Post Cold War

Thought for the day:

The victor of "The Cold War" between totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism has proved to be totalitarian capitalism.

During the cold war, each system fought within itself as well as against each other: totalitarianism versus communist ideals, democratic ideals versus capitalism. Each system defined itself to a great extent by the other. They attempted to reconcile the opposite pulls within their own systems: totalitarians justifying themselves as essential to communism, capitalists as essential to democracy. But still, because of the presence of the other system, the ideals, communism and democracy, had meaning.

After the collapse of both systems, the worst elements of both systems were free to discard those ideals, and totalitarian capitalism has become the dominant world system.

Broadly speaking, only in South America does there remain hope for something better: a democratic socialism.

anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Arbeit macht nicht frei

“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves. They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country and my vision is to get America working again.”

That's what Mitt Romney said in a speech on April 4 to the Newspaper Association of America.

Here's what Hilary Rosen said on CNN on April 11:

"What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, 'Well, you know my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues and when I listen to my wife that's what I'm hearing.' Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and why do we worry about their future."

The rest is history, with most people revealing that they have thrown away their humanity in picking what political team they root for.

Mitt Romney and Hilary Rosen are saying the same thing. They deny the other's right to say it, because they are both expressing false concern. And both are wielding their comments as a weapon against the other.

What this whole stand-off illustrates is the false divide in U.S. politics.

Hilary Rosen is a right-wing corporate flack, famous for leading the Recording Industry Association of America's campaign against people sharing the music they've bought with friends. She still advises Obama on the issue. After quitting that job, for a short time she was interim director of Human Rights Campaign, which awarded their 2011 Workplace Equality Innovation Award to Goldman Sachs. While working at the Huffington Post, she was outed as a consultant for BP.

Ann Romney is married to one of the predatory capitalists that Rosen serves. They may not have anything in common in personal style and beliefs, but they both serve the same master.

At least Ann Romney only raised a few children and supported her husband on behalf of that system, whereas Hilary Rosen has actively contributed to its evil. Her dismissal of Ann Romney appears to be because the latter has only listened to women on the campaign trail, without a history of actively working to maintain their economic misery.

Many "liberal" commenters on this issue have expressed a hatred for women who choose to stay at home as a betrayal of feminism, as if feminism is only about a few women getting to the top of the exploitative pyramid and everyone else being forced to toil in "service" jobs as somehow liberating.

Rosen's strong support of Obama and the Democratic Party is clear evidence that the only difference between the parties is that one is slightly more tolerant of gays.

That's certainly a good to be counted, but it does nothing for the 99% of the people, women and men, gay and otherwise, who are not striving to triumph in a cut-throat system. It's good that Goldman Sachs extends benefits to gay partners, but that hardly makes it a benign force in the world. Human rights are rather a broader issue.

What is work for? Actively raising a family should not be the privilege only of the rich. Is either Mitt or Hilary suggesting an economic system that makes raising a family easier for everyone (as in many European countries)? They are both against women, against men, against families, against humanity.

Arbeit macht nicht frei. Work does not make you free.

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Go Egypt!

(Omar Sharif as Ernesto Guevara in Che! (1969))

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Trim costs of wind power: Don't build 'em

Kate Galbraith writes in today's "Green, Inc." column for the New York Times that offshore wind is moving along: first example, Denmark's starting the operation of Horns Rev 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, in September. That project represents the first addition of wind capacity in Denmark since 2003. In November, it had already ceased operation due to problems with the transmission connections -- which Galbraith forgot to mention.

Horns Rev I, a.k.a Nysted, had expensive problems, too. Every single nacelle (with blade assembly) had to be brought back ashore to replace all of the transformers and generators. Less than 3 years later, it was shut down again because of transformer problems.

Clearly, offshore wind is even more of a boondoggle than onshore wind.

It is also clear that the imperative to build it up is stronger still -- witness the growing number of ads (and even video games) featuring wind turbines featuring wind turbines. This goes hand in hand with corporate support for a cap-and-trade "solution" to carbon emissions: Wind is the absolver. As long as those blades are spinning, someone gets to continue emitting carbon. Build enough of them, and nobody has to change anything about their energy use. With wind on board, coal and oil are clean and green! Even though the reality is that wind is just more of the same making things worse -- for people, for nature, for the economy.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The enemy of the good

There is an excellent essay at Counterpunch today by Alan Nasser: "Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer".

Similar to what he notes about Obama, it seems to be a motto for the sometimes slightly progressive neoliberal politicians in Vermont that "We can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good [so let's not even consider it, or for that matter whether what I'm going along with actually is any good]." It's one big antidemocratic thumbing of their collective nose and most people just nod at this signature wisdom.

And so by dismissing actual good as too "perfect", as irresponsible madness, all that is usually left is quite a bit less than good.

And so we have health insurance reform from our Congress and President: the same lousy system, only more punitive.

human rights, Vermont, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Against the day

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

tags: anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, Finnegans Wake

Thoughts on Americanism and Freedom

When I was growing up in Florida some decades ago, the state required an “Americanism versus Communism” course in 11th grade. “Communism” meant not any economic system, but rather the totalitarian Soviet Union, and “Americanism” presumably its opposite — not only in the means of working towards achieving the universal aspirations of human society, but also in what those aspirations might be. Mostly, of course, the intention was to define Communism as all bad and Americanism as all good. (Our teacher subverted the state’s intention by teaching us a lot of Russian history and about world power politics. She used the official course guide as a spur to commentary and analysis. Today, illustrating how much freedom has been lost with the ascendancy of capitalism, it is unlikely that she could have gotten away with that.)

Americanism is the premise that market capitalism is the best means of securing individual freedom. At its most crude level, it is the belief that everyone striving to maximize his or her own acquisition of wealth ensures the most equitable distribution of wealth. (And too bad if you have other interests than such striving and acquisition — that’s your choice — or if you lack the advantages of the already wealthy — that’s just a greater spur.) The belief has followed that capitalism is synonymous with freedom; and consequently, that any social structure that limits the liberty of capital is an enemy of freedom itself.

Yet by definition, capitalism is a system of hoarding, such that the success of one requires the diminished wealth of many. The imperatives of Americanism require an imperial program of conquest and exploitation both to prevent socialist sharing and to expand wealth.

As more of the world is forced to live by the terms of Americanism, however, it must keep more of its own wealth. American capital must turn on its own citizens to maintain the level of hoarding it expects. Capitalism becomes the enemy of freedom, and Americanism reveals itself as fascism — no longer pretending to benefit the many and redoubling the myth that a weakening of the power of capital is a threat to the liberty of all.

The lie of American democracy also is revealed. Dissent that challenges the myth of Americanism is viewed as not just subversive, but even treasonous: a rebellious act of war. As for an alternate vision of individual freedom, secured by a social system that equitably shares the common wealth, that does not allow one individual or group to hoard while others suffer a lack of food, shelter, leisure, medical care, education, and economic security — such a vision can not be allowed publicity. Its proponents must be vilified as terrorists, whose aim is no less than to bring down the American way of life (which is true, as far as Americanism is a barrier to freedom and not its guarantor).

Politics in the U.S.A. forbids a challenge to Americanism. Only a tinkering with the capitalist myth is allowed, an occasional crumb when the people clamor for bread. One party continues to work to expand Americanism throughout the world, and the other party works to reinforce the equation of unfettered capital and individual freedom. Liberalism is the tool of the former, religion the latter’s weapon. Both muster the energies of self-righteousness and fear which characterize their cynical politics. Hand in hand, they protect capital and strengthen its power against the needs of the people. War — at home as well as abroad — is the price the people must pay for the freedom of capital. The approved parties must either minimize or deny, or deny as currently impractical, the fact that every expansion of popular freedom has been by the limitation of capitalist power.

human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Folly dressed up as science

The Burlington Free Press describes the final presentations of "The Energy Project Vermont," a celebration of wind power by the ECHO museum and Burlington City Arts:

Bringing in the science behind wind power, Thomas Tailer, co-director of UVM's Engineering Institute, ... has worked in alternative energy and education since 1979. Tailer's passion for seeing engineering and environment at work together was clear throughout his presentation. ... Tailer said just as the iconic Quixote jousted windmills to fight the Industrial Revolution, people today are in denial of our changing climate and are fighting alternative energy sources. ... "The image of an angel is an icon, and to me the windmill is that kind of icon, an icon of a sustainable future for this planet."

First, Miquel Cervantes published the first volume of his history of Don Quixote 1605 (the same year William Shakespeare produced King Lear), long before the industrial revolution. Tailer may be thinking of William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" (preface to Milton, 1804).

Second, if Don Quixote were nonetheless a proto-Luddite, then he has (like the English Luddites of Blake's time) been vindicated by the environmental and social devastation wrought by centralized industry, and his battle was not madness but prescience. To equate that with denial of the devastation thus foreseen therefore doesn't fly. It is Tailer who denies the devastation wrought by industrial windmills, and Don Quixote who is right to tilt against them.

Third, Tailer evokes angels only to denigrate them as mere icons. But so it must be with windmills. Their agency doesn't really exist. They serve only as symbols.

So let's get real. If large-scale wind actually worked, it wouldn't need all these twisted rationalizations to justify it. Tailer not only mocks Don Quixote and angels, he also makes a mockery of science.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

"Enfeebled conscience"

Aware of the Other Vibe's growing reluctance to trust reports from out in the field, Foley, who usually was out there and thought he had a good grasp on things, at first resentful and after a while alarmed, had come to see little point these days in speaking up. The headquarters in Pearl Street seemed more and more like a moated castle and Scarsdale a ruler isolated in self-resonant fantasy, a light to his eyes these days that was not the same as that old, straightforward acquisitive gleam. The gleam was gone, as if Scarsdale had accumulated all the money he cared to and was now moving on in his biography to other matters, to action in the great world he thought he understood but -- even Foley could see -- was failing, maybe fatally, even to ask the right questions about anymore. Who could Foley go to with this?

Who indeed? He had at least brought himself to reckon up what the worst outcome might be, and it came out the same every time. It was nothing to recoil from, though it did take some getting used to -- maybe not massacre on the reckless, blood-happy scale of Bulgarians or Chinese, more, say, in the moderate American tradition of Massachusetts Bay or Utah, of righteous men who believed it was God they heard whispering in the most bitter patches of the night, and God help anybody who suggested otherwise. His own voices, which had never pretended to be other than whose they were, reminded Foley of his mission, to restrain the alternate Foley, doing business as Scarsdale Vibe, from escaping into the freedom of bloodletting unrestrained, the dark promise revealed to Americans during the Civil War, obeying since then its own terrible inertia, as the Republican victors kept after Plains Indians, strikers, Red immigrants, any who were not likely docile material for the mills of the newly empowered order.

"It is a fine edge here," the tycoon had hinted one day, "between killing just the one old Anarchist and taking out the whole cussèd family. I'm still not sure which I ought to do." ...

But a voice, unlike the others that spoke to Foley, had begun to speak and, once begun, persisted. "Some might call this corrupting youth. It wasn't enough to pay to have an enemy murdered, but he must corrupt the victim's children as well. You suffered through the Wilderness and at last, at Cold Harbor, lay between the lines three days, between the worlds, and this is what you were saved for? this mean, nervous, scheming servitude to an enfeebled conscience?"

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Social aspects of wind energy development

“When people are talking about changing the way we harness and use energy, industrial wind instead entrenches a centralized and inefficient system. When people are talking about reducing the burning of fossil fuels, industrial wind entrenches the grid’s dependence on them. When people are talking about moderating the corporate control of society, industrial wind entrenches the worst of predatory and crony capitalism that works to move more public money into private hands, transfering the common wealth of the many into the pockets of a few without regard for human, societal, or environmental cost. Big wind operates much like — and is often firmly embedded in — the military-industrial-banking complex subverting democracy and fairness by making politics a stepping stone to private riches, with the frisson of riding a wave of green-technology utopianism. Only those who have sworn allegiance to their program are citizens of their country. The rest of us are only resources to exploit and barriers to overcome.”

—from Wind Energy Primer

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, , anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The Green Masquerade

[excerpts -- click on title for complete interview at Counterpunch]

Alan Maass: Among a number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power.

Jeffrey St. Clair: That comes out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Gore's political biography will know that he's his father's son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector as a congressman and as a senator.

If you go back to Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes of that book is a cooling tower. That's Gore's solution to the global warming crisis -- a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president, that was their message, too.

Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power industry's fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it didn't. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research funding and renewing all the protections.

So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes. And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into believing that we're going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, then you're going to be confronted with the argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way to do that.

Alan Maass: Can you talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this corporate greenwashing?

Jeffrey St. Clair: The environmental movement made its deal with the devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal lobby shops. The idea was that if we can't defeat capitalism, if we can't change capitalism, then let's just give in and see if we can use some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage done to the environment.

These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but really reached an apogee in Clinton Times.

I don't even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s, and '80s -- Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But they don't have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset.

You can't distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world's great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is in a joint venture with Ikea -- so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to me to be very passé.

Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations -- they control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, W. Alton Jones -- their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.

I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your agenda.

Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then the money dries up.

What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics, because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around global warming.

environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism

the spineless ledger

It might have been comforting to think of himself as one of Yashmeen's holy wanderers, but he knew the closest he'd ever got to a religion was Vectors, and that too was already receding down a widening interval of space-time, and he didn't know how to get back to it any more than Colorado. Vectorism, in which Kit once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a coexisting world of imaginaries, the "spirit realm" that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it. Kit had sold himself a bill of goods, come to believe that Göttingen would be another step onward in some journey into a purer condition, conveniently forgetting that it was still all on the Vibe ticket, paid for out of the very account whose ledger he most wished to close and void, the spineless ledger of a life once unmarked but over such a short time broken, so broken up into debits and credits and too many details left unwritten. And Göttingen, open to trespass by all manner of enemies, was no longer a refuge, nor would Vectors ever have been Kit's salvation.

Someplace out ahead in the fog of futurity, between here and Venice, was Scarsdale Vibe. The convergence Kit had avoided even defining still waited its hour. The man had been allowed to go on with his dishonorable work too long without a payback. All Kit had anymore. All there was to hold on to. All he had.

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Have a fascist new year.

In a year-end wrap-up of U.S. politics last week, which I caught on NPR by chance, the guest noted how both Democrats and Republicans have lost favor. The host, oblivious to reality, or perhaps determinedly fending it off, asked if this provided an opportunity for a third party, "something more centrist".

In that question, he persisted in the story line that the Democrats are the party of the left and the Republicans the party of the right, which has in fact never been true. The Democrats and Republicans as a whole have always marched hand in hand as two faces of one imperial capitalist party, sometimes playing the game as understood by the NPR host to keep their control. Thus, for example, during campaigns, if not while governing, Democrats once reached out to unions, Republicans to the upwardly mobile. It shifts with time and demographics, but the parties deftly divide the market between them.

There is no "center" between them. They represent two styles of imperial capitalism. Occasional individuals may break ranks on single issues, but they dare not truly break away and challenge the narrow range of action allowed by this system, let alone the assumptions of hegemonic exploitation as necessary to their comfort.

What the NPR host lacked is perspective, perhaps honesty. The center is not between the two imperial capitalist parties, but between the people and that government. The center is not some magic place of smorgasbord compromise, but a place of mediation. It is real government in communication with the people, not as targets of marketing to keep them buying a bill of goods, but as citizens.

It is the difference between democracy and fascism.

human rights, animal rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Military Hero Worship

Thomas H. Naylor writes at Counterpunch:

Nations which amass military might always find a way to use it. The risk of war increases in direct proportion to the military power of the state. Wars also cover up a plethora of political and economic problems by deflecting public attention away from the real issues.

Many, but not all, of our troops are naïve, well intended, ill-informed, patriots, who have been manipulated into risking their lives for false gods by our prowar media and political system. But heroes they are not.

In stark contrast to the troops, Obama, Biden, Panetta, Clinton, Petraeus, Stevens, Leahy, and Sanders know better. They are all people of the lie. They know exactly what business they are in. It’s call technofascism.

Vermont, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

America's White Underclass

Joe Bageant ends this article at Counterpunch (click the title of this post):

We’re finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We’ve got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won’t be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, “Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant.” Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:

Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There’s no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who’s drinking himself to death because, “I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I’m all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I’ll never have another one and I’ve got four more years to go before Social Security.” He doesn’t need scientific proof. He doesn’t need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.

And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people’s scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you’re fucked, you know it. You don’t need scientific verification.

I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn’t. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.

May God forgive me.

human rights, anarchosyndicalism

George Monbiot trashes animal rights movement

A few weeks ago, George Monbiot, the bold defender of all that is middle-class left, wrote a very good article about the monstrously vague Protection from Harassment Act in the U.K., which can be invoked to outlaw pretty much any protest as "alarming" or "distressing". He writes how the security forces, as well as industry and developers, use it for just that purpose. As he notes,

With the exception of animal rights protests, these campaigns in the UK have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

And so The Guardian continues its own campaign against the animals rights movement, tarring an overwhelmingly peaceful group with the "distressing" tactics of a very few. Monbiot and the rest have cheered on the very harassment of animal rights protesters that he now decries against causes he agrees with. Whoops!

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism

Illusions of progress and victory

As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade . . . the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable.

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Unselling single-payer

Helen Redmond writes at Counterpunch:

... There’s been virtually no stories about labor’s support for HR 676 [Representative John Conyers' single-payer legislation], despite the fact it’s been endorsed by 554 union organizations in 49 states and by 130 Central Labor Councils. But we heard plenty when Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU sat down with Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-mart to discuss solutions to the nation’s health care crisis. Those two are experts on providing health care to workers? What about the nurses and doctors who support single-payer and got dragged out of, and arrested in Max Baucus’s senate hearings in Washington, DC? If doctors and nurses had been arrested for any other political issue it would have been the lead story in every newspaper and online edition. Doctors and nurses never deliberately get arrested -- that’s news!

The sea change in the public’s attitude toward government financed health care, however, has gotten press. A New York Times poll in June found that 72 percent supported a government-administered insurance plan – like Medicare for everyone under the age of 65. That poll also reported 64 percent believed the federal government should guarantee coverage to the entire population, i.e. health care should be a human right. Another interesting number: 85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt. This is in stark contrast to President Obama’s position of tepid, incremental reform. Obama asserts if he was starting from scratch he might favor SP, but we aren’t so he can’t. He wants to build on the existing system and not “disrupt” the employment-based provision of health care. As if employment-based health coverage isn’t being massively “disrupted” by the economic depression that has laid off millions of workers and forced them down into the ranks of the 50 million uninsured.

But what is truly disgusting is how the “progressive” left has caved so quickly and cravenly, given up the fight for single-payer and support for HR 676. They have become the indignant foot soldiers, apologists and spinmeisters for Obama’s piece of shit legislation. They are betraying what they absolutely know to be true: the private insurance industry must be evicted in order to provide health care to everyone and end the fiscal crisis the multiple-payer system creates.

Even the insurance companies know that, according to revelations by Cigna whistleblower Wendell Potter. He reports the implementation of a single-payer health care system is what keeps the billionaire CEO’s of insurance companies and Karen Ignagni, the high priestess of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), awake at night cowering in fear and forced to spend 1.4 million dollars a day to make sure it doesn’t happen. They don’t fear a public option despite their protestations; they accept that due to the depth of the crisis, a few token compromises are in order to stay in business. It’s chump change and in exchange for perhaps losing a little market share, they’re going to get a mandate that legally obligates every person to buy their priced-to-make-profits “insurance products” or be financially penalized. If the Obama bill subsidizes the uninsured going into private plans, that’s millions of new customers to extract profits from and a transfer of taxpayer dollars into insurance industry coffers. The Massachusetts mandate madness gone nationwide. ...

human rights, anarchosyndicalism

Land of the free market

But sometimes Veikko went on and got philosophical. He'd never seen much difference between the Tsar's regime and American capitalism. To struggle against one, he figured, was to struggle against the other. Sort of this world-wide outlook. "Was a little worse for us, maybe, coming to U.S.A. after hearing so much about 'land of the free.'" Thinking he'd escaped something, only to find life out here just as mean and cold, same wealth without conscience, same poor people in misery, army and police free as wolves to commit cruelties on behalf of the bosses, bosses ready to do anything to protect what they had stolen.

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The sham of "green jobs"

What's a "green job"? It's not the job that's green, since it's regular old manufacturing and construction that are as "ungreen" as ever -- but building something that is believed will ultimately help reduce human impact on the earth (without our having to give anything up).

If such jobs involve installing electricity-generating plants in, say, delicate ecosystems where even much lighter development is not allowed, they can not be called "green". Environmentalists and conservationists recognize that such construction programs do not justify destroying wildlife habitat or wrecking the landscape. That in fact, destroying the landscape in the name of saving it just doesn't wash.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, thinks it has found a powerful cudgel to use against protective regulation: "green jobs"! Like tiresome children, any expression of concern -- for wetlands and birds, bats, habitat degradation and fragmentation, noise, enjoyment of one's property, etc. -- is shouted down with NIMBY! They've even dedicated a web site to chronicle the shameful parade of citizens fighting to protect the land and their health against heedless energy development.

The insult, however, is that so many environmental groups join with the Chamber in their denunciations in service of industry instead of doing the job of defending nature.

And the insult is compounded by politicians who ignore their constituents' concerns -- particularly those whose lives are directly affected by such construction programs -- and hide behind the "green" mantle that industry has so courteously stitched together for them.

Green jobs (everything I support) good! NIMBY (everything you support) bad!

Age of Stupid, indeed.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism