And When You Say "Economy", You Mean. . .?

People seem to understand the word "economy" in the weirdest ways:

President Barack Obama's approval rating has hit its highest point in two years — 60 percent — and more than half of Americans now say he deserves to be re-elected, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll taken after U.S. forces killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In worrisome signs for Republicans, the president's standing improved not just on foreign policy but also on the economy.

We are all glad that Osama is dead, that goes without saying. But the economy didn't improve overnight because the terrorist was killed. There are very serious economic problems plaguing this country. They need to be resolved by changing what happens within this country. While chasing down terrorists who are hiding in Pakistan is a very worthy goal that I, for one, wholeheartedly support, it doesn't fix the economy.

In the two most recent elections, we kept hearing that this time people will vote on economy because that's what everybody cares about right now. Today we are seeing what this caring about the economy actually amounts to.

Do you remember how I told you that one of Marxism's tragic flaws is its reliance on the idea that people are motivated by economic factors? Does anybody need any more proof that people couldn't care less about the economy even if they loudly claim they do?

Will Mitt Romney Get the Republican Nomination?

Didn't we already leave Romney on the trash heap of history after he tanked in the last primaries? Why am I hearing so many reports about his extremely high chances of getting the Republican nomination for presidency? Do people learn nothing from past experience? We've already had a preppy religious fanatic and a former male cheerleader from an extremely wealthy family as our president for eight years. And we still can't sort out the mess he created both inside and outside the country. Do we really need yet another version of Bush Jr. in power? 

If the Republicans really can come up with nothing better for the elections that will mean so much to them, it goes to show that the crisis within the party is even deeper than everybody thought. Choosing the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama to run against. . . Obama sounds like pickings are extremely slim among the Republicans.

Now Who's Sensitive?

We keep hearing that it's difficult for women to get hired for responsible positions or get people to vote for them because everybody is afraid that poor little ladies might get too emotional on the job. And then we read something like this and realize that being a churlish, overly sensitive, tantrum-prone individual has nothing to do with gender:

George W. Bush won't be at Ground Zero with President Obama Thursday in part because he feels his team is getting short shrift in the decade-long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. "[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap," a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday.Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way."

Mwaaa, mwaaa, Mommy, he took my toy! Mwaaaaa!

What Is Communism?

The following dialogue took place in both sections of my literature course.

Me: This philosopher says that the masses are stupid. In his opinion, the masses are incapable of governing themselves, which is why every society needs a strong governing minority that will direct and guide the stupid masses. How would you characterize the political stance of this philosopher?

Students (in unison): He is a Communist!

Me (baffled): No, actually such views belong on the opposite end of the political spectrum. If we have Communism on the far left, then which political system belongs on the far right?

Students (in unison): Socialism!

Those pesky Communists and Socialists seem to have colonized the entire political spectrum in my students' opinion.

Conservatives Win in Canada

Here is what the election results look at this point:

Even though the outcome is obvious, you can still consult the updated numbers here.

Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Canadian Liberals, is so unappealing as a politician that he managed to drag his party down to the third place. The second place is now firmly occupied by the NDP. For those of you who do not follow Canadian politics, if Ralph Nader could organize a viable political party in the US, it would be the American version of the Canadian NDP. 

What the results of this election tell us is that Canadian progressives are an overwhelming majority in the country. At this point, their vote is split between the old and corrupt Liberals and the new and hopeful NDP. Today's victory of the Conservatives is not a victory at all, in my opinion. This is the very last chance they get to grab for power. Soon, the progressives will get their shit together and take our country back. And if you want to tell me otherwise, do it on some other day. Today, I've got to believe this.

Liberal Sexism

This is the kind of nasty, extremely sexist post that gives all Liberals a bad name. Right now, I'm completely ashamed to be on the same side of the political fence as somebody who wrote this atrocity:

Boy this last 24 to 48 hours have not been very kind to poor Sarah Palin. . . Then you send out a bitter, and clearly insincere tweet (and follow upFacebook post), in which you thank the troops for killing Osama Bin Laden while denying any credit to the Commander in Chief, which once again identifies you as a hateful, immature attention whore, and which receives richly deserved  condemnation from all over the blogosphere. And just when you believed that things could NOT get any worse, somebody posts a picture of you on the Internet with food stains (At least we hope they're food stains!) ALL over your expensive outfit. Okay I don't want to start any unnecessary rumors, but exactly what was on the menu at that Vanity Fair after party? 

