Chicken Feed & Moralizing Hypocrisy

NEW YORK TIMES  DECLARES WAR  ON BERNIE

No sooner was Hillary’s loss a done failure in New Hampshire, than the New York Times fired a broadside at Bernie.

In a front page Op-Ed, Marc Schmitt of the “New America” foundation declared that the era of expansive liberalism was over; the future belonged to invisible incrementalism. 

“The essence of Mr. Sanders’s version of liberalism is government programs. Expansive initiatives that provide benefits to a broad cross-class constituency,...

“That’s in sharp contrast to the policy approach of the Obama administration since about 2011, and also to Hillary Clinton and most of Mr. Sanders’s congressional colleagues...

“[T]he future of social and economic policy will involve, for better or worse, these complex, incremental and often invisible changes, instead of big programs.”

If one substitutes the word “chicken-feed” for “incrementalism” you know all you need to know about Hillary’s “progressivity” and the Times’ left-over centrism. 

Schmitt’s piece cannot be considered a “guest column” printed — on the front page — as “diversity of view.”  The New America foundation is headed by Anne-Marie Slaughter a political intimate of Hillary Clinton whom the Times has endorsed for president.  Schmitt’s piece is a Times broadside in alter voce and represents what the Times thinks is bad about Sanders and good about Clinton.

Feel the Invisibility

One might wonder exactly what “often invisible” changes might be.  Does the author of this assertive piece mean  “You’re feeling better, you just don’t feel it.” ?

Actually, yes. He goes on to say, “Citizens don’t see or feel these initiatives and may not know that they are benefiting from a government initiative at all.”

Not only do they not feel the benefits, the benefits might actually not exist! 

As an example of invisible incrementality, Schmitt cites an obscure regulatory tweak which will “set millions of Americans up with low risk, low-cost retirement savings accounts.”  Five paragraphs later, Schmitt acknowledges that the tweak will “not be enough to meet the shortfall in Americans’ retirement savings or reduce inequality of wealth.”

Rejoice!  Not only will you not feel the invisible benefit, you won’t be benefitted at all!  You will be incrementally less screwed.

Think tanks are the modern version of feudal vassals or roman clientela.   All three are made up of interlocking (and often inter-marrying) networks  of  patronage existing through  complex social bonds in service of agreed upon socio-economic-military interests as symbolized in some grand personage.   Roman clients were expected to attend, applaud and make  hubbub about and for their patrons, including  a display of Fumbling the Scrolls (Oh how many scrolls!) in the great man’s wake.   

In the present case, the New York Times is simply orchestrating the parade.  What it and Hillary’s coterie have decided is that, for better or worse, the incremental benefits will be so eensy teensy weensy, you won’t even notice them!  Hurrah for “common sense” programs.  Phooey on big, broad, gauche liberalism!

But the Times did not only have Bernie in its sights.  It was taking aim just as much at Theodore Roosevelt who, back in 1910, pronounced,

“Where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government...

“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock."

Contrast,  the New York/New America Times Op-Ed,

"[Hillary’s] agendas are most interesting and novel for the absence of big, universal programs that require legislative action. Instead, they test the limits of what government can do by rearranging the pieces of existing programs, using regulations, incentives to states, tax credits and “nudges” informed by behavioral economics in place of direct spending."

“Most interesting?”  Certainly not “novel.”  What the Times is advocating — and what it makes abundantly clear that Hillary is trumpeting — is a return to what did not work under Wilson or Hoover. 

“Nudges  informed by behavioral economics”?  What the hell is that?  It’s Hooverian “volunteerism” dressed up in millenial-speak; for the difference between Hoover and Roosevelt was not that Hoover did nothing, but that he refrained from “broad-based” mandatory national programs to address a national crisis.   

Hillary’s ghosted Op-Ed is also hard nudge advocacy for Justice Rhenquist’s “New Federalism” — the core of which was his engineered devolution of power to the "laboratory of the states"  (quoth) as testers and tinkerers’ of social fixes. 

A fuller-bore reaction could hardly be imagined. Rehnquist’s New Federalism might better have been called the New Feudalism, because the States were holdovers from the pre-monarchical era.  No — I am not making this up.  The Andrus Plan of 1688 had sought to consolidate the colonies into a single Dominion in common; but the Colonies (that is the Chief Families in them) revolted at the prospect of loosing their manorial privileges, including some rather peculiar ones.

It is hardly unfettered imagination to imagine Rehnquist slurring and salivating at how the States were best suited to “test” and incrementally  “experiment” with social issues such as Negro slavery.

After writing a clerk’s memo against desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — (“I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by "liberal" colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.") —  Rehnquist went back to Arizona were he became national campaign manager for Barry Goldwater...   Hillary Clinton’s own youthful hero.

To ramble on in this vein may seem like a digression, but it is actually not.  It helps to put things in historical context because the Times hopes you wont.  

It supported Clinton (II) because he “refashioned the Democratic Party’s approach to government”  He “stood up to the spendthrifts in his own party”  He “bucked the democratic leadership to secure the free trade agreement”   In the same breath, without a blush, it lauded Clinton’s “promise” to ease “unfair attacks on the poor and legal immigrants.”

It supported Mondale noting that, “He has laudably continued the deregulation begun by Jimmy Carter.” 

It endorsed McGovern, Humphrey, Johnson and Kennedy because Goldwater was a loose cowboy and because the Times bore a deep (and mutual) animosity against Nixon on account of the latter’s anti-semitism and hopelessly pathetic, back water petite bourgeois background.

But this apparent liberalism was only “situational” like the occasional lapse at a truck stop. More true to form it  endorsed Eisenhower twice, Thomas Dewey twice and Wendell Wilkie over FDR.

In 1936   the editorial board pronounced, “The New York Times, a conservative newspaper in its own sphere, believes that the public interest will best be served” by the reelection of Roosevelt because the president will “make his second Adminstration more conservative than the first”  and his reelection will provide insurance against radicalism of the sort which the United States [i.e. its ruling class] has most to fear.”

1933 endorsed FDR because “his speeches have not [sic] indicated clear and strong and burning convictions.... Imagine what would have been done by such a man as William J. Bryan...!” 

In 1912 it endorsed Wilson first, Taft second... any one but Roosevelt third.  “It would be an ill omen and ... want of sense if so large a part of the people should yield to the appeals of Mr. Roosevelt.

This sketch of the Times’ editorial trajectory indicates what a fundamentally conservative paper the Times actually is.   It may espouse socially symbolic “liberal” causes on behalf of “cognized groups” but it reacts with horror and disparagement at any “broad based” programs aimed at ending the economic alienation of the working class.

Let us be clear.  The fundamental injustice of the U.S. political economy is that it alienates the worker from the fruits of his own productivity.  He produces economic value (“profit”) but it accrues to others rather than himself. To make matters worse he is economically oppressed by a variety of taxes, fees and other transfers of wealth labelled as “cost of living.”  His work itself is alienated from his own free will.  It is not an expression of anything he wants or of any collaboration among self-owning men; rather he is simply a unit of labour (a “human resource”) in someone else’s scheme. The American worker is “free” to travel where he wants, to tune in the channel where he wants, to sing the hymns and buy the junk he wants; but he is in all fundamental respects a slave and a serf.  

Neither Bernie Sanders nor LBJ nor either of the two Roosevelts proposed to fundamentally alter this system. They wanted some broad and pervasive adjustments that would render it less unjust; return some greater quantum of value to the worker who produced it; spread the costs and ease the burden of overall living expenses; provide the worker with economic security and social leisure if not actually determinative political power.

It is this adjustment which the Times disparages today and has always disparaged as “radicalism.”   What it toots as “incrementalism” is simply code for the least redistribution of anything the ruling class can get away with.

The genocidal vileness of the Times’ invisible incrementalism is best illustrated in relation to climate change.  Exactly what degree of imperceptible incremental reductions in global warming does the Times have in mind?  Something small enough not to be noticed at all?

What kind of insanity is this?

Oh but surely when the Times decries “broad brush liberal” approaches it doesn’t have global warming in mind.  Oh but surely it does, because “broad brush” reductions in global warming are absolutely not possible without predicate broad-brush reforms to the industrial-financial system which produces global warming.

One of the key ingredients of Clintonian Triangulation, is what might be called “issue alienation” — disconnecting the necessary relationships between various aspects of an underlying problem. 

In fact “issue alienation” is the key feature of so-called U.S. “liberalism.”  It is what enables a creeps like the Clintons to pretend to be all in favor of Black empowerment or women’s rights or Our Precious Children even while they work to end welfare, curtail unions and undercut the laws and programs which would give people — including Blacks, women and children — real security and real opportunity. 

In tandem,  issue-alienation allows the Clintons — and their toney clarions in the Times (or is it the reverse?) — to erect a moralistic Potemkin Village of cognized group chicken feed (“entitlements”) and pleasant but largely symbolic measures which hide the political disenfranchisement and economic impoverishment they actually -- and broadly -- promote.

As if matters could not be more nauseating than they are, one need only recall that there was nothing “incremental” about NAFTA or the TPP or the 2009 bank bailout.  When it comes to safeguarding the core interests of American Capital, Blue Dog Democrats and the Times get as non-incremental and broad based as necessary.

To niggardly stinginess one can add grotesque hypocrisy. That is what the Times and Hillary stand for.

   

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Benie Concedes

Allowing Clinton to label herself a "progressive" (because she believed in progress) and conceding that Obama was also a progressive, Bernie all but conceded the nomination.  By failing to distinguish himself and define his cause as something other than what Obama and Clinton have offered, Bernie undercut the raison d'etre of his vaunted "political revolution."

As explained in Chipster's Journal,  the word "progressive" has a defined meaning in U.S. political history.  It includes nice and decent things like raising standards of living, conservation, and so on.  More importantly, however, progressivism was and remains a rejection of Jefferson individualism and its political correlative of State Sovereignty.  It stands for a concept of government as the custodian of common resources and socio-economic welfare with powers to regulate the use as well as the distribution of wealth.   

If Bernie's "democratic socialism" did not mean this it meant nothing.  Clinton and Obama are not progressives but globalist neo-liberals (to say nothing of warmongering).  Bernie was not obligated to delve into the arcana of political philosophy  -- arcana that are beyond the mental capacities of most U.S. denizens in any event.   But it was incumbent on him to draw a line between himself and his opponents and to assert, at the very least, that while Obama and Clinton might like to think of themselves as "progressives" they have both utterly failed at enacting anything on par with either Roosevelt.

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And from Versailles....

Asked the other day, why she ate cake while the people in Paris starved, l'Antoinette replied, "Well, that's what they served."

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Hillary's Inner Goldwater

Recoiling from her victory in Iowa, Hellary Clinton lashed out at Bernie Sanders saying,

“Our founders knew if we were going to survive as the great democracy they were creating we would have to have a system that kept the passions at bay ...”

Oh! the progressivity!  What “the Founders" knew is that if they were to survive as a ruling class they had to keep the populace at bay. Anyone who has gone to law school or studied U.S. political history must know that the Federalist Convention of 1788 was a pre-emptive counter-coup by the conservative elements who feared those populist, democratic movements they called "mobocracy."

There were a several factors which impelled the newly sovereign states toward a “more perfect union.” Among them,  intra-state jealousy which made the newly minted “republics” susceptible to being played off against one another by some foreign power. Settlement of claims and access to credit was another.  But the chief concern was democratic radicalism among single family farmers, indentured servants and a growing number of young, illiterate under-employed hired hands.  

James Madison put it succinctly in Federalist Paper 10, in which he famously discussed the inflamed passions of political factions,

"But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

Madison went on to say that while “the causes of faction cannot be removed, ... relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” 

Controlling the “effects” of the lower classes was  the principal purpose of the “more perfect union.”

The Federalists succeeded admirably. They resurrected House of Lords (the Senate) and gave it effective veto over the lower popular House. If that didn't work, they concocted a judicial form of Curia Regis, to veto anything that might get by the Senate. From the Holy Roman Empire, they borrowed an Electoral College to insure that no passionate leader would ever really be elected president without approval from the better, cooler class. They dressed up institutional deadlock as "checks and balances" and packaged the whole reactionary affair as "the world's first and best democracy."

Even States’ rights got into the act; for it has always been assumed and understood that the States themselves would be the first line of defense in “handling their own.”  Over and over throughout the course of U.S. history movements for national, popular reform have been broken on the rock of state sovereignty — or “federalism” as it is sometimes called.

On the other hand, the “imperative” of national (“interstate”) commerce got trucked out whenever the issue concerned the facilitation of railroads, industrial development, corporate rescue or the promotion of more innovative financial “products.” The entire premise of F.D.R’s  “national regulation” was implicit in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)  and  in the Lexicon of Doubletalk that regulates political discourse, “regulation” includes the granting of privileges and immunities to corporate capital. 

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court frankly (and correctly) dubbed F. D. Roosevelt’s reforms as National Capitalism.   But the truth is that national capitalism was always the American Agenda.  When  Calvin Coolidge said that the “business of America is business” he was not being polemical but laconically factual.

Hillary knows all of this  and is perfectly content with it.   She is more than content with the "super-delegate" system which gives 12 to  20 percent of primary and convention votes to unelected delegates, appointed on the basis of their status as "party officials" and "friends of the establishment."  Her unmistakable allusion to Madison's essay on controlling the impulses of political passions could not be more clear.  Anyone who knows Hillary knows that keeping the populace at bay is what she has always been about.

This is the same shameless Hillary who just last Fall was gushing over how much she admired Eleanor Roosevelt... you know that passionate advocate of the not-so-well-off.  But at last Hellary’s Inner Goldwater has burst out.  It could not be repressed forever.   Hopefully people will not forget it in favor of the bullshit she puts on a plate.

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Hillary's Loss in Iowa

There are no Pyrrhic Victories in sports; but in politics, as in war, some wins protest too much.  Hellary's expected three point victory over Bernie Sanders bespeaks nothing but failed leadership and  stunning electoral distrust.

The question is not what Hellary takes out of Iowa but what she put in.   And what she put in was something like a Soviet tank assault.  Hillary went into Iowa with millions of dollars at her back and the Democratic Party machinery fully at her disposal.   Like the legions of the Later Empire, she went into battle with awesome recognition and glittering armour.   And in spite of this terrifying political might, an aged mouse from Vermont pulls within three fucking points?

The Clinton Camp, which is good at nothing if not at self-promotion, will clang, cymbal and gong Hellary's victory for all the ear can bear.  But to anyone of reason it will ring hollow. 

The vote tomorrow is not the national election, which historically is always close.  This is a primary election among a subsidiary part of the electorate that is presumptively well disposed to a person who has been at the centre of the Democratic Party's power structure for two decades and who is, in all but name, the President's anointed successor.    This is not the battle against the foe but rather a rallying of the troops.  And the troops are all but mutinous. 

Hellary may walk away with the prize; but it will be a battered horn. 

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Our Present Future

Manuel Vals, France's prime minister, stated yesterday that France's state of emergency would last indefinitely. It is a total and global war that we are facing with terrorism," he added. "The war we are conducting must also be total, global and ruthless."

Really?

Ah, indeed... and so today we hear,

 

"Total war is the demand of the hour. The danger facing us is enormous. ...  The question here is not one of method, but of the goal, namely eliminating the danger"

Danke, Vals.

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RapsNacht im Köln

One has to sneer at the inconvenient marriage between Germany’s politically correct left and its politically incorrect right, over the “sexual assaults” which allegedly took place in Cologne’s cathedral square on New Year’s Eve.

Even now, no-one - and that includes the police - really knows what happened.   BBC

And yet, without knowing what really happened, the official world, the media and the public have gone off half-cocked over the issue. (Actually, full blown cocked.)

Aside from the squirming as the multi-cultural, Kumbaya Left finds itself embraced-in-schadenfreude by the cultural integrity volk at PEGIDA, the real issue is the danger of language and how our species’ supposedly superior capacity for articulated howling turns us into beasts worse than hyenas.

Shrieking headlines — not just in the tabloid press — have screeched about women “running the gauntlet,” “sexual attacks” and “rape-fests.”  If one asks if anyone was actually “raped,” as in unconsented vaginal intercourse, the answer is an indignant accusation of misogyny.

So let’s go back to basics.

The word “assault” derives from the Latin ad-saltus meaning to leap or jump at.  It does not require any contact because the harm is in the spooking.  This makes the concept of “sexual assault” rather problematic. 

Is rushing to embrace someone a sexual assault? If so, how is it distinguished from a gushing co-sharing of our common humanity?   If “sexual assault” refers to a “jumping at” which is sexually motivated, how do determine a person’s motive?

Unfortunately, to make matters less clear, the word “assault” is commonly used as the equivalent of a “battery” which originally meant a hitting of some sort.

Now, a rape could be called a sexual battery, because the essence of rape is that the male penis is used an instrument of violence on the person.  But in that case the word “rape” is sufficient to describe what happened.

Alas, to make matters even more unfortunate, the legal definition of “battery” is not limited to hitting but encompasses any “offensive touching, howsoever slight.”

This creates a whole host of uncertainties in its own right.  But in the context of “sex crimes” it can be supposed that a “sexual assault” is coterminous with a “sexual battery”

What then constitutes a offensive sexual contact which is not rape?  Well... tit-grabbing, crotch groping and butt slapping come to mind.  An attempt to make close, labial contact might also qualify.

But since an “assault” does not require contact, vague hand motions accompanied by lewd and leering remarks would also qualify. 

The ultimate result is that the term “sexual assault” encompasses a very wide spectrum of conduct. 

The problem with reporting vaguely and amorphously about "sexual assaults" is that people fill in the blank with whatever part of the spectrum they want to imagine, which inevitably ends up being the worst.   And, of course, nothing gets worse than swarthy dark men "sexually [   ]ing and  [   ]ing"  (our) white women... 

This is not to say that crotch grabbing is nice (or, in the current puritanically correct lexicon, “appropriate”).  It is to say that some sexually motivated “offensive” touching is not as serious as rape. 

No one, male or female, likes “unwanted” sexual attention.  A wink from someone we find incredibly hot, is just as incredibly welcome.  Oh lucky day!  That same act — the wink — from someone we are not in the least interested in is annoying, icky, repugnant.  That’s why bitches snap.  It’s natural.  It’s also the luck of the draw.

What distinguishes what happened at Cologne from Rio’s Carnevale?  Not much.  Inebriated, happy males, venting their sexual urges by whistling, making lewd comments and perhaps groping is not the Rape of the Sabines. 

What would the world say of same Pious Nellie, who walked out of the festive crowds at Rio complaining (indignantly) about being “sexually assaulted” ?  C’mon, comes to mind.

In ordinary circumstances, a male butt slapping a woman at work or in the supermarket, without being signaled to do so, could rightly be reproved with a misdemeanor.  But walking into a crowd of foreseeably inebriated party goers on New Years Eve???  What were the women thinking?  That they were going to sing Nun Danket?

Well... this is Germany and not Brazil.  So perhaps a certain Buddenbrooksian Pall hangs over things.  Still it would be nice to know what happened before the press works itself up into a frenzy over the sexual holocaust on RapsNacht.

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