GDAEman: October 2010

October 26, 2010

Wiki Leaks War Logs: Weak Search Capability

Wiki Leaks War Logs search capability disappointing. They invest untold time into combing thru the documents and making them searchable, then have a very weak search tool.

I wanted to search for Colonel James Steele, the guy who brought death squad methods from Central America to Iraq. I search for "Steele" and get "steel" too (and steal miss spelled as steel, Go USA!). I want to search for "James and Steele," and the search tool can't handle boolean logic.

Also, the public version is pretty heavily redacted. Compare Guardian UK report:

"Only the severed head was found. A wire was run through the ear with the corpse's ID attached to the wire. 3rd bn [battalion] commander identified the remains as Ahdel Abu Hussain, he was an officer in the NP [national police] Wolf Brigade."

compared with what is available on line:

: //-___ REPORTS IP'___ FROM ___ FOUND A CORPSE IPE___ AND E___ FROM JSS ___ THE RECOVERY AND DISPOSITION OF THE REMAINS; NO BODY FOUND, NO OTHER WOUNDS VISIBLE, ONLY THE SEVERED ___ WAS FOUND. A WIRE WAS RUN THROUGH THE EAR WITH THE CORPSEE___ ID ATTACHED TO THE WIRE.
___ Battalion COMMANDER IDENTIFIED THE REMAINS AS
___ , HE WAS AN OFFICER IN THE ___ WOLF BRIGADE ___ Battalion, ID SERVICE NUMBER IS ___.

And we hear all of this racket from the US establishment about how wiki leaks exposes people to threats of reprisal. The material is pretty sanitized. Typical establishment spin.

The Tea Party and the Fascist Impulse

True, people toss around the term fascism without care. Hopefully this post isn't another such case.

An essay, Global Capitalism versus Global Community, by Walden Bello, begins with some historical background. He talks about unbridled capitalism's rise "in what is now known as the first age of globalization that spanned the ninteenth century and ended with World War I in 1914." It included the late 1800s Robber Barron era.

This "first age of globalization" saw "the emergence of sharp disparities in the distribution of income and assets." Bello then notes that this "provoked a countervailing push from society, especially the lower and middle classes" to re-balance the inequities. This is where my insight begins.

At first I didn't understand why Bellow didn't define the "first age" to continue through the 1920s to the Great Crash. Then I realized that his cut-off point it's central to my insight: The rise of NAZIs between the two world wars.

We on the left like to think of the "countervailing push" to re-balancing the inequities caused by unfettered capitalism to be solely our domain; it's the little people reasserting their say in the socio-economic system, asserting public freedom over excessive private freedom. But Bellos reminded me that this isn't the way it really works.

... not all of the responses to globalization were progressive. For example, fascism, which Karl Polanyi defined as "the reform of the market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions," was also part of this countervailing drive, one that hijacked the search for community in the service of reaction, counterrevolution and racism.

Yes. The "first age of globalization" does find a break-point at World War I, after which Hitler found a desperate populace that was itself hijacked in his service. The "little people" were swept up in the fascist "countervailing push".

It's a similar strata of today's society that has an impulse to follow the Tea Party movement. Now they are following the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Tom Delay, all of whom are very pro-corporation, like Hitler and Mussolini the later of which who said, in Italian of course:

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

The conundrum of the Tea Party, being against the establishment, but for the corporate system, now makes more sense. But it is a bad omen, particularly when one considers another definition of fascism by FDR:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sources:

First posted on Challenge the Establishment blog.

October 25, 2010

Associate Press Blow Interpretation of Health Care Poll

What's up with the Associated Press (AP)? Seems it's been captured by the transnational corporations too (like the other three branches: U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Executive). AP has teamed up on polling with GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications... I'm not kidding, that's their name.

I was drawn to this realization after reading a recent AP article entitled, "AP-GfK Poll: Americans Split On Health Care Repeal." Oh really? "Split" usually means 50 percent for and 50 percent against.

So, out come the latest AP corporate communications numbers on the recent health care legislation:

40% Support Health Care legislation
11% Neutral on it
51% Total

45% Oppose the Health Care legislation

45% to 51% percent is almost a "split," only six points apart, but not on "repeal" of the legislation.

32% want to repeal it completely, which isn't exactly a "split" when compared with 40% who "support."

But what really got me was that the AP article makes the lame oversight that so many polls do on this topic; it doesn't directly address the question that some people who are "opposed" to the legislation didn't feel it goes far enough to truly reform health care. Well it did, but it stacked that number up against "repeal" and called it a "split."

I went to the Oct. 13-18, 2010 corporate communications poll [PDF] to look at the numbers. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the follow-up question, "of those opposed, who wants stronger legislation?" But, you can get close to the answer of that question. Here are the numbers:

18% say leave the Health Care legislation as it is.
39% say change the Health Care legislation so it does MORE.
57% Total say keep it the same or stronger Health Care legislation

9% say change the Health Care legislation so it does LESS.
32% say completely repeal the Health Care legislation.
41% Total say make it weaker or repeal it.

41% Repeal or does LESS, 57% Keep as-is or does MORE. This should have been the headline, not a lame twisting of the number to say Americans are "split" on wanting to repeal the Health Care legislation.

Instead, AP cherry picks two numbers from "likely voters" that fit a story line: Those who want stronger health care legislation and those who want repeal it, as if that is a logical comparison.

But, the damage of the headline is done, less than two weeks before the elections. Shame on the Associated Press and its corporate communications partner. It's telling that it was AP's corporate communications partner that does the interpretation of the poll video.

Let AP Know What You Think:

Contact AP:

E-mail: info@ap.org
Phone: 212 621-1500

Contact FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting to let them know what you think.

E-mail: fair@fair.org

Sources:

First posted on Challenge the Establishment blog.

October 24, 2010

Where Does Boundless Economic Growth Inevitably Lead?

Yesterday I explored the notion of "imperialism," that natural tendency for industrialized nations with mass production that manufactures too much to be absorbed at home and must be sold abroad... by force if necessary (the imperialism part).

OK, so lets take the long view. "Economic Growth" is actually an acceleration; it's not good enough to be stuck at x% growth... the increase needs to be increasing year after year. This raises questions about carrying capacity and the wisdom of an economic framework that demands growth for the sake of "a healthy economy."

This question is explored by William Fort, 80-year-old founder of Praxis, a transnational corporation that is on par with with large nations. Fort is a fictional character, living in 2010, but his insights are pretty real. He knows that the global carrying capacity is finite and he is smart enough to know that economic growth in today's sense isn't sustainable; the economic model must change. The setting is a discussion among a few people chosen by William Fort to think about this issue:

One morning he spend an hour talking about feudalism -- how it was the clearest political expression of primate dominance dynamics, how it had never really gone away, how transnational capitalism was feudalism writ large, how the aristocracy of the world had to figure out how to subsume capitalist growth within the steady-state stability of the feudal model.

One can debate whether or not this question should be left up to the "aristocracy of the world", but the existence of the underlying question is not open to debate.

William Fort eventually reveals his insights on the matter to his select group:

The opportunities for growth are no longer in growth.

Sounds like a puzzle stated by a martial arts instructor or something. Fort continues,

We've got to identify the new nongrowth growth markets, and get into them.

He talks about "nonmarketable capital", which he boils down infrastucture investment, a long-term investment. One of the participants in the discussion observes that such "nonmarketable capital" is publicly owned, to which William Fort responds:

Yes. Which means close cooperation of the governments involved. Praxis's gross annual product is much larger than most countries'. What we need to do is find countries with small GNPs and bad Country Future Indices [bad future prospects]. ... We identify those, go to them and offer them a massive capital investment, plus political advice, security, whatever they need. In return, we take custody of their [nonmarketable captial]. We also have access to their labor. It's an obvious partnership. I think it will be the coming thing.

It's not "coming;" it's already been here. It's "imperialism" writ large. It's privatization. A particularly insidious form is described John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."

Sources:

Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

October 23, 2010

Capitalism and Why We're Imperialists

The title probably sounds like the ranting of a lefty wing-nut. But a little sober thought reveals a reality that is hard to deny.

Way back in 1902 an English economist, John A. Hobson, provided a simple explanation of the term imperialism, which holds to this day. In simple terms, mass production creates too many products for domestic consumption. This necessitates finding foreign markets, and the capitalists who make the products use the power of their government to secure those markets using military force if necessary. Hobson puts the motivation for new markets this way:

It is open to Imperialists to argue thus: "We must have markets for our growing manufactures, we must have new outlets for the investment of our surplus capital and for the energies of the adventurous surplus of our population: such expansion is a necessity of life to a nation with our great and growing powers of production."

Hobson then puts words to the next logical step: Corporations influencing government's use of the military to secure foreign markets:

After 1870 this manufacturing and trading supremacy was greatly impaired: other nations, especially Germany, the United States, and Belgium, advanced with great rapidity, and while they have not crushed or even stayed the increase of our external trade, their competition made it more and more difficult to dispose of the full surplus of our manufactures at a profit. The encroachments made by these nations upon our old markets, even in our own possessions, made it most urgent that we should take energetic means to secure new markets. These new markets had to lie in hitherto undeveloped countries, chiefly in the tropics, where vast populations lived capable of growing economic needs which our manufacturers and merchants could supply. Our rivals were seizing and annexing territories for similar purposes, and when they had annexed them closed them to our trade. The diplomacy and the arms of Great Britain had to be used in order to compel the owners of the new markets to deal with us: and experience showed that the safest means of securing and developing such markets is by establishing 'protectorates' or by annexation....

What strikes me is that the logic is so simple and it explains the corruption of our government by corporations.

Sources:

October 18, 2010

Opportunities to Miss

Not sure it's kosher, but I'm going to re-print a Paul Krugman blog post in it's entirety:

In today’s [New York Times] report on the foreclosure mess, a revealing sentence:

As the foreclosure abuses have come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.

Surely this can serve as a generic statement:

As NAME ISSUE HERE has come to light, the Obama administration has resisted calls for a more forceful response, worried that added pressure might spook the banks and hobble the broader economy.

Stimulus, bank rescue, China, foreclosure; it applies all along. At each point there were arguments for not acting; but the cumulative effect has been drift, and a looming catastrophe in the midterms.

Or to put it another way, the administration has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And soon there won’t be any more opportunities to miss.

===== End ====

Ouch!

Sources:

Challenge the Establishment Blog

October 9, 2010

GDAE Podcast - Episode 35

Left / Right Populism - Part VI

Can principled people on the left and right clean up our democratic institutions?

Case-study from Electoral Politics: David Sirota on Tea-party-backed candidate for US Senate in Colorado, Ken Buck.

Shared Left/Right Populist Anger: CNN interview with David Sirota explains Bush & Obama failure on Financial Bailout.

MUSIC: Ryan Harvey, "It's Not Just Bush"

Historical Context of Tea Party: We've seen this before in past decades. Kevin Drum exposes how the Tea Party follows the same broad contours of past right-wing spasms during Democratic Party presidencies.

Prosecute Bush: An example of a "nation of laws," Iceland is holding its leaders accountable for financial meltdown.

Play Episode 35 from this page:

Click to Download Episode 35.

Listen to Part V in the series, Episode 34:

Listen to Part IV in the series, Episode 33:

Listen to Part III in the series, Episode 32:

Listen to Part II in the series, Episode 31:

Listen to Part I in the series, Episode 30, (20-minute abridged version):

October 4, 2010

Scottish Ghost Music

Sources:

October 1, 2010

GDAE Podcast - Episode 34

September 30, 201o Posting Date

Left & Right Common Goals - Part V

Conversation with Vince Tola: Perspectives on the potential of principled people on the left and right to join forces and reassert the power of the people over our democratic institutions. Vince is a public school teacher and Maryland Green Party organizer.

Play Episode 34 from this page:

Click to Download Episode 34.

Listen to Part IV in the series, Episode 33:

Listen to Part III in the series, Episode 32:

Listen to Part II in the series, Episode 31:

Listen to Part I in the series, Episode 30, (20-minute abridged version):

GDAEman

October 26, 2010

Wiki Leaks War Logs: Weak Search Capability

The Tea Party and the Fascist Impulse

October 25, 2010

Associate Press Blow Interpretation of Health Care Poll

October 24, 2010

Where Does Boundless Economic Growth Inevitably Lead?

October 23, 2010

Capitalism and Why We're Imperialists

October 18, 2010

Opportunities to Miss

October 9, 2010

GDAE Podcast - Episode 35

October 4, 2010

Scottish Ghost Music

October 1, 2010

GDAE Podcast - Episode 34

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