This just makes me want to vomit all over that inexpensive blog. People who have been around my site for a while know that I have been consistently critical of Sarah Palin and have expressed my criticism in very harsh terms. However, calling a person a whore and making ridiculously stupid suggestions about stains on her outfit is simply not right. This is sexism, and I don't give a rat's behind where it comes from. It's just so sad that wherever you turn, you find some sexist shit like this. 

I am very disgusted right now.

Donald Trump as a Republican Candidate

Of course, he's mildly creepy and he has weird hair, but if I had to choose among Republican candidates for president in case Obama loses (which today seems less probable than yesterday), I'd choose Trump. The reason why I think he'd be better than all the other candidates from that party is that he is not a religious fanatic. Better yet, after all the divorce proceedings, casinos and TV shows, he will not be able to sell himself as a religious fanatic. I believe that there is nothing scarier in the world today that religious fanatics of any persuasion.

Religious fanaticism today is a symptom of not being able to accept contemporary reality. The hysteria of religious fanatics betrays how confused and lost they are in the world they simply don't get. Learning to live with the new and constantly changing realities is an impossible proposition for them, so they'd rather the whole planet went to hell in a basket.

Trump is obviously not one of these folks. He is the exact opposite. He has found a way to manipulate the existing realities to his own advantage and turn them into opportunities. This is a person who thrives and flourishes in today's world. I don't see him buying into the fundamentalist propaganda, not even to win an election.

This is a big country with a huge variety of opinion (I think I deserve the right to an occasional platitude, especially on a Monday). If there is a Progressive movement, there has to be a Conservative counterpart. "Audiatur et altera pars" is a principle that I hold near and dear. For the longest time, I've been hoping to hear what the Conservative discourse in this country is. However, the Conservative movement in the US has been hijacked by a minority of crazed fundamentalists. There must be intelligent, non-hysterical, educated Conservatives who don't evoke Jesus, sin and evil every fifteen minutes and who are as comfortable with today's realities as we are. A candidate like Trump could help such people take back the party. This would be the kind of a Republican party that I would still not support, but at least I'd be able to respect it. Difference of opinion is a great thing, and it's precisely that which no religious fanaticism can allow to exist. I'm a lot more comfortable with (mind you, not happy about but comfortable with) an administrator who asks me to demonstrate how my existence is profitable to the university than the one who requires that I demonstrate how the teachings of Jesus will be integrated into my course on Spanish grammar (a true story).

"But he is a ruthless capitalist who will walk over everybody and everything in search for a profit margin," people say. That he is. And for many people this is what this entire country is about: being able to do whatever is needed to become rich and assume the risk of failure. A Democrat in office is supposed to make sure that we have some protections in place in case we fail. A Republican's job is to remove such protections based on a belief that this will make us try harder to win the competition. One can dislike this position but at least it's based on reason and not on hysterical fanaticism. 

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On Obama's Birth Certificate

I was going to blog about President Obama releasing the long version of his birth certificate yesterday but my friend from Nigeria did it a lot better than I ever could:

I am a firm believer in the inner goodness of every human being in spite of their colour. I approached this country and people with the same open mindedness and was – like everyone else around the world – ecstatic and absolved when Obama was elected in 2008 in spite of what many considered his biggest obstacle: the colour of his skin. And then, from then, disappointed as to how every criticism of his policies seemed to come with something more than just a mere disagreement with economic policies. The press conference by Mr. Trump exemplified for me an unfortunate culmination of an underlying culture of intolerance. . . I don’t think that many Americans realize just how bad this reflects on the country to the rest of the world, and that makes it a little more unfortunate. I’m not American and may never try to be one. But seeing how the country treats its own and one of its best leaves very much to be desired. 

You can read the post in its entirety here.

Obama as Richard III

It's heartening to know that I'm not the only one who sees profound similarities between Richard III, the falsely vilified legitimate King of England, and President Obama. The following comes from a blog by Charles Rowley who is a professor of Economics at George Mason University:

On August 22, 1485, an engagement of great historical significance was fought at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire  between the usurper king, Richard III of England and Henry Tudor,  the former Earl of Richmond , who had been deprived of that title in 1741. This battle would prove to be decisive in ending  a lengthy sequence of increasingly bloody wars between the White Rose of York and the Red Rose of Lancaster.  Henry Tudor (of Lancaster) routed the incumbent monarch on that battlefield and established the Tudor Dynasty and all that it would involve for the evolution of European Civilization. 

Finally, after months of prevarication and dissembling, the usurper president, Barack Obama, has emerged from his funk-hole to engage with a determined upstart  opponent, Paul Ryan (R, Wisconsin) in fiscal maneuvers that will be resolved in presidential and congressional elections of major historical significance in November 2012.  The future economic status of the United States will depend largely on the outcome of that engagement.

 Nobody agreed with me when I drew parallels between the existing attitudes to Obama and the popular beliefs about Richard III. Here, however, we see a conservative professor confess that he does equate Obama and Richard.

I Wish Eagleton Just Kept to What He Knows

Terry Eagleton is my favorite literary critic. I'm an Eagleton wannabe in the sense that I want to learn to write about literary theory in the same beautiful and clear kind of prose that will make non-academics want to read my writing. Eagleton's After Theory and Ideology: An Introduction are bestsellers that address complex theoretical issues in a way that makes it easy for non-specialists to understand what he is talking about. Eagleton is also a brilliant public speaker who delivers lectures of pure, unadulterated genius in a way that makes you stare at the watch praying that the time would stop and let you enjoy the talk a lot longer than the scheduled 45 minutes. 

However, like many literary critics Eagleton believes that he will make a greater impact on humanity if he ventures into the field of politics. And that conviction has been the downfall of many a politicized academic. Just think of Edward Said who made himself and his entire brilliant scholarly legacy look ridiculous when he was caught on film throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

I always experience a deep sense of embarrassment when I read the pompous and unintelligent pronouncements on politics of otherwise extremely bright scholars. Take, for example, Eagleton's recent article in Commonweal titled "Was Marx right?" Like most of the leading thinkers of our times (Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou come to mind), Eagleton is dedicated to proving that Marxism can still be salvaged. Unlike Žižek, however, he does it in such a plodding and uninspired way that I cringe with vicarious shame when I read his articles on the subject. In a painstaking (and useless since the answer is self-evident) manner, Eagleton strives to answer the question of why nobody is willing to waste any more time on  Marxism:

From the mid-1970s onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes. There was a shift from traditional industrial manufacture to a “postindustrial” culture of consumerism, communications, information technology, and the service industry. Small-scale, decentralized, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement was subjected to savage legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while local, gender, and ethnic identities grew more insistent.

It is not surprising that, like many white rich men in their sixties, Eagleton is annoyed with those pesky women, blacks, and post-colonial subjects who dared reject his Marxist dream for the sake of fighting for their rights. He might realize that dismissing these "insistent" folks could be damaging to his cause but, like so many Marxists, he just can't help himself.

Eagleton acknowledges that many people have been put off Marxism by the revelations of the horrors that have been committed in its name. He briefly concedes that

anyone who calls himself a Marxist today must answer for Stalin’s show trials and Mao’s labor camps, as well as the brutal crackdowns in Prague and Tiananmen Square. 

However, Eagleton immediately downplays this crucial issue that has scared many a follower away from Marxism. He concocts yet another one a long line of bizarre explanations of why we need to forget about the horrible repression and genocide that were committed in the name of Marxism:

Taken overall, both Stalinism and Maoism were botched, bloody experiments that made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. Marx never imagined that socialism could be achieved in the impoverished conditions Stalin and Mao faced. Such a project requires almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the Internet in the Middle Ages. You cannot reorganize wealth for the benefit of all if there is precious little wealth to reorganize. You cannot abolish social classes in conditions of scarcity, since conflicts over a material surplus too meager to meet everyone’s needs will simply revive them again.

I honestly want to think that Eagleton wrote the above-quoted paragraph just to make a point. The idea that a profoundly intelligent thinker can actually believe anything this stupid is disturbing. "Reorganizing wealth" in the countries where a Marxist experiment has failed did not work not because there wasn't enough wealth to go around. It failed because no matter how much wealth you reorganize, people will remain people. In a very short while, some of the folks who received a part of this reorganized wealth will spend it, end up indigent and get into debt. Other people will make different choices and will end up with their own portion of wealth and that of their neighbors. In order at least to try to prevent this from happening, you will need an extremely powerful police state. Which is precisely where the Communist experiment led the Soviet Union. Eagleton's argument about the "poverty-stricken" Russia on the eve of the October Revolution is an outright lie. The immensely powerful Russian Empire boasted one of the highest GDPs in the world. Acknowledging this fact, however, would bring the entire edifice of his unconvincing argument down, so he falsifies the facts.

What Eagleton proposes instead of today's flawed capitalism is a system of cooperatives and resource allocation on the basis of discussions and negotiations:

On this model, resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists, and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighborhood, and consumer councils. The broad parameters of the economy, including decisions on the overall allocation of resources, rates of growth and investment, energy, transport, and ecological policies would be set by representative assemblies at local, regional, and national levels. These general decisions about, say, allocation would then devolve downward to regional and local levels, where more detailed planning would be progressively worked out. At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential.

This statement could only have come from someone who has spent decades buried in his ivory tower and hasn't seen actual people in a very long time. We recently had a situation at my department where we needed to add a single sentence to a document. We discussed the sentence for hours and ended up not reaching a consensus and postponing the debate for later. Eagleton's system will only lead companies into a quagmire of discussions which will prevent anything from ever getting done.

As many other Marxists, Eagleton sees human beings as one-dimensional little robots with absolutely no individuality. He forgets that there are no shared interests or "social need." The only thing that exists are conflicting interests of different individuals:

 In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

As a person who never produced any breakfast cereal or any hospitals (a qualification that I share with Eagleton), I have no idea how many of them this mysterious "we" needs. I don't want the so-called freedom of making such decisions because no single individual can have the knowledge that is necessary to make such choices for the entire society. I actually believe that "we" don't need any breakfast cereal at all because I don't eat it and think nobody else should. Just imagine how productive any discussion of "our" need for cereal will be if I am asked to be part of it.

It would be great if a brilliant literary scholar like Eagleton just kept to what he does know well and stopped embarrassing himself by unconvincing and dishonest discussions of politics. He is a person who has been served incredibly well by the capitalist system he is denouncing. He has spent his entire life in a cushy job that never required any physical effort from him. He is very wealthy. He has traveled the world extensively. The system handed him a young wife to serve his needs. This is why his fake concern for the inhabitants of the slums in Lagos, whose reality he cannot possibly know anything about, sounds just a tad hypocritical.

Elections in Canada

I've been trying for a while to write a post on the upcoming elections in my country. However, I have to confess that I have been away from Canada for a while now and feel rather out of touch with its political scene. Canada has been impacted by the global financial crisis a lot less than the US*. Housing prices dropped a little for a while, but then started showing signs of growth again. In Quebec, real estate prices were never as inflated as in the US, of course, which made the drop in value of real a state a lot less dramatic. 

In terms of employment, there was a moment when people started getting laid off and finding a new job was difficult. Now, however, things seem to be back to normal. My sister, who lives in Montreal, felt so comfortable about the business of recruiting people that she left a very high-paying position with a well-established company to start her own recruiting company. 

Unlike the American shoppers, the Québécois customers still consume like there is no tomorrow. The last time that I visited Montreal I was (pleasantly) surprised to see that stores, coffee-shops and restaurants were filled with people to the extent where you could hardly get inside. 

Of course, even though Canada got through the crisis with relatively few losses (compared to the US), there are still massive problems in the country. Canadians at large seem to be completely out of sync with the Conservative agenda of Harper's Tories. Canada's conservatives would be considered commie-pinko Liberals in the US. However, their views are still too medieval for the majority of the country's population. Still, Harper and Co managed to stay in power since 2006 because Canadians are sick and tired of the overblown, ridiculously huge federal government and of the endless and unashamed corruption of the Liberals**.  Now that it has become clear that the Tories have no intention (or no wherewithal, as the case may be) to either avoid being as corrupt as the Liberals or to get the unwieldy government apparatus under control, new elections loom on the horizon.

Liberals have promised really fantastic things in their election platform. Huge amounts of money for education, creation of new professorial positions, and daycare services caught my attention. Are these promises enough, however, to attract voters to the Liberals' side? Is there a viable alternative to the Conservatives versus Liberals dichotomy that has plagued the political scene of both the US and Canada?

Please share your thoughts on the future of the best country in the world :-) whether you are Canadian or not.

* Most of my information is based on what is happening in Quebec and partly in Nova Scotia, which might not always be representative of the country at large, of course.

** As in every other post, I express my own views here. People might have a very different interpretation of what is going on in Canadian politics.

"And He's Not Even a Marxist!": The Nation's Shabby Coverage of William Cronon's Persecution

In case you haven't heard the story, William Cronon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has recently become a victim of persecution on the part of the state's Republicans. They are filing a lawsuit demanding access to Cronon's emails that contain words such as “Republican,” “collective bargaining,” “rally,” and “union.” You can find Cronon's blog that explains what happened and why here. 

Of course, any thinking individual who values freedom of speech is appalled at this most recent show of contempt for the Constitution of the United States on the part of the GOP. However, some progressive journalists have taken a very strange approach to defending the right of a scholar to mention the word "union" in his emails. This is an excerpt from an article that The Nation, a magazine that I subscribe to and like, has published on the subject in its blog:

Many faculty members call themselves “Marxists” or “socialists,” and some describe themselves as “anarchists” or “revolutionaries”—but Cronon doesn’t. He’s not Bill Ayres, the education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago who happily defends his Weatherman past. Cronon describes himself as a “centrist.” He says he’s never belonged to the Democratic (or the Republican) party.

How is it relevant at all whether Cronon is or is not a Marxist, an anarchist, a satan-worshipper or a creature from the Blue Lagoon? Are we to have different standards for people based on how they identify politically? Is a persecution of somebody who is politically centrist more egregious than the persecution of a radical?  I couldn't care less about Cronon's politics in this situation. All that matters to me is that he should be able to say, write and publish whatever he wants freely and without fear of persecution.

UK's David Cameron Pushes for the Destruction of Academia

So many things have happened while I've been away that I hardly know what to blog about first. The conservative assault on scholarship in the UK is one of the topics that deserve immediate attention of all of us who value intelligence and oppose the cult of ignorance promoted by conservative forces everywhere. David Cameron's government will now pull the funding of all research in the Humanities that does not support his weird idea of "big society":

Academics will study the "big society" as a priority, following a deal with the government to secure funding from cuts. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a "significant" amount of its funding on the prime minister's vision for the country, after a government "clarification" of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent. Under the revised principle, research bodies must work to the government's national objectives, although the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that ministers will not meddle in individual projects. It is claimed the AHRC was told that research into the "big society" was non-negotiable if it wished to maintain its funding at £100m a year.

The article where I found the above-quoted statement proceeds to suggest that

It is government money. They have the right to spend it on what they want.

This, of course, is completely ridiculous. This money doesn't belong to the government. It belongs to the taxpayers who hired the government to manage this money. If the way these hired managers administer the funds given to them by the people does not serve the public good, the citizens of the country have every right to send the government packing.

The problem with forcing academics to pursue only those projects that study the "big society" is that nobody really knows what this concepts actually means. It was coined in order to promote a political campaign of a party that is not famous for its high intelligence and is supposed to have as its goal 

 to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will 'take power away from politicians and give it to people'.

I don't think that even the people who came up with this strange definition know exactly what it's supposed to mean. As a result, it will be possible for the UK's conservative government to exercise firm control over the country's intellectuals based on a set of criteria that nobody has even bothered to define.

What Cameron and his posse of fools don't understand is that when people start their research, they don't know where it is going to lead them. If you begin a research project and expect it to reach a predetermined set of conclusions, you are going to fail. A responsible academic does not conduct research in order to support ideas s/he had before beginning the project. Nobody can reasonably guarantee that the funding one received to promote the "big society" will end up supporting conclusions that have anything to do with that goal.

Now, every academic who wants to engage in a project will have to come up with elaborate ways of convincing illiterate idiots in charge that the project in question will fit into these unintelligent politicians' view of what the country needs. This will result in a lot of aggravation, bureaucracy, corruption and will bring about absolutely no positive results whatsoever. Unless, of course, you count the destruction of UK's academia among positive results. This, I believe, is the ultimate goal of the British government.

Virginity Tests in Egypt as a Form of Torture

A colleague and a reader of this blog just left a link to the following horrible piece of news from Egypt:

Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahrir Square earlier this month.  After army officers violently cleared the square of protesters on 9 March, at least 18 women were held in military detention. Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges. ‘Virginity tests’ are a form of torture when they are forced or coerced. "Forcing women to have ‘virginity tests’ is utterly unacceptable. Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women," said Amnesty International. "All members of the medical profession must refuse to take part in such so-called 'tests'."

Obligatory gynecological exams aimed at shaming women for being sexually active and forcing them to hate the fact of having been born female are something that, unfortunately, I know very well firsthand. In the Soviet Union, we were subjected to forced gynecological exams since the age of 11 or twelve. Often, people conducting such tests on pre-teen girls were young male students of med schools. You can imagine how traumatic it is to be pawed and ogled by twenty-year-old men when you are at that age.

Later on, if one was getting a college education while being female, one was forced to undergo gynecological exams in order to be allowed to continue as a student. Such exams were extremely invasive and often resulted in women being shamed for being sexually active. Sometimes, spurious medical diagnoses were invented and women were obligated to go through painful and completely unnecessary medical procedures to get "cured" from illnesses they never had.

Forced gynecological procedures are one of the most popular methods used by repressive regimes to coerce and terrorize women. It horrifies me that this is now happening to the women of Egypt.

How Can They?

Somebody on Reddit quotes my post on the GOP campaigning for oral and anal sex to be outlawed in Texas and somebody else asks, "How could any man want oral sex to be illegal?!" 

I'm not registered on Reddit, so I'll answer here: he can if he's not getting any. That's the problem of all hysteria-driven conservatives who want to police other people's genitals: they are simply jealous because they aren't getting any and it drives them nuts.

Interventionist Policies

What I don't understand is how people can be simultaneously opposed to Bush's invasion of Iraq and supportive of Obama's bombing of Libya. Any military intervention in the affairs of another country under the slogan of "Let's remove that nasty dictator and liberate the people!" can only be based on the belief that one knows better what that country and those people really need. 

The idea that there is "good interventionism" and "bad interventionism" is, in my opinion, deeply flawed. Either you believe that your superior military strength allows you to meddle in the affairs of others, or you don't. But it's very hypocritical to criticize it when it's done by Bush and support it when the same thing is done by Obama. And, please, don't tell me that Obama and Bush have different intentions here. We cannot possibly know anything about their intentions or motivations. All we know is that the bombs are dropping and the people are dying because somebody from a different continent decided they know better.

I just read a joke on a Russian website on this subject:

"Why is Obama bombing Libya?"

"Oh, he just wants to get a second Nobel Peace Prize."

Democrats Are Hopeless

It is becoming more and more obvious that the Democrats are planning to base their 2012 election campaign on the following message: "The Republicans promised to deliver jobs but they lied and did nothing to boost job creation." This is very similar to their 2004 "Bush lied" slogan, and we all remember how successful that was.

In Solzhenitsyn's major (in my opinion) novel In the First Circle, the character of Stalin says that his opponents lost because they had an extensive knowledge of books but their knowledge of people was non-existent. It is the same with the Dems. They tend to live in the world of ideas and disregard people. They address their campaigns not to actual human beings but to an imaginary concept of what human beings should be like.

The sad truth of the matter is that people don't care about economy. They say that they do but their willingness to vote against their own economic interests time and again proves that the opposite is true. The Dems are trying to discredit the Republican Congress that was elected last November by suggesting that it hasn't delivered what it promised. The truth, however, is that it has. From the day they were elected, the Republicans set out to push very aggressively for the implementation of things that every conservative holds near and dear. Their assault on reproductive rights has been relentless, their attempts to repeal Obama's healthcare legislation started as soon as they got into the Capitol, they are pulling federal funding from countless programs. Their anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric is more venomous than ever. They even took the time to defund the NPR which is hated by conservatives.

Compared to the Democratic Congress of 2006, the Republican Congress we have today can only be described as vigorous, aggressive, and strong. It must feel great to support a party that is so unapologetic about achieving its goals. Every day brings a small ideological victory to the Republican supporters. And ideology trumps economy every single time. While the Democrats had both the Congress and the Presidency, all we heard was a string of excuses why things weren't possible just for the moment. The Republicans don't offer apologies or excuses. They act. They push their barbaric agenda with the single-mindedness of bulls in the arena. 

As long as they do what they promised in terms of ideology, their supporters couldn't care less about the repeal of the Wall Street reform that they have begun.

Are the Democrats Wising Up?

I found the following excerpt from a negative political campaign leaflet on Echidne's Blog:

Sounds nasty, doesn't it? However, there is one thing you need to know. Rose Ferlita is a Conservative candidate and the leaflet was sponsored by a Democrat. 

I think it's great that finally there are some Democrats who are willing to give the Conservatives a taste of their own medicine. We've seen enough abstinence pushers whose children give birth in junior high. Promoters of family values who serve their wives with divorce papers on a hospital bed. Gay bashers who get caught with teenage male prostitutes. Let's make the Republicans live up to their avowed beliefs. If you keep preaching about family values, you better uphold them in your own life. If you are a woman who runs from a party that is in the habit of condemning female Hispanic judges as temperamentally unsuited for public office, be prepared to be judged according to the same standards.

Finally, there is a Democrat who is not afraid to make the Republicans confront their profound hypocrisy. 

Governor Pat Quinn is Doing a Great Job

As a resident of Illinois, I can tell you that Governor Pat Quinn is doing a great job. I couldn't be happier that we elected him, albeit by a small margin, rather than the Republican buffoon who ran against him. Unlike the Republicans who harp on the budget deficit without ever doing anything that would actually solve the problem, Quinn started working on fixing the budget the moment he got elected. We have seen the results of his hard work already: the state of Illinois repaid the entire amount that it owed our university. Had a Republican been elected as Governor of Illinois, we wouldn't have seen a dime of that money as the Republicans warned us before the election.

Quinn supports our new healthcare law, which shows that he is an intelligent, progressive person. He is adamant in his defense of a woman's right to be in control of her own uterus. He supports gay marriage and is in favor of enacting gun control legislation. Recently, he has demonstrated that, unlike the majority of American politicians, he is not afraid of antagonizing a huge corporation if that's what it takes to protect the interests of our state. 

Those who have been brainwashed by the Tea Party into believing that the government is always bad and the corporations are always good are trying to crucify Governor Quinn for his brave and intelligent decision to show Amazon that it is not above the law. Middle-of-the-road folks who are so spineless that they can't just pick a side already and stick to it screech that Quinn's new piece of legislation (the one that will force Amazon to pay taxes in Illinois) will be impossible to enforce. "Things are the way they are, nothing will ever change," they keep screeching. This defeatist attitude to life is not shared by Quinn and his supporters. We might not matter individually, but together we can achieve a lot. 

Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part III

To continue our conversation about the collapse of the Soviet Union that we started here and here, I want to answer the question that people often have when they are told that there was no transfer of power when the system changed. If money and power remained in the same hands after the fall of the Soviet Union, people ask, how is it possible that nobody noticed? Weren't the citizens supposed to start asking questions as to why such a profound transformation as going from socialism to capitalism did not bring about a major transfer of power?

Of course, people would have asked these questions. They were prevented from doing it, though, by a very inventive distractionary tactic. The tactic in question consisted of presenting the people whose pictures you can see below as the new post-Soviet billionaires:

This is Roman Abramovich whose fortune is estimated at $13,4 billion. 

He is the 53rd richest person in the world. 

This guy is Boris Berezovsky. His fortune has dwindled in the recent years (an expensive divorce, endless court cases, exile, etc.) and now stands at a puny $1 billion.

While he still served the purposes of the regime, it looked like his political and economic power was unrivaled.

This is another post-Soviet billionaire, Vladimir Gusinsky. He is now also in deep trouble with the regime. In the nineties, however, he owned pretty much everything in Russia. Except, of course, what the other guys whose pictures I posted owned.

So these are the people who were given to us in the nineties as the all-powerful billionaires who now had all the money and the power of the former Soviet Union. And they all have one thing in common. It might not be obvious to an American eye that is used to seeing a huge ethnic and racial variety on a daily basis. It is immediately obvious to any Soviet person, though, that these guys are Jews. (These are not the only billionaires of the 90ies, of course. There are a few more, and most of them are also Jewish.)

In the early nineties, the people who were effectuating the so-called transition from the Soviet Union to a free market democracy (a transition that never really took place, of course) used this nifty little trick to distract the fiercely anti-semitic Soviet people from what was really going on. They appointed some very obviously Jewish guys to act as figureheads for the seemingly new regime. When the Jewish billionaires had served their purpose, they were thrown over by the regime. Now many of them are either in hiding or in exile. In my opinion, they had been chosen as figureheads from the pool of minor KGB informers. Of course, I have no data to substantiate this opinion but no other possibility makes sense logically.

In the next post in this series I will tell you who I think was really in power in the Soviet Union and why the decision was made to disband the USSR temporarily.