Happy Loyalty to Capital Day

While people across the United States and indeed the world are today celebrating May Day, marking the achievements of workers and organized labor, President Barack Obama is urging Americans to celebrate a very different holiday: Loyalty Day. In a presidential proclamation highlighting the occasion, Obama recommends those wishing "to recognize the American spirit of loyalty" do so by "displaying the flag of the United States or pledging allegiance to the Republic for which it stands."

Whatever you do, is the implicit message, don't start looking into the ways the system to which you are pledging allegiance serves the interests of capital at the expense of the working class. Stick with the symbolism, folks, stay away from the history. Definitely don't open a book and read up on how the U.S. government has throughout its history warred against those demanding better working conditions, sending federal troops to break up strikes and, the evidence suggests, staging a bombing at a union demonstration in Chicago that in fact spawned the marking of May 1 as a celebration of the labor movement. Don't do that.

And while it's cool to talk about how great the Constitution is -- in the abstract, like, "boy, isn't the Bill of Rights swell?" or, "I'm sure glad I live in a country that has specially designated areas where I'm free to speak my mind, within reason" -- it would probably undermine the noble cause of Loyalty to look too deeply into who exactly that state charter was designed to serve. Word to the wise: you'll want to stay away from James Madison. Yes, I know, he's supposed to be one of the "good" guys, but he was also rather blunt about the whole we're screwing the masses big time with this whole system of government thing, noting that the purpose of the American state -- and the Senate in particular -- "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

"An obvious and permanent division of every people is into the owners of the Soil, and the other inhabitants," Madison once explained. "In a certain sense the Country may be said to belong to the former." He didn't mean the indigenous peoples.

In order to ensure the continued divide between the haves and the have-nots for generations to come, Madison counseled political centralization. "Large districts are manifestly favorable to the election of persons of general respectability, and of probable attachment to the rights of property, over competitors depending on the personal solicitations practicable on a contracted theatre," he wrote. "And altho' an ambitious candidate, of personal distinction, might occasionally recommend himself to popular choice by espousing a popular though unjust object, it might rarely happen to many districts at the same time."

In other words, James Madison might say, for every Norman Solomon out there, the system is structured to guarantee there will be 99 Steny Hoyers; we can vote for the former (at least 0.001 percent of you probably can), but it'll be the latter running the show. And for most people, they won't even get that chance to pretend their voice is being heard, instead being left to choose between, say, a Barack Obama and a Mitt Romney. In hindsight, the founders may have gotten a lot wrong -- whoops, slavery -- but they sure did know how to construct a durable system of economic exploitation.

So gracious

Our old friend Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine, last seen 'round these parts wondering why more Americans weren't blaming "deadbeat" Americans for costing poor 'ol Wall Street so much money, is willing to concede not every member of the Occupy movement is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler:

"While the history of anti-capitalism is infused root and branch with racism, I do believe that at least a minority of participants in the Occupy movement are not racists or anti-Semites."

And I'm willing to believe "at least a minority" of Reason writers aren't such craven shills for the wealthy that they would stoop to suggesting a few nuts blaming The Jews for the status quo are representative of a mass movement that enjoys the support of a majority of Americans.

Nicaragua triunfará

Elections in Nicaragua are less than a month away, which means the criminal misuse of American pop songs -- artistically speaking -- as a means of marketing the various candidates to the all-important Youth of the Country has just about hit its awful peak.

Sometimes the songs are almost endearingly awful, as when 79-year-old businessman and conservative presidential candiate Fabio Gadea airs television ads set to a repurposed -- and still awful -- Black Eyed Peas song. Other times, as in the case of certain local candidate for office here in the southwestern department of Rivas by the fucking name of "Alejandro," it's enough to drive a nice anarcho-pacifist boy into a fit of violent, unthinking rage, particularly when said asshole plants his campaign truck right outside your apartment and blares his unofficial theme for the better part of a Saturday.

But I'm ranting.

Recently, the Central American tradition of using bad pop music to sell even worse politicians made news when a certain mom-and-pop corporation by the name of Sony Entertainment decided it didn't like Sandinista leader and odds-on favorite to win Nicaragua's presidential election Daniel Ortega's use of the 1961 hit "Stand by Me."

Now, I don't much like the song either. Or at least I don't now that I've heard three times a day for the past four months. But Sony's problem with it is a bit different than mine: it contends the Sandinistas' appropriation of the tune constitutes a "serious infringement" of the company's copyright over the half-century-old song. And that's a big no-no.

“We don’t allow our songs to be used by political campaigns,” Jimmy Asci, a spokesman for company, explained in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Of course, the actual song being used by Mr. Ortega is nothing like the one recorded by Ben E. King 50 years ago. The words are completely different; it doesn't even say "stand by me." It's in Spanish. And it's about Nicaragua. And peace and love, two themes that if adopted by any major candidate in the United States would get them laughed right off the stage of the prime-time CNN debate brought to you by Lockheed-Martin.

Check out the song yourself:



Intellectual property laws ostensibly exist to encourage artists to create art because, as we all know, the best musicians are those in it for the money. But that's not the issue here: the guy who recorded the original "Stand by Me" has made his cash. The issue is a major company's ability to make even more money off of another's work -- and to prevent that work from being used in ways its executive board doesn't deem acceptable, which would be called "censorship" if carried out by a state but is called plain old "capitalism" when it involves a state-chartered corporation reliant on the legal machinery of the state.

Judging by the country's complete and thoroughly admirable lack of respect for those intellectual property laws, however -- I've yet to see a "legitimate" CD or DVD in my 10 months here -- I'm guessing Nicaragua will triumph.

Congressional drones

Concerned that the unmanned aerial drones currently raining death upon the unfortunate inhabitants of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia aren't having their synthesized voices heard in Congress? Sick and tired of our brave robots defending American overseas lacking representation the halls of power? Fret no more, friend. Drones, unlike some bipeds, now have their very own caucus in Washington consisting of around 50 lawmakers -- perhaps the only patriots left in America.

Here is their mission:

This is an exciting and existing technology that will continue to grow, and improve our lives [ed: by ending them?] as public acceptance progresses. The Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus’ goal is to educate members of Congress on every facet of this industry. We are this industry’s voice on Capitol Hill, and will work closely with industry to ensure we continue to expand this sector through efficient government regulation and oversight

Be sure to check out the sea of mostly pale white faces bravely speaking out for poor, disenfranchised military contractors like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin in the face of the dire threat posed by the dark forces of the peace-activist-congressional complex. One only hopes they can convince the public they purport to represent to accept this killer technology for which their tax dollars are paying. Good luck, brave sirs!

As for all you other living and breathing folks, especially you hippies protesting the collusion between state and Wall Street, just be aware: while Predator drones have a voice in Congress, you don't.

Another state subsidy to the insurance industry

Besides just outright mandating that people purchase private health plans as under the 2010 health care law, the U.S. government subsidizes the insurance industry in a number of other ways, particularly through the tax code, where it encourages Americans to put money into dubious insurance products as a way to reduce their IRS bills.

"Life insurance," to take but one example, "enjoys unique status among financial products." Among its advantages:

1. You pay NO current income tax on interest or other earnings credited to cash value. As the cash value accumulates, it is not subject to current taxation.

2. You pay NO income tax if you borrow cash value from the policy through loans. Generally, loans are treated as debts, not taxable distributions. This can give you virtually unlimited access to cash value on a tax-advantaged basis. Also, these loans need not be repaid. After a sizable amount of cash value has built up, it can be borrowed against systematically to help supplement retirement income and in many cases, never pay one cent of income tax on the gain. Several cautions regarding policy loans: First, loans are charged interest and policy loans can reduce the overall value of the policy. Second, the cash value is potentially subject to income taxes when there is a withdrawal from or surrender of the policy, or if a certain ratio of death benefit to cash value is not maintained. Third, if the policy is a modified endowment contract, the loan may be taxable.

3. Your heirs pay NO income tax on proceeds. Your beneficiaries receive death benefits completely free of income taxation. Therefore, a $500,000 policy delivers $500,000 in benefits with no deductions and no withholding required. Note: This is true with all life insurance policies, both term and cash value.

4. You can avoid potential estate taxes and probate costs on policy proceeds, as long as the beneficiary designations and policy ownership are arranged in accordance with current law. For instance, if you (A) own your policy at the time of your death or (B) make your estate the beneficiary, the policy proceeds will generally be included in your estate at death. This can increase the value of your estate, triggering estate taxes. This situation may be avoided, however, by placing ownership and naming beneficiaries outside your estate. If structured properly, the policy proceeds will not be included in your estate. However, to avoid estate inclusion for existing policies, the policy must be transferred more than three years before your death. Consult your tax and legal advisors regarding your particular circumstances.

(Source: New York Life Insurance Company)

Life insurance is a sound investment for the wealthy individual looking it to avoid taxes when passing on wealth to their children. Speaking of which: one man worth $39 billion currently being rewarded with praise from Democrats for his selfless call for higher taxes on the rich -- let's call him "Barren Wuffet" -- would like to know if you're interested in some life insurance.

This is not only an example of how the state subsidizes the insurance industry, by the way: it's another reason why critics of the status quo and the growing divide between rich and poor ought to spend less time on the topic of higher taxes for the rich -- which they can afford to avoid, not that they shouldn't be raised anyway -- and more time on the policies, including existing incentives in the tax code, that are responsible for actually making them rich.

'The End of Loser Liberalism' and the myth of the free market

(This is the extended, Director's Cut edition of my review published by Inter Press Service)

The top 1 percent of earners in the United States now control more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, their income steadily rising at the same time most of the country now takes home less pay than a decade ago, with an all-time high of 46 million Americans now living below the official poverty line.

To many on the right, this trend is the natural consequence of market forces, of freedom and free enterprise rewarding the more productive members of society. Many on the left also hold free markets responsible for the expanding gap between rich and poor and the global economic meltdown that accelerated it, arguing for a more interventionist role by the state to promote stability and arrest the growth in inequality.

But as economist Dean Baker observes in his latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, the truth is that those on both sides of the political spectrum who assert that the U.S. economy is based on free markets are fundamentally mistaken. Markets in the U.S. have never been free of state intervention. Rather, that which we call the “free market” has in fact been fixed, consciously designed to redistribute wealth from the working class to the idle rich, from patents that allow pharmaceutical giants to reap monopoly profits to restrictions on labor that neuter the ability of Americans to organize and demand better compensation.

If critics of the corporatist status quo want to quit losing policy debates, argues Baker, it's time they started accurately describing the system they're up against and quit debating on its apologists' terms.

“In reality,” writes Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, “the vast majority of the right does not give a damn about free markets; it just wants to redistribute income upward.” Though cloaking their language in the rhetoric of liberty, conservative politicians – both Democrat and Republican, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush – have in fact crafted an economic system based on coercion and dependent on state-granted corporate privilege.

Of course, they can't just say that, so they couch their rhetoric in terms of the American Dream, of hard work and ingenuity being rightly rewarded with prosperity. But politicians in Washington professing their allegiance to free markets should be no more believed than when they profess their devotion to peace.

Unfortunately, critics of a system crafted by and for the rich have accepted the “free market” framing of its defenders, which is why Baker posits the left has been losing the policy debate in recent decades. All too often, liberals have accepted the increased concentration of wealth as the natural result of free enterprise; if their opponents have any fault, then, it's that they have too much faith in people being left to conduct their own affairs free of intervention by the state. That, Baker maintains, is far too easy on politicians whose only allegiance is not to the principles of the free market, but the principal of the rich.

And blaming free markets for inequality and economic catastrophe in America is not only factually flawed, writes Baker, “it makes for horrible politics.” Accepting the right's framing of the debate allows conservatives to cast themselves as defenders of “productive” Americans who live in bigger houses than the rest of us because they worked harder, enabling the left to be “portrayed as wanting to tax the winners in society in order to reward the losers.”

Instead of devoting so much time to taxing the rich, Baker maintains the left would be better off striking at the root and attacking the state privileges that enrich them in the first place. Instead of allowing the right to masquerade as defenders of limited government, the left ought to reveal conservatives as the true proponents of massive state intervention in the economy.

Consider the debate over deregulation. A common liberal critique is that the repeal of the Great Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, enabling commercial banks to jump into investment banking, was an example of laissez faire ideology run amok, a move that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008. The truth, though, is that the repeal of the act didn't actually minimize state intervention in the economy at all. On the contrary, it only increased the state's role in shaping market outcomes, extending the deposit insurance the federal government provides commercial banks to the investment firms that could now operate under the same roof, providing a taxpayer-funded subsidy to risky investments and exotic financial instruments.

Proponents of “deregulation” in the 1990s were in truth the real advocates of Big Government. So why isn't the left saying that?

Baker also details how, under the watch of alleged free marketeer Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve – the very existence of which is at odds with a free market – pumped the economy full of cheap credit, fueling reduced lending standards and the creation of exotic financial instruments by banks confident that, should times turn sour, their allies at the Fed would refuse to let them fail.

Indeed, the Fed itself was from its founding in 1913 “deliberately designed to insulate it from democratic control and leave it instead to be a tool of the financial industry.” The problem was never a lack of regulation or state involvement in the economy, observes Baker, it was for whom those regulations and interventions served.

