[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Anti-Empire Report, May 12, 2010

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think perhaps Cockburn might return the compliment.

I'm appalled at the recent liberal cave-in on nuclear power (except for 
Iranians) and glad that Cockburn points it out.  (As a secondary school student 
I interviewed people at the AEC who described how "experts" would make it 
possible to dredge harbors with atomic bombs while providing safe, clean, and 
virtually free power.)  Fool me once, as G. Bush said...

This seems about right to me:  <http://www.spectacle.org/0510/seger.html>.

On 5/12/10 10:56 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:

> I guess I have used lawyers a couple of times (once when I was fighting for
> my job at a research reactor, and then more recently as I'm coming to the end
> of my line ):=)), so that makes me a member of the upper middle class. But I
> don't believe in rigid demarkations insofar as class is concerned.
>
> But how about you, Carl?
>
> And as for Cockburn, he is ignorant about societies' real problems and
> opportunities concerning  energy issues and more than ignorant about nuclear
> power and its "irrefutable" dangers. I know whereof I speak. Too often,
> Cockburn's just nutty and self absorbed.
>
> --mkb
>
> On May 12, 2010, at 10:10 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> ...This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once
>> beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on
>> permanent retainer "is the very essence of richness." That's the upper
>> class. Those in the upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel they
>> need one to handle wills, contracts and so forth. Middle-class people know
>> they ought to employ lawyers but can't quite afford them. Members of the
>> lower middle class believe they can defend themselves better than any
>> lawyer, and can't afford one anyway. To lower-class folk, public defender
>> and prosecutor look identical.
>>
>> The lower middle class is what we're focusing on here, the people who own
>> auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners,
>> fish stores and all the other small businesses across America - in sum, the
>> "petite bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big
>> fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions. The left always
>> hated the petite bourgeoisie because it wasn't the urban proletariat and
>> thus the designated agent of revolutionary change. Today's left no longer
>> believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of
>> inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of
>> all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite
>> bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite
>> indispensable.
>>
>> And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever backwash they
>> got from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't afford
>> health plans for themselves or their employees. They're three or four
>> payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about
>> trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits,
>> blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what
>> they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same
>> cliff.
>>
>> The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains
>> them. But here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught by
>> David Barstow, the Times reporter whose long piece on February 16 prompted
>> [Frank] Rich's mad column[s].
>>
>> Rich refers to Barstow's "chilling, months-long investigation of the tea
>> party movement," as though the reporter had gone undercover, watching Klan
>> rituals through binoculars somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly
>> mischaracterization of Barstow's perceptive and rather sympathetic account
>> of tea partydom, in which he significantly doesn't quote the SPLC but pops
>> in, right at the end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who sued the
>> Hayden Lake Aryans into extinction.
>>
>> Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts
>> and opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some of its
>> ideology back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical platform
>> of which, in 1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to
>> twenty-one years, restricting public office to the native-born (there's
>> your birther movement), keeping the Bible in schools and resisting "the
>> encroachment of a foreign civil and spiritual power upon the institutions
>> of our country." Back then this meant the Vatican; today it's Davos,
>> Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.
>>
>> At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter's 1964
>> essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put aside that
>> snotty essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under the leadership
>> of Obama - cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the left - and a
>> Democratic Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar movement of any
>> heft; a bailout for Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by both
>> parties; the prospect of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy plants; a
>> huge hike in defense spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at least
>> at the rhetorical level, an impending onslaught on Social Security.
>> Constitutional abuses endorsed or instigated by the White House continue in
>> a straight sequence from the Bush years.
>>
>> Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was bought off
>> from resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its Cadillac health
>> plans. Because of alleged anthropologically prompted global warming, the
>> green movement has sat on its hands, hopelessly split on nuclear power,
>> whose real, baneful effects have been irrefutably demonstrated, starting
>> with nuclear waste. There's been near total silence on the huge nuclear
>> weapons budget boost (the largest for Los Alamos since 1944). Total silence
>> on the Patriot Act, reauthorized February 27. What to do? Rally round the
>> flag and scaremonger about the right, where's there's actual political
>> ferment.
>>
>> [That's Alex Cockburn on class and the tea party.  Where do you belong on
>> the class scale by Russell Baker's calculus, Mort?  --CGE]
>>
>>
>> On 5/12/10 9:41 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>>> I would suggest a) that there are similar aspects to the current
>>> situation and what has passed before, but there are also differences too,
>>> as always — Blum brought out similarities; b) he did not infer or say
>>> that /*all*/ people are stupid (or ignorant), but there are plenty of
>>> them and they come out of the woods periodically. This was his point I
>>> think, and people should understand it.
>>>
>>> As for Chomsky's mistaken? remark: I would say there are /*some*/
>>> grievances which are legitimate, clearly not all, and it is unclear to me
>>> that those motivating the current movement are legitimate. You can pick
>>> and choose (socialism? government? Obama's birth?, immigration? taxes?
>>> bailouts?…). Mostly, they seem to be missing the boat.
>>>
>>> I think a degree of contempt is justifiable, but one should certainly
>>> not dismiss them as a "movement", however illformed and ill informed it
>>> is.
>>>
>>> You mean by "petit bourgeois" that they are mostly shopkeepers, small
>>> business, "middle-class" people? Or are they salaried or unemployed? How
>>> many union people join them? Immigrants? I suspect that there are even
>>> fairly well off Repubs among them, those who hate Dems, Obama and other
>>> despicables who want to spread their wealth.
>>>
>>> Sometimes contempt is appropriate, but, again, one should try to
>>> enlighten and organize for better ends as much as possible. I'm not
>>> optimistic here, but good luck. (Admission: I hung out with them once
>>> with flyers showing that their precious tax dollars were being diverted
>>> to killing, and was ignored for the most part.)
>>>
>>> --mkb
>>>
>>> On May 12, 2010, at 8:11 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think it would be a mistake to include either (a) there's nothing
>>>> unique about the current political situation or (b) it's all because
>>>> people are stupid. There certainly are parallels between anti-communism
>>>> and anti-terrorism - but that's because they were both massive
>>>> propaganda enterprises of the American ascendancy.
>>>>
>>>> Chomsky's comments have certainly been misinterpreted. He makes two
>>>> points, both correct it seems to me: (a) the grievances motivating the
>>>> teaparty movement are real; and (b) the Left in this country has
>>>> allowed the Right to offer (mad and dangerous) interpretations of
>>>> those grievances.
>>>>
>>>> Simply ridiculing the teaparty movement - or dismissing it with
>>>> contempt as simply low-class racism - is also mad and dangerous. A
>>>> flood of (quite legitimate) popular distress - dammed up by liberal
>>>> indifference and denied a political spillway - will burst through in
>>>> crazy and far more dangerous ways.
>>>>
>>>> Of course the tea party movement is not a working class uprising. The
>>>> teapartiers are, in classical terms, mainly petty bourgeois - but with
>>>> substantial appeal to the working class, as the Nazis were. The
>>>> crucial point about them is that, while they amount to about 18% of the
>>>> population (according to a NYT survey), 48% of the population
>>>> sympathize with their attitudes and beliefs (as compared with 44% for
>>>> Obama).
>>>>
>>>> What the left should be doing is what it did in the 1930s, when there
>>>> was also a very dangerous nativist movement, but it was countered by
>>>> working class organizing - not contempt for the stupidity of the
>>>> masses. --CGE
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 5/12/10 6:19 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>>>>>> ... *Anti-Empire Report *May 12, 2010 William Blum
>>>>>> www.killinghope.org <http://www.killinghope.org>
>>>>>> <http://www.killinghope.org/> *Terminally-dumb people have always
>>>>>> been with us of course. It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone
>>>>>> stupid.* ... If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the
>>>>>> nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is
>>>>>> a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and
>>>>>> Rush Limbaugh ... If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the
>>>>>> latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama
>>>>>> the antichrist” ... If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: "I have
>>>>>> never seen anything like this in my lifetime” ... keep in mind that
>>>>>> the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as
>>>>>> mean-spirited...
>

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