You Don't Know Jack

Jack Layton came to Kingston the other day, and I had the good luck to catch him as he swung by Queen's University. Supporting the Harper government has been a pretty controversial move on the NDP's part, and the crowd made sure Jack registered its disapproval, with a friend of mine even asking why he was helping to continue Stephen Harper's "reign of terror." Honestly, I think it's a pragmatic move. The NDP has fallen pretty low in the polls lately, with a mere 12% approval rating, so an election probably wouldn't help them at this point. I also believe the party is sincerely focused on expanding Employment Insurance. Besides, if you're a party that has never formed a government in the history of Canadian federal politics, there's no need to force an election merely on the desire to see your party back in power (Iggy, I'm looking at you).

As a politician, Jack seems very much a man of the people, even coming out to the Grad Club for a few post-speech beers. Certainly to a greater extent than the more "bourgeois" parties, the NDP represents working-class Canadians and activists motivated by social justice issues. But at the same time, the party has come a long way from its more socialist roots with the CCF. During question period, I asked Jack whether he would consider incorporating a more explicitly anti-capitalist message in the party's platform, given the enormity of the global financial crisis. Since the Conservatives and Liberals will label the NDP "socialists" whenever the party gets on their bad side, I reasoned that they should embrace both the word and the ideology, in the same way that rappers reclaimed the N-word and made it a positive thing.

In his answer, Jack said the party was open to new and radical ideas, and made reference to their past support for the nationalization of Hydro Quebec and the party's efforts to promote a massive green jobs campaign. I was satisfied with the answer, since Jack is obviously constrained by political reality from saying anything too obviously threatening to the status quo, and the programs he mentioned were exactly what comes to my mind when I imagine what a democratic socialist government could do for Canada. At the same time, the NDP's reluctance to advance a straightforward critique of capitalism bear witness to how far the party has come from Tommy Douglas and the CCF. The Regina Manifesto of 1933 bluntly stated that "No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation [a] full programme of socialized planning."

Given the obvious failures of a command economy as practiced in the former Soviet Union, these sentiments may seem overly simplistic and ideological to modern ears...but is it any more ideological than the "free market" fundamentalists in the United States urging more deregulation as the solution to every problem, where everything can be solved by the magic of the market? It's like this: if you were to ask me whether I'm a capitalist or a socialist, my answer would be socialist for the simple fact that I consider the progression of society a more important value than the accumulation of my own personal capital. The NDP should embrace the "socialist" moniker because socialism envisions a more just society than that of a callous laissez-faire capitalism. While the party advances sensible policies that embody socialist values, it should not be afraid to make its bold opposition to the status quo known. After all, should the party continue in the opposite direction - forever watering down its policies, becoming the "Democratic Party", moving rightward until it is indistinguishable from the Liberals or even the American Democratic Party - then the purpose of the NDP ceases to exist. The party is a vehicle for the impassioned Canadian Left, and the magnitude of the current crisis should make it more open to radically different ideas.

I understand concerns about "electability", but honestly, there's nothing that would rouse my political passions more than a party that pledged to make radical changes in the fight for a more egalitarian society. The cautious pragmatism of the current NDP stands in sharp contrast with the more radical socialism of workers in the 1930s, and this is a pattern I've seen in many countries. After 30 years of neoliberal indoctrination, we seem to have accepted the omnipresence of the capitalist mode of production as a historical inevitability, and lost our agitation for more radical change. Call such an approach "old-fashioned" if you must, but you have to compare the huge gains made by the more radicalized Left in the 1930s to the incremental progress made today, where those of us concerned with social justice often content ourselves with writing stuff on the internet (guilty as charged). If there's one thing I've learned from the American health care debate, it's that passion and emotion, no matter how misdirected, can still be a powerful force in political discourse. If we could just turn out with the same force as the teabaggers, but with facts and history on our side...we might be unstoppable.

Country Boys

Am I the only one who saw some racist undertones in criticism of the Kanye West/Taylor Swift thing? I'm not trying to defend what Kanye did - it was pretty stupid and ill-considered - but the discussion of it on Hannity veered a little into good ol' boy territory when John Rich suggested Kanye was "lucky there weren't any country boys in the audience." Although Mickey Rourke sounded pretty reasonable, the ensuing discussion of a "19-year-old girl" - who, Rich added as if to further underline her purity, was clad in a WHITE dress - being victimized by a black man, seemed, given the venue, to be a bit of a throwback to Jim Crow-era proclamations of the need to "protect" white women from threatening black men...especially with the ominous reference to "country boys" waiting in the wings to deal with him physically if need be. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this. The American cable news cycle is so dominated these days by back-and-forth accusations of racism, I might just be imagining it. But it does seem a little peculiar that the outbursts of Kanye West and Serena Williams produced such widespread condemnation compared to that of Rep. Joe Wilson, who created a profitable career for himself as a right-wing folk hero after his own outburst towards the president.

Also, it's genuinely sad to see a musician like Rich, who penned perhaps the first great protest song of this Great Recession, align himself with the reactionary likes of Sean Hannity and the teabagging crowd. "Shuttin' Detroit Down" was a powerful anthem with lyrics that spoke directly to the pain of working class people being crushed by large, impersonal economic forces and mocked by the boundless greed of Wall Street tycoons still getting record bonuses. To see him help misdirect their anger at phantom enemies projected by the right-wing noise machine - ACORN, the poor, immigrants, minorities - is a vivid example of either cynical indifference to the real source of economic pain in America, or just the tragic self-deception inherent to right-wing populism.

Health Care, American Racism and the Manchurian Candidate

And now, for a long overdue post. I've neglected this blog somewhat since I got a data management job in June working for the Ontario provincial government. It was a great seven weeks, and only reinforced my respect for the public sector. But don't think for a moment that I was so busy with that job that I neglected to follow the news. On the contrary, if anything, the fact that I was following the news so closely contributed to the absence of a new post for a couple of months.

Specifically, I'm speaking about the Obama administration's purported efforts to reform American health care. This is one of those subjects that, as a Canadian basking in the warm glow of a single-payer system, probably shouldn't concern me. But given the subject's dominance of the cable news cycle and the blogosphere, it's been impossible to avoid. And if I'm interested in American politics partially because it's so much more out there than Canadian politics, then this summer has been a stark lesson in both the ironclad grip of corporate lobbyists over the political process south of the border, and the maddening gullibility and stupidity of a large portion of that country's white working class.

Although I wasn't alive in 1967 to experience the Summer of Love, I've now had the misfortune to bear witness to 2009 devolving into the Summer of Hate. When the teabaggers and right-wing extremists first burst onto the national consciousness at the town hall debates, the sheer madness and idiocy of what they were saying stunned me into silence. Never before in my life had I seen so much misdirected anger as when these sad rubes let loose their redfaced rage at the prospect of receiving HEALTH CARE. Bush's wars of aggression, shredding of the Constitution and civil liberties, disregard for looming ecological catastrophe and undeclared class war against poor and working-class Americans all passed them by, but Fox News and hate radio have given them their marching orders: all the accumulated disasters facing the country as a result of eight years of Republican mismanagement (and, more to the point, 30 years of neoliberal economic dogma) have now been placed solely at the feet of one Barack Hussein Obama. Sadly, the town hall rubes are more than racist enough to fully embrace this logic.

Let's not kid ourselves: a good deal of the fears generated among misinformed white working class Americans by the right wing noise machine are based primarily on race. Tim Wise summed up best the reasons for their ludicrous belief that Obama, as total a Wall Street whore as has ever occupied the Oval Office, whose entire health care "plan" is based around salvaging the existing private insurance system, is secretly attempting to impose communism on America:

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing--his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites--which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below--Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.

Of course, Obama has made it much harder for progressives to defend him, given his propensity for spitting in the face of his most loyal supporters. His health care bill is to the health insurance industry what TARP was to Wall Street - a government bailout in which taxpayers subsidize private industry. The great Matt Taibbi explained in his recent Rolling Stone article on health care why the bill that ultimately emerges may actually be worse than no bill at all, since it essentially forces the population to buy a defective product. This is classic Obama - he has always offered pretty words while his actual policies have constituted the grossest kind of corporate welfare.

Nevertheless, the sheer level of venom directed at him by the extreme right is profoundly depressing because it fails to address any substantial, real problems with the bill. Rather, the lies, distortions and exaggerations peddled nonstop by Republican politicians and the right wing hate machine have raised ridiculous fears of "death panels" and pulling the plug on grandma. It's just really, really sad to see people again loudly protesting against their own best interests, because if they should be protesting anything, it's that the Obama plans don't go nearly far enough towards universal health care. But that would require a knowledgable, informed citizenry - impossible in the modern United States given the predominance of corporate disinformation campaigns that pass as "news".

I want to end this somewhat disjointed post by referring to two vastly different books I recently read as part of my ongoing attempt to understand conservative redneck culture, to figure out once and for all why these people consistently vote against their own best interests. The first book is a truly worthwhile read by Winchester, Virginia native Joe Bageant called Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. Bageant is a product of a culture saturated with God and guns, yet through education and 60s-era hippie liberalism managed to emerge a self-proclaimed "godless socialist", earning him mad props from yours truly. His book is a sad indictment of the South in which a toxic combination of religiosity, poor education and an otherwise commendable commitment to "self-reliance" has resulted in a population snugly in the hands of an ingenious Republican public relations machine. Conservatives' success in framing national issues through Southern cultural tropes is truly impressive in its diabolical success, and the only hope for liberals and progressives is to grab the bull by the horns and create new frames by which progressive policies can find a hold in these reactionary strongholds. This will be extraordinarily difficult given the utter corruption (via corporate campaign contributions) of the current Democratic Party.

The second book has value only in that its pages can be burned as a fuel source if necessary. Michael Savage is perhaps the most repugnant talk radio host in America, no easy feat in a field dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I recently perused his book The Savage Nation, and was predictably mortified by its scathing hatred towards Savage's imagined shadowy force of secular, gay-loving, America-hating liberal "Commu-Nazis". Reading this latest version, published in 2002, it was clear that the equation of Obama to Hitler by conservatives is by no means a recent phenomenon. But I gained some insight into the uniquely twisted reasoning of deluded white conservatives towards Obama and his apparently sinister aims. It goes something like this:

Throughout his book, Savage, like many conservative commentators, explicitly equates liberals with socialists, communists, Nazis and terrorists. Despite Obama's excruciatingly middle-of-the-road, mealy-mouthed centrism and fellating of Wall Street and the Washington establishment, right-wing media has successfully mined his record for anything that could conceivably be used to fit him into a convenient "angry black man" stereotype. The widespread coverage of Jeremiah Wright, magnification of Obama's relationship to William Ayers, and subsequent demonizing of Van Jones as a radical communist revolutionary all combined to create a Bizarro world version of Obama specifically designed to stoke fear among backwards conservative voters - a dichotomy best captured in this article by The Onion.

So the longstanding conservative equation of liberals with terrorists, combined with the exotic "otherness" of Obama's personal background (white mother, black Kenyan father) and his suspiciously Muslim-sounding middle name, Hussein, all conspire to create a version of Obama onto which any manner of conservative fears can be projected - socialism, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, you name it. The teabaggers, birthers and deathers all seem to truly believe Obama is some Manchurian candidate who will soon reveal his true nature as a communist/socialist/fascist/Muslim racist. That these ideas often contradict each other is no problem for far-right propagandists and true believers.

The fact that conservatives will demonize Obama no matter what he does makes his willingness to reach out to Republican politicians in a futile effort at "bipartisanship" that much more frustrating. In fact, the Democrats' approach to health care has been so undeniably weak that it's fair game to assume that that was their plan from the beginning. The always-excellent David Michael Green said as much in today's must-read column:

Of course, he's also chosen to put healthcare reform on the table as the signature legislative initiative probably of his entire presidency. That's fine, but watching him in action I sometimes wonder if this clown really and actually wants a second term. I mean, if you had asked me in January, "How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?", I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.

Altogether, it's an astonishingly perfect recipe for getting rolled, so much so that I'm not the first person to have wondered out loud if that was actually the president's intention all along. Look at this freaking fool. Now look at the guy who ran a letter-perfect, disciplined, textbook, insurgent, victorious campaign for the White House. Can they possibly be the same person? And, since they obviously are, is there possibly another explanation for this disaster besides an intentional boot? I dunno. But what I do know is this. Obama's very best-case scenario for healthcare legislation right now represents a ton of lost votes in 2010 and 2012. And the worse that scenario gets, the worse he and his party do. But even a 'success' in the months ahead will produce a tepid bill, a mistrustful public, an inflamed and unanswered radical right, and a mealy-mouthed new government program that doesn't even begin to go online until 2013. A real vote-getter that, eh?

Trust me, if Obama was actually the Islamic Marxist revolutionary racist of Glenn Beck's psychotic delusions, he'd be a lot more effective at actually getting things done.

Fighting Fire With Fire

I'm becoming a big fan of Ed Schultz. As the latest addition to MSNBC's weeknight lineup, he's continuing the network's transition into a liberal mecca (within the confines of corporate cable news, anyway). He first impressed me with his adamant demands for single-payer health care, a topic I thought was strictly out-of-bounds in the world of mainstream American news. Ed apparently has the courage to go where no other TV news personality will. As if to confirm that, yesterday he tore into Dick Cheney with a vengeance. It was pure magic.

You can watch the clip here. Former Cheney aide Ron Christie was on to regurgitate the former VP's standard talking points, but Ed didn't let him get away with it. He constantly reminded him of Cheney's numerous crimes and misdemeanours - you even heard him use the phrase "war crimes" at one point, a stunning admission of the kind you barely ever hear on typically sycophantic American news. It was a startling demonstration of speaking truth to power, supposedly the whole point of the fourth estate, but a quality that very few mainstream journalists ever demonstrate (with many doing the exact opposite, as we've seen in the cases of those reporters urging that we not prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes).

That said, it did occur to me that in some ways, Ed was copying a technique used by the worst, most obnoxious Fox News propagandists, which is dominating the conversation, talking loudly and not letting the other person finish. Usually, I watch that happen with Bill O'Reilly or whoever and it really upsets me, because I'm not there to listen to some blowhard spout his opinion; I want to hear what the guest has to say. When Ed Schultz does the same thing, am I justified in treating him differently, merely because I happen to agree with his opinion? I think I am, and here's why.

The average TV news viewer is probably not that politically savvy. He tends to agree with the newsman, who is apparently on his side. This country ignorance is what allows professional liars like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck to cram right-wing propaganda down the throats of Fox News viewers. Ed Schultz is an avowed, proudly liberal voice on the airwaves. In my experience, liberals and progressives tend to be more interested in hearing other people's opinions, and as a result are more laidback in the interview format, allowing the guest to say whatever he has to say. HOWEVER, in this age of spin doctors and pundits, half the time your guest is some professional hack paid to voice the approved talking points of his masters. Enter Ron Christie.

In cases like these, it's doing a disservice to the viewer to have a guest on and allow him to spew blatant lies without follow-up questions. This tends to be the modus operandi of Fox and CNN, but Ed Schultz clearly has balls. In the kind of media environment we have today, sometimes you need to fight fire with fire, and if Schultz needs to adopt similar tactics to O'Reilly to quash the reactionaries that use the airwaves to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, than I say all power to him.

Blaming the Victim?

Reading Mark Steyn's latest column in the Republican propaganda organ National Review, a few thoughts crossed my mind. The first was fairly standard - that Steyn, a classic right-wing shill with a column in the increasingly unreadable MacLean's, is an idiot. His arguments are always low on facts and heavy on hypocrisy, but that's par for the course when it comes to your average conservative diatribe.

The second thought concerns his whole argument, against government-funded health care. Once you get past the usual fearmongering about a massive "U.S. health bureaucracy", you get one of the more nonsensical statements I've seen lately about the issue:

When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that the current, privatized United States health system costs far more than any of its equivalents in the industrialized world while delivering far less. American health care is completely dominated by insurance companies that make all their profits by denying people coverage. The profit motive is the reason why Americans with health insurance are constantly told they have "pre-existing conditions" not covered by the company. A public health care system would be infinitely superior to a private one for the simple reason that its aim is not to profit at the expense of other peoples' lives; it's aim is to provide health services for the population - taking care of people, helping them when they're sick. As Democratic politicians love to point out (without doing anything about it), health care should be a right, not a privilege. A health care system whose entire motive lies in denying people health care is a sick joke, or at least it should be.

But this brings me to the last thought I had while reading the column, and it addresses a far larger issue. Often, when I talk about American politics with my family, they'll tell me something along the lines of "who cares? That's in America." And in a way, they have a point. I spend hours and hours each day reading about American news, politics, and media. Part of that is because it's just so much more fucked up in general than Canadian politics; it's hard to believe that an entity like the modern Republican party, dominated by wingnuts, Jesus freaks, venture capitalists, torture apologists and chickenhawks, can be one of the two major political parties in what is (for now) the world's lone superpower. It would seem like a perfectly plausible argument for someone to tell me that I shouldn't worry what the right-wing noise machine is saying on any given day. As a Canadian progressive, why the hell should I care what wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest of the Faux News crew have to rant about?

The problem, of course, is that while I don't take these guys seriously - I watch it knowing perfectly well that it's propaganda - many, many people in the United States do. And it's not just rednecks and wealthy conservatives; the mainstream media sees these demogogues as worthy contributers to the national discussion. Arianna Huffington, in her book Right Is Wrong, identified one of the main faults of corporate cable news: they always assume that there are only two sides to every issue, a liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) view, and that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. CNN is the prime culprit here when it comes to television, but it equally applies to establishment rags like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And it's immensely destructive when it comes to an issue where the right/left paradigm does not apply. Take the issue of global warming. Typically, a news segment on the issue might have one person who says global warming is real, and another who says it's a hoax or the science isn't advanced enough for us to know for sure. Since global warming is real, providing such a false balance leaves the viewer disoriented and unsure what the truth really is.

I saw a particularly putrid example of this phenomenon last night on CNN during a discussion about Gitmo detainees. Campbell Brown assured us we would hear from "two very different perspectives", which was fairly spot-on: it featured a face-off between Liz Cheney repeating her father's standard talking points (the detainees were Evil Terrorists, "the worst of the worst", too dangerous to try in American courts for some reason, and repeating the debunked lie that 15% of them had "returned to the battlefield), and Joan Walsh, arguing that Guantanamo only served as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda (sharing the opinions of U.S. military commanders). I have my disagreements with Walsh - she's one of those liberals that sometimes cheers on imperialist war when it's carried out by a Democratic president - but I have to give her props this week, not only for her performance on the side of "truth" on CNN against Liz Cheney, but also for her bravura verbal ass-kicking of Bill O'Reilly on the issue of Dr. Tiller's murder.

Anyway, the problem was that CNN was offering - as Huffington described it - "equal times for lies." You have Liz Cheney lying her ass off, defending torture and extraordinary rendition, Joan Walsh offering a reasonable rebuttal actually based on fact, and then you have Campbell Brown weighing in before the commercial break with a typically CNN sitting-on-the-fence moment: "well, you both have interesting arguments, let's see if afterwards we can come to some kind of agreement." Panels like this make a mockery of the journalistic ideal. Theoretically, a journalist is supposed to sort through facts to arrive at the truth. Brown lets two sides talk - one of which is consciously lying and distorting the truth - and then leaves it to the viewer to decide which side is right, a complete abdication of her supposed responsibility as a journalist.

And this brings us back to the larger issue - the power of the right-wing propaganda machine. As stupid as conservatives are when it comes to actual policy, I'll give them this: they are brilliant when it comes to getting their message out. As George Lakoff summarizes in his book The Political Mind, Republicans have always been masters of framing issues in ways that skew towards their own agenda; hence, Democrats are accused of being "soft on terror" or "weak on national security". And Democrats always buy right into that framing, adopting right-wing policies to prove how "tough" they are and by extension looking all the weaker, as opposed to if they stood up for principle and said they were "strong on liberty" or something like that. In any typical media event, the Right always sets the agenda and the "Left" responds, and in this way, they allow the Right to effectively control the news cycle.

By presenting the lunatic fringe as the Respectable Right (although there's really not much difference these days), the media keeps a seat at the table for the forces of reaction. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this. The conservative movement is insanely well-funded by wealthy patrons. The corporate news media - both its owners and its advertisers - have an interest in presenting the news in a way that does not interfere with their own privileges, and so will always give time to a political movement that stands up for the interests of the American oligarchy. An educated population would be able to see through these lies. But guess what? Most people don't know that much about the news. They form their opinions based on very superficial impressions of what goes on in the world, and in that arena, it's hard to beat the right-wing noise machine.

So the problem is that the disinformation and lies purveyed by Wingnut TV and Hate Radio reach an audience of largely uneducated Americans, which the Right preys upon by exploiting basic fears and prejudices (Immigrants! Gays! Blacks! Evil Muslim Terrorists!), as well as wedge issues like abortion, in order to get them to vote against their own interests. Once in power, the Right leads the forces of imperialism and rapacious capitalism, lowering the standard of living for workers, trashing the environment, and engaging in endless war with a never-ending supply of unfortunate civilians slaughtered by U.S. airstrikes at wedding parties. In short, they're ruining the world for my generation and each one after it.

It's tempting to point the finger at the Wingnut segment of the U.S. population: the dumbass, xenophobic, God-fearing, gay-hating, gun-loving hillbillies who watch Fox News and think that a millionaire blowhard like Bill O'Reilly, a Republican-talking-point robot like Sean Hannity, or a racist, sexist 300-pound Oxycontin addict, with a few failed marriages under his belt, who claims to be the paragon of "moral values", have their best interests at heart. These are the Americans who have barely any concept of the world outside their borders, who have no idea that every country in the developed world besides theirs have some form of universal health care, who think that wanting their country to bomb brown people on the other side of their world somehow makes them "tough"...at some level, you have to blame them for their own stupidity and gullibility. It takes all sorts to make up a society, and you will always have those undereducated buffoons who ascribe to what Matt Taibbi referred to as "the peasant mentality."

However, I still can't let myself adopt the attitude of my brother, who suggested the other day, "who cares about a bunch of hillbillies?" The thing is, those hillbillies are actually an ever-shrinking minority in the U.S., and they support Republican politicians mainly because they lack the education to see how they're being misled. The majority of the American electorate voted for Obama, and even if most of them can't see past his celebrity-facade to see that he is a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (like all recent presidents), we can at the very least accept that they wanted some form of "change". Call me an optimist, but I prefer to believe that most people want very reasonable things from their politicians. The mass media today, meanwhile, serves to spin the policies and distract the populace so that they think they really do live in the greatest country on earth. To ascribe the policies of the United States governments to the voters is true on some level - there is some truth to the old adage that you get the government you deserve - but to take a society in which the ruling class systematically lies and distorts its way through the media every day, and blame its failings on the people who are fooled, is to some extent blaming the victims.

It's no coincidence that the United States is both the most religious country in the developed world and the one with the weakest labour movement. The American ruling elite has worked its whole history to maintain its privileges, to demonize supporters of labour unions as dangerous "socialists", to divide the working class by appealing to racial prejudices, and to distract the people from the faults of this world by pointing them to a fantasy afterlife in another. There's only one way to change that: by educating the people to the point where they can develop a sense of class consciousness.

Canada's Next Top Metal Band

Joining 3 Inches of Blood as metal's best new hope for the Great White North is Toronto's Cauldron, a band whose debut album I've been listening to nonstop for the past week. Cauldron take the best of NWOBHM and early thrash, with a sprinkling of Dokken-style pop metal, to create an amalgram of the kind of music that I just instinctually love. One reviewer said the vocals are sung with more enthusiasm than ability, but hey, you could say the same for early Metallica. After hearing about their music, I saw a photo of the band and knew they had the image too. Seeing a bunch of scruffy longhaired metal dudes drinking beer - well, that takes me right back to the sense of fun and awe towards the majesty of rock that personified many of the best bands of the classic rock era. Plus, just look at the t-shirts: Budweiser and Dio. If that isn't a great combination (despite the watery nature of American beer), what is? Add a talent for tuneful choruses and atmospheric intros and you've got the EXACT kind of band I like.

Check out one of my favourite songs from the debut.

General Motors and the Crisis of Capitalism

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's take on the government-subsidized "restructuring" of General Motors was good for a laugh:

The governments of Canada and Ontario are co-operating to provide financing to General Motors of Canada Limited (GMCL) and General Motors (GM) Corporation to support the companies’ efforts to restructure while maintaining Canada’s production share in the Canada-U.S. market and making a significant investment in research and development.

“The management, unions and financial institutions behind General Motors have each made major sacrifices to help ensure a sustainable, competitive company going forward,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was joined by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement in making the announcement.

Since the onset of the global financial crisis, a constant thread has been the assault on the working class by a financial oligarchy intent on making them pay for the financial crisis. The old quote, "As goes General Motors, so goes the nation" has never been more relevant. Contrary to Harper's bullshit, the unions have borne the lion's share of "sacrifice". From SocialistWorker:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page sounded a similar theme. "The new agreement simplifies some work rules and job descriptions but makes no reductions in hourly pay, pensions or health care for active workers," the Journal complained. It was forgetting that the United Auto Workers (UAW) agreed to forgive a $20 billion debt that GM owes the union for a retiree health care fund. Instead, the UAW health care trust fund will get 17.5 percent of company stock--which is highly unlikely to ever be worth enough to pay for retirees' health care.

At Chrysler, the UAW health care trust fund will get 55 percent of company stock under the takeover by Fiat--but that's even more likely to force cuts in retiree health care. And at both Chrysler and GM, the UAW gave up the right to strike until 2015--and contract negations will apparently be replaced by arbitration.

So despite the complaints of right-wing blowhards, it's autoworkers, their families and communities who are getting screwed. With 14 GM plants set to close, the company's UAW workforce will be downsized from 64,000 today to just 40,000--compared to 450,000 in the late 1970s.

And as better-paid autoworkers retire, most will be replaced with new hires earning just about half the current top wage of about $28 per hour, thanks to a contract concession made several years ago.

The sacrifices of the UAW mirror the experiences of millions of working people in Canada and the United States, who are being squeezed mercilessly by governments in the pockets of our respective financial aristocracies. As Linda McQuaig notes, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made no secret of his contempt for workers and the unemployed, whom he blames for the crisis. The stinginess of the Conservative government in its treatment of Employment Insurance is truly remarkable, given how many Canadians have paid premiums into the program without receiving any benefits. But then, this isn't strictly a Conservative thing. After all, it was the Liberals who used built-up money from EI premiums to balance the budget. It left us ill-prepared for an economic rainy day, let alone the tsunami of a global financial meltdown.

Conspicuously absent from political discussions in Canada and the United States has been any discussion of a progressive income tax - i.e., of raising taxes on the rich. In the recent provincial election in British Columbia, even NDP leader Carole James pledged not to touch Liberal premier Gordon Campbell's corporate tax cuts. Since government budgets everywhere are swimming in red ink - deficit spending being necessary to stimulate the economy - you'd think this obsession with balanced budgets might point pundits towards the most obvious solution - raising taxes on the rich. After all, in times of economic crisis, it's the working classes that make or break a recovery. By giving people more disposable income through EI or social programs, they can afford to purchase more and help the economy recover (especially since they are far more likely to spend money quickly than the wealthy).

Unfortunately, that's the not the way our elites think. For them, any kind of limitation on their own luxurious lifestyles - no matter how small - is inconceivable. No, better to make the working masses pay for it, despite the fact that it was this parasitical financial oligarchy, with their reckless gambling on Wall Street and incessant demand for tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cut, that left us in such a precarious position today. As the always-brilliant Bill Maher pointed out, America is never short of people willing to fuck each other over for a buck - although it can easily be argued that the trait of greed is universal. But episodes like the developing plan to turn California into a Third World state are always staggering to hear about. As a kid, I admired Arnold Schwarzenegger as a larger-than-life action hero, but it turns out that he is a very small man indeed. Granted, this is institutional inertia as much as anything else, and was likely forced on him by the usual combination of corrupt politicians in Sacramento and Washington, and the wealthy donors that legally bribe them. States are unable to run a budget deficit, and so in that sense he had no choice - Schwarzenegger had to find some way to fill that $21 billion hole in the budget. Yet with raising taxes on the rich politically impossible, he took an axe to social programs with a vengeance. Many Californians will die because of these policies. But hey, you can't deny the rich their fair supply of yachts.

Of course, it all could have been prevented if President Obama had any balls. The federal government could easily have supplied $21 billion to California, but refused to. Apparently, it's no problem to give $185 billion to AIG, $45 billion to Citigroup (with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company's toxic paper), but politically insurmountable to try and save the actual people of California, one of the world's largest economies. As if it wasn't clear before, just more proof that the American government was bought and paid for a long time ago.

Blame Reagan.