February 2009 archive

I’ve always considered  the Hindus to be the endearing exception  to my “all religions are dangerous to others” rule. I mean, how dangerous can a religion be when they have a god who  has an elephant head? Apparently I was mistaken about our Hindu brethren and sistren: they’re as nuts as the rest. I look at the lunatics of  every major religion, and somehow the fact that my pagan Celtic ancestors went in  for the odd bit of headhunting  and human sacrifice seems almost benign. (and yes, I recognize that this organization is purportedly a “nationalist” or “cultural” organization, but this sort of “defend the culture” madness is always driven by deep wells of religious lunacy. Always.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…

Militants belonging to a group called Sri Ram Sena, who claim to be custodians of Indian culture, said Valentine’s Day is un-Indian.

The threat comes days after the group’s activists stormed a bar in the south western city of Mangalore, dragging out and beating women they accused of acting obscenely and “going astray”.

The attack led to fears an extremist “Hindu Taliban” was on the rise in India.

Gangadhar Kulkarni, an activist in the group, which is a radical wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, said: “If people celebrate the day despite our warning, then we will definitely attack them.”

“Valentine’s Day is definitely not Indian culture. We will not allow celebration of that day in any form,” added Pramod Mutalik, the group’s founder.

Sigh.

There are those who will dismiss this as yet another Obama bashing rant, but unlike Rush Limbaugh and the Republicans he leads I really would like Obama to succeed.

I understand Rush.  I am hyper partisan.  I never accepted W as my president even during the smoking pile nobody could have anticipated bin laden determined to attack in the US bullhorn bullshit 95% of YOU! you willfully ignorant accessories to war crimes times you thought he was the bees knees.

I want to grind your nose in your tortures and murders, your common thefts and lies and pederasty and perversion that you accepted by your complicity.  Up against the wall motherfuckers.  Were I not fundamentally opposed to the death penalty you might hope to provoke me to a quicker relief from your shame and degradation than the lifetime in Spandau I think your pissy pants craven cowardice and oathbreaking deserve.

Obama has never been a liberal.  The DLC assumed he was one of theirs until he disavowed them.

The reason progressive Democrats deluded themselves is that Obama was consistently anti-Iraq.  For them the real game is whether we meet the 16 month deadline and the Odierno – Petraeus – McArthur axis are doing what they can to impede it.  No nukes in Korea.  Get the troops out or find another job.

Frankly if he satisfies that minimum requirement Obama need fear no challenge from the left, for the most part they will be co-opted.  Those of us who care about little things like the Geneva Convention and the Magna Carta and the US Constitution can hope they get carried along on the tide but…

We are the 5%ers and proud of it.

Still who knows?  The level of ignorance about simple dimple economics astounds me.

These Chicago School Free Market Fundamentalists, these Randian Hard On Libertarians, these Friedmanite (Milton and Thomas) Monitarist Morans refuse to recognize that we have efficiented ourselves out of business.  We don’t make anything except conmen who will sell you a lump of wood and call it nutmeg.

Tulips.

Keynesian denial seems to have permeated our discourse and people no longer understand that it’s possible to over supply demand.

Supply side economics is a lie.

It doesn’t matter how much you can produce if nobody is buying.  Prices fall into a deflationary spiral and you have an economy with excess capacity.  Cars rotting on lots, high inventory, job cutting, fall in demand.

DUH!

You need to reduce inventory and create scarcity- plow under those debts and fuck the creditors.  You need to create demand and re-inflate.  This is basically spending, but if you were wise and responsible you’d spend it on stuff that was valuable and would last, still spending alone will do because of the multiplier effect.

If I pay you a dollar it doesn’t just go to you.  It goes to your Starbucks barrista and from them to their Chiropractor and Aroma Therapist (you stand on your fucking feet all day and it doesn’t fucking matter).  Eventually your dollar ends up in the pocket of someone who decides to invest it in something like a Credit Default Swap and with less stimulative effect than a bet on 24, odd, black when the ball comes up 00 the coupier rakes it in.  Sucks to be you.

In the mean time someone got coffee which made the coffee people happy and the barrista stands a little straighter.

Fuck you, you tightfisted greed heads.

Come In

Bring A Friend

Enjoy The Music

Bob Seger Night Moves

This Pony Party may be treated as an open thread.  Please do not rec the Pony Party.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

I woke up Sunday thinking that Attorney General Eric Holder could save the lives of the 49 people who are presently facing the federal death penalty.  He could save their lives simply by reviewing the determinations made by the Bush Administration AG’s directing that federal prosecutors should seek death in these cases, and he could decide that death wasn’t an appropriate maximum penalty in these cases.  He could decide, for example, that life without parole was enough.  More than enough.  And this simple decision could save someone’s life.  This simple decision could also put the United States in the main stream of civilized countries in the world that do not impose the death penalty.  Ever.  And it could prevent us in the United States from having even more unjustifiable blood on our hands.  And it would move us slowly, gradually toward ultimate abolition of the death penalty in the United States. What a great idea!

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

This week marks 49 years since the Greensboro, NC, sit-ins, the historic protest which launched the Black Freedom Struggle in this country onto a new trajectory. Next year we will see a lot of celebration of the courage of the four students who first sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and of the chain reaction it set off. Or at least I sure hope we will.

I wrote such a tribute myself, yesterday. (You can read it directly below the fold.) In the course of refreshing my fading memory, via Google, to complete the task, I found another facet of the Greensboro story. It’s one I had never come across, and one that will, I think, resonate with anyone who has spent much time in the activist trenches.

Many of us know the story of how four students on February 1 became dozens and by February 4, hundreds, as students across North Carolina and the South girded to emulate them and launch the wave of struggles that finally killed Jim Crow.

The other side of the story has to do with the five months it took to crack the management at Woolworth’s and S.H. Kress and the rest of the Greensboro power structure.

The multiplication of protesters in that first week is now at the heart of the legend. But that level of activity was hard to sustain, especially as the students’ demands remained unmet and white hostility grew more intense.

Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil remained part of the organizing core from Day One. McCain recalls:

What people won’t talk (about), what people don’t like to remember is that the success of that movement in Greensboro is probably attributed to no more than eight or 10 people. I can say this: when the television cameras stopped rolling and we didn’t have eight or 10 reporters left, the folk left. I mean, there were just a very faithful few. McNeil and I can’t count the nights and evenings that we literally cried because we couldn’t get people to help us staff a picket line.

I don’t know about you, but I can recall lulls in more than one campaign for justice  when fatigue, frustration, setbacks and doubt had me in tears. When it happens again, and it will, I hope I remember to draw on this part of the lesson of Greensboro, not the audacity and the courage of the students, but the dogged persistence of the core they built.

1. The Sacramento Bee reports the Stimulus bill is nothing like Roosevelt’s New Deal. “The $900 billion economic stimulus package being debated in Congress, aside from being similarly huge, bears little resemblance to that New Deal spending spree. Today, lawmakers talk about infrastructure and tax credits. Back in the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a more grass-roots approach, putting people directly to work.”

   The New Deal left a “lasting impression” on America. “Roosevelt created a civilian army of 8.5 million workers, paying them through such agencies as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps.” Gray Brechin, a historical geographer and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, said:

   “I’m just blown away by all that they did during 10 years of horrible economic depression.” …

   “It’s all around us, but it’s invisible,” he said…

   “I always liken this to discovering a lost civilization that we forgot about,” Brechin said. “It just happens to be ours.“

   Imagine what FDR could have done with a $900 billion stimulus package, then think of what we’re going to get. Try not to get more depressed.

Four at Four continues with signs of the consumer society dying, banks still not lending, epic fail on public transit, and Iran launches satellite into space.