Wisconsin victories significant

While it is true that the Wisconsin recall elections failed to win the 3 Senate seats necessary to gain control, and while the conservatives therefore spin this as a “loss,” don’t be fooled. This is a major victory against the conservative agenda instituted by Governor Walker and his legislative cronies. Robert Creamer notes the immense ground gained by the recalls as follows. The 6 recalls on Tuesday were in heavily conservative districts, and that the Dems won 2 of the 6 is indicative of a huge swing. A third race against Alberta Darling, Walker’s darling rubber stamper, was quite close. That is was this close despite the millions spent by Darling and her financiers is astounding.

Comments on downgrade and market

Tom replied over at IPS to my post about the S&P downgrade and market crash. Read his post for some insightful analysis. I responded to him in part below, his comments in italics.

The option not bargained in the debt deal is the only eventual solution....trade cuts to domestic spending for tax increases.

You say the Dems can convince the Reps to agree to this because if they don't the automatic cuts to further spending, including military spending, will kick in. Yet tax increases, or even closing tax loopholes and ridiculous subsidies, was forbidden on the conservative side from the beginning and why we got the shitty deal we did. You really think 1) the Dems will grow balls that fast and 2) the Repubs will shrink theirs? There has been no evidence of either to date.

S&P downgrades US debt yet Treasuries soar?

So S&P downgrades our debt rating, and US Treasuries are what we sell to finance our debt, so one might assume the downgrade was a statement on our ability to pay on the debt held by those invested in Treasuries? No, that would be too sensible. Yes, the stock market crashed again yesterday but there was a heavy influx of investment into Treasuries, not out of them. It is still the safest and most trusted bet in the marketplace, investing in the US's ability to pay on its debt. So what then is the downgrade all about if not that? Is S&P credible to judge on something that is not about the actual debt? Or even a credible rating agency at all, given their AAA rating of the toxic mortage-backed securities that caused the last crash? And why the market crash and simultaneous investment into US debt?

Michael Moore on the day the middle class died

Moore says it best so I'll let him speak, from his 8/5/11 blog:

Quote:


From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Bill Maher on a liberal Tea Party counterpart

I watch Real Time "religulously" every week and last Friday he did a New Rules sketch on having something akin to the Tea Party on the liberal side. It is in part where I'm getting my notion of having principled progressive representatives to counter the Tea Party. He denigrates them as crazy and humorously suggests we elect Democrates equally as crazy to combat them. He suggest they be called the Donner Party, since they'd rather eat their own than give in. As Maher is always complaining about spineless Democrats I think the hyperbole is intended to elect a strong liberal faction that sticks to their principles,* like the Tea Party which doesn't back down and compromise. He appreciates their steadfastness but detests their policy and only wishes liberals would have more of the former.

Change from within the political system?

I quickly skimmed the posts from Eco-Transitions since 6/5, reading a few sections here and there. It seems the bottom line is that effective transition to the "next-step economy" must come from those within the existing business and political structures through individual "changes in consciousness." And that this will have to happen in transition stages over a long period. Arnsperger does though realize that to do so within the system has the high likelihood of being corrupted by that system, much like freshly minted lawyers start their first job believing in truth and justice and are quickly disabused of such pipe dreams. And that there will be those within the system who will use the language of the new ecopreneurs to maintain the status quo by rhetorically manipulating those truly interested in such change. Like Obama, for one.  Or oil company subsidies to research alternative energy while really using the money and research to sabotage such alternatives.

Hägglund's response to Caputo

See Caputo's comments at this link. Here are excerpts from Hagglund's response:

"We can thus understand why Derrida insists on a distinction between faith, on the one hand, and the religious ideal of absolute immunity (the unscathed) on the other. The two are usually conflated in the notion of religious faith, which is understood as the faith in an absolute good that is safe from the corruption of evil. Drawing on his logic of radical evil, however, Derrida reads the religious ideal of absolute immunity against itself. To have faith in the good is not to have faith in something that can be trusted once and for all. On the contrary, the good is autoimmune because evil is inherent in its own constitution. As Derrida emphasizes, there is 'nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity.' The argument here—articulated in Derrida's main essay on religion, 'Faith and Knowledge'—is that the very movement of sacralization is contradicted from within by a constitutive autoimmunity. To hold something to be sacred is to seek to immunize it, to protect it from being violated or corrupted. Yet one cannot protect anything without committing it to a future that allows it to live on and by the same token exposes it to corruption” (132).

Tea Party lessons

Jon Stewart is bewildered by the winners of the debt “debate,” the Tea Party. Their intransigence led to trillions of dollars in cuts with no revenue so you’d think they be basking in their glory. But noooo. Many of them voted against it because it wasn't draconian enough! And yet a large contributor to the deficit was maintaining the Bush tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, which cuts they supported. Stewart correctly understands that they’re not happy because government still exists. We still have traffic lights, those evil controls on our “freedom.”

Olbermann on the sellout

Keith Olbermann's special comment on Monday points out the 4 hypocrisies in the debt ceiling deal. And all of it due to a self-created “crisis” unprecedented in US history for political gamesmanship. The debt was run up by a prior President spending wildly on wars, all of which was approved without a peep by the very same conservatives now crying about the problem. Meanwhile some credit the President for compromising with these jackals, but this only further reinforces that whatever principles he espouses with effective rhetoric are empty of political fact.

Surrender on the debt ceilling

Paul Krugman is adamant that what the President and the Dems did was capitulate completely yet again to the fanatical Tea Party extremists. And of course he's right. And worst of all it was further debilitate an already anemic economic recovery, and likely send it back into another recession. Which is exactly the goal of the conservative plan. The myth that increased spending cuts are somehow magically going to instill business and consumer confidence to the point of a turnaround has been proven a failed policy for so many years now that anyone still clinging to this ideology surely has lost any credibility with those with "half their brains tied behind their backs," to steal a line for one of those half-wits.