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

[C. G. Estabrook]

Are you purposely ignoring what Chomsky said about the the relation of 
Limbaugh/Palin/et al. to the teaparty movement?  Or didn't you read it?

The frightening ignorance of American experts on nuclear power from the 
beginning is a matter of record. On the eve of the Trinity experiment, members 
of Oppenheimer's crew that thought there was a possibility that it would ignite 
the atmosphere.  They didn't know, but went ahead with the test.

But there is a lot of (public) money to be made from nuclear power.  Whom are 
its promoters paid by?

On 5/12/10 11:51 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> If you'll pardon the expression, what is pure crap. The only scientists
> I know who suggested such things were Edward Teller's acolytes; the
> great majority of the science experts, physicists, thought it was nutty.
> And of course, it should be noted that Cockburn thinks the climate issue
> is a non issue—one of the deniers. Is he paid by Exxon-Mobile or BP or…?
>
> On another line, i thought you, and others, might be interested in what
> Chomsky has to say about science and a Tea party heroine . Among his
> comments:
>
> Listen to talk radio sometimes, which I do a lot when I'm driving. It's
> a segment of popular opinion. I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh
> interviewing Sarah Palin. For anybody who cares about possible survival,
> it's pretty frightening. It was all leading questions, "Sarah, what do
> you think of global warming?" "Oh, that's just made up by elitist
> liberals who are taking our jobs who don't care about us poor people.
> It's nothing like that. Look out the window, do you see any palm trees?
> Well, that takes care of global warming."
>
> For the rest of the Chomsky interview, see
>
> http://www.zcommunications.org/government-involvement-with-science-and-art-by-noam-chomsky
>
> --mkb
>
> P.S., You ignored my question…
>
>
>
> On May 12, 2010, at 11:32 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> 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>
>>>>>>>> <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...
>>>
>

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.