http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/07

Quite naturally I've posted some PopIndy oldies in there and it seems obligatory, no pleasurable, to keep the hammer down on what is becoming more obvious every passing moment. An easy place to register at Common Dreams and certainly they could use a does of the Kid's unique humor.

I slipped this one in there:




Chris is wrong in his thesis, "The liberals are useless" when looked at from the dirty, blood soaked lens of the ruling class. The liberals are not only useful they are in fact the primary ideological support for the ruling class. The liberals serve, even more than the conservatives, to provide legitimacy to the overall structure of our grotesque social system.

The ruling class doesn't fear any ideology, any alternative lifestyle choices, any theories. Elite clubs of intellectual snobs refining radical theories pose no threat to them, either. Intelligent people who have an inflated sense of their own self worth are very easy to buy off and neutralize.

Narcissistic Code Pink style antics and guerrilla theater are useful to the ruling class and are welcomed and encouraged by them. Speaking truth to power? You might as well throw marshmallows at a charging rhino. We need to speak truth about power to the powerless.

It is broad participation by the people in politics that the ruling class most fears and works hardest to prevent. That is why saying in essence to millions of people that "you aren't smart enough (or pure enough in the case of the New Agers) to join our elite club" is the kiss of death for any serious political movement that claims to be in any sort of opposition to the ruling class.

This is a chronic problem and blocks or cripples any attempts at mobilizing the working people. I believe that a relatively small group of people control all discussion and all power on what passes for the Left in this country, and that they would sooner surrender anything else - including selling all of us down the river - before they would let go of their sense of exceptionalism, superiority and entitlement.

"Liberal" has come to mean "a superior sort of individual," while "progressive" has come to mean "an individual traveling the path to enlightenment and transcending above their inferiors." No matter how many radical theories or what ideology or superior personal spiritual beliefs you set out as window dressing, the cult of the enhanced and actualized individual will always be contradictory to and destructive of efforts to build the working class solidarity that is essential to any serious political change.

Why are there so many arguments, so much bitter antagonism, such paralysis and confusion on the much ballyhooed “Progressive-Liberal-Left”?

Because people fight for their positions as though their personal identity depended upon them, as though their existence depended upon their political position or theory. That is because their personal identity does depend upon their political positions. They are one and the same - "be the change you want to see." The Modern Liberal actually means "seek the change that suits who you are as an actualized individual" since it never involves self-sacrifice or focus on the needs of others, but always on individual personal choices and self-expression. In fact, their political positions are not political positions at all, but narcissistic expressions of their personalities.

Chaos and confusion. Great to see it unraveling.

There is a parallel thread on DU that was getting a little interesting too

Gotta a PM coming your way.

Where is the DU thread?

sorry, I missed this post yesterday, the DU thread was the one linked to over at Pop Indy. It kind of petered out unfortunately

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7172174#7173231

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7178474

It's been put up at least 3 times. Check out post #13

Here it is at Alternet...

http://www.alternet.org/world/144419/are_liberals_pathetic?page=entire

I can't remember the last time comments on an article separated the wheat from the chaffe so clearly.

One second elohim is firing off a great rant about people being half man half automaton and the next he is invoking Ken Wilber ("Integral Theory", I'm-Not-A-New-Ager New Ager)

Maybe its phony radicalism and maybe its just more ballast jettisoned from the bottomless wells of confusion and disorientation. Sometimes you stare into the abyss and an Abyssinian maid stares back. Siren songs accompanied by dulcimers.

All of which is to say, Elohim, we need to talk..

"Siren songs accompanied by dulcimers."

I ain't working for those people any more.

Although abysmal siren accompaniment sounds intriguing.

Mebbe you could hook up with Enya....

Its from Kubla Khan -- "Abyssinian maid/On her dulcimer she played"

I think Abyssinian is modernday Ethiopia and/or Sudan.

Ruined my whole day by mentioning Enya.

Have an apple.

https://commerce.earthlink.net/www.slowfoodusa.org/ark/apples/EsopusSpitz3.jpg

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7175864

Look like Jonathans.

They are identified as Spitzenburgs, though they do look like the ones we used in the pie, right size too.

otoh we have the devastating riposte from one of my fav uber-libs:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7179540&mesg_id=7179540

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7179540&mesg_id=7182033

Of course, I broke the cardinal rule. I wrote more than 2 paragraphs...

...and they are amazing.

The first is basically: "Hope? Change? Obama? ...No? Well, Revolution then."

I don't take the violence/non-violence talk seriously. It has no meaning. Much more serious is that three people over there could not agree on "the problem", much less a common program. Still, two years ago there was no mention of "Socialism". It will evolve. And, in the cracks, there are the first hints of the real desperation to come (rather than simple, middle-class frustration).

The other thread is Mike's nightmare: The entitled, New Agey, "let me tell you my words of wisdom about ______(human nature, history, revolution, the sheeple, whatever)."

Revolution is (violent, dictatorial, worse than now, unconstitutional, chaotic, bad for us, yadda yadda). This is the voice, not of caution, but of counter-revolution... and this well before any form has appeared to any future change. This is the "life isn't really so bad and I will fight any attempt to change it" team.

Man, if you thought the Republican fracture was something, wait for the Democrats...

All your scenario needs is perpetual rain (as in Blade Runner). Still, literary license notwithstanding, I don't think you will get any response. What can they answer with? "That can't happen here?" By imagining the conditions for "revolution", you simultaneously underline how trite the "skeptics" objections are.

"Well... if things get that bad... hmmm... I dunno."

http://www.thevegaswindow.com/site/nicksblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/bladerunner-01-0707.jpg

There will be "Change".

Whether it can be characterized as "revolution" remains to be seen.

"Change" happens when the ideology of a society and its reality come into contradiction with one another. "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains", wrote Rousseau, "One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they." Nothing in the existing social fabric of Rousseau's society could address this simple observation. Quite the contrary, all of the social instruments had evolved to maintain and not overturn the basic status quo.

In our time, it might be phrased thus: "The United States is the richest country in the world. Yet there is not a single political program or social strategy that has realistic ly been proposed to prevent the majority of the populace from lapsing into poverty."

It simply will not do to count on the lethargy or lack of active involvement of the great mass of people to forestall "Change". That is unhistorical and confuses cause with effect. It is prosperity which brought political apathy.

There will certainly be people prosperous enough to content themselves with the questions raised by the OP - Why, in place of How or When. For others, circumstances have already changed. The Republican Party has already fractured on these questions and it is entirely possible that the Democrats may as well.

Perhaps the sheeple are people after all...

... going out into the grey outside world to buy more liquor.

Heh, the DU crowd is unlikely to read the quantity I posted. But there are any number of points along the slide into revolutionary awfulness that a True Believer could try to claim that the Party will not let "this line be crossed". If, that is, they could really believe any of the lines I describe wouldn't be crossable.

Heh... well, the real point, I suppose, was to make sure there was a post on that thread to make the shit talkers pause and take a deep breath. And, as the point was just to try to draw out those who might see a revolution coming so that they could be ridiculed... I felt like one post that they were afraid to approach would be tantamount to showing them to be the cowards that they are... and now I'm thinking of the "Liberal" threads here that I saw Two Americas and... was it BlindPig(?) posting...

Not that there's really any point... I'm sure I'll be rationalized away as... something.

I mean, I'm not sure... and I certainly have no links or such to point to... but there is a wispy bit at the back of my brain that remembers some bits and pieces of paragraphs in history text books... which suggested that the populist and unionist sentiment of the early 20th Century was on the verge of boiling over into "revolution" during the Great Depression... hijacking of milk trucks to feed babies... farm shipments hijacked to feed families... hints and clues between the lines of history as written in textbooks...

I might've just imagined it... or wishfully thunk it into what I was reading... but I still suspect that one of the fundamental reasons for putting together welfare was to provide some support for the least fortunate (the poorest sons of bitches in the land) in order to blunt the revolutionary spirit in the air (the commie revolution in Russia was only around 10 years before, give or take).

Ok, I'm hoping someone will have more details to prove me right or wrong or somewhere in the middle on that... but it seems like this new economic implosion, and the new unemployment numbers, and the sporadic stream of vets returning to enjoy the unemployment rates (like after WWI)... there's something of a parallel here, I think.

What is there left to fight for though, I can't help but wonder. Retail job unionization? (Hmm, that might not be a bad idea... Barnes & Noble Employees of the World Unite!!). Get militant, and start threatening the management when the going gets tough? (Bukowski, in Post Office, mentions the workers who drop hints to their managers... about the long walk across the dark parking lots at night back to their cars...)

How does one determine if one's fellow proles are psychologically prepared for that sort of shit? Is it even a good idea?

During the economic crisis of the 1930s, many expected a socialist revolution. The revolution never came. Why? The man in the White House co-opted the left.

Here's an odd article from an odd sourse but it touches upon a few things you might be interested in:

How FDR Saved Capitalism

By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks

During the economic crisis of the 1930s, many expected a socialist revolution. The revolution never came. Why? The man in the White House co-opted the left. By Hoover fellow Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks.

With the coming of the Great Depression in the 1930s, a sharp increase in protest and anticapitalist sentiment threatened to undermine the existing political system and create new political parties. The findings of diverse opinion polls, as well as the electoral support given to local radical, progressive, and prolabor candidates, indicate that a large minority of Americans were ready to back social democratic proposals. It is significant, then, that even with the growth of class consciousness in America, no national third party was able to break the duopoly of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Radicals who operated within the two-party system were often able to achieve local victories, but these accomplishments never culminated in the creation of a sustainable third party or left-wing ideological movement. The thirties dramatically demonstrated not only the power of America’s coalitional two-party system to dissuade a national third party but also the deeply antistatist, individualistic character of its electorate.

http://media.hoover.org/images/digest20011_lipset.jpg

The politics of the 1930s furnishes us with an excellent example of the way the American presidential system has worked to frustrate third-party efforts. Franklin D. Roosevelt played a unique role in keeping the country politically stable during its greatest economic crisis. But he did so in classic or traditional fashion. He spent considerable time wooing those on the left. And though many leftists recognized that Roosevelt was trying to save capitalism, they could not afford to risk his defeat by supporting a national third party.

The Nation Shifts to the Left

Powerful leftist third-party movements emerged in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York. In other states, radicals successfully advanced alternative political movements by pursuing a strategy of running in major-party primaries. In California, Upton Sinclair, who had run as a Socialist for governor in 1932 and received 50,000 votes, organized the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, which won a majority in the 1934 Democratic gubernatorial primaries. He was defeated after a bitter business-financed campaign in the general election, though he secured more than 900,000 votes (37 percent of the total). By 1938, former EPIC leaders had captured the California governorship and a U.S. Senate seat.

In Washington and Oregon, the Commonwealth Federations, patterning themselves after the social democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation of Canada, won a number of state and congressional posts and controlled the state Democratic Parties for several years. In North Dakota, the revived radical Nonpartisan League, still operating within the Republican Party, won the governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, and both congressional seats in 1932 and continued to win other elections throughout the decade. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party captured the governorship and five house seats. Wisconsin, too, witnessed an electorally powerful Progressive Party backed by the Socialists.

The Socialist and Communist Parties grew substantially as well. In 1932 the Socialist Party had 15,000 members. Its electoral support, however, was much broader, as indicated by the 1932 presidential election, in which Norman Thomas received close to 900,000 votes, up from 267,000 in 1928. The Socialist Party’s membership had increased to 25,000 by 1935. As a result of leftist enthusiasm for President Roosevelt, however, its presidential vote declined to 188,000 in 1936, fewer votes than the party had attained in any presidential contest since 1900. The Communist Party, on the other hand, backed President Roosevelt from 1936 on, and its membership grew steadily, numbering between 80,000 and 90,000 at its high point in 1939. Communists played a role in “left center,” winning electoral coalitions in several states, notably California, Minnesota, New York, and Washington.

http://media.hoover.org/images/digest20011_lipsetbook.jpg

National surveys suggest that the leftward shift in public opinion during the 1930s was even more extensive than indicated by third-party voting or membership in radical organizations. Although large leftist third parties existed only in Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin, three Gallup polls taken between December 1936 and January 1938 found that between 14 and 16 percent of those polled said they would not merely vote for but “would join” a Farmer-Labor Party if one was organized. Of those interviewees expressing an opinion in 1937, 21 percent voiced a readiness to join a new party.

Co-opting the Left

If the Great Depression, with all its attendant effects, shifted national attitudes to the left, why was it that no strong radical movement committed itself to a third party during these years? A key part of the explanation was that President Roosevelt succeeded in including left-wing protest in his New Deal coalition. He used two basic tactics. First, he responded to the various outgroups by incorporating in his own rhetoric many of their demands. Second, he absorbed the leaders of these groups into his following. These reflected conscious efforts to undercut left-wing radicals and thus to preserve capitalism.

Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated his skill at co-opting the rhetoric and demands of opposition groups the year before his 1936 reelection, when the demagogic Senator Huey Long of Louisiana threatened to run on a third-party Share-Our-Wealth ticket. This possibility was particularly threatening because a “secret” public opinion poll conducted in 1935 for the Democratic National Committee suggested that Long might get three to four million votes, throwing several states over to the Republicans if he ran at the head of a third party. At the same time several progressive senators were flirting with a potential third ticket; Roosevelt felt that as a result the 1936 election might witness a Progressive Republican ticket, headed by Robert La Follette, alongside a Share-Our-Wealth ticket.

To prevent this, Roosevelt shifted to the left in rhetoric and, to some extent, in policy, consciously seeking to steal the thunder of his populist critics. In discussions concerning radical and populist anticapitalist protests, the president stated that to save capitalism from itself and its opponents he might have to “equalize the distribution of wealth,” which could necessitate “throw[ing] to the wolves the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of one million dollars a year.” Roosevelt also responded to the share-the-wealth outcry by advancing tax reform proposals to raise income and dividend taxes, to enact a sharply graduated inheritance tax, and to use tax policy to discriminate against large corporations. Huey Long reacted by charging that the president was stealing his program.

President Roosevelt also became more overtly supportive of trade unions, although he did not endorse the most important piece of proposed labor legislation, Senator Robert Wagner’s labor relations bill, until shortly before its passage.

Raymond Moley, an organizer of Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” emphasized that the president, through these and other policies and statements, sought to identify himself with the objectives of the unemployed, minorities, and farmers, as well as “the growing membership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Norman Thomas’ vanishing army of orthodox Socialists, Republican progressives and Farmer-Laborites, Share-the-Wealthers, single-taxers, Sinclairites, Townsendites [and] Coughlinites.”

...

More here:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/4512566.html

probably will. We were discussing this in some thread earlier and this very issue came up. Indeed, the "Reds" were on the move in the late 20s/early 30s. People were in the streets, taking what they needed, and voting for actual left-wing parties. Communists and Socialists got something like 13-15% (or something like that) of the vote in 1932 and it scared the hell out of both Republicans and Democrats - that is why FDR pushed his reforms through; it was to save capitalism, not to "help" the "working man". The way to save capitalism was to make reforms to satisfy the working class and poor - if the best way to save capitalism had been to kill-off all of the under classes, FDR would have done it without batting an eye. The only way to obtain concessions from the Owners is by threatening their power and that cannot happen from any direction but the real left (not the faux left that is the lefts biggest enemy). Of course, at this point "concessions" just won't do...

Bukowski's Post Office? Awesome. Do you like Fante and possibly Rimbaud too? You should go to the thread in the Lounge about the Drop Kick Murphys because I have some punk rock recommendations for you.

About returning vets: I saw a PBS report about TBI (Traumatic Brain Injuries) where it said 1/4 of returning soldiers suffer from this condition. We are talking about people who are nearly invalids who communicate by blinking and things like that. They are major, lifelong, severe injuries and the cost of care -- which isn't measured only in dollars -- basically can't even be tallied. And of course the money isn't there either.

Anyway, I figured "1/4 of returning soldiers" meant 1/4 of those who returned INJURED. Not so. There are 70,000 soldiers who have been diagnosed with TBIs. That is unfucking believable to me.

I will look for some links for you, but I am pretty sure that the US started working to isolate and undermine the Bolsheviks almost immediately. Wilson was definitely involved.

Unlike some of the others, I don't think Roosevelt had a "Master Plan" anymore than the present day occupation of Afghanistan reduces to the base motive of wanting to build a pipeline to pump gas from Central Asia into Europe. In the case of Roosevelt, he was trying his damndest to save Capitalism from itself which was not only a case of placating the social unrest from fomenting. In fact, Roosevelt's policies -- as relatively "progressive" as they were -- didn't really work. The massive government takeover of industry during the war effort didn't really do it either. If you saw Michael Moore's Capitalism -- I think he pretty much had it when he said "This is the state of the Germany auto industry after the war" and the screen flashes to a picture of burned out factories and steaming rubble.

There was a real question of whether liberal democracy was cedeing its grip to fascism as the political form of capitalism. There was the very real problem of colonialism and control of the "colonial markets". There was the specter of a Soviet Union that might one day come knocking on Western Europe's doorstep. Not to mention things like foreign investment virtually withdrawing from China and into Imperial Japan, virtually ensuring that China would be "lost" to the evil communists.

The Great Depression was a world crisis, and FDR could no more assuage it with social reforms than Obama can answer this crisis with Health Care Reform. Of course it is true that they were back on their heels, but it wasn't a plot. They did what they had to do. It speaks to their smug assuredness, that this time they don't feel like they "have" to do much of anything.

I think they're about to be proven very wrong.

... but for the most part it is correct. There are at least three substantial modifications that are needed.

1. It is probably an overstatement to say "many expected a socialist revolution". That was the nightmare of the ruling classes expressed as political prediction (as is easy to see in the reactions of NAM and Mr. Anonymous). In many areas of national life, organization and radicalization were just beginning. Still, there is no question that a genuinely independent and very powerful "Left" was growing by leaps and bounds and that it was reflected in strong radical movements in both political parties, mainly because it was fully capable of acting without either.

2. The role of FDR is also easy to overstate. There is no question that he was very good at co-opting (and being co-opted by) the Left. The problem is that this is a debate similar to that which revolves around the Great Depression. Did FDR "end" the Great Depression or did World War II, and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole unscathed capitalist power, really end it by creating new economic conditions? Similarly, did FDR "kill" the independent Left or did WWII create the conditions of "prosperity" which allowed the purge of the Left and its dismemberment (McCarthyism) afterwards? The answer to both questions tilts more towards the War and the subsequent "Golden Age".

3. The timing of this narrative is a little "off". The watershed event was 20 years earlier in World War I (1914-1919). Whole scale murder by the millions for no other purpose other than the re-division of the world by various capitalists, followed by the disgusting decadence of the "Roaring 20s", was as shocking as any set of historical events could be. In the middle of all that, the Russian Revolution lit the way. The Left began to grow at a furious pace. The Depression merely accelerated that.

Interestingly, the Leftward tilt of the Socialist Party managed to scare the Socialists. While presidential vote totals remained significant into the 1930s, the Socialist Party lost a lot of support between the time of Debs and the time of Thomas. In 1919, party membership was 40,000, twice that of the 1930s.

Not so for the Communist Party. In 1917, it had not existed. Two years later, it had 60,000 members. With affiliates, that number swelled to over 300,000. This is a huge number for a CP that was not primarily focused on electoral politics... and is yet another example of the far more radical socialists becoming the overwhelming "majority".

In turn, this vastly accelerated the Labor Movement (the opposite of the normal narrative). The progression was IWW to TUEL to Steel Workers Organizing Committee to the CIO. When Foster decided to organize the Steel Industry in 1918, there was essentially no Steel Workers union. By early 1919, over 100,000 members had been signed up. In August, 1919, when a strike was called, over 250,000 steel workers turned out. In 1936, UE owned a total of two office chairs and had $4000 in the bank. A decade later, they had 600,000 members, having organized RCA, GE, Westinghouse...

"Socialist Revolution"? Not yet, but...

http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cmhec/images/bigsteel.jpg

The Hedges piece is at over 700 comments. Looks like the folks over at CD are interested in keeping this flame going. Whatever the reason it can bring yet another 'opening' for a bit of clarity to seep through.

Liberals, I Do Despise

by Adolph Reed

First Published in The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 1996

After years of crafting and rationalizing Bill Clinton's version of the attack on poor people, high-ranking Department of Health and Human Services officials May Jo Bane and Peter Edelman resigned recently, several weeks after the president signed the hideous "welfare- reform" bill. David Ellwood, another architect of the welfare overhaul, left a year earlier. I'm sorry, but their grand gesture, tastefully skirting direct criticism of Clinton's action, seems too much like a self-righteous attempt to escape responsibility for their own involvement in bringing this savagery about. To that extent, their crocodile tears underscore the ugly truth of American liberalism.

Sometime early in Ronald Reagan's first term, I decided to forget everything I'd always disliked about liberals. I took pains to subordinate what put me off about them to the larger objective of unity against the rightwing onslaught, I decided to overlook their capacity for high-minded fervor for the emptiest and sappiest platitudes; their tendencies to make a fetish of procedure over substance and to look for technical fixes to political problems; their ability to screen out the mounting carnage in the cities they inhabit as they seek pleasant venues for ingesting good coffee and scones; their propensity for aestheticizing other people's oppression and calling that activism; their reflex to wring their hands and look constipated in the face of conflict; and, most of all, their spinelessness and undependability in crises.

But during the '80s liberal opinion gradually accommodated to Reaganism by sliding rightward. Two rhetorical justifications emerged for this adaptation. The Democratic Leadership Council called for a new centrism, jettisoning egalitarian politics and the constituencies identified with it. Additionally, an excesses-of-the-'60s-as-fall-from-grace fable propelled this slide and justified the smug dismissal of those of us who didn't want to go along. This new liberalism curtly demanded that we grow up and accept the realpolitik; Reaganism was all our fault for going too far anyway.

Bill Clinton's genius is that he managed to embody both the neoliberal and DLC variants of the rightward shift, and combined them with a superficial earnestness that mitigates whatever egalitarian thoughts may linger among those who will to believe in him. So liberals have followed and rationalized and pimped for him through the debacle of his half-assed, insurance company-led health-care reform, NAFTA and GATT, his horribly repressive crime and antiterrorism legislation, and his conspicuous retreat from support of civil rights enforcement. Now Clinton's apologists even attempt to justify his embrace of the abominable welfare- reform bill, stooping to a Flip Wilson defense (Gingrich made him sign it) and using the bill's passage as a reason to vote for Bipartisan Bill (so that he can "fix" what he just did). Talk about will to believe. Or is it will to get paid? Their lapdog defense of Big Bill highlights liberals' willingness to sacrifice the poor and to tout it as tough-minded compassion and an act of courage. Even before Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992 this trait was visible, especially among those policy-jock types who had begin to sense the possibility of a Clinton victory and their impending opportunity to consort with power. I got my wake-up call from a poverty-researcher colleague who, on the eve of the Illinois primary, impatiently dismissed my objections to Clinton's having just executed black, impoverished, and brain-damaged Rickey Ray Rector. She blew me off as naive for not recognizing that any Democrat who hoped to win the presidency would have to support capital punishment. "Easy for you to say," I thought, but, regrettably, was too polite to say out loud.

Nowhere have the moral and political deficiencies of this liberal notion of realpolitik been more clearly exposed than around the Clinton administration's welfare-reform politics. A decade ago, William Julius Wilson set the tone with The Truly Disadvantaged. In that work, Wilson chided the left for losing credibility, to the benefit of conservative critics, by not facing up to a spreading social pathology among the urban underclass. He proposed a sleight-of-hand approach to helping the poor schmucks through "universal" programs that wouldn't antagonize the better-off by appearing to do anything for poor people in particular. Fittingly, he became a major Clinton apologist in 1992. Following Wilson, David Ellwood, a highly regarded liberal poverty researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School, invented the "two years and off" notion, which he publicized in his 1988 book, Poor Support. Ellwood eased his provocative idea with calls for a battery of support services that would accompany expulsion from the welfare rolls. Like Wilson, he blew off the critics on his left who argued that his costly bundle of safeguards would go nowhere without a forceful challenge to the right-wing climate that his get-'em-off-the-dole slogan accommodated. The fear, now realized, was that his liberal credentials would legitimize the two-years-and-off idea as a programmatic goal without including any of his finely crafted hedges.

Attracted by Bubba's call to "end welfare as we know it," Ellwood and Kennedy School colleague Mary Jo Bane headed south to become part of official Washington. They would be the main players in the administration's overhaul of welfare, using two-years-and-off as their centerpiece. Joining the team later was Peter Edelman, the perennially up-and-coming liberal lawyer. He had assailed welfare as early as 1967, employing the coded attack phrase fostering dependence (read: poor folks are lazy bastards).

Beneath all this idiotic coyness lie liberals' long-standing aversion to conflict and their refusal to face up to the class realities of American politics. They avoid any linkage of inequality with corporations' use of public policy to drive down living standards and enhance their plunder, So Marian Wright Edelman (Peter's wife) of the Children's Defense Fund concocted the strategy of focusing on children. This save-the-babies politics is not only maudlin (notice how her pal Hillary's "whole village" went so easily from raising a child to stoning poor families in her support of hubby's welfare travesty), it also gives in to the right's demonization of poor adults by conceding their worthlessness in order to focus on their presumably innocent kids.

Roll ahead to the summer of 1994. Ellwood and Pane, representing HHS, sat at Daniel P. Moynihan's Senate Finance Committee hearing on Clinton's welfare-reform package (which, by the way, wasn't all that different from the Republican thing he signed). Alongside them was their boss, another liberal stalwart, HHS secretary Donna Shalala. As chief Clintonista, Shelala proclaimed that the purpose of the president's welfare-reform initiative was to eliminate out-of-wedlock births, her underlings nodded in agreement -- thus playing into one of the ugliest right-wing canards about social provision. As if that wasn't disgusting enough, when Moynihan invoked the specter of "speciation" -- the notion that generations of out-of-wedlock breeding in isolated, impoverished city pockets has created a new "species" -- each of the HHS folks nodded again.

I'm sure that these good liberals would have explained away their participation in that dehumanizing characterization as a strategic move; their intention being the advancement of humane social policy within an unfavorable political climate. However, their behavior exposes a deeper truth about the political commitments on which this strain of liberalism rests: This is a politics motivated by the desire for proximity to the ruling class and a belief in the basic legitimacy of its power and prerogative. It is a politics which, despite all its idealist puffery and feigned nobility, will sell out any allies or egalitarian objectives in pursuit of gaining the Prince's ear.

In a few short years, these sort of liberals have reminded me of all that had troubled me about them, and more. I'd just about convinced myself that my earlier scornfulness was a function of youthful hotheadedness. Some was, but not that much. In the end, it is the poisonous mix of self-righteousness and hypocrisy -- as illustrated by Ellwood, Bane, and Edelman -- which earns my contempt.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/09-7

In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.

“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996

Not a bad catch for over a decade ago...

Fante? I like him... but his work always feels slightly... forced(?)... like watching Barton Fink. Enjoyable, but just on the verge of... nails on a chalkboard. Rimbaud I haven't checked out, though I'll remember to do so now. Celine (who Bukowski's detective was looking for in Pulp- Luis Ferdinand Celine) is absolutely insane, like Kerouac on quaaludes... and his prose sets a precedent and justification for my over use of the ellipse (...)

I'll pop by the Lounge thread you mention... but when Starry Messenger posts Drop Kick Murphy links, I usually hear it from the other room before it makes it to the internets... ;)

I think I agree with you about the "Master Plan" notion. There may be "master goals", but even that is something that the participants in its creation would probably be "too close" to recognize at the time. It is precisely when considering this point that I think the "big ass yacht/cruiser" image is most apt. Trying to steer the state is indeed an imprecise art, and requires all sorts of adjustments and intuition, such that a "Master Plan" is rarely (I would guess) anything more than a collection of prioritized goals (which one could, presumably, apply some "fuzzy policy multivariable calculus" to in order to distill a "master goal"... which would probably present as its "solution" an equation which presents a "master goal" that "evolves as a function of time"... if that makes any sense). And saving capitalism (probably expressed at the time as "preventing a descent of civilization into anarchy"), i.e. the familiar structures of the society FDR knew, was probably pretty high up on the list.

And I have to say, I'm curious to see what will happen in this current atmosphere of accusing the left of disloyalty, to a system that is failing them, and arguably failing even to maintain itself... rather than moving to embrace the left in order to co-opt it (which at least has the advantage of getting some progressive stuff into the works... like an out of court settlement rather than going to the trouble of finding a jury to argue before).

Maybe Huey Long was the difference in the overall "equation"?

Maybe I'll have to watch "All the King's Men" again (it's sure a long ass book to re-read...) .

(Is that the same Hoover Institute that ...? interesting.)

I think that article is exactly what I was looking for, and when I'm feeling "lucky" (read: vindictive and in the mood for a fight, and see an opening that will get wide viewership) I'll probably make some reference to it as reason the apologists should really consider "throwing some bones to the left", rather than trying to shout us into submission.

Good times...

I mean... I think I agree with you that it wasn't so much FDR's policies that brought "prosperity", so much as it was the war... and the elimination of all other global industrial powers.

But when I try to think of a modern equivalent... I find a funny answer in my head. It occurs to me that the war material build up that was the underpinning of the jobs program that led to "prosperity" never really stopped. Sure, it seems to have been outsourced a bit, but from where I'm sitting the US Arms Industry (MIC) never wound down... so "winding it back up" isn't even an option. That being the case, I can't help but wonder if the last 70 years haven't just been a reprieve for US capitalism- but now (... where was I, fucking DSCC just called trying to get me to pledge a monthly payment "to maintain a Democratic Majority in the Senate"... I almost feel sorry for the poor lady after all the shit I just talked about the DNC and Obama...)

Ohh yeah, but now, without the prospect of a simple solution like war production, and likewise with no corporation (let alone government official) interested in reversing the trend of exporting the middle class, even if there were a massive production boom in the works... I don't see how the current economic anemia can be treated.

--Ohh, wait: "Weatherproofing." Maybe Obama's a genius after all...

Whatever you do, don't assign him to the kitchen. He'll take the dirty dishes and throw them in the dumpster out back.

Dishes are doooooonnnnneee!!!!!

thats a feather in his cap

I like writers who are claim them as a prominent influence more than either of them. I like the ellipse too but I only use (..) because that way maybe its a period and maybe its an ellipse..who knows :)

Rimbaud is sort of a much earlier predecessor/kindred spirit I guess. He is rather quotable (je es un autre). You always feel you are two steps from the Satyricon..and oftentimes you don't know if its two steps out or two steps back

Some of this stuff I concede I was more into 10 years ago when I was in high school. Like with Philip K Dick. In retrospect its a tad embarassing. But then I look back on many things I wrote, say, three agos and feel about 10 years older now.

Please correct me if I missed it.

I was not pointing to military spending as the terminus of the Great Depression (I know that some people make this argument). Military spending is like any other build up of aggregate demand by the government (i.e. "stimulus"). It compensates to one degree or another for the rapid deflation of the economy during economic crisis. Sooner or later, however, it has its limits. It represents spending while markets contract. But capitalist markets must return ("recovery"). How is that done? By a more thorough exploitation of existing markets and the conquest of new ones. It was this last that I was pointing to. Both World Wars were fundamentally caused by attempts to redivide the world amongst the major powers. WWII settled the matter. Not only were the pretenders defeated but decolonization (in the British, French, Dutch, Japanese Empires) and the break-up of the Pound Sterling monetary zone opened up massive opportunities for U.S. capital even among its wartime allies.

Having said the above, I think I agree completely with what you are saying. Once a single nation state controls the world market, economic crisis, which can only be resolved through the conquest of new markets, has no permanent resolution. Of course, for all other capitalist states, there is one resolution.

The anemia has no treatment... Wars become purely defensive (of Empire) and there are no broad social bribes to be had. The sun sets on the Empire. The Queen is reduced to ruling a tiny island. And the standard of living equals that of Portugal (except that the Portuguese have a future).

and conquering new markets, what the hell is the point of creating a ton of bantustans that function primarily as placeholder Imperial regents? Contrary to all that Pipeline jazz thats whats really going on in Iraq/Afghanistan it seems to me..(and there are so many precedents for this, its really hard to credibly argue against it)

And Pakistan is the obvious next target but Obomber already put Yemen and Somalia on the dartboard.

Whats the geo-political angle? How is this a defense of Empire, other than perhaps representing an attempt to unilaterally (re)assert NATO as a force to be reckoned with?

I mean..they have to know they can't militarily take over the globe..right?

It is defensive. What was the point of the British punitive expeditions in Afghanistan, in Ethiopia, in Natal? What was the point of Vietnam? Grenada?

I think they fight in one place in order to avoid fighting in all places. And, I think they are conquering nothing.... just keeping what they already have.

"And I have to say, I'm curious to see what will happen in this current atmosphere of accusing the left of disloyalty, to a system that is failing them, and arguably failing even to maintain itself... rather than moving to embrace the left in order to co-opt it (which at least has the advantage of getting some progressive stuff into the works... like an out of court settlement rather than going to the trouble of finding a jury to argue before)."

1) The "left" by definition is "disloyal", because the left advocates for the end of the current ruling system.
2) The "system" isn't "failing them", the system is designed to exploit them for the benefit of the propertied class. The failure is ours, in opposition to this system.
3) "Co-opting" the left has worked in the past (on a temporary basis) and has set back leftists goals accordingly. But the "progressive stuff" in the works is never worth the price.

Huey Long was one of the thorns in FDR's side, but even bigger ones were the communists and socialists who were actually winning votes in elections!

Just my take on this. You are right, "All the Kings Men" is a long ass read, but a pretty good book. "The Grapes of Wrath" might be even more on point...

CONSUMER BOYCOTTS. See my message in this forum as I do not want to repeat the text here.