It's good to be a corporation, part II

As discussed here some months ago, the Supreme Court today handed in its decision on Citizens United v. FEC declaring limits on corporate campaign spending unconstitutional.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

Well, it's awfully magnanimous of them to make unions exempt as well, since there's nothing the American labor movement needs more than to throw away more money in a Sisyphean effort to battle corporations in the political arena. This is, I guess, the court's idea of "balance;" I don't see how this provision doesn't help big business even further.

On the positive side, it will now be impossible--if it weren't before--to deny the elephant in the room of corporate-bought democracy. Maybe, as many have suggested, our politicians can take a page from auto racing and wear the logos of their sponsors on their suits. Imagine the acceptance speeches now! "I'd like to thank the boys of Citibank and DuPont for giving me a great car out there this campaign season." It could go places.

MOAR: American Leftist.

Your kids now belong to the state of Massachusetts

I'd guess most mainstream liberals are skeptical about the merits of plebiscite democracy, at least the few I've read on the subject are. And it does correspond well to their general attitude toward the stupidity of the mob rule. The preponderance of anti-gay ballot initiatives and the general political malaise in California are generally cited as examples of where allowing popular votes on policy go awry.

The MA-Sen race, however, provides a pretty good oppositional case against media-managed representative government. Despite the localized nuances of the race and the fact that a not insignificant number of Brown voters were in protest of watered-down healthcare reform and timid policing of Wall Street, the narrative of Brown's win is nonetheless being written to fit the script prepared by the managers of democracy. Choosing between two candidates with purposefully ambiguous policy aims makes it virtually impossible for the public to make concrete political desires manifest.

Keep doin' watcher doin'

Even before the polls closed in the Massachusetts special Senate election tonight, Eli Lilly's personal senator Evan Bayh could tell us What It All Means.

“ The only we are able to govern successfully in this country is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates,” Bayh said. “Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country -- that’s not going to work too well.”

One is tempted to ask Bayh to cite examples, but that would be pointless. One is also tempted to wonder whether Democrats winning huge majorities in Congress was a huge mandate for the "furthest left elements"...oh what the hell, the tool is just giving you the interpretation that you are always going to get from Broderists of all stripes. Regardless of what political activity is actually happening on the ground, the Democrats are forever in danger of lost to the grasp of the non-bathing hippies. This, of course, is the reason progressives ought to be louder and meaner, because it is futile to try and assuage the paranoid fears of the permanently Concerned Centrist.

Instead, the party liberals are out in force with the latest update in tool-enabling Blame-Ralphism just in case the Coakley loss could be blamed on a lack of enthusiasm from the party's left base. Which, as we know, also permanently owes its vote to Democrats in perpetuity regardless of policy action because ZOMGFascisms and shut up that's why.

And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there's a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they'd be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It's extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

Ah, but here's the catch to reliable hippie-hater Drum's point. This strategy almost always works for the right. During periods of exile, the Republican party reliably becomes more conservative than it was before. Theoretically, a similar tactic of ignoring a left-denying Democratic Party should have the same effect for progressives. Provided, of course, that Democrats really cared about winning elections, which one assumes is the goal of a functioning political party. The Democrats are not, however, a usual political party. They are the Washington Generals of American politics, a caretaker ruler for those moments when the preferred business party needs a moment to regroup. Thus there is no meaningful way to punish them. The game is already lost.

Richard Estes continues with his usual perspicacity.

...appeals for support for Coakley took on more and more hysterial tones. If Brown won, they screamed, Republicans would return to power and destroy the country. Voters who refused to respond to the rhetorical horsewhipping administered by Democratic activists deserved what they will get. Left unanswered, of course, was whether voters deserve what they are currently getting from Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress. Coakley supporters were left with such emotional appeals, because there have nothing to substantively say that would persuade voters that Coakley, and by extension, Obama, have any intention of challenging the plutocracy that controls the government.

It's important--though probably futile--to mention that the MA-Sen election doesn't translate perfectly to any national interpretation which we'll inevitably hear in the coming days. It's hard to imagine the vote representing a plebiscite on the "extreme left" health care reform bill when Massachusetts citizens already have a health care system which is more progressive than anything being floated presently. Any single race is always dependent on the characters involved, in this case Martha Coakley who, by most accounts, ran a terribly lackadaisical campaign expecting to cruise to victory.

Sex is dirty

Here's something you ought to know, though hopefully you will never find yourself in this position. If you are 28 years old, a virgin (indeed, the entirety of your romantic relationships can be boiled down to three weeks when you were 19), unattractive, devoid of most useful skills, not very independent, and so forth, you have to come to grips with a certain set of facts, no matter how much you would like to avoid them. You are not finding a partner. You are not getting laid. The end.

I'm not saying this resembles anyone I've ever met. Just hypothesizing.

A person, we'll say a straight guy just for kicks, who finds himself here has a couple of options for how to rationalize this situation. He can, if he wants to become a bitter, narcissistic old goat from whom all discerning parents will keep their children at a healthy distance, blame the entirety of the female population for some inherent flaw in womanhood which prevents all of them from seeing what a really wonderful person you are underneath all of the signs pointing to what a terrible person you are. If you have landed at this space, do not pass go, do not collect $200. The less said, the better.

The other option, if you don't want to cordon yourself from half the human race, is to realize that women make perfectly fine companions who can provide you with fulfilling friendships even if none of them wants to spend any quality time with you naked. The notion that women are people, too has the added virtue of being something you ought to believe anyway regardless of how much action you're getting. But in my...I mean, your situation, it's absolutely essential to avoid a lonely life of bitterness.

But there is a problem here which is going to interrupt our egalitarian vision of ponies and comradeship. Eventually, biology intervenes. Or perhaps the saturation of the great majority of human culture does. The distinction is important, so maybe I should deal with it, but for now I won't*. Point is, times will come when, despite what you've convinced yourself rationally about the unnecessary luxury of romantic partnerships, you're still struck by some murky desire for a more intimate connection.

Now, I'm sure all of you are jumping out of your chairs to yell "sex!"** I do that all the time. But that brings us to the next step on our journey. Sustaining your principles about the just person-hood of the opposite sex here requires one of two mutually exclusive positions. Either a) everyone screws or b) no one does. The first is straight out. Even if it's probably healthier for everyone (and I'm not sure monogamy can be intellectually defended anyway) it's not going to solve your problem because, as we've already established, you're hideous.*** Even if people think you're kinda cool, they aren't going through that with you.

So that leaves us with the "sex is base and vile" position. At first glance this makes a certain kind of sense. After all, what kind of quantifiable meaning do you get out of it? No one talks with his mouth full, as it were. I may be imagining things, or extrapolating from limited data, but this seems to be making something of a comeback in some progressive circles as a reactionary position to the mainstreaming of more casual sex; i.e, the perversion of the masses is no substitute for our spiritual/philosophical/emotional bonding. Can't we have all of our needs for emotional connections and communication met without it?

The bonus here is that, as most people define a relationship as whomever they are physically intimate with****, shouldn't forswearing the need for sex eliminate the need for them? That's where we will have to leave it, because I don't have the answer. I don't think so, but I don't know. I cannot completely crush those periodic longings for a unique, completely uninhibited relationship with another person. That's at once baffling and frustrating. Geez, I am too old for this sort of thing.

*I'm pretty sure it's biology, but I'm aware I may be making excuses.

**In the interest of our more sensitive viewers, you can substitute "physical intimacy." Your Sunday School teacher was right, hand-holding is basically indistinguishable from the real thing. Adults have moved past this argument, though. See this great post from Roger Ebert of all people.

***"What is wrong with your FACE?" (6:00 in)

****Again, presuming one speaks to members of the other sex who are not your partner.

Too many footnotes.

Short answers to good questions

ginandtacos.com - A Modest Proposal

Stationed in Baltimore, the Comfort can be ready to sail in five days and it'll take a couple more to reach Haiti. A lot of people who could have been saved will have died in the interim. So here's my idea. Let's build five of them. Staff them with medical students and military doctors, distribute them around the world (Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, etc.) and have them on duty 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Make calls in poor countries and provide medical care for people who have nothing. When disasters happen, the ships can be there in hours, not a week. You know, doing stuff that might make people around the world less likely to hate us. If we can maintain military bases in 30 different countries around the world we can afford a handful of ships. But without any guns, it would be a hard sell on both Congress and the public.

Isn't the military always going on and on about that "winning the hearts and minds" shit after they turn some nation into rubble? That might work – one of these decades. Or we could spend a tiny fraction of our obscene military budget on, you know, helping people. But that doesn't interest us. We want to do as we please and then find some way to make people like us afterward. It worked well in Vietnam and Iraq, so why change now?

John Cole at Balloon Juice makes a similar observation, noting that a BBC poll showed the United States with a 70% approval rating in Indonesia, due largely one assumes to goodwill accumulated by American aid in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. Given the shocking discovery that generosity tends to make people "hate us for our freedoms" much less, why don't we practice it more often?

Alas, empires don't run on candy and good thoughts. US aid during major natural disasters is more public relations spending than anything else. Catastrophes like the Haitian earthquake are too high profile for the United States to be seen sitting around doing nothing, especially by its own population which expects to have the image of the great American spirit of generosity reinforced. So, in isolated cases like this, we come bearing alms blowing our trumpet before us, before going back to business as usual, helping subvert Haitian democracy and driving the agrarian population into an overcrowded shantytown slums which....oops.

A little action

Swim, swim aching soul
through the mighty sea of earth.
Feel the cool licking of countless teeming bodies rushing past,
how can we choose whom to breathe and whom to expel?
I cannot choose at all;
they come and go or don't,
with joys and woes, dreams and fears,
always too quick for my staggered gasps of breath.

How I would have loved them,
but my limbs are short and knobby,
my gurgling lungs atrophied for want of a good cry,
my lips unable to pray a kiss.
This human drama has me;
I fly but sink, limp and exhausted
surrendering to a solitary journey; floundering listlessly through
the golds and the roses and the tears
to the bottom, like a needle, never touching anything.

The uses of anti-intellectualism

Ask any loyal liberal about the great vices ensnaring America and one won't have to wait long before the lamentations about the exceeding dumbness of the American unwashed masses start to pour in. There seems to be a virtual cottage industry dedicated to understanding how stupid we can be. Furthermore, the story goes, not only are we dumb, but we are proud of our dumbness, and hate eggheaded intellectuals solely because they have the temerity to know things.

Now, one imagines there is a great deal of self-flattery involved in this monologue. Our hypothetical liberal professional is mighty proud of those degrees, not to mention the money he spent on it, and what better way to pass the time than imagine there is a mob of sulking parasites who are stewing in their jealousy of you. This is pretty standard behavior in a competitive society, though; substitute looks, money, athleticism, etc. and you'll find a similar attitude among many other people. Our liberal naturally thinks he is above that sort of thing, and that his learning has elevated him above such petty feelings of superiority, but, well, the line starts here.

In the political arena, of course, this is manifested by the obsession with Sarah Palin and other right-populists leaders who allegedly represent the common-sense knowledge of everyday Americans against the murky "elite" who control government, culture, and all and sundry. Liberals largely buy into this frame because, as I said, it flatters them. (I should be more careful with terms; populism need not be anti-intellectual, but it does if you can't abide the thought of philistines learning things, so liberals distrust it.)

There's just a slight problem: For a country which supposedly derides the "elites" and favors good old fashioned truth from the gut over science and the ivory tower, we have a pretty foolproof record of letting those elites do what they want with the country. We elect incumbents to Congress at a rate that would make the Politburo blush. Any kind of strike or mass protest of any kind on the level seen in other parts of the world is big news. There was some anger at the decadence of Wall Street in the wake of the financial meltdown, but it was mostly unfocused and ultimately nihilistic.

So it is somewhat puzzling then to read liberals complain that there are never any mass movements to do anything these days. No marches on the streets for single-payer health care, no rallies to end the wars, no protests for election reform or cleaning out government-by-money. Why should there be? We think our elites are doing a good job. After all, they have the credentials to prove it and there's no way that we, the uneducated toilers of the hoi polloi, would dare think we could do their job better.

How low can Joe go?

Public Policy Polling - Lieberman tanks

81% of Democrats now disapprove of Lieberman's job performance with only 14% approving, and he's not real popular with Republicans who disapprove of him by a 48/39 margin or with independents who do so by a 61/32 spread either. It all adds up to a 25% approval rating with 67% of his constituents giving him bad marks.

Conventional wisdom amongst mainstream pundits as well as many Sensible Liberal outlets is that "Blue Dog" Democrats in conservative states and districts must make a show of holding up Democratic legislation in order to electorally survive or be seen as complicit to the radical Marxi-liberal agenda of whatever corporate Democrat is in the White House. In practice, however, your hypothetical Blue Dog succeeds only in alienating everyone. Republicans will hate him or her merely for having the temerity to associate with the Global Communist Conspiracy, and progressives will be uninspired by one capitulation after another. Granted our congresscritter is in a nearly-impossible situation; she isn't likely to survive the right-wing backlash of a first-term midterm election anyway. So why take the one approach that's guaranteed not to work? Alan Grayson may lose, but he isn't going to go meekly.

Lieberman is a special case, of course, as he comes from a very liberal state and was already, for all intents and purposes, elected as a Republican in 2006. Nonetheless, it's gratifying to know that the media-darling Broderist ubermenschen act has put his approval numbers into Dick Cheney territory.

Basketball Jones

Paul Campos has found the most exquisite metaphor for our elite media's hysterical assessment of our vulnerability to terrorism.

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

He then goes on to wonder why we spend so much energy demanding a stronger government response to something with such a low likelihood of ever killing anyone.

Meanwhile, in the week that began with a terrorist incident in which no one other than the pathetically incompetent aspiring terrorist was hurt, approximately 47,000 Americans died. Around 13,000 of these people never reached old age, including nearly one thousand children.

Indeed over the past seven days approximately 350 Americans were murdered. About twenty of these murder victims were women killed by their husbands and boyfriends, while something like 35 were children who died as a result of abuse. Several hundred Americans committed suicide between Christmas and New Year’s Day and several hundred others died as a direct consequence of not having any medical insurance.

...

Another reason has to do the imaginative capacities of our elites. The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or syndicated columnist can’t really imagine not being able to afford to take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight that’s blown out of the sky. And while it’s true the risk he faces of suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are for a poor person, literally zero.

I've thought for awhile that there may be something to this; that terrorism so frightens the ruling class because it is indiscriminate and cannot be passed off to the poor the way most dangers can. Even so, however, the chances of the well-to-do perishing in some terrorist attack are much less than any number of other natural or man-made disasters. The point may be that none of those work nearly as well at, shall we say, "terrorizing" the rest of the public or acting as a red herring from other curable maladies which the rulers believe are simply necessary for keeping society ordered the proper way.