Are You Leaning Far Enough to the Right to be Considered a Fascist? - Page 6 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

loquitur · 03-30-2008, 06:17 PM

why is it that you think you have political opinions and I have political prejudices, host?

host · 03-30-2008, 08:04 PM

I guess because you post "stuff" like this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

......Fascism as I understand it entails, on the economic side, commandeering the economy to achieve nationalist ends - in effect, putting national greatness ahead of normal economic functioning of the free market.

That's the reason I see little difference between socialism and fascism - whether the govt owns the production or merely controls it, splitting the goodies with its cronies, makes very little difference. Both systems foster corruption and tyranny.

There are great, great differences....all you have to do is take a "head count" of who wins and who loses, compared to before. 1933 Germany, vs. 1950 Germany, 1958 Cuba, vs. post 1991 Cuba, for example.

....you give me the impression that you are more incurious than I am, compared to me, nothing shocks you, and you have a more black or white approach to things like, socialist leaning economic and political systems, for instance.

Who benefits, loquitur....in pre and post Nazi Germany, inside and outside Germany? Who exhibits respect for other governments, for the rule of law?

Who benefits in Cuba, loquitur?

Forgive me for using a "collage" to help male my point:

Were you familiar with this family?

Quote:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...240_page_2.htm

.....Despite his Nazi membership—and, as it now appears, his use of slave labor—Günther Quandt was deemed after the war to have been more of a "passive follower" than a convinced Nazi. But Benjamin Ferencz, a prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials interviewed in the documentary, said that the facts revealed today likely would have led to Quandt's conviction for war crimes—similar to those meted out to members of the Krupp and Flick families.

"Quandt escaped justice," Ferencz told the filmmakers. Industrialist Friederich Flick, by contrast, received a prison sentence of seven years at the Nuremberg Trials for deploying slave labor and for serving the Nazi war machine, but was freed in 1950.

After the war, Quandt received his company, later renamed Varta (VARGK.F), <H3>back from the government and continued to build his industrial wealth—the fortune eventually wielded by his son Herbert in 1959 to buy BMW.</H3> Herbert's heirs, including wife Johanna, daughter Susanna Klatten, and son Stefan, today own a controlling 47% stake in BMW, which has a market capitalization of $42 billion. The Quandts also own a controlling stake in pharmaceutical giant Altana (ALTG.DE). The family's holdings are worth an estimated $34 billion.

Damage Control
Despite its acknowledgement that the family's ties to the Nazis have been played down, the Quandt family members insist the details of Günther Quandt's past are not entirely new. A 2002 biography covered much of the same ground. It's also been known that Quandt's wife Magda Ritschel, whom he divorced in 1929, remarried Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1931 and that Goebbels adopted Quandt's son Harald. Adolf Hitler acted as witness at the wedding.

Many German companies including BMW, Volkswagen (VOWG.DE), and Deutsche Bank (DB) already have explored their own wartime collaboration and misdeeds during the Nazi era, publishing books, turning over documentation to experts, and paying millions of dollars into funds distributed to forced-labor survivors. Volkswagen's book documents its deployment of 20,000 slave laborers during the Third Reich. In 1999, BMW and other German companies founded the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" foundation, which provides compensation to former forced laborers.

<h3>The Quandts, by contrast, have remained silent about their past</h3>, perhaps fearing a global public backlash against the BMW brand. Until now, the family has refused historians access to its Nazi-era historical archives and papers—and it still has not acknowledged that Afa factories made use of slave labor from concentration camps.

Do you think it's a coincidence that Alfred, son of Betha Krupp, met with Hitler in 1933 to help map out the reich rearmament strategy and profited handsomely thereafter. He quickly managed to get his company back after his Nuremberg conviction.

....and from wiki...(edit/change anything that you object to and can document....)

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescot..._collaboration
Prescott Bush
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Prescott Sheldon Bush

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

United States Senator
from Connecticut
In office
November 5, 1952 – January 2, 1963
Preceded by William A. Purtell
Succeeded by Abraham A. Ribicoff

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Born May 15, 1895(1895-05-15)
Columbus, Ohio
Died October 8, 1972 (aged 77)
New York City
Nationality American
Political party Republican
Spouse Dorothy Walker Bush
Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 – October 8, 1972) was a United States Senator from Connecticut and a Wall Street executive banker with Brown Brothers Harriman. He was the father of former President of the United States George H. W. Bush and the grandfather of current President George W. Bush.

Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman). The President of UBC at that time was George Herbert Walker, Bush's father-in-law.
Dutch-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, the American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)
The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Bush was on the board of directors of UBC and held one share in the company. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000.(a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim) These supposed assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry. There is no documentaion to support this assumption either.

Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) make him complicit with the mining operations in Nazi-occupied Poland which used slave labor out of Oświęcim, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed.

The New York Herald-Tribune referred to Thyssen as "Hitler's Angel" and mentioned Bush as an employee of the investment banking firm Thyssen used in the United States. Some records in the National Archives, including the Harriman papers, document the continued relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with Thyssen and some of his German investments up until his 1951 death.[8] Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averell Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany." Two former slave laborers from Poland have filed suit in London against the government of the United States and the heirs of Prescott Bush in the amount of $40 billion. A class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. in 2001 was dismissed based on the principle of state sovereignty.[5]

Prescott Bush connection to the Merchants of Death[9] industry came from his father Samuel P. Bush who worked for Buckeye Steel Castings Company which manufactured railway parts for the railroad industry and barrels for guns and casings for shells for Remington Arms.[10][11]

[edit] Alleged plot to overthrow FDR
Main article: Business Plot
On July 23, 2007, the BBC Radio 4 series Document reported on the alleged Business Plot and the archives from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee hearings. The program mentioned Bush's directorship of the Hamburg-America Line, a company that the committee investigated for Nazi propaganda activities, and the 1933 attempt to stage a military coup against President FDR to install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. [12]

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world...cia-index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world...-cia-intro.pdf
By JAMES RISEN

The Central Intelligence Agency's secret
history of its covert operation to overthrow Iran's government in 1953 offers an inside look at how the agency stumbled into success, despite a series of mishaps that derailed its original plans.

Written in 1954 by one of the coup's chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran's elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist.

The document shows that:

Britain, fearful of Iran's plans to nationalize its oil industry, came up with the idea for the coup in 1952 and pressed the United States to mount a joint operation to remove the prime minister.

The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi's regime two days after the coup prevailed.

Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric's home in a campaign to turn the country's Islamic religious community against Mossadegh's government.

The shah's cowardice nearly killed the C.I.A. operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign C.I.A.-written royal decrees to change the government. The agency arranged for the shah's twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Desert Storm commander, to act as intermediaries to try to keep him from wilting under pressure. He still fled the country just before the coup succeeded. ....

Quote:

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/4/817

.....The public health experience in Cuba has several distinctive features. Although economic productivity is an important determinant of population health, Cuba does not conform to the expected relationship. International agencies like the World Bank have suggested that per capita income in Cuba is under $1000 per year; Cuban estimates, which take account of subsidies, are higher, in the range of $2–5000 per year.18 Using either measure, however, when health outcomes are correlated with GNP, Cuba clusters with North America on the former scale and countries like Bolivia on the latter (Figure 1). Abrupt economic disruptions also provide evidence on how social forces shape population health. The economic crisis which began in 1991 after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union wreaked havoc on many aspects of Cuban society. The impact on health indices was relatively modest and short-lived, however, further demonstrating that economic measures alone are poor predictors of physical well-being within a society. One potential explanation of this anomalous pattern <H3>may be the relative absence of extreme poverty, which is the most powerful economic correlate of ill health and can confound the effect of average GNP. Cuba has a high degree of income equality and lacks the marginalized slum populations of most of Latin America</H3>, although the growing dependence on the tourist economy and, to a lesser extent, foreign remittances has widened the income distribution. .....

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 07:29 AM

Host, I arrived at my opinions from doing a lot of reading. I have changed views on a number of issues as a result of new information and real life experience. You need to accept that intelligent well-read people can arrive at conclusions different from yours and still be intelligent well-read people.

I tend to have very liberal (in the classic sense) views about most issues, though not all. I also believe in stepping back and taking the long view in assessing events. Finally, I think partisanship is poison. Not only does it interfere with interpersonal relationships, it makes people unscrupulous. It is the mode of thought most conducive to making smart people act stupidly that I have yet to encounter.

That's why you have no doubt found that I'm not in a constant state of outrage, and my views generally aren't partisanly predictable. You might want to ask yourself whether you're doing yourself any favors by not stepping back once in a while to ask yourself whether you are really thinking things all the way through. I have found in life that you never know where you might find wisdom, so everyone's views are worth considering and evaluating - some more than others, true - but it's important not to have your filters pre-set to block information that might be a bit uncomfortable. The world doesn't adjust itself to your comfort levels, though you can certainly adjust your information inputs to maximize your own comfort. It's much more useful to step back and ask whether there isn't something you're missing. It also might combat the apparent hubris of the supposition that those who disagree with your views are stupid or brainwashed or indoctrinated. Remember, those who disagree with you could say the same thing about you, it's just an issue of who is doing the brainwashing and with what tools. [The "you" in the preceding few sentences is a generic "you," not a reference necessarily to you, host.]

See, to me one expansionist totalitarian mass murdering ideology isn't all that different from another, no matter what platitudes the dictator invoked to justify his bloodlust. If you think Stalin and Hitler aren't roughly mirror images of each other, I do'nt know what to tell you.

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 08:34 AM

well, comrade, if you want to put that last bit of yours into something like perspective, you might take a look at actually existing capitalism and its glorious history and start thinking in terms of the destruction that particular expansionist mass-murdering ideology has wrought as well--after all, unless you are totally disengenuous about it, you have to factor in the entire history if colonialism from the 19th century, the development of modern warfare, world war i directly--it ain't pretty.

it is ludicrous to defend a liberal ideological position of capitalism as if it is somehow benign and only the ideologies that you designate as problematic are to blame for untoward human suffering. but i suppose there's suffering and then there's suffering. you know, the suffering that happens as a result of an economic ideology you endorse is less real than is the suffering engendered by political ideologies you do not. i understand, comrade: multiple weights, multiple measures.

to head off the obvious snippy response--it is not interesting to play the relative barbarism game. this is only to say that you do not speak from a clean position yourself.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 08:40 AM

Depends how you define capitalism, my friend. Doesn't it?

My thesis simply is that the instinctual response to most issues should be toward liberty (personal and economic), with restrictions being imposed only after serious examination. Glorification of the state/party/race/bureaucracy instead of safeguarding rights of individuals has not tended to have a happy ending. Right?

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 08:55 AM

that really isn't a definition of capitalism--that's an aesthetic predisposition.
i'm way too much of a historian to find that adequate.
to wax marxian for a minute (and to show just how far apart we probably are aesthetically)--capitalism refers to the entire mode of production shaped by the particular relations of ownership to wage labor and the internal organizational tendencies toward standardization and fragmentation. ideology is but a part of this picture. liberal ideology is an even smaller part.

nothing's at stake in this sort of debate, really, so we have the option of whether we choose to talk past each other or not--at least as time goes on i'm getting a better idea of why we have talked past each other in the past, though--which is interesting in itself...just saying (and there's not sarcasm in that..sometimes i wonder if everything i write comes off so)

host · 03-31-2008, 09:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

Depends how you define capitalism, my friend. Doesn't it?

My thesis simply is that the instinctual response to most issues should be toward liberty (personal and economic), with restrictions being imposed only after serious examination. Glorification of the state/party/race/bureaucracy instead of safeguarding rights of individuals has not tended to have a happy ending. Right?

What does this say about our "system". The woman described in the quote box below is the grand daughter of the wife of Joseph Goebbels. Her grandmother participated in 1945, the injecting of morphine and administering of cyanide ampules in the murder of her and Goebbels six young children, in the fuhrerbunker, on May 1, 1945.

This woman, as a direct result of her father and grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis...her grandfather is known to have operated businesses that employed slave labor resulting in much suffering and in hundreds of deaths. inherited a fortune from her father. Her grandfather, after WWII, avoided Nuremberg prosecution for his war crimes, and, thanks to cooperative American occupation authorities, was handed back his vast portfolio of Nazi era business holdings.

What kind of a system and process results in this woman being tolerated as "one of the wealthiest"? After a media expose of her family's activities in WWII, this woman joined with other family members in a commitment to "investigate the wartime activities of the family".

Call me a cynic, loquitur, but I sincerely cannot see that "our system" is superior to any other...it feeds on wars and coups to sustain itself, makes partners with the devil, is content to permit wretched living conditions for the majority, in way too many countires, including in our own hemisphere, and is possessed by and radiates a sickeningly sweet air of it's own superiority, righteousness, and accomplishment.

Quote:

http://translate.google.com/translat...3Doff%26sa%3DG

<center><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/52/Goebbels-family.jpg/290px-Goebbels-family.jpg"></center>

(Pictured with his mother Magda and his stepfather Joseph Goebbels, is Gabriele's father, Harald Quandt, dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform. There is documentation that after his mother Magda divorced his father, Gunther Quandt, Gunther remained in good relations with his ex, Magda. He permitted Magda and Goebbels to hold their marriage ceremony at one of his Gunther's properties, and Hitler was a witness at the ceremony. Harald lived with his father, initially after the divorce, but, in 1934, went to live with his mother, and Goebbels adopted him.)

Gabriele Quandt Langenscheidt (* 1952 as Gabriele Quandt) from the Quandt family is the daughter of the German industrialist Harald Quandt (1921-1967), in 1967 in a plane crash killed. Her mother was Bandekow Inge (1928-1978) and her grandmother Magda Quandt, the later Magda Goebbels. She has four sisters: Katarina Geller (* 1951), Anette May-Thies (* 1954), Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo (* 1962) and Patricia Halterman (* 1967, † 2005).

1985 erwarb sie an der französischen Business-School INSEAD ihren MBA. 1985, it purchased at the French business school INSEAD her MBA.

Through several industrial shareholdings one of the richest women in Germany. Sie ist die Vorsitzende der Harald Quandt Holding, She is the chairwoman of Harald Quandt Holding, the roughly 1.2 billion euro major assets (as of 2006) of the heirs of Harald Quandt.

She is married since 1986 with the German Florian Langenscheidt Publishers, with whom she has two sons.

Moreover, they share with her husband the Children initiative for a better world launched the voluntary involvement of children and young people and annually promotes particularly successful initiatives strengths.

So the daughter of Goebbel's adopted son, Harald, and granddaughter of Goebbel's wife and a wealthy Nazi industrialist collaborator who used slave laborers in his Nazi era factories, is "one of the wealthiest", today, and gets to "investigate" her family's profitable wartime activities, herself.

What is the downside from descending from a Nazi predigreed family? Apparently, in our "system", there isn't any....no shame, no stigma, no penalty.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 10:49 AM

Host, I know it's important to vent sometimes, but that last post is so irrelevant to what we were discussing that I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what my last post has to do with it. You're making some kind of connection in your mind that is not readily apparent. I think you are starting from a logical presumption that is just not accurate and certainly not shared with me.

host · 03-31-2008, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

Host, I know it's important to vent sometimes, but that last post is so irrelevant to what we were discussing that I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what my last post has to do with it. You're making some kind of connection in your mind that is not readily apparent. I think you are starting from a logical presumption that is just not accurate and certainly not shared with me.

loquitur, who benefited from the activities and policies of the reich? It seems as if it was the German class called the Junkers.

Who benefited from Castro's revolution? Probably 2/3 of Cubans benefited, and untolled numbers since, from Cuban medical aid outreach.

I asked what kind of a system would permit the next generation of the Quandt family, and as yet unknown families in Germany, Italy, and Japan to retain their wealth and go unpunished for the crimes they committed in WWII?

What kind of system permits a practitioner of pre-emptive, war....Mr. Bush, to continue as it's political leader?

The whole point, loquitur, is that you've written your own prescription for the rose colored glasses that you wear. You defend the indefensible, and you think those who disagree with you are denouncing the system. It won't improve if you remain so satisfied with it loquitur.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 12:00 PM

......and that has to do with my classic liberalism how? My political views have precisely zero to do with the Junkers and even less to do with the kleptocracy that now runs Cuba.

Host, you obviously don't understand the difference between Hayek and early 20th century European oligarchy, and until you do, your posts will continue to massively miss the point. You are assuming that you can just lump all ideas different from yours into one mass, and that's just not the case. You assume an awful lot, which is why I'm scratching my head on what you write because it has pretty close to zero to do with me. Please get it through your head that classical liberals like me are much further away politically from the authoritarians you claim to hate than you are.

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 12:37 PM

loquitor: assuming that one accepts the distinction you make between the features of "classical liberalism" and the actually existing capitalist mode of production that it does and does not speak about.

if i may, host--

there's a way in which you can link the stuff about goebbels to the problems that fascism created for american-style nationalist ideology by way of the (simple historical reality) of operation paperclip--you know, the americans controlled the master list of all german pows after ww2 and used this bureaucratic advantage to shelter a large number of german war criminals from prosecution--but most of this followed from a sense of wanting war reparations rather than from any elective affinity--and from a sense of wanting to get stuff like german intel about the soviets, as the cold war was already taking shape (war economies need war like a junky needs heroin, dontcha know)....but that is and is not a direct connection. and making it is problematic--there's some radio guy who i think is an old trotskyite who tries this one a routine basis--and it's a shame because he digs up alot of good information and then smashes it all down with simplistic interpretations.

the other problem--fascism as radicalized nationalism as ideological problem for the americans--you can kinda see playing out in more diffuse ways in the post-war period: one vector is visible via local german elections directly after the war, during which american occupation forces were willing t prevent kpd party members from winning elections by rigging them and/or allowing former nazis to stand...another via the erasure of the content of fascist ideology from the popular historical imagination concerning world war 2 by way of the blizzard to stupid war films that make nazis into a collection of fashion quirks, funny accents and the capacity to die in great anonymous number at the hands of the grizzled gi....and in the erasure of the magnitude of pre-war support for fascism amongst americans--but that's hard to say much about empirically (like in terms of numbers)...

i think that there *is* a problem---> fascism is primarily radicalized nationalism----both are a type of collective mental disorder orchestrated via ideology.

i don't imagine that a classic liberal would venture to speak to that, as notions of "individual freedom/liberty" are wholly abstract, not tied to anything at all, anywhere at all, just as "classical liberalism" has nothing to say about anyplace at all. so it seems to be applicable everywhere, should the motivation to apply it happen to take shape--such is the temptation of any metaphysics.

but that said, i kinda understand why loquitor would be perplexed--you keep skipping the middle steps of your arguments, comrade. someone reading your posts in the last section of this thread who is inclined to can insert those middle steps--but they aren't in the posts--and (for example) my attempt to fill them in creates problems because i don't have exactly the same linkages that you have in mind.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 12:49 PM

Sure, and socialism necessarily restricts liberty everywhere it's been tried. You might LIKE the restrictions, but that is a different question. Just beware of empowering the govt too much because one day the people in charge might not be the ones you like. You might be happy giving FDR a lot of power, but if you do that you end up with GWB.

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 01:01 PM

uh---you know, loquitor, not only is that statement arbitrary, but it's not even any fun to think about.

there are social and economic classes. your liberty-carrying economic order produces and reproduces a brutally stratified class system. it has been like this for 150 years--blah blah blah liberty while in the real world, there's only liberty for a few and the rest are just debris--extra people--but hierarchy is "natural"---so in the end, who gives a shit.

and so long as there is liberty for a few, there will always be an even smaller set willing to defend that liberty-for-some and to repeat in that defense the wholesale erasure of the social reality that ideology has wrought.

so you think about "liberty" for a few and i'll think about what capitalism does as a social formation: you can have fun, i'll do what i do and there we have it.

i'm not even going to get started on the characterization of socialism.
it's a waste of my time.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 01:16 PM

c'mon roachboy, that's not even remotely accurate. the amount of social mobility people achieve even within their own lifetimes is astounding in this country, and virtually unique. The notion of lumping this system where people can start over as many times as they want, with a system of hereditary nobility is batty.

Just as an example: my grandfather arrived in this country in 1914 with zero to his name. He worked in a sweatshop for a few years and eventually found a location where he could open up a store, and did. That little store supported his family and, after he died and my father took it over, my family. It put their three kids through school. And this story of coming up into the middle class is not even remotely unique: as you know, millions of people are clamoring to get into this country - not, I will note, into places like Cuba and Venezuela. There's a good reason why: they have the liberty to make their own fortune here, more than in most other places.

Only someone complacent from prosperity and with the luxury to contemplate injustices (real or imagined) could come up with the sort of stuff you guys are coming up with.

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 01:29 PM

i don't know how much further there is to go on this one, comrade.
i am not feeling inclined to fight through the dissociative twaddle of that last post--the anecdote about your grandfather aside, of course.

i have some anecdotes about my grandfather somewhere too...

but i did enjoy the final rhetorical flourish--if i were more one with das volk, i'd think as you do.
funny stuff.

Ustwo · 03-31-2008, 01:35 PM

My mother in law started working at 18, no college degree, for a large corporation as a secretary.

My father in law did have a college degree from a 'lower level' college, and worked for a major corporation followed by only barely solvent small personal businesses.

They lived simply, saved money, never went out of their means, and I have recently discovered they are in fact multi-millionaires. They are the quintessential millionaire next door.

Perhaps they needed to read more books by unsuccessful men on how they were brutally stratified, unable to succeed, and held down by the system, but instead they worked hard, invested wisely, saved their pennies, and now are set to live a very nice long wealthy retirement. Needless to say I turn to my father in law for investment advice.

I really wish I knew what Amerika some people here live in, because I've never seen it.

Perhaps my father was right when he told me the problem with people who read all the time is they never do anything.

Willravel · 03-31-2008, 01:46 PM

I see, so if your in-laws can do it anyone can: the quintessential American fallacy.

"If you work hard, you'll be a millionaire". Hehe....

Ustwo · 03-31-2008, 02:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

I see, so if your in-laws can do it anyone can: the quintessential American fallacy.

"If you work hard, you'll be a millionaire". Hehe....

You got a hell of a lot better chance than not working hard and reading about how horrible it is while sitting on your ass.

Personally I think its damn impressive for a secretary and a guy barely making it in small business.

When I first started to date my wife, I was annoyed with how cheap they seemed when she was growing up, now I see why that was.

roachboy · 03-31-2008, 02:01 PM

that's fascinating ustwo.
more anecdotes. how nice.
the world must be exactly that way.

your anecdotes give you access to all of reality--the consequences of structural adjustment programs in the southern hemisphere, the consequences of the american war economy, the consequences of the radically uneven distribution of educational resources across the board in the united states, the consequences of all aspects of the current economic rationality in all sphere of social being--clearly all facets of the american system of socio-economic class stratification and reproduction are all jammed in to your anecdotes. clearly those people are EveryPerson, and your anecdotes Edifying Tales that all of us should contemplate and learn from.

from your olympian vantagepoint, armed with Telling Anecdotes and Important Analytic Major Premises on the order of "i dont like taxes" and Vastly Informed Minor Premises like "it does not matter what socialism actually is i hate it anyway", no phenomenon on earth---no matter how small---can escape you. ever.

and from such olympian heights, what good are mere books, what value has mere information, mere data, when you commune with the Nature of Things Immanently--why you do not need to even expend the energy to open your eyes----without even opening your eyes, you can peer directly into the bodies of human beings and see that genetics determines the outcomes of behaviors, you can look around and see that any social hierarchy that enables you to imagine yourself atop it must necessarily be without ANY problems because, hey, you're atop it and that is as it should be and so all is necessarily right with the world. through you Science and Reason obviously speak.

but it must be a mixed blessing to have such awesome powers that you know so much about the world without bothering to acquire any actual information about it.

but i for one am every bit as grateful as you imagine me to be that you take time out from your vastly burdened internal world to interact with mere mortals like myself who have to struggle through the odious process of assembling an understanding of the world by way of information, who are not graced with the Powerful Insight that you are that makes Understanding of the World something that requires no information.

and you have demonstrated the validity of your position with such persuasive power, and the extraneousness of information to your arguments at the same time, that i simply bow in your general direction.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 02:13 PM

Yep, the complacency and luxury of having one's most basic needs satisfied sure does lead to some amazing narcissistic convolutions.

When the immigrant flows start heading out of the US and toward one of the workers' paradises, come back and we'll talk. Until then, I'm pretty confident my anecdotes can be aggregated into statistics quite nicely.

Willravel · 03-31-2008, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

You got a hell of a lot better chance than not working hard and reading about how horrible it is while sitting on your ass.

Am I a fluke, then? Don't forget that you're talking to a liberal socialist who, a little over 1 year ago at the age of 23, was making more than the average dentist. And I read a lot.

Making a lot of money comes down to a few simple things:
1) Family - if you've got either family money or family connections to business
2) Intelligence - unless you've got #1, you're going to need to be smart, and this often means education
3) Luck - yeah, luck
4) Ruthlessness

That's the whole thing.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 02:25 PM

Actually, I'd agree on #3, not on the others, and I'd add "insight" - seeing something other people don't see - as well as hard work. Family money can help but is hardly indispensable. Ruthlessness is a short term strategy at best.

Will, I bet you had some good insights. Right? And some lucky breaks that let you act on them the way you wanted, I bet.

None of this has anything to do with fascism, though.

Willravel · 03-31-2008, 02:48 PM

You wouldn't include insight as intelligence?

But seriously, the family thing is really where the easy millions are.

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 05:11 PM

it's a subset, a very specific kind. There are lots of brilliant people who wouldn't have the particular type of insight we're talking about.

host · 03-31-2008, 05:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

Actually, I'd agree on #3, not on the others, and I'd add "insight" - seeing something other people don't see - as well as hard work. Family money can help but is hardly indispensable. Ruthlessness is a short term strategy at best.

Will, I bet you had some good insights. Right? And some lucky breaks that let you act on them the way you wanted, I bet.

None of this has anything to do with fascism, though.

Rockefeller never let up from his ruthlessness...not until he was an old man...

Quote:

http://www.caj.ca/mediamag/summer2002/books.html
.....Ida Tarbell’s series on the Standard Oil Company (precursor to Exxon) consisted of 18 monthly installments in McClure’s Magazine. Tarbell raked through a wealth of court documents and transcripts of congressional hearings into Standard’s operations. She interviewed people who worked for the monopoly as well as those who had been victimized by it.

Then she documented how Standard Oil officials had fought their way to control by “rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, and perhaps even more important by ruthless,never slothful efficiency of organization and production,”....

loquitur · 03-31-2008, 06:05 PM

Host, if you operate in an industry where you deal with other people, as a general rule you need reasonable relations in order to do business. People will get burned and then refuse to deal with you unless they have no choice. That's why ruthlessness only works short term in most instances.

Of course, "ruthlessness" is open to interpretation.

host · 04-01-2008, 10:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

Host, if you operate in an industry where you deal with other people, as a general rule you need reasonable relations in order to do business. People will get burned and then refuse to deal with you unless they have no choice. That's why ruthlessness only works short term in most instances.

Of course, "ruthlessness" is open to interpretation.

Ruthlessness and evidence that the corporatism that enables the tax incentives described in the first article, calls into question the notion that "our capitalist system" is as beneficial to "our great nation", as many assume:

Quote:

http://news.morningstar.com/newsnet/...01084_univ.xml
Prof Suggests Review Of Sovereign Wealth Funds' Tax Breaks3-6-08 4:56 PM EST | E-mail Article | Print Article

WASHINGTON (AP)--An academic credited with being an early critic of U.S. tax breaks enjoyed by private-equity firms and hedge funds has set his sights on a new target: investment funds run by foreign governments.
Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said in an online posting this week that tax exemptions benefiting sovereign wealth funds - large pools of capital controlled by governments across Asia and the Middle East - may deserve a closer look by Congress.

Fleischer, who couldn't immediately be reached for comment, was among the first researchers to highlight the ways that partnerships such as private-equity firms and hedge funds pay substantially lower tax rates than corporations. Legislation was introduced in Congress last year that would have changed those rules, but it stalled in the face of heavy lobbying by private-equity groups.

Because they are exempt from paying taxes on a wide range of investments, sovereign wealth funds have an unfair advantage over foreign and domestic private investors because they can offer better terms to U.S. companies, Fleischer argues, when lending money or purchasing complex securities.

While foreign governments are taxed on profits they earn from commercial activities in the United States, they don't have to pay taxes on proceeds from stocks, bonds and other passive investments - and sovereign funds benefit from that exemption.

"Encouraging foreign investment in the United States generally increases overall welfare," Fleischer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. <h3>"But ... it is not at all clear that we should give state-owned funds a competitive advantage that crowds out private investment."....</h3>

Quote:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/15251...lth_funds.html
Sovereign Wealth Funds

Author:
Lee Hudson Teslik, Assistant Editor

January 18, 2008

....What sorts of investments do SWFs make?...

.....Several SWFs have gained public attention for specific investments. China’s fund drew recent headlines for investments in major U.S. financial firms. Analysts at Morgan Stanley says these purchases represent a broader trend—they estimate that Temasek Holdings, a fund managed by the government of Singapore, had invested 38 percent of its portfolio in the financial sector as of September 2007. In 2005, a United Arab Emirates-owned company, Dubai Ports World, stirred controversy in the United States by purchasing a British-owned shipping company, thus giving it control over parts of several U.S. port facilities. Dubai Ports World is a state-owned business, not a sovereign wealth fund, but the concerns provoked by the incident mirror concerns over SWFs purchasing business interests that had formerly been the domain of private companies.
What are the geoeconomic implications of SWFs?

Experts say the emergence of sovereign wealth funds represents a fundamental shift in the reasons governments invest money. “To the extent governments have traditionally held investment assets, it was to protect domestic currencies and banks from crisis,” writes the Economist. Modern sovereign wealth funds go well beyond this basic agenda. Writing in the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby, the director of CFR’s Center for Geoeconomic Studies, says global government currency reserves have expanded “way beyond their prudential needs and more than triple the amount in the world’s hedge funds.”.....

Quote:

http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6331/
Pol/Econ: China Sovereign Wealth Fund Could Buy Every US Company

Monday, 22 October 2007 Written by Bill Bonner

....While wages in the USA haven’t risen in 30 years, in Asia they’re going up about 10% per year. The Asians are making money…and getting richer. And in the process they’re accumulating huge stacks of dollars. Many of those dollars end up in the new Sovereign Funds – immense private equity funds owned by governments. <h3>Lenin said that capitalists would sell the ropes that he’d use to hang them.</h3> Well, the communist Chinese are ready for a buying spree. Currently, those funds have about US$2 trillion in them. They’re expected to have about US$17 trillion by 2010 – enough to buy every publicly-listed company in America…with change left over.

What will they do with all that money? Well, what would you do?

Yesterday, the dollar hit new record lows. The euro rose to nearly US$1.42. Since we live in Europe…and pay our bills in euros…but earn our money in dollars…every day, your editor loses more than he makes. His dollar assets go down. He’s getting tired of it. Surely, other dollar holders/earners are too – including foreign treasuries. What will they do? They will try to trade their dollars for something solid, while they still can.

Companies. Land. Gold.

Whatever they can get.

What they will do is to use their paper US dollars to buy America’s valuable assets.
The dollars, of course, are essentially worthless. The United States can create as many as it wants at negligible cost. But the companies…the factories…the land…the resources – those are really valuable. When the foreigners gain ownership, Americans’ own wealth – and independence – is reduced.....

loquitur · 04-01-2008, 10:34 AM

circular reasoning.

host · 05-30-2008, 05:59 AM

I debated where to post this "stuff". If you think "the media" has a "liberal" bias, consider where you must be positioned in the political spectrum, if that is the way you view the general tone of the attitude and presentation of "the media. What would CNN, for example, need to change, from your POV, to appear to be neutral, or conservative leaning, if you regard CNN as "too liberal", at present?

What is this? Wouldn't a former white house correspondent for a major US news media publication, be expected to be a li'l less of a fascist than Politico's Mike Allen is acting as...and wouldn't it be a surprise that "liberal leaning" GE/NBC would hire Mike Gallagher, and allow him to continue to broadcast, after this?:
(<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/30/allen/index.html">Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time</a>)

Quote:

Allen shared his complaint about "left wing haters" while chatting agreeably with Mike Gallagher, who <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/20/gallagher-damon-olbermann/">previously said this</a>:<blockquote>I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar. Round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann. Take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors.</blockquote>Allen and Gallagher can't stand those left wing haters.

