Jim Grisanzio

When people push to exploit, do not back down. Instead, deflect. Assert.

Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins, Matt Taibbi. This piece is not only about Iowa. It’s about the entire American election, which runs on cash and access and not on ideas or any well defined processes of the Republic. It’s really an excellent article. But for even more documentation that Taibbi is correct, see The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics from Tom Ferguson at the University of Massachusetts. Politicians are skilled rhetoricians and their propaganda resonates pretty well among the general population, but all their messaging and hand-shaking in the world only counts for a paper thin veneer of a meta marketing campaign. It’s the spin. The suggestion that you count. That you matter. Well, you don’t. The only people who count in this process are the people who can afford to simply buy the politicians outright and have them implement policies that rarely support your interests. There are (a few) exceptions, of course, but the rule is clear. If you think otherwise, read Taibbi’s articles and watch Ferguson’s film. The entrenchment is nearly complete.

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President Obama quietly signed the National Defense Authorization Act today, which makes it perfectly legal for his government and future administrations to detain American citizens indefinitely without due process. He said he had “misgivings” about several provisions in the bill and that he would work hard to ensure that the rights of Americans would be protected as his regime goes after suspected terrorists. I find that characterization disturbing given that it was the Obama administration that wanted indefinite detention for American citizens in the bill in the first place (here, here, here). Yet, this is the Obama spin. And the media is helping promote his position, so the message will resonate clearly among most Americans who are sleeping or who are simply suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome.

So, the battlefield for the never-ending war now includes the United States of America. One wonders who is fighting who at this point, though. Regardless, I suppose this latest move was inevitable, along with the multi decade destruction of American civil liberties from previous Democratic and Republican administrations. Actually, now that indefinite detention without due process is the law of the land, along with the current president who asserts the right to kill American citizens without due process (which Obama has done at least 3 times via drone attacks), I’m not sure what remains of the term “civil rights” in the United States anyway.

It’s clear the foundational documents of the country and the very liberties on which the nation stands are all very much at risk. If Americans can’t see the trend at this point then there is no hope. And aside from Ron Paul and a few others there was pretty much zero outrage about the crafting of the bill in the first place, and the mainstream media is (as usual) taking a pass as well. It really is a profoundly depressing start to 2012 in America — a country whose political class seems determined to recreate the dark circumstances of 1920s/30s Japan and Germany (see Noam Chomsky, Karel Van Wolferen, and Herbert Bix for more on that last point). Is this the HOPE and CHANGE Americans voted for in 2008?

We ask our soldiers to fight on our behalf. They risk their lives. They get hurt. They die. And when the survivors return home? Well, for far too many of them there is no home. Puts patriotism in perspective.

Think you have a tough job? Stressed out? Ready to quit? Well, if you are able to view these four videos from Al Jazeera English — Working Man’s Death — than you are rich and have it easy. Get some perspective.

“Another lie that the American people believe is that presidential elections bring about regime change. This is sheer nonsense. The Obama state is the Bush state. The Bush state was the Clinton state. The Clinton state was the Bush state. The Bush state was the Reagan state. We can trace back and back in time and see the overlapping appointments, bureaucrats, technicians, diplomats, Fed officials, financial elites, and so forth. Rotation in office occurs not because of elections but because of mortality.” Lew Rockwell, The Fascist American State. Rockwell is certainly correct about the changes that simply do not occur between presidents. The other parts of his talk about the American slide into Fascism resonate clearly as well. It’s a disturbing speech but one I find painfully difficult to argue with. But at least it’s a good thing people are paying attention, right? Right.

Don’t forget to watch Top Secret America on Frontline on September 6. Should be quite a documentary for Americans. The Top Secret America section in the Washington Post is pretty depressing for civil libertarians, and I’m sure the PBS special will be just as heart breaking. But this is the direction the United States government is determined to take. And, for the people, things won’t get better — as has been demonstrated since 2008 when everything was supposed to “change” when we all had “hope” and believed in the election propaganda. We were told 2008 was “historical” right? Yeah. No, sorry, things are only going to get worse. Security States don’t just reverse themselves. Or perhaps I missed that lesson from history.

It’s been entertaining watching Ron Paul confuse the democrats, republicans, and the media thus far in the 2012 campaign. For the most part all three groups are clueless about how to deal with him and ignoring him is not working very well. If Paul gets too much more traction he’ll be gang attacked by the left/right/media because of the issues he keeps bringing up. But strangely, Paul does not attack people personally. He just digs — deeply and aggressively — into issues from his point of view and expects others to spar with him from their point of view. May the best idea win, he says. This is odd. American politicians generally run from issues and instead specialize in gutting people in a childish effort to distract attention from their own lack of intelligence. And the media likes it that way because the fights help sell advertising. Yet Paul continues to do the opposite. And he clearly could care less about the results — and that is the key to his rhetoric.

I guess only Richard Nixon could have gone to China and so it may follow that only Barack Obama could gut Social Security. George W. Bush certainly could not have gotten away with what Obama is doing without the Left filling the streets and raising holy hell, right? But too many people bought all the “hope” and “change” and “yes we can” bullshit from Obama and the Left is now neutered. It will be utterly fascinating — and humorous — to see how many outspoken Obama supporters from 2008 will come back for more punishment in 2012 and associate themselves with this guy. Here is Dean Baker on Why Is President Obama So Anxious to Cut Social Security? Shameful.

I see Barack Obama out there building community again, inspiring the HOPE and CHANGE for which he was so well-known during his community organizing days as a young man in Chicago. This time, with the power of the modern security state at his disposal, he sent in SWAT teams and the FBI in a military-style raid to take out an anti-war activist who organized protests at the Republican National Convention in 2008. Organizers beware. That’s the message. Alinsky would be proud. So would the Nobel committee. Al Capone, too.

Image: Indonesia, 2009

Zbigniew Brzezinski recently talked about the potential for civil unrest in the U.S. It’s actually a disturbing interview when you consider the source. In fact, he was pretty emphatic about it even though he kept hedging that he didn’t want to focus on doom. Yet he did just that. Was it a warning? And if so to who?

Image: Tokyo, Japan, 2009

I have not voted for a mainstream Democrat or Republican in a long time. I gave up on them both ages ago. They are hopeless symptoms of deeper problems they have no intention or ability to fix. They push some pretty good rhetoric but the reality is they don’t offer viable solutions and they badly implement the solutions they do offer. Why? I think it’s simple. They don’t work for us. They’re focused elsewhere and they don’t care about us (here, here). Our role in elections is merely to provide marketing cover promoting the illusion that we matter. We don’t. That’s not difficult to see anymore and to argue otherwise is silly. One need only look at campaign donations and how concentrations of cash affect policy. Those who give the money get the results.

Yet every election when well-meaning friends ask me who I voted for — and I stupidly tell them — they always bark back that I “wasted” my vote. My guy could never win, they say confidently, and therefore my 3rd party vote is wasted. Shame on me. That assertion is ridiculous because my guy was on the ballot just like their guys were. The fact that my guy lost is irrelevant. My vote counted. And when more votes are counted for my guy in future elections he’ll win. It’s that simple. A kid can get this. Granted, there are certainly more representative voting schemes than the American system, but those systems can be gamed as well and none of that argues for following some magical herd you may not agree with just because you want to “win” an election. Under that thinking change can never happen no matter what system you follow. I wonder if all those Obama voters noticed that they actually elected another George W. Bush? Probably not. They won. That’s what matters. They didn’t waste their votes.

But it seems this “wasted” snit for some is a powerful Pavlovian response deep from the unconscious in the mainstream left/right. Why? Why are they so offended by some free speech and a bit of individuality? Whatever. If you believe in one side over the other there may be good reason for your voting that way because there are small differences at the lower and local levels of the parties and that can affect the lives of some people. I have no problem seeing that. However, many more people are affected by policies at the national and international levels and the differences up there are largely nonexistent these days. I’m talking about fiscal, monetary, military, regulatory, medical, etc. You’d have to use a pretty powerful electron microscope to see the differences between Democrats and Republicans at those levels. So, for me supporting the existing left/right power system seems a waste of time when we can instead focus on building entirely new systems to implement entirely new polices. Things we really need. We either do things ourselves or elect people from outside the political structure to build new parties that represent us. Not them.

If you don’t buy what I’m saying that’s fine. Check out a (much) more articulate view in Glenn Greenwald’s speech at We Are Many. He’s talking about civil rights in the age of Obama, which is scary enough, but towards the last 1/3 of the session he gets into this notion of voting for the lesser of evils. You may not like candidate X but X is better than candidate Y because Y is nuts. So, just hold your nose and vote X. You don’t want to waste your vote, do you? And you don’t want Y getting into office, right? Greenwald bought that argument for many years but rejects it now for some of the same reasons I cite. But he goes well beyond what I’m saying so give a listen to the talk. It’s only an hour and a half. I find the opportunity costs resulting from voting for mainstream candidates too high, and he’s the first one I’ve heard articulate this view.

So, what’s left? Where do you go if the mainstream is poison? The edge. There are some interesting things going on at the edges of the existing left/right paradigm and I regularly probe those areas. They rarely make a dent in the middle initially, though, since that’s where the power lives. It takes time. But the edge is far more interesting when you use it to challenge your world view. The edge is also where innovation comes from and it’s where propaganda breaks down a bit because the platforms on which people deliver their rhetoric aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the mainstream mechanisms. There is no professionally packaged CNN delivering 24 hours of coverage at the edge. There is no Fox News or NYT cutting across paradigms. Instead, the stories at the edge are disjointed and messy and easily criticized by the more powerful holding judgment in the mainstream. But the edge is also where real community development can take place because established power structures haven’t been constructed and embedded into everything. People can lead for themselves. They can take action. They can think. But if you are too busy following the mainstream you won’t even see the edge and you’ll miss the other paradigms developing. You have to consciously look for them and embrace them at least temporarily to experience their reality. At that point you can challenge the center if you’re so inclined. Good luck. I’d rather keep building the edge.

Just don’t let anyone tell you that you wasted your vote. If you honestly explored the issues and voted for someone you thought would make a difference than your vote wasn’t wasted. No amount of intellectual gymnastics or political peer pressure can change that. Just relax. Vote as your heart guides you.

Image: Tokyo, Japan, 2008

I watched the latest Adam Curtis film: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. It’s excellent. It’s depressing. If you think technology is liberating things out there you may want to watch not only this documentary but a few more from Curtis. There are some interesting [disturbing] themes running through his stuff but the concepts of independent thinking and actions aren’t among them.

Image: Tokyo, Japan, 2007

Reports: Obama pushing for cuts to Social Security, Medicare. Glenn Greenwald: “Obama knows full well that he can slash Medicare, Medicaid and even Social Security — just like he could sign an extension of Bush tax cuts, escalate multiple wars, and embrace the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template recently known in Democratic circles as ‘shredding the Constitution’ — and have most Democrats and progressives continue to support him anyway.”

Great. Now Obama is leading the charge to gut social services and push the country into austerity for absolutely no reason whatsoever — other than to enrich his friends and political donors. And he is doing this with the helpful support (which means silence) of the megaphones who had cheered “hope” and “change” and “community” and other such nonsense back in 2008. Any thought of cutting your wars first, Barack? Yeah, dumb idea. You are such a fraud.

At the TEPCO shareholders meeting today Tokyo Electric Power executives offered another apology for their ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Earthquake and tsunami and the natural dangers of nuclear energy notwithstanding, the mess at Fukushima would not be nearly as bad had TEPCO been competent and this has been well documented in the Japanese and international media since March 11 (and even well beforehand). And people are not buying their propaganda (except perhaps for NHK). The New York Times attended the meeting today and documents the raw emotions of some people. One woman rushed the stage shouting “shame on you … you should all be sacked.” One elderly guy said, “Go jump into a reactor and die!” The clips on TV tonight were just as interesting with many loud outbursts. Imagine the seething anger it took to move these people to say such things in this setting. We’ve seen this before with frustrated parents lashing out at TEPCO and government officials about their brave reduction of radiation standards for children.

This anger, though justified, probably won’t change much in the short term given the history of the nuclear industry in Japan. It will take millions of people hitting the streets and adjusting their voting and buying behavior to change the industry. And it will take years. It can and should be done but the challenge is great. The nuclear industry is largely immune to angry populations. The industry owns politicians in their respective countries and their bidding is done — even though their technology is obviously faulty, expensive, and toxic; even thought they clearly don’t have the engineering skills to safely site, build, and operate reactors; even though they have absolutely no business model whatsoever without massive public support to construct their plants and insure their accidents. Nuclear energy is not viable. It should be abolished.