Gaping Void

Okay, I exaggerated on this one to make a point. If you are selling shampoo, deodorant or mayonnaise, then you’ll probably have to sell to the mainstream. You’ll have to sell your soul, water it down, pander to the usual suspects and then try to find pleasure in your golf game, bourbon or PTA. However, for those of us who have a choice, we have no alternative but to push it to the edge. Go for the 10% that will die to get your stuff and stay true to your beliefs. Who knows this is a one in a billion chance that you will become the main stream, like Mr. Jobs.

This applies equally to politics too. Stand your ground, try hard, and sometimes the mainstream comes to you. The Republican Party understands this, the Democratic Party does not.

You preschoolers better behave. We are watching

The Contra Costa County School District has become the first to implement an electronic tracking system for its students. Preschoolers in Richmond are now required to wear what resembles a basketball jersey that is implanted with a radio frequency transmitter.

Administrators say such an Orwellian device is just peachy because it will save them time and money because they won’t have to take attendance. No word on what happens if a child loses or forgets their tracking device. As expected, privacy advocates and parents are aghast at such a Big Brother-ish intrusion. Because of course the program will expand. Oh, Little Timmy spend 8 minutes in the bathroom and our guidelines clearly state that 5 minutes is more than adequate. That will be 10 demerits.

It also starts children out early being part of the surveillance society. How useful for governments, training them to “be a loyal plastic robot / For a world that doesn’t care, ” as Frank Zappa put it.

The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism

City Journal makes the case that the environmental movement, with its implied assumptions that progress and science is suspect and back-to-nature always laudable, caused a shift in liberalism from its original optimism to endless forecasts of doom. It also led to elitism and then a subsequent loss of power by liberalism. they say. I’m not sure I agree entirely but they make some telling points.

American liberalism has remarkably come to resemble nineteenth-century British Tory Radicalism, an aristocratic sensibility that combined strong support for centralized monarchical power with a paternalistic concern for the poor. Its enemies were the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness it associated with an industrial economy powered by bourgeois energies.

Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us.

A few years ago when we lived in Connecticut, Sue and I went to an organic food, grow-your-own convention. We were expecting useful ideas about home gardening but what we got from the headline speakers was arrogance due to their supposed enlightened position as arbiters of what is proper to eat, combined with contempt and scorn for actual farmers. The speaker, and I am not making this up, said we have to somehow teach all those beer-drinking NASCAR fans about organic gardening and how to grow food properly. You could almost see his nose wrinkle in disgust as he mentioned such obvious social inferiors. Obviously, rednecks would have no clue whatsoever about how to grow food and needed to be taught this by their betters, one of whom was a NYC chef. Idiots. It is precisely this attitude, sneering liberal elitism, that quite rightfully pisses off many people.

True to its late-1960s origins, political environmentalism in America gravitates toward both bureaucrats and hippies: toward a global, big-brother government that will keep the middle classes in line and toward a back-to-the-earth, peasantlike localism, imposed on others but presenting no threat to the elites’ comfortable lives. How ironic that these gentry liberals —progressives against progress— turn out to resemble nothing so much as nineteenth-century conservatives.

Be sure to recycle your trash, use paper bags at the market, and eat organic food. Because that is the Enlightened Thing to do. But pay no mind to the corporatism behind the curtain.

The California state legislature sauntered back from their month long July vacation on August 1 and promptly got back to what they were doing before, which is virtually nothing of substance about passing a budget. Now September is nearly here and there has still been no forward motion on a budget. Goodness, just because the state constitution mandates that a budget be passed by June 30, and it’s already two months late, is certainly no reason for our esteemed legislators to work themselves into a tizzy doing what they were elected to do.

Truly, it’s certainly better for them to sit and think about a number of things, then vote on competing budgets that had no chance of passing and in fact, didn’t. This was, according to Assembly Speaker Perez, a “next logical step” in the process he has been promising for months, a way to get “a honest appraisal of where people are at.” Excuse me, but I think we already know that. Republicans want to slash spending to the bone and not have any new taxes because they delude themselves into thinking this will somehow grow the economy. Meanwhile, Democrats want to keep spending mostly as it is while imposing a bunch of new fees and taxes that magically won’t actually increase anyone’s taxes. Do I have that right? And is there any question as to where the respective sides are at?

The problem is both sides in the legislature are ideologically fixated as well as being beholden to their special interest groups and donors. They can stonewall the budget for months more. Hey, it’s not hurting them. Plus it’s a wonderful fund-raising opportunity.

Read the whole article

They say more investigation is needed for a final decision yet they know a crime has been committed.

Curiouser and curiouser.

What the Republicans / Tories said, says Mini-Me

In essence, the Mirror has succumbed to the myth that Labour needs to reconnect to middle England rather than its core vote and the working class. It echoes the New Labour line, espoused by Blair in today’s papers, that Labour lost the last election not because of New Labour, but because the party wasn’t New Labour enough.

Ed Miliband [David's brother and also a politician] at least recognises that huge swathes of the working class turned its back on Labour at the last election, due to the demoralisation caused by the previous years of betrayal and the righward shift which saw Labour only succeeding in out-Torying the Tories on too many key issues.

Sounds like the Democratic Party, doesn’t it? Moving steadily to the right, ignoring or even backstabbing its traditional base, too often a Mini-Me to the Republicans, with no discernable platform or anything it will stand and fight for.

If David Milliband does get elected, the pattern whereby the unions are treated as an embarrassing older relative will continue.

There was a time when the Democratic Party strongly supported unions, the working class, immigrants, the poor. But those days are gone.

“Why every president from Reagan through Obama has put Wall Street before Main Street“, by Michael Hirsch.

For the last thirty years, it has been the mantra of Washington, Wall Street, and economic academia: The fastest way to economic growth is to make financial markets happy. The few economists and government watchdogs who took exception to this theory or pointed out some of the dangerous trends that accompanied it were either castigated, dismissed as cranks, or ignored. How could this happen? How could five successive presidents from both parties pursue and expand an economic policy that hollowed out the American economy and produced the worst economic catastrophe since 1929?

It was at least partly control fraud, the deliberate looting of a nation or company by a few at the top. Former regulator William Black developed the concept of control fraud, and in a crucial phrase said, the failure of the entity is not a failure of the control fraud.

Bill Clinton once said “You mean to tell me that the success of my [economic] program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”

But bow to them he did, and and was then instrumental in the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which directly greased the way for the rise of the banksters and our current financial collapse.

So, how do we take back our country?

The 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project has been approved by the California Energy Commission. When built, it will be the first large-scale solar thermal plant in the US in over 20 years and will generate enough power for 100,000 homes. This is first of many such solar thermal projects planned for the Mojave area. Twelve more may be approved by the end of the year with a total of 34 being planned. If they all are built, then 300,000 acres of the Mojave Desert will be used to generate 2.4 gigawatts of electricity, which could power nearly one million homes.

More

A new Gallup poll gives Republicans a 10 point lead in a generic ballot. While such polls don’t necessarily reflect how people will actually vote, it’s the biggest GOP edge in 68 years of generic ballot polls.

Quick, tell me, what does the Democratic Party stand for? That’s a toughie to answer, isn’t it? And therein lies the major problem for Democrats. “There is no there there.”