Obama's Betrayals Made Romney Credible

Everybody's biting their nails and holding their breath. What's going to happen? Who's going to win? The "Hollywood liberal" machine is out in full force with clever ads by luminaries like Joss Whedon of Avengers, Buffy and Firefly fame and hipster filmmaker Lena Dunham chiming in. There's no doubt that this is a dramatic finish and I've been reading coverage and watching the videos as avidly as the next person.

But this dramatic finish begs a question: how is Mitt Romney, a bigoted snobby billionaire with a lunatic Tea Party running mate, even a contender? I mean the stuff coming out of the mouths of Republican candidates about rape alone ought to make them little more than laughing stocks. That they are the candidates of one of the two main American political parties is a testament to how backwards and steeped in anti-intellectual superstition America has become. But it also tells us something about the failure of the Obama presidency.

Who doesn't remember the Obama rallies last time around - tens of thousands of people chanting "Yes, we can!", a slogan taken from the mass mobilizations of the immigrants rights movement. It seemed like everybody from every progressive social movement back then - from unions to gay rights to anti-war activists - was pouring into the campaign. Here was an opportunity to change America to a kinder, gentler nation after years of George W. Bush, proud ignoramus and spoiled brat.

What happened was the record of Obama. The bailouts went to the banks and the car companies - not to the ordinary people losing their homes in their millions. Gay rights, in particular gay marriage, was immediately shelved, leading to the first mass mobilizations demanding Obama do something. He didn't. Obama eventually drew down US troop presence in Iraqi cities - but he ramped it up in Afghanistan and increased the use of illegal, civilian killing drone strikes inside of Pakistan's borders. He promised comprehensive health care and instead came up with a plan that is a gift to the health insurance corporations. He has supported Israel's ongoing torment of the Palestinian people pretty much blindly and refuses to even smackdown the compulsive warmongering of the Middle East's colonial-settler state viz Iran. The list goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Romney is an odious human being who lives on another planet. And were I in the USA I'd take the thirty seconds of democracy you get every few years and I'd put an "X" next to Obama's name. But I have no illusions that he behaves fundamentally any different in office than the Republicans with whom he has been more than happy to compromise over the last four years. He will do the same next time around. It is exactly for that reason that Romney is in the running and that the focus of the election has become not the issues but the maneuvering and marketing of the election campaign - who spends the most money, who has the most volunteers, etc. Until America produces a credible third party that is built out of the struggles of working people and the oppressed - rather than the crackpot pet projects of lunatics like Ross Perot - America will continue to be a two-party dictatorship (or, rather, one party with two wings).

Out With Unions, In With Coercive Voting

Way back in the bad old days there was a system of economic organization, particularly amongst rural, isolated resource workers, known as paternalism. The idea was that it was a sort of noblesse oblige, the idea that underlings obeyed their "betters" and the elite treated their workers as their children. They were to be protected in an era of no state social programs; taught at a time of no state schools; and disciplined by company police and militia. Usually there was more discipline than protection or education. It also meant directing them to vote for the candidate of choice in any given election, oftentimes facilitated by bringing workers en masse to polling booths.
Of course that was the 19th century, before the advances of modern democracy.

Flash forward to the election today in the USA. Employers are now permitted to direct their workers how to vote and are doing it with mail outs. Unionization, however, has never been more difficult and unionization rates are pushing ten percent (compared to close to half the workforce in the 1950s-60s). Here, according to the New York Times, is the result:

“The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job, however, is another four years of the same presidential administration,” Mr. Siegel wrote. “If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current president plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company.”In an interview, Mr. Siegel said he was not ordering his employees to vote his way. “There’s no way I can pressure anybody,” he said. “I’m not in the voting booth with them.”Mr. Siegel added: “I really wanted them to know how I felt four more years under President Obama was going to affect them. It would be no different from telling your children: ‘Eat your spinach. It’s good for you.’ ”

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Prometheus: Big Ideas Made Dull

$130 million and all you can come up with is that we were created by muscular white dudes with waxed chests?

Let's keep this quick and painless and cut straight to the point: the $16 I spent to see Prometheus in 3D (and, sorry Andrew, I dragged you into a $16 expense along with me) was money almost totally wasted. Even the 3D, which could have made the movie at least a visual spectacle, sucked. The best 3D part of the film was the little ad with a dog fetching a ball to promote the 3D company that came before the movie started. After that - nothing.

To be charitable this felt like a three or four hour movie that was corseted into two hours and a bit (though, including the 20 minutes of advertisements trying to sell me every mobile product made by Samsung, the movie felt looong). But that's not my fault - that's the job of the director: to get a film that can be shot and make sense within the time slot of the theatre. Perhaps Ridley Scott had an eye towards the "director's cut" on an as-yet-to-be-released DVD.

Whatever the cause, the movie ended up being two hours of dragging incoherence. It takes us well into the second act to even know for certain who the protagonist is. There are so many actors that all of them feel truncated and flat, not helped by the fact that their lines are often painfully wooden and false. Charlize Theron seemed to have been given about three lines, which she dutifully repeated when ever she came onscreen. And when they weren't struggling through their lines, the actors were expected to change unexpectedly and without motivation from scene to scene. Dr. Charlie Holloway, who starts the film as a bit of a galomphing puppy, exuberant and enthusiastic about their discovery, is suddenly transformed into a sullen drinker, a bit mean-spirited towards David, the humanoid robot. Then he is back to being his puppy dog self again - and sober enough seduce his partner, Noomi Rapace, who plays Elizabeth Shaw.

And then there are the cheap thrills a la B-horror films. You know the ones where the character about to die goes down into the dark basement where there has just been the sounds of someone getting slaughtered? So, a biologist puts his hand literally in the mouth of an alien lifeform that is a cross between a king cobra, a lamprey eel and a penis. Such people, of course, deserve to die the horrible death that awaits them. I mean, not like "don't touch the mysterious, possibly deadly animal" isn't the first lesson they teach you in university biology. And how about when the giant alien croissant, I mean spaceship, is rolling across the ground towards you: run perpendicular to the damn thing, not in the same direction. It might make a better shot but we all know it's plain dumb. It's hard enough to believe that a spaceship would crash from the sky, land on its edge and then roll like a coin just fell out of God's pocket without adding in cartoonish behaviour. But hey, this is Ridley's movie and if he wants rolling spaceships, dammit, then he's gonna have them.

Speaking of "visual grandeur" - mentioned as a compelling element of the film in the Rotten Tomatoes summary of the reviews (it got 73%?!? One more reason to have no respect for reviewers)... It's time we stopped giving directors credit for "visual grandeur" when they have a $100 million plus budget. It's almost impossible to not have a striking visual backdrop. Half the games on my Xbox have "visual grandeur" of the same scope. Can we not stop being impressed by shiny things, even once they are absolutely everywhere?

OK, but what about the "big ideas" that everyone talks about. Ooh, but it's so deep. Uh, nope. This is the usual Batman phenomenon where the studio marketing department creates buzzwords to describe the movie, lazy journalists pick it up and spread it, and then the rest of us shmucks absorb it into our vocabulary and repeat it. "Batman is dark and brooding..." No, it isn't. It's a shlocky superhero movie about a rich guy who runs around in a rubber suit talking like a phone perv. He never hurts anyone who doesn't "deserve" it. He's charming, etc. The Watchman? Now that was dark, if flawed. They use their powers to hurt people, intentionally and unintentionally.

So, what are Prometheus' big ideas? "Why are we here?" Sure, that's a big question but don't look for any answers or even suggestions at answers. It's just a question, hanging in the air, like "hey, where can I buy a coffee around here?" You don't get to claim you're deep unless you try to answer the question, even if you fail. Say it with me: The. Emperor. Has. No. Clothes.

In the end I suppose it was a prescient question because it was precisely the one that Andrew and I asked as we sat in our seats watching $130 million worth of dull movie (and $32 of our hard-earned money) go up in flames. "Why are we here?" Indeed.

Is Gun Control Debate Missing The Point?

The brutal and tragic killing of 12 people in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado has raised the thorny issue of gun control in an election year. Not surprisingly both Obama and Romney, fearful of being targeted the politically powerful National Rifle Association have dodged the issue and stated that they are committed to defending the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees citizens the right to bear arm. For or against gun control has become the central focus of the political debate.

But what if the entire debate is, in part, besides the point? Don't get me wrong, the American obsession with owning M-16s and Uzis is a clear signpost that America is a sick society. The fact that it is easier to get guns than it is to get decent healthcare or to organize a union is also a symbol of America's bizarro world priorities. And it is those priorities that ought to be interrogated because they are ultimately at the root of America's gun crime world record.

First, the idea that mass killers - or even just run of the mill murderers - are the result of gun availability or not misses the underlying point: why do so many Americans solve their problems with weapons? I mean, why would a guy who had a bright future, like James Holmes, do such a thing? Why would high school students show up to school and shoot their fellow students? Let's try to pick this apart.

There's an element of chickens coming home to roost in all of this - obviously not that any of the victims deserved what they got but rather that America valorizes violence in its foreign and domestic policy and, as a reflection of that, in its popular culture. The US spends more on the military than the next ten biggest military spenders combined. They spend as much on the military as on education and sixty percent more on the military than on welfare. America holds its pre-eminent place in the world order, as the empire that rules other empires, by use of that enormous military might. It propped up the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak by supplying weapons and money for weapons. It sells plentiful weapons to Saudi Arabia that are used, in part, to suppress their own population. The lion's share of aid to Israel is also in the form of military equipment. In fact, America is the world's largest supplier of weapons used in global conflicts.

Given the importance of weapons to the US political and economic system it's no surprise that the foreign policy response of the USA involves violence or the threat of violence. After 9/11 the first response of America wasn't to examine why they were targeted, it was rather to organize a war... against two countries that weren't responsible for the 9/11 attack, Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, America has invaded more countries and overthrown more foreign government than any nation in history.

At home the response to social problems and social movements is also profoundly influenced by the role of violence. From the violent repression of the Black Panthers in the 1970s to the police brutality by leading NYPD officers that brought the Occupy Wall Street movement to national attention, violence is the go-to response to political movements. It's no surprise that America incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other country on the planet. Punishment for deviancy is a core American value.

And this dependency on violence to maintain America's dominant position in the world order can't but help find its expression in popular culture. Of the top ten highest grossing films of 2011at least eight have plots that revolve around violence, or in which the problems of the lead character are solved through violence. I'm no prude and I like a good action movie; this isn't about judging people's personal tastes but rather making the point that American society is steeped in violence.

But it doesn't end with valorizing violence. That valorization itself is rooted in the fact that America is the most unequal society on the planet. America NEEDS violence to sustain that inequality - that and a stiflingly conservative and narrow ideology that labels anyone who disagrees with the main tenets of US foreign or domestic policy (never mind challenging the dominance of the market) as "UnAmerican." In part because social and political responses to inequality are shut down, the frustration that working people feel is often channeled into interpersonal violence, both verbal and physical. Secondly, the inequality and repressive laws, for instance around drugs, lead many poor people into a life of crime, understanding that "crime" is itself defined by those with power. It's OK to steal the homes and livelihoods of millions of ordinary workers (in fact, you will be rewarded with a bailout when the pyramid scheme comes crashing down). But if you sell a bag of weed or crack cocaine you will spend some serious time in jail. When people are defined as living outside the law they are the subject of violence, both by state institutions like the police and prison system, and from outlaw gangs who compete through violence as a side effect of their outlaw status.

Finally, the military and repressive priorities of the US federal and state governments and the lack of a comprehensive and universal health care system, austerity to social programs at the state level, etc. means that deeply disturbed people are on their own. The destruction of any institutions of social solidarity - outside of the family, which lacks the training and resources to tackle mental health issues - means that someone as deranged as James Holmes is left to fend for himself. He had more opportunity to purchase guns and ammunition online than he did to receive treatment. If the money spent on the US military were instead spent on a comprehensive network of support services - from welfare to mental health services and more - it would be less likely that someone like James Holmes would fall through the cracks. And it would also create a paradigm shift in some of the dominant values of American society, making it less likely that his mental derangement would lead him towards violence.

Gun control? Sure. But it's time to talk about the sickness at the heart of American society that is at root - not least because that is exactly the model which Harper's conservatives would have us emulate here in Canada.


Obama, Romney back gun owners as they decry shootings - The Globe and Mail:

'via Blog this'

Spain & The Madness of Europe

There's a saying that defines madness as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. By that criteria, it's clear that the European Union's response to the long and painful crisis unfolding on that continent is utterly and completely mad.

With the appearance a few years ago of a Greek sovereign crisis - it must be said for debt levels that weren't much higher than those of the USA - the alpha and omega of the EU's response has been to demand austerity. There's two things to be said for Greek austerity. The first is that Greece's difficulties - condemned by German politicians and capitalists as being the result of greedy workers living the high life - is actually the result of the fact that the Euro is too high given the level of development of the Greek economy. On the other hand, the downward pressure that Greek underdevelopment exerted on the EU had the effect of boosting German exports. Not only did German capitalism sell abroad, it also colonized the European economy, competing on an equal footing with unequally developed economies, like those of Portugal and Greece. So, German finger-wagging is utter hypocrisy. The greasy Euro notes that line the pockets of German capitalists were squeezed out of the pockets of Greek and Portuguese workers.

But the second thing that must be said about austerity is this: it doesn't work. As Larry Elliott notes in today's Guardian:

"The lesson from Greece is absolutely clear: slashing spending and increasing taxes when an economy is in free fall leads to higher, not lower, levels of debt. Spain is following Greece down the vicious spiral that starts with weak growth and rising unemployment and ends with expensive bail outs that do more harm than good."

And therein also lies the madness. Having haughtily and with much chest-thumping bravado, utterly destroyed the Greek economy, these idiots are now proceeding to perform the same savage surgery on the Spanish economy. But if the Greek economy represents merely cutting off an EU earlobe, the Spanish economy - the fourth largest in the EU - is like losing an arm or a leg. Such a large wound won't cauterize itself and Europe could easily bleed out with Italy following Spain down the path to ruin. European capitalists, again, led by the Germans, remind me nothing so much as a medieval leech, who cures the patient by killing them. The only hope for both Greece & Spain is that the revolt of the masses, still on a simmer in Greece and heading for a boil in Spain with demonstrations last week involving millions, forces the ruling class of Europe to give up on austerity as a strategy. The long term hope is that the masses kick out the ruling class of Europe and run the continent in the interests of the people who do the work, not the parasitic bankers and bond traders who brought the continent to this pass in the first place.