Got this from a reader post by a bellumregio on Kevin Drum’s column regarding GOP hack David Frum. Thought it was pretty spot on and one of the best analysis on this topic I’ve seen in awhile…

Frum, the Ivy League Canadian in love with Empire, is coming up against the provincial anti-government of Dixie’s fair land. George Bush, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee represent three Southern types. Although Bush has Yankee roots he is a typical, and unremarkable, aristocratic Texan with a taste for extraction resources and crony government. His cultural model of government has more in common with the planters of the Caribbean than with the enlightened democrats of Europe. Ron Paul is a small town no government idealist. For him it is plain fundamentalism in liberty and the Constitution. Huckabee is a Southern paternal populist. Although he will not shy way from a fight he will take into account the well being of the good herrenfolk democracy of the Christian community. This makes him less of an imperialist than careless aristocrats like George Bush.

The Southernization of the conservative movement is what Frum does not like. Southern conservative anti-intellectualism, the rejection of experts, the provincialism, the crippling cronyism, the top-down organization, low infrastructure investment and the worthless small town moralism do not make a competent empire. Empire needs experts, knowledgeable bureaucracy, and money.

The conservative movement in the US is really just a Southernization of national government and the economy. Huckabee even says that the US was founded on honor. He really means the culture of the Southern US is an honor society. This is not the whole story but it accounts for the particular tenor of conservatism in the US.

—————

I think the war in Iraq has highlighted a split in the nation. Old style isolationism is long gone. But we do have the elites on one hand who embrace neoliberal economic policies including global labor arbitrage and immigration to some degree, reject risk-sharing schemes that put a burden on the haves, and are prone to foreign interventions to prop up Pax Americana. Opposing this economic axis we have anti-imperialist progressives and the old herrenfolk democrats who find their sense of patriotism betrayed. The later find Ron Paul and Huckabee attractive candidates. In essence there is a national move across the political spectrum against the elites for a Middle Class America-first politics that rejects the foreign for the domestic. It will become isolationism or worse if the elites do not respond by governing for the many and not the few who benefit from neoliberalism.

Read the original article Here

Good to see this key issue regarding the commodification of our rights given some attention in the major media.

Money, by definition, is a medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values in the market. We are taught that the value of some things, such as our integrity as individuals, our privacy, and our right to free expression, cannot be expressed in monetary terms.

But in the United States today, we apply this principle inconsistently - and generally in ways that undermine democracy and favor wealthy people and special interests.

The US Supreme Court, in its 1976 decision in the case Buckley v. Valeo, essentially concluded that free expression can be counted in dollars. Money spent to influence elections, the court concluded, is a form of constitutionally protected free speech.

———–

Other Western democracies presume political speech and access to airwaves are priceless. So France, for example, requires all media to provide an equal forum to all candidates, if it is provided to one. Free access to broadcasting’s mass audiences is wholly consistent with democracy and the public interest. Moreover, the FCC already has sufficient authority to make this a condition to hold an otherwise free broadcast license as a public trust. Without the requirement to spend huge amounts of money to access instant mass audiences, candidates could instead focus on issues of concern to the American people, and the cost of elections would decrease.

But perhaps the United States instead will continue to act as if basic rights can be bought, sold, and owned.

The article, going to the heart of the communications rights issue, does a good job in deconstructing the underlying reasons why this condition exists, and what can - and should - be done to rectify it in our civic culture.

Highly recommended read

Ah yes, the best democracy money can buy.

The corporacrats certainly know how to quickly discern whose in charge of filling up the feeding troughs.

As the new Congress considers legislating network neutrality for internet service providers, telecoms in Colorado are piling on the campaign cash for Democrats who will decide the issue. Campaign donations from telecoms in the state have shifted dramatically from Republican candidates to Democratic ones over the 2004-2008 election cycles.

Read The Full Report

Though this is not meant as an endorsement, I do find the headline of this article first published in the Guardian U.K. to provide a pretty good reason to support John Edwards’ candidacy.

What is interesting is some of the feedback I have gotten in regards to this, and the claims that Ron Paul would actually be the candidate most feared by the Corporatocracy.

There is no question there that Ron Paul would be no fan favorite of the corporate elites. I myself have a fair amount of respect and affinity for Rep. Paul’s principled stances on a number of important issues (though he does appeal to a certain contingent of the American electorate which is rather disturbing. Endorsements from the Aryan Nation don’t exactly get me all warm and fuzzy about someone’s political career).

However, without getting into the debate over who might be more ‘realistically viable’ as a candidate, I would think that in comparison to Edwards, Paul would have some critical deficiencies in regards to this question. The thing about Ron Paul is that he promotes an economic ideology that provides, whether intentional or not, an enriching fertilizer and an open playing field for these criminal entities to operate. Market Fundamentalism is the flag and mantra of the Corporatocracy. Paul’s economic prescriptions have been the basis for the provision of the political leverage that these entities have been wielding since day one, since their earlier dominance at the turn of the last century, to even the basis for the original economic structuring of American political power with the usurpation of the American Revolution by the implementation of a property-over-people’s rights constitution. The mechanism for providing for minority control over majority rule has been the hallmark of the American political structure since day one (it is, in it’s most literal and blatant incarnation, the very essence of the slave state which America was founded as).

The question comes down to, do we live in a democratic society that contains a market economy, or do we live in a market society? Unfortunately, I just don’t see Ron Paul as being capable of making the necessary distinction to that question. And that confusion is exactly what the Corporateers thrive on (though whether Edwards could or even would deliver on his rhetorically charged promises is also another question entirely).

Symptoms over disease. You’ll never be able to cure the disease by supressing the symptoms. And America needs to challenge itself to begin to finally, openly, honestly and meaningfully confront the true nature of the problem by answering this simple question to every aspect of every question we have… “Who Decides?”.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, takes on political superhack Thomas Friedman, one of America’s most influential (and highly paid) propagandists for corporate globalization and apologists for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What is most disturbing about people like Friedman is that no matter how incontrovertible the facts become in challenging their world view analysis, they simply carry on as if nothing has changed and none of that reality has any relevance. I could go in more detail about how these people’s increasingly delusional fantasies transcend issues of political debate, crossing more distinctly into the realm of unhinged psychological conditioning, but Mr. Greenwald does a good deal of that with this overview, and much more pointedly and lucidly than I would.

Just when it seemed Thomas Friedman realized the destructive nature of Dick Cheney’s foreign-policy vision, the New York Times columnist suggests today that the VP’s approach is not only healthy, but should play a role beyond 2008 if a Democrat succeeds Bush. Specifically, Friedman seems excited by the prospect of an “Obama-Cheney ticket.” (Friedman goes so far as to say “they complete each other.”)

I think a President Obama offering to go to Tehran would have a huge impact on that country and create lots of internal debate, especially if we made clear that America would be satisfied with a verifiable change of Iranian behavior.

But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient…. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Glenn Greenwald continues to tear this inane line of thinking apart quite effectively in his Salon article here…

So obviously, Freidman’s mentality — aside from being both childish and barbaric — was completely about himself and his perceptions of his own weakness and some lurking belief that he had to “restore his virility.” That’s why he loved and loves Dick Cheney, and it’s why our press corps so admires the faux swaggering idiocy of Rudy Giuliani.

The “philosophy” which the Very Serious Tom Friedman was spouting was exactly the same as what truly absurd figures like Michael Ledeen and Jonah Goldberg were running around spouting (”Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”). That was the childish, inane playground tripe pouring forth in 2002 from America’s Most Serious Liberal Foreign Policy Expert (Friedman’s own version of “The Ledeen Doctrine” was expressed through his now-infamous “Suck. On. This.” justification for the Iraq War).

As Friedmans’ column this morning demonstrates, this is exactly the same mentality which our pundit class continues to embrace today: America can only succeed in the world if we run around constantly threatening countries that we will invade and incinerate them. Thus, Democrats like little Obambi are too weak and not enamored enough of war to be Serious in national security. The country needs the Real Tough Guy Republicans like Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani — the crazed warmongers — to stay safe.

The drooling, bloodthirsty desire for war and vengeance which Friedman spewed forth in the months after 9/11 has been suppressed some as a result of the disaster in Iraq, but it is still lurking in him and the rest of our pundit class with all the vibrancy it had in 2002. And now that they are starting to convince themselves that they were Right After All about Iraq, they’re starting to unveil it again, in completely unchanged form. They have learned absolutely nothing. They cannot, because they are convinced that they are the Guardians of Great Wisdom and cannot err. Even in Iraq, they did not err.

Read The Full Report

So the nation is about to get a new energy law.

According to John Broder, writing for the NYTimes Co. (12.14.07), “Industry Flexes Muscle, and Weakened Bill Passes Senate.”

Last week, I had read that the bill was 1000 pages in length. Despite the corporate culture drumbeat about landmark increased motor vehicle efficiency standards, that piece of information of itself should have been sufficient to force the conclusion that nothing good could possibly emerge. On the contrary: what could our public servants fill those pages with except even more poisonings, destructions, and tyrannies?

A thousand pages? Clearly, no Earthling had read the bill. No representative. No journalist. No pundit. No candidate. And just as clearly, few elected officials hands had ever fondled a clause.

What the NYTimes Co. reported on Friday was that the bill that cleared the Senate was “pared-down” legislation. Why pared-down? “…the oil industry and utilities…the Edison Electric Institute…the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce…” were, I reckon, merely asserting their First Amendment “rights.”

Courageous Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted that “it would pass overwhelmingly early next week.” She could be confident because “A White House spokesman said President Bush was pleased that the bill was ‘moving in the right direction’ and that he would sign it if he could remember how to spell his name.”

An add-on to the NYTimes article mentioned that Congress reached a SEPARATE agreement “on a major energy package that it plans to enact outside the energy bill…to be included in a broad govt spending bill…would authorize the Energy Dept to guarantee loans for various energy projects, making financing far easier…would guarantee loans of up to $25 billion for new nuclear plants and $2 for a uranium enrichment plant.. It would also provide up to $10 billion for plants to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel and $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas. And $10 for renewable energy projects. (Not my mother’s idea of appropriate solar, I’m sure!)

Whatsamatter? The 1000 page energy bill wasn’t fat enough to include all this other stuff? But I digress. The reporter pointed out: “Environmental advocates were generally pleased with the passage off the new vehicle fuel-economy standards and the biofuel provisions. Dan Becker, an environmental consultant who has been working on auto efficiency issues for nearly 20 years, called passage of the bill the biggest environmental victory since enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1990.”

The biggest environmental victory since the Clean Air Act of 1990? Wowiezowie. It’s history in the making. But BAD history piled up upon BAD history. What WAS the “Clean Air Act of 1990″? Dan Becker should know. He was there 18 years ago, working for the Sierra Club. But in case you don’t go back that far, here are some excerpts from an article I wrote in 1991.

I had been one of the few Earthlings actually reading every draft and version of the proposed Clean Air Act Amendments. With this knowledge about the words that were really and truly in the bills, I wrote a number of articles, primarily to alert community activists who obviously were being sold down the river from the get-go. Do keep in mind that by the end of the 1980s, a strong and vigorous anti-toxic struggle had emerged from communities — starting off in the Southeast, moving to the Northeast, and then spreading across the nation — and I thought, maybe, that these folks would force their “friends” in Washington DC to be a little honest.

Here are some excerpts from what I wrote after the president signed the bill into law. I titled my article THE SONG AND DANCE OF THE 1990 CLEAN AIR ‘ACT’. It appeared in New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, Winter 1991

The words that follow [posted here] describe what happened almost two decades ago. The same is happening TODAY with this current “energy” stuff. The same will keep happening over and over with every other “issue” until there is no air to breathe, no water to drink, no work for anyone, no Earth to stand on. And our leaders — especially our “friends” — will continue declaring that their treasons and stabbings in the back are the greatest victories since the last time they screwed the people, and screwed the planet.

And now, down memory lane. Alas, it’s not a nice journey.

- Posted by Richard Grossman, CELDF

(Read Grossman’s Essay Commentary from 1990 in the Comments section)

This emphasizes telecommunications-related legislation, but it is quite instructive as to the overall dire condition our so-called public policy process is currently in. It’s most interesting in how it exposes the lobbying efforts by corporations hiding behind the facade of supposed ‘grassroots’ organizations and their non-profit status.

The American Legislative Council, or ALEC, lets corporations cultivate legislators and win support for industry-written bills while not technically breaking lobbying rules ˆ and paying no taxes. (First of two articles)

Q. The American Legislative Council, or ALEC, is a corporate-funded group that gives large donations and other perks to legislators in states across the country. It writes industry-serving bills that those legislators introduce and get enacted. How many legislators in your state are or were members of ALEC?

Q. How many ALEC-drafted bills, if any, were introduced by legislators in your state? How many were enacted?

Q. ALEC is a tax exempt 501(c)(3) group. Should it be?

In previous articles I discussed Astroturf groups (fake grassroots organizations), co-opted groups (activists that bend to serve donors), and think tanks whose research is aimed at serving the special interests that fund them.

This cast of characters churns out corporate-friendly data. But the real action takes place when laws are passed based on this one-two sucker punch of skewed data and high-priced, propaganda-style marketing ˜ a process to which the public is not invited. The drafting of proposed legislation is often a done deal before the public knows it has begun, much less has a chance for input.

Read The Full Report

This is beyond the beyond any more. The fact that Newsweek bothers to print this man’s horseshit or that Charlie Rose just sits there and allows this kind of dissembling of reality to be pissed into his lap on his own show, without the dignity of a rebuttal of any facts whatsoever, says just as much if not more about the sad sack state of our scions of the Fourth Estate than it does about the pitifully diseased character of Karl Rove.

You are not going to believe this, well, actually you will… According to Karl Rove (on Charlie Rose ), the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. Rove, you see, did not think the war vote should be “political”.

Moreover, according to Rove, that “premature vote” led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors.

George Orwell had it nailed decades ago with his treatise “Looking Back On The Spanish War” when he wrote….

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence… So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth…

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’–well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five–well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs–and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

Following up on this very theme is this piece by Joseph Palermo on The Huffington Post, on this somewhat clever comparison of the post-modernism of Karl Rove and Michel Foucault…

In his 1970 book, The Order of Things, the French philosopher Michel Foucault proclaimed that the concept of man “is an invention of recent date” and would soon disappear, “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Foucault and other postmodernists argued that the individual self (or subject) is an ideological construct, and that there is no “truth” aside from discursive myths society perpetuates and constructs through language and thought. Karl Rove, with his recent history lesson on the Charlie Rose show, has posited a similar set of ideas. For Rove, like Foucault, there is no such thing as objective “truth,” only assertions mediated through an ever-shifting discourse where the past and the future matter little and are infinitely malleable.

Rove’s recounting of the run-up to the Iraq invasion is not, as some commentators called it, historical “revisionism.” Historians who revise history must do so through constructing an argument. Any historical argument must have the minimal prerequisite of an evidentiary base. What Rove has given us is not an argument but an assertion, and it is an assertion devoid of evidence in the historical record whatsoever. Worse still, it is an assertion that is diametrically opposed to the record. It is a sad and cynical display that would make even George Orwell’s jaw drop.

Read The Full Post

(Originally Posted November 30, 2007)

This really can’t be considered much of a surprise, what with so-called presidential ‘debates’ being nothing more than amplified PR opportunities for candidates, featuring commentary and remarks with the spontaneity of a performance by the Disney Hall of Presidents. But it does seem to expose yet a new low in the downward spiral of any shred of credibility of one of these ‘performances’ by these contenders, where elections are pretty much just a higher stakes version of ‘American Idol’.

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred ‘diamonds or pearls’ at last night’s debate, wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Putting the ‘mock’ in democracy. Read the full report Here.

Oh, and don’t forget that presidential debates are now run by the “Commission on Presidential Debates”, a private corporation created by and for the Democratic and Republican parties. The League of Women Voters used to organize and run them, but in 1988 rejected the demands for controlling the debates by the two ‘major’ parties and released a statement saying that they were withdrawing support because “the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter”.

The flower of that seed of fraud is now in full bloom.

Of course this is all simply a coincidence and the personal relationships and financial connections don’t have any correlation at all to the situation at hand.

Executives at the two biggest phone companies contributed more than $42,000 in political donations to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV this year while seeking his support for legal immunity for businesses participating in National Security Agency eavesdropping.

The surge in contributions came from a Who’s Who of executives at the companies, AT&T and Verizon , starting with the chief executives and including at least 50 executives and lawyers at the two utilities, according to campaign finance reports.

The money came primarily from a fund-raiser that Verizon held for Mr. Rockefeller in March in New York and another that AT&T sponsored for him in May in San Antonio.

Mr. Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emerged last week as the most important supporter of immunity in devising a compromise plan with Senate Republicans and the Bush administration.

The most telling quote from all of this has to be from AT&T spokeswoman, Claudia B. Jones, who said:

“Many AT&T executives work with the leaders of both the House and Senate Commerce Committees on a daily basis and have come to know them over the years”, Ms. Jones said.

I’m sure they have.

Read the full article in The New York Times