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...len/index.html

<div class="story_date">Friday May 30, 2008 06:51 EDT</div>

<h2>The right-wing Politico cesspool</h2>
<div class="body_text">
Politico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time, appeared yesterday on the show of right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher. <h3>The two of them guffawed together at how absurd are Scott McCellan's claims that the media was "deferential" to the Bush administration</h3> and then <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/29/allen-mcclellan-sounds-like-the-left-wing-haters/">Allen said this</a>:<blockquote>ALLEN: And indeed, Scott does adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric of the left wing haters. Can you believe it in here he says the White House press corps was too deferential to the administration?</blockquote>Think Progress <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/29/allen-mcclellan-sounds-like-the-left-wing-haters/">has the audio</a>, which makes even clearer how eager Mike Allen was "to adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric" of the right-wing operatives which Politico exists to serve. Actually, not even Karl Rove -- who gave Allen and comrades their marching orders earlier this week when <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/28/draft-the-liberal-media-mythhahaharove-calls-mccallan-a-left-wing-blogger/">he said</a> during an interview with Sean Hannity that McClellan "sounds like a left-wing blogger" -- goes so far as to refer to those critical of the media's war coverage as "left wing haters." But Politico "reporter" Mike Allen does. 


After hearing his repugnant comments, I e-mailed Allen last night and asked him several questions, including (full email is <a href="http://utdocuments.blogspot.com/2008/05/e-mail-to-mike-allen.html">here</a>): "Is anyone who believes that the media was too deferential to the Bush administration in the run-up to the war a 'left-wing hater?'" and "Can you give a few examples of the 'left-wing haters' you were referencing?" and "Are there 'right-wing haters'? If so, any examples you can provide?" Allen sent me a completely non-responsive reply that had nothing to do with what I asked. When I emailed him again and emphasized that I was particularly interested in his use of the term "left wing haters," this is the reply he sent me, in full:<blockquote>Ah, gotcha. No, you can call them "critics" or "skeptics" or "opponents" or whatever. My only point was that McClellan has now validated points of view that the administration had in the past pushed back against -- and that, in fact, have been proven empirically in many cases. For instance, the Larry Lindsey $100-200 billion was once considered heresy by Scott and his colleagues. Now, it looks like a lowball...</blockquote>When he referred to "left wing haters," he just meant "critics" of the administration -- war "skeptics" and Bush "opponents." That's all synonymous in his mind with "left wing haters" -- interchangeable terms. Thus: "you can call them 'critics' or 'skeptics' or 'opponents'" -- or the phrase I used: "left wing haters" -- "or whatever." So according to Politico's chief political correspondent (the former White House Correspondent of Time), administration critics are, by definition, "left wing haters." 

Allen shared his complaint about "left wing haters" while chatting agreeably with Mike Gallagher, who <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/20/gallagher-damon-olbermann/">previously said this</a>:<blockquote>I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar. Round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann. Take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors.</blockquote>Allen and Gallagher can't stand those left wing haters. 


Allen recently conducted an "interview" with George Bush that was so vapid and sycophantic that the normally polite Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post detailed the "questions" Allen posed and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/05/14/BL2008051401929_4.html">then asked rhetorically</a>: "Has there ever been a more moronic interview of a president of the United States than the one conducted yesterday by Mike Allen?" 

Speaking of Politico's sycophantic service to the GOP, Allen's colleague, Daniel Paul Kuhn, today has <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10699.html">an article</a> about how gay marriage is going to help McCain win the election and doom Obama among independents and working class voters. Last week, Kuhn wrote <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10585.html">an article</a> reporting that GOP operatives were excited about the prospects of McCain winning in a "blowout." Several weeks before that, Kuhn wrote <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/13/politico/">an article</a> about how the Iraq War's growing popularity among Americans would be a huge asset for McCain and doom the Democratic candidate. Not even the most shameless GOP hack makes such absurdly optimistic claims about the GOP's electoral chances -- at least not out in the open. They just have Kuhn and Politico do it for them. 


I once thought that Politico would be a pernicious new addition to our rotted media culture. Instead, it actually provides a valuable service by packing every destructive and corrupt journalistic attribute, in its most vivid form, into one single cesspool.

</div>

-- Glenn Greenwald

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...lin/index.html
<div class="story_date">Thursday May 29, 2008 06:03 EDT</div>

<h2>CNN/MSNBC reporter: Corporate executives forced pro-Bush, pro-war narrative</h2>
<div class="body_text">
(updated below - Update II) 

Jessica Yellin -- currently a CNN correspondent who covered the White House for ABC News and MSNBC in 2002 and 2003 -- was on with Anderson Cooper last night discussing Scott McClellan's book, and made one of the <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/28/acd.01.html">most significant admissions</a> heard on television in quite some time:<blockquote>JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings. 


And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president. 

I think, over time... 

(CROSSTALK) 

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president? 


YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.</blockquote>The video of that exchange is <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/29/jessica-yellin-on-cnn-says-news-execs-pressured-her-to-make-bush-look-good/">here</a>. As noted in Update II below, Yellin today said that she was referring to her time at MSNBC. 

Yellin's admission is but the latest in a growing mountain of evidence demonstrating that corporate executives forced their news reporters to propagandize in favor of the Bush administration and the war, and censored stories that were critical of the Government. Katie Couric <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/28/gibson/index.html">yesterday said</a> that threats from the White House and accusations of being unpatriotic coerced the media into suppressing its questioning of the war. But last September, Couric <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/28/couric-faced-corporate-pressure/">revealed even more specifically</a> the type of pressure that was put on her by NBC executives to refrain from criticizing the administration, after she conducted a "tough interview" with Condoleezza Rice:<blockquote>After the interview, Couric said she received an email from an NBC exec "forwarded without explanation" from a viewer who wrote that she had been "unnecessarily confrontational." 


"I think there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations," she said in an interview with former journalist and author Marvin Kalb during "The Kalb Report" forum at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.</blockquote>In April of 2003, then-MSNBC star Ashleigh Banfield <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/truths-consequences-by-digby-since.html">delivered a speech</a> at Kansas State University and said that American news coverage of the Iraq war attracted high ratings but "wasn't journalism," because "there are horrors that were completely left out of this war." She added, echoing Couric:<blockquote>The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason. 

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. . . . I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.</blockquote>Shortly thereafter, Banfield was demoted, then fired altogether, and -- as Digby <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/truths-consequences-by-digby-since.html">put it</a> in her great analysis of Banfield's speech -- "she's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show." 


At the same time, MSNBC fired the only real war opponent it had, Phil Donahue, despite very healthy ratings (the <a href="http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html">highest of any show on MSNBC</a>, including "Hardball"). When interviewed for <a href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html">Bill Moyers' truly superb 2007 documentary</a> on press behavior in the run-up to the war, Donahue reported much the same thing as Yellin, Couric, and Banfield revealed:<blockquote>BILL MOYERS: You had Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector. Who was saying that if we invade, it will be a historic blunder. 

PHIL DONOHUE: You didn't have him alone. He had to be there with someone else who supported the war. In other words, you couldn't have Scott Ritter alone. You could have Richard Perle alone. 

BILL MOYERS: You could have the conservative. 


PHIL DONOHUE: You could have the supporters of the President alone. And they would say why this war is important. You couldn't have a dissenter alone. Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal. 

BILL MOYERS: You're kidding. 

PHIL DONOHUE: No this is absolutely true. 

BILL MOYERS: Instructed from above? 


PHIL DONOHUE: Yes. I was counted as two liberals.</blockquote>A <a href="http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html">leaked memo from NBC executives</a> at the time of his firing made clear that Donahue was fired for ideological reasons, not due to ratings:<blockquote>The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war . . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."</blockquote>NBC executives then proceeded to hire Dick Armey as an MSNBC commentator and give a show to Michael Savage. Michael Savage. 


This is nothing less than compelling evidence that, in terms of our establishment press, our media is anything but "free." Corporate executives continuously suppressed critical reporting of the Government and the war and forced their paid reporters to mimic the administration line. The evidence proving that comes not from media critics or shrill left-wing bloggers but from those who work at these news outlets, including some of their best-known and highest-paid journalists who are attesting to such facts from first-hand knowledge despite its being in their interests not to speak out about such things. 

* * * * * 

Yesterday was actually quite an extraordinary day in our political culture because Scott McClellan's revelations forced the establishment media to defend themselves against long-standing accusations of their corruption and annexation by the government -- criticisms which, until yesterday, they literally just ignored, blacked-out, and suppressed. <h2>Bizarrely enough, it took a "tell-all" Washington book from Scott McClellan, of all people, to force these issues out into the open, and he seems -- unwittingly or otherwise -- to have opened a huge flood gate that has long been held tightly shut.</h2> 

Network executives obviously know that these revelations are quite threatening to their brand. Yesterday, they wheeled out their full stable of multi-millionaire corporate stars who play the role of authoritative journalists on the TV to <a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_05_25_archive.html#8898416978311420719">join with their White House allies</a> in mocking and deriding McClellan's claims. One media star after the next -- <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#24859923">Tom Brokaw</a>, <a href="http://www.oliverwillis.com/index.php/2008/05/28/david-gregory-rewrites-history-says-the-press-did-a-good-job-on-iraq/">David Gregory</a>, <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/28/gibson/index.html">Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams</a>, <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=t1gcPdc0FFI">Tim Russert</a>, <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/28/sitroom.01.html">Wolf Blitzer</a> -- materialized in sync to insist that nothing could be more absurd than the suggestion that they are "deferential, complicit enablers" in government propaganda. 


I have little doubt that they would be telling the truth if they denied what Yellin reported last night. People like Williams, Gibson and Gregory don't need to be told to refrain from reporting critically about the war and the White House because challenging Government claims isn't what they do. And amazingly, they admitted that explicitly yesterday. Gibson and Gregory both invoked the cliched excuse of the low-level bureaucrat using almost identical language: exposing government lies "is not our job." 

Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and company are paid to play the role of TV reporters but, in reality, are mere television emcees -- far more akin to circus ringleaders than journalists. It's just as simple as that. David Halberstam <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/24/halberstam_press/">pointed that out some time ago</a>. Unlike Yellin, Donahue and Banfield, nobody needed to pressure the likes of Williams, Gibson and Russert to serve as propaganda handmaidens for the White House. It's what they do quite eagerly on their own, which is precisely why they're in the corporate positions they're in. They are smooth, undisruptive personalities who don't create problems for their executives. Watching them finally describe how they perceive of "their role" leaves no doubt about any of that. 

* * * * * 

This is the most vital point: this is not a matter of mere historical interest. This is not about how the media operated five years ago during an aberrational time in our history. This is about how they functioned then and how they function now. The same people who did all of this still run these media organizations and it's the same coddled, made-up personalities still playing the role of "journalist." 


That's what makes the NYT "military analyst" story so significant, and it's why it's so revealing that the establishment media black-out of that story continues. Not just in 2003, but through 2008, the networks relied upon Pentagon-controlled propagandists to masquerade as their "independent analysts." Those analysts repeatedly spouted <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/09/cnn_abc/">patently false government propaganda without challenge</a>. The numerous financial incentives and ideological ties these analysts had were concealed. And these networks, now that this is all revealed and even with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/washington/24generals.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin">multiple investigations underway</a>, still refuse to tell their viewers about any of it. 

Clearly, if these network media stars think they did nothing wrong in the run-up to the war and in their coverage of the Bush administration -- and they don't -- then it's only logical to conclude that they still do the same things and will do the same things in the future. As people like Jessica Yellin, Katie Couric, Phil Donahue and Scott McClellan are making clear, these media outlets are controlled propaganda arms of the Government, of the political establishment generally. For many people, that isn't a new revelation, but the fact that it's becoming clearer by the day -- from unimpeachable sources on the inside -- is nonetheless quite significant. UPDATE: The central excuse offered by self-defending "journalists" is that they didn't present an anti-war case because nobody was making that case, and it's not their job to create debate. This unbelievably rotted view found its most darkly hilarious expression in a <a href=" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Apr26.html ">2007 David Ignatius column</a> in The Washington Post. After explaining how proud he is of his support for the attack on Iraq, Igantius explains why there wasn't much challenge made to the Administration's case for war (h/t Ivan Carterr):<blockquote>In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it.</blockquote>They were "victims of their own professionalism." It's not up to them to create a debate where none exists. That's the same thing Charlie Gibson, David Gregory, and <a href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html">Tim Russert</a> -- among others -- have all said in defending themselves. 


The idea that journalists only convey statements from politicians rather than "create debates" is the classic Stenographic Model of "Journalism" -- "we just write down what people say. It's not our job to do anything else." Real reporting is about uncovering facts that the political elite try to conceal, not ones they willingly broadcast. It's about investigating and exposing -- not mindlessly amplifying -- the falsehoods and deceit of government claims. But our modern "journalists" (with some noble exceptions) don't do that not only because they can't do it, but also because they don't think it's their job. That's because, by definition, they're not journalists. 

But beyond that, this claim is just categorically, demonstrably false. As <a href="http://mediamatters.org/columns/200805280002">Eric Boehlert</a> and <a href="http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_05_25_archive.html#7834482293112993939">Atrios</a> both demonstrated yesterday, Ted Kennedy in September, 2002 "delivered a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about a possible invasion." Moreover, <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/gore/gore092302sp.html">Al Gore</a> (the prior presidential nominee of the Democratic Party) and <a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/dean/dean021703sp.html">Howard Dean</a> (the 2003 Democratic presidential frontrunner) were both emphatically speaking out against the war. 


Thus, three of the most influential voices in the Democratic Party -- arguably the three most influential at the time -- were vehemently opposing the war. People were protesting in the streets by the hundreds of thousands <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/15/sprj.irq.protests.main/">inside the U.S.</a> and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm">around the world</a>. In the world as perceived by the insulated, out-of-touch and establishment-worshiping likes of David Ignatius, Brian Williams, David Gregory, and Charlie Gibson, there may not have been a debate over whether we should attack Iraq. But there nonetheless was a debate. They ignored it and silenced it because their jobs didn't permit them to highlight those questions. Ask Jessica Yellin. She'll tell you. She just did last night. UPDATE II: Yellin <a href="http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/29/tv-news-under-the-microscope/">clarifies in a post today</a> that her comments "involved [her] time on MSNBC where [she] worked during the lead up to war" and that she was referring to "senior producers." She says that "many people running the broadcasts wanted coverage that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the country at the time." That, of course, is the same network that fired Ashleigh Banfield and Phil Donahue, and where David Gregory, Tom Brokow, Brian Williams and Tim Russert all now insist that they performed superb journalism in the run-up to the war. 


On a different note, contrary to the standard establishment journalist excuse that there were no real anti-war advocates for them to include in their coverage, there were ample politicians and experts speaking out against the war. Aside from the numerous examples listed above, many of the nation's leading international relation scholars were forced to <a href="http://utdocuments.blogspot.com/2008/03/nyt-pre-war-ad.html">pay for ads</a> in places such as the The New York Times to make their anti-war case because the media would not -- <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/25/war_opponents/">and still will not</a> -- include them in its coverage. Numerous non-liberal factions -- from foreign policy <a href="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3369">scholars at the Cato Institute</a> to <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/jim-webb-marty-peretz-and-our-serious.html">former Reagan defense officials</a> -- were vehemently against the war. But the networks featured an endless stream of know-nothing war cheerleaders while almost completely excluding actual opponents of the war.

</div>

-- Glenn Greenwald

If "the media" seems "too liberal", considering all of the evidence that it is dominated and controlled by a corporate agenda aligned in close cooperation with a repressive, war mongering, obsessively partisan right administration, might you be a corporatist, and not have considered it as such? Why not?

roachboy · 05-30-2008, 06:45 AM

long ago and seeingly far away there was an e-list called red rock eater that i subscribed to--the guy who ran it was consistently interesting (i can't remember his name) and was the first person i know of to note the centrality of projection to the conservative ideological worldview--in this case, the myth of the "liberal media" is a screen the primary function of which has nothing to do with an accurate description of the current media environment and everything to do with situating the conservative-specific blurring of ideological statements and information about the world in their own media apparatus as a corrective to perceived "bais" from without.

the effects of this projection are obvious.

this information about explicit directives coming from "above" that infotainment about the iraq debacle be shaped to accord with the pronouncements of the bush people is different--this is collusion of a different order and poses a quite fundamental problem concerning the nature of the american "free press"--and since the press is the principal relay of the information required for the functioning of the american "democratic" polity, of the political system more generally.

what is obvious: we are living in an ideological context that is not terribly different from the relation of the french communist party and the confederation generale du travail (pcf-cgt) of the 1950s, in which formally independent organizations tightly co-ordinated the nature and release timing of information in order to co-ordinate opinion in order to either enable or block actions, shape dispositions--to organize consent. in that case, the "transmission belt" functioned in a larger, pluralist context, so in principle was an open space in the sense that folk could, if they chose, move into and out of that informational universe--but the fact is that this system was largely self-enclosed and self-enclosing.

in the states, what it looks like is a pattern of co-ordination has been set up that operates on a much larger scale and effects the central elements within the media system or apparatus itself.

this explains alot. what it explains is **really** not good--the centrality of denial in american political life, the inability to adapt to change, the inability to think strategically because the information required to do so simply is not present--information is conditioned by the desire of the dominant social class to remain dominant--and so is ideological in the classic marxist sense of the term.

you also can read off an interesting indication of the relative weight of types of media in shaping the information processing of alot of the population--information hierarchies if you like--it seems that television, despite every fucking thing about it--is seen as providing a more "direct" access to "the world" presumably because of the role played by action footage, which provides an illusion of unmediated access to real-time or close-to-real-time phenomena or events. but anyone who has thought about it at all knows that television is a talk medium more than it is a visual medium--but the relation which i think obtains for alot of folk is inverted. print media in paper form seems to carry more weight than information available in electronic form--so it follows that the relative openness of the information context available on the web is not of the same status as the more self-enclosed media environments of television infotainment supplemented with slightly more depth-oriented glosses provided by newspapers. wedged in there somewhere is the natterings of the chattering classes, who provide simplistic and therapeutic mobile narratives for the unsettling aspects of live footage that escapes the confines of the immediate voice-overs provided by the manicured actors who read teleprompters but who are confused with Authorities or Information Sources.

whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives.
that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it.

host · 05-30-2008, 07:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

.....whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives.
that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it.

Follow the shift in power....there was a time when a television journalist, employed by a major news network was powerful enough to call it ON THE AIR, as he saw it. In some quarters, there is no recogntion that this was not a partisan condition. It was the way I percieved as the American way.... a free press, challenging power, speaking truth to it.....

We had a thread where some posted that it was not the job of the press to find the secrets of the powerful and to publicly report them.

How do they square that belief with it's effect on their own potential to "know what they know"? Do they think their ability to be informed will be there, anyway....how could that be.....?

....In other threads, we noted a purely partisan reaction to Cronkite's power to overcome corporate control.....

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...ar#post2347256

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

There was once a time when Rosanne Bar was the most watched show in America. Walter was a liberal who looked conservative and respectable with a good voice. If he were to start again today he would just be another liberal pundit. Congratulations, to him for helping fuel a retreat which cost a lot of good Vietnamese their lives and subjected them to totalitarianism. Without looking I'm sure he wants the same in Iraq. Hes predictable in his liberalism.

When any president trusts a news caster for his opinion, we got issues on many levels, and thats any president, past or future.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...on#post2448731

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopilot

At that very moment, Cronkite ushered in the era of creating the news rather than reporting the news.

wait for it ... wait for it ... not much longer ...

Quote:

http://books.google.com/books?id=9o2...GtilHr3Q&hl=en

1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos ...
by Charles Kaiser -

...."To say that we are closer to vistory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unrealistic pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only reslistic; yet unsatisfactory, conclusion...It is increasingly clear to this reporter the the only rational wya out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
"This Walter Cronkite. Good Night."

Never before had such an influential American identified the futility of our effort on prime-time television. The war's opponents reacted with a mixture of astonishment and glee to this battlefield conversion. Cronkite's words carried greater weight that those of any politician- and Lyndon Johnson knew better than anyone. The fact that Johnson had enjoyed a very special relationship with CBS for 30 years only increased the size of the shock. It had been Frank Stanton (then a young assistant to CBS founder William Palry) who agreed in 1938 to make the Texas congressman's radio station in Austin a CBS afiliate- and it was that decision that made the outlet the foundation of the Johnson fortune.(48)
Byt the time Stanton was president of CBS and Johnson was president of the UNited States, the two men were very close friends indeed. Stanton even redesigned the presidential desk in the Oval Office. He also provided endless technical advice in the futile effort to make the commander-in-chief look better on television.(49)

The president has unusual respect for the CBS anchor. "I can't compete with Walter Cronkite", he explained. "He knows television and he's a star. So whenI'm with him, I'm on his level, yet he knows what he's doing and so he does it better and I lose."(50) Now the president's telegenic opposite had become his avowed enemy, and Johnson was devastated by the loss of Cronkite, the personification of CBS in the public mind. The president told his aides that is he had lost Walter, he had lost the common American....

I cannot accept how far we have descended, from the country I experienced as a high school student. I don't think it is a mystery why we are so divided and how we got to where we currently are..... a shift so far to the right, with so little recognition or protest of the shift.... as a matter of fact, it is welcomed where power and wealth are concentrated, and feeds that concentration trend.

loquitur · 05-30-2008, 07:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

that really isn't a definition of capitalism--that's an aesthetic predisposition.

Roachboy, I had sort of forgotten about this thread, but I came back across it and read that line and thought to myself "YES!!!!" that's precisely it - I have an aesthetic predisposition and not an ideology. Political ideology is too much like religion for my taste, and it tends to make people partisan and thus (if I might be so bold as to say so) stupid. Whereas simply having a set of preferences permits case by case evaluation of a problem and a good deal of flexibility in approach to it.

Or did you mean something else by "aesthetic predisposition?"

roachboy · 05-30-2008, 07:50 AM

folk seem to have been persuaded that "control" is to be understood as a matter of whether the state is explicitly involved or not--so control is a function of direct state involvement. in a "free" context, dominated by private interests, the "logic" goes, there cannot be domination. so folk treat information either as given, in which case problems of co-ordination disappear, or as entirely suspect, in which case they can simply fall back on a priori attitudes and "feelings" as if they occupied the same space in a political deliberation and positions informed by data concerning the world.

personally, i don't think walter cronkite represents much of anything.
i think that the problems of ideological co-ordination in the context of mass media did not just start--try to imagine fascism in the 20s and 30s without radio as a political co-ordination device. you can't do it.

this is not new. this is a structural problem.

one of the reason that the transmission belt relation occurred to me as an analogy is that there is a variability in the connectedness between formally independent organizations implied by it--sometimes seeming more loose, other times tighter--so the problem is not periods of relative looseness (vietnam, say, at the level of network coverage of the war) but the relation itself, the whole transmission belt arrangement.

host · 05-30-2008, 07:54 AM

roachboy, you may not think Cronkite an important example, but, can you think of another one that more obviously portrays the shift in what is permissible today, vs. in 1968? Do you think it is even possible for any TV anchor today to embark on an unembedded fact finding trip to Iraq or Afghanistan and then come back and make the kind of qualified opinion that Cronkite made, and have it broadcast, without editorial interference....?

<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=132321&highlight=secrets">Is the Primary Role of the US Press to Uncover and Report "Secrets of the Powerful"? </a>
Post #20

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

the question as posed makes no sense. Who is "powerful"? How do you define it? Is a union leader powerful? Head of a NGO? A local neighborhood organizer?

And what does "Uncover and report" mean? Suppose there is no lawbreaking or unethical behavior?

And I thought the purpose of the press is to report the news and provide a forum for opinions. Sometimes powerful people (however defined) do things that are newsworthy (whether good or bad). Sometimes non-powerful people do things that are newsworthy (whether good or bad).

In principle, at least, the press writ large isn't supposed to be grinding axes for its own agenda. That's not to say that some segments of the press should be - I.F. Stone, for example, used to do a fair amount of investigative journalism and was very good at it, and he had a very definite point of view. Dan Rather used to fancy himself an heir to that sort of approach, though he wasn't as careful as Stone was.

Is the question any clearer, now? Isn't the power...the inclination to investigate....go whereever the circumstances lead....and report, no matter who in power has his toes stepped on...... either in the hands of the journalist, or in the hands of the corporate executive, aligned with the regime?

loquitur · 05-30-2008, 08:10 AM

Roachboy, isn't just an issue of characterization? Cultural milieus can explain a lot. But at some point, following your logic, what you end up with is a variant of "false consciousness" as an explanation for a lot of people's views, and I tend to resist that because it denies agency to individuals while simultaneously recognizing some select priesthood that through some alchemy is able to see through what the rabble can't. It's not Marxian exactly but has a lot of the same overtones.

roachboy · 05-30-2008, 08:25 AM

loquitor: i don't see the leap you make between recognition of systemic problems and the positing of some "priesthood"--i would say that anyone who takes a systematic view of the ways in which opinion is managed in the current media-space will come to similar conclusions. the problem is that folk do not seem to take such a view typically--personally, i think that follows from shortcomings in education--which is geared around structuring the politics of kids toward consent rather than predisposing them to take a critical distance. at stake here really is the question of whether americans have or are a democratic polity--and i am not at all sure they have one or are one. i emphasize the democratic polity because it seems to me that critical distance cannot and should not be a prerogative of some elite--and if it is, then the consequence is that we, collectively, have internalized the worldview particular to this form of soft authoritarian rule.

which i think most have. but that last bit is conjecture. i remain--somehow--vaguely optimistic and hope that i'm wrong. but i don't see it around me--i just hope i'm wrong.

host---the conservative revisions of the history of vietnam, the conservative explanation for the explosion of opposition to the war in vietnam, has little if anything to do with the political conditions that explain it historically. for the right, the problems seem to have been at least 3-fold: the draft, the left, and inadequate control of information. you see the consequences of this today.

cronkite was a talking head who operated as a talking head in a context wherein the power of footage and the illusion of immediacy it provides had not yet been taken into account in the process of building consensus for political actions like a war, and particularly not for building consent for another illegitimate war. getting around this last point can be seen as an explanation for why it is that sad old george bush wanders about these days continuing to try to equate iraq and world war 2--in an adequately uninformed historical view, ww2 is the last war that enjoyed widepsread consensus as to its legitimacy. so the references have (self-evidently) fuck all to do with the iraq debacle and everything to do with conservative mythologies concerning war and how to sell it.

within all this, cronkite is just a functionary who operated in a particular context.

loquitur · 05-30-2008, 08:34 AM

it sort of depends on what results from the critical thinking in your view, doesn't it? A person like me who has concluded that collectivism is generally a bad idea - does that meet the standard you're positing?

I had an interesting insight the other day. I was walking in the alley between the federal and state courthouses in downtown Manhattan, and I passed by the back entrance to the state courthouse. There is a pair of classical-looking statues flanking the entrance, both female. One of them, maybe both, was holding a book, a sword and....... the fasces. I did a double take. But then I remembered the Lincoln Memorial. His seat has fasces, too. The US dime used to have fasces on it, too, starting in 1916 (before Mussolini started using it).

So does that make the courthouse or US coinage or Lincoln fascist? Of course not. It simply means that the symbol of the Roman polity has been used for diverse purposes, which are not necessarily related to each other. Labels are misleading.

roachboy · 05-30-2008, 09:17 AM

not really, loquitor---if you think about what democracy would entail--the polity has to be in a position to make informed judgments. without adequate information, such judgments are impossible--i mean, you can go through the procedures and arrive at a conclusion, but whether that conclusion would be anything other than a kind of agitation of preconceptions or not isn't clear. if we are to talk about ANYTHING to do with a democracy, the question of information and its reliability is central to it. the ability to critically assess information is an assumption. arguments that happen between positions that folk arrive at about that information--and by extension about the situation to which that information refers and what action should or should not be taken--is what deliberation is. and deliberation is the center of the process.

americans like to talk about democracy, which is strange given the extent to which they are willing to allow its main preconditions to slide away. kinda make you wonder what american foreign policy is exporting under the word, doesn't it?

so in a situation where adequate information is at hand and we can assume that something like rational judgments are possible because we know how to fashion them, you and i could debate the meaning of "collectivism" and whether it is or is not a good process.

but even in a tiny space like tfpolitics, there's no particular agreement about what constitutes information and what role it ought to play in debates.

on the other statues---i understand your point, but am unclear about why you make it beyond relaying an anecdote, which is interesting enough in itself, but seems pitched toward being some kind of allegory. are you wanting to talk about the status of the notion of fascism by way of it?

i generally use the term in a kind of technical sense when i use it. i understand that it is also a problematic term in that it's been used and abused alot and so may or may not signify. do you want to go through this again?

here's a parallel little story: plato was an enemy of democracy--he opposed it at every level--the republic is a little allegory written by an opponent of democracy, rooted in the assumption--which i know you share--that there are natural hierarchies which distinguish folk and that democracy--somehow--presupposes that folk are all equal---plato's counter is that hierarchies of ability undercut the idea of equality at the level of form. i don't buy that. but anyway, when folk talk about the republic, they tend not to want so much to talk about "the laws" which comes after the republic and which is a text about authoritarian rule, a society governed by secret committees which meet at night and take decisions with no transparency. i think that the american system has followed plato's trajectory from the republic to the laws, in a general way. as i keep saying, i see the american system as a form of soft authoritarian rule, which has the quirk of a dominant political discourse that throws around the language of democracy. i also see that the american system is doing to the language of democracy what the past 50 years have done to the discourse of fascism--draining it of any meaning, making it a replacement for living under a particular form of political domination. the other quirk is that this soft authortarian rule happens in the context of abundant consumer goods, so you can like your life surrounded by plush things, be powerless and manipulated and not really even notice that you are politically disenfranchised and your formal freedom is no more than that.

if this was not the case, the way in which information is presently manipulated would be unacceptable.
my other little bit of optimism is that once the extent of this manipulation--particularly obvious as it now is in the context of the last 5 odious years--once this becomes obvious, it will also become unacceptable.

we'll see

loquitur · 05-30-2008, 09:48 AM

Actually, if you go through the Federalist Papers you'll see that the US system was set up to deal with the fact that most people aren't especially politically engaged nor especially well-informed. Strictly speaking, it's not a democratic system - it relies on having appointed and/or insulated institutions checking the frequently elected ones. But that's a discussion for another day. I don't think there is any way to force people to pay more attention to the Senate than to NASCAR, nor do I think it desirable to do so, because politics by its nature creates conflict.

Quote:

plato was an enemy of democracy--he opposed it at every level--the republic is a little allegory written by an opponent of democracy, rooted in the assumption--which i know you share--that there are natural hierarchies which distinguish folk and that democracy--somehow--presupposes that folk are all equal---plato's counter is that hierarchies of ability undercut the idea of equality at the level of form.

What on earth led you to think I believe in natural hierarchies? All I have ever said is that different people are good at different things, that their circumstances change over the course of their lives, and that children need not be prisoners of their upbringing. How does that equate to a belief in natural hierarchies? Heck, given that my ancestors were pretty damn downtrodden for centuries, based on who they were, it would be extremely curious for me to have any such view.

roachboy · 05-30-2008, 10:05 AM

loquitor:

interesting relation to politics you have--did i not know better, i'd take you for an anarchist.
i read the federalist papers--they're kinda depressing in their patronising attitude toward the polity.
but my point stands.

as for the natural hierarchy thing--you've defended the position any number of times here, comrade. and it was the hierarchy of abilities--differences arranged as hierarchy. btw--i don't dispute that different folk are good are different things--the trick is in the linkages you make between that and a conception of political order. from what i remember, you argued an aristotelian line on this question.

the question of whether one should be bound by one's class origin is entirely different--a natural hierarchy need not entail it, all the more if you predicate it on a notion of some distribution of abilities. not the same thing, then.

03-31-2008, 07:29 AM	#203 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Host, I arrived at my opinions from doing a lot of reading. I have changed views on a number of issues as a result of new information and real life experience. You need to accept that intelligent well-read people can arrive at conclusions different from yours and still be intelligent well-read people. I tend to have very liberal (in the classic sense) views about most issues, though not all. I also believe in stepping back and taking the long view in assessing events. Finally, I think partisanship is poison. Not only does it interfere with interpersonal relationships, it makes people unscrupulous. It is the mode of thought most conducive to making smart people act stupidly that I have yet to encounter. That's why you have no doubt found that I'm not in a constant state of outrage, and my views generally aren't partisanly predictable. You might want to ask yourself whether you're doing yourself any favors by not stepping back once in a while to ask yourself whether you are really thinking things all the way through. I have found in life that you never know where you might find wisdom, so everyone's views are worth considering and evaluating - some more than others, true - but it's important not to have your filters pre-set to block information that might be a bit uncomfortable. The world doesn't adjust itself to your comfort levels, though you can certainly adjust your information inputs to maximize your own comfort. It's much more useful to step back and ask whether there isn't something you're missing. It also might combat the apparent hubris of the supposition that those who disagree with your views are stupid or brainwashed or indoctrinated. Remember, those who disagree with you could say the same thing about you, it's just an issue of who is doing the brainwashing and with what tools. [The "you" in the preceding few sentences is a generic "you," not a reference necessarily to you, host.] See, to me one expansionist totalitarian mass murdering ideology isn't all that different from another, no matter what platitudes the dictator invoked to justify his bloodlust. If you think Stalin and Hitler aren't roughly mirror images of each other, I do'nt know what to tell you. Last edited by loquitur; 03-31-2008 at 07:57 AM.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

03-31-2008, 08:34 AM	#204 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, comrade, if you want to put that last bit of yours into something like perspective, you might take a look at actually existing capitalism and its glorious history and start thinking in terms of the destruction that particular expansionist mass-murdering ideology has wrought as well--after all, unless you are totally disengenuous about it, you have to factor in the entire history if colonialism from the 19th century, the development of modern warfare, world war i directly--it ain't pretty. it is ludicrous to defend a liberal ideological position of capitalism as if it is somehow benign and only the ideologies that you designate as problematic are to blame for untoward human suffering. but i suppose there's suffering and then there's suffering. you know, the suffering that happens as a result of an economic ideology you endorse is less real than is the suffering engendered by political ideologies you do not. i understand, comrade: multiple weights, multiple measures. to head off the obvious snippy response--it is not interesting to play the relative barbarism game. this is only to say that you do not speak from a clean position yourself. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-31-2008, 08:55 AM	#206 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	that really isn't a definition of capitalism--that's an aesthetic predisposition. i'm way too much of a historian to find that adequate. to wax marxian for a minute (and to show just how far apart we probably are aesthetically)--capitalism refers to the entire mode of production shaped by the particular relations of ownership to wage labor and the internal organizational tendencies toward standardization and fragmentation. ideology is but a part of this picture. liberal ideology is an even smaller part. nothing's at stake in this sort of debate, really, so we have the option of whether we choose to talk past each other or not--at least as time goes on i'm getting a better idea of why we have talked past each other in the past, though--which is interesting in itself...just saying (and there's not sarcasm in that..sometimes i wonder if everything i write comes off so) __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-31-2008, 12:37 PM	#211 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	loquitor: assuming that one accepts the distinction you make between the features of "classical liberalism" and the actually existing capitalist mode of production that it does and does not speak about. if i may, host-- there's a way in which you can link the stuff about goebbels to the problems that fascism created for american-style nationalist ideology by way of the (simple historical reality) of operation paperclip--you know, the americans controlled the master list of all german pows after ww2 and used this bureaucratic advantage to shelter a large number of german war criminals from prosecution--but most of this followed from a sense of wanting war reparations rather than from any elective affinity--and from a sense of wanting to get stuff like german intel about the soviets, as the cold war was already taking shape (war economies need war like a junky needs heroin, dontcha know)....but that is and is not a direct connection. and making it is problematic--there's some radio guy who i think is an old trotskyite who tries this one a routine basis--and it's a shame because he digs up alot of good information and then smashes it all down with simplistic interpretations. the other problem--fascism as radicalized nationalism as ideological problem for the americans--you can kinda see playing out in more diffuse ways in the post-war period: one vector is visible via local german elections directly after the war, during which american occupation forces were willing t prevent kpd party members from winning elections by rigging them and/or allowing former nazis to stand...another via the erasure of the content of fascist ideology from the popular historical imagination concerning world war 2 by way of the blizzard to stupid war films that make nazis into a collection of fashion quirks, funny accents and the capacity to die in great anonymous number at the hands of the grizzled gi....and in the erasure of the magnitude of pre-war support for fascism amongst americans--but that's hard to say much about empirically (like in terms of numbers)... i think that there is a problem---> fascism is primarily radicalized nationalism----both are a type of collective mental disorder orchestrated via ideology. i don't imagine that a classic liberal would venture to speak to that, as notions of "individual freedom/liberty" are wholly abstract, not tied to anything at all, anywhere at all, just as "classical liberalism" has nothing to say about anyplace at all. so it seems to be applicable everywhere, should the motivation to apply it happen to take shape--such is the temptation of any metaphysics. but that said, i kinda understand why loquitor would be perplexed--you keep skipping the middle steps of your arguments, comrade. someone reading your posts in the last section of this thread who is inclined to can insert those middle steps--but they aren't in the posts--and (for example) my attempt to fill them in creates problems because i don't have exactly the same linkages that you have in mind. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 03-31-2008 at 12:39 PM..

03-31-2008, 01:01 PM	#213 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	uh---you know, loquitor, not only is that statement arbitrary, but it's not even any fun to think about. there are social and economic classes. your liberty-carrying economic order produces and reproduces a brutally stratified class system. it has been like this for 150 years--blah blah blah liberty while in the real world, there's only liberty for a few and the rest are just debris--extra people--but hierarchy is "natural"---so in the end, who gives a shit. and so long as there is liberty for a few, there will always be an even smaller set willing to defend that liberty-for-some and to repeat in that defense the wholesale erasure of the social reality that ideology has wrought. so you think about "liberty" for a few and i'll think about what capitalism does as a social formation: you can have fun, i'll do what i do and there we have it. i'm not even going to get started on the characterization of socialism. it's a waste of my time. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-30-2008, 06:17 PM	#201 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	why is it that you think you have political opinions and I have political prejudices, host?

03-31-2008, 08:40 AM	#205 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Depends how you define capitalism, my friend. Doesn't it? My thesis simply is that the instinctual response to most issues should be toward liberty (personal and economic), with restrictions being imposed only after serious examination. Glorification of the state/party/race/bureaucracy instead of safeguarding rights of individuals has not tended to have a happy ending. Right?

03-31-2008, 10:49 AM	#208 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Host, I know it's important to vent sometimes, but that last post is so irrelevant to what we were discussing that I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what my last post has to do with it. You're making some kind of connection in your mind that is not readily apparent. I think you are starting from a logical presumption that is just not accurate and certainly not shared with me.

03-31-2008, 12:00 PM	#210 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	......and that has to do with my classic liberalism how? My political views have precisely zero to do with the Junkers and even less to do with the kleptocracy that now runs Cuba. Host, you obviously don't understand the difference between Hayek and early 20th century European oligarchy, and until you do, your posts will continue to massively miss the point. You are assuming that you can just lump all ideas different from yours into one mass, and that's just not the case. You assume an awful lot, which is why I'm scratching my head on what you write because it has pretty close to zero to do with me. Please get it through your head that classical liberals like me are much further away politically from the authoritarians you claim to hate than you are.

03-31-2008, 12:49 PM	#212 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Sure, and socialism necessarily restricts liberty everywhere it's been tried. You might LIKE the restrictions, but that is a different question. Just beware of empowering the govt too much because one day the people in charge might not be the ones you like. You might be happy giving FDR a lot of power, but if you do that you end up with GWB.

03-31-2008, 01:16 PM	#214 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	c'mon roachboy, that's not even remotely accurate. the amount of social mobility people achieve even within their own lifetimes is astounding in this country, and virtually unique. The notion of lumping this system where people can start over as many times as they want, with a system of hereditary nobility is batty. Just as an example: my grandfather arrived in this country in 1914 with zero to his name. He worked in a sweatshop for a few years and eventually found a location where he could open up a store, and did. That little store supported his family and, after he died and my father took it over, my family. It put their three kids through school. And this story of coming up into the middle class is not even remotely unique: as you know, millions of people are clamoring to get into this country - not, I will note, into places like Cuba and Venezuela. There's a good reason why: they have the liberty to make their own fortune here, more than in most other places. Only someone complacent from prosperity and with the luxury to contemplate injustices (real or imagined) could come up with the sort of stuff you guys are coming up with.

03-31-2008, 01:29 PM	#215 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i don't know how much further there is to go on this one, comrade. i am not feeling inclined to fight through the dissociative twaddle of that last post--the anecdote about your grandfather aside, of course. i have some anecdotes about my grandfather somewhere too... but i did enjoy the final rhetorical flourish--if i were more one with das volk, i'd think as you do. funny stuff. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-31-2008, 01:35 PM	#216 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	My mother in law started working at 18, no college degree, for a large corporation as a secretary. My father in law did have a college degree from a 'lower level' college, and worked for a major corporation followed by only barely solvent small personal businesses. They lived simply, saved money, never went out of their means, and I have recently discovered they are in fact multi-millionaires. They are the quintessential millionaire next door. Perhaps they needed to read more books by unsuccessful men on how they were brutally stratified, unable to succeed, and held down by the system, but instead they worked hard, invested wisely, saved their pennies, and now are set to live a very nice long wealthy retirement. Needless to say I turn to my father in law for investment advice. I really wish I knew what Amerika some people here live in, because I've never seen it. Perhaps my father was right when he told me the problem with people who read all the time is they never do anything. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

03-31-2008, 01:46 PM	#217 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	I see, so if your in-laws can do it anyone can: the quintessential American fallacy. "If you work hard, you'll be a millionaire". Hehe....

03-31-2008, 02:01 PM	#219 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	that's fascinating ustwo. more anecdotes. how nice. the world must be exactly that way. your anecdotes give you access to all of reality--the consequences of structural adjustment programs in the southern hemisphere, the consequences of the american war economy, the consequences of the radically uneven distribution of educational resources across the board in the united states, the consequences of all aspects of the current economic rationality in all sphere of social being--clearly all facets of the american system of socio-economic class stratification and reproduction are all jammed in to your anecdotes. clearly those people are EveryPerson, and your anecdotes Edifying Tales that all of us should contemplate and learn from. from your olympian vantagepoint, armed with Telling Anecdotes and Important Analytic Major Premises on the order of "i dont like taxes" and Vastly Informed Minor Premises like "it does not matter what socialism actually is i hate it anyway", no phenomenon on earth---no matter how small---can escape you. ever. and from such olympian heights, what good are mere books, what value has mere information, mere data, when you commune with the Nature of Things Immanently--why you do not need to even expend the energy to open your eyes----without even opening your eyes, you can peer directly into the bodies of human beings and see that genetics determines the outcomes of behaviors, you can look around and see that any social hierarchy that enables you to imagine yourself atop it must necessarily be without ANY problems because, hey, you're atop it and that is as it should be and so all is necessarily right with the world. through you Science and Reason obviously speak. but it must be a mixed blessing to have such awesome powers that you know so much about the world without bothering to acquire any actual information about it. but i for one am every bit as grateful as you imagine me to be that you take time out from your vastly burdened internal world to interact with mere mortals like myself who have to struggle through the odious process of assembling an understanding of the world by way of information, who are not graced with the Powerful Insight that you are that makes Understanding of the World something that requires no information. and you have demonstrated the validity of your position with such persuasive power, and the extraneousness of information to your arguments at the same time, that i simply bow in your general direction. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-31-2008, 02:13 PM	#220 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Yep, the complacency and luxury of having one's most basic needs satisfied sure does lead to some amazing narcissistic convolutions. When the immigrant flows start heading out of the US and toward one of the workers' paradises, come back and we'll talk. Until then, I'm pretty confident my anecdotes can be aggregated into statistics quite nicely.

