[PEN-L] treating the Bush administration as an aberration

[soula avramidis]

From the FT Bush is no abberation or crazy symptom... he is a natural outgrowth of America
A nationalism without precedent 
By Erik Tarloff 
Published: October 24 2004 19:48 | Last updated: October 24 2004 19:48
America Right or Wrong
An Anatomy of American Nationalism
By Anatol Lieven
Oxford University Press, HarperCollins $30, £18.99

The litany of abuses is surely familiar to everyone by now. The US authorities imprisoned thousands without regard to due process and maintained the right to hold their prisoners indefinitely, often under barbaric conditions. They manufactured and distorted evidence in order to lie the nation into an unnecessary war. They gave Israel a free hand in its dealings with Palestinians and winked at the undemocratic policies pursued by the president of Russia, both in the name of opposing terrorism. They prepared legal arguments defending the American president's right to authorise torture and secretly acted on those arguments without overtly invoking them. 
These policies are appalling, uncivilised, grotesque. They remain a source of grave anxiety to anyone who cares about human rights. But they are also - and this is crucial - without historical precedent. Despite the extended intellectual lineage from which such policies may derive, no previous administration in US history has attempted anything comparable. Lieven's history is sound in its details, but he has not persuaded me of its pertinence. 
I am writing these words a fortnight before the American presidential election, the outcome of which is still very much in doubt. This datum is not irrelevant to the book under discussion and far from irrelevant to my reaction to it. I believe Lieven has written his book in response to a specific phenomenon: the collective hysteria that followed the events of 9/11 and the Bush administration policies that have been enabled by that hysteria. 
Lieven has elected to treat this phenomenon as a logical outgrowth of America's history. To me, the evidence suggests it resulted, rather, from a series of unforeseeable and almost random events. Nevertheless, I concede that if Mr Bush is re-elected - a prospect at this juncture rather more likely than not - it will constitute a retroactive national ratification of these policies. No one then will have the luxury of treating the Bush administration as an aberration. And in the process, Lieven's book will have acquired a retrospective validity. 
The writer is a London-based novelist and critic
 
 

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[PEN-L] Fwd: Re: [PEN-L] Health Economics Question

[michael a. lebowitz]

A note from Robert Chernomas:
User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:42:41 -0600
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Health Economics Question
From: Robert Chernomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "michael a. lebowitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
X-Virus-Scanned: by antibody.sfu.ca running antivirus scanner
X-Spam-Level: Spam-Level
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 (2004-09-13) on antibody2.sfu.ca
Hi Michael,
The single-payer Canadian health Care System is based on the idea of
producer sovereignty-because of of asymmetric information, incomplete
agency, the special nature of the service-(pain and or death skews the
supposed relationship between price and demand), etc., that is consumers
left to their own devices cannot make efficacious-efficient decisions.
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are a means of undermining the relationships
made possible by universal health systems where the poor get more care
because they need more. Health Savings Accounts create two/three tier health
care systems and make efficacious decisions less likely and greater acuity
more likely, because they reduce access for those who do not have
discretionary funds. I can send references on the advantages of single-payer
systems, the effects of income on efficacy and on Health Savings Accounts.
Interestingly, they gained notoriety because a former right-wing president
of the the U of M student union (who tried to break our 95 strike) became a
doctor and wrote a book championing them, which the National Post continues
to love.
Robert

on 11/3/04 9:30 PM, michael a. lebowitz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> X-MS-Has-Attach:
>> X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
>> Thread-Topic: [PEN-L] nausea
>> Thread-Index: AcTCFWpdS0DGCZgXQyGWCpO/UIvwIgAAu15t
>> Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 21:53:03 -0500
>> Reply-To: PEN-L list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Sender: PEN-L list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> From: "Frank, Ellen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: [PEN-L] Health Economics Question
>> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> X-OriginalArrivalTime: 04 Nov 2004 02:52:43.0009 (UTC)
>> FILETIME=[5B02AF10:01C4C219]
>> X-Virus-Scanned: by antibody.sfu.ca running antivirus scanner
>> X-Spam-Level: Spam-Level S
>> X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 (2004-09-13) on
antibody1.sfu.ca
>> X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by rm-rstar.sfu.ca id
>> iA42qpO2001780
>>
>> Well, one more try
>>
>> Today's WSJ has a piece on health savings accounts which
>> states, repeating a claim made frequently about such
>> accounts:  "Implemented correctly, they hold out the
>> possiblility of putting the brakes on health care costs
>> by giving patients more of a stake in the experience of
>> getting well and staying well."
>>
>> Any health economists out there who are aware of studies
>> that support this?  In particular, what kinds of health
>> decisions do consumers control that could yield this outcome?
>> I can think of some small ones, like OTC anti-allergy and
>> arthritis drugs in place of prescriptions.  Maybe there
>> are other scenarios, but I can't imagine them.
>>
>> Ellen
>
> Michael A. Lebowitz
> Professor Emeritus
> Economics Department
> Simon Fraser University
> Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
>
> Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
> Residencias Anauco Suites
> Departamento 601
> Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
> Caracas, Venezuela
> (58-212) 573-4111
> fax: (58-212) 573-7724
>
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
Residencias Anauco Suites
Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-4111
fax: (58-212) 573-7724

Re: [PEN-L] nausea and the reporting thereof

[Kenneth Campbell]

Joel writes about the psychological part of economics (and politics):

>Bush's victory has one other crucial dimension with which we 
>must grapple. A diminished sense of control motivates a 
>significant part of this electoral coalition.  
> [ ... ]
>I've long thought that this relationship would dissolve amid a 
>more class-based politics. But now I'm not so sure. Something is 
>going on here that is not so easily amenable to the old formulas. 

I know what you mean. Media is the key. 

I repost something I posted on that from Sept 6 this year.

Ken.

--- cut here ---




Michael wrote:

>The real problem is that we have not figured out how 
>to get the message across.

I agree.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky hit a nerve with his discussion of media. And he was 
only trying to inform that 1923 Lippman set a tone for corporate messaging control 
that most miss... (In the same way that McLuhan joked that "I don't know who 
discovered water, but it wasn't a fish.")

The problem with the ideologues is that they can't see the message for the speaker. So 
what if Noam likes libertarian anarchists? So what if Bill Clinton is a leftwing 
Democrat? So what if anyone is anything? So fucking what?

These "appellations" only add to the general decay of the momentum towards a goal 
that, I think, almost everyone on this list wishes would happen.

By trying to limit a person to a label, to something they have said or done in their 
past, is really a way of squelching a voice that is currently on our side. It does not 
mean anyone on that issue is cemented to a position.

When one cements oneself to a position, one is probably either

 (a) Tenured
 (b) Mentally feeble.

(Just a joke. Please forgive.)

Life changes all the time, as do our conditions of living life. 

>Lots of people have already noted that on the issues, most 
>people are left of center. They just vote right wing 
>candidates into office.

Most people are left of centre... 

Yet they can't hear messages in their own best interests? Why?

Ken.

[PEN-L] DP leaders believe that religion is the answer to their woes

[Louis Proyect]

The Democrats
Need to Connect With Religious, Rural Voters Noted
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 4, 2004; Page A35
As the Democrats began picking up the pieces yesterday after their
latest defeat, many leaders focused on the need to re-engage their party
with church-going and rural constituencies they acknowledge ignoring in
the past.
The Democratic Party and allied groups waged an expensive and largely
effective effort to increase the turnout of urban and minority voters,
but Republicans trumped them by finding even more support among white
voters outside the cities and inner-ring suburbs -- many of them people
for whom religion is a central element.
That yielded a quickly emerging consensus yesterday across the
Democrats' ideological spectrum that they "have to take the time to
understand the concerns of rural families and Christian families," as
Clinton White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta put it. "We cannot
ignore the swath of red [Republican] states across the South and
Midwest. The party of FDR has become the party of Michael Moore and [his
film] 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' and it does not help us in big parts of the
country."
full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23670-2004Nov3.html
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

[PEN-L] A common cause in Iraq

[Louis Proyect]

From Kerry's concession speech
In the days ahead, we must find common cause. We must join in common
effort, without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor.
America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion.
I hope President Bush will advance those values in the coming years.
I pledge to do my part to try to bridge the partisan divide.
I know this is a difficult time for my supporters, but I ask them, all
of you, to join me in doing that. Now, more than ever, with our soldiers
in harm's way, we must stand together and succeed in Iraq and win the
war on terror.
I will also do everything in my power to ensure that my party, a proud
Democratic Party, stands true to our best hopes and ideals.
full:

--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

[PEN-L] End of partisanship

[Kenneth Campbell]

I am with Daily Show senior senior correspondent Stephen Colbert about
the "end of partisan politics."

Here is the speech I wrote for him, but he did not use:

There will be talk tomorrow of a need to heal all
wounds. To work together.

Well, fuck that.

This is the highest turnout for a presidential
election in decades. People actually give a shit!
You cannot say no to that.

I say: Enough! No more politics of healing!

Look across the fence at your neighbor and say:
"Hey! Fat ass! Take your stinking sign down!"

Make this country worth living in again.

Thank you.

Ken.

[PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Louis Proyect]

GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES
by Sam Smith
From a talk at the Shelter Rock Unitarian Universalist Congegration, 
Manhasset, NY, delivered one week before the election of 2004

This is a time for metaphors. A time for parallels and parables.
Logic has failed us, theories have failed us, technology has failed us, 
policy has failed us, diplomacy has failed us, our military, our leaders 
in government, media, and the intelligentsia. . . even our faith seems 
to have failed us.

And so we yearn for stories that makes sense, that help to end the 
madness. . .

We seek allegories and anecdotes and allusions to turn things right. . . .
But it does no good if the tales and the metaphors are delusional. . . 
if they drag us even further into a psychopathic state that veers wildly 
between arrogance and fear.

It does no good if it sends us deeper into a new middle ages where 
reality is ignored or sent to the inquisition while myth becomes the 
dominant truth. . . only this time propagated not by the church but by 
cable TV.

We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in 
which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past 
tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no 
longer a nation of laws but an adhocracy run by law breakers, law 
evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity, a 
term from Latin America where they know it well - a culture in which 
corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in 
a Mafia neighborhood now.

(clip)
Now many these days blame our problems on George Bush. It's a convenient 
and perhaps useful way to think about it, but historically it falls 
short as Bush himself revealed during one of the debates when he 
defended the Patriot Act by saying, "As a matter of fact, the tools now 
given to the terrorist fighters are the same tools that we've been using 
against drug dealers."

He was right: the unconstitutional principles of the war on drugs were 
the warm-up act for the Patriot Act - steps so small, so 
inconsequential, so well explained, as the German professor would have 
put it.

Four years before 9/11, I wrote an article titled, "How You Became the 
Enemy," about how America was drifting into the situation in which we 
now find ourselves. Here were some examples - all pre-Al Queda and 
during a Democratic administration:

- Many paramilitary police units were conducting between 200 to 700 
warrant or drug raids a year- almost exclusively no-knock entries.

· A paramilitary unit in Chapel Hill NC conducted a crack raid of an 
entire block in a black neighborhood. Up to 100 persons were detained 
and searched, all of whom were black (whites were allowed to leave the 
neighborhood). There were no prosecutions.

· Police in Fresno CA refer to their beat as "the war zone."
- The National Guard was deeply involved in the War on Drugs.
- The military was being used to train police officers, inevitably 
increasing the tendency of citizens to be regarded by these officers as 
"the enemy."

- The century-old posse comitatus act, designed to keep the military out 
of civilian law enforcement, appeared to be on its last legs.

· Eight-nine percent of the county's police departments, had 
paramilitary units.

- Plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the 1980s to take 
over the country in an ill-defined emergency appeared to have been only 
partially dismantled. Among the most striking aspect of these emergency 
plans was the absence of any provision for a legislature or judiciary.

The real turning point, though, for America was the Reagan 
administration. Reagan was a brash voice for the wealthy, the greedy, 
and the lucky, a Bill O'Reilly with charm. By the time he ran for 
president, the overt crudity and the covert cruelty had been transformed 
into a faith, a philosophy, and a political platform. Reagan transformed 
American politics into show business and the media was glad to join the 
cast. The fatuous banalities passing for sound philosophy or ex cathedra 
statements pretending to be arguments passed deep into the mind of 
America. Reagan had taught us that truth and reality were no longer 
important.

Here are just a few things that have happened since then:
- More than two-thirds of older households had someone earning a pension 
in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did

- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care 
benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.

- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. 
By 2002, six corporations did.

- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real 
dollars than in 1984.

- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 
2000 there were two million.

- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than 
they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a 
recent male high school graduate decli

[PEN-L] To American Liberals Upon Bush’s Victory

[Louis Proyect]

(Asad Haider is a high-school student in Pennsylvania)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=6570
To American Liberals Upon Bush’s Victory  	
by Asad Haider  November 04, 2004 	
	
I was walking around campus as the news of Bush’s victory was still 
sinking in. A preacher is paid to stand in front of a building to spew 
fundamentalist drivel, and as I walked past he was responding to a 
question from a student as to whether a less aggressive foreign policy 
in the Middle East might reduce the threat of terrorism. He said, more 
or less: “These people have a religion and an ideology which will always 
lead to violence against us. They’re not good people. Islam will always 
preach hate against the US.”

I couldn’t ignore him this time—I interrupted with unexpected speed and 
volume: “What about the four decades before the Nineties when we 
systematically supported and created Islamic fundamentalism as a 
political force in the Middle East? What about our aid for Saudi Arabia, 
our support of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the mujahideen in 
Afghanistan?”

He laughed at my ignorance of Cold War politics, since I seemed not to 
understand that the US must always interfere in everyone else’s 
business. Then a student sitting on the steps said something about 
Islam; I turned to him and he began to explain the religion to me. He 
said I should know, as a Muslim, that Islam has always made war on 
Christianity. I should know, as a Muslim, that “Muhammed ruled by the 
sword.” I should know, as a Muslim—I am not a Muslim—that Islam is about 
submission and violence.

I do not react well to such things; a fortunate burst of self-control 
led me to walk away. But I realized that it was nothing to be shocked 
by; John Kerry accepted the same premises when he promised to “hunt and 
kill the terrorists,” when he complained that “we now have people from 
the Middle East… coming across the border,” when he said he will “get 
the job done” in an illegally occupied country that does not belong to 
him. Maybe Kerry was not as extreme, but behind each of the perspectives 
above are certain fundamental tenets of imperial ideology: the 
dehumanization of those not like us and the assumption that we have a 
right to run the rest of the world.

My liberal American friends, you worked very hard in my community to 
gather votes for Kerry. But now that the American people have spoken, I 
must ask this: is it really so surprising that Bush won after we bought 
into this imperialist and racist discourse?

We allowed the candidates to go on about “defense” and killing 
terrorists in the Middle East without pointing out that the people of 
the Middle East are human beings who must defend themselves against us. 
We accepted the racist argument that Iraqis could not run their own 
country, and failed to support their right to resist occupation. We 
decided that as long as getting Bush out of office was the priority, the 
left could no longer “whine” about Kerry’s complicity in supporting 
American hegemony.

We kept calling Bush a liar, as though finding weapons of mass 
destruction would justify colonial war and mass slaughter. We said that 
even though Kerry was also part of an oppressive corporate class, it 
didn’t matter since he “looked more Presidential” in the debates. 
Instead of advancing a clear platform of change and acting to create a 
broad-based radical movement that would give voice to the global 
subjects of the American empire, we spent all our energy on voter 
registration drives that—let us be honest—don’t mean a thing now.

And since we let the extreme right set the terms for political 
discussion, the election became centrally about the “war on terror,” and 
“winning” the war in Iraq. No wonder Bush won; he was much more 
consistent and strong-willed than Kerry was about “hunting and killing” 
the terrorists. He is much more enthusiastic in fostering hatred for 
those unfortunate enough to be born with brown skin, much more dedicated 
to violence and destruction.

So, all my liberal friends who came cheering to the pro-Kerry rallies 
and stayed at home when there were teach-ins on war crimes in Iraq; all 
my liberal friends who could not bring yourselves to vocally support 
self-determination for the Iraqi people; all my liberal friends who said 
that now was not the time to use words like “imperialism”: what will we 
do now, now that American domination will extend its fist throughout the 
countries of the world and the awesome machinery of violence will be 
unleashed on those the neoconservatives (and the neoliberals) have 
dubbed less than human? What will we do as the brutal fist of American 
fascism emerges, as corporate globalization removes its gloves and the 
militaristic state bares its fangs?

Let’s think long and hard about what has happened—what we have allowed 
to happen—and what will happen in the days to come. We no longer have 
the right not to be radicals.

--
The Marxism li

Re: [PEN-L] Health Economics Question

[Devine, James]

Paul P writes: >was also I believe pushed by the loony right Fraser
Institute.<

Hey, here in the US of A, they be called "moderate"!

JD

Re: [PEN-L] Ohioans with an Annual Income of Less Than $50,000 (48%)

[Carrol Cox]

Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> I agree with Melvyn that a real Democratic party would be fighting for progressive
> causes, but the existing one wants to win over the people and the big donors at the
> same time.  It can't be done.
>

The concept of a "Real Democratic Party" exists only in the daydreams of
leftists who have given up changing the u.s.

The Real Democratic Party is the party that launched the cold war. It is
the Party that launched Vietnam. It is the Party that carried out the
Bay of Pigs. It is the Party that destroyed public aid. It is the Party
that began the drive to privatization in the U.S. It is the Party that
launched the u.s. interference in Afghanistan. It is the Party that
wholeheartedly supported the invasion of Iraq. It is the Party whose
Keynote Speaker in 2004 believes the u.s. should bomb Iran. It is the
Party that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq through bombing and
sanctions. It is the Party that formed the Organization of American
States, a major arm of u.s. imperialism and of the slaughter of millions
in Latin America. It is the Party whose leader approved in advance the
assassination of Bishop Romero. The list goes on and on.

That is, was, and will be the Real Democratic Party.

All leftist thinking should be grounded in a clear and unambiguous
recognition of this fundamental fact of u.s. politics.

Carrol

Re: [PEN-L] Health Economics Question

[Frank, Ellen]

Thanks, Paul.  This is very helpful.  The only empirical
study of behavior and health costs that I am aware of
is from a real-life experiment in which a Fortune 500
firm substantially increased co-pays for drugs and found
that people with chronic conditions high cholesterol,
blood pressure, diabetes, asthma) went off medications.
 
Ellen 

 

Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Carl Remick]

From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES
by Sam Smith
 Every president after Reagan - including Bill Clinton - moved this
country to right until we found ourselves with George Bush who is not so
much the cause of our troubles as their grimmest and most recent
manifestation. Placated by Prozac, persuaded by prevarication and pacified
by prohibition, we have ignored our drift towards the mean and the brutish
and continued to accept the lie that we are the better for it.
Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the
possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far
less so than enduring the frustrations, failures, damage and human
casualties involved in constantly butting up against reality like a boozer
who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home.
full: http://prorev.com/badtimes.htm
I remember how bleak the world looked at the time of Nixon's second
inaugural, when the prospect of "Four More Years!" seemed the curse of the
ages.  Then, presto, in no time at all the wheels started to come off the
Nixon presidency with the advent of Watergate.  Likewise, GWB's second term
doesn't signal the start of any thousand-year reich.  I have a sure sense
that this second term will spell finis for the conservative ascendancy that
started in the late '70s.  However content Americans may be to live in a
fantasy world, the rest of the planet simply will not continue to support
our self-indulgence -- in areas ranging from Mideast policy to the US
external debt -- as it has until now.  GWB's mandate-driven second term will
be exceptionally unpleasant for progressives in the U.S., but there's no
question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for something
completely different in four years.  There are great opportunities for the
left ahead if the left prepares for them.
Carl

[PEN-L] Palast: KERRY WON

[Paul Zarembka]

The best person in the entire U.S. on U.S. elections is Greg Palast (*Best
Democracy Money can Buy*), cited for example by Paul Krugman of the *New
York Times* before this current election.  Here is Palast's statement this
morning:
 http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=391&row=0
"KERRY WON.
Here's the facts
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I
don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called
American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the
deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll
showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53% to 47%. Kerry also
defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51% to 49%. Unless a third gender
voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
Get the full story in the next hour on TomPaine.com. A special Greg Palast
invesigation."
I await the story itself, probably quite telling for "I concede, thanks for
your time" Kerry.
Paul
***
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY,  Paul Zarembka, editor, Elsevier Science
 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka

Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Devine, James]

Sam Smith writes: >Placated by Prozac<

 

In my understanding,
Prozac and similar Saris don't "placate". Instead, they allow people
to more effectively deal with the personal reasons why they’re depressed,
especially in conjunction with talk therapy. (That’s not to deny the
side-effects or the over-prescription of such drugs, of course. But those are
different problems.)

JD

[PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Devine, James]

Oops. My clicking the wrong button on my spell-checker
changed “SSRIs” to “Saris”!

 



Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/ 











From: Devine, James 
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004
8:07 AM
To: 'PEN-L
 list'
Subject: RE: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on
bad times



 

Sam Smith writes: >Placated by Prozac<

 

In my understanding,
Prozac and similar Saris don't "placate". Instead, they allow people to
more effectively deal with the personal reasons why they’re depressed,
especially in conjunction with talk therapy. (That’s not to deny the
side-effects or the over-prescription of such drugs, of course. But those are
different problems.)

JD

[PEN-L] morality & politics

[Devine, James]

In a previous message, I cited Robert (not Wilhelm) Reich’s
view that the Dems – or the anti-Bush people in general[*] – should
embrace moral argument (as opposed to policy-speak) and Michael Perelman
agreed. We must be conscious that this involves moral conflict (and not just class conflict). The right-wing morality involves hatred
of gays and opposition to abortion rights. 

 

[*] it should be remembered that a lot of the Dems aren’t
really that anti-Bush.

 

Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
; web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/


 

[PEN-L] nausea/no exit

[Charles Brown]

 *  From: Joel Blau



Bush's victory has one other crucial dimension with which we must
grapple. A diminished sense of control motivates a significant part of his
electoral coalition.  Muslim terrorists fly airplanes into
building.  Employers drop them at the slighest sign of bigger profits
elsewhere. And in the intimate relationship that constitutes their only
refuge from these assaults, gay people want to redefine marriage and devalue
the coin of the realm.  Such an assault creates psychopolitical conditions
that are straight out of the Frankfurt School, where Bush, who feigns caring
better than anybody else-- becomes the protective, authoritarian father.
Between Bush and the evangelicals, this protection
has a strong religious component. He's their savior, and all the more a
credible savior because he believes too. That this relationship has a strong
sado-masochistic component (in economic terms, he treats them badly, but bad
treatment merely seems to strengthen their willingness to submit) imbues the
relationship with an even more bizarre complexity.



CB: If it's not too cliched to say, diminished control, severe anxiety and
alienation from living in the economic rat race and being threatened by
worldwide "terrorists" would be classic causes for turning to religion for
hope in a hopeless condition,etc.
Or maybe the Frankfurt school embeds that idea in theirs.

 The masochism may reflect the spirit of sacrifice which is a main theme of
Christianity. Suffering in this world is piling up treasures in the next
one.

Anyway, should we name this United States of America a highest-tech populist
theocracy ,like the Enterprise might run into in another galaxy ? Science
and religion take a new twist in their opposition and interpenetration.

^



I've long thought that this relationship would dissolve amid a more
class-based politics. But now I'm not so sure. Something is going on here
that is not so easily amenable to the old formulas. We're going to be
pounded by the right for the next four years. If we don't figure out how to
disentangle this set of psychodynamics, we are going to be pounded on by the
right for much longer.

Joel Blau

^^

CB: Yea, and this after we have been pounded by the right for the last
twenty-five.


>From a sister:

I have also thought about the fact that we are not under the boot, (yet), as
were our ancestors who were slaves or who had to live under Jim Crow. We are
not in camps as the Holocaust victims were.  We are still on our feet. And
as long as we have good, sound minds and hearts we have to RESIST the Reagan
revolutionaries. We have to  find a way to reach these ignorant sheep who
are easily manipulated by sophisticated media control and unsophisticated
right wing religious fanaticism.  The progressive revolutionaries before us
had it much worse and they found a way to fight. We need to look to them for
inspiration and strategy.

Love,

[PEN-L] nausea

[Charles Brown]

Reich is correct.  Unemployment & job insecurity destroys families.  Poverty
hurts
the fetuses that the fundies want brought into the world.

^
CB: Isn't Roe v Wade in jeopardy now ?



Many of the voters are not extremists, but the Dems. give them the idea that
they
don't care about their concerns

[PEN-L] getting going or getting filters

[michael a. lebowitz]

At 11:46 04/11/2004, Carl wrote:
From:
Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES
by Sam Smith

SNIP
  GWB's mandate-driven second term will
be exceptionally unpleasant for
progressives in the U.S., but there's no
question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for
something
completely different in four years.  There are great opportunities
for the
left ahead if the left prepares for
them.

Ah, there's the begged question. This was the point of my earlier
question to Joel: 'what kind of political-economic programme could begin
this process of disentangling?' This is an opportunity to analyse
carefully without any parti pris the various aspects of the consciousness
of the US working class (let us not deny that this is who has spoken)
with the use of all these polls (exit and otherwise), to try to identify
the contradictions, and to develop a strategy. If, on the other hand,
this is to be an opportunity for more ABB-bashing within a miniscule
constituency, it's filter-time, comrades.
michael

Carl


Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6

Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
Residencias Anauco Suites
Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-4111
fax: (58-212) 573-7724

Re: [PEN-L] getting going or getting filters

[Michael Perelman]

Excellent point!

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 12:58:53PM -0400, michael a. lebowitz wrote:
> At 11:46 04/11/2004, Carl wrote:
> >>From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >>
> >>GETTING THROUGH THE BAD TIMES
> >>
> >>by Sam Smith
>
> SNIP
>
>GWB's mandate-driven second term will
> >be exceptionally unpleasant for progressives in the U.S., but there's no
> >question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for something
> >completely different in four years.  There are great opportunities for the
> >left ahead if the left prepares for them.
>
> Ah, there's the begged question. This was the point of my earlier question
> to Joel: 'what kind of political-economic programme could begin this
> process of disentangling?' This is an opportunity to analyse carefully
> without any parti pris the various aspects of the consciousness of the US
> working class (let us not deny that this is who has spoken) with the use of
> all these polls (exit and otherwise), to try to identify the
> contradictions, and to develop a strategy. If, on the other hand, this is
> to be an opportunity for more ABB-bashing within a miniscule constituency,
> it's filter-time, comrades.
>  michael
>
>
> >Carl
>
> Michael A. Lebowitz
> Professor Emeritus
> Economics Department
> Simon Fraser University
> Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
>
> Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
> Residencias Anauco Suites
> Departamento 601
> Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
> Caracas, Venezuela
> (58-212) 573-4111
> fax: (58-212) 573-7724

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

[PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Louis Proyect]

Counterpunch, November 4, 2004
The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Lesser Evilism
A Right-Wing Republic?
By SHARON SMITH
George Bush barely defeated John Kerry in the Electoral College, but he
won the popular vote by a sizeable margin of 4 million across the
country. Republicans increased their majority in Congress, while voters
in 11 states voted to ban gay marriage. And California's referendum
against "three strikes" sentencing laws also went down to defeat.
Republicans--and social conservatives--swept the 2004 election, despite
the extreme polarization of the nation's population.
No one can blame Ralph Nader this time around. Nader's half-million or
so votes had no influence on the outcome of this election. The Democrats
made sure of that, devoting months of effort to keep Nader's name off
ballots in populous states across the country.
Who is to blame, then? Unfortunately, the first conclusions coming from
the Anybody But Bush left appear to have quickly shifted blame to the
U.S. population itself.
For example, Justin Podur's article, "The Morning After," posted on
ZNet, argues:
"[I]t is time to admit something. The greatest divide in the world today
is not between the U.S. elite and its people, or the U.S. elite and the
people of the world. It is between the U.S. people and the rest of the
world. The first time around, George W. Bush was not elected. When the
United States planted cluster bombs all over Afghanistan, disrupted the
aid effort there, killed thousands of people and occupied the country,
it could be interpreted as the actions of a rogue group who had stolen
the elections and used terrorism as a pretext to wage war. When the
United States invaded Iraq, killing 100,000 at the latest count, it
could be argued that no one had really asked the American people about
it, and that the American people had been lied to. When the United
States kidnapped Haiti's president and installed a paramilitary
dictatorship, it could be argued that these were the actions of an
unelected group with contempt for democracy."
With this election, all of those actions have been retroactively
justified by the majority of the American people.
Many people will be influenced by these arguments because Bush's margin
of victory was so much larger than anyone predicted. New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristoff, for example, argued on Nov. 3, "Democrats
peddle issues, and Republicans sell values. Consider the four G's: God,
guns, gays and grizzlies."
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Michael Perelman]

Let's drop the Nader thing.  The Dems ran a poor campaign.  Let's hear what we can do
better, but rehashing Nader serves no good purpose.

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 12:16:24PM -0500, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Counterpunch, November 4, 2004
> The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Lesser Evilism
> A Right-Wing Republic?
>
> By SHARON SMITH
>
> George Bush barely defeated John Kerry in the Electoral College, but he
> won the popular vote by a sizeable margin of 4 million across the
> country. Republicans increased their majority in Congress, while voters
> in 11 states voted to ban gay marriage. And California's referendum
> against "three strikes" sentencing laws also went down to defeat.
>
> Republicans--and social conservatives--swept the 2004 election, despite
> the extreme polarization of the nation's population.
>
> No one can blame Ralph Nader this time around. Nader's half-million or
> so votes had no influence on the outcome of this election. The Democrats
> made sure of that, devoting months of effort to keep Nader's name off
> ballots in populous states across the country.
>
> Who is to blame, then? Unfortunately, the first conclusions coming from
> the Anybody But Bush left appear to have quickly shifted blame to the
> U.S. population itself.
>
> For example, Justin Podur's article, "The Morning After," posted on
> ZNet, argues:
>
> "[I]t is time to admit something. The greatest divide in the world today
> is not between the U.S. elite and its people, or the U.S. elite and the
> people of the world. It is between the U.S. people and the rest of the
> world. The first time around, George W. Bush was not elected. When the
> United States planted cluster bombs all over Afghanistan, disrupted the
> aid effort there, killed thousands of people and occupied the country,
> it could be interpreted as the actions of a rogue group who had stolen
> the elections and used terrorism as a pretext to wage war. When the
> United States invaded Iraq, killing 100,000 at the latest count, it
> could be argued that no one had really asked the American people about
> it, and that the American people had been lied to. When the United
> States kidnapped Haiti's president and installed a paramilitary
> dictatorship, it could be argued that these were the actions of an
> unelected group with contempt for democracy."
>
> With this election, all of those actions have been retroactively
> justified by the majority of the American people.
>
> Many people will be influenced by these arguments because Bush's margin
> of victory was so much larger than anyone predicted. New York Times
> columnist Nicholas Kristoff, for example, argued on Nov. 3, "Democrats
> peddle issues, and Republicans sell values. Consider the four G's: God,
> guns, gays and grizzlies."
>
> full: http://www.counterpunch.org/
>
> --
>
> The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Carrol Cox]

Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> Let's drop the Nader thing.  The Dems ran a poor campaign.  Let's hear what we can do
> better, but rehashing Nader serves no good purpose.

Why? I would argue that the Nader thing is almost the only aspect of the
campaign that is worth rehashing. And it is not clear at all that the
Dems ran a poor campaign. To say that is to presuppose that we are in
agreement on what the prupose of DP campaigns are.

Frankly, I think the DP ran as good a campaign as it is possible for the
DP to run without violating the principles which make sense of its
existence.

What we need to discuss is how leftists can operate politically
_outside_ of and independently of the DP. The primary mode of such
activity is building social movements (starting within what ever
opposition movement exists at any given time: now the anti-war
movement). But we also need to discuss how electoral activity
(independent of the DP) can or cannot contribute to this.

The ABB effor failed miserably, as it deserved to. The Nader campaign of
course did not achieve much, but we need to examine it for what it _did_
achieve. That means do a lot of talking about both the "Nader campaign"
and the general question of how to engage in electoral activity
indpendent of and opposed to the DP.

This raises many questions to debate, but at some point leftists have to
realize that the DP is their enemy, that it exists to absorb and blunt
actual political activity.
Carrol

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Doug Henwood]

Carrol Cox wrote:
This raises many questions to debate, but at some point leftists have to
realize that the DP is their enemy, that it exists to absorb and blunt
actual political activity.
If such a thing existed, I might agree with you. But it's not 1968 anymore.
Doug

[PEN-L] Stupid Elections

[Shane Mage]

How can so many people manage to fume about Ubu's "majority"
of "votes" without ever mentioning the word DIEBOLD?  This
really, really stupid election was even phonier than the 2000
farce.  To the loss and regret of all of us, Those Who Decide
chose not to dump UbuPOTUS. Why?  Are the deciding members
of the US capitalist class so weakminded that they caved in
to their most stupid and piratical faction?  Is their economic
situation so fuckedup that even the trivial "progressivist"
concessions to be expected from a Dumbocrat president
have become unaffordable?  Are they so committed to
unending military adventures that a draft and the fascistic
repression necessary to enforce it cannot be entrusted to
a "Liberal" administration?  Has it been decided that real
elections (ie. bougeois democracy) "have lived" (Cicero)
and that henceforth only dieboldized virtual plebiscites
are to be permitted?  History will give the bad word.
As to the pathetic campaign put on by the Party of Craven
Capitulation (I mean the Dumbocrats--the Republicons are
the Party of Malignant Stupidity), the only question is
whether Kerry intended from the beginning to throw it
to his fratbrother or whether someone persuaded him
that the fix was in *his* favor?   But really, how could
anyone have imagined that this Designated Loser was
really contesting an election when, in the first debate,
he was asked why people should believe he would do as
well as Ubu in a 9/11 situation--and instead of delivering
a knockout punch by starting with "Well, you know, I
couldn't possibly have done worse, and neither could any
of you watching this debate right now"  and going on to
two minutes detailing UbuPOTUS's criminal nonfeasance,
he went straight into a rhetorical clinch about how strong
a leader against "Terrorism" he, Swiftboatveteran JFKerry
was, is, and would always be.  In comparison,
the Max Baer/Primo Carnera bout looks like a model of
honest, vigorous competition.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even
downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true."  (N.
Weiner)
Original message (11/2/04)
Ulhas asks:
Are foreign policy questions the really decisive ones in the US
politics?
"foreign policy" is never at issue in US duopolist politics.  The issue
in today's Stupid Election is The War.  And what makes this election
really, really stupid is that the vast majority of antiwar Americans,
including, apparently, most of those posting on this list,  have so
succumbed to ABB Dementia that they are actually voting *for*
the war by giving their vote to a pro-war candidate without
even a trace of a "tactical voting" rationale.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not
consent to be called
Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Michael Perelman]

Because Nader was right on just about every issue, but the debates revolve around the
person and how the Democrats reacted to him.  It has all been said before!

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 11:49:48AM -0600, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Michael Perelman wrote:
> >
> > Let's drop the Nader thing.  The Dems ran a poor campaign.  Let's hear what we can 
> > do
> > better, but rehashing Nader serves no good purpose.
>
> Why? I would argue that the Nader thing is almost the only aspect of the
> campaign that is worth rehashing. And it is not clear at all that the
> Dems ran a poor campaign. To say that is to presuppose that we are in
> agreement on what the prupose of DP campaigns are.
>

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

[PEN-L] Canadian News

[Devine, James]

CANADA REPORTS HUGE JUMP IN IMMIGRATION [by Andy Borowitz]

 

Over 55,000,000 Requests for Citizenship Since Tuesday Night

 

Canadian immigration officials have reported a huge increase
in the number of
requests for Canadian citizenship in the past twenty-four hours, with over fifty-five million such
inquiries pouring in since late Tuesday night.

 

Of those fifty-five million requests, well over 99.99% of them
came from U.S.
citizens, the lion's share residing in such states as New York, California, Massachusetts,
Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

 

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said that
he was "flabbergasted"
by the fifty-five-million-plus requests for Canadian citizenship, adding that it was difficult to
pinpoint the precise reasons for
the staggering increase.

 

"My only theory is that after many years of exposure in
the U.S.,
hockey is finally
starting to catch on," Mr. Pettigrew said.

 

He cautioned, however, that it is impossible to know exactly
what is sparking the
sudden interest in America's
frozen neighbor to the north: "People
answering our immigration hotline say that it is hard to understand many of the American callers
because they are sobbing uncontrollably."

 

In other news, President Bush used his acceptance speech
Wednesday to reach out
to supporters of Sen. John Kerry, telling them, "You can run, but you can't hide."

 

Meanwhile, in his first statement since being voted out of
office Tuesday night,
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said, "Do you want fries with that?"

 

Elsewhere, experts said that exit polls may have falsely
predicted a Kerry victory
because Kerry voters exited while Bush voters stayed behind and voted again.

––

JD 

Re: [PEN-L] A common cause in Iraq

[Dan Scanlan]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 6:07 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
From Kerry's concession speech
...I pledge to do my part to try to bridge the partisan divide.
I know this is a difficult time for my supporters, but I ask them, all
of you, to join me in doing that. Now, more than ever, with our
soldiers
in harm's way, we must stand together and succeed in Iraq and win the
war on terror.
Go, go Skull and Bones!

Re: [PEN-L] morality & politics

[Eubulides]

- Original Message -
From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


In a previous message, I cited Robert (not Wilhelm) Reich's view that
the Dems - or the anti-Bush people in general[*] - should embrace moral
argument (as opposed to policy-speak) and Michael Perelman agreed. We
must be conscious that this involves moral conflict (and not just class
conflict). The right-wing morality involves hatred of gays and
opposition to abortion rights.

==

Anybody here remember the Thirty Years War and the emergence of secularism
and capitalism? I've been perusing -very slowly because it is brilliant,
rich and intense- Jonathan Israel's "Radical Enlightenment" which goes
into the emergence of modern atheism and moral skepticism etc. My guess is
that what we need is a reframing of moral argument that massively shifts
the justificatory burden onto the Right:

"What is the justification for homophobia?"

"What is the justification for jingoism and racism in foreign policy?"

"What is the justification for denying the sick access to medical care?"

The goal of such simple questions could be directed at pointing out just
how much capriciousness, anti-pluralism and authoritarianism lurks in the
very discursive approach the Right takes on issues of morality; that is,
moral discourse itself is the source of a lot of our inability to solve
deep problems of social suffering. As Theodore Lowi points out in "The End
of the Republican Era" this makes Conservatives very nervous; so Reich and
others who think the adoption of moral discourse is something that needs
to be done need to be prepared.

The non-metaphysical aspects of Theism are far harder to crack than the
metaphysical ones.

My 2 cents.

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Paul Zarembka]

I think I've read more messages from Michael not to talk about Nader than I
myself have written about Nader.
Michael, you'll have more success, in your own terms, if you just stop
trying to limit the discussion (e.g., I wouldn't have posted this).
Turning to the larger question:
I, for one, expect a big crashing in of this fossil-fuel economy, beginning
soon (I'm not prescient enough to know when).  What happens as the world
arrives at wide-spread famine, four times higher gasoline prices and going
up, wide-spread unheated homes, etc.?  Are we preparing for that in
political terms?  (I "lucked" into teaching Environmental Economics this
semester and it is teaching me.)
Paul
--On Thursday, November 04, 2004 10:12 AM -0800 Michael Perelman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Because Nader was right on just about every issue, but the debates
revolve around the person and how the Democrats reacted to him.  It has
all been said before!

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Michael Perelman]

Exactly, we should be figuring out how to approach the future.  Here, I am with you 
all the
way.

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 01:27:26PM -0500, Paul Zarembka wrote:
> I, for one, expect a big crashing in of this fossil-fuel economy, beginning
> soon (I'm not prescient enough to know when).  What happens as the world
> arrives at wide-spread famine, four times higher gasoline prices and going
> up, wide-spread unheated homes, etc.?  Are we preparing for that in
> political terms?  (I "lucked" into teaching Environmental Economics this
> semester and it is teaching me.)

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Dan Scanlan]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 9:49 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
Michael Perelman wrote:
Let's drop the Nader thing.  The Dems ran a poor campaign.  Let's
hear what we can do
better, but rehashing Nader serves no good purpose.
Why? I would argue that the Nader thing is almost the only aspect of
the
campaign that is worth rehashing.
I tend to agree with Carrol on this.
This is the very first posting of the Nader campaign and bears
rereading:
"It is a big country out there and we heard from a lot of people! Now
that Ralph has decided to run, we are no longer taking a referendum on
the question of whether he should. If you encouraged him, we hope you
will now help by getting him on the ballot, contributing to the
campaign and volunteering at the local level. If you discouraged him
and disagree with his decision, don't support or vote for him. But
please keep an open mind and have the courtesy to recognize that others
would like to have the opportunity for more choices and voices in the
electoral process to move this country forward. And that is exactly
what this campaign will be all about. Stay tuned.
Thank you.
Theresa Amato
Ralph Nader Campaign Manager
February 22, 2004"

Re: [PEN-L] A Right-Wing Republic?

[Dan Scanlan]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 10:08 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
Carrol Cox wrote:
This raises many questions to debate, but at some point leftists have
to
realize that the DP is their enemy, that it exists to absorb and blunt
actual political activity.
If such a thing existed, I might agree with you. But it's not 1968
anymore.
Doug
"Thing" refers to what?  Leftists, DP or "actual political activity"?
Dan
They would privatize your private thought
And charge a dollar just to be.

Re: [PEN-L] morality & politics

[Devine, James]

Ian writes:>…My guess is that what we need is a
reframing of moral argument that massively shifts the justificatory burden onto
the Right:

 

>"What is the justification for homophobia?"...

 

>The goal of such simple questions could be directed at
pointing out just how much capriciousness, anti-pluralism and authoritarianism
lurks in the very discursive approach the Right takes on issues of morality;
that is, moral discourse itself is the source of a lot of our inability to
solve deep problems of social suffering. As Theodore Lowi points out in
"The End of the Republican Era" this makes Conservatives very
nervous; so Reich and others who think the adoption of moral discourse is something
that needs to be done need to be prepared.

 

>The non-metaphysical aspects of Theism are far harder to
crack than the metaphysical ones. <

 

Don’t you think that a lot of people will answer that
question with “gays are YUCKY” or similar? Or simply say “it’s
tradition”? 

 

I’m an agnostic when it comes to theology, but I don’t
see any point in trying to undermine theism. Metaphysical assumptions seem
impregnable. 

 

Might it be better to put forth the alternative moral point
that it’s good to be tolerant of human differences unless they actively
hurt others and that hatred of gays hurts people? It seems that there are good
Judeo-Christian reasons to oppose hatred of gays (and maybe some can be found
in Islam, too). 

JD

 

[PEN-L] Overgeneralizations

[michael perelman]

The horror of the Civil War made people more skeptical about
fanaticism.  At least, that is the message of Menand, Louis. 2001. The
Metaphysical Club (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).  Supposedly, this
change of mind helped to push one group of people toward progressivism
and a more rational (albeit capitalistic) way of organizing society.
Michael Pollack posted note here (or maybe at LBO), quoting Armstrong,
Karen. 2001. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (NY: Alfred
A. Knopf), which suggested that the same event led to the especially
rural fundamentalist uprising which became so powerful during the 1920s
in the red states of today.
The horror of the first world war made people far more aware of
irrationality.  The Nazis learned to harness the irrationality.
Will thenThe horror of the Civil War made people more skeptical about
fanaticism.  At least, that is the message of Menand, Louis. 2001. The
Metaphysical Club (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).  Supposedly, this
change of mind helped to push one group of people toward progressivism
and a more rational (albeit capitalistic) way of organizing society.
Michael Pollack posted note here (or maybe at LBO), quoting Armstrong,
Karen. 2001. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (NY: Alfred
A. Knopf), which suggested that the same event led to the especially
rural fundamentalist uprising which became so powerful during the 1920s
in the red states of today.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901

[PEN-L] To ABB from Nader

[Dan Scanlan]

Dear Anybody But Bush Liberal Democrats
... Let's face the facts. Our country has serious problems. The world 
is not doing very well. We need every source of energy inside the 
electoral arena to turn harmful, costly and cruel trends against 
billions of innocent people into just and healthy directions.

 The electoral system in our country is rigged in many ways against 
third parties and independent candidates having a level playing field 
chance to compete. This leaves the two major Parties to regenerate 
themselves internally without external pushes and jolts. The 
Republicans generate themselves with corporate batteries while the 
Democrats try to play catch up in the corporate money-raising 
sweepstakes. So it is not surprising that many people are left with the 
least of the worst choice and TAKE it, assuming you are not in a single 
party district. After all, they know they are all hostages to this 
winner-take-all electoral college strait jacket. They realize that the 
political terrain is rigged to leave them as of now with just that 
choice if they want to be with a possible winner, which most voters 
want to be. A modern full representation system to make more votes 
count should become part of our national political debate. One version 
– multi-seat districts – elected the first woman, Jeanette Rankin, to 
Congress from Montana in 1916.

 Apart from their ways, the Democrats need to be shown additional ways 
-- strong, rational, emotive ways to defeat Bush and the Republicans. 
Why? Because their leaders and consultants are either too cautious, too 
unimaginative or too indentured to vested interests to even conceive, 
not to mention field test, these vulnerabilities of the Bush regime.

 Enter an independent candidacy in a duopolized system that does not 
believe the election has to be totally enclosed by zero-sum gaming 
among the major candidates. Instead there should be various strategies 
and probes and anticipations inside the electoral arena that in 
important ways escape the zero-sum mind so as to more likely achieve 
the common goal of ouster.

 Here is what I mean. Campaigns must have distinct approaches -- not 
only to get more votes on one's side but also to depress the votes on 
the other side. The latter voters either stay home or switch to another 
candidate, other than the major opponent, as a protest vote. In 2000, 
exit polls showed that 21% or 25% of my vote would have gone to Bush, 
38% or 41% to Gore, and the rest would not have voted. 
Counter-intuitive, isn't it? Not if you know that conservative and 
libertarian Republicans have not been happy with the corporate 
Republicans who dominate the party and concede to their right wing the 
verbal platforms to keep them in line. Now, many conservative or 
libertarian Republicans are furious with Bush over the massive 
deficits, taxpayer-funded, corporate subsidies, the Patriot Act's 
invasion of privacy and undermining of civil liberties, the impaired 
sovereignty issues in NAFTA and GATT, uncontrolled corporate 
pornography beamed to their children in violent commercial 
entertainment -- to name some points of serious disappointments. Not a 
few of them are outraged over the corporate looting by executive greed 
and crimes, exemplified by the Enrons, World Coms and Tycos (they lost 
jobs, 401K’s and investments too) and believe that Bush/Cheney are too 
close to these companies to launch a crackdown that will convict and 
jail these executive crooks. This is why they like CNN’s Lou Dobbs' 
regular reminders about these crooks *not* being sent to jail.

 The Democrats need to be shown in the field how to appeal to the 
millions of voters whom they have turned their back on because many of 
them are against abortion and gun control. It is one thing when litmus 
paper tests are applied to candidates by groups or voters, but 
candidates are foolish to do this in reverse -- after all even your 
friends don't agree with you on everything.

 Moreover, an independent candidacy that generates more political and 
civic energies by the American people helps to generate more 
understandings and support for major new directions for our country -- 
realistic long overdue directions. You want to be reminded of them? 
Here's a short list -- full public financing of public elections -- 
merits not money should rule here; universal health insurance -- 55 
years after President Truman proposed this to Congress (overdue?); a 
serious drive to abolish poverty (Nixon proposed one preliminary way to 
Congress); a living wage for tens of millions of workers making under 
$10 an hour (adjust to inflation and even the 1968 federal minimum wage 
could be $8 an hour today, not $5.15); strong enforcement against 
corporate crime, fraud, and abuse that has looted or drained trillions 
of dollars from innocent workers, their pensions and investors; a 
non-lip service, comprehensive nurturing of the physical and 
educational needs of children who require m

[PEN-L] election article

[Joel Wendland]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/112/112_cover_election.html
Better analysis of the elction. I simply don't accept the implication made
by a number of left people on this list that Black voters are dumb, duped,
cowardly, reactionary, don't know what's best for them, etc.
Joel Wendland
_
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

[PEN-L] good read

[Dan Scanlan]

Election Night Remarks from Campaign Manager Theresa Amato
I am the campaign manager of Nader/Camejo 2004, but I am also a worker, 
taxpayer, citizen, and voter in the last colonial capital of the free 
world, known as Washington, DC, where voters do not have the same 
rights to statehood and representation as the rest of this country.

As the campaign manager, I have a lot of people to thank this evening.
Let me start with our most dedicated staff. This group started not with 
a campaign, but with a handful of people who simply started asking 
about a year ago whether Ralph Nader should run for president this 
year. We heard lots of anti-incumbent language: People said they would 
vote for Genghis Khan instead of this president. Some said they would 
vote for their pet monkey instead of this president. Others said, they 
would vote for any appliance in their house instead of this president.

When people started telling us they would vote for their toaster over 
the president, we knew there were many that demanded that George W. 
Bush had to go. Anybody but Bush was a zeitgeist as well as a mantra. 
But it was a vapid, vacuous mantra, to be sure. And as it developed, it 
didn’t really mean anybody but Bush, it was really anybody who is 
electable against Bush, no matter what the platform. And as one 
anti-war candidate after another was ridiculed, ignored, or sabotaged 
by their own political party, thousands of conversations were had 
across the country, on the phone, in living rooms, at kitchen tables in 
an attempt to ask what is the right thing to do when our country is at 
war and yet there will be no anti-war candidate offered by the two 
major parties come election day?

A lot of people from Marcia Jansen in Indiana with 13 grandchildren to 
Kevin Zeese in Maryland to Carol Miller in New Mexico, to Steve Conn in 
Alaska, to myself—looked at the faces of our children or grandchildren 
said, is it right in a time of war, to support a pro-war candidate?

And the young people on our staff – Jason Kafoury, Amy Auer, Rob 
Cirinicone, Matt Bradley and far too many more to mention -- who have 
brothers and sisters and peers or friends who could be drafted or who 
already serve, they too asked is it right to support more pro-war 
candidates?

And we all asked is it right in a time when 45 million people have no 
health insurance to support anything less than a plan to give health 
care to all? Is it right when 1 out of 3 Americans makes WalMart wages 
to support a family -- less than a living wage? Is it right when people 
are in jail without charges and without lawyers to support a 
pro-Patriot Act candidate to reduce everyone’s civil liberties? Is it 
right when whole industries are being outsourced to support a pro-NAFTA 
and WTO candidate? Is it right when we have a criminal injustice system 
and institutional racism to support a pro-drug war candidate? And the 
list goes on….and finally we asked is it right to sit down, shut up, 
toe the party line, and say nothing, as we were repeatedly told, all 
because George W. Bush has got to go no matter what?

We said no. The staff of Nader/Camejo said no – and stood up to a lot 
of pressure from their families, their peers, their role models – to 
say “No, it is not right.” All of them here and on the west coast with 
Peter Miguel Camejo, our eloquent Vice Presidential candidate, and in 
every state – Please stand, wave, take a bow.

You have been courageous and we thank you for saying yes to this 
campaign, to raising the progressive agenda, and for the thousands of 
hours you have devoted to put more voices and choices before the 
American people in this historic election.

To all of them and to their families (to my own family Todd Main and 
our 19-month old daughter Isabella) we say thank you for all your 
sacrifices. We know that this has been not just a sacrifice of time and 
energy and resources but an investment, an investment in the futures of 
our families, the country and the world.

To our thousands and thousands of volunteers, our campus coordinators, 
our high school students, our field coordinators in every state 
(especially Margaret Guttshall in a hospital in Michigan), to our 40 
van people who have traveled to 800 communities often ignored by the 
major parties, to our thousands of donors (90% of you gave $100 or less 
and we still need your help at votenader.org!) and all the supporters 
we thank you for your brave persistence and determination to provide 
more voices and more choices at the ballot box in this election.

To the determined people who petitioned for us, who were met with 
abuse, subpoenas, threats, violence, intimidation, and dirty tricks of 
all kinds, we thank you for standing tall and taking it all.

To our compatriots who run as independent and third party candidates we 
took a lot of the ballot fights off your hands this year and tried to 
make it easier in the years that come. And we thank you for sticking up 
for our ri

Re: [PEN-L] nausea/no exit

[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]

Yes, I intended to imply these parts of this issue, and I'm glad you
spelled them out.

Joel Blau

Original Message:
-
From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 11:39:42 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: nausea/no exit


 *  From: Joel Blau



Bush's victory has one other crucial dimension with which we must
grapple. A diminished sense of control motivates a significant part of his
electoral coalition.  Muslim terrorists fly airplanes into
building.  Employers drop them at the slighest sign of bigger profits
elsewhere. And in the intimate relationship that constitutes their only
refuge from these assaults, gay people want to redefine marriage and devalue
the coin of the realm.  Such an assault creates psychopolitical conditions
that are straight out of the Frankfurt School, where Bush, who feigns caring
better than anybody else-- becomes the protective, authoritarian father.
Between Bush and the evangelicals, this protection
has a strong religious component. He's their savior, and all the more a
credible savior because he believes too. That this relationship has a strong
sado-masochistic component (in economic terms, he treats them badly, but bad
treatment merely seems to strengthen their willingness to submit) imbues the
relationship with an even more bizarre complexity.



CB: If it's not too cliched to say, diminished control, severe anxiety and
alienation from living in the economic rat race and being threatened by
worldwide "terrorists" would be classic causes for turning to religion for
hope in a hopeless condition,etc.
Or maybe the Frankfurt school embeds that idea in theirs.

 The masochism may reflect the spirit of sacrifice which is a main theme of
Christianity. Suffering in this world is piling up treasures in the next
one.

Anyway, should we name this United States of America a highest-tech populist
theocracy ,like the Enterprise might run into in another galaxy ? Science
and religion take a new twist in their opposition and interpenetration.

^



I've long thought that this relationship would dissolve amid a more
class-based politics. But now I'm not so sure. Something is going on here
that is not so easily amenable to the old formulas. We're going to be
pounded by the right for the next four years. If we don't figure out how to
disentangle this set of psychodynamics, we are going to be pounded on by the
right for much longer.

Joel Blau

^^

CB: Yea, and this after we have been pounded by the right for the last
twenty-five.


>From a sister:

I have also thought about the fact that we are not under the boot, (yet), as
were our ancestors who were slaves or who had to live under Jim Crow. We are
not in camps as the Holocaust victims were.  We are still on our feet. And
as long as we have good, sound minds and hearts we have to RESIST the Reagan
revolutionaries. We have to  find a way to reach these ignorant sheep who
are easily manipulated by sophisticated media control and unsophisticated
right wing religious fanaticism.  The progressive revolutionaries before us
had it much worse and they found a way to fight. We need to look to them for
inspiration and strategy.

Love,


mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .

Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Frank, Ellen]

If the Republicans, with a mandate and control of all 3 branches of government, does
half of what the right has been talking about for at least a decade -- privatizing 
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, eliminating taxes on corporations, replacing 
the income tax with a flat tax or VAT,
capping lawsuit awards, overturning Roe v Wade -- they will almost certainly be booted
out in 2008.  
Ellen 

 



From: PEN-L list on behalf of Carl Remick
I have a sure sense that this second term will spell finis for the 
conservative ascendancy that
started in the late '70s.  However content Americans may be to live in a
fantasy world, the rest of the planet simply will not continue to support
our self-indulgence -- in areas ranging from Mideast policy to the US
external debt -- as it has until now.  GWB's mandate-driven second term will
be exceptionally unpleasant for progressives in the U.S., but there's no
question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for something
completely different in four years.  There are great opportunities for the
left ahead if the left prepares for them.

Carl

[PEN-L] The rise of open-source politics

[Louis Proyect]

Nation Magazine, November 4, 2004
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
by Micah L. Sifry
	
Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the 
results from election day should not obscure an important shift in 
America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the Internet have 
reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in 
processes that used to be closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort 
for Kerry supporters now, but the truth is that voters don't have to 
rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward 
anymore. The era of top-down politics--where campaigns, institutions and 
journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass 
capital--is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more 
satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order.

One moment when this new power began to be collectively understood by 
grassroots activists was on April 23, 2003. It was 4:31 pm (EST) in 
cyberspace when Mathew Gross, then toiling in obscurity on Howard Dean's 
presidential campaign, posted the following missive on the message board 
of SmirkingChimp.com, a little-known but heavily trafficked forum for 
anti-Bush sentiment:

So I wander back to my desk and there really IS a note on my chair 
from Joe Trippi, the Campaign Manager for Howard Dean. The note says:

Matt,
   Start an "Ask the Dean Campaign" thread over at the Smirking 
Chimp.
   --Joe

Surely a seminal moment in Presidential politics, no?
   So, here's the deal. Use this space to throw questions and 
comments our way. I'll be checking this thread, Joe will be checking 
this thread. We're understandably very busy so don't give up if we 
disappear for a day or two. Talk amongst yourselves while we're out of 
the room, as it were. But we will check in and try to answer questions. 
We want to hear from you. We want to know what you think.
   So, go to it. And thanks for supporting Howard Dean.

About an hour later, after thirty responses appeared, Zephyr Teachout, 
Gross's colleague, chimed in with some answers. A little later, a 
participant on the site wrote: "This is too cool, an actual direct line 
to the Dean campaign committee! Pinch me--I must be dreaming!" 
Ultimately, more than 400 people posted comments on Gross's thread. 
Richard Hoefer, a frequent visitor, later wrote me: "That was an amazing 
day to see that rise out of nowhere. People were floored that the thread 
title was 'Ask the Dean Campaign'--and Trippi and Matt were actually 
asking questions and interacting. Never before had anyone seen that."

Never before had the top-down world of presidential campaigning been 
opened to a bottom-up, laterally networked community of ordinary voters. 
The Smirking Chimp is a website with 25,000-plus registered members, 
founded after the 2000 election as a gathering place for liberals, 
progressives and leftists who felt the newly selected President reminded 
them most of, well, a smirking chimp. Each day they devour and critique 
the handful of critical articles selected by its webmaster, Jeff 
Tiedrich, a New York-based programmer who started the site on a lark and 
is amazed by its growth. "The community of the Chimp is the angry, 
angry, engaged left," Tiedrich says. When it was offered a direct 
connection to Dean, who was then the only candidate attacking Bush and 
the war in stark terms, lightning struck.

"The reason these community sites have formed," says Gross, rattling off 
the names DailyKos, MyDD, Eschaton, Democratic Underground and 
Buzzflash, along with the Smirking Chimp, "is the Democratic Party is 
too based on insiders." (Some Republicans apparently feel the same way, 
and have started similar sites, like RedState.org.) Indeed, at most 
political organizations, "membership" and "participation" mean little 
more than writing a check in response to a direct-mail appeal, as 
Harvard professor Theda Skocpol argues in her 2003 book Diminished 
Democracy. This wasn't always the case, Skocpol notes--through the first 
half of the 1900s tens of millions of Americans were engaged in 
cross-class fellowship and civic activism through federated mass 
membership organizations like the Free Masons, the Knights of Pythias 
and the American Legion. But, undermined by the Vietnam War, the "rights 
revolutions" and especially the new mass-media system, mass membership 
groups atrophied. They were replaced by a proliferating array of 
professionally run, top-down advocacy organizations, like the AARP and 
Natural Resources Defense Council. "America is now full of civic 
entrepreneurs who are constantly looking upward for potential angels, 
shmoozing with the wealthy," Skocpol writes, rather than talking to 
people of modest means.

But it is also true that insiderism and elitism have recently come under 
heavy attack, as everyone from Trent Lott to Dan Rather can attest. And 
it's not just Congress and bi

[PEN-L] Ruy Teixeira on the elections

[Louis Proyect]

(An interesting commentary from Ruy Teixeira, despite the foolishness of 
his repeated prediction that Kerry would win--a notion obviously related 
to his off the wall theory that the Democrats are an "emerging 
majority". Although he correctly identifies the contradictions of the 
Democratic Party, his solutions seem way off-base, especially investing 
any hope in the likes of George Soros.)

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/
Let me suggest that there is a structural strength for the Republicans 
and a corresponding weakness for the Democrats, that has been an 
underlying factor driving the politics of the last two or three decades.

The Republicans have the advantage of an inherently clearer message. 
They have been, since the nineteenth century, the party arguing for the 
individualist values of capitalism, and the market. Although these 
values are far from being the same as the values embodied in patriarchal 
monotheism, they are quite consistent with Protestant evangelicalism, 
not so hard to fit in with right-wing Judaism, and at least compatible 
with Catholicism. The link, operative in the last 20-30 years, between 
the two, has been familism, the exaltation of a father/husband dominated 
family, with obedient children. This has immense sentimental appeal. It 
includes many themes of what we are now supposed to call "moral values." 
Among them are the sentimental view of motherhood that conflicts with 
reproductive choice; notions of feminine modesty and sexual propriety of 
the sort that Janice Jackson flouted and that rap music outrages; and, 
of course, homophobia.

Many business leaders favor familism for practical reasons. It is the 
practical expression of their small-government ideology, which rests on 
a meager social wage, and means-tested social welfare. If people just 
"live right" and maintain a proper family life they will not demand 
social benefits, because the family will meet their nurturant needs. 
This is the notion of the family as default nurturer.

This is the simple clear Republican economic and social message.
As they are now, the Democrats cannot equal the dignified -- though 
essentially unrealistic and spurious -- symmetry and simplicity of this 
message. At one time they had a competing message, but it has failed 
them, because of historical circumstances.

From 1933 until about the mid-seventies, the Democrats put forward a 
competing outlook that was clear, simple and made convincing sense. This 
was corporate liberalism at its best. It's material base was the United 
States' international economic rôle as the dominant capitalist power. 
The American political economy was able to assure a compromise with 
labor such that working peoples' standard of living could rise fairly 
steadily. Within this, the political economy and the Democratic Party 
could assure a stable family life with increasing consumption, on the 
basis of the husband/father's earnings.

All this has changed, and the Repubican message has not had to change 
with it. We heard Bush "staying on message," as he drove it home. Again 
by contrast, the Democrats have only a mixed, muffled, confusing, and 
unclear message, which they try to hype with phony stunts, like Kerry's 
pose of Catholic piety, of hunting, etc. Slicker maneuvers, like 
pretending to be an evangelical will not work. Four years ago they tried 
to use the really authentic Judaic observance of Joe Lieberman to make 
them seem pious, and even this came off as a phony stunt, even as 
sincere as he is about it.

I think this underscores the point I've tried to make a number of times 
-- that the material message the Democrats can win with is not going to 
come out of the Democratic party itself. In fact, such messages have 
never come out of electoral parties. It will have to come out of 
extra-party initiatives. And it is the rôle of the left, like DSA 
hopefully, to help co-ordinate efforts at creating programs for 
progressive reforms. [Ha-hah-hah!] These have to involve putting forward 
real alternative ways to address human needs, alternatives that embody 
progressive notions of family that actually reflect the facts of 
multiple forms of normative family structure and experience like single 
parenthood. A clear program for day care as a right is one that I think 
could generate much support.

One might ask: why didn't Kerry have such a program? But then one must 
also ask, why hadn't leftists come to him with organized support pushing 
him to support such a program?

Day care is just one example. There could be similar ones having to do 
with the right to organize. The weakening of the US' international 
economic rôle has also weakened unions. Why hasn't the labor movement, 
in which many leftists work, developed a Charter of Worker Rights, 
including, but going beyond the right to organize? Demanding a 
formulation of the right to overtime, for example, instead of just 
responding to Bush's anti-worker chang

[PEN-L] something familiar

[Dan Scanlan]

There's something kind of familiar about this map.
http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog10/maps/
They would privatize your private thought
And charge a dollar just to be.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

>There's something kind of familiar about this map.
>
>http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog10/maps/

There sure is.

I've commented before that I wish the northern states would finish the
Civil War.

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Daniel Davies]

I see you won Ohio that time :-)

-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Dan Scanlan
Sent: 04 November 2004 21:09
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: something familiar


There's something kind of familiar about this map.

http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog10/maps/


They would privatize your private thought
And charge a dollar just to be.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

>I see you won Ohio that time :-)

In Quebec, they call that "etapism."

Ken.

[PEN-L] Loren Goldner on Marx and Ricardo

[Michael Perelman]

Loren asked me to post this.  I find his work quite interesting.

>I have posted a new article on the Break Their Haughty
>Power web site
>
>http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner
>
>on the presence of the concept of the "inverted world"
>(verkehrte Welt) deep in Marx's critique of political
>economy, and in particular with reference to Ricardo,
>both in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. I also
>briefly discuss Marx's mathematical manuscripts, which
>show conclusively that he was studying Hegel's Logic,
>and in particular the critique of 18th century "bad
>infinity" in mathematics, to the end of his life.

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Devine, James]

there really isn't anything similar. The Rocky Mountain states and a large part of the 
Midwest that went with the South. 
 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 



From: PEN-L list on behalf of Kenneth Campbell
Sent: Thu 11/4/2004 1:17 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] something familiar



>There's something kind of familiar about this map.
>
>http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog10/maps/

There sure is.

I've commented before that I wish the northern states would finish the
Civil War.

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

Jim writes:

>there really isn't anything similar. The Rocky Mountain
>states and a large part of the Midwest that went with
>the South.

Could you clarify that? There may be a word extra in there.

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

Carl writes:

>Since the south has a long tradition of militarism that
>the north lacks -- not to mention possession of the vast
>majority of military bases -- I don't think this would
>have quite the outcome you envision.

I do not envision anything.

The south is the repository of military bases BECAUSE of the dislocation
of slavery economy.

I am going to school near a premier military base in Canada. I know
about self interest and the military. See them riding their bikes
everyday. (My previous comment, as usual, dealt with a degree of humor.)

>I'm afraid it's the north that faces Reconstruction now.

Right about that. Does not have to be.

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Devine, James]

in the map of the "red (Bush) states," it's not just the South, 
but also the Rocky Mountain states and a large part of the Midwest. 
 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 



From: PEN-L list on behalf of Kenneth Campbell
Sent: Thu 11/4/2004 2:32 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] something familiar



Jim writes:

>there really isn't anything similar. The Rocky Mountain
>states and a large part of the Midwest that went with
>the South.

Could you clarify that? There may be a word extra in there.

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times

[Chris Burford]

wheels will be dropping off within two years, not just four.
I think there will be a price for the support from the rest of the
world.
I mean it's not just about the time frame, it's about somehow some
changes in the nature of politics that hopefully are more fundamental
than which president is in office.
Chris Burford

- Original Message -
From: "Carl Remick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 3:46 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times
I remember how bleak the world looked at the time of Nixon's second
inaugural, when the prospect of "Four More Years!" seemed the curse
of the
ages.  Then, presto, in no time at all the wheels started to come
off the
Nixon presidency with the advent of Watergate.  Likewise, GWB's
second term
doesn't signal the start of any thousand-year reich.  I have a sure
sense
that this second term will spell finis for the conservative
ascendancy that
started in the late '70s.  However content Americans may be to live
in a
fantasy world, the rest of the planet simply will not continue to
support
our self-indulgence -- in areas ranging from Mideast policy to the
US
external debt -- as it has until now.  GWB's mandate-driven second
term will
be exceptionally unpleasant for progressives in the U.S., but
there's no
question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for
something
completely different in four years.  There are great opportunities
for the
left ahead if the left prepares for them.
Carl

[PEN-L] Daily Mirror (UK)

[Devine, James]

look at this front page: http://www.mirror.co.uk/frontpages/ 
 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

But, did not Dan's original map that started this thread show that the
Rockies and related territories were slave-friendly but not
slave-positive? Thought it was historically interesting.

Ken.


>in the map of the "red (Bush) states," it's not just the South,
>but also the Rocky Mountain states and a large part of the Midwest.
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine
>
>
>
>From: PEN-L list on behalf of Kenneth Campbell
>Sent: Thu 11/4/2004 2:32 PM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: [PEN-L] something familiar
>
>
>
>Jim writes:
>
>>there really isn't anything similar. The Rocky Mountain
>>states and a large part of the Midwest that went with
>>the South.
>
>Could you clarify that? There may be a word extra in there.
>
>Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Devine, James]

right. but Oregon territory was larger at the time than present-day Oregon, whereas 
the entire Midwest was "blue" (anti-slavery) back then. 
 
In addition, it's important to see the reaction as more than just a bunch of (white) 
Southerners. there's also a lot of government-subsidized "individualism" in the Rocky 
states (e.g., Cheney) along with evangelical Christians (Bush) and 
anti-Castro/pro-Israel types (Florida, usually not seen as part of the "old South"). 
It's a mistake to reduce this election to just one dimension. 
 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 



From: PEN-L list on behalf of Kenneth Campbell
Sent: Thu 11/4/2004 3:10 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] something familiar



But, did not Dan's original map that started this thread show that the
Rockies and related territories were slave-friendly but not
slave-positive? Thought it was historically interesting.

Ken.


>in the map of the "red (Bush) states," it's not just the South,
>but also the Rocky Mountain states and a large part of the Midwest.
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine
>
>
>
>From: PEN-L list on behalf of Kenneth Campbell
>Sent: Thu 11/4/2004 2:32 PM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: [PEN-L] something familiar
>
>
>
>Jim writes:
>
>>there really isn't anything similar. The Rocky Mountain
>>states and a large part of the Midwest that went with
>>the South.
>
>Could you clarify that? There may be a word extra in there.
>
>Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Kenneth Campbell]

Ahh, Jim... you know I agree with you. Nothing is one-dimensional.

I was just having fun with Vera Cruz and all in the midst of this
leftist despair.

Blame it on Dan's damn map.

Respectfully,

Ken.

Re: [PEN-L] something familiar

[Dan Scanlan]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 3:24 PM, Kenneth Campbell wrote:
Blame it on Dan's damn map.
Weren't my damn map. I just pointed to it.
Dan

[PEN-L] come back

[Dan Scanlan]

Begin forwarded message:
From: "Ralph Nader" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: November 4, 2004 4:11:07 PM PST
To: "Dan Scanlan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Now - YOU Can Respond
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<>Dear Dan,
<>HEAR Ralph's Post-Election Message
Thank You
We need your help today.
<> 
First of all, thank you so very much to the thousands of volunteers, 
our Corporate Crimebusters, State, Regional and Campus Coordinators, 
our valiant staff here in Washington, DC, all of our generous donors 
and every one of you who voted for Nader/Camejo 2004.

Well, it should now be clear to all: the Democratic Party cannot get 
the job done against the worst Republicans in a long time. So much 
time and money was spent by the Democrats, only to push a message that 
ultimately said, “Don’t vote for George W. Bush.” It’s a shame. If 
losing to George W. Bush isn’t the breaking point for Democrats who 
have been fed up for years by the leadership in their party, then I 
can’t imagine the indignities that they are further willing to endure.

America isn’t being allowed to get better; it is going backwards into 
the future on many human indicators.

You probably have dozens of friends and family members who chided you 
for supporting our campaign in the last several months. We know that 
their stances against you went against the very things that they 
actually believe in, when they urged you to “keep quiet and vote for 
John Kerry.”

Now, it is your turn to make some friendly demands of them. We need 
you to forward this email or make a call to each of your friends—with 
a message from you saying, “Come back.”

We must begin calling on everyone to come back into the principled and 
substantive thinking that they departed for tactical reasons.

We have incurred debt that must be paid off before we can devote all 
of our attention to putting a progressive agenda back on the table, 
including ending the worsening war in Iraq.

We must recollect, we must reform, we must regroup with all of those 
who believe in our message.

There is no reason that our progress forward—to give a voice to the 
concrete Peace and Justice communities—should be slowed down by the 
corporatists who drained our campaign to make us give up.  They 
failed.

We need support from everyone who believes in our message for moving 
forward with their issues.

Welcome everyone back to us, please contribute so we can all, 
together, take on the corporate supremacists now hunkering down in the 
White House readying their vile plans against innocent people.
<><>Contributions are not tax deductible.
Paid for by Nader for President 2004 General Election Committee
202.265.4000 — P.O. Box 18002,Washington, DC 20036
To remove yourself from all mailings from VoteNader.org, please click 
here

To modify your profile, please click here 
 <>
They would privatize your private thought
And charge a dollar just to be.

[PEN-L] The Most Recent Stolen election

[Craven, Jim]

Title: Message




--
"Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up 
on two objectives which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate 
all power in his own hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a 
political organization which would seek power exclusively through constitutional 
means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his henchmen Karl Ludeke, 
while still in prison: 'When I resume active work it will be necessaary to 
pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall 
have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist 
deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the 
result will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is 
slow...Sooner or later we shall have the majority--and after that Germany.' On 
his release from Landsberg, he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the Nazi 
Party would henceforth act within the framework of the 
constitution.
But he allowed himself to be carried away with the 
enthusiasm of the crowd in his appearance at the Buergerbraukeller on February 
27. His threats against the State were scarcely veiled. The republican regime, 
as well as the Marxists and the Jews, was 'the enemy'. And in his peroration he 
had shouted: 'To this struggle of ours there are only two possible issues: 
either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs!' " ("The Rise 
and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, 30th Anniversary Edition, 
Fawcett-Cress Publishers, N.Y. 1992, pp 169-170)
--
There is a saying in Malayalam (usually 
in response to the question "is this correct or true?" by someone who does not 
think something is correct or true): "If the crow takes a bath, can it become a 
swan?" The answer is always no. 
Behind this last fraud 
(all elections have been frauds since the beginning of the so-called "Republic") 
was textbook "Bush's Brain" or Karl Rove. The phony leaflets in Black Counties 
saying "Allegheny Election Board" announcing that voters may vote on either Nov 
2nd or 3rd at their convenience. The Diebold machines in Ohio that arrived 
programmed with a negative 25 million votes. The thousands of democrat voter 
registrations thrown into dumpsters in Nevada and Oregon. The few voting 
machines in Black districts that resulted in 7-hour waiting to vote coupled with 
more than ample voting machines in Republican districts with no waiting to vote. 
The wholesale intimidations of Latino voters in New Mexico. The slashing of 
tires of republican vans for taking elderly to the polls made to look like it 
was democrats who did it (so as to have some balance to the myriad stories of 
fascist and anti-democratic machinations of the republicans). The 30 counties in 
Florida using Diebold machine with no paper trail that routinely broke down or 
wouldn't start up.
The good news for 
Marxists is that it doesn't really matter--Kerry or Bush. It is the system that 
is the issue and ultimately Bush will do for capitalism what the 
movies Jaws I,II and III did for ocean bathing.
Jim 
Craven
 
From Greg 
Palast:
The best person in the entire U.S. on U.S. elections is Greg Palast (*Best 
Democracy Money can Buy*), cited for example by Paul Krugman of the *New York 
Times* before this current election. Here is Palast's statement this
morning:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=391&row=0
"KERRY WON.
Here's the facts
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I 
don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called 
American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the 
deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll 
showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53% to 47%. Kerry also defeated 
Bush among Ohio's male voters 51% to 49%. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, 
Kerry took the state.
Get the full story in the next hour on TomPaine.com. A special Greg Palast 
invesigation."


  
  

  
  Kerry Won. . .
  Greg Palast
  November 04, 2004
  



  

  
  Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 
  percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election 
  jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened 
  in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if 
  Ohio’s dis

Re: [PEN-L] Why does Kerry concede, could someone explain?

[Paul Zarembka]

I just got off the phone with a Democratic organizer in Ohio, who walked
into the ACT office 5 min. after Kerry conceded yesterday.  He said it was
like a morgue.  They had put so much time and effort into what they were
doing and their candidate did not hold up his end of the bargain.  He
added that this shock will have repercussions.

I have been harping on this concession issue because it is the coda to the
feeling that Kerry is a loser AND that it exposes the character of the
Democratic party as a political institution independently of its specific
policies.  Actually, I think it was a party mistake.  They should have at
least PRETENDED to fight for a while (Kerry's own lawyers wanted to fight,
I have read more than once).  By conceding SO quickly they exposed
themselves as worthless when push comes to shove.  Most of us may already
know that, but they shouldn't have let the secret out into the light of
day.

What does it mean?  There is the beginning of a base for drawing people
under another party.  As you saw from a posting a few hours ago,
Nader/Camejo are on the move.  Please consider them even if you didn't
vote for them (in Ohio, you couldn't).  And also how to retake the Greens
(I wonder how many ballot positions they have lost from their fiasco of
2004).

Paul Z.

*
Vol.21-Neoliberalism in Crisis, Accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg's Legacy
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, Zarembka/Soederberg, eds, Elsevier Science
** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka


On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> >But, Louis, damn it, he is stabbing one hell of a lot of work of a
> >lot of people in the back.  Jesus Christ, forget for the moment that
> >you and I supported Nader.  There really were huge numbers of people
> >working day and night and overtime for Kerry, people you and I know
> >personally and which I have seen in a long while.  I mean he was
> >over-anxious to get out!  And what I posted which just a few of the
> >issues behind what happened, just the technically, just the votes,
> >to hell with any questions of substance of his ABB campaign (which
> >obviously wasn't at all ABB).
> >
> >Paul Z.
>
> Today, we managed to have a protest of about two hundred people in
> Columbus.  It was a modest size, but some kids were militant.
> Kerry's abjectly quick concession made the scales fall from some
> youthful eyes, I think.  That's a hopeful sign.
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Critical Montages: 
> * Greens for Nader: 
> * Bring Them Home Now! 
> * OSU-GESO: 
> * Calendars of Events in Columbus:
> ,
> , & 
> * Student International Forum: 
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
> * Al-Awda-Ohio: 
> * Solidarity: 
>
>
>

Re: [PEN-L] election article

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/112/112_cover_election.html
Better analysis of the elction. I simply don't accept the implication made
by a number of left people on this list that Black voters are dumb, duped,
cowardly, reactionary, don't know what's best for them, etc.
Joel Wendland
Black voters who voted for Kerry are on the left -- they just are not
self-organized at this moment.  That's the hard truth.
Kerry's separate peace
As usual, the corporate media pretend that the Republican's bullying
and official criminality in the weeks preceding Election Day - events
they covered - never happened. John Kerry collaborates in the farce,
proclaiming in his public concession speech that America is in
"desperate need for unity, for finding common ground and coming
together. Today, I hope we can begin the healing."
But the troops who carried him, the Black men and women targeted for
harassment and humiliation at the polls, are bleeding on the field,
many of their votes never to be counted or even acknowledged. The
vaunted legions of Democratic lawyers that were supposed to descend
on Ohio and Florida to tear apart the rigged systems of electoral
apartheid were told to stand down on Tuesday night. PBS News Hour's
Margaret Warner told viewers that Kerry's legal team advocated a
"scorched earth" policy to challenge the crooked system until it
screamed - a result Democratic troops would have cheered. Kerry
overruled his lawyers, to make a false peace with the Pirates.
At Harvard, Dr. Dawson reports that "students don't understand how
Kerry could concede before all the votes, particularly Black votes,
were counted. He owes those people, who stood for hours in line and
were asked for multiple identifications. We have another bounced
check."
And what of the provisional ballots in Ohio, which Democrats at one
time numbered at 250,000? What about all the federally-mandated
provisional ballots in each of the 50 states. Are these all to be
swept under the rug to avoid what Kerry calls "a protracted legal
process?" Once again, reconciliation between the rich and white
trumps justice for Blacks every time.
In Florida, the computer-generated Bush-heavy election returns that
so dramatically clashed with earlier Kerry-heavy human exit polls are
now explained away as the result of the stealth invasion of Karl
Rove's church-based mass voter movement - a half-million strong
evangelical invasion force that most hard-wired Republican pundits
did not even know existed. As "Ghosts of Florida" author Tom Grayman
III writes, "by no method has it been determined that the [exit]
polling was incorrect and the voting equipment was not."
On Washington-based XM-Radio, talk show host Mark Thompson remarked
that the "third eye" of every Black person in America was wide open,
blinking in disbelief as Kerry Democrats and Bush Republicans
rearrange the facts about November 2, 2004.
The last thing America needs is unity with thieves, Pirates and
punks. The nation and the world need peace, jobs and justice. Let's
get back to work.

If Black voters were self-organized, they would have been out at the
statehouse and/or Kenneth Blackwell's office and/or the Republican
and Democratic Parties' headquarters in Ohio and other states where
the margins were slim on November 3rd, or would be there soon, to
demand that all the provisional ballots be counted and to make a
ruckus about "spoiled" votes.
--
Yoshie
* Critical Montages: 
* Greens for Nader: 
* Bring Them Home Now! 
* OSU-GESO: 
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
,
, & 
* Student International Forum: 
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: 
* Al-Awda-Ohio: 
* Solidarity: