June Week 5, 2006

Something is wrong with the link bars on this page... I can't figure it out yet...

Took Autumn to the Dermatologist in Spokane. She has some moles and other spots that needed to be looked at. The Doc removed one mole but he said the others were nothing to worry about.

Repaired the screen on the back porch, it was torn at the top and I needed to put the ladder at right angles to a slope. There is a bar across the bottom of the ladder for stability and I could use a couple flagstone rocks to level it out. I had to go on the roof to finish it off though... it's a metal roof and I haven't been up one it before and I had no idea whether it was strong enough or slippery... yes, it's slippery but you can get a grip and stand on it, it seems able to withstand my weight OK.

Pressure washed the moss and mildew off the front of the house. The roof is slipperier when it's wet... it was a little nervewracking but the house sure looks better.

Sprayed the trees with insect repellant, the pressure washer works great, I had tried to do it once before but I couldn't get the sprayer to pick up the solution in the bucket... once I took the time to read the instructions I realized I was using the wrong nozzle on the sprayer, there is a 'low pressure' nozzle that allows the applicator hose to let the solution in.

Washed Christy's van, the van has a bad odor, I can't figure out where it's coming from...

Laid back day... hot too, G D mosquitoes everywhere, if there is a God he will have to justify mosquitoes to me before I pay him any homage. I stayed busy all day but I'll be damned if I can remember what the hell I did, Cindy went to Jeff's again and the girls went to Box Canyon to swim... Calie and Monica seem to be getting along pretty good lately, not sure why.

Too hot to do much outside, and in the evening when it cools the mosquitoes are thick, we don't have air-conditioning but it stays pretty cool in the house. at least it's possible to find a cool place in the house. My shop is not as hot as I thought it would be but there isn't a lot to do down there. Christy got her blood tested, she is really at a low point, her immune system is non existent and her energy level is as low as I have ever seen it... Grandpa had some more moles removed... he's really getting grumpy, not a lot of fun to be around.

The young apples are falling off one of the trees, if I shake a branch the apples fall off in bunches, it's seemed odd to me but I suspected that because some fell and others were clinging fast that it was some sort of natural phenomenon... I was right. I checked with Marcella Kuboda (Long story behind that name) and she said it was just the tree protecting it's fruit by self pruning.

I patched the porch railing together again, I will have to replace it next spring.

A Prarie Home Companion will be on PBS this weekend, it shows up four times on Direct TV.

Not much accomplished again today... I got Calie and Christian pissed off at me... Oh well, I guess I can live with their anger... just makes the day seem longer.

I enjoyed your article on Libertarians, I read Lou Rockwell's web site regularly because I seem to agree with much that is said there. But there are times when I have a hard time with their version of of the ideal society and I have been unable to put my finger on which aspect of their "I got mine, now you try to get yours," philosophy. It is admittedly better than the Republican "I got mine and you can go to hell" philosophy or the Democratic "I got mine, you give me yours and we'll share yours with the needy" Were we all equal in every sense I would not have a problem, but the truth is we are not all equal... like Frederick Nietzsche railing about the fact that the world is made up of sheep What Nietzsche failed to understand is that the world is not Nietzsche , we are sheep, and what Libertarians and Republicans and Democrats need to understand is that a shepherd takes care of his flock, he doesn't exploit it

We are losing ground against a rhetorical assault.

The Libertarian star, hurled by the upward burst of American business which occurred in the Reagan era after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has risen. This global expansion over the last two decades is capitalism's second Big Bang, and it still accelerates. Mercantile missionaries have been flying to remote and backward nations in Indonesia, Latin America and the Middle East to show them liberty, democracy and wealth. The message: business is the solution; as your nation gets richer, it will benefit everybody.

The actual sequence is floridly exposed by writers like John Perkins (1). Ostensibly we send bold venture capitalists traipsing from country to backwater country, nailing freedom into place and unfurling banners of abundance. In practice it takes money to get started. First, corporate reps fly in and propose to arrange gargantuan loans for improvements. The lenders include the World Bank, and the loans may be used partly to bribe local officials, but they come with many rules and conditions that the construction work be done by American contractors. It is big money and it is made clear to local politicians they will get a fabulous rake-off. The paperwork is set. Next the contractors move in and install concrete ports, iron factories, fences, oil wells, roads, telephones and mines. The factories fill with local workers. The big money loans also come with big interest payments (always in American dollars.) If the loans are not paid off quickly (they never are - these improvements take time) they compound into mountainous obligation. This brings whole sectors of the nation under the control of the foreign lenders. This may be used to extort political changes. Obstructing local leaders may be removed.

The pattern is an old one. On a local scale it used to be called carpetbagging. After the American Civil War northern profiteers traveled south taking advantage of Southern chaos and loss, buying property and plantations from devastated landowners, hiring at starvation wages, getting rich, and leveraging themselves into political office, arguing that the employment they brought benefited all. They were hated as exploiters. A poster from the period shows the KKK threatening to lynch carpetbaggers.

Our international version has brought backward nations in Indonesia, Latin America and the Middle East phones, satellite TV, and clinics, while natural resources are taken under the lender's rules. This was supposed to lead to local wealth but most of the money goes to pay off the contractors and the lenders.

On this side, reports seep back to American shareholders of indigenous people working twelve-hour shifts for five dollars a day in the new concrete sweatshops surrounded by barbed wire and having no standards and no labor laws; walled hells of exploitation – but cheap labor means bonanza profits. Some mansions appear on the hillside. But not everybody is lifted. Years later, there are acres of slums. Instead of gratitude come street demonstrations against Americans.

But challenge the working conditions and you get corporate table pounding: ‘Five dollars a day is much better than the dollar a day they made herding goats.' And if you object that it doesn't look like liberty for the workers – ‘but we saved them from communism.' Perkins goes on to relate how corporate reps, poolside at shimmering hotels, talk about civilizing the savages, the way the colonial British talked a century ago.

Some very wealthy American politicians are entangled in these corporations. When these politicians are interviewed on talk shows or the evening news, it's a familiar line: we bring freedom and economic opportunity to oppressed nations (if they sit on oil fields).

The better known of these politicians are called neocons, or new (born again) conservatives. The rhetoric they use is that a rise in corporate wealth – and their wealth - benefits all. They sometimes must struggle to make these small countries see sense, as well as liberal doubters at home. They must explain. This is where ideology comes in.

Neocon business ideology is smudged, a mix of market principles with a subtext of Social Darwinism, and more subtext conveyed in TV images, and that all this is prayed on in church; clumsy. So Libertarian principles are used.

The Libertarian Party was invented in 1971 and it has never won any national elections. Actually, true Libertarians are against expansionism. They do not want foreign wars. They hate wiretapping, domestic spying, police powers, and big government. At the Libertarian center is an anarchist's desire for as little government as possible. New as it is, the Libertarian movement has a towering advantage: a crisp ideology.

Ultimately, policy is steered by ideas. So while neocons and their lobbyists guide huge money around, they must fall back on quoting an ideology that's not quite theirs. So Libertarians get outsize respect.

Libertarian ideology is both powerful and backward-looking. It is expounded by older authorities like Ayn Rand (2) and new, and its principles may be found in a few quite readable books (3-5). It insists on maximizing personal freedom. It uses ancient concepts like natural law, and its goals are a reversion to the ‘natural state' – simple communities based on the rightness of inequality, and natural selection among humans. It is not democratic. It does not deal with conscience, nor with justice, nor compassion; its single-minded focus is on liberty, and it embraces concepts like survival of the fittest. It claims Adam Smith's principle of the ‘invisible hand,' and it promotes concepts like laissez-faire that businessmen want to use.

Libertarianism is not to be confused with populism, because populism is egalitarian and focuses on the good of the common man. Libertarians avoid anything common; they talk about natural nobilities and elites.

Throw in Libertarians' insistence that the ‘common good' is a deception, throw in their exaggerated assertions of the total failure of socialism, throw in their insistence that taxation is theft - and businessmen are ready to do battle at high pitch.

No matter how they press us with this, and expect us to see sense, we never will. Adam Smith's principles are over two hundred years old. Forcing it on global markets is perverse.

And this is my thesis: Libertarian ideology throws us in jeopardy.

First, their foundation is flawed. They present freedom as shining and obvious, a self-evident good. Actually she is an ambiguous woman, surrounded by a logjam of philosophy. Many, many crimes have been committed in her name.

Second, a point on the nature of democracy. The two basic values of democracy are freedom and equality. They are the wings on which this precious bird flies, and for flying they should be equal. But as de Tocqueville originally pointed out, the two values are in conflict. Especially in big societies, the more freedom, the less equality. It's like water in a U-shaped tube: as freedom increases on one side, equality drops. But as the equality side goes down, so do things that adhere to it: equity, equal treatment, justice.

Water always seeks its own level. If the Libertarians persist in artificially raising one side, nature will eventually reassert. Sensing this, some Libertarians propose a radical method to preserve this arrangement. Hans-Herman Hoppe demands we dismantle democracy – like dismantling the whole U-shaped tube - and reinstall ancient natural nobilities (6). This is an atavistic proposal. Hoppe (called an "international treasure" by Lew Rockwell) actually states the Constitution was an error (7) – and Ayn Rand was not far behind.

Third, a newly discovered hazard of social inequality.

There is new evidence, collected in the health sciences and published in medical journals, showing hierarchy is a killer. Simply: social inequality (aside from poverty) hurts people's health and shortens their lives. These are based on correlations in states, countries, and cities: wherever there is marked social inequality, violence is up, health is down, infant mortality is up, and life expectancy is shorter - and this affects all levels within the community. These scientific findings, published over the last ten years in both the United States and Britain, are powerful and clear. They show egalitarian societies are simply healthier (8-10).

So the expansion of free markets under Libertarian principles cannot benefit everybody. A few people get exponentially rich, but at the same time we are exporting threats to both health and justice. If there were truth-in-lending packages attached to these foreign loans, they should include photos of our own skid rows, and statistics on American hunger.

Some of America's political rights are formulated as freedoms - of speech, of assembly. Another is to select who will govern. By derivation, another – through elections, a slow process – is to select the shape of our society. We should protect this if we are to care for our health.

The Libertarians are up to no good.

And I am not proposing a coercive new program, nor a new political machinery, nor an end to business, nor new social engineering.

I am suggesting we let water find its own level.

Notes

1. Perkins, J. Confessions of an economic hit man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, 2004.
2. Rand, A. Capitalism: the unknown ideal. New York: Signet Books, 1946.
3. Murray, C. What it means to be a Libertarian. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.
4. Boaz, D. Libertarianism: A primer. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
5. Hoppe, H. H. Democracy, the god that failed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004.
6. Hoppe, H.H. "Down with Democracy" retrieved at http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe12.html
7. Hoppe, H.H. Democracy, the god that failed. p. 279.
8. Wilkinson, R. The impact of inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. New York: The New Press, 2005.
9. Kawachi, I., B.P. Kennedy and R.C.Wilkinson, The society and population health reader. New York: The New Press, 1999.
10. Sapolsky, R. "Sick of poverty." Scientific American, 2005, 293, 92-99.

Author Julian Edney can be contacted from his website.

We Are All Forrest Gumps

Americans are feeling uncomfortable. There is strangeness in the air and we don’t fully understand what is happening. We see things that make no sense, and we wonder, "Am I part of this, or not?" Whether one answers "Yes" or "No," the implications are distinctly terrifying.

A good citizen, we are told, supports the war in Iraq. That this occupation is not a "war," that it is based on Washington, D.C.–generated lies, that it is a permanent part of a still secret and regional strategic agenda, and that it effectively creates terrorists instead of killing them is irrelevant. To be a good citizen, you must support the war in Iraq.

A good citizen does not criticize his President, a.k.a. his or her "commander in chief." It is easy to be confused. We are told that 300 million citizens and 30 million more living in the United States are the same as the 1.4 million on military active duty, who acknowledge the President as a commander in chief during, and only during, times of war. We are told that a selective permanent military occupation of an oil rich state equates to just war. We are told that the First Amendment to the Constitution really doesn’t mean what it says in black and white, much like the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Yet, only moments earlier we were told that the freedom from government interference outlined in the Bill of Rights is sacrosanct, and worth an eternal and global fight to the death.

A good citizen is not a criminal – yet we live in a modern America where one is a criminal if one does not wear a state-mandated seatbelt, if one enters a public building without the appropriate citizen’s identification, if one smokes a cigarette on the wrong sidewalk, if one does not remove clothing as demanded by the Department of Homeland security prior to a commercial plane ride for which one has not only privately purchased, but paid a smorgasbord of additional fees to cover the costs imposed by these same Homeland Security regulations. One must disclose all of one’s activities to the state, in advance, if possible. The state must never be placed at risk by the checks we write, the things we buy, the letters we send, the phone calls we make, places we go, the friends we hold dear, the words we say, the ideas we consider.

My local paper, the Shenandoah Valley Herald, ran a front-page article yesterday about a truck driver who was tasered to death less than ten miles from my house on June 20^th because he would not submit satisfactorily to the local police queries. He was pepper sprayed, then tasered multiple times until he expired. I don’t know what crimes he committed, but I suspect they will be recorded as many and most serious.

Jon Stewart captured the insanity of the American state in this four-minute clip, where Stewart conducts a Forrest Gump style assessment of the latest FBI and Department of Justice anti-terrorist operation against the notorious Miami Seven. It is absolutely hilarious, as if made for comedy. It stars Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his two best men, all playing themselves.

We need to take Forrest Gump in America to a whole new level. Instead of being entertained by Gumpian common sense and wide-eyed amazement, as we are with The Daily Show, every good American ought to aspire to achieve a certain level of personal Gumpism.

Public critics of government excess – in any era – tend to be the educated, the economically and historically sophisticated, the articulate, the intellectually curious, and the morally or religiously devout.

It is always good to criticize governments, starting most vociferously with your own. But Forrest Gump was not educated, articulate, or religiously devout.

Public supporters of government excess, top-down mandates for law and order, moral majorities and central-planning state-allocators of global resources, are not Gumpian either. These flocks are Gump’s immediate enemies. When Forrest is running, it is from this angry, obsessed, jealous prole-mass, whether they are attempting to beat him into submission, punish him for crimes uncommitted, or keep him caged by low expectations.

Forrest Gumps are the living, breathing nemeses of fascism, gang mentalities, and chic utilitarianism. Gumps among us may not speak the whole truth, and they may understand little of what intellectuals and know-it-alls say about "how the world works." But the Forrests of the world trust their gut, and they prefer to believe their real mothers, not their would-be nannies. Forrest Gumps know that stupid is as stupid does.

Gumps believe in hard evidence, and they observe this evidence wherever it rests, without fear. Gumps are not dismayed when those doing stupid things appear powerful, respected and are well-dressed. They are blissfully ignorant of the idea that the wealthy and politically connected have power over the smallest detail of a man’s life. Forrest Gumps, childlike and innocent, will openly observe that the emperor is stark naked, and by extension, powerless over his betters.

With today’s state-loving blowhards busy blowing with all their might, we might consider a third way. The proper response may not be, as in the Three Little Pigs, to build a stronger house. It may be simply be to walk out the back door, change the dynamic, shift the power perspective in our own worldview. It is asymmetric warfare of the finest kind.

Gump’s fictional story is nothing more than a single life lived honestly, damn the consequences. This way of life is remarkably self-centered – yet as the Winston Groom novel shows, this type of life tends to be more influential than the lives of flocks and flocks of those who look to others to know what to think, what to do, and how to behave.

It is good to enjoy Gumpism for its inspirational and entertainment value, but we should go further. We ought to cultivate Gumpian perspectives of American politics, and adopt a Gump-inspired lifestyle in the heart of an increasingly vicious and amoral state.

Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum on Saturday nights, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com. To receive automatic announcements of new articles and upcoming guests on her American Forum radio program, click here.

President Bush's effectiveness as a domestic president is ending not with a bang but a whimper. Five months before the midterm elections, congressional Republicans fear that association with him may alienate their constituencies and result in loss of the House of Representatives. They hold the House by only 15 seats, and suddenly even previously safe districts are at risk. Just a month ago Bush delivered a televised address on immigration, urging Congress to provide for eventual citizenship for the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the country (the pro-business position). He convinced the Senate, but the House refused to budge from its punitive position to criminalize any assistance to them.

The White House had hoped that the killing of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would reverse Bush's slide in popularity. Indeed there was a slight bump upward of several points. But this is a classic epiphenomenon that has already started to wither. From the vantage point of Capitol Hill, Bush's evanescent Zarqawi "recovery" has failed to cast any glow on to Republican prospects. Enforcing party discipline for a purely political Congressional vote last week endorsing Bush's policy, such as it is, in Iraq has barely quelled panic. As Bush briefly nudged up from the low to mid-30s, Republican candidates fell further behind. For Republicans, Bush has become cement shoes.

Two recent near-death experiences have desperately frightened Republicans. In a June 6 byelection to fill the seat of the corrupt and imprisoned congressman Randy Cunningham in suburban San Diego, one of the safest Republican districts in the country, the Republican narrowly held on only through demagogic appeals against immigrants. In Utah, in an even safer Republican district, the state party denied endorsement to Chris Cannon because he had made the mistake of supporting Bush's plan. On Tuesday Cannon edged out a primary challenge from an anti-immigrant activist who insisted he was battling "Satan".

Southern Republicans picked this moment to stall the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, enacted after a century of African-American disfranchisement in the south. Their ringleader, Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, is also the sponsor of bills that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House and Senate as well an amendment to the constitution to justify these sort of displays.

In the Senate, on Tuesday, Republicans staged a day-long debate on a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. The Republican Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, proclaimed nothing less than a "crisis": "Enemies of American freedom abroad are well aware of the ideals emblemized by the American flag." The measure failed by one vote to attain the necessary two-thirds majority.

So far this year there have been four incidents of flag burning - the evildoers have not been al-Qaida suspects but the usual rowdy small-town teenagers.

While the Senate was consumed debating the flag-burning amendment, the Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota was removing every mention and likeness of Bush from his campaign literature and advertising. As the Republican cultural warriors march into the midterm elections, they are unfurling nativism and jingoism as their banners, and some are even raising the shadow of Jim Crow. The unpopular conservative president is the emblem they seek to hide. But only by suffering slights from Republicans can Bush hope to escape a Congress led by Democrats that would cast sunlight on his remarkably secretive and unaccountable administration.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars