War, He Said That?

Sure, Oliver Stone is a bit of a madman, and I don't know the first thing about former president of Argentina Nestor Kirchner, but this exchange--part of an interview for an upcoming Stone documentary is, well...

Kirchner: I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.

Stone: War, he said that?

Kirchner: He said that. Those were his exact words.

Stone: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?

Kirchner: Well, he was talking about the United States: “The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.” He said it very clearly.

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Forced Adherence to Orthodoxy

Read the whole column:

Forced adherence to orthodoxy is the most potent weapon in status quo preservation.

That's how our political debates remain suffocatingly narrow, the permanent power factions in Washington remain firmly in control, the central political orthodoxies remain largely unchallenged. Neither party nor its loyalists are really willing to undermine the prevailing political system because that's the source of their power. And neither parties' loyalists are really willing to oppose serious expansions or abuses of government power when their side is in control, and no serious challenge is therefore ever mounted; the only ones who are willing to do so are the Crazies.

Thus, for the two parties to ensure that they, and only they, are recognized as Sane, Mainstream voices is to ensure, above all else, the perpetuation of status quo power.

After all, how much Change can you expect when the new president's pick to lead the Department of the Interior was Ken Salazar. Hey, he's a Democrat, it's all good...right?

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Tony Motherfucking Judt

I've banged the drum here for my day-to-day politics bloggers, Glenn Greenwald and Digby.

Now I want to introduce you to Tony Judt, one of my big picture guys, who happens to be my favorite writer right now.

He has written a massively well-regarded work about post-WWII Europe, titled, appropriately, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. It's quite the page-turner--no easy task for an 896 page history spanning 60 years and an entire continent.

He contributes to the New York Review of Books (only some pieces are available online for free--when I can rub two nickels together I plan to subscribe).

His latest work, Ill Fares The Land, just came out. I plan to read it, but I have read this excerpt from its first chapter, as well as this related essay.

I highly, highly recommend reading both.

And he is quadriplegic due to advanced Lou Gehrig's Disease. Take that, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis!
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It Shouldn't Be This Hard, Should It?

A simple, straightforward thought from a former U.S. Senator:

A mature society, one that understood both history and human nature, would reach a thoughtful balance that permits private corporate interests to drive economic growth, and make a reasonable profit, under conditions where the public interest, the common good, and the interests of future generations and nature were represented by well-trained, alert, dedicated, disinterested (that is to say, not regulators drawn from the industries they are sworn to regulate), and knowledgeable government officials made fail safe systems work.

That has at times been the accepted understanding of the relationship between our economy and our form of government, but now is not one of those times. And those that understand this are most assuredly on the sidelines.

Sure, I hear you bleating "well, what does 'reasonable profit' mean? Is the government going to tax corporations into submission to achieve your socialist utopia?"

Apologies to Senator Hart, but I think a clearer way to say it would be "profits earned under conditions where the public interest, the common good, and the interests of future generations, etc. would be reasonable." That is, reasonable precisely because they do not come at the expense of all those good things enumerated in the above-quoted paragraph.

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Need A Comedy Recommendation?

Look no further than comedy duo Mitchell and Webb. Or as the British like to call it, a comedy double act. That's David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

BBC America is currently airing That Mitchell And Webb Look, the duo's current show. Also aired by BBC America is Peep Show, in which Mitchell and Webb play characters in a sitcom that shares much in comedic sensibility with TMaWL while being a regular-ish sitcom.

TMaWL, on the other hand, is a skit show in which Mitchell and Webb play almost every character. The show has recurring characters, and recurring sketches, as well as little in-between skits in which Mitchell and Webb play (versions of) themselves. If you like Little Britain, I'd wager you'll like this better, as I do. Little Britain even managed to get a U.S. version on HBO, with characters and skits carried over from the BBC show as well as new American ones. I wonder if such big things lay ahead for Mitchell and Webb? I dare say David Mitchell could play Obama's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court sans wig and with a minimum of costume or makeup.

Anyway, here's a sample of the duo in action:

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Weaksauce

So AG Eric Holder announces that the White House will seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects with first informing them of their Miranda rights.