If Baker's assessment of the U.S. economy sounds radical to the liberal ear, his statement that, in general, “Progressives should want a free market,” probably seems heretical. But in most cases, he maintains, government intervention not only does not provide a check on the concentration of wealth and the rise of monopolies, but in fact is the underlying cause for the increasing gap between rich and poor. Be it overly restrictive licensing schemes that limit competition in the medical and legal professions, resulting in much higher salaries than would be possible in a free market, to labor laws that hinder organizing and prohibit unions from engaging in sympathy boycotts and other effective negotiating tactics, the overwhelming effect of government intervention is to make the wealthy elite wealthier.

Indeed, the very corporations held up as the pinnacles of success in a free society “do not exist in the natural world or in the free market,” Baker notes, their very existence owed to an act of government that, thanks to the doctrine of corporate personhood, enables executives to evade legal and financial responsibility for poisoned rivers and fraudulent mortgages – and to avoid answering to shareholders who are ostensibly their bosses.

The rise in health care costs in America is also largely due, not to market forces, but state interventions, notes Baker. For example, Baker writes that Americans currently spend around $300 billion a year – or 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) – on prescription drugs. In a competitive market free from monopoly-granting patents, that figure would be closer to $30 billion.

“This difference of $270 billion a year is more than five times as large as the annual cost of President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of the population,” Baker writes, the same inflated costs applying to patented medical equipment. Yet, despite even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noting that “intellectual property” is the single greatest factor when it comes to redistributing wealth from the lower to upper classes, it receives nowhere near the attention that tax policy does from the left.

The End of Loser Liberalism demonstrates that what the left and right have come to call the “free market” is in fact an economy fixed by the wealthy and their allies in government to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top of the economic pyramid. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Baker shows time and again a true free market would actually lead to more progressive outcomes and that there's nothing corporate America fears more than unbridled competition – and no institution it's more dependent on than the U.S. government.

Many liberals and progressives have been conditioned to view the state as the public's last best defense against corporate power; what Baker shows is that it is more often than not its chief enabler. But while his assessment is radical, his solutions are reformist – perhaps overly so. And if Baker's to be faulted, it's for thinking too much like an economist than a progressive visionary.

That is to say, while Baker ably demonstrates the many ways state interventions in the economy are designed to enrich the wealthy, he never fully articulates his vision of a what a more progressive economy would look like, so when he advocates a major government stimulus to reboot the American economy, the reader is left to wonder: absent radical reform, what's really the point? Sure people need money, and perhaps direct payments from the state would be more “loser liberalism” and syndicalism too radical for the time being, but if stimulus money is only going to help reboot the same crony capitalist economy as before, with its fixed wages and debt-based consumerism, will short-term reductions in unemployment come at the expense of more fundamental – and necessary – reform?

Some of Baker's other ideas also aren't likely to help liberals beat the “big government” rap and shift the terms of the debate, either. Providing every American a $100 voucher to give to an artist of their choosing could conceivably undercut the power of copyright-dependent media conglomerates, for instance, but's it's hard to imagine a GOP Congress approving of tax dollars going to any artist more radical than Norman Rockwell, much less Anarcho-Vegans Against War. In effect, the proposal could very well encourage bland, politically advantageous conformity in the art world at the cost of unpopular dissent. Taking on excessive and draconian intellectual property laws head-on would seem to be both politically more attractive, bringing on board both leftists and libertarians, and less likely to subject the art world to greater political manipulation.

Providing businesses incentives to hire more workers at shorter hours, meanwhile, might reduce unemployment. And Baker's likely right that a shorter work week would be closer to what would occur on a true free market, where tax codes tying health care to employment and labor laws undercutting worker bargaining positions would no longer conspire to force Americans to work longer hours with less time off than their counterparts in Europe. But even so, mandating a shorter work week is bound to be attacked by conservatives as liberal social engineering, a left-wing war against “hard work.” If the goal is to paint conservatives as advocates of state power in the service of the wealthy, why not focus instead on changing the manipulative tax codes and big government restrictions on labor?

If the American left is to capture the public's imagination, it will ultimately need to put forward a broader, more holistic and compelling vision of society than that offered by their opponents on the right, one based more on consensus and cooperation than corporations and coercion. That vision, while hinted it, isn't detailed in The End of Loser Liberalism.

But that's a rather minor quibble. Before it can achieve radical social change, the left needs to radically change its rhetoric and quit debating on the right's terms. And if leftists wants to quit losing to conservatives, they would do well to start listening to Dean Baker.

“The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive” is available as a free download on the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Putting drug company profits over people

Apparently the United States' "Responsibility to Protect" poor innocent people wherever they may live is limited to bombing and occupying their countries. Sacrificing some of the pharmaceutical industry's billions of dollars in profits so that poor innocent people wherever they may live may . . . live? Ha!

From The New York Times:

[G]eneric drug companies say they are on the verge of selling cheaper copies of such huge sellers as Herceptin for breast cancer, Avastin for colon cancer, Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Enbrel for rheumatoid arthritis. Their entry into the market in the next year — made possible by hundreds of millions of dollars invested in biotechnology plants — could not only transform the care of patients in much of the world but also ignite a counterattack by major pharmaceutical companies and diplomats from richer countries.

Already, the Obama administration has been trying to stop an effort by poorer nations to strike a new international bargain that would allow them to get around patent rights and import cheaper Indian and Chinese knock-off drugs for cancer and other diseases, as they did to fight AIDS. The debate turns on whether diseases like cancer can be characterized as emergencies, or “epidemics.”

Rich nations and the pharmaceutical industry agreed 10 years ago to give up patent rights and the profits that come with them in the face of an AIDS pandemic that threatened to depopulate much of Africa, but they see deaths from cancer, diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases as less of an emergency and, in some cases, the inevitable consequence of better and longer living.

The inevitable consequence of putting patents and the monopoly profits they secure politically influential pharmaceutical companies over the interests of cancer-stricken patients is that many people will die preventable deaths. And Ronald Reagan's generic knockoff is cool with that. But hey, we all gotta go some time. It's inevitable, ya know

(via Chase Madar)

'Corporations are people,' says every American politician

Out stumping on the campaign trail this week, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney committed the following "gaffe" when confronted by some liberal hecklers:

"Corporations are people, my friend. . . . Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people."

Like the spectacle of a moderately liberal New England governor campaigning as a true, red-blooded social conservative, Romney's remark is ludicrous and liberal pundits have rightly had a field day with it. Corporations, of course, most certainly are not people; they can't be imprisoned, for one. So yes, let's all enjoy a good chuckle at ol' Mitt's expense and hope he provides many more belly laughs in the coming months -- I have my fingers crossed for more impromptu mingling with minorities.

But here's the thing, and the reason I have "gaffe" in scare quotes: Does any national politician -- does any leading Democrat -- actually disagree with what Romney said? Not the rhetoric, which I think most would be wise enough to avoid, but the substance of what he was defending: corporate personhood.

Some would no doubt point to President Obama's denunciation at last year's State of the Union Address of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which held that corporations enjoy the same free speech rights as any other person. However, that response is something of a non-sequitur, as Obama's criticism was not of the root problem behind the decision about which I asked, corporate personhood, but of a narrow ruling that merely extended said legal status. And on strictly legal grounds -- which, full disclosure, I don't much care about -- it's hard to disagree with the court's ruling, which is merely the bizarre consequence of the even more bizarre and longstanding practice of the state bestowing the legal status of a person on an inanimate financial venture.

This isn't nitpicking. Conflating criticism of the Citizens United ruling with criticism of corporate personhood itself is like conflating criticism of a politician with sedition and treason. I mean, what's the fear, exactly: that, thanks to the Supreme Court, corporations are now going to corrupt Our Democracy by buying and selling politicians? I'll admit such an outcome is scary, but if we're going to be in the business of constructing doomsday scenarios, we ought to be sure they differ from the status quo.

The truth is, Romney's "gaffe" is much like Sarah Palin's remark in 2008 that, why yes, the U.S. would be legally obliged to attack Russia if it went to war with a member of NATO. Back then, every pundit and politician with a blog or a microphone went to town ridiculing Palin's ill-considered and risible remark, arguing it proved her unfitness for office, all the while obscuring a key fact: that what she said was indisputably true. Then as now, the real controversy ought not to have been the clumsy way something was stated, but the truth of what was said.

Criticize Romney and the Supreme Court all you want, the more troubling issue is that, legally speaking, corporations are people -- and that no one in establishment political circles sees a problem with that. This bipartisan embrace of the corporate state consequently causes problems for the 99.9 percent of us not likely to sit on any corporate boards for, while real-live people do indeed reap the benefit of corporate profits, corporate personhood and its attendant "limited liability" ensure they face almost none of the consequences of their bad, and often criminal, decisions.

For instance, while mere mortal, flesh-and-blood people would face serious prison time for paying right-wing death squads to execute labor activists, corporate executives who personally approved those very payments were able to conceal their identities and get away with a mere fine from the Justice Department, the cost of which was no doubt passed along to costumers and shareholders as a whole, rather than the actual perpetrators. Legally, the executives weren't responsible, some prick named "Chiquita" was.

Because blame for wrongdoing can be passed off on to another person -- another person who, again, can't go to jail -- corporate executives can get away with reckless behavior as a matter of course. The profit when such recklessness pays off is huge and, of course, theirs to keep. When it doesn't, as in the case of Goldman Sachs and the housing bubble and with BP and its destruction of the Gulf, the worst that happens is someone like Tony Hayward has to delay remodeling the kitchen in their 14th house by a few weeks while, in true American socialistic fashion, the rest of us chip in to pay for their mistakes. And every politician from Mitt Romney to Nancy Pelosi is fine with that, even if they disagree on how best to rationalize it to an angry public.

If you're laughing at Mitt Romney because, well, he's Mitt Romney: Fine. By all means. But if you're laughing at his remark under the impression his stance on corporations is fundamentally at odds with, say, Barack Obama, the laugh's on you.

It starts with an 'F' (and the answer's not 'freedom')

In economics, like in war, the best propagandists prefer the language of euphemism to straightforward, ignoble fact, the latest in obfuscatory jargon to the jarring reality of truth. Why, that's not a dead mother whose children are uncontrollably weeping over her corpse as we speak, that's collateral damage; that's not a fraudulent investment that turned out bad for some rich banker who may, god forbid, have to cancel his daughter's private tennis lessons with Steffi Graf, that's a toxic asset.

Like any other illusionist, the better practitioners of the art of literal and economic warfare cloak their actions in mystery – things are never quite as simple as they seem. No, that box doesn't contain two women, just one who I cut in half! No, we're not just stealing your money to give it to rich people, we're restoring systemic confidence! And they do it for the same reason: to deceive.

Larry Summers, former top economic adviser to Barack Obama, is a master when it comes to making theft and exploitation sound banal and almost respectable. In an Op-Ed this week in the Financial Times, “How to save the eurozone,” Summers predictably urges policymakers in Europe to follow the American lead and guarantee one thing and one thing only: Keep the rich, well, rich. And make 'em richer if you can.

To just come out and say that anybody making above a certain six-figure threshold gets to play by different rules than the unwashed masses would be uncouth, albeit true. Summers, faults aside, knows this. But when the purported economic genius speaks of the need for “a clear commitment that, whatever else happens, no big financial institution in any country will be allowed to fail,” there's no getting past the meaning.

And when he condescends that "Teaching investors a lesson is a wish not a policy”? He's being a bit of a dick, yes. But he isn't wrong.

Who, after all, besides those engaged in direct action, is going to hold the likes of Goldman Sachs accountable when the entire ruling establishment is beholden to them? Those with the most power and money in America have long since succeeded in buying the support of that criminal class famous for its fidelity to little more than power and money: politicians. Barack Obama, the much-vaunted community organizer of change, raked in more money from Goldman than John McCain in 2008, and he's gone on to serve the financial elite well since in office, occasional grumbles notwithstanding. Embarrassing perp walks for those who raped the global economy with fraudulent investment schemes financed with cheap government cash is a nice fantasy, but barring an incident with a live boy or a dead girl, it'll remain just that.

Summers, however, expresses some concern over the threat of populism, which has manifested itself in popular protests from Greece to America but not so much in actual policy. The pitchforks are starting to appear, though, and some timid lawmakers could be unserious enough to listen to those wielding them. For that sort Summers has a stern message: “punishing creditors for the sake of teaching lessons or building political support” – there's the allusion to that annoying will of the people again – “is reckless in a system that depends on confidence.”

As a rich man whose own wealth and power has only grown in the face of failure, advocating and helping draft the policies that led to the Internet and housing bubbles chief among them, it's no surprise Summers, who makes tens of thousands of dollars an appearance to make wealthy bankers feel important, believes actual performance should be no obstacle to obscene wealth. And it comes as no shock that he's smugly defensive about it, ridiculing as myopic and driven by emotion attempts to hold the investor class accountable. A lack of personal responsibility and rugged individuality is to be denounced in the lower class, the lazy welfare cheats, not expected from the ruling one.

As other defenders of the bailouts and the accountability-free culture that rules the financial sector, Summers doesn't blame the ongoing economic woes around the world on bankers and the politicians that, listening to folks like him, diverted trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to the very financial interests that helped sink the global economy. No, even as small banks and businesses that were actually responsible are being denied loans because all the money has been redirected to the big boys, Summers maintains the global economic depression is due to the fact that not enough of the lower and middle classes' wealth has been siphoned off by the ultra-wealthy.

Indeed, the problem according to Summers' telling of it is that short-sighted policymakers allowed Lehman Brothers to fail like it were – imagine! – some poor janitor laid-off by his Fortune 500 employer. “The adverse consequences of the shattering effect that had on” – you know what's coming – “confidence are still being felt now,” he says. Employed no less than six times, “confidence” is code-word for “theft,” surpassed in euphemistic quackery only by Summers' appeal to the need for “restoring arithmetic credibility.”

Tom Friedman, hand over your crown.

Thoroughly deserved and unapologetic mockery aside, let's be clear about what Summers is advocating – and the policy his protégé, Barack Obama, is implementing from the White House: the rich, “whatever else happens,” must stay rich, even (nay, especially) at the expense of the poor. If you are deemed rich enough, “big” enough, you and your company will continue to be big and rich for eternity. Financial institutions like Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs – they are all too big to fail, unlike you or I. The financial status quo is perfection, bequeathed to us by a loving, day-trading god. Change is a campaign slogan, not an economic policy.

Unless the change in question is the poor getting poorer. That's cool.

Far from radical reform, the Obama/Summers goal is maintaining things exactly as they were before the economic crash of 2008, with a small but increasingly wealthy class calling the shots and free to make mistakes, often criminal in nature, with impunity. At the same time, an increasingly large impoverished class is asked to go further in debt to the same class it bailed out – someone needs to keep buying the cheap crap our economy runs on – with the gap between the politically connected haves and the politically exploited have-nots ever-expanding.

“Systemic confidence,” in this context, is a nothing but an academic-sounding deception, a fanciful way of conning the masses into believing the theft taking place is something other than just a standard stick-'em-up robbery. In the pursuit of “confidence,” the profits of big business are privatized – we aren't communists! – while their losses are socialized. When it comes to the trials and tribulations of the rich, we're all in this together. When it comes to the perks? Get off my lawn, I'm calling security.

There's an admittedly over-used but entirely appropriate word, starting with an “f,” that describes the form of economic system advocated by the likes of Summers and being imposed by the ruling elite. It isn't “freedom.”

'The rules are written by those who profit from the status quo'

It wasn't the federal government's land to begin with. It was, to quote some guy, "made for you and me." So when environmental activist Tim DeChristopher interfered with a Bureau of Land Management attempt to sell off pristine Colorado federal park land to oil and gas interests -- taking land stolen from one group of people and handing it over to another, wealthier group of people -- he had the confidence that comes with knowing what one's doing is morally right, if not necessarily legal.

DeChristopher's attempt to defend the commons from being expropriated by state-enabled corporate interests has won the 29-year-old a federal court case and the prospect of a decade behind bars; the powerful don't look kindly, it seems, upon uppity citizens thinking they have a right to shape the world they live in, much less prevent powerful corporations from polluting it.

That doesn't surprise DeCristophe. “The rules are written by those who profit from the status quo,” he observes in an interview with Chris Hedges. “If we want to change that status quo we have to step outside of those rules."

As DeChristopher says, the status quo is stacked in favor of corporate privilege. It serves you, the common person, the same way those aliens from The Twilight Zone served man: on a platter. To change the way we live, to overturn a system that accepts permanent war, pervasive pollution and double-digit unemployment as unalterable facts of life, requires attacking the system, not obligingly working within it and electing "more and better" rulers.

Changing the way things are means more than just shuffling the figureheads in power who, whether they identify as Republicans or Democrats every few years, reliably enable and enrich not those who elected them, but the corporate interests that bankrolled their campaigns. It means challenging the whole notion of the U.S. system of government; of a system that calls the choice between a couple of empty suits from two indistinguishable political parties "democracy"; of a power structure that grants corporations the legal status of persons but treats undocumented immigrants as pests.

Changing the status quo means acknowledging one's role in perpetuating it and, importantly, choosing to do something about it. Changes comes not from dutifully accepting laws and orders as writs from a benevolent god and perhaps signing a politely worded e-petition requesting a tinkering here and there, but from questioning the legitimacy of arbitrary authority. The oft-offered excuse that someone is "just following orders" -- "the law's the law" -- does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, it makes them complicit.

State capitalism and aggressive war aren't possible if the people refuse to obey their rulers' edicts.

Civil disobedience is required not just of soldiers asked to fight in unjust wars, but of everyday citizens asked, as jurors, to sanction the imprisonment of their peers. Unfortunately, if understandably, most people are unwilling to buck what their fancy-dressed superiors from the state tell them: have someone in a silly robe give the order and, like Abraham, your average American will readily offer their first-born son for sacrifice (while showing up five minutes early to avoid a fine). As DeChristopher tells Hedges, when the judge in his case found out prospective jurors had been handed pamphlets on jury nullification -- the act of juries passing judgment not on the accused, but on the laws they stand accused of violating -- he sternly lectured them on the evils of nullification.

The jurors ate it right up:

[The judge] said that regardless of what the pamphlet said it was not their job to decide if this is right or wrong, but to listen to what he said was the law and follow that even if they thought it was morally unjust. They were not allowed to use [their] conscience. They were told they would be violating their oath if they decided this on conscience rather than the evidence that he told them to listen to. I was sitting in that chamber and could see one person after another accept this notion. I could see it in their faces, that they had to do what they were told even if they thought it was morally unjust. That is a scary thing to witness in another human being. I saw it in one person after another brought in the courtroom, sitting at the end of a long table in front of the paternalistic figure of [the] judge with all the majesty around him. They accepted it. They did not question it. It gave me a really good understanding of how some of the great human atrocities happened with the consent of the population, that people can accept what is happening, that it is not their job to question whether any of this is right or wrong.

If you have a conscience, it is your duty to exercise it, not suspend it upon request. Those willing to forgo judgment of the rightness of their own actions or, worse yet, willing to do something they know is wrong because, by god, somebody important asked them to do it "command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt," in the words of Henry David Thoreau.

The first step in changing the system is acknowledging one's complicity -- because we're all, to varying degrees, complicit -- and, instead of rationalizing it, doing what you can to end it.

Privatization is theft

Taxes entail coercion; this is why they're not called donations. Accordingly, one might think self-styled advocates of free markets and smaller government, Ayn Rand aficionados especially, would be cognizant of the fact that, when it comes to a moral claim over the things that said taxes go to -- from telecommunications to transit systems -- the coerced taxpayer would have the strongest case for ownership.

You'd be wrong, of course. When it comes to downsizing the state, most conservatives and libertarians have a raging hard-on for privatization, by which they mean the government auctioning off taxpayer property to the highest private bidder. The problem with this approach, from a Freedom! and individual rights perspective, is that those who were forced to invest in the state entity to be auctioned off are left with next to nothing to show for it, usually some multinational corporation instead swooping in to pick it up at pennies on the dollar.

Take the example of Guatemalan state telecommunications firm GUATEL. In the late 1990s the Guatemalan government, instead of handing the firm over to the workers and taxpayers who had supported it over the previous two decades, sold 95 percent of its stake to a private company called Telgua, which -- thanks in no small part to its being handed a monopoly share of the market -- continues to be the country's largest telecommunications provider.

At Reason magazine, the move is this week being commemorated as a clear victory against statism. "In Guatemala," former head of GUATEL Alfredo Guzmán tells the magazine, "we have a clear example that freedom works."

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. While Reason argues the move is responsible for the widespread availability of phone services in Guatemala today, one can look elsewhere in Central America and see a similar story of proliferation. Even in behind-the-times Nicaragua -- and I say that endearingly -- I can get 3G Internet access pretty much anywhere I need (and unlike in the "free market" U.S., I can do so affordably using a prepaid modem).

But if we're going to call what happened in Guatemala the result of "freedom," more pertinent to me than the number of sexting Guatemalan teens there are today is how the transition from state to "private" telecom monopoly actually came about. And if you actually look at it, it begins to look less like a story of free minds and free markets and a bit more like the standard, time-old tale of one economic class, international capitalists, using the power of the state to exploit another economic class, in this case Guatemalan workers.

As former GUATEL head Guzmán himself boasts in the interview with Reason, the decision to privatize the firm was so politically unpopular (read: courageous! ) in his country that the Guatemalan government actually had to threaten its own citizens with jail time should they protest the proposed sale by striking. Rather than respect the right of its people to freely organize and voice their discontent as they saw fit, in this case by merely not going to work, the government of Guatemala threatened those forced to live under its rule with the prospect of time behind bars should they exercise those rights. Moves like that may make life easier for multinational corporations, but it ain't exactly "freedom."

Rather than hand the state's telecom monopoly to the highest bidder, the Guatemalan government could have -- and to my warped syndicalist mind, should have -- turned it over to the Guatemalan people. Each citizen of the country could have been given a share in the company and a say in how it was run; perhaps they'd vote to delegate that authority to an elected board. Or the state could have divided its telecom monopoly amongst its workers, who could run as a cooperative. Either option, or a combination of both, would have better protected the rights and, indeed, property of those poor Guatemalans who put their time and money into GUATEL than merely auctioning it to the multinational corporation with the most money.

Putting aside the financial and political reasons as to why that didn't happen -- maybe, I dunno, it's because rich capitalists have more a say over government decisions than poor workers? -- there's a cultural reason why actual liberty-and-freedom preserving options aren't given much consideration by the folks at Reason and other privatization zealots: it reeks of socialism. Sure, cooperatives are entirely compatible with voluntarism and even modern capitalism, but unless there's a CEO with an insane salary and a private jet involved, right-wing libertarians don't want to hear it -- after all, who would pay them to defend those insane salaries and corporate jets?

While they preach their love of freedom, it's clear that for many on the right the love of markets -- or specifically, corporations -- trumps all other concerns about force and state power. All human needs must be met by a corporation in a quasi-competitive marketplace (the second part's optional), in their view, lest we all become limp-wristed socialists prattling on about "sharing" and "community." That there are alternatives to such strictly defined systems of economics that are not based on state coercion -- and who do you think grants corporations personhood and limited liability? -- is not so much as acknowledged. The light at the end of the freedom tunnel is a McDonald's arch. Corporate ledgers are the gospel.

If minimizing the use of coercion in human affairs is your goal, however, as opposed to maximizing corporate profits, than faux-privatization schemes like the one Guatemalans were subjected to should be described for what they are: manifestations of corporatism, not liberty and free markets. Again, it bears repeating: Transferring a state monopoly funded by taxpayers to the control of international investors is not a win for freedom. The only thing that changes in that scenario is who profits from state coercion, politicians or capitalists -- if it even does that, given the ties between the two.

Instead of fawning over big business and demanding state power be given to state-created corporations, libertarians and other self-styled proponents of freedom on the right ought to be demanding that power be given to the people. That they're not suggests they should be described not as proponents of liberty, but of corporate capitalism. And no, Virginia (Postrel), they're not the same thing.

What Ronald Reagan's stupid face taught me about capitalism

It was the summer after 10th grade when I learned everything I would ever need to know about corporate capitalism.

Chalk it up to boredom, a wish to spend some time away from my parents and asshole friends, or a simple base desire to ineptly hit on and not hook up with a new crop of young teenage girls -- the more things change... -- I chose, voluntarily, to spend a week of my life on the campus of a nondescript Pennsylvania college learning about the power and glory of America's Free Market System.

And what a load of horseshit that was.

Founded in 1979, Pennsylvania Free Enterprise Week was started by a group of educators and businessmen interested in addressing “the compelling and urgent issue of workforce preparedness.” Born in 1984, I was founded as the result of a condom breaking in the back of a Chevette. Yet while coming from dramatically different backgrounds, the mysteries of fate decided that the paths of I and this seven day course in corporate capitalist brainwashing would cross that magical summer of 2000.

I'm getting teary just thinking about it.

In between what I was later told were motivational speeches from the likes of former Pennsylvania Governor and color-coded chart aficionado Tom Ridge and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert – truly, I was a privileged youth – the program consisted of this: creating groups of about a dozen other pimply-faced youth who, in something of a corporate Lord of the Flies, selected a CEO, a CFO, a COO, a CDO, a CPO, etc. etc. ad infinitum, to Lead Us. We then proceeded to sell undefined “widgets” in various made-up markets based on the numbers a computer would spit out. Basically we, the corporate elite, would guess at what a computer algorithm wanted by writing down on a piece of paper how many widgets we desired to sell in a given place on a given day. We would then submit said piece of paper to the mercy of the electronic gods.

This was meant to teach us something about supply and demand. Or so I was told (According to the program's website, I apparently learned to “appreciate our free enterprise system” by witnessing from “a practitioner's perspective what it takes to be successful in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.” I believe the website was also written by a computer algorithm.)

The United States of British Petroleum

If you're anything like me, or if you've spent more than five minutes over the last decade glancing at the headlines, you're probably suffering from some form of outrage fatigue. Well, make room for one more thing to get mad about.

From Reuters:

Fishermen in Mississippi say they are angry that under the terms of BP's $20 billion oil spill fund, money they earn doing clean-up will be subtracted from their claim against the company.

The fishermen reacted after Kenneth Feinberg, the federal official in charge of administering the compensation fund, announced the decision at a town hall meeting in Biloxi on Friday.

Cast as a great victory against the heartless oil giant that caused the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico it turns out -- surprise! -- that the Obama administration was basically working to help limit BP's financial liability. No other excuse flies when the White House's own head of the fund, Ken Feinberg, is pronouncing that all those fishermen who have been busy cleaning up the same mess that destroyed their livelihood have been working for the very corporation that caused it have been doing so for free.

It doesn't help that Feinberg was a patronizing ass when he announced the dick move:

"[W]orkers can file a claim, but we will subtract the amount they are paid from BP from their claim. That is how it has to work . . . . Of course you can file a claim. You must file a claim, but you cannot get paid twice," Feinberg told the meeting.

Right -- the U.S. government reserves paying people twice for corporate agriculture.

Of course, when it comes to the Gulf we're not talking about paying people twice for the same thing, but rather reimbursing them for the ruin by corporate malfeasance and compensating them for their efforts to try and fix the damage -- two separate, distinct things, as far as BP's financial responsibility is concerned.

But not only is the administration's move unjust, it's simply counterproductive and destined to slow recovery efforts -- why risk your health cleaning up the Gulf when you can get paid the same amount sitting at home watching Terminator? And in light of the public mood towards BP, it's also likely to provoke a good deal of grandstanding from across the political spectrum. If there's a significant outcry, I wouldn't be surprised if the White House somehow found a way to reverse its decision, or explain away Feinberg's comments as an unfortunate mix-up, a miscommunication. And it's not hard to see why: the administration's current stance is akin to letting an arsonist burn a house down and then charge the victim for the cost of rebuilding it -- except you'll never really be able to rebuild the Gulf.

Put another way: it's f*cked. It's also a great example of the State swooping in to protect an influential, major corporation under the auspices of punishing it -- great theater, really -- in this instance crafting a compromise settlement that appears aimed at being just enough to quell popular calls for tarring-and-feathering those British, yacht-racing bastards, without actually forcing Tony Hayward to give up any of his private floating islands.

(Cross-posted at AlterNet)

BP and the federal government: 'unlikely partners'?

President Obama determinedly trying to remember what it feels like to care.

"I’m absolutely confident BP will be able to meet its obligations to the Gulf Coast and to the American people," President Obama proclaimed following his meeting with the oil giant's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg. "BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it remains so."

Blah, blah, blah, boilerplate, talking point -- wait, hold on, what the hell did he just say? It's in "all our interests" that BP continue to prosper and thrive even after it just caused the worst environmental disaster in US history? Sorry, but I don't think the average American ought to much care about the future of a multinational corporation that declined to spend the 10 hours it would have taken to cement and stabilize the deepwater well that eventually exploded and killed 11 people, all because the potential loss in profit meant CEO Tony Hayward would have had to wait two more weeks to remodel his third kitchen (in his fourteenth house). Under the "free market" that we certainly do not have but to which Obama occasionally pledges his allegiance, companies that do Very Bad Things should -- and this is obviously just in theory -- have Very Bad Things happen to them in return. Bankruptcy, maybe, with the company's assets divided up amongst the victims of its malfeasance.

Obama apparently doesn't feel the need to elaborate, though, on why it's in "our" interest that BP continue to be BP; on why, like AIG, it also is "too big to fail." Like the rest of the Washington political establishment, he appears to take for granted that it's necessary and just. BP is a major corporation -- one of the 10 biggest in the world -- with quarterly earnings to die for (not funny), ergo it should always remain that way. Too many people with too much money need it to be that way. As the failure of Lehman Brothers showed, no company that was ever once profitable and influential should be allowed to fall by the wayside, lest by upsetting the status quo our golfing buddies be forced the indignity of sending their little Johnny to public school along with the rest of the dirty, nose-picking proles, or so the thinking probably goes; when elites justify policy decisions by pointing to the need for "stability," remember they're likely thinking in terms of them and their friends' social status.

A silly question, though: were you or I the subject of an ongoing investigation for possible criminal wrongdoing in the deaths of nearly a dozen people, countless wildlife and the livelihoods of many Gulf coast residents, ya think the president would be declaring how important it is for everyone that we, the accused, continue to be as "strong and viable" as we were before the alleged crime? To ask is to . . .

And that silly question brings me to the silliest headline/lede of the month, courtesy, as one might expect, The Washington Post. "It was a marriage of necessity, awkward from the start," the paper's Joel Achenbach says of the relationship between oil giant BP and the Obama administration in the wake of the worsening ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The headline? "Oil spill makes unlikely partners of BP and the federal government".

To say the partnership between BP and the federal government is "unlikely" is about as naive a thing as one could write; it's like remarking how "surprising" or "disappointing" it is that Obama hasn't rolled back the power of the presidency since becoming . . . president. The Defense Department, the single largest energy user in the US with a carbon footprint greater than many countries, purchases the majority of its oil and gas from BP. The deepwater rig that exploded and is now leaking as much as 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf per day was leased by BP from the federal government, which decided on the behalf of us -- thanks guys! -- that it was in the national interest that the company be able to drill in public waters for private gain. And let's not forget that in 1953 the Eisenhower administration actually helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran because the uppity bastards decided it maybe wasn't such a good idea to grant a company run by a foreign government -- BP, then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company -- a monopoly over the country's oil resources (commies!).

The piece also undercuts its own premise: that the relationship between BP and the Obama administration has been shaky and Odd Couple-esque. As an anecdote noted in the article shows, the two appear in fact to be getting along like old friends, even coordinating their PR and taking a shot for the other when need be:

The company knows that the White House needs to score political points. For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, officials in Alabama wanted BP to pay for sand barriers to protect beaches. BP was willing go to do so but also saw the advantage in letting the White House appear to be ordering BP to do it against the company's will. Hayward was quoted as saying, "Let the White House have the victory of announcing it, but it's the right thing for us to do."

You almost get the sense that the verdict's already been decided -- BP's here to stay, folks, and there ain't nothing no criminal investigation can do about it -- and that, like with regulatory oversight of the oil industry, the response to the spill from the both the government and the corporation (an increasingly artificial distinction) has had a lot more to do with show, with theatrics, than anything else. Like it has more to do with preventing the masses from grabbing their pitchforks than holding corporate power accountable. Silly, I know.

A lesson for Afghans from the healthcare debate

(credit: AP)

The Great Victory over the health insurance lobby now achieved with Congress' passage of a bill that mandates you buy the industry's products, inexplicably popular progressive blogger Matt Yglesias tells us "Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents" -- barring, that is, some sort of "unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation" (presumably this means "blow job," not "unprovoked and illegal act of military aggression"). Democrats now in power, the victims of the U.S. government's imperial agenda of course no longer serve as useful fodder for the professional liberal class in Washington -- you can't blame their deaths on a bumbling and unpopular Texan, after all -- with Yglesias acting as if Obama's reputation has not already been stained with the blood of his drone strikes and the obsequious partisans at Daily Kos, who once upon time penned tedious 3,000-word jeremiads denouncing George Bush and the GOP for their killing of innocents abroad, now spending most of their days mocking Glenn Beck and praising their historic leader's historic-ness, happily relegating his illegal wars and troop surges to the dark recesses of their fawning, feverish minds.

To regain liberal sympathy, I offer a suggestion: the victims of Obama's wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq should seek to qualify their respective nationalities as preexisting conditions. Or move to Darfur.

Conservatism: the heart of progressive reform

Teddy Roosevelt was by any measure a monstrous buffoon, an avowed racist and imperialist who saw war as a societal tonic -- only for the victor, presumably -- and fervently believed in American exceptionalism, empire and the flaunting of military might as the path to national greatness. While donning the mantle of progressive reform, Roosevelt left intact most of the financial trusts he was supposedly determined to bust, making a show of superficial changes to national policy designed not to rein in the power of the economic elite, which accepted and often championed the ostensibly liberal reforms, but to protect their interests from more radical calls for change -- and revolution. It is for these reasons, one can only assume, not because of them that Roosevelt is so fondly remembered by the bipartisan establishment in Washington, defining as he does the political class’ faith in “corporate capitalism” and a more “merit-based civil service” (read: Ivy Leaguers like them) as the key to progress, in the words of former George W. Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.

Now Gerson, co-author of the phrase “axis of evil” -- yes, it took more than one person -- is the sort of power-worshipping hack only the Bush administration and the Post could love; the kind of man who could only thrive in DC, typifying as he does the condescending, nose-in-the-air Beltway attitude toward all the yokels who question whether people like them should really be expounding on, much less crafting, policy for a nation of 300 million people. If I spent the time responding to all his tedious, lifeless prose, it would be as lengthy and worthwhile endeavor as spending the rest of my life electing more and better Democrats in the pursuit of Peace In Our Time. But, the dude makes a few good points, inadvertent though they may be, and obscured by heaping loads of smug derision for the so-called Tea Party movement and the “Beck/Paul platform” -- a conflation between Ron Paul, a non-interventionist libertarian, and Fox News’ Glenn Beck, a pro-war demagogue that has accused the former of treason, that displays a rather remarkable lack of attention to detail. The snide dismissal of the right-wing rabble, in this case for failing to worship at the altar the Rough Rider, is indeed so grating it's enough to make one want to head over to the nearest townhall meeting and, in a display of solidarity with the tea partiers, shout “Nazi baby killer!” at the county commissioners -- anything just so as to not feel any sort of sympathy for a stance held by Michael (obscenity) Gerson.

In the midst of heaping praise on former president Roosevelt and claiming those who would question his standing as a great man are engaged in an “ideological scrubbing” of history -- as if “history” is some sort of physical science, the prevailing view of which is not already heavily influenced by ideology -- Gerson does make an important observation: while ‘ol Teddy may have times sounded like a no-good socialist fighting for the common man, “it was Roosevelt's political purpose to avoid a revolution.” Rather than using state power to upend the existing economic order, he sought to preserve political capitalism -- the collusion of politicians and capitalists in the drafting of state economic policy -- and to use the guise of populism and “incremental reform to diffuse radicalism.” Though by no means “laissez faire,” Gerson observes that the use of the state to stave off threats to the ruling economic order and enhance the power of political elite -- my words, not his -- is well within “authentic conservative tradition”, acknowledging the lie of the GOP’s oft-invoked fidelity to the "free market."

The point is well taken: though Republicans claim to their base to represent an ideological counter to the godless Democrats, their "free market" policy proposals are without fail statist in nature. Likewise, while often cloaked in progressive rhetoric, much of what passes for liberal reform is conservative and reactionary in nature, crafted with an eye more toward preserving the status quo than overturning it. Reforms, such as they are, are intended to stave off calls for more radical, systemic change by making the existing power arrangement more sustainable, a few crumbs tossed to the poor and certain politically favored constituencies only so far as is necessary to prevent a couple thousand pitchfork and torch-wielding proles from showing up outside their elected representatives McMansions.

There are those who push for reforms with a genuine desire for change, of course, acting on the honest if naive belief that regulation can be enacted -- and implemented -- along the progressive lines favored by activists and policy wonks. But such reform efforts imply a strong belief in the underlying system and institutions to be reformed, and as historian Gabriel Kolko writes about the so-called early 20th century Progressive Era and the push to regulate various industries under Teddy’s reign, it was “big business [that] led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.” To be sure, “well-intentioned reformers often worked with them -- indeed, were often indispensable to them," he notes, but that "does not change the reality that federal economic regulation was generally designed by the regulated interest to meet its own end, and not those of the public or the commonweal.”

In a world of thousands of competing concerns, very few people are going to spend their time learning about, much less lobbying on, any given federal regulation. Attend a hearing about some regulation and, lo and behold, chances are most seats will be taken up by people with a direct financial interest in how the process unfolds. It’s a microcosm of politics, really. A company with a significant financial interest in the outcome of the regulatory process is, not surprisingly, going to care a whole lot more and dedicate both time and money to ensuring it helps shape the final result. Outside a few do-gooders and the occasional crazy, not many are willing to do that. Government regulation is an easy way for established interests to keep out upstart competitors, permits and licenses being much less of a financial burden to a large corporation, intellectual property laws -- laws that forbid the mixing of life-saving but “patented” chemicals and the unapproved use of images and ideas -- a clear example of established financial interests utilizing the political means to ensure a revenue stream, it being a much easier way of making money than competing with rascally new upstarts or actually producing something of some worth for society. Smart businessmen during Roosevelt’s time realized, though, that when the middle and lower classes were getting restless and increasingly receptive to calls for overturning the status quo, “the best way to thwart change was to channelize it.” And what better way to thwart demands for radical change than to channel them to the political system?

Have you followed the Senate lately?

Legislation that would genuinely help the public at large is non-existent, while even “reform” bills that upon reading appear to be anything but can’t seem to make it to the president’s desk. But uch troubles and concerns about arcane Senate rules were not apparent when Wall Street’s $700 billion slush fund was at stake, of course. Recent history in fact demonstrates yet again that when it comes to manipulating state power, the already wealthy enjoy one hell of an edge over those unable to afford high-paid lawyers and lobbyists. This is true now just as it was true during Teddy Roosevelt's time, when the former president observed that the “man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."

To most liberals and advocates of reform, the best way to address those "special advantages" the state affords the wealthy is -- and this should come as no surprise -- through more reform and regulation; more campaign finance laws, oversight boards and blue-ribbon commissions that experience has shown will undoubtedly be dominated by the same interests they are ostensibly investigating and regulating. The spectacular failure of reform efforts to arrest the trend toward ever-greater concentration of power and money in the hands of a few beckons us to contemplate a more holistic solution to the problem of the state and the influence of capital, but one that, as Thoreau would put it, can only be considered when the masses are prepared for it, when people come to grasp that they can get along just fine without the charlatans and hucksters who claim to represent them -- when violence and power come to be abhorred, not worshiped.

We have a ways to go.

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*Sega video game designers knew what was up: the villain of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, Dr. Robotnik (pictured above), was purportedly based on America's 26th president.