stock and remember the evolution in consciousness that Christianity represented.

As for the rest of us, it is worth noting how current the structure of the debate remains today.  Trump’s is the voice of angry justice a la Cleon.  Hillary’s is the voice of calculated and self-interested expedience.  The problem with that dichotomy is that ultimately it is a false distinction because the well-spring for both is simply egoism. 

The denouement of a tenuous and spurious distinction is shown in the Melian Dialogue.

A decade after the Mitylenean affair, Athens invaded the island of Melos.  Just like that.  It was a pure neo-con “preemptive defense” kind of thing.  The Athenians demanded that Melos submit and pay tribute or be destroyed.

The Melians answered: why should we?

The Athenians replied: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”


The Melians argued that they were a neutral city and not an enemy, so Athens had no need to conquer them.

The Athenians countered that if they accepted Melos' neutrality and independence, they would look weak: people would think they spared Melos because they were not strong enough to conquer it.  “We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued, or subjects who have already become embittered by the constraint which our empire imposes on them.

To this the Melians answered : Nevertheless we trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as yours, because we are standing for what is right against what is wrong.

To which the Athenans replied: So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. Our aims and our actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it."

The dialogue broke off and the Athenians laid siege.  The Melians resisted valiantly and even made some incursions against the invader.

Thucydides relates: “As a result of this, another force came out afterwards from Athens under the command of Philocrates, the son of Demeas. Siege operations were now carried on vigorously and, as there was also some treachery from inside, the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves.

There is an evident progression and similarity between the two debates.  The difference is that in the Mitylenean debate it is ego (self love and self interest) which underlies the concepts of justice and expedience.  Cleon wanted to exercise power to vindicate “ourselves” whereas Didotus wanted to moderate power to promote "our" self interest.  In the Melian dialogue, power ends up consuming both — power is justice and its exercise is expedient  -- always because.

Although the Mitylenean debate involved a contest between rival justifications, these masked a latent kernel of brutish selfishhness which slowly festered until in the Melian dialogue it burst forth in a torrent of unapologetic brutality.   

Historical analogies are always a perilous business. But it does seem to us that all the current blather about how Trump is Hitler or represents a replay of 1933 is just a lot of hysterical and uniformed nonsense.  The NSDAP's principal plank in 1930-1933 concerned stimulating the economy and providing Germans with economic justice and security.  If anyone bothered to read Hitler’s speeches, they would find that as often as not he sounded more like Bernie than Trump.

The more instructive analogy concerns the progression of speech (logos) into howling and snarling; for whereas the essence of Trump is to bellow and bay, the essence of Hillary is micro-aggressive  self-promotion.   Trump's is the voice of retaliatory justice a la Polus and Cleon -- us contra mundum.   Hillary does not dispute the exceptionalist preeminence  of "us" she merely calculates how to promote oligarchical self-interest at the expense of the rest of the world.   Either will end up producing some shameful disaster.  

©

The only thing we have to fear . . .

Is government itself. 

In the wake of the horrendous Nice killings, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic were quick to pounce on the event in order to further their police state agendas by instilling the populace with the fear of an ever present, undetectable “terrorist threat” — in short by peddling ghosts. 

In the immediate aftermath of the horror, there were virtually no details about the assailant.  Before it was even known that he was a “French-Tunisian,”  Obama declaimed, “I condemn in the strongest terms what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice,”  

On what basis did it “appear to be”?  Given the U.S.’s experience with gun-toting lunatics, an American must certainly know that not every mass-killer is a “terrorist.” 

A tad more nuanced was Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May who said, “If, as we fear, this was a terrorist attack we must redouble our efforts [against] those who seek to destroy our way of life.”  May added, that “a terrorist attack on the UK is highly likely.”

A terrorist attack on the U.K. might be likely, but the present issue was whether the incident in Nice could be taken to be an indicator of that likelihood. May’s statement put two fruits on the table (voilá!) but failed to explain any connection between them. 

Similarly, France’s president, François Hollande spoke of the attack as having a “terrorist character” before going on to declaim against “terrorism” while extending the state of emergency that had been about to expire.  In speaking this way, Hollande engaged in pure sophistry.  His statement ought not to have fooled anyone but it certainly fooled the press whose character appears more and more to be that of terrified geese.

In the days following the incident, press and politicians (who are now merely manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon), sought to make up the evidentiary deficit with almost vaudevillian tabloid slurs.

The assailant was a “loner” with a “history of violence” who “allegedly beat his wife” and whose apartment contained fake weapons and “more documents.”

"He is a terrorist, probably linked to radical Islam one way or another,"  Prime minister Valls told France 2 television. “Yes, it is a terrorist act and we shall see what links there are with terrorist organizations."

Did anyone think to ask how Vals could say it was a terrorist act without there being any known links to terrorist organizations?

Evidently not.  Instead, the press decried the “failure” of the  French Security Forces.  The New York Daily News stating that “The fact he was not on the watch list will be of grave concern as an investigation into last year’s Paris attacks identified multiple failings by France’s intelligence agencies.

A watch list for what?  A watch list for spousal discord, relabeled “marital terrorism”?

Inspector Clouseau notwithstanding,  Securité is not a bunch of incompetents.  The fact that they didn’t detect any “links” even though he was known to police indicates not a failure of investigation but rather the absence of links.

As of July 16th “authorities have not found links to terror groups or evidence of radicalisation.”  That did not give any pause to Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, who pronounced that the killer most certainly was « radicalisé très rapidement »  

Indeed!  He was suddenly radicalized just moments before the attack.  This sort of thing happens, you know.

What is truly choice is that Cazeneuve can’t cite any evidence that Bouhlel was in anyway interested in Islam or ISIS or Middle east politics.  It cannot even be argued that “radical islamic propaganda” was festering and steaming in his brain until suddenly it reached a critical mass in his consciousness causing him to mow down bystanders in a instantaneous murderous “epiphany”

What is known is that he was was a petty criminal who drank alcohol, ate pork, took drugs  and never attended the small mosque near his block of flats. He was something of a cunt hound and was rumoured to have beat his wife.  He got kicked out the house and fell into depression for which he was taken to a psychiatrist by his father.   His actual criminal record consisted of petty theft and a road rage battery when he slammed another driver with an “improvised weapon” — i.e. one of the wooden pallets he has in the back of his truck.

 
The simple facts are that modern society engenders a great deal of alienation and at the same time furnishes a wide spectrum of lethal instrumentalities for misuse.  This incident had everything to do with societal dysfunction and nothing to do with terrorism.

Of course, ISIS is always there to rescue Western politicians from their hysterical inanity. According to the UK Guardian, “ In an online statement through news agency Amaq, it described the attackers [sic] as one of its “soldiers” carrying out the “operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State”

The only thing this statement proved is that ISIS is quick to seize any opportunity to puff up its strength and advance its agenda of fear.

 
What is dismal is that Western politicians have the same agenda.  ISIS wants to fan the flames of fear and Western governments want to use those flames to tighten their police grip on society.   We’ve seen, before, the symbiotic relationship between subversives, anarchists, disaffected loners and the apparatus of the state.

Manuel Vals has been on our shit-list ever since he called for a "total war" against terrorism in January of this year.    Beware the Ides, when politicians start sounding like Goebbels


Post Script (18 July 2016)

French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, admitted to day that links between the Nice killer and ISIS  have "yet to be established."

Meanwhile, attending a memorial ceremony in Nice, prime minister Manuel Vals was roundly and loudly booed for minutes on end.   The gist of the disapproval was that Vals and his government were "incompetents."

He got what he bargained for.  Had he not been cynically pumping this incident up as an act of terrorism he would not have been booed, because no one would hold the government responsible for failing to detect the act of a lone, nutcase, who could hardly be expected to be on Securité's radar.



©

Monsanto's Niebelung

Obama is in the United Kingdom pushing the idea that he is tickled pink by Little Prince George and that Britain’s exit from the European Common Market would be a disaster

A disaster to what?  Well... “it could be” — he says —five to ten years before Britain could negotiate its own trade deal apart from any trade deal with the Common Market.

The trade deal Obama has in mind is the TTIP  the Atlantic version of the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Obama’s tinsel tongue pushes both trade deals as a win win situation in which everyone trades even more furiously than they do now and everyone makes money, money, money. Good, good, good. Happy, happy, happy.

Obama lies. There is already plenty of trade between the United States, Europe and Asia. When Obama says that the trade deals will open up “market access” what he means is that various regional or national laws concerning the environment, health, safety and labor conditions will be swept away making it easier for predatory corporations to sell their goods.

To give a simple example. In order to protect the bee population and its own citizens from cancer, the E.U. passes a law forbidding the sale of products produced with Roundup. As a result, ecocidal Monsanto-Wheat cannot be sold in Europe.  The TTIP “frees up” trade by trashing Europe’s health and environmental regulations.

Not only does the TTIP do away with the regulation, to make sure Monsanto gets to peddle its poison, the treaty would also do away with citizen’s rights to challenge regulations in European courts.  The treaty will restrict judicial and legislative action and transfer actual judicial and ministerial governance to secret, corporate-run “arbitration” boards which would be more aptly called Corporate Courts & Councils.

It was recently pointed out by Robert Reich that neither of the trade treaties have anything to do with actual trade.   As a point of detail, Reich is right. But he misses the overall picture.  The trade deals are the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of liberalism.

The word “liberal” was invoked by the bourgeois revolutionists of the 18th and 19th centuries because the essence of their advocated political-economy was to “free up” trade from so-called “feudal encumbrances.”  Of course feudal encumbrances was just a popular whipping goat. What really irked the capitalist class was a wide range of customs, laws, policies that subordinated the act of acquisition and money making to “higher” civic, moral and national goals.  Let trade proceed unrestrained governed only by the invisible hand of what the market will bear!  So what if children haul coal for pence a day, exchange value is the unum bonum. 

No State shall...pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts

By the end of the 19th century even the most politically conservative realized that this trumpeting of moneyed egotism was an anti-social dead end.  Under various names and guises anti-liberal programmes of “regulating” the economy once again came into vogue.

With regard to civil authority, Leo XIII (1891), boldly breaking through the confines imposed by Liberalism, fearlessly taught that government must not be thought a mere guardian of law and of good order, but rather must put forth every effort so that "through the entire scheme of laws and institutions . . . both public and individual well-being may develop spontaneously out of the very structure and administration of the State."[19] Just freedom of action must, of course, be left both to individual citizens and to families, yet only on condition that the common good be preserved and wrong to any individual be abolished. The function of the rulers of the State, moreover, is to watch over the community and its parts; but in protecting private individuals in their rights, chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor. "For the nation, as it were, of the rich is guarded by its own defenses and is in less need of governmental protection, whereas the suffering multitude, without the means to protect itself relies especially on the protection of the State. Wherefore, since wageworkers are numbered among the great mass of the needy, the State must include them under its special care and foresight." -- Pope Pius XI, Quadressimo Anno  (1931)

What was realized was that the “right of contract” did not enshrine arms-length equality but, on the contrary, enforced gradually increasing inequality. If in any given exchange one party got the benefit of the bargain, the other must necessarily bear its loss.  On the second exchange those two parties are no longer negotiating from positions of equality but from legally enshrined positions of inequality, so that

To he who hath more shall be given; to he who hath not even that which he hath shall be taken away.

What made the hand invisible was that the inequality inherent capitalist accumulation was often shifted, displaced, hidden or simply bullshitted away from particularized view.  Many small exchanges are indeed barters where one useful item is traded for another. Even where money is used as a medium the acquisition of the second useful item is merely deferred.  But money does not grow on trees.  Where the objective of the transaction is to make a profit, the increased value acquired simply cannot come from an exchange of equal values.  Some party has to bear a decreased return.

The vicious canard of capitalism is that “freedom of contract” almost eo instante translates into “servitude of obligation.”  The happy bonhomie at loan signing quickly turns into snarling shylockery  when a payment is missed.    This was in fact well understood which is why the cited constitutional provision and similar provisions in various civil codes are phrased not in terms of "freedom" but of "obligation."

Neo-liberalism takes the game further.  Contractual rights no longer mean the right to insist upon the payment of an obligation, but rather the right to exact an annualized or expected profit.  This is what the law of patents and copyright have turned into.  A supposedly civil society, inter pares, has been turned into a scrambling mass of debtors, renters, licensees, beholden to algorithms for their daily needs.   This is what the CEO of Nestlé means when he says, “there is no right to public water.”

Obama’s vaunted trade deals turn the Rule of Nestlé into global law.  Free trade means your right to be obligated in perpetuity.   The provisions of the trade treaties have been kept secret and their enactment has been fast tracked because what they actually do is establish global corporate economic despotism.  Rule by the same “folks” (an Obambi-word) that have brought you fracking, deforestation, desertification, polluted waters, global warming, mass-extinction, animal torture and cruelty, dis-employment, sub-subsistence wages,  guaranteed life-time debt-servitude, child labor, medical bankruptcy, and, in general, the dystopian hell that lies on the horizon.
 
And like a pedo-predator sweet talking a little child, Obama has the cunning and gall to tell young folks to “be optimistic.”


©JustinLaw, 2016

Perimeters

WaPo:  Brussel’s Bombings Bring New Security Measures!

"Neffenger said local law enforcement officers also may conduct random checks of cars and taxis driving toward the airport, a practice already in place at the Los Angeles airport.

“You have to get away from thinking about a perimeter,” he said. “I’m much more interested in thinking about the security environment that is essentially from the moment that you make a reservation to the moment you physically arrive at the airport.” 

"[Is it time to set up checkpoints outside airports?]

 Fifteen years ago, one day after 9/11,  Barfo wrote:

In all events, this war against terrorism on which we embark today, like the war on drugs on which we embarked years ago, cannot be won. Today our politicians in all but chorus denounce the “heinous assault against civilization and freedom;” but just you wait, tomorrow they will palaver about the required “sacrifices” and “tools” needed to defend our homes and loved ones. What sacrifices? What tools? None other than the loss of the liberty supposedly defended.

This war is nothing that can be won with a handful of battles. On the contrary, it presupposes a continuous engagement. And who is the enemy? All Arabs? No.... not all.... The American militias? Perhaps, but not always. The Irish? At times. The Basque?  Could be. What the Government will have to presume is that everyone is at least a potential terrorist. In the most fundamental sense that is a presumption that is entirely antithetical to the concept of civil friendship, i.e., societas.

In present day England they have already mounted cameras on every corner in the country in order, it is said, to defend against IRA terrorism. But what this entails is that every movement anyone makes in public is made under the all seeing eye of the Command and Control Center

Such things are but the visible manifestation of what is in actuality a policio-military apparatus of espionage and control that is gradually being erected over us. Bit by bit, the denizens of this country have been led to accept incremental police measures, soothingly reassured at each step that -- the police being husbands and fathers themselves -- these powers will not be abused. Bit by bit, fear has been insinuated between government and the governed and, ultimately, between citizens and neighbors themselves. And, as always, fear goes shadowed with intolerance and hatred of anything different or unusual.

The most stupid thing about this new “war” is that the security it purports to achieve cannot be attained.   The problem presented by so-called terrorism is not the criminality of the act but the criminalisation of the actor.  The difference between “lawful war” and “unlawful terrorism” is not that the former is in actual fact less terrorist, but that it occurs within a larger context of regularity and stability.  The unofficial terrorist, on the other hand, is like the ordinary criminal who, precisely because he is a nobody, has nothing to loose.

To declare war against an unseen, amorphous, invisible enemy who is given no option other than implacable hate, is a gross stupidity which can only be explained by this country’s overweening arrogance and self-righteousness. For that pride the Devil will have to be paid.

-o0o-

Elsewhere at the time, the Barfo pointed out that every wall has two sides.  If people are kept  out; others are kept in.   Duh.  Neffenger is wrong.   The concept of "perimeter" still exists; it is what used to be known as the borders of a country.  All else in between is what is known as a prison.

Scurry little mice, scurry.  The Devil demands his due.

©

Chicken Feed & Hypocrisy

NEW YORK TIMES  DECLARES WAR  ON BERNIE

No sooner was Hillary’s loss a done failure in New Hampshire, than the New York Times fired a broadside at Bernie.

In a front page Op-Ed, Marc Schmitt of the “New America” foundation declared that the era of expansive liberalism was over; the future belonged to invisible incrementalism. 

“The essence of Mr. Sanders’s version of liberalism is government programs. Expansive initiatives that provide benefits to a broad cross-class constituency,...

“That’s in sharp contrast to the policy approach of the Obama administration since about 2011, and also to Hillary Clinton and most of Mr. Sanders’s congressional colleagues...

“[T]he future of social and economic policy will involve, for better or worse, these complex, incremental and often invisible changes, instead of big programs.”

If one substitutes the word chicken-feed for incrementalism you know all you need to know about Hillary’s “progressivity” and the Times’ left-over centrism. 

Schmitt’s piece cannot be considered a “guest column” printed — on the front page — as “diversity of view.”  The New America foundation is headed by Anne-Marie Slaughter a political intimate of Hillary Clinton whom the Times has endorsed for president.  Schmitt’s piece is a Times broadside in alter voce and represents what the Times thinks is bad about Sanders and good about Clinton.

Feel the Invisibility

One might wonder exactly what “often invisible” changes might be.  Does the author of this assertive piece mean  “You’re feeling better, you just don’t feel it.” ?

Actually, yes. He goes on to say, “Citizens don’t see or feel these initiatives and may not know that they are benefiting from a government initiative at all.”

Not only do they not feel the benefits, the benefits might actually not exist! 

As an example of invisible incrementality, Schmitt cites an obscure regulatory tweak which will “set millions of Americans up with low risk, low-cost retirement savings accounts.”  Five paragraphs later, Schmitt acknowledges that the tweak will “not be enough to meet the shortfall in Americans’ retirement savings or reduce inequality of wealth.”

Rejoice!  Not only will you not feel the invisible benefit, you won’t be benefitted at all!  You will be incrementally less screwed.

Think tanks are the modern version of feudal vassals or roman clientela.   All three are made up of interlocking (and often inter-marrying) networks  of  patronage existing through  complex social bonds in service of agreed upon socio-economic-military interests as symbolized in some grand personage.    Roman clients were expected to attend, applaud and make  hubbub about and for their patrons, including  a display of Fumbling the Scrolls (Oh how many scrolls!) in the great man’s wake, as he made his way through the forum.   

In the present case, the New York Times is simply orchestrating the parade.  What it and Hillary’s coterie have decided is that, for better or worse, the incremental benefits will be so eensy teensy weensy, you won’t even notice them!  Hurrah for “common sense” programs.  Phooey on big, broad, gauche liberalism!

But the Times did not only have Bernie in its sights.  It was taking aim just as much at Theodore Roosevelt who, back in 1910, pronounced,

“Where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government...

“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock."

Contrast,  the New York/New America Times Op-Ed,

"[Hillary’s] agendas are most interesting and novel for the absence of big, universal programs that require legislative action. Instead, they test the limits of what government can do by rearranging the pieces of existing programs, using regulations, incentives to states, tax credits and “nudges” informed by behavioral economics in place of direct spending."

“Most interesting?”  Certainly not “novel.”  What the Times is advocating — and what it makes abundantly clear that Hillary is trumpeting — is a return to what did not work under Wilson or Hoover. 

“Nudges  informed by behavioral economics”?  What the hell is that?  It’s Hooverian “volunteerism” dressed up in millenial-speak; for the difference between Hoover and Roosevelt was not that Hoover did nothing, but that he refrained from “broad-based” mandatory national programs to address a national crisis.   

Hillary’s ghosted Op-Ed is also hard nudge advocacy for Justice Rehnquist’s “New Federalism” — the core of which was his engineered devolution of power to the "laboratory of the states"  (quoth) as testers and tinkerers’ of social fixes. 

A fuller-bore reaction could hardly be imagined. Rehnquist’s New Federalism might better have been called the New Feudalism, because the States were holdovers from the pre-monarchical era.  No — I am not making this up.  The Andrus Plan of 1688 had sought to consolidate the colonies into a single Dominion in common; but the Colonies (that is the Chief Families in them) revolted at the prospect of loosing their manorial privileges, including some rather peculiar ones.

It is hardly unfettered imagination to imagine Rehnquist slurring and salivating at how the States were best suited to “test” and incrementally  “experiment” with social issues such as Negro slavery.

After writing a clerk’s memo against desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — (“I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by "liberal" colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.") —  Rehnquist went back to Arizona were he became national campaign manager for Barry Goldwater...   Hillary Clinton’s own youthful hero.

To ramble on in this vein may seem like a digression, but it is actually not.  It helps to put things in historical context because the Times hopes you wont.  

It supported Clinton (II) because he “refashioned the Democratic Party’s approach to government”  He “stood up to the spendthrifts in his own party”  He “bucked the democratic leadership to secure the free trade agreement”   In the same breath, without a blush, it lauded Clinton’s “promise” to ease “unfair attacks on the poor and legal immigrants.”

It supported Mondale noting that, “He has laudably continued the deregulation begun by Jimmy Carter.” 

It endorsed McGovern, Humphrey, Johnson and Kennedy because Goldwater was a loose cowboy and because the Times bore a deep (and mutual) animosity against Nixon on account of the latter’s anti-semitism and hopelessly pathetic, back water petite bourgeois background.

But this apparent liberalism was only “situational” like the occasional lapse at a truck stop. More true to form it  endorsed Eisenhower twice, Thomas Dewey twice and Wendell Wilkie over FDR.

In 1936   the editorial board pronounced, “The New York Times, a conservative newspaper in its own sphere, believes that the public interest will best be served” by the reelection of Roosevelt because the president will “make his second Adminstration more conservative than the first”  and his reelection will provide insurance against radicalism of the sort which the United States [i.e. its ruling class] has most to fear.”

1933 endorsed FDR because “his speeches have not [sic] indicated clear and strong and burning convictions.... Imagine what would have been done by such a man as William J. Bryan...!” 

In 1912 it endorsed Wilson first, Taft second... any one but Roosevelt third.  “It would be an ill omen and ... want of sense if so large a part of the people should yield to the appeals of Mr. Roosevelt.

This sketch of the Times’ editorial trajectory indicates what a fundamentally conservative paper the Times actually is.   It may espouse socially symbolic “liberal” causes on behalf of “cognized groups” but it reacts with horror and disparagement at any “broad based” programs aimed at ending the economic alienation of the working class.

Let us be clear.  The fundamental injustice of the U.S. political economy is that it alienates the worker from the fruits of his own productivity.  He produces economic value (“profit”) but it accrues to others rather than himself. To make matters worse he is economically oppressed by a variety of taxes, fees and other transfers of wealth labelled as “cost of living.”  His work itself is alienated from his own free will.  It is not an expression of anything he wants or of any collaboration among self-owning men; rather he is simply a unit of labour (a “human resource”) in someone else’s scheme. The American worker is “free” to travel where he wants, to tune in the channel where he wants, to sing the hymns and buy the junk he wants; but he is in all fundamental respects a slave and a serf.  

Neither Bernie Sanders nor LBJ nor either of the two Roosevelts proposed to fundamentally alter this system. They wanted some broad and pervasive adjustments that would render it less unjust; return some greater quantum of value to the worker who produced it; spread the costs and ease the burden of overall living expenses; provide the worker with economic security and social leisure if not actually determinative political power.

It is this adjustment which the Times disparages today and has always disparaged as “radicalism.”   What it toots as “incrementalism” is simply code for the least redistribution of anything the ruling class can get away with.

The genocidal vileness of the Times’ invisible incrementalism is best illustrated in relation to climate change.  Exactly what degree of imperceptible incremental reductions in global warming does the Times have in mind?  Something small enough not to be noticed at all?

What kind of insanity is this?

Oh but surely when the Times decries “broad brush liberal” approaches it doesn’t have global warming in mind.  Oh but surely it does, because “broad brush” reductions in global warming are absolutely not possible without predicate broad-brush reforms to the industrial-financial system which produces global warming.

One of the key ingredients of Clintonian Triangulation, is what might be called “issue alienation” — disconnecting the necessary relationships between various aspects of an underlying problem. 

In fact “issue alienation” is the key feature of so-called U.S. “liberalism.”  It is what enables a creeps like the Clintons to pretend to be all in favor of Black empowerment or women’s rights or Our Precious Children even while they work to end welfare, curtail unions and undercut the laws and programs which would give people — including Blacks, women and children — real security and real opportunity. 

In tandem,  issue-alienation allows the Clintons — and their toney clarions in the Times (or is it the reverse?) — to erect a moralistic Potemkin Village of cognized group chicken feed (“entitlements”) and pleasant but largely symbolic measures which hide the political disenfranchisement and economic impoverishment they actually -- and broadly -- promote.

As if matters could not be more nauseating than they are, one need only recall that there was nothing “incremental” about NAFTA or the TPP or the 2009 bank bailout.  When it comes to safeguarding the core interests of American Capital, Blue Dog Democrats and the Times get as non-incremental and broad based as necessary.

To niggardly stinginess one can add grotesque hypocrisy. That is what the Times and Hillary stand for.

   

©

Bearclaw meets Pancake

Appearances are a substantial part of politics.  One has to look the part,

even if one is short, pot-bellied and bald. Appearances are to humans what alpha-smell is to dogs. 

Sniffing the candidates’ butts, it was obvious that Sanders lost Wednesday night’s debate with Clinton.  He looked like a wet bunny who had been hit on the back of its head while Mme. Clinton puffed and strutted on stage like a cock.

Clinton was full of double-daring and aggro-victimhood.  “Enough is enough” she cried, as if her patience were truly exhausted beyond human endurance at having to put up with “insinuations” that she was Goldman’s Girl.

Mark Hannah's Boy

One could but feel for poor President McKinnley...

But instead of ripping Hillary a third asshole, Sanders just hunkered down and mummbled that money had too much influence in politics. 

Hillary’s reply the previous day that she had accepted $650,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sacks because “that’s what they offered” was the kind of clueless insouciance that has marked others in history with indelible infamy. In Hillary’s case the cluelessness was faux and Sanders ought to have raked her over her words seven times over.  He didn’t.

Far worse, was Sander’s complete failure rally his own cause and define himself as the standard-bearer for American “progressives."

The issue came up when Clinton was asked if she considered herself a “progressive.”  With shameless sophistry, Clinton replied that she did because she believed in making progress.

By that definition, Louis XIV, Peter the Great and Herr Autobahn himself were “progressives.”  But that is not what the word means in U.S. political history.  In terms of this country’s historical traditions, “progressivism” has a defined ideological meaning which neither Clinton nor Obama meet.

By the end of the 19th century, it was obvious to most disinterested people that laissez faire capitalism was corrosive to civil society and that economic individualism had to be replaced with mechanisms of economic responsibility.

Voices as disparate as Bismarck’s and Pope Leo X called for an end to predatory capitalism and for measures that would guarantee the economic security and social welfare of the working class.  As Bismarck stated,

The real grievance of the worker is the insecurity of his existence;... If he falls into poverty, even if only through a prolonged illness, he is then completely helpless, left to his own devices,

Before century’s close, Germany had enacted health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884)  old age and disability (1889) and  worker protections (1891). These were of course first steps but significant enough that the flow of German emmigration to America was stopped.

Why should not the labor soldier receive
a pension as much as the veteran?

Bismarck’s programs were dubbed state socialism.  Unlike Marxist socialism, they did not call for the abolishment of capitalism but rather for government regulated “cooperation” between capital and labor for the benefit of that nation as a whole.  Both sides of the class divide had responsibilities to one another and to the commonwealth as an organic entity.

In the United States, such ideas began to take hold under a call for a New Nationalism to replace antiquated notions of “state sovereignty” and unregulated private enterprise.

By the 1880’s, corporate power, assisted by corrupt legislatures and a reactionary judiciary, had completely subverted any meaningful existence of “democracy.” Not surprisingly social and cultural deterioration ensued.  Around the country, under the banner of “progressivism,” reformist movements strove to correct various perceived failings in the system. 

Two key players emerged: Herbert Croly the intellectual and Theodore Roosevelt, the politician.  It is typically said that Roosevelt’s famous New Nationalism speech in Osawatomie Kansas (August 1910) was “influenced” by Croly’s book The Promise of American Life (November 1909)

However, Croly’s book itself discusses various “nationalist” and trust-busting reforms Roosevelt had advocated as president. The truth is that Croly and Roosevelt played off one another, reinforcing each other’s goals until their partnership ended in 1916.

Croly was frankly impressed by Bismarck’s national reforms which he felt had far exceed in scope and effect the merely liberal ameliorations tepidly introduced in France and England.

"The German Empire presents still another phase of the relation between democracy and nationality,  ...    She is at the present time a very striking example of what can be accomplished for the popular welfare by a fearless acceptance on the part of the official leaders of economic as well as political responsibility, and by the efficient and intelligent use of all available means to that end.  ... ".

Given the traditions and temperament of Americans, Croly envisioned a democratic "bottom up" version of Bismark's "top down" socialism. 

Like Bismarck’s state socialism, the essence of Croly and Roosevelt’s progressive, new nationalism was a rejection of the concept of the state as the mere container of competing selfish interests.  Rather, government stood for and in service of an overarching commonwealth from which all parties derived benefits but to which all parties owed responsibilities.   As articulated by Roosevelt,

"Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.... Nor should this lead to awar upon the owners of property."

But 

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.   ...

"One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege.   ...  At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress.

"In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

"...  our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests.   ...  so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.

"Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare."

These principles became the under-structure of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party which he co-founded in 1912.   Because, by 1912, the United States was so utterly out-of wack and behind the times both politically and economically (although not in the accumulation of private profits), much of the Progressive Party’s platform sounds merely reformist and ad hoc. Indeed Croly felt that it did not go far enough.

But Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” went beyond tinkering at the edges and beyond calling for government to be “the chief almoner of the nation” (as Justice McReynolds would later scathingly characterize FDR’s plan for social security).  Roosevelt’s progressive platform rejected Jeffersonian individualism as the beacon of U.S. politics, in favor of  a  more socially unitary concept of the state as “the family of us all” in which all segments played co-responsible parts.   As Roosevelt put it from porch of the railroad car,

"The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.

"The national government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government.

"The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.

"This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. I t demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.

That was the banner Sanders supposedly raised with his advocacy of “democratic socialism.”   That was the banner Sanders let fall to the ground with his failure to nail Clinton on her weaseling definition of “progressive.”

When Sanders agreed that Obama was a progressive he all but undercut the raison d’etre of his own candidacy.   If Obambi is a progresssive, then vote for Hillary because there is hardly a wit of difference between the two.  Both (as Hillary correctly pointed out) were recipients of Wall Street’s largesse.  Both are as much “Mark Hannah’s Boys” as McKinley.    Teddy Roosevelt would never, ever have said (as Obama did ) that he did “not begrudge” Lloyd Blankenfein or Jamie Dimon their billions.

No real progressive would have shurgged off the colossal, disparate accumulation of wealth with Obambi's insulting insouciance “That’s part of the free market system,"

We were loathe and reluctant to believe those more cynical observers on the  U.S. left who from the start denounced Sanders as a mere stalking horse for the DNC, who would get  younger voters all enthused only to switch the bait once Hillary rode her triumphal chariot into the convention hall.   (Ave! Ave!)   But his performance the other night was so tepid and pathetic that one is left thinking that perhaps the cynics were right.

marche de triomphe

Hillary's Inner Goldwater

Recoiling from her victory in Iowa, Hellary Clinton lashed out at Bernie Sanders saying,

“Our founders knew if we were going to survive as the great democracy they were creating we would have to have a system that kept the passions at bay ...”

Oh! the progressivity!  What “the Founders" knew is that if they were to survive as a ruling class they had to keep the populace at bay. Anyone who has gone to law school or studied U.S. political history must know that the Federalist Convention of 1788 was a pre-emptive counter-coup by the conservative elements who feared those populist, democratic movements they called "mobocracy."

There were a several factors which impelled the newly sovereign states toward a “more perfect union.” Among them,  intra-state jealousy which made the newly minted “republics” susceptible to being played off against one another by some foreign power. Settlements of claims and access to credit was another.  But the chief concern was democratic radicalism among single family farmers, indentured servants and a growing number of young, illiterate under-employed hired hands.  

James Madison, put it succinctly in Federalist Paper 10, in which he famously discussed the "inflamed passions" of political factions,

"But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

Madison went on to say that while “the causes of faction cannot be removed, ... relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”

Controlling the “effects” of the lower classes was the principal purpose of the “more perfect union.”

The Federalists succeeded admirably. They resurrected House of Lords (the Senate) and gave it effective veto over the lower popular House. If that didn't work, they concocted a judicial form of Curia Regis, to veto anything that might get by the Senate. From the Holy Roman Empire, they borrowed an Electoral College to insure that no passionate leader would ever really be elected president without approval from the better, cooler class. They dressed up institutional deadlock as "checks and balances" and packaged the whole reactionary affair as "the world's first and best democracy."

Even States’ rights got into the act; for it has always been assumed and understood that the States themselves would be the first line of defense in “handling their own.”  Over and over throughout the course of U.S. history movements for national, popular reform have been broken on the rock of state sovereignty — or “federalism” as it is sometimes called.

On the other hand, the “imperative” of national (“interstate”) commerce gets trucked out whenever the issue concerns the facilitation of railroads, industrial development, corporate rescue or the promotion of more innovative financial “products.” The entire premise of F.D.R’s  “national regulation” was implicit in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)  and  in the Lexicon of Doubletalk that regulates political discourse, “regulation” includes  the granting of privileges and immunities to corporate capital. 


The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court frankly (and correctly) dubbed F. D. Roosevelt’s reforms as National Capitalism.   But the truth is that national capitalism was always the American Agenda.  When  Calvin Coolidge said that the “business of America is business” he was not being polemical but laconically factual.

Hillary knows all of this (at least instinctually) and is perfectly content with it.   She is more than content with the "super-delegate" system which gives 12 to  20 percent of primary and convention votes to unelected delegates, appointed on the simple of their status as "party officials" and "friends of the establishment."  Her unmistakable allusion to Madison's essay on the "impulses of passion" could not be more clear. Anyone who knows Hillary knows that keeping the populace at bay is what she has always been about.

This is the same shameless Hillary who just last Fall was gushing over how much she admired Eleanor Roosevelt... you know that passionate advocate of the not-so-well-off.  But at last Hellary’s Inner Goldwater has burst out.  It could not be repressed forever.   Hopefully people will not forget it in favor of the bullshit she puts on a plate.

.