I'll let Matt Taibbi speak for me here:

For the Democrats, it will surely end up being one of the darker moments of the Obama presidency — not because it’s necessarily so terribly meaningful (at least compared to ending Too-Big-to-Fail), but because it represents a new low on the utter-lack-of-balls front. The only reason we’re even talking about this Miranda issue is because a bunch of morons on talk radio made a big fuss about it, and if our president is going to go sticking his thumbs into the constitution every time he can’t take a few days of getting reamed by a bunch of overpaid media shills whose job it is to hate him no matter what he does, then we’re all in a lot of trouble.

Although I have my concerns about the constitutional implications of knee-jerk rights-stripping in the name of terror-war, I'm really concerned moving forward about the total pussification of the Obama White House. The reading of the Miranda rights wasn't an issue until right-wing media started popping off about this. It's one thing for Republican lawmakers to make noise on this and have the White House react, but this is re-goddamn-diculous.

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Ahhh....

That's much better.



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Closer

Closer to 40 than 30.

Closer to madness than sanity.

Closer to 300 lbs. than 200 lbs.

Closer to anxiety than calm.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yay!

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A Corporate Death Penalty?

[The above photo is of the crude oil flowing straight into the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP's inability to shut if off. It's from a terrific set of photos that The Boston Globe has here. And when I say "terrific," I mean the  Merriam-Webster definition number 1: very bad: frightening.]

Corporate Death Penalty

That phrase just popped into my head as I thought about the BP oil spill.

If we assume that this spill is or will be the worst ever, and we assume that BP chose not to employ existing technology to outfit this oil platform with a remote or automatic shut-off--such technology exists and is in use in Norway, what should be the consequences for BP? (For the sake of this thought experiment, I'll ignore that federal regulation or oversight seems to have allowed a platform like this to exist without such a mechanism, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of dead, oil-choked fish.)

I mean, we know what the consequences will be: BP will spend a significant but not crippling amount of money paying for the cleanup, and their liability for damage caused to property, etc. is limited by statute (though I reserve the right to follow up on that statutory limitation, as the NYT article seems to have been written in haste). So they'll pay up and move on, and like Exxon with its Valdez spill before them, they will no doubt return to making the kick-ass mega-profits that come with being in the oil biz. Profits to the tune of $163 billion last decade, and $5.6 in the first quarter of 2010 already.

So yeah, the consequences will be business as usual. But I ask you to take a moment and think about what the consequences could be or should be.

Can anybody really disagree with the notion that "you fucked up so badly we will not allow you to engage in that activity ever again and, by terminating your shit, we hope this will serve as a warning to the rest of you knuckleheads that if you similarly fuck up we will terminate you, too"?

To me, the flip side of that is "you can screw up to an unimaginable degree (and we'll all agree it was 'unforeseeable') but if you can pay for some of the shit that goes wrong, you can keep on truckin'."

I can recall off the top of my head a commercial death penalty of sorts, but of course it happened to an individual: a client of the first law firm I worked for was banned by the Federal Trade Commission from telemarketing. Ostensibly because he was a reprehensible scumbag who didn't give a shit about who he hurt when he broke the law. Of course if he had been raking in billions, I'm sure the outcome would have been very different.

Let's face it, corporations get away with shit that a person never could. But it's not just because of the money--rich people get away with shit all the time. My point is that they are conceptually immune from the type of punishment we bestow on individuals, namely, imprisonment and death.

And on that cheery note, the good news is that BP has commandeered 1/3 of the world supply of chemicals used to disperse spilled oil and is unleashing that shit into the Gulf, too. If the thunder don't getcha then the lightning will.
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On Empire: George Orwell's "Shooting An Elephant"

Years ago, age 14 or so, I read this essay at my grandfather's behest.

It is evergreen, and perhaps more topical than it was in 1988 when I read it.

Another Orwell essay I read back then and revisited recently can serve as a bit of a mental tune-up if you're doing any writing of any sort--be it technical, creative, for pay or for pleasure. You can find it, and all his collected essays, here.

Fascinating chap. I wish he'd been born a little later and lived a while longer so he could opine on the United States overtaking Great Britain in matters of empire.

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