03-31-2008, 02:25 PM	#222 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Actually, I'd agree on #3, not on the others, and I'd add "insight" - seeing something other people don't see - as well as hard work. Family money can help but is hardly indispensable. Ruthlessness is a short term strategy at best. Will, I bet you had some good insights. Right? And some lucky breaks that let you act on them the way you wanted, I bet. None of this has anything to do with fascism, though.

03-31-2008, 02:48 PM	#223 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	You wouldn't include insight as intelligence? But seriously, the family thing is really where the easy millions are.

03-31-2008, 05:11 PM	#224 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	it's a subset, a very specific kind. There are lots of brilliant people who wouldn't have the particular type of insight we're talking about.

03-31-2008, 06:05 PM	#226 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Host, if you operate in an industry where you deal with other people, as a general rule you need reasonable relations in order to do business. People will get burned and then refuse to deal with you unless they have no choice. That's why ruthlessness only works short term in most instances. Of course, "ruthlessness" is open to interpretation.

04-01-2008, 10:34 AM	#228 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	circular reasoning.

05-30-2008, 06:45 AM	#230 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	long ago and seeingly far away there was an e-list called red rock eater that i subscribed to--the guy who ran it was consistently interesting (i can't remember his name) and was the first person i know of to note the centrality of projection to the conservative ideological worldview--in this case, the myth of the "liberal media" is a screen the primary function of which has nothing to do with an accurate description of the current media environment and everything to do with situating the conservative-specific blurring of ideological statements and information about the world in their own media apparatus as a corrective to perceived "bais" from without. the effects of this projection are obvious. this information about explicit directives coming from "above" that infotainment about the iraq debacle be shaped to accord with the pronouncements of the bush people is different--this is collusion of a different order and poses a quite fundamental problem concerning the nature of the american "free press"--and since the press is the principal relay of the information required for the functioning of the american "democratic" polity, of the political system more generally. what is obvious: we are living in an ideological context that is not terribly different from the relation of the french communist party and the confederation generale du travail (pcf-cgt) of the 1950s, in which formally independent organizations tightly co-ordinated the nature and release timing of information in order to co-ordinate opinion in order to either enable or block actions, shape dispositions--to organize consent. in that case, the "transmission belt" functioned in a larger, pluralist context, so in principle was an open space in the sense that folk could, if they chose, move into and out of that informational universe--but the fact is that this system was largely self-enclosed and self-enclosing. in the states, what it looks like is a pattern of co-ordination has been set up that operates on a much larger scale and effects the central elements within the media system or apparatus itself. this explains alot. what it explains is really not good--the centrality of denial in american political life, the inability to adapt to change, the inability to think strategically because the information required to do so simply is not present--information is conditioned by the desire of the dominant social class to remain dominant--and so is ideological in the classic marxist sense of the term. you also can read off an interesting indication of the relative weight of types of media in shaping the information processing of alot of the population--information hierarchies if you like--it seems that television, despite every fucking thing about it--is seen as providing a more "direct" access to "the world" presumably because of the role played by action footage, which provides an illusion of unmediated access to real-time or close-to-real-time phenomena or events. but anyone who has thought about it at all knows that television is a talk medium more than it is a visual medium--but the relation which i think obtains for alot of folk is inverted. print media in paper form seems to carry more weight than information available in electronic form--so it follows that the relative openness of the information context available on the web is not of the same status as the more self-enclosed media environments of television infotainment supplemented with slightly more depth-oriented glosses provided by newspapers. wedged in there somewhere is the natterings of the chattering classes, who provide simplistic and therapeutic mobile narratives for the unsettling aspects of live footage that escapes the confines of the immediate voice-overs provided by the manicured actors who read teleprompters but who are confused with Authorities or Information Sources. whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives. that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-30-2008, 07:50 AM	#233 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	folk seem to have been persuaded that "control" is to be understood as a matter of whether the state is explicitly involved or not--so control is a function of direct state involvement. in a "free" context, dominated by private interests, the "logic" goes, there cannot be domination. so folk treat information either as given, in which case problems of co-ordination disappear, or as entirely suspect, in which case they can simply fall back on a priori attitudes and "feelings" as if they occupied the same space in a political deliberation and positions informed by data concerning the world. personally, i don't think walter cronkite represents much of anything. i think that the problems of ideological co-ordination in the context of mass media did not just start--try to imagine fascism in the 20s and 30s without radio as a political co-ordination device. you can't do it. this is not new. this is a structural problem. one of the reason that the transmission belt relation occurred to me as an analogy is that there is a variability in the connectedness between formally independent organizations implied by it--sometimes seeming more loose, other times tighter--so the problem is not periods of relative looseness (vietnam, say, at the level of network coverage of the war) but the relation itself, the whole transmission belt arrangement. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-30-2008, 08:10 AM	#235 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	Roachboy, isn't just an issue of characterization? Cultural milieus can explain a lot. But at some point, following your logic, what you end up with is a variant of "false consciousness" as an explanation for a lot of people's views, and I tend to resist that because it denies agency to individuals while simultaneously recognizing some select priesthood that through some alchemy is able to see through what the rabble can't. It's not Marxian exactly but has a lot of the same overtones.

05-30-2008, 08:25 AM	#236 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	loquitor: i don't see the leap you make between recognition of systemic problems and the positing of some "priesthood"--i would say that anyone who takes a systematic view of the ways in which opinion is managed in the current media-space will come to similar conclusions. the problem is that folk do not seem to take such a view typically--personally, i think that follows from shortcomings in education--which is geared around structuring the politics of kids toward consent rather than predisposing them to take a critical distance. at stake here really is the question of whether americans have or are a democratic polity--and i am not at all sure they have one or are one. i emphasize the democratic polity because it seems to me that critical distance cannot and should not be a prerogative of some elite--and if it is, then the consequence is that we, collectively, have internalized the worldview particular to this form of soft authoritarian rule. which i think most have. but that last bit is conjecture. i remain--somehow--vaguely optimistic and hope that i'm wrong. but i don't see it around me--i just hope i'm wrong. host---the conservative revisions of the history of vietnam, the conservative explanation for the explosion of opposition to the war in vietnam, has little if anything to do with the political conditions that explain it historically. for the right, the problems seem to have been at least 3-fold: the draft, the left, and inadequate control of information. you see the consequences of this today. cronkite was a talking head who operated as a talking head in a context wherein the power of footage and the illusion of immediacy it provides had not yet been taken into account in the process of building consensus for political actions like a war, and particularly not for building consent for another illegitimate war. getting around this last point can be seen as an explanation for why it is that sad old george bush wanders about these days continuing to try to equate iraq and world war 2--in an adequately uninformed historical view, ww2 is the last war that enjoyed widepsread consensus as to its legitimacy. so the references have (self-evidently) fuck all to do with the iraq debacle and everything to do with conservative mythologies concerning war and how to sell it. within all this, cronkite is just a functionary who operated in a particular context. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-30-2008, 08:34 AM	#237 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	it sort of depends on what results from the critical thinking in your view, doesn't it? A person like me who has concluded that collectivism is generally a bad idea - does that meet the standard you're positing? I had an interesting insight the other day. I was walking in the alley between the federal and state courthouses in downtown Manhattan, and I passed by the back entrance to the state courthouse. There is a pair of classical-looking statues flanking the entrance, both female. One of them, maybe both, was holding a book, a sword and....... the fasces. I did a double take. But then I remembered the Lincoln Memorial. His seat has fasces, too. The US dime used to have fasces on it, too, starting in 1916 (before Mussolini started using it). So does that make the courthouse or US coinage or Lincoln fascist? Of course not. It simply means that the symbol of the Roman polity has been used for diverse purposes, which are not necessarily related to each other. Labels are misleading. Last edited by loquitur; 05-30-2008 at 08:41 AM..

05-30-2008, 09:17 AM	#238 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	not really, loquitor---if you think about what democracy would entail--the polity has to be in a position to make informed judgments. without adequate information, such judgments are impossible--i mean, you can go through the procedures and arrive at a conclusion, but whether that conclusion would be anything other than a kind of agitation of preconceptions or not isn't clear. if we are to talk about ANYTHING to do with a democracy, the question of information and its reliability is central to it. the ability to critically assess information is an assumption. arguments that happen between positions that folk arrive at about that information--and by extension about the situation to which that information refers and what action should or should not be taken--is what deliberation is. and deliberation is the center of the process. americans like to talk about democracy, which is strange given the extent to which they are willing to allow its main preconditions to slide away. kinda make you wonder what american foreign policy is exporting under the word, doesn't it? so in a situation where adequate information is at hand and we can assume that something like rational judgments are possible because we know how to fashion them, you and i could debate the meaning of "collectivism" and whether it is or is not a good process. but even in a tiny space like tfpolitics, there's no particular agreement about what constitutes information and what role it ought to play in debates. on the other statues---i understand your point, but am unclear about why you make it beyond relaying an anecdote, which is interesting enough in itself, but seems pitched toward being some kind of allegory. are you wanting to talk about the status of the notion of fascism by way of it? i generally use the term in a kind of technical sense when i use it. i understand that it is also a problematic term in that it's been used and abused alot and so may or may not signify. do you want to go through this again? here's a parallel little story: plato was an enemy of democracy--he opposed it at every level--the republic is a little allegory written by an opponent of democracy, rooted in the assumption--which i know you share--that there are natural hierarchies which distinguish folk and that democracy--somehow--presupposes that folk are all equal---plato's counter is that hierarchies of ability undercut the idea of equality at the level of form. i don't buy that. but anyway, when folk talk about the republic, they tend not to want so much to talk about "the laws" which comes after the republic and which is a text about authoritarian rule, a society governed by secret committees which meet at night and take decisions with no transparency. i think that the american system has followed plato's trajectory from the republic to the laws, in a general way. as i keep saying, i see the american system as a form of soft authoritarian rule, which has the quirk of a dominant political discourse that throws around the language of democracy. i also see that the american system is doing to the language of democracy what the past 50 years have done to the discourse of fascism--draining it of any meaning, making it a replacement for living under a particular form of political domination. the other quirk is that this soft authortarian rule happens in the context of abundant consumer goods, so you can like your life surrounded by plush things, be powerless and manipulated and not really even notice that you are politically disenfranchised and your formal freedom is no more than that. if this was not the case, the way in which information is presently manipulated would be unacceptable. my other little bit of optimism is that once the extent of this manipulation--particularly obvious as it now is in the context of the last 5 odious years--once this becomes obvious, it will also become unacceptable. we'll see __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-30-2008, 10:05 AM	#240 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	loquitor: interesting relation to politics you have--did i not know better, i'd take you for an anarchist. i read the federalist papers--they're kinda depressing in their patronising attitude toward the polity. but my point stands. as for the natural hierarchy thing--you've defended the position any number of times here, comrade. and it was the hierarchy of abilities--differences arranged as hierarchy. btw--i don't dispute that different folk are good are different things--the trick is in the linkages you make between that and a conception of political order. from what i remember, you argued an aristotelian line on this question. the question of whether one should be bound by one's class origin is entirely different--a natural hierarchy need not entail it, all the more if you predicate it on a notion of some distribution of abilities. not the same thing, then. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite