Zen and the art of dismissal

So I hear these two guys talking on the radio. It's a conversation on the Amateur Radio 20 meter band, so half the world could be listening if conditions are right.

"I heard one of these protesters said he was there because 'Capitalism was taking over Wall Street' -- like it hasn't been Capitalist for over two hundred years! What an idiot!"

Well I'm assuming this guy isn't an economist any more than he might be a historian, and I'm assuming he got the information about what the "typical" loony-left and ignorant protesters are from some artisanal propaganda source like Fox News.

Yes, of course, there were protesters baring their breasts and preforming other charming acts having little to do with constructive criticism of laissez-faire Capitalism. While I'm the last person to discourage such acts, I'm also the last person to believe that this kind of New Yorky opportunistic revelry has anything to do with the reasons more qualified critics like Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would lend support by their presence: reasons having to do with Wall Street practices, their relationship to the market crash, the credit crunch and the dire state of the world economy -- subjects the people who script and sculpt the news would rather mock, would rather have you mock, than discuss intelligently.

For someone who suffered through the late 1960's as an adult, the techniques political enterprises use to dismiss well grounded movements hold no novelty. I remember quite well how anyone openly questioning the benefits and reasons for maintaining an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia was told to "get a job" and had his personal hygiene questioned as well. Easier to dismiss someone, albeit clad in Brooks Brothers attire and obviously gainfully employed, as a silly, radical and stupid "hippie" than to answer disturbing questions as why killing peasants, bombing millions and stifling free elections was preventing the 'lights of freedom from going out in America' as was wrongly claimed by the Right. Then, as now, the real struggle was to keep the lights of reason off and it was fought with the same kind of smugly simplistic and fatuous fallacies the powerful always use to crucify the good.

But the dishonest selection of unrepresentative examples and illuminating them as "typical" is ancient and not the property of right wing extremists. It's the sort of thing our foul species does to advance our cults and parties that want to keep us in squalor and ignorance and the occupation of Wall Street isn't about the irrational or Communist inspired hatred of freedom or free markets, as you know, or you wouldn't have read this far. It's about corruption and the lack of rules and oversight that promotes private exploitation of free markets to the detriment of all. The occupation of Wall Street is just another station of the cross where the sidewalks are filled with mockery and abuse.

That unwitting clowns are flopping about in over-sized shoes, honking horns and mocking, is inevitable, given the well-fed smugness of the stupid. Their invisible rulers are very good at making them eager participants in their degradation and suffering; but failure isn't inevitable. It's tempting for old-timers like me to opt out of the circus, but perhaps there's hope, unlikely as it may seem, that enough people can be made to see how they're protecting the practices of the looters, pillagers and vandals on Wall Street and in Washington to do something about it. There's hope, but I'm not yet ready to bet on it.

Attack of the killer tomatoes

I found out about the salmonella scare early this week; sitting in front of the TV while eating a take-out sub sandwich loaded with nice, juicy tomatoes. I guess I've lucked out, since I didn't get sick, but it's hard to forget that "oh shit" feeling you get as the potentially lethal food slides down the throat. I have no statistics to back it up, but the number of food scares seems to be far larger than it once was, and now that one hardly ever knows where the stuff comes from, how it's been processed and handled, or who handled it -- a bit of fear is probably justified. Tainted spinach, peanut butter, ground beef and even medicines like Heparin have made headlines of late. Where's the FDA? Inspections have declined as the number of producers has increased, according to the GAO.

The GAO, commenting yesterday on the FDA's new plan to focus on the riskiest food products says it really can't be evaluated because the agency has revealed nothing about how this plan would be carried out. Perhaps, like Dick Cheney, the FDA will take their case for keeping essential knowledge about what we pay for a secret all the way to the Supreme Court. Perhaps not. All we have been told so far is that it's a "strategic vision."

I hate to belabor the subject of creeping deregulation and crawling chaos. There are far too many examples, and some of them deadly examples, of the results of turning over responsibility for public safety and even national security to for-profit groups and depending on the kindness of corporations. Besides, I'm starting to feel a little queasy.

Meanwhile we still don't know where the killer tomatoes are coming from.

The Jungle

We're counting the days until Bush becomes just another bad memory but that memory may well live on and on in the dismantled rubble of what was supposed to be a government of, by and for the people. The dismantling of most regulation and of the law itself continues as though Bush's 8 year Reich was intended to last for a thousand and his overwhelming lack of support seems only to have strengthened Bush's disregard for the well being and the will of the people.

Concern for tainted food, dangerous toys, contaminated products of all kinds is being hyped in the media constantly and denunciations of the FDA and Consumer Product Safety Commission for their incompetence are rampant. It's being portrayed as a failure of government, but it's a mark of the success of Bush's unitary rule that the already emasculated agencies that serve to keep the dangers Upton Sinclair scared the hell out of America about are being further depopulated, and de-funded.

The latest stunning violation of common sense and governmental responsibility is to demand that congress do nothing to rebuild the CPSC. According to the New York Times today, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the commission has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of new legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff. Ms. Nord, is on record as being critical of banning lead from toys, the argument being that product safety lawsuits eat into profits.

Supporting the American people, of course is anathema to the "Support the Troops" crowd. The sole exceptions to the "government is bad - corporations are good" Republican ethic are War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery and although the Orwellian antinomy thing is wearing thin, it continues to be apt.

Regulating imports, regulating food quality, regulating the marketplace, regulating air and water supplies: these things are still marked for elimination, but regulating the government that was designed to be regulated by the citizens, is not only frowned upon, but nearly treasonous. No price is too high to pay to gain control over the oil, but any price to keep America's Children alive, to keep the lethal bacteria out of our food or dangerous chemicals out of our food, water and air is out of the question. Bechtel needs the money, Halliburton, Blackwater and the Bush family need the money.

I don't see anything in sight that can change it. I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not in 2008 or ever. I see only a long dark road to hell.

Where's the beef?

We know that we're all in imminent, clear and present danger from dangerous Chinese products. Horrified housewives bleat "will we ever feel safe anywhere?" on TV screens and Lou Dobbs gets so tired from the relentless jawboning about COM-unist China that he has to take a vacation before he pops an aneurysm. Danger danger - there's danger everywhere.

Of course there's another anti-American, freedom hating, Godless entity posing bigger dangers - and not only to our children, but to the troops who stand between us and the chaos Bush created in Iraq. Someone has been trying to poison them and to poison us and as if that weren't enough, they want to do it by using our sacred national meal, our national symbol: the Hamburger.

Of course you know I'm talking about the Topp's ground beef recall of what now appears to be of over 20 million pounds of e-Coli tainted beef. It's being pulled off the shelves of US military commissaries as well as from the shelves at the local supermarket. That's enough to sicken and kill countless people and keep so many troops in the latrine that they can't be deployed. That's enough to constitute a terrorist attack as big or bigger than most.

Of course our last line of defense, the Congress of the United States has the situation well in hand. The 2007 Farm bill passed by the House last July is awaiting the Senate stamp of approval and it protects us by relaxing inspection of meat products. Better we die than place an unnecessary burden on Agri-Business and thus reduce the benefits they supply to Senators. The beef industry does not agree that we need more inspectors and inspections and yes, it is their country not yours, you Left-Leaning, Tofu-eating, Liberal Surrender Monkey.

Fairness is unfair

Marie Antoinette never really did say "Well let them eat cake" but Mark Fowler, former head of the FCC evoked the spirit of arrogant royalty when he said "Well, let them have unfettered access to information" in response to the attempt to re-instate the "fairness doctrine" that once required broadcasters to provide air time for rebuttals to editorial content.

The fairness doctrine was eliminated in 1987, under the wise leadership of another George Bush and the excuse was that anything designed to protect the people from distortions and propaganda espoused by the few people who own the media was unwonted interference with corporate free speech. 20 years later, we have even fewer people in control of what we hear and more of them are ultra conservative corporations with an ever deeper involvement in the editorial policies of media outlets.

To Fowler, "unfettered access to information" would suffer if the fairness doctrine were to return and people like Bill O'Reilly had to listen to their lies being analyzed by someone not hand picked by Rupert Murdoch.

An anti-Fairness doctrine bill introduced by Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota was beaten back by Senate Democrats this week despite arguments such as Coleman's assertion that "There is no limitation on the ability of anyone from any political persuasion to get their ideas set forth." Of course that sentiment ignores the 400 pound corporate gorilla that controls much of what people do hear and that is well insulated by its size, wealth and government support, from public accountability.

Of course the internet has done something to provide an alternative source of information, at least so far, as a free internet is an idea rapidly being undermined by telecommunications interests, but as it is now, several million blogs can hardly compete with the platform given to people like Limbaugh, or Coulter or Hannity or O'Reilly. It's not about freedom of speech, it's about freedom to profit from without responsibility to the country that provides that profit.

Dobbs, Hobbes and snobs

Don't try to make too much sense of that - I just can't resist a rhyme.

But speaking of nonsense, ever notice that Lou Dobbs never mentions the world's most populous country without the epithet Communist? I suppose one might, if one were of the right political persuasion, call the island of Taiwan by the name Republic of China, but when we talk about China, we usually think of the big one, the one that owns enough of our debt that we're afraid to do much more than make useless gestures of disapproval, like Lou Dobbs does.

At this point in our history, it really isn't necessary or necessarily accurate to call it Red China or Communist china any more than it's useful to say Socialist Sweden, Capitalist Mexico, Royalist Saudi Arabia, Dictatorial Pakistan or Theocratic Vatican City. It's a gratuitous pejorative when used to describe a still totalitarian country tripping over it's own shoelaces in its haste to get rid of government ownership of the means of production and become capitalist.

Lou seems happy to find an external scapegoat, as indeed many are, now that we don't have the Soviet union to kick around any more. China bashing is a popular sport with left and right and with Dobbs and since the label Communist still has a lot of punch to it and isn't going to be around forever, he's happy to use it while he can. To be sure, there have been enough recent incidents with tainted cat food and plastics that contain enough lead to make us worry about our children, coming from China and now with ethylene glycol being sold as pharmaceutical grade glycerin and poisoning people, we can't ignore the safety of our imports. It's hard to see however that Communism has anything to do with greedy, unscrupulous capitalists and unregulated free markets in China. It seems to me, in fact, that what we are seeing are the results of massive deregulation of a magnitude that would make Ronald Reagan weep with joy. What we are seeing is a need for regulation and inspection in our country whether or not it annoys big corporations like Wal-Mart.

The notion that free markets are self regulating and that unregulated industry will automatically, as if by an invisible hand, steer toward the public good has done a lot of damage in the US and the lack of adequate inspection of imported food and pharmaceutical substances is an example. China is expanding its free market economy so rapidly that the ability to control corruption and greed has not caught up. The US is not experiencing the growth, yet is still under the sway of the Great Deregulator's voodoo; still being led by people who think inspecting food is kind of pinko and inspecting incoming freight will cut into profits.

And while I'm picking on Lou, I have to mention his tirade about the Martin Luther King Memorial using a Chinese sculptor to supply a statue of Dr. King. It's a bit amusing to watch people like Tucker Carlson and Dobbs howling about how it should be made by a "Black" artist so that the world could see what King stood for. No amount of reminding that he seems to have stood for the idea that race shouldn't be a factor in judging a man or employing him, seems to sway the opinions of these wealthy white men about what black people should do. 90% of the hundred million it will take to build the memorial is private money, and it will be built of American stone by American workers. The statue is one small part of the whole. Using interviews of people on the street, CNN launched into a crusade to make it seem as though there was public outrage. What the effort revealed is that the public either doesn't care - and in some instances thought the monument was to be built in China - or lacks the background to have a worthwhile opinion. Seems to me that Tucker and Lou who don't see the irony in their lecturing the "colored folk" about how to memorialize Dr. King, aren't far behind.

As to whether American monuments need to be constructed 100% of American materials, designed by Americans and built by Americans for the benefit of Americans, I have one answer: The Statue of Liberty. And regarding the nativist crappola about building anything in Washington DC, don't forget the Frenchman, Pierre L'Enfant, who designed it.