Anniversary Mourning

September 11, 2010 – 20:49

Nearly a decade ago thousands of our neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens were maimed and killed in attacks against our country. We all should remember them and their sacrifices.

For months and years after the horrid attacks of 2001 we were told, again and again, that those events of 9/11 had changed everything. But should they have? Should we have allowed a tiny group of religious fanatics to have such a large effect on our country? Should we have allowed them to reshape our culture, our politics, and our psyches? The answer, of course, is no. But nine years after the planes crashed and the towers fell we as a country are significantly less free, less moral, and less rational.

The basic cornerstone of western freedom — habeas corpus — is today considered optional or luxurious, and our government now monitors our communications with impunity. We not only tolerate but extol the torture of other human beings as both necessary and moral. We allow politicians and pundits to use fear to manipulate and divide us without ever questioning their motives or rhetoric. And we have sacrificed so many lives and spent billions of dollars all in an effort to feel more secure.

Half a century ago Sayyid Qutb — the intellectual founder of Al Qaeda –  wrote of his disdain for the western notions of pragmatism, rationality and individual autonomy. He believed that these things alienated people from God, and were infecting the Islamic world. For Qutb, Islam and western liberalism were incompatible and would forever battle until one was eliminated. Sadly, Qutb’s extremist, fringe, viewpoint is today being propagated by many American religious and political leaders. Today, we are becoming the enemy Al Qaeda wishes us to be.

In 2001 our country suffered a tragic attack against our people and our values. Nine years later it’s time to reevaluate just how successful that attack was, and decide how much more successful we will let it be.

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Religion, Signs of the End | Comments (0)

The Root of Evil: Bicycles

August 4, 2010 – 14:06

Colorado Gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes has identified a new threat to the very existence of America: Bicycling. Maes has decoded the the evil plan of the globalist cabal. He has deduced that the efforts to boost cycling, in the major metro area, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.” And went on the say “This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed.”

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

Indeed, Maes has recognized the creeping grasp of the one world UN run socialist paradise that’s taken root in Denver, CO and stood forth, like a real patriot, and screamed J’accuse at Mayor John Hickenlooper and all the other peddlers of socialism.

Of course, this is not the first time that conservatives have recognized the villainy of the velocipede. In the 19th century, conservatives campaigned hard against these cycles of sin. They noted with disgust how cycling allowed women to shed their corsets and bustles, or as the Right Reverend Reynolds pointed out in 1899:

A large number of female bicyclists wear shorter dresses than the laws
of morality and decency permit, thereby inviting the improper
conversations and remarks of the depraved and immoral. I most certainly
consider the adoption of the bicycle by women as detrimental to the
advancement of morality.”

Proud conservatives even raised the horrid specter of female masturbation as a byproduct of the evil conveyance.

Conservatives of today, like Maes, are still very concerned over women’s health and morality, but they also see the larger totality of these rims of revolution. Maes knows that cycling is but one gear in the great conspiracy to bring down America, and without his key insights our once great country will be reduced to this:

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Misc. Ramblings, Politics | Comments (0)

Ye shall know them by their fruits

July 31, 2010 – 17:10

Yesterday, the Anti-Defamation League announced their opposition to the Muslim community center to be built in lower Manhattan. The structure which opponents have labeled the “ground-zero mosque” in reality is not at ground-zero of the 9/11 horrors, nor is it exclusively a mosque, but it has become a rallying cry for bigots and opportunists who seek to turn fear and hatred into political power.

In their statement the ADL assured everyone that they “…regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths – to build community centers and houses of worship.” Shortly after this statement, however, they suggest that that “cornerstone of democracy” shouldn’t apply when it upsets some people:

The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.

But then to show that they are not really caving into religious bigotry the ADL proceeds by invoking an all too familiar stereotype:

In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.

The suggestion that the Cordoba House, the name of the community center project, is being funded by terrorists is without basis and serves to try to justify bigotry and fear. It is perhaps the most offensive element in the ADL’s missive because it attempts to justify their irrational bigotry by plucking the strings of terrorism and the hateful notion that all Muslims are somehow connected to global terrorists.

If there was a single group which would be keenly aware of religious hatred and what may result from it, one would think it would be the Anti-Defamation League. The ebbs and flows of religious bigotry in this country have a long and sorted history: from the brutalization of the Quakers to anti-Catholic violence — which my own family encountered with the Klan — to the persecution of the Mormons and to the rampant anti-Semitism of the 20th century our nation has often seen minority groups of faith persecuted and made scapegoats for the ill of their times. Time, however, has a tendency to move religious hatred around. The transitive property of bigotry almost ensures that the evils ascribed to one faith will be assigned to another in the future. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that bigots spoke of an international cabal of Jews trying to destroy western civilization and working out of local synagogues. The ADL should be keenly aware and very sensitive to this history, and yet they seem to happy to join in with the bigots and haters who claim Islam is a devil religion, or a cult, (pejoratives used in the past to describe Judaism), or with those who simply wish to fan religious enmity to gain power. By lying down with angry bigots and hucksters of hatred the Anti-Defamation League has sullied itself for years to come. For to take any future claims from the ADL of religious intolerance would be akin to giving weight to charges of racism from David Duke. To quote the great bard, “Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues We write in water”.

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Politics, Religion | Comments (0)

Bait & Switch

July 26, 2010 – 09:24

Since the economic collapse in 2008 and the rise of the Obama candidacy, and then presidency, our nation has seen a significant increase in race baiting. This repugnance came to the forefront this week when Andrew Breitbart released a deceptively edited video purporting to show an African-American department of agriculture employee boasting to the NAACP about withholding services from a white farmer. Shirley Sherrod, the DoAg employee, was condemned by the NAACP, and forced to resign, by Sec. Vilsack, before her entire speech was reviewed. Upon review Sherrod’s speech showed that she had not withheld services and had, in fact, overcome personnel prejudices to go beyond her normal duties to help the white farmer save his property from foreclosure.

Breitbart’s heavily edited video was published with the title “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism” in response to the NAACP’s call the previous week for Tea Party groups to repudiate racist elements in their midst. Breitbart’s “story” was then picked up by conservative and then mainstream media outlets (lead by Fox news), many of whom highlighted Sherrod’s racism and the double standards of the NAACP. In general, conservative groups and the media were all too willing to accept Breitbart’s narrative of Black on Whilte discrimination. It was a narrative, after all, that they had been propagating for the past year with hyperbolic stories about ACORN, Van Jones, the New Black Panther Party, et. al. All of these stories carried the subtext that African Americans are asserting control and gaming the system for their advantage at the expense of whites. This attitude not uncommon in writings of Tea Party supporters as well, who often claim they are not racist, but go on to suggest that African Americans are receiving government services and special treatment unavailable to whites, and that these ‘perks’ contribute to America’s economic ills and the size of its government. Of course, the majority conservatives and tea party activists carry no racial animus; however, they do seem to be particularly susceptible to arguments which strike a cord of racial division. This may simply be part of the nature of being a conservative which, as William F Buckley said, is “..someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…”

As Rachael Maddow Pointed out this week, the ginning up of racial animus in order garner white votes is nothing new, and has been common in the Republican party since Richard Nixon employed the Southern Strategy in the late 1960’s. What Maddow, and many other commentators, fail to see or acknowledge is how this constant hyping of racial issues overlies our current economic problems. In the early days of the economic meltdown in 2008 several conservative commentators tried to blame minority lending for the collapse of the housing and credit markets. Shortly after President Obama’s inauguration many of these same commentators, followed by the Tea Party groups, began to rail against “redistribution of wealth”, “socialism,” and “communism” — though very few seem to have any idea of what these concepts entail. The cry against redistribution is a cry against the movement of services or capital from the wealthy to the poor. For many Americans, this suggests a movement of capital from white to black or hispanic Americans. The anti-redistribution crowd often site taxes as their real concern. But this is a ridiculous argument, as a glance at the historic tax rates show:

Top Marginal Tax Rates

Year(s) Tax Rate Year(s) Tax Rate
1950-51 91% 1971-80 70%
1952-53 92% 1981 69.13%
1954-63 91% 1982-86 50%
1964 77% 1987 35.8%
1965-67 70% 1988-89 28%
1968 75.25% 1990-92 31%
1969 77% 1993-2000 39.6%
1970 71.75% 2003-09 35%

As we can see the top marginal tax rates are presently  near the lowest levels they have been at in the last 60 years. In fact arguments about redistribution and taxes are often diversions to obscure more fundamental economic problems: the loss of manufacturing and the climbing trade deficit, for instance, due to neo-liberal free-trade policies. Or the widening gap in our nation between rich and poor and the loss of the middle class. Race baiting allows these issues to be obscured in favor of a narrative that pits groups, often suffering the same economic hardships, against one another. This type of division almost always suits the status quo except, of course, is when the smoldering resentment, driven by the media, turns into a violent blaze, and people’s lives become endangered.

Many bloggers and commentators have pointed to the Sherrod incident as an example of the duplicity of Andrew Breitbart. While Breitbart’s manipulation of the facts to generate racial animus is contemptuous, it is not nearly as appalling as the media’s rush to repeat his narrative. Breitbart can be excused for simply being what he is — a partisan huckster selling any trope which brings him attention and his cause to power. Many in the mainstream media (CNN, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC), however, were all too happy to repeat the story without investigation. This alone shouldn’t come as a major surprise. The media, overall, has done an abysmal job at covering some of the most important stories of the past decade (ie. the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afganistan, the fianancial crisis and melltdown, healtcare and financial reform, etc). Again, the Sherrod story fit a particular narrative that the media was eager to exploit — one which divided Americans at a time of shared suffering, and helped maintain the status quo.

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Economy, Injustices, Politics | Comments (0)

This Thing that Wouldn’t Die

July 18, 2010 – 17:35

On June 25th of this year, ICANN resurrected the .xxx sponsored Top Level Domain from its death, yet again.Ten years after it was originally proposed, very few ever thought it was a good idea. So why is it back?

The history of the .xxx TLD goes back a decade to when Jason Hendeles formed the ICM registry and made application to ICANN in 2000. Hendeles originally requested that .xxx be approved as a generic Top Level Domain (ie. .com, .net,..org, etc). ICANN denied the .xxx gTLD shortly after it was submitted, as ICANN noted at the time:

ICM Registry’s application for an .xxx TLD does not appear to meet unmet needs. Adult content is readily available on the Internet. To the extent that some believe that an .xxx TLD would segregate adult content, no mechanism (technical or non-technical) exists to require adult content to migrate from existing TLDs to an .xxx TLD.

Of course, this statement is truer today then it was in 2000, but ICM persisted.

In 2005 ICM returned to ICANN and requested that .xxx be accepted as a sponsored Top Level Domain. sTLDs require significant support from the sponsoring business and the professional community they represent (ie. the .travel sTLD is supported by various travel agencies and associations). ICM had started the International Foundation for Online Responsibility to act as a sponsoring business. ICANN drafted a registry agreement at that point a sought public comment. It became very apparent, shortly afterward, however, that ICM had no support from the larger industry, adult content providers. Finally, ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (which coordinated Internet name and number policies with world governments) reported that several governments from around the world opposed the .xxx sTLD. This should have been the end of the .xxx domain. It had no support within the industry it was suppose to serve, and governments around the world opposed it. But in 2007 ICM pushed ICANN again for a registry agreement, and again ICANN found little sponsorship support, government opposition, and rising opposition among Internet users. In 2008 ICM appealed, under ICANN’s bylaws, to an Independent Review Panel, which met in 2009. During the review process ICM accused ICANN of political motives and collusion with religious groups in its rejection of the domain and threatened legal action. In the IRP’s final report, issued in February, a majority (2-1) found that ICANN had technically approved ICM’s application in 2005, and should pay $475K to ICM in reimbursements. The dissenting panel member made it clear that he felt that ICM’s application still lacked community support, and that ICANN was well within its rights to deny the application. In March the ICANN board decided to accept public comment on the situation to determine a course of action, as it had no process to deal with an application that was six years old. The public comment, again, overwhelmingly opposed the creation of the .xxx domain. Of the over 12,000 public comments received by ICANN, 95% opposed the creation of the domain. Opposition came from disparate groups ranging from free speech advocates, family values and Christian organizations, to adult content providers and ISPs. Yet, with the IRP report ostensibly against them, and fearing legal action by ICM, the ICANN board begrudgingly voted to allow .xxx to move forward.

So a Top Level Domain that Internet users don’t want, international governments are against, and the industry it’s suppose to represent opposes is now on it’s way to deployment. Why? and Why should we care? In the short term, ICM will rake in hundreds of millions of dollars as intellectual property owners rush to register their .com names with the .xxx suffix. Domain squatters will rush to register cars.xxx, macdonalds.xxx, etc.creating a huge ramp up in prices which will benefit ICM’s bottom line.

From an operational perspective, .xxx is going to wreak havoc as security software makers, ISPs, and other potential content filters struggle between demands to block the suffix, from anti-porn organizations, and demands to leave the Internet open. Providers of Adult content will avoid the TLD for primary use, knowing that anti-porn forces will campaign strongly for major ISPs to block the domain suffix. In the public policy arena, advocacy groups and politicians will call for adult content to be limited to the .xxx domain. In 2006 Senators Bauchus and Pryor introduced a bill which would have required sites with sexually charged content to be removed from .org, .net, and .com domains and relegated to only .xxx. The fallout from such a idea would be monumental: aside from defining what sexually charged or sexually explicit content is, and determining who would police such a rule, there is the issue of domains or sites hosted outside of the US, which would not be subject to a US law. Nevertheless, we can be certain that such a proposal will be made, and that ICM will support it, even if its surreptitiously.

The overall problem with the .xxx TLD, as I have stated over the years, is that if further politicizes Internet operations and draws operating groups and committes into disputes about Internet content. The Internet should, and does, serve as a conduit for information, ideas, and general content from all over the world. It performs this function well because the people who work together to develop the standards, perform the operations, and design the overall systems do so for the improvement of the Internet and its technology. Discussions of general content never, or rarely, enter into the discussion. This is the way it should be. By folding to ICM, ICANN has put itself, and the future of the Internet, in a dangerous position. It has laid a path for a segregation of content. We don’t know exactly where this will lead, but we can be certain that it will not be towards more open and free Internet.

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Internet, Politics | Comments (0)

Let the Circle Be Unbroken

July 17, 2010 – 14:22

If you ever spend any time with real American communists — meaning Americans who actually theorize, think, and believe that Marx, Engels, Mao, etc. were really on to something with the whole end of private property, communal production, simple class-struggle thing, and not those who simply get labeled communists because they believe in a social safety net or government services — you realize pretty quickly that they are in deep denial. Their first and most vociferous defense of communism comes with the simple statement, “Well, it’s never been really tried.” This is the same response received when criticizing or questioning libertarians or free-market advocates on the right.  They too seem to be in deep denial. They claim that their ideas or policies have never really been applied — that any previous applications were too weak or because they were half-measures end up creating disasters instead of the promised utopian efficiencies. Of course anyone running around quoting Karl Marx is simply dismissed from the mainstream public discourse as a loony. But, for some reason, those spouting on about the ideas of Ayn Rand or Frederich Hayek are accepted as serious contributors to our policy debates.

In the past week we’ve seen this dynamic play out with several members of the GOP: Senators Kyle (AZ), Coburn (OK), and minority leader Mitch McConnell (KY), all of whom keep intimating that the federal deficit is such a horrific problem that unless we deal with it while we’re in the midst of this recession we will all soon be turning to thunderdome to set our economic policies instead of relying upon their wisdom, have come out and said that huge Bush tax cuts of 2003, set to expire this year, have no effect upon the deficit. McConnell went even a step further in defending Kyle’s suggestion that tax cuts should never need to be offset and said:

“That there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually
diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of
these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was
expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

This is the kind of denial which libertarians and conservatives constantly deride their opponents for. But in the so-serious, accepted, world of free-market, small government, ideology some of the most powerful men in our country feel free to spout this nonsense. Business Insider recently illustrated effect of these tax cuts and their relationship to the deficit:

With this data we have to ask the same old question that we always have to ask of the Republican leadership in recent memory: are they disingenuous or stupid? It’s not often an easy question to answer. This same group of men were unconcerned and complicit as the deficit tripled under President Bush. Were they being disingenuous then? Believing that the deficit was a problem, but that our military conquests would reap economic rewards to offset their spending or were they simply stupid and have recently found new insight? Are they being disingenuous today, believing that hyping the deficit feeds into uneducated fears over unemployment and can be used to exploit class and racial rifts in our country for political gain? Or are they simply stupid and truly believe that by reducing government spending at a time when consumer and business spending is very low will positively effect employment or people’s lives? As I said, it’s often difficult to tell. In this particular instance  it may be that these men were so blinded by ideology that they actually believed, beyond any reason or evidence (ie. stupid), that that tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration would actually increase revenues; yet, after six years of cuts and no increase in revenues and a sinking job market what rationale can they sight? This same naive ideology?

Thus we arrive where we began. Why are radical free-market conservatives and some libertarians (who really should be referred to as anarcho-capitalists) taken as serious economic authorities while communists are dismissed as crazed loons? In reality there is little difference between these groups. They both have a utopian vision: one finds it in a equal society of communal order, the other finds it in economic efficiency created by an unfettered marketplace. In both instances human beings are perceived as rationally good actors: a good communist would never take advantage of another individual because it would ultimately violate the communal contract and the commune would punish him; likewise a free-marketer would never take advantage of an individual because market forces would punish them in the long term. Both systems seem to argue that great inequality is necessary at first before utopianism is achieved: enormous economic gaps between rich and poor for the free-marketers and the dictatorship of the proletariat for the communists. Of course there are essential differences in the classical definitions of these systems. Communism, for instance, was envisioned as a holistic system encompassing history, economics, and political rule. Capitalism (the root of the free-market ideology), on the other hand, was not considered a political philosophy until very recently, when it was presented as an alternative to the holistic system of communism.

In one of my seminars on political theory, my professor used to draw a circle on the blackboard to illustrate how opposing political ideologies could generate similar policies or beliefs. He would note a policy and two ideological beliefs, and then we would travel the circle clockwise or counter-clockwise to arrive from the belief to the policy. What became illustrated was that the more radical or extreme the ideology the shorter the distance it had to travel to an extreme policy, regardless if the ideology started on the left or the right. This circle of radicalism used to be accepted as simple fact, but in today’s world the circle is broken. Radical free-marketers are allowed to express patently erroneous theories and policies, proven by experience to be false, and never are held to account in the mainstream debate. Instead we are expected to simply accept their arguments and ideas as the well reasoned result of an intriguing ideology which has simply never been tried.

, , ,

By sjk | Posted in Economy, Politics | Comments (0)

The Past is Never the Past

July 11, 2010 – 14:57

Earlier this month Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote something which I think resonates throughout recent history and succinctly describes our current situation. In his July 1st column he wrote:

When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.

Krugman sees the austerity responses to our economic problems — high unemployment, below average GDP growth, etc — as irrational, ill-informed, and, perhaps, disingenuous. Of course, he’s completely correct. Today’s hyper-concerns over our Federal deficit bear no-relation to today’s economic realities. Instead they arise irrationally from the free-market ideology which has been de rigueur for the past 25 years. According to this ideology there are only two economic pitfalls to ever be concerned about: government interference (re. regulation or taxation) and inflation.

Within the free-market bubble, regulation always stifles business interests; thus, reducing market growth. In the real world, of course, regulation serves to protect consumers and citizens, and in fact can lead to market competition, as Robert Waldmann observed about telecom regulation in the 90’s which reduced consumer prices, spurred technology, and created employment across multiple sectors.

Like regulation, free-marketers always see inflation as something to be avoided at all costs. We see evidence of this in the constant fretting over inflation in the federal reserve reports and in the extreme flogging of the issue by the Beck-apocalypse crowd, who horde gold in anticipation of the day they can gun down their neighbors, who are pushing around shopping carts full of dollar bills. Again, in the real world, controlled inflation can be a useful economic tool: it often increases real world wages and reduces personal and small business debt. These reasons, of course, are why the free-marketers fear inflation so much. Over the past 35 years wages for most Americans have essentially stagnated:

In order to compensate for this wage freeze, the markets opened up consumer credit lines which flowed easily in the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s. Free-marketers view this tradeoff as a major win for the market economy. Yet, the tradeoff was, and has proven to be, unsustainable. With some 60% of GDP tied to consumer spending, personal debt at all time high levels, and tight credit markets the economy has ground to a halt. Yet, free-market advocates continue to try to re-establish this system of the past 30 years; hence, the ~.5% interest rates currently offered by the fed.

But what of the unemployment rate? Why don’t these oh-so serious free-market advocates see this as a problem? Simple, it simply doesn’t fit their ideology. For these advocates  it is easier to fall back to earlier myths then to question their ideology. In this case they turn back to a 100 year old American trope, which was eloquently explained in one of my freshman textbooks:

The starting point, for educated Americans of the nineteenth century, was the belief that human affairs were ruled by immutable law. The central law of political economy was the the general good would be best served by the pursuit of individual self-interest. If, under competition, there were difficulties or suffering in society, these were necessary spurs to the effort. Rewards went to those who worked hard and deserved them, while poverty was almost always a punishment for vice and laziness. It would be both foolish and immoral for the state or for any private organization to intervene in economic affairs.

These laws of political economy were, said the textbooks, the laws of God. They were also, for those who accepted the new lessons of Darwinian evolution, the laws of biology. The struggle for existence was the means by which the human race had reached its present high development. Interference would simply help the weak and unfit, injure the strong, and weaken the race. Often spokesmen of laissez faire combined the two sources of authority: free competition was the means by which evolution took place under Divine superintendence. (Sellers, May, et. al., A Synopsis of American History)

We’ve all seen this ugly attitude rear it head in recent debates over unemployment extensions. Politicians have implied and even stated that those suffering from long term joblessness are too lazy, or spoiled, to get a job or are simply immoral drug users feeding at the public trough. Of course, our modern economy and job creation are tied far more to global demand and a desire to establish profit through supply “efficiencies” than to simple bootstrap individuality. Yet, this myth continues to permeate economic policy.

The “bootstrap” myth is not unlike the accepted belief that somehow the federal budget is similar to one’s household expense sheet. This analogy is constantly called upon by armchair free-marketing economists at every turn. Like all overly simple analogies, it bears no resemblance to reality: in my household, I cannot issue 1,5, or 10 year bonds to offset my immediate debt, nor can I create currency to spur growth. Yet for some reason, some Americans seem to think that the federal deficit is somehow effecting job creation. It’s not.

With government interest rates are at all time lows, taxation a 50 year low, joblessness still remains high. It is time to discard all of these free-market myths and address the real economic problems we are faced with. While it may be too risky to raise interest rates, at the moment, the government must step in an help create demand. It must stop trying to respond counter-productively to problems which are imaginary — like high inflation or over-regulation — and respond to ache that regular Americans are feeling and reacting to: high unemployment and under-employment. Paul Krugman has written that another government stimulus is needed to help prime the economy. Again, he’s completely correct. Yet for long term growth we should also look towards regulation which creates competition and reduces monopolies and too-big to fail institutions. For hundreds of mid-sized banks or small radio stations will employee more people and create more innovation then a couple of ultra large financial behemoths or media conglomerates ever could.

, ,

By sjk | Posted in Economy, Politics | Comments (1)