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Eye Of Newt

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Why NOT me? These other guys are nuts.

It seems like a century ago when Newt Gingrich led the charge to overthrow decades of Democratic rule in the House of Representatives using his Contract for America as the blueprint for an agenda that included balancing the budget and term limits. At the time, the Democrats were stale and liberalism an obsolete political philosophy that had hardened into political correctness. What Gingrich did was nothing less than to revolutionize American politics, turning Tim O’Neil’s maxim that all politics was local on its head. Thanks to Gingrich, all politics was now national and he ran the Congressional campaign as if it were a British parliamentary election. The Republicans won and America has never been the same.

But no sooner had he been sworn in as Speaker, he opted to accept a book deal from Rupert Murdock for millions of dollars, violating the rules of the House. Term limits vanished from the agenda. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, told Clinton to adopt the Republican agenda by balancing the budget and changing the welfare system to end permanent dependence. It worked and Clinton won reelection.

Then Gingrich blew it by closing down the government. The Republicans lost numerous seats in Congress and he resigned. His legacy was his censure by Congress for ethics violations and his party’s defeat. Most wrote him off as finished in politics and it appeared as if he wrote himself off as well. His extramarital conduct became the stuff of legend and he vanished from the political scene, starting a consulting business and authoring countless books, including works of fiction. He married his last mistress and became a Catholic.

When he announced his candidacy for president, most dismissed him off as a has-been with absolutely no chance of winning. As if to confirm this, he took his wife on a cruise in the Greek Islands and most of his staff quit. He announced his intention of staying in the race but this was counted as bravado. He had no money and no organization, yet he had sufficient numbers in the polls to get into the debates, during which he actually sounded sane and he began to attract attention. The radical right, in its quest to stop Mitt Romney, first went with Michele Bachmann, whose over-the-top comments made her seem loony. Then they supported Rick Perry, who turned out to be an idiot. There was the flirtation with Herman Cain, whose campaign imploded in the wake of allegations by women of sexual misconduct. Because Ron Paul opposed aid to Israel, he was anathema to the Evangelicals so his poll numbers have remained in the low teens. Finally there was Newt, who espoused conservative values with sufficient clarity during the debates that he began to pick up support. No one was more surprised by this than Newt himself, who was running in order to keep charging thousands for speaking engagements, receive lucrative book contracts and increase the clientele of his consulting business. It came out that he has made millions as a consultant to the health-care industry and to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, but none of this halted his sudden rise.

This was a “new” Newt, observers said, more mature and stable, whose new-found religious faith made his past personal transgressions fade into insignificance; he had gone to confession and been forgiven.

So far, his poll numbers have not been affected by the negative ads attacking him in Iowa since most people are concerned about the economy and think Romney is a Wall Street insider, a representative of the old GOP Establishment, which the Tea Party despises. In their search for a candidate of their own, they settled on Newt, with his unadulterated support for capitalism.

But is this really a new Newt? Remember Richard Nixon’s comeback, when commentators described him as the “new Nixon”?

No, that's the old Newt. I'm the new Newt.

He was more self-assured and less strident and looked comfortable in his skin. He bested both Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination and won a close election against Hubert Humphrey. In the wake of the disastrous McGovern campaign, he won his long-sought landslide and seemed to have more power than any president in the past, including Lyndon Johnson, who had self-destructed.

But this was no new Nixon at all. It was the same old Nixon, devious, dishonest and vicious. Under pressure, he cracked and became the first president in American history to resign. Gingrich is made of the same stuff and the Republicans will nominate him at their peril. But what he’s got is an ability to throw the base raw meat the way no other candidate can. His remarks on the Palestinians show he knows how to appeal to key constituencies of the GOP in a powerful way. It would be a mistake to count him out because, like Nixon, he has a subterranean connection to the worst impulses of many Americans and is unafraid to exploit that connection. Democrats, gleeful at the idea that Newt could be the Republican nominee, should remember that they could get what they wish for and come to regret it.

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A Culture Of Death

September 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Vote Perry!

During the first debate among the Republican candidates for president, the moderator began a question to Rick Perry, the governor of Texas with this: “During your eleven years as governor of Texas, you have overseen 234 executions.”  Before he could go any further, thunderous applause filled the Reagan library, lasting several minutes. At the next debate, co-sponsored by the Tea Party Express and CNN, the moderator posed this question to the panel of candidates: “Suppose a young man without health insurance is hit by a car requiring six months hospitalization. How could his expenses by paid for or should we just allow him to die?” Shouts of “Let him die!” filled the auditorium.

Those responses, one suspects, were not a reflection of a small minority of Americans. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare and Rick Perry’s attacks on Social Security have actually not affected public opinion as liberals have hoped. To the contrary, polls show a growing advantage for Republicans in a generic election for both houses of Congress. And the attacks on Perry from the other candidates have caused no slippage for him in the polls. If anything, they seem to have increased his lead.

What is one to make of this new culture of death that is sweeping America? It demonstrates a total lack of empathy, which means that individuals are concerned only when something affects them directly. I knew a Republican politician who opposed government involvement in health care until a close relative required round-the- clock dialysis. He then sponsored a bill in the state legislature to provide financial support for dialysis, making it virtually free in the state.

There is, one suspects, an element of racism in all of this. White people across the country increasingly resent paying for services provided to indigent blacks because they believe they are shiftless and responsible for their own situation. This goes largely unsaid, except by Hillary Clinton during the desperate hours of her losing candidacy when she went around the country shouting about “hard working white people.” It was a shameless appeal to race that almost pulled it out for her, and yet she remains an American liberal icon.

When Roosevelt was pushing for his New Deal legislation, one of his most important allies was the powerful racist senator from Mississippi, Theodore G. Bilbo, who would go on to argue for the deportation of all blacks in America to Africa. That proved too much even for a Senate that continually held up civil rights legislation and he was forced to leave the Senate. Still, Roosevelt found in him a useful ally because the alliance indicated to the white population that these programs were designed to help white people. Roosevelt never made any move towards civil rights and even his wife, the progressive Eleanor Roosevelt, kept saying that it was too soon to do anything about that. It is only when those programs start to benefit racial minorities that resistance arises.

The one policy of Rick Perry’s that is commendable and which could cost him support is his backing of the rights of children of undocumented immigrants to attend public schools and their further right to attend state universities at in-state tuition. When attacked for this, Perry countered by saying that these were “human beings who deserve to be treated as human beings.” But before one ascribes this to Perry’s munificence, it should be noted that Texas has a burgeoning Mexican population and that his policies are wildly popular with them. He also knows that for a Republican to win the presidency, he must be able to appeal to Hispanics, who are increasingly turned off by the Democratic Party. There is an element of race involved in this as well since many Hispanics resent the power of blacks in the Democratic Party, and choose to identify with the whites.

Adolph Hitler declared himself to be a socialist but he had an interesting spin on this term. He insisted that

Hurry up and die, would you? USA! USA!

socialism was fundamentally about race. If a country is made up of a “volk,” a homogeneous population in which everyone identifies with everyone else like a family, then socialist policies can succeed because the people will want to care for each other. His socialist policies of job creation, through public works, housing, free universities and medical care were highly popular because the German racial state was taking care of its own. In “Being and Time,” Martin Heidegger suggested that humans are different from other species because they have a sense of time, leading them to understand that their time on earth is limited. Because of this, he concluded, they care for each other. Heidegger also concluded that the best person in a nation was the soldier, because he was willing to sacrifice everything, including his life, for his people. When Heidegger bought into National Socialism and became a disciple of Hitler, it was because he shared the notion that caring is linked with race. If you got rid of all the people of color in America, the programs the Tea Party now is attacking would once again become popular. Racialism is at the heart of the Republican Party, notwithstanding several conservative blacks in the party who are treated like pets, tokens to show that Republicans are not racists. These are blacks that identify with the oppressor, much as Jewish Majority Leader Eric Cantor identifies with a party that is largely anti-Semitic. If this is the direction the nation is heading, the future will see much more of this as it becomes commonplace to abolish federal programs that were designed to provide a safety net for Americans. The Bismarckean compromise of Social Democracy to defeat Socialism, which Bismarck hated, is not appreciated in America, which lacks a Social Democratic tradition, so it should come as no surprise that there is support for abolishing the safety net. But it should be remembered that Bismarck invented Social Democracy for a racially pure Germany, a far cry from multi-racial America.

There are forty million people in America classified as poor, with over fifteen percent of the population living below the poverty line. Alas, America has no Jonathan Swift to write America’s version of “A Modest Proposal.” This country can’t even come up with brilliant satire.

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Endless War

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

What Is It Good For?

The war in Libya is taking on biblical proportions, like the parts when Moses and Joshua tell the Israelites to kill all of the people in the way of their conquest of Caanan, including the women and children. These passages in the Bible have invaded the consciousness of countless people, from the Crusaders to the white settlers in America who massacred the Indians to Adolph Hitler who said he learned everything from Moses.

This  was supposed to have been a new century with the horrors of the Twentieth Century behind us.  But starting with 9/11, barbarism has reached new heights, leading one to conclude that the human race may simply be hopeless.  The killing and the maiming goes on for all kinds of justifications, each group of murderers believing their cause is just.  What happened in Tunisia and Egypt were exceptions, wonderful to perceive.  How they managed to pull it off remains a mystery.  Africa and the Middle East are killing grounds with murderous dictators slaughtering their own populations.  The pronouncements by the Obama administration about human rights and its participation in the war against Qaddafi, which has escalated from a humanitarian mission into a civil war, is hypocritical.  In Bahrain, the king whose family  has ruled the country for centuries oppresses the Shiites who make up eighty percent of the country’s population. When they rose up against him in the name of democracy and human rights, the response from America was muted.  Bahrain, which has oil, is also only a causeway away  from Saudi Arabia. With a wink, Obama and Clinton gave the go-ahead to the Saudis to invade and put down the non-violent revolution.  The king and his cronies engage in torture and murder to perpetuate their rule but Bahrain has vanished from the news, as if there were some sort of gag order to the press.

What is going on in Syria is tragic.  Syria has more universities and colleges than any country in the Middle East, including Israel, and they are good.  The medical school, from which the current Assad dictator graduated, has an excellent reputation.  There is an entire university devoted to the arts.  The Assads and the Alawites rule with an iron hand because if they didn’t the Sunnis would massacre them in response to their brutality.  Assad’s father ordered the destruction of the ancient city of Hama because the Sunnis there dared to challenge his rule.  He called them fanatics and terrorists to justify this violent act of  genocide. If they are fanatics and terrorists, what is he?

Bill Clinton had the late President  Assad to the White House numerous times and succeeded in getting

More fun than peace.

him to  agree to a deal by which Syria would grant Israel full diplomatic recognition in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel during the 1967 war. But Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, at the last minute, refused to get off the plane.  He and the Israelis were more comfortable perpetuating the state of war between both countries. The Israelis keep expanding settlements on Palestinian territory, an illegal activity that a peace deal would halt.  But maybe the Israeli hardliners are right. Why should they trust countries that have invaded them before, and Hamas, which has pledged to destroy Israel?  More killing seems to be the solution on both sides.

For much of the world, a state of war is preferable to  peace.  We are just over a decade into the new century and the slaughter goes on.

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1848 – Karl Marx, Richard Wagner & Carl Shurz

December 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Merry Christmas, you capitalist swine.


In the pro-democratic uprisings in Europe in 1848 three names are paramount–Karl Marx, Richard Wagner and Carl Schurz–all Germans, all brilliant and all determined to create the political and artistic forces that would shake the world.   The autocrats crushed the revolution in Germany giving rise to the careers of the three who had failed to create democracy. Marx fled to London and Schurz to America while Wagner remained in Germany, forsaking philosophy for the music that would inspire Hitler.

Marx’s father, who had encouraged him, told him, “Someone has to think.”  And what thought.  “A specter is haunting Europe-the specter of Communism.”  So begins the Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Communist Manifesto), launching a movement that would indeed haunt not only Europe but also the rest of the world.   In Das Kapital, Marx’s monumental work, capitalism is portrayed as a stage of human evolution that will make its important contribution and then give way to socialism.  Marx dedicated Das Kapital to Darwin, directing German ideology towards a materialistic interpretation of history.  With Marx, German ideology becomes a scientific approach to political economy in the spirit of the times which saw the ascendancy of science eclipsing all else.  Marx corresponded with Lincoln who agreed that the workers of the world should unite, though not in opposition to capitalism but rather for a better life under it. In the United States, William Graham Sumner at Yale invented sociology as a discipline but opposed socialism in his fervent endorsement of laissez faire capitalism.  He did have one caveat however, and it was that capitalism and empire, with their concomitant aggressive wars, were incompatible.  For this reason he opposed the Spanish-American War, the annexation of the Philippines and America’s brutal suppression of the Philippine insurgency.  Lenin agreed with him, writing that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, referring to the desperate carving up of Africa in Berlin by the European powers in 1884 to create new markets during a prolonged depression.

Lenin pulled Russia out of the First World War by suing for peace with Germany. After the war the Western European powers and the United States intervened on the side of the Whites against the Red Bolshevik government in order to overthrow it.  Woodrow Wilson did so reluctantly, insisting that his sole motive was to protect American munitions sent to Russia during the war when it was still fighting alongside the allies.  But Lenin and his Communist regime survived.  Lenin did implement the NEP (New Economic Policy) to reintroduce a measure of free enterprise but after his death Stalin revoked this and imposed a centrally planned command economic model.  We all know how this ended up.  It proved a brutal failure, engendering the total collapse of the Soviet Union and its Communist empire.  China, which was supposed to be the heir to the Russian Revolution under Mao,  threw out Communism when Deng Xiao Ping told the people to “get rich.”

Wagner went in an entirely different direction. Through his Romantic music based on Teutonic myth and his endorsement of anti-Semitism and German racial superiority, he became a proto-Nazi.  His anti-Semitism was initially rejected by the Germans but ultimately embraced when the Nazi Party under Hitler prevailed in the 1933 elections and Hitler became Chancellor in a time of economic chaos–hyperinflation followed by depression.  Campaigning on a platform of anti-Communism, Hitler imposed a centrally planned command economic model, and although he did not nationalize German industry, he transformed it into an instrument of the state.  As F.A.Hayek explained, this model required endless war to confiscate the wealth of other countries to pay for it.  Hitler came perilously close to winning that war but he suffered devastating defeats at the hands of Stalin on the eastern front and the Allies to his west.   National Socialism and Fascism, both forms of State Capitalism, like Communism, failed and vanished.

The last of the three greats of 1848 was Carl Schurz, who went to Wisconsin and became an active member of the Republican Party and a supporter of Lincoln who made Schurz a general during the Civil War.  Schurz became the first immigrant to be elected to the United States Senate and served as Secretary of the Interior under Rutherford Hayes.  Schurz was anti-slavery but pro-private enterprise in the spirit of the Republican Party of his era.  It is his vision that has prevailed, one that led to the New Deal that opposed both Communism and Fascism.  It triumphed over Nazi Germany and then won the Cold War.  But now it is in crisis.  Burdened with debt, the Western nations are at a crossroads. Can free market economics and human liberty prevail?  In an e-mail sent during the financial meltdown, Austan Goolsbie of the University of Chicago Business School who is currently serving as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, told this blogger  that only a gigantic deficit could prevent America from sinking into a depression as bad, if not worse, than the Great Depression.   The bailouts and the stimulus have helped to create a deficit and a national debt of monumental proportions.   It is in this context that the Americans bought the argument of the Republicans and the Tea Party that only by cutting both taxes and spending on a massive scale could capitalism be saved.

Sweet, delicious anarchy.

But will it?  William Graham Sumner predicted that one day America would be faced with a stark choice between anarchism and socialism, the anarchism being what would now be described as the Murray Rothbard variety of anarcho capitalism.  Sumner said that in such a situation he would side with the anarchists.  Americans now look at the welfare state and see Europe and reject that model out of hand.  But how far can one go in this direction?  Do you end up like Arizona, which lets people die because it has cut Medicaid funds for organ transplant operations? The great French poet, Paul Valery, once said that if you take any idea to its logical  conclusion, it will lead to the extinguishing of the human race.  Carl Schurz would have undoubtedly agreed.

On that note…

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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O’Donnel’s Revolution

December 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The “I’m-not-a-witch” losing candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, has landed a book deal with

Okay, so I ride a broomstick at night whilst wearing a silly hat. That makes me a witch?

St. Martin’s Press.  This anti-Establishment Tea Partier is represented by one of the top literary agencies, Trident Media.  So far, no one’s talking about the size of the advance.

In the book, O’Donnell will reveal her frustrations with American electoral politics and her experience defeating an Establishment Republican with Tea Party support.  O’Donnell made this statement: “The 2010 midterm elections were just the beginning—the first rumblings of a revolution that has not fully erupted.  I plan on making my book one of the revolution’s catalysts.”

Her book is hardly going to be THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO or Tom Paine’s COMMON SENSE.  But this is what revolutions have come to in America.  We have had the “Reagan Revolution, “The Gingrich Revolution” and now this, the “Tea Party Revolution,” and its chief theorist will be an empty-headed nincompoop who can barely speak a sentence.  What are the chances that she will be the actual author?  Of course, it will be snapped up by the radical right across the nation and will make all the bestseller lists, including The New York Times.  All the struggling bohemian writers in Brooklyn will be gnashing their teeth at St. Martin’s total sellout, jumping the shark with this specious project.  But there is something more important going on here than meets the eye and it has to do with the meaning of revolution.

When the left speaks of revolution, the FBI goes after them and they are branded as “un-American.”  But when Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Palin, Beck and now O’Donnell speak of revolution, it is perfectly acceptable because it comes from the right.  Hitler, too, said he was a revolutionary but what is true of these so-called rightwing revolutionaries is that they are, in fact, counter-revolutionaries, all backed by forces of reaction. Under the banner of defeating socialism and communism, they are determined to stamp out the social progress achieved by progressives. They all tend to be racist to some degree and when you scrape the surface, big money is backing all of them.  The corporate and financial types are paranoid about socialism because they believe they are threatened by a violent revolution that will take away all they have.   When the market crashed in 2008, wealthy New Yorkers hired security guards because they feared poor blacks and Hispanics would descend upon them from Harlem and the Bronx.

The ones with the money are far from revolutionaries.  They consider themselves to be conservatives, part of a respectable ideological tradition going back to William Pitt, but they are not.  They are much more like the conservatives in Germany who were terrified of a Communist Revolution and saw in Hitler and the Nazis potential allies in defeating it. They assumed that they could co-opt them and rule behind the scenes with Hitler as a sort of front man with no real desire to govern but wanting only to make speeches and bask in the limelight.

That's Mister Fuhrer to you.

What happened was the reverse.  Hitler devoured the conservatives, who ended up dependent on him.  Pappen, the conservative Deputy Chancellor, had no power.  He actually opposed Kristalnacht, to no avail. And old Hindenburg, the national hero who had defeated Hitler when he was elected president of Germany, succumbed as well.

The Republican Party is now going the way of the German conservatives.  Terrified of Obama because they are convinced he is a Socialist, they allied themselves with the Tea Party after Tea Party-backed candidates succeeded in routing numerous members of the GOP old guard in primaries.  And while they are trying to block Palin with a traditional Republican, Mitt Romney, in the end they will accept Palin because they are so terrified of what they are convinced is a socialist conspiracy to take over the country.  At a recent Tea Party-sponsored meeting of candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee, the Tea Party activists dominated, with all of the candidates pandering to the radical right.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, once Richard Nixon’s protégé, finds himself the next target of the Tea Party. As one of Lugar’s Tea Party opponents in Indiana put it, he has become “moderate.”  Getting rid of Lugar is, as a Tea Party activist at the beauty contest held for candidates seeking the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee put it, a “priority.”  They would not support any candidate for chairman of the party who did not share this objective.  Jack Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri who is from an old-line aristocratic family, lamented that the Republican Party has become so extreme that it is now “beyond redemption.”  But, of course, he is one of the  “elites” that Sarah Palin has vowed to purge from the Party.  And once she has, the counterrevolution will be in full force, calling itself a version of the original American Revolution, as the Tea Partiers proclaim.  Jefferson would not think so.

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