How Americans make Iran into a BS problem

Problems come in two types: real and BS. Your kid snorting cocaine, that’s a real problem.

Unless she’s living in your house, having a mother-in-law is not a real problem: it’s a BS problem.

BS problems can infect entire nations, because they roam wider than herpes. Take illegal immigration. Perfectly natural: we’ve got work for people, Mexicans come over to do it, Americans pay them for it: no problem. However, some Americans don’t like those Mexicans and some politicians want the votes of those Americans, so they make illegal immigration a BS problem. You want a real problem? One out of four kids don’t finish high school. Solving that would be change I can believe in.

Internationally, real and BS problems contend like Tokyo and Godzilla, too. Real: Americans die every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Ask any politician this Tuesday, and they’ll give you a reason. Ask them next Tuesday, you’ll get a different reason. Whatever: the American penchant for sticking our nose in other people’s business is a hellhole of hubris that makes a Greek tragedy look like a sitcom. Removing our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan so they don’t die there like lab rats would be a change I can believe in, Mr. Babyface Barack.

Now for some BS: Iran. The problem? Iran is supposedly thinking of making supposed nuclear bombs. It’s no problem that America, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, India, China and Pakistan actually HAVE the bomb, it’s only a problem that Iran MAY get it. Talk about the pot calling the kettle a 100% saturated black.

What would be the problem if Iran had the bomb? Israel would squeal like an insurance company faced with a major surgery claim. Big deal. Israel actually has from 200 to 400 nuclear bombs, but we don’t seem to mind, even given their record of bombing everyone around them. Iran has a record of not bombing anyone around them for thousands of years, except once when Saddam Hussein attacked them. Israel having the bomb is way scarier than Iran getting it.

But isn’t Iran a dangerous theocracy that funds the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah? Depends on your point of view. In the case of Hezbollah, Iran is funding their Shia buddies in Lebanon where the Shias have always been treated like second-class citizens, and Hezbollah is the mainstay of charities and education for the Lebanese Shias.

In the case of Hamas, it’s basically a game of tit for tat. The US supplies Israel with weaponry and money to the tune of $3 billion a year, and Iran supplies Hamas with funds. Israel uses our money and weapons to bomb the Palestinians, and Hamas uses funding from Iran to fight back. What’s the difference? The US and Iran are doing exactly the same thing. Given the fact that Israel kills from four to ten Palestinians for every one Israeli the Palestinians kill, the US is helping Israel do a four to ten times better military job than Iran does for Hamas — and a moral job worse than Iran by four to ten times.

Why might Iran WANT the bomb? Well, some damn foreigner invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of Iran, killing and maiming people for nine years now. You’d have to be Amish not to look into a deterrent.

Iran isn’t the problem, stupid. We are. Because like illegal immigration and your mother-in-law, we make Iran our BS problem. Focusing on real problems, now that would be a change I can believe in, Babyface Barack.

by Evert Cilliers

3quarksdaily.

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What Matters

Walter Benn Michaels Reviewing Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson

In the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, announced that, having ‘achieved its goals’, Love Makes a Family would be ceasing operations at the end of this year, and that she would be stepping down to spend more time with her wife, Charlotte. Our ‘core purpose’, she said, has been ‘accomplished’.

It’s possible of course that this declaration of mission accomplished will prove to be as ill-advised as some others have been in the last decade. Gay marriage is legal in Connecticut, where Love Makes a Family is based, but it’s certainly not legal everywhere in the US. No one, however, would deny that the fight for gay rights has made extraordinary strides in the 40 years since Stonewall. And progress in combating homophobia has been accompanied by comparable progress in combating racism and sexism. Although the occasional claim that the election of President Obama has ushered us into a post-racial society is obviously wrong, it’s fairly clear that the country that’s just elected a black president (and that produced so many votes for the presidential candidacy of a woman) is a lot less racist and sexist than it used to be.

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

More: via LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters.

The Town Hall Mob

Required reading, perhaps, for those who think that ‘ideology’  is a superfluous concept – an example of an intelligent liberal getting it right. Credit where it’s due…

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting (here it is, above -CH). The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s “billion” — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.

But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

Op-Ed Columnist – The Town Hall Mob – NYTimes.com.

I took this photograph of the elegant Hancock Building  a couple of years ago. I was attracted by the way the building seemed to merge with the sky, earth and buildings around it.

America’s Unserious Right

“Republican leadership calls for Obama to condemn Iran’s election results and speak out for the demonstrators shows no knowledge of Iran whatsoever. If he did so, America would become the issue in Iran, not Ahmadinejad, and we would become the excuse and justification for spilling Iranian blood. These sniping remarks by Republican leaders also shows they put pandering to their right wing above American national security. Why can’t they listen to their own real foreign policy expert — Senator Richard Lugar — and see and say that the U.S. must exercise restraint in our public statements for Iran’s sake and our own,” – Les Gelb.

We’ve known for some time that the United States cannot afford the current Republican leadership to be in charge of foreign policy. They have neither the understanding, judgement or temperament to do so. They veer from hoping Ahmadinejad to win all the way to wanting to stand up and get the president cheering for one faction in an extremely tense and difficult situation. Just thank your stars we do not have McCain or Palin grandstanding this in the White House right now. Or Cantor’s AIPAC-dictated cant in the House.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

Long Sunday: The Discomfort of the Establishment

I cite: Long Sunday: The Discomfort of the Establishment.