Don't Look Back In Anger?

Conditions: Blustery


Who Will Save Us? The Socialists?

One of the bigger themes of the great depression of 2010 is that capitalism, as a way of life, is dead. Finally proven as a giant shell-game of worthlessness. And (still) standing in the wings, waiting for the moment to shine, is capitalism's eternal enemy: socialism. So, is it time for the collective to raise up as a new way of life? Are the commies ready to roll? Well, no, not really. Because the crash of capitalism seems to have damaged the runway that socialism would use to take off from.

There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

- alternet.org/

Unsurprisingly, they don't. I mean, no one else has a plan, why should the socialists differ. Socialism, like most other ways of life, assumed there would be things worth distributing and managing. But what we're faced with here is apparently the need to entirely remake how we as a civilisation lead our lives. And while we can look to the revolutionary campaign of President Obama, sung to the tune of "Yes we can", it's a long-ass way from principles to fusion to action. There is one seed of hope there though, in that the more people become unemployed, the more people there are to cluster together in groups and "discuss" how things should be. I wouldn't want to be a fat cat in those days to come.



Dropping The Hammer.

After eight years of Bush rule, most thought the series of abuses of the law by him and his administration were unlikely to be addressed. But this week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to explore the possibility of investigating what actually happened. Great Scott!

"We must not be afraid to look at what we have done, to hold ourselves accountable as we do other nations who make mistakes. We must understand that national security means protecting our country by advancing our laws and values, not discarding them," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said, later adding, "in order to restore our moral leadership, we must acknowledge what was done in our name. We cannot turn the page until we have read the page."

Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) the highest-ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called the actions of the Bush administration "the greatest expansion of executive power in United States History." Spector went on to say that the actions of Bush administration lawyers who provided legal justifications for potentially unlawful Bush administration policies may amount to "criminal conduct."

Spector stopped short of endorsing the idea of a commission, instead arguing that the Department of Justice (DOJ) should be tasked with prosecuting officials who may have committed crimes.
[...]

An issue central to the formation of a commission to examine possible criminal wrongdoing is whether individuals who testify will be granted immunity. Previous examples of so-called "Truth and Reconciliation" commissions have come under criticism for allowing those who violated the law to avoid prison. Historically, these commissions have been used to document atrocities in lieu of formal prosecutions where official court cases could have been too destabilizing to a weak central government or too divisive to a society recovering from conflict.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley argued against using such a commission to avoid dealing directly with crimes committed by Bush administration officials on his blog.

"We are not some new nation emerging from civil war or dictatorship. We are a nation of laws. Bush officials have already confirmed the acts of torture and we are obligated by treaty to prosecute such war crimes ... Otherwise, President Obama's repeated statements of 'no one being above the law' will appear a pretty cynical spin designed to give the appearance of actions while evading our collective international obligations."

During Wednesday's hearing, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, argued in favor of a fact-finding commission, which would leave the door open to prosecution.

- truthout.org/

In my opinion, a special investigation into criminal wrongdoing by an administration that grants immunities and does not prosecute offenders is worth less than a chocolate firefighter. Hopefully they'll keep their heads and work towards perhaps repairing some of the damage that man and his lackeys did in their eight years of power.



Laugh O' The Week.

- Danziger

- Peace Out