Over at Exiledonline, there’s a piece on the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr. If you know anything about Mark Ames who runs the site (and previously built the best alt newspaper in history, The eXile), then you already know that it isn’t going to be a fluffy, feel good pile of nostalgic crap.

“It’s important on this anniversary to distinguish between two entirely different events: first, the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989; and then German unification, on October 3, 1990. Americans often conflate the two into one process. But for Germans and those who were there, it’s a much more complicated story. The fall of the Berlin Wall became a poisoned memory for a certain set of Easterners, thanks to the events that followed that event.” [snip]

How the West Hijacked the Berlin Wall Revolution

Go read the rest, because ignorance is only bliss if you’re happy being stupid.

So i took a break from my household activities for a short walk to pick up a few things from the neighborhood grocery. The young man (early 20’s) in front of me did one of the things most likely to make me snap in public someday. He pulled out his bridge card to pay for his purchases. Here in Michigan we don’t call them food stamps anymore, today it’s called “the bridge card”.

I’m not afraid of socialized medicine or spending on social programs. For all i know, there might be a socialist trapped inside me trying to get out. Maybe i’m a socialist-libertarian, but i don’t even know if such a thing exists.

Why the scene above pisses me off after the jump…

The young man’s purchases consisted of a 12-pack of Mountain Dew, a box of Hot Pockets and a frozen pizza. Junk food should not be eligible for food stamp purchases. There’s an argument in discussing this situation as it pertains to the inner cities; many of those residents do not have access to much more than convenience store junk food. The situation i saw happened at a rather nice little grocery store.

It has everything that one would need to stock the larder, if slightly higher prices and a more limited selection than other stores. It has an in-house bakery; a produce section; and the best fresh kielbasa this side of my late, great-grandmother. (weird as that is) He could have bought a can of soup, all the things to make a pizza or even one of the cook-yourself pizzas that the store prepares. Lot’s of choices, but it was social spending on the bottom of the barrel crap food.

It probably wouldn’t upset me so much if i wasn’t treated to the sight on a regular basis. At the grocery near my work i’m regularly waiting in line behind obese people using food stamps to buy pop, powdered donuts, chips and all the other things that made them obese in the first place. Then i’ll see them loading all those socialist groceries into a vehicle plastered with Republican bumper stickers.

Freedom isn’t free, but apparently junk food is.

Hey, i’m a libertarian. I don’t care what you eat. I do care that the person who’s on federal food assistance–who almost certainly does not have private health insurance–uses that assistance to purchase junk food. It should be used to purchase actual food, sustenance. All that other stuff should come out of pocket.

Here we are, subsidizing a major contributor to the health care issue that we’re fighting over because we can’t agree on whether it should be subsidized. We could cut long-term health care costs by simply not subsidizing junk food purchases.

I wonder if the Teabaggers would protest for their right to eat powdered donuts on everyone’s dime?

Congressional Democrats teared up and patted their own backs last night because they passed the health insurance industry protection bill. The normal apologists are telling us to look past all the nefarious components of the bill because this is such a significant step towards reform. No, no it is not. And the few portions of it that might truly be called steps towards reform will almost certainly be gutted in the Senate. The bill that the President will proudly sign into law will amount to nothing more than a preemptive bailout of the health insurance industry. The real costs–social and monetary–will kicked down the road for someone else to handle. And the Democrats will claim their liberal-reformist credentials.

We need health care reform, no question about that. This isn’t it. This isn’t even designed to be it, but only to look like it so that the spineless leadership of the Democratic Party can declare a victory for itself. And there’s the important part. The Democratic Party is looking for a victory for the party, not for the people it represents. Were the Democratic Party fighting for a victory in the name of its constituents, the bill would not look anything like what was passed.

Bah and humbug to the argument that a real reform bill wouldn’t get passed the “blue dog” Democrats in the House. How do we know that? Real reform was never even discussed, much less attempted. The Kucinich amendment, which would have given states the right to establish single payer systems, was not even allowed for a vote. That would be the Democratic leadership who decided that single payer, even on an individual state basis, is off the table. But the Stupak amendment not only got a vote, but got whipped to help it pass.

So there you have it, “reform” in the Democratic dictionary is defined by writing laws that deny funding for a legal procedure while shutting down anything that might truly threaten the monopoly of the insurance companies. Reform is mandating that i purchase insurance without giving me a good option to purchase.

What could we expect from the party who ran on “we’ll end the Iraq War” and then voted right along with the war when it came to power. Why be surprised by the party that campaigned on helping the American people against the greed of Wall Street profiteers and then handed those same profiteers the keys to the treasury.

The GOP can best be described as malicious with a fair sprinkling of incompetence. The Democratic Party is incompetent with a fair sprinkling of  maliciousness. And they’re both craven, grovelling for the largess of their big financial contributors.

I only have one vote, and i cannot vow to stop contributing to the Democrats because i’ve never contributed to the Democratic Party or any of its candidates. But i hereby solemnly swear that i shall never vote for any candidate representing the Democratic Party. (Don’t worry, i made the same promise to myself about the Republican Party a long time ago.)

That’s it, i’m done…washing my hands of the sons-a-bitches. If they’re unwilling to vote for me, why in god’s name should i vote for them? And there will be no exceptions, because a good (or even great) candidate will surely be ruined by the affiliation and party machinations. Both parties are a pox upon our nation…and the few good examples–like Kucinich–are ostracized and marginalized by their own parties.

Werther has a fine piece up at Electric Politics.

As an example of the sort of sloppy, tendentious journalism by which Brooks distinguishes himself, the column is merely typical. What is more interesting is the columnist’s lyrical invocation of sheer will power as the quality that will determine the outcome of the war [Afghanistan]. Believe in victory, he says, do not be distracted by any other consideration, and victory will be ours. Lack of will, by contrast, is a synonym for “defeatist.” This sort of faux-Churchillian preening is a particular characteristic of neoconservative chickenhawks, but it is also key to understanding the psychology of the Right Wing more broadly.

Read the rest…

“We must never allow the scent of capitalism to attract us,” declared the Minju Chosun (a DPRK cabinet publication), adding, “We are being penetrated by the imperialists with every kind of rotten bourgeois lifestyle, and the sensitive nature of our young generation is being taken advantage of on a massive scale.”

I hate to tell you this, Kim, but that’s how the imperialists work. It always starts with free candy for the kids, then jeans, then rock ‘n’ roll and the next thing you know your kids are riding off in an old, imperialist van with no windows.

It’s a shame that out government produces such craptacular propaganda. If we’re going to be bombarded by propaganda (and we are), then i want it to be well written propaganda. I’m not deciding on a disposable razor here, so the slick, Madison Ave crap just wears on my nerves. Give it to us like you mean it. Here, the Minju Chosun will show you how it’s done…

“To devastate our political and ideological position, capitalist elements, including the United States, continue to blow a viciously sweet scent of capitalism into our country. To preserve their fate and guarantee a bright future for the nation. it is vitally important to educate our young so they won’t be dazzled by this scent of capitalism.”

“Once paralyzed by the sweet capitalist wind, they will fall into corruption, ignore the revolution and focus on individual pleasure, so we must awaken them to the enemies’ strategy.”

See, that’s good propaganda. And if you like the wind imagery as much as i do, you’ll be happy to know that it’s a full-fledged motif in DPRK propaganda. The Rodong Shinmun warned in September that blocking the “capitalist wind” was of the utmost importance, suggesting that maintaining illusions about capitalism is akin to drinking poison.

So there you have it, capitalism: history’s biggest fart. Viciously sweet at first, even dazzling but then paralyzing and poisonous. Kim, i’m sure, feels confident that America won’t just walk through the door and cut a window-rattler…he has the bomb after all. He’s worried about the evil SBD, the kind you don’t even know is there and then an intriguing whiff before it all goes bad.

What Kim doesn’t understand is that he’ll never be able to hold out. This is the globalization era, which is like being in car with the windows rolled up…and the driver being the only one with window controls…and the driver cutting SBD’s because he knows there’s nothing that any of us can do about it.

You won’t be able to hold your breath forever, Kim.

And i slid by the DPRK’s wikipedia page only to find a picture of a Family Mart in the Kaesong Industrial Region. Come on, Kim, i realize that it’s only for South Koreans but a god-damned Family Mart? Talk about sticking your nose into the flatulent, ass-end of capitalism. Maybe you’re not really holding your breath, huh? Maybe you’re just pretending to be disgusted but you secretly like that viciously sweet smell.

*The fart metaphor is all mine, but i got the quotes from a World Meets US article.

I abhor the word “romp” in book reviews. “Somebody or another takes us on a romp through/to somewhere, yada yada yada.” That creates a difficult position for me in composing an unsolicited review of Original Sin (A Cultural History) by Alan Jacobs.

The ultimate scene in the film Russian Ark consists of nothing more than dancing. An orchestra plays and masses of costumed dancers fill a ballroom in the Winter Palace. For the scene to be riveting (and it is outstanding), the viewer must have foreknowledge that it was shot in a single take. The orchestra, the costumes, the dozens and dozens of dancers executing complicated steps were really as perfect as they appear on film.

Original Sin is, from the first page to the last, like that ballroom scene: a massive undertaking of incredible complexity that comes together such that it seems like an effortless good time.

Those who have put thought to paper know that it’s difficult labor. Jacobs sets out to trace the history of original sin in 274, 6×9″ pages. It could not have been as easy as he makes it look. I imagine that he spent arduous hours in that peculiar torment of rewriting, but his toil is the reader’s treasure.

Whether he’s discussing Robert Owens’ utopian mill and the birth of socialism or Gregor Mendel’s experiments, no idea is left forever on pages turned. He weaves Dionysos, Milton, Hellboy, R.D. Laing, Tom and Jerry, Dutch Calvinism, William James, the birth of American anarchism, Coleridge, the abolitionist movement and the proverbial “much, much more” together in the sort of tapestry that is good history in wide angle. And the footnotes are so delightful that the reader looks forward to asterisks.

Jacobs is a practicing Christian, he tells us as much–if subtly–early in the book. It is not, however, a Christian explanation of the concept; more importantly, it is not an attempt to refute a Christian concept. I’m not sure that a non-Christian could bring the necessary feeling of personal exploration that animates this book. If there was an attempt to convert me, i missed it.

I was having too much fun enjoying Jacobs’ deconstruction of modern conservativism in a short, but utterly devastating, eleven pages. That’s not the only thing that gets deconstructed, but it is not a book about who’s right and who’s wrong.

The last sentence of the afterword (which is about the Blues) reads, “If there is a proper response, a truly wise response, to the narrative of this book, it surely begins with the recognition that if everyone is bad to the bone–if all of us strut and fret our hour upon the stage, filled with the consciousness of injured merit, fairly glowing with self-praise–then our condition is, first and above all else, comical.”

Amen

Original Sin: A Cultural History; Alan Jacobs; HarperOne; 2008; ISBN: 9780060783402

Available at all the major web book stores (Powell’s, Borders and Amazon), and i found it at my local public library.

By now any casual reader of the news should have gotten the picture that the Obama administration would prefer different leadership in Kabul. The whisper campaign began almost as soon as Obama took office and grew to crescendo with the charges of election fraud. Along the way we were treated to plenty of accusations that senior, Afghan officials are linked to the opium trade. And by all accounts, Abdullah Abdullah was the D.C. preferred candidate. With Abdullah dropping out of the Western imposed run off, things are likely to get even more complicated in Afghanistan.

Karzai stuffed ballot boxes, that’s clear. Most western media has not been entirely forthright in its role of public informer. There was plenty of vote rigging on the part of Abdullah’s allies too.

But the arm twisting seems to have come to naught. Abdullah has withdrawn and the Afghan Election Commission sees no point in holding an election with only one candidate.

As far as i can see, it means that the Obama administration has painted itself into a corner. For months it has talked about needing a “legitimate” government to partner with for the sake of the COIN doctrine. Now it’s stuck with a government that the administration has spent plenty of time and energy painting as illegitimate.

This situation would, of course, be the perfect moment to bring deescalation and withdrawal to the table. That’s unlikely. The military will oppose it, the neo-liberal interventionists within the administration will oppose it and the chances are slim that Obama will play with the fire it would create domestically.

That and pouring money into the effort is the only way left for the administration to run economic stimulus.

There’s a very large “but” in all of this. After the smear campaign, the rumors about his brother and the public loss of honor that the Obama administration put Karzai through, it shouldn’t surprise us if he starts turning away from the US.

I expect him to no longer even attempt to please DC, and it won’t surprise me if he moves closer to both Iran and the Russia-China-India alliance gearing up to fill the vacuum of America’s failure or withdrawal. That will be tricky, but dancing between foreign powers is a long-standing practice of Afghan politics.

The CIA-opium attack on Ahmed Karzai looks particularly ripe for blowback. An excellent analysis by the Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, suggests that some in the Afghan government are ready to bring Western involvement in the opium trade to the public if Washington goes through with the threatened, congressional  inquiry.

The rest of Bhadrakumar’s article is in direct opposition to the standard narrative in the American media. He sees Karzai as the winner in this, and, like myself, expect Karzai to start maneuvering without US approval or direction. He thinks that Hekmatyar might break ranks with the insurgency and ally with Karzai. That would change everything.

Perhaps most importantly, Turkey is slated to lead the ISAF. Having a Muslim nation with a track record of dealing with several of the players on the Afghan scene can only be helpful. If Karzai’s government can work well with regional neighbors as Bhadrakumar thinks it can, and if Karzai can split the insurgency we may see significant improvements.

But the case for optimism is in spite of the US rather than because of anything we’re doing. If Obama is smart, he’ll stand the generals down and find out how he can be of assistance to the situation as it really is…rather than how those in Washington wish that it were. He’d probably be asked to start withdrawing American forces, and unfortunately, it does not sound like that possibility is part of the discussion.