quote unquote: Eisenhower on militarism

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." -- Dwight David Eisenhower

TSA Excesses: Sometimes you just gotta laugh

The Long War: Without lies, could ruling elites justify their wars?

The Real News interviews David Swanson on his new book War Is A Lie, a much-needed counterweight to the mass of disinformation that distorts our understanding of American politics and history. For the United States, war is an economic enterprise, enormously profitable for those engaged in it, crushingly expensive for the rest of us. We didn't listen when Eisenhower warned us about the danger we faced from military-industrial power. It will be interesting to see if, after 40 years of increasing control over American life, corporate power can be arrested now.
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A coalition of antiwar groups has proposed a major action for April 9, 2011.

Media: The Maddow/Stewart Interview Uncut

Rachel Maddow and John Stewart had a conversation Thursday night that was comparable to the sort of intelligent, respectful, uncontentious dialogue that was the staple of Bill Moyers's Journal (it wouldn't be a bad thing if the too-often-smug Maddow morphed into a philosopher-journalist along the lines of the greatly missed Moyers). For his part though, Stewart still doesn't get why the Left objected to his characterization at the Can't We All Just Get Along Rally of conservative and liberal as opposite sides of the same coin. He's probably right that it may be more effective rhetoric to describe George W. Bush, say, as engaging in criminal acts than it is to call him a criminal. But if Stewart's intention was, as he says, to turn down the heat of partisan debate in the media, he didn't get the job done.

This may be a product of bad analysis. Stewart misreads Fox News, for example, when he argues that the network isn’t a partisan organization. In fact, Fox is the marketing division of the Republican Party, speaking in the same voice as the Party of No in its opposition to anything proposed by the White House or the Democratic leadership in Congress no matter how closely those proposals hew to free market or other traditionally conservative ideological positions. There are interesting conservative arguments to be made in favor of communitarian approaches to issues like taxes, the environment, foreign policy, military spending, and so on, but you won't hear them articulated on Fox. A news network with a conservative ideological bent would find much to like in Barack Obama's pro-corporate approach to governing, for example, but not Fox (in 2008, you couldn't go to a Democratic rally without tripping over conservatives for Obama); Fox isn't interested in ideology, just politics, specifically in advancing the fortunes of the Republican Party.

In any event, the thoughtful and, more unusually, civil exchange between Maddow and Stewart was a pleasure to watch. Stewart may even be correct that Maddow's use of comedy to illustrate points on her show may be counter-productive. If last night's conversation is any example, her pleasant personality may be enough to get the audience to sit still for explications of complex or controversial ideas. She doesn't need schtick.

No Comment Department: Safe Streets

From the BicycleLaw.com blog:

In the Netherlands, the law imposes a rebuttable presumption of liability on drivers -- if a motorist is involved in a crash with a cyclist, the law presumes that the motorist is liable for the crash, unless the motorist can rebut that presumption with evidence to the contrary. The reason for this shift is that the Dutch recognized that the cyclist will virtually always be the injured party in a collision with an automobile, and by putting the onus of fault on the driver, have provided motorists with a powerful legal incentive to pay more attention to the presence of cyclists.

It needed to be said: The Rally to Restore Sanity was about nothing

As the absurd Keith Olbermann contretemps underscored, the idea of Left-Right equivalency is a fantasy, a right wing myth deliberately fabricated by the same conservative disinformation machine that has driven our politics increasingly fringeward. As Jon Stewart surely knows, there is no Liberal media conspiracy, no death panels, no $200M-a-day trips to the Taj Mahal, no Socialist in the White House, blah blah & blah. For Stewart to position himself equidistant between the Left and Right is to do a disservice to the very political sanity he was nominally attempting to revive. As Bill Maher put it on his show the other night:

The message of the rally, as I heard it, was that if the media stopped giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side forgetting that Obama tried that and found out...there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said the national conversation was dominated by people on the Right who believe Obama's a Socialist and people on the Left who believe 9/11's an inside job, but I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11's an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's a Socialist? All of them.

Here's the full clip:

The rest of the story: The Left vs. Jon Stewart? by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones 2010-11-08).

Activism: The United States is at the crossroads.

We will come out of the next two years a very different country, one way or the other. If we continue on as we have since the early 1970s, the forces of reaction will complete the incrementally paced revolution that has enabled the corporate elite and the super-rich to appropriate an ever greater share of public wealth and power. Or they will be stopped, and the nation will get back on the path to expanded freedom, justice, and equality that leads from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights through Emancipation and universal suffrage to Social Security and Medicare.

The corporations relied on fear and ignorance to win the latest round. The next round could be the last.

Although some members of Congress are wholeheartedly committed to the struggle for political and economic reform, most elected officials in both parties are too compromised or too timid to be counted on as allies in this struggle.

Alternative organizations are needed to develop new leaders, to formulate new solutions, and to fight fear and ignorance. Many progressive institutions already exist, of course, from foundations, research centers, academic journals, magazines, newspapers and websites, to activist groups organized around action against war or poverty or in favor of affordable universal health care or equal rights -- People for the American Way, the makers of this video, is one, and there are many others on the links section to the left of this page -- but all their efforts together have not added up to nearly enough. We may need to develop new organizations. We may need to merge existing outfits into bigger entities. We may need umbrella groups to help existing institutions better work together. We may need to form a progressive political party. But, for sure, more people must participate if the resistance to corporate power is to succeed. This means you -- joining, funding and actively spreading the word about the fight for progressive values.

Economic Policy: Foreclosuregate in 30 seconds

At Mother Jones, Andy Kroll neatly summarizes the complex mess otherwise known as "Foreclosuregate:"

You've got "robo signers," the mortgage servicing employees who scrawled their signatures on hundreds of thousands of crucial legal filings without knowing what they said (violating federal rules), and "foreclosure mills," the full-steam-ahead law firms that cut corners and allegedly broke the law in foreclosing on homeowners quick and dirty (and are now facing multiple investigations). There's trusts and mortgage-backed securities and securitization itself. The list goes on and on.

Or, he says, you can cut to the heart of the problem as Damon Silvers, policy director at the AFL-CIO and member of the bailout watchdog Congressional Oversight Panel, did in recent  testimony:

The Right's disinformation machine: "It must be true. I read it on the Internets"

If the truth will set you free, what will lies do for you?

2010: A mind-clearing exercise for an election day morning

Ralph Nader discusses what's at stake in the midterm elections in an interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

Democracy Now! election results live tonight at 8pm (eastern): http://ow.ly/337rp
Twitter: follow #FSvote.

2010: Friends don't let friends vote Republican

Vote. By all means, vote. Just don't vote for Republicans.