DemocratsForProgress

DemocratsForProgress's Journal

May 28, 2014

When Reason Stops Short

Walter Rhett: When Reason Stops Short

Unlike bullets and political rhetoric, reason often stops short. Like bullets and rhetoric, reason often puts forth a single-sided, unchallenged view. Thinking is no longer a safe zone: it is used for deadly purposes. Political leaders and armies have conscripted reason into their arsenals. Insurgents and students deploy it in the service of their cause. As we review the cases, we see reason how reason stops short and trends farther and farther from the truth. It does its most damage when it stops short. Here’s proof.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin says he still recognizes Viktor F. Yanukovych as Ukraine’s president. Nobody has heard from Yanukovych since February, when he gave a press conference after he had disappeared and turned up in Russia near Ukraine’s border. It is a globally accepted practice that when a head of state flees a country voluntarily, has no popular or party support, no longer controls the military, can no longer appoint ministers or cabinet members, and no longer has signatory authority, that person is considered to have been stripped of the power of office. But in Russia, in the logic and reason of Putin, such a person still holds high authority. Reason stopped short.

The recent Ukrainian national election won by a billionaire chocolate maker, Petro Poroshenko, a former Ukrainian foreign minster and trade minister who knows Putin well, was not enough to convince Putin otherwise. Putin’s reasoning not only falls short but steps into a big hole—it ignores the overwhelming presence of a connected series of irrefutable facts. Putin is the communist president who would be the Russian empress Catherine. His subjects silent, fearful of laughing, afraid he or his agents will hear snickering, he declares he is sartorially arrayed in the regalia of power, when his closet (and coffers!) are empty and his tenuous rewriting of history is in free fall.

Putin positions his army on the edge of his reason. Looking down the barrels of very large guns spread across their borders, local populations and even nations rarely object to his fallacies and delusions. Armed threats are persuasive; his words make no case...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/28/when-reason-stops-short/

May 26, 2014

Stormy Monday, 5/26/14

Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 5/26/14

After his invigorating Memorial Day weekend trip to Afghanistan, the President leaves the storied delights of Bagram Airfield behind for the shilling fields of DC. No wonder he’s planning to get out of town again by midweek, when he’ll head to West Point to deliver a commencement address focused on foreign policy, advocating what one Administration official calls “interventionism but not overreach.”

But before he gets that far, on Tuesday the President plays host to the fifth annual White House Science Fair. This year’s edition celebrates the achievements of women and girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) competitions nationwide.

Speaking of the President, Senator Ted Cruz, intrepid Texan-Canadian-Cuban defender of all things he considers Constitutional, warned last Thursday that the wily Kenyan Usurper and his Senate henchmen are goiing to repeal the First Amendment. Will it happen this week? You never know. Stay vigilant, and keep a bag packed in case you have to flee the house ahead of the secret police coming to haul you off to that FEMA camp you heard tell was being built out there in the woods past Transit Road.

Tuesday, voters will decide whether veteran Congressman Ralph Hall – 91 years old and a lurid example of that weirdest of political creatures, a Democrat turned Republican – should get another kick at the can, or whether he has already done sufficient damage to the Republic and should be replaced by the even more odious John Ratcliffe. If you’re a voter in the Texas 4th, well, to paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, “any way you look at it, you lose.”

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/26/stormy-monday-52614/

May 21, 2014

The Insanity of Capital

Walter Rhett: The Insanity of Capital

The art of politics is lost. Money is the main candidate. The largest amount wins. You no longer need a record of civil involvement, just the right connections. Its a bidder’s war. The price of the 2016 elections will be insane.

But cash can get you in trouble. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced a guilty plea to criminal charges yesterday by the international bank Credit Suisse that included fines totaling $2.6 billion. In the plea, Credit Suisse admitted actively helping its account holders to evade US taxes.

On the heels of the Attorney General’s announcement, the New York Times reported the German bank, Commerzbank, suspended two employees for manipulated the $5 trillion daily currency market. The bank called their conduct “inappropriate.” Commerzbank issued a statement citing their “zero tolerance for non-compliance with rules and regulations.” A Swiss commission is also investigating eight institutions for colluding to manipulate global benchmark currencies, and one of those institutions is Credit Suisse.

More: A German authority also reported finding evidence of attempted currency manipulations but has decided not to pursue its findings...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/21/the-insanity-of-capital/

May 14, 2014

A Template for Greed

Walter Rhett: A Template for Greed

I.

In a statement for a case the Supreme Court declined last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “prejudice should not be substituted for reason.” That’s a tall order, from the streets or the bench.

Having institutionalized its attitudes of bias into law, and into employment patterns, housing, education, wages, voting and social behavior for more than a century, the US is still struggling to dismantle racism, despite loud proclamations that it is gone, and blaming its victims for recognizing its problems.

Racism is in slow retreat, but its legacy remains; intact. Not always as a barrier, as limits on opportunity or as carrier of stereotypes and hate—racism’s legacy is a template of action, tied to wealth. An empty jar is a template. It can hold water or nitroglycerin. A basket can hold fruit or be filled with vipers. Racism’s biggest impact on America’s political economy is its template, an interconnected, elaborate methodology of laws, beliefs, behaviors and networks, a series of conjectures and omens that can be abstracted and applied to issues far outside race. Surprisingly, its manifest destiny has attached to international finance.

Substitute wealth into the language of race, and you can see the labels, the special privileges, the denials, the demagoguery, the legal justifications for its concentration and expansion of power that once accompanied race. America’s political economy is in a battle royal for wealth and power, seeking their absolute convergence...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/14/a-template-for-greed/

May 12, 2014

Stormy Monday, 5/12/14

Stormy Monday, 5/12/14

With the Benghazi pseudo-scandal momentarily on hold as John Boehner’s Republican-dominated kangaroo court – uh, I mean select committee, is assembled, the Secret Service has set tongues wagging with the revelation by the agency’s former director, Mark Sullivan, that agents were routinely pulled from White House perimeter duty to protect Sullivan’s assistant at her Maryland home. Expect calls this week for House and Senate investigations. And don’t be surprised if Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann or one of their GOP colleagues gets the bright idea to have Sullivan reappointed to his old position so that they can then demand his resignation again. Hell, one or more conservative pundits clamoring for the President’s impeachment on the grounds that he failed to micromanage his own security detail wouldn’t shock me either.

In other Secret Service news, Thomas Lemuel “Lem” Johns, who was assistant to the special agent in charge of LBJ’s security detail in Dallas on November 22, 1963, died Saturday, aged 88. The Alabama native was present at Johnson’s ad hoc inaugural aboard Air Force One, and would later head the agency’s Birmingham field office. His son and grandson also went on to serve on presidential security details. Lem Johns will be interred at Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery on Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, Senator Patty Murray of Washington will introduce the Social Security and Marriage Equality (SAME) Act of 2014, which would “amend the Social Security Act to grant survivor benefits to any individual legally married anywhere in the United States, regardless of whether he or she lives in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage.” The bill is co-sponsored by another Democrat, Colorado’s Mark Udall. Yep. Not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. Yep.

With a ton of testosterone-tinged rancor left over from his aggression in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin could be poised to invade the Eurovision Song Contest following Friday’s victory in Copenhagen by Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst’s impassioned “Rise Like a Phoenix.” Russia was unsuccessful in its efforts to strong-arm the contest into banning Wurst’s performance. Following the result, Russian Vice Premier Dmitry Rogozin noisily tweeted about Europe’s future being “a bearded girl,” while numbskull MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky described the win as “the end of Europe.” Wurst’s performance is a marvel, no question, and certainly anything that ticks off Pootie is a good thing, but to a codger like me it’ll never top Eurovision winner “Waterloo,” which poured non-stop out of every transistor radio in Europe during my summer there in 1974. Yes, it was a simpler, more innocent era: the Paris Peace Accord had crumbled, resulting in renewed hostilities in Vietnam, civil war raged and Haile Selassie was dethroned in Ethiopia, Turkey invaded Cyprus (twice), the Red Brigades were bombing seemingly every passenger train I wanted to take, and Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/11/stormy-monday-51214/

May 7, 2014

The Fifth Wheel: America’s Political Economy

Walter Rhett: The Fifth Wheel: America’s Political Economy

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented her first oral dissent from the high bench last week. The New York Times coverage also reported a written statement she released the previous year on a case the Court declined to hear. The statement makes plain a profound truth overlooked. A federal prosecutor’s statement* about a group of African-Americans and Hispanics and a drug deal, she noted, was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence, and racial prejudice for reason.”

Have we become a government by stereotype and blame? Yes. But more importantly, how did it happen? What were the economic and politic elements that created a such a dramatic shift? The answers lie within our political economy, one of five models active as global templates.

The most traditional of the five is the European template. In Europe, government is actively engaged in providing public service; it offers benefits to its citizens and is concerned with the public good and common resources, from roads to energy consumption, from employment to schools, from the internet to the arts. No European government would declare the death of Big Bird, the most successful teacher of early childhood language skills, as Mitt Romney did in a presidential debate (overlooking the fact that “Bird” is a part of a private non-profit group that is self-sustained by license fees). By all measures except for taxation, the European model works well, and citizen groups are not in open revolt about its goals, even as the countries of Europe debate its priorities.

European conservatives argue for austerity, but few go so far as calling for the dismantling of national social nets, the transfer of government assets to the private sector, or bizarre gun rights such as “stand your ground.”

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/07/the-fifth-wheel-americas-political-economy/

May 5, 2014

Stormy Monday, 5/5/14

Jeff Rosenzweig: Stormy Monday, 5/5/14

The great John Conyers might not make it onto the primary ballot this year as he seeks a 26th term. Cathy Garrett, Wayne County’s Clerk, said late last week that signatures collected by two Detroit circulators are apparently invalid since the circulators are not registered voters or weren’t at the time they collected signatures, leaving the Congressman short of the required 1,000 signatures. Pursuant to a formal complaint from primary rival Horace Sheffield, a final ruling in the matter will be issued Wednesday, and Conyers could be forced to run this fall as a write-in candidate.

Evidently convinced that the millions of dollars and many thousands of person-hours already blown on brainless, redundant parallel committee hearings on the Benghazi pseudo-scandal were just not an egregious enough exercise in Congressional overreach and grandstanding, John Boehner announced last week that he will soon convene a select committee to conduct the mother of all pseudo-investigations. Hey, it’s an election year, and House Republicans have to be seen to be doing something so that they can avoid actually, you know, doing something. Or something. Watch for committee hopefuls to audition via the airwaves this week, eagerly showcasing their outrage.

Speaking of stale-dated nonsense, the House is expected this week to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for her supposed role in the agency’s supposedly unfair treatment of conservative groups.

This week, the Senate takes up the Shaheen-Portman energy bill, which would do good things like stepping up conservation practices at federal agencies and providing training in energy-efficient technologies. Since the bill as authored apparently didn’t contain anything terrible, along came North Dakota Senator John Hoeven (a Republican) and Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu (who is almost one) to offer up an amendment which would mandate construction of the infamous Keystone XL Pipeline despite the State Department’s continuing review and a pending lawsuit over the pipeline’s proposed route...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/04/stormy-monday-5514/

May 1, 2014

Cross-post from the Good Reads forum: Race and Myth Revisited

Walter Rhett: Race and Myth Revisited

In a written account of a runaway from slavery, authorities stopped a suspected fellow, questioning him closely. “Where are you going?” they asked. “I am from South Carolina!” he replied. Puzzled, unsure about his answer, they let him continue on his way. His empathetic response won the day.

“I’m from South Carolina!” Do you think I am so stupid as to run away, knowing what I face if captured? Surely the masters of fear succeeded in deterring the thought of escape and made profoundly clear my lot, and I my willingness to accept it without challenge.

“I’m from South Carolina!” Need I say more than this simple moral plea, even for a bondsman? Is justice found in the demands for denigration and physical cruelty that respect no rights except wealth and power?

“I’m from South Carolina!” I know you will never admit my feat of deception, or the success of my journey so far; it casts a long shadow on your beliefs and institutions and shows how the cherished follies you substitute for truth fall woefully short, including the idea that superior intelligence and character is tied to skin color and the land of birth or heritage. I am African. Stop me—and reveal to yourselves your failure, and know you will fail again. You can not face this failure, so you will ignore my success. Let me go; you will pretend this never happened and that your fears and narcissism are intact...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/04/30/race-and-myth-revisited/

May 1, 2014

Race and Myth Revisited

Walter Rhett: Race and Myth Revisited

In a written account of a runaway from slavery, authorities stopped a suspected fellow, questioning him closely. “Where are you going?” they asked. “I am from South Carolina!” he replied. Puzzled, unsure about his answer, they let him continue on his way. His empathetic response won the day.

“I’m from South Carolina!” Do you think I am so stupid as to run away, knowing what I face if captured? Surely the masters of fear succeeded in deterring the thought of escape and made profoundly clear my lot, and I my willingness to accept it without challenge.

“I’m from South Carolina!” Need I say more than this simple moral plea, even for a bondsman? Is justice found in the demands for denigration and physical cruelty that respect no rights except wealth and power?

“I’m from South Carolina!” I know you will never admit my feat of deception, or the success of my journey so far; it casts a long shadow on your beliefs and institutions and shows how the cherished follies you substitute for truth fall woefully short, including the idea that superior intelligence and character is tied to skin color and the land of birth or heritage. I am African. Stop me–and reveal to yourselves your failure, and know you will fail again. You can not face this failure, so you will ignore my success. Let me go; you will pretend this never happened and that your fears and narcissism are intact...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/04/30/race-and-myth-revisited/

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