Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald (battle of the Glenns) has this very good post about Obama losing the populist mantle:

That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington — the central promise of his campaign — by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington. Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets. But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity. Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers — and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding — possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can’t.

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party — controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country’s vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse — now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party’s failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner — continuing America’s endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living — renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

In the Glenn Beck video up top, a construction worker blames his unemployment on “illegal immigration.”  This is hardly the problem.  Even if his job was given to an illegal immigrant, why blame the immigrant and not the business-owner doing the hiring?  But Obama seems to be in no position to make this type of argument because he’s pro-corporate (”Change doesn’t happen from the top down, but the bottom up”=bullshit).  In short, it’s Obama’s own fault that deranged people are calling him a socialist because he hasn’t been able to stand up “for the people,” as that’s not entirely the side he’s on. He’s explained nothing about the true nature of our economic problems because he’s keeping them in place.

And so you get distressingly backwards documentaries like this one, in which the left is called “evil.” This can’t end well. The left might’ve said the same thing about Bush and Co. but the right have the guns.

[I'm] very disturbed to see that so many people have been taken in by Alex Jones and cannot see that he’s, at best, an unstable megalomaniac who’s low on facts and high on fear-mongering, and worse, he fits to a tee the description of a disinformation agent or agent provocateur. I wouldn’t trust this guy as far as I could throw him.

By and large, I agree. He gives conspiracy theory a bad name by linking it to the unhinged fringe – even if he’s calling attention to real corruption and he’s an equal-opportunity critic, paranoid about the left and right. He’ll take the video below too far, but he’s right about the overuse of executive power. Isn’t any better with Obama than Bush. I’m a former Obama supporter whose support has waned since he started legislating. This video (on “liberal” MSNBC) is getting traction on the right. But it should. It fucking sucks:

Good take on the financial meltdown and what caused it. Still don’t know how derivatives work. But then, nobody does. A reminder how clueless and dangerous Boehner’s ant comment was. Could have done without the political music interludes. I’m not sure if there’s a lower form of music than songs that are overtly political, singing about taxes and such. Very cool that this project was completed via Kickstarter.

Seeing Ross Gelbspan’s despair about the future of humanity is one of the more persuasive things I’ve seen about the Global Warming debate.  He knows his shit and he’s genuinely sad that the world as we know it could be coming to an end.  Follows the Global Warming debate through Katrina and “Inconvenient Truth ” – from total apathy to new interest.  It puts the oil spill in a different light – in that it could be another moment that drastically changes public perception for the better.  The argument about Obama’s anger is not necessarily his anger at BP – but his indignation, saying, “Things need to change and will. Now.”  Obama has sucked on this issue.  As much as it’s a disaster, it’s also a potential gift.

Also persuasive about how awful the mainstream media has become – the other side of the discussion is always given a seat at the table, no matter how dubious their claims.  Confuses the issue totally – unsurprisingly.  Because given the choice between a hoax and this-will-kill-you, why wouldn’t it be more comforting to believe it’s a hoax?  Even if the hoax idea is perpetrated by the Tony Haywards of the world.

Less effective because Naomi Wolf goes Godwin with a vengeance. I’m sure she got shit for this – haven’t look at reviews. But it’s fascinating to see Wolf couch the Bush administration in exactly the same terms as the Tea Party – erosion of liberty, believing in the constitution, etc. Imagine if Glenn Beck released a movie called the “End of America” equating Obama with Nazism. Basically, his show does just that every night. There may be more truth to what Wolf is saying, and the Bush administration was a total nightmare, but if we lived in a true totalitarian state, I wouldn’t be writing this. She’s as alarmed at Obama as well, who has been a real disappointment.

All of these issues should be of concern to the right wing base, except Tea Baggers don’t realize the problems in their own party, or don’t care. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Republican Party operative was the first person to start bringing Obama=Hitler signs to rallies. Then it metastasized. So long as Obama is painted as far left (because in the lunatic mind, Hitler=left) then anything he does, no matter how reasonable (or right-leaning) will be met with resistance, and so he’ll have to move rightward. This is exactly what’s been happening (see: healthcare). Trouble is, Obama might not have needed this push even without the insane resistance.

I’d like to see a master documentary covering all these things: Finance/Environment/War, without being overly partisan. Because a fair amount of blame goes to Clinton and Obama as well. In “Capitalism,” Michael Moore smartly called out the members of the Clinton administration who are responsible for deregulation, though he’s called far left. This is a populist issue, not partisan. Someone needs to make an Alex Jones documentary for non-paranoids.

He’s also wrong most of the time.

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

The Spill, The Scandal and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

Here’s what I wrote in April 2009:

Because I’m an avowed conspiracy theorist, I believe there’s got to be more to the torture story than merely “trying to get information.” When you’re waterboarding someone 183 times, there’s something else happening….This really seems like pure sadism at work – or possibly practicing the technique to be used on other people. Or seeing the effect of multiple bouts of torture on the human psyche – i.e. experimentation, nothing to do with gaining information.

Read Truthout’s comprehensive history of the mind control/torture projects MK Ultra and Project Artichoke – no conspiracy theory here.

Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora’s box of legal, institutional, international and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA….

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

Obama’s protection of this program is one of the bigger mysteries – suggesting that it’s way worse than what has thus far been revealed.  Like people claim UFO disclosure would shatter the fabric of society, the disclosure of these torture programs might shatter people’s faith in government.

You can argue (if you like) that Global Warming is not man made, or it can’t be stopped, but you cannot argue that inclement weather is not a national security issue. Suppose another 9-11 happened during another Katrina. Emergency resources would be cut in half. It’s very much a national security issue. 1200 people dying in Katrina is not just “the weather.”

What’s worse is that Fiorina probably knows this. What separates Palin is that she’s as stupid as her supporters. She’s not always manipulating them – she’s a nutcase who so believes in herself that she believes in her lies as gospel. Palin is truly a fictional character – which is part of her appeal. She doesn’t seem to belong to the real world – while her supporters, overcome by a similar dementia, tout her as one of them. To be one with Palin is to experience a religious kind of ecstacy, in which your experiencing the same fictional reality together. This is why Palin’s lies are getting more blatant, as Christianism constructs its own reality. Palin is a priest of the stupid.  Fiorina is not that demented – she’s merely playing to the idiot id of the right.

Say what you will about Obama being a corporatist and not doing nearly enough to fix our horrid situation, but he does not represent ignorance. He doesn’t tell people to ignore facts. It is not much of a surprise this happens – because if you don’t believe in the theory of evolution, why would you believe in climate science? Once you let one fictional story control your world – especially something as huge and unknowable as God – then you can just pick and choose what you want to be true.

Demon sheep.

We talked about how Obama’s been a disappointment and how maybe he’s not unable to get things done because of the climate, but basically he’s getting what he wants.  So while he is to the left of Dick Cheney, there is still indefinite detention, the Patriot Act was quietly extended another year last week, the big Pharma deal, the lack of new financial regulation, on and on.  For some reason, those in highest power are right-leaning corporatists – Clinton was basically a Republican president and Obama’s of the same mold.  A “progressive” these days is just what a regular average Democrat used to be and the Democratic party has gone rightward.  For all the talk of a Democratic majority, it’s a ridiculous assertion, as there are only a handful of true Democrats and then a bunch of Republican-style corporatists.

Me, as the conspiracy theorizing sort, sees the possibility of a nefarious plot in all this – that there’s some purpose to all this pro-corporate anti-humanist legislation being passed.  I just cannot buy the assertion that it’s just for profit.  My brother mentioned that the Rubin crowd thought they were doing good: with the regulations stripped in the nineties via complicated derivatives equations, they thought they were giving the economy a good boost.  Makes enough sense, except regulations are put in there so people don’t abuse the system. So you strip the regulations and abuse is a given.  Were they really that short-sighted that they couldn’t see the obvious?  Or is this a nefarious plot to bring down the financial system to usher in something new?

When you break it down, it doesn’t matter.  Whether or not the Bilderberg/Trilateral Commission decided to destroy the economy and told Robert Rubin to do its bidding, or it was accomplished due to blind, abject stupidity, the result is the same.  The attraction of conspiracy theory is that it gives a purpose to society’s breakdown, which actually feels better than the realization that there is no grand purpose to civilization’s demise – it’s just that humans are fuck-ups and given the opportunity to fuck up (deregulation) they’ll take it.  Greed is just such a boring reason for the financial meltdown.  Really, people just wanted more money?  They’re just a bunch of addicts?  Maybe – and that makes me think even less about the human race than if there was some kind of machination behind all these recent events.

Except there still might be.  Even if all the recent events are totally arbitrary and not planned beforehand, it’s still leading to systemic collapse.  So there’s still a conspiracy to destroy the system – even if it’s unconscious.  In my novel I pontificate about humanity’s seeming death wish and how this plays into prophecy.  Although the battles in the Middle East, the decline of the financial system, the melting of the environment, et al. aren’t necessarily proof that the Book of Revelation  is real, it is very curious that world events seem to be mirroring end of the world prophecy regardless if it’s intentional.  Either way, we’re heading towards collapse – our current structure is unsustainable, and it’s eerie that we seem to be acting out prophecy, even if that prophecy wasn’t a literal prediction.

I take a more esoteric approach to the possibility that people are bringing these events to life – an unconscious conspiracy that is acting out a grand “design,” whether it’s bringing a Jungian archetype to life or something else, is as valid as a secret meeting at Bohemian Grove.  People might not know why they’re doing it, but they’re still doing it.  The shadowy group in control might just be the unconscious. In that sense, the New World Orderites might be taking things a shade too literally.

I take a similar leap with something like crop circles.  It is possible that even hoaxes are revealing some kind of coded message.  Couldn’t an advanced alien race – conceivably – act through hoaxers to create the same messages as they could do themselves?  We’re talking a race a million years more advanced than ourselves – why not?  What made those hoaxers decide on that particular design?  Even a hoax has possible meaning.  Whatever the case, they’re beautiful, and shouldn’t be laughed off just because they’re so cool:

There’s still a lot we do not understand about consciousness, and the potential of collective consciousness, so people may be creating an apocalyptic future without total intent.  Just as it’s eerie that our world seems to be acting out 2012 prophecy, it also seems to be acting out New World Order conspiracies (Patriot Act, globalization…).  Whether it’s a literal plot to end the world or a plot comprised of humans’ worst instincts may not actually matter.

Though I find elements of Paul’s outlook interesting, I also think libertarianism is impractical. Yes, a stateless utopia via the Venus Project is a nice idea, but it’s not possible currently with the current U.S. system. You could argue that the system necessarily needs to fall apart in order to usher in a new stateless system, and given human instincts, libertarianism would probably usher in that downfall faster than any other system. As has been proven countless times, if the unfettered free market is given free reign to do whatever it wants, it sides with abuse of the planet and its people. To have government intervene with new regulation isn’t proof of creeping fascism, it’s proof that humans won’t do the right thing if they have the choice not to.

Whenever anyone cries socialism about Obama I recoil – it’s just such an inaccurate reading of the tea leaves.  If Obama was a Communist, he wouldn’t be making the far left so angry.  He’s a Clinton centrist, and for that reason he’s a disappointment.  I figured he was running towards the center for the election and would be a bit more open when he finally got into office.  And by open, I mean, yes, more socialist.

The problem we’re in is that we’re in a corporatocracy, so anything that takes away corporate power is fine by me.  But some conspiracy theorists and the “small government” right see nefarious encroachment in any government – which doesn’t make sense.  All government isn’t evil.  Of course not.  At what point do libertarians draw the line at regulations?  I’m glad my tap water doesn’t kill me, for one.  Much regulation is reasonably self-protecting.

Doubtlessly, the entire system needs reworking because people are basically forced into a system in which their income doesn’t much exceed their basic needs, so they’re tied endlessly to the 40 hour work week.  People then blame taxes for their troubles, but really they should be blaming the amount of their paycheck, not the amount that goes to taxes – how much profit is the business making relative to what its paying its employees? Make no mistake, if the monthly paycheck was higher, people wouldn’t be so concerned with the amount taken out by taxes. Perhaps that makes me a Communist – because I see no fault in there being some equality between what a business owner makes and what an employee makes. Perhaps not equal, but some better disparity is more equitable.

Likewise, the hardliner conspiracy-minded rightwing that scream about the global warming “hoax” also makes me want to flee. The mounting scientific evidence aside, the fact that global warming is inspiring more environmental awareness can only be positive. At my kid’s school, there’s a board where kids have created collages saying “Protect the earth” and so on. Some would call this “indoctrination.” It’s not because at its core, it’s positive.

If you look at the rhetoric of the right – libtards, et al. – it doesn’t take into account how Teabagger-style angry the left is about the state of the country.  For example, Game Over:

Without a single iota of hyperbole, it may now be said that regulatory capture of our government by Wall Street has been concluded. Done deal. Since Monday, the sheer volume of news supporting the truth that Wall Street essentially controls our government has become–quite simply–overwhelming.

It is the total sellout of Main Street and our country as a whole that’s been all but concluded before our very eyes. To call it anything less than that would be inaccurate reportage.

It’s beyond disgusting, IMHO. Words cannot convey my sense of contempt…that to which we’re bearing witness today.  It is the definition of betrayal.

That sounds exactly like Teabagger hysteria, but unlike “Obama is a socialist,” this one has some merit.  It’s actually closer to fascism – the marriage of corporations and government – except that doesn’t make Obama a fascist, because this is an ideology perpetrated by the right much more than what remains of the left in power.  An idea very much lost on the right wing.  The purpose of a government health care plan, for example, is not “socialism,” but to take power away from Blue Cross and other corporations who are screwing their consumers.

Where the right stupidly think Obama represents a socialist takeover, they don’t seem to realize that they basically have a Republican, corporate-centered candidate who is stripping regulation, not adding more government “interference.”  People’s sense of logic really does seem to be devolving – though I imagine this is how it’s always been.  Stupidity has no generation:

More in this vein:

There’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Think that’s from a Paulite conspiracy screed?  Joe Stack’s manifesto?  No, it’s from The Atlantic.

Obama is enough to make one paranoid – I’ll grant conspiracists that.  In the sense that he had more honest idealism during the campaign (wasn’t entirely just exploiting people’s hopes) and then once he was handed the reins he learned – this is how it really works.  I continually can’t get my head around a system that is continually built so that it destroys itself.  He seems to be playing the same game as everyone else.  Basically, all of Obama’s slogans were crap: “Change doesn’t happen from the top down, but from the bottom up.”  “We’re the change we’ve been waiting for.”  “This is the moment.” Etc.  The crash from all that hope is pretty stark.

I’m glad I didn’t see Zeitgeist until now because in 2008, during Obama’s rise, I wouldn’t have wanted to absorb it.  The primary and election season were a fucking lot of fun.  It felt like Kennedy – don’t insert Kennedy’s bad policies here, on a more thematic level than that.  I’ve held on for a long time that Obama’s presidency was transformative enough by just who he is, but basically all we get with Obama is financial collapse at a slower rate than would have happened with McCain/Palin.

So I’m kind of in no man’s land. Too liberal for the libertarian right, and too whacked out entertaining 9-11 truth, UFO’s, et al. for the Daily Kos left.  I’m not sure such a forum exists.  So I’m writing here.

Two interesting interviews found recently.  One via Futurismic with the founder of Paypal and principle investor in Facebook who has a sci-fi vision of the future.

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

Wired: You’re worried about economic stagnation, but you’re optimistic about artificial intelligence and space?

Thiel: I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again.

Wired: We need underwater cities and flying cars, otherwise we’re going bankrupt?

Thiel: We go bankrupt if radical progress doesn’t happen and we don’t realize it’s not happening. That’s a dangerous combination.

Next, via Dangerous Minds, a piece from Of Two Minds called “Why I am Optimistic”:

I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.

Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.

Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.

Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”

Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry…

Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.

Maybe not that optimistic, because it still relies on things falling apart before being reborn as something less manifestly stupid. I was at the doctor’s office where I picked up a copy of Time Magazine and this article by Kurt Anderson called The End of Excess:

We cannot just hunker down, cross our fingers, hysterically pinch our pennies, wait for the crises to pass, blame the bankers and then go back to business as usual. All that conventional wisdom about 2008 being a “change” year? We had no idea. Recently Rush Limbaugh appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, panicking not so much about the economy but about how the political winds are blowing as a result. If we finally manage to achieve something like universal health care, Limbaugh warned, it would mean “the end of America as we know it.” He’s right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is the end of the world as we’ve known it. But it isn’t the end of the world.

In a mainstream magazine, it’s basically making the exact same point.  This system needs to die because it doesn’t work.  While anti-government/corporation hysteria makes sense, the trouble is that this sort of rallying cry has been taken over by the fanatical right-wing.  Timothy McVeigh was “anti-government,” and there’s no sense that the pro-militia right have any answer about how to run this very complex system except to burn it all down.  And the right-leaning anti-government types usually have the wrong targets, when it’s the “small government” right wing that enables a further devolution of our system.  From The Economist:

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Libertarians, though, want to do away with the tax system altogether.  Though it would be great to have a Venus Project style Utopia ala Zeitgeist, it’s less feasible than reforming our current system (even if a reformed system is unsustainable).  What’s so striking about Joe Stack’s suicide note is that he’s no right wing teabagger – he references Communism as being potentially preferable (while decrying the tax system, which makes limited sense).  The guy’s no hero – he tried to kill his wife and daughter, so he’s a mentally ill fuckwit.  But it’s not going to be entirely surprising if things like this happen with more and more regularity.  The Economist article concludes, “It’s a massive populist backlash waiting to explode.”

A Second American Revolution is not entirely implausible (or at least an attempt) because imagine a time when oil has peaked, jobs are scarcer due to digital automation, and the planet seems to be killing itself with our help, people would actually need to “take it to the streets” in order to change the system – a form of self-preservation.  This isn’t a right-wing idea – it’s the basis of the hippie movement, or anyone who’s been anti-establishment.  It’s just with Obama in power, the right have lost their collective minds with the incredibly stupid mantra “I want my country back.”  Which country – the one that led to the state we’re in right now?

The idea that this is “Barack Obama’s economy” is myopic bordering on insane – hear that, media?  You’re insane.  There is no way Obama is responsible for our current economy any more than he’s responsible for our oil-based economy or rampant obesity.  Our civilization is systemically fucked-up and if anything, you can fault Obama for zombifying a system that needs to die.  He’s keeping it alive, not killing it, and it needs to be dead and buried. So when people decry “socialism” over the health care debate, when reform is (ideally) meant to benefit people and take power away from the corporations, they are hardly the people to lead a populist revolution against the status quo.  They’re too fucking stupid.

The interview on Of Two Minds led me to the book Operation Serf, which I’m going to check out, though on his blog he refers to the Socialist agenda, which makes me nervous.  That novel in turn led me to the book American Apocalypse – interestingly, both self-published via CreateSpace.  Not sure about the political affiliation of that one.  Most end of the world scenario diatribes tend to be Libertarian.

Pretty volatile and interesting time we’re living in. Or at least an interesting time to be a writer.