Bye!

JackSilverman economics blog has found closure. But: how cruel of me --- to leave the political blog hanging!

-Jack S.

CNN Reporting ...

Giant companies buy other companies but that does not help a young man with Crohn’s disease. He lacks insurance. He is not so happy ...needs $640 worth of medicine, but his need is bigger than his weekly paycheck. Everyone in our society is completely happy, of course, except, of course, for those who aren't.

So, he’s been going without medicine, and he's in and out of hospital. 29 miners just died the other day, in the coal industry, which is one of the most exploitative and irresponsible industries that exist, and has been exposed as such.

Our country cheerfully presents us with this stuff. It is the news.

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regarding the coal industry:

[In] " ...Jeff Biggers’ new book, Reckoning At Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal In The Heartland..." "he quotes a friend: “The abuse of the land is always connected to the abuse of the people.” ..."

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Arizona does not want the baddies, or their darned drugs!

This is from a blog and it is the text of some comments by Arizona governor re. controversial immigrationa bill:

"
There is no higher priority than protecting the citizens of Arizona. We cannot sacrifice our safety to
the murderous greed of drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and
violence compromise our quality of life.
"

So, of course ---- all that nasty stuff will just move to another state.

Obama

Analysed dispassionately this man impresses us, first of all, with his competence.

One weakness of his was that he could be called a scion of the establishment. (Maybe not scion exactly, but, Well---you get the idea, right?) It is reasonable. We can come to the conclusion that Obama was pretty much a creature of the intellectual elite class in America.

Obama is more of a certified member of the U.S. elite than other recent presidents --if, by elite, we mean a quality of education and not that of the business sector, like the two Bushes; nor the entertainment sector like Reagan; nor old wealth, like, again, the Bushes. One salient difference is that Obama, unlike others, never had a career in business, nor business law in any event.

Nor entertainment. He is instead a lawyer and a community activist or organizer. That is a good stepping off place for a democratic society to select its president from. Being a community activist is fairly close to being a president.

They're a bit different also --- and one test of Obama's first term is how well he makes the transition.

Palin

Americans are mean. They love to villify others.
Ever notice that?
Or do you not have any idea about it? You're the innocent one, I suppose.
Let me get my camera and get a snapshot of this.

Palin holding to chest Down's syndrome child, her daughter. Poses she for photo-op ---- she pointing finger, she villifying enemy, this the necessary enemy. You horrible horrible man. You called my child "retard."

She a witch. She a Killer Witch. She a total, diseased fraud, a big liar, making her diseased accusations. (I called her a "she") Let's hear what she has to say now, let's tune in to the actions, exactly as they happened ("literally"):

Who are you, you "other"? Who let you into my America? Where do you come from, buster? You aren't one of us. What babies do you abuse? Why are you in my free market? How dare you stand before me. With black skin. Calling baby a retard. You have foreign accent. You not like us. Where is your washing machine? Where are your hair clippers? Where are your qualifications?

Segue back to 1971:

Innocent handsome Warren Beatty, looks at world with wide eyes. He is the opposite of Palin. Sensitive. He is open minded, he looks at world around him with open eyes, and handsome, too. And he innocently opens his handsome eyes and looks 'round. And out and around and out at world, and what does handsome man in wide belt see? ---- he sees right-wing bitch, and one who is being treated by the mainstream press as legitimate, a celebrity, a person in the news. She the would-be political leader is ranting about feelings hurt. Someone -- one of those "libs" -- Limbaugh won't do -- used the word "retard" either on national T.V. or in some private meeting. Or something.
Would the wide-eyed handsome young man confronting the world in his innocence, who opens his eyes and asks of world, "What do I see?," now an older Beatty, observe that, after all, Americans love to villify one another? He would then retreat into a hotel room. With a bottle of Scotch (today made from the new "witch malt")

if he could find one in Palin's moralizing universe.

The Best Days of Europe

The best days of Europe were in Greece, from 460 to 420 B.C. This happened in one little corner of the ancient world.
What Hitler did was unspeakably awful. The Romans were usually doing wrong things. They may have had some redeeming qualities from 400 B.C. to 200 B.C., when they were a republic. Yet we fail to condemn Rome for raping the Sabines and many other acts. This made it easier for Hitler, who openly admired what the Romans did. We bring these things on ourselves by failing to condemn evil.

NO characteristics

"Culture" is known to be a difficult word. It is a deep and expressive linguistic "sign" (as the semioticians would say) that can be looked at from many angles. But at any rate, one of its meanings is that of a group of persons that has its own characteristic way of being, or of doing stuff.
Liberal modernity is a cultural system that persons live in. The culture they live in has been called the "developed world." But liberal modernity is a bit different in that it is not a culture wherein a group of persons look at things in some particular characteristic way that is held in common by all members and that comes as naturally to them as breathing. This is the sense of "culture" we briefly visit just above. And it works fairly well, right up until we get to this new thing, the "modern" thing. Here is a "culture" where things are looked at from many if not all angles. Any and all angles. Yet this is exactly what we need to understand in a more comprehensive fashion.

In the other cultures the entire group sees things in one particular way. Not so in the system most high-income persons live in today. Which is "the" characteristic way of their looking at things? Even the functional division into "left" and "right" is deceptive because the truth is that there are many ways of looking at things in modern urban developed culture, not two.

There is no reason to believe that human beings can live without culture. Culture, the anthropologist tells us, is universal. Everyone needs culture, and you cannot live without it. Everyone needs to have an ordered life. We see that "culture," is a particularly difficult word to define. But it is always there and this because it is an ordering system. At least up until these days, because now I am not so sure there is an ordering system. If there is, who is in charge of it? The hedge fund managers? Goldman Sachs? Or is culture itself in charge? There is something ominous about the way things are going, when everything comes down to economics --- yet this “economics” is about stock market and hedge fund and derivative. That seems ominous. What all human groups need has something to do with [sorry, anarchist communities] order. It is hard to see order coming from capitalism as it now operates --- consisting of a kind of a poker game, one wherein you need the main players to follow the rules.
But what kind of "cultural" rules are the rules of the stock market? Humans require some kind of order. Humans, like most animals, always live in some kind of society (sorry, "rugged individualists;" sorry, those who don’t like government).
This point brings us to the crux of what seems to be a looming problem with what has up until now been, for some folks, a successful system. As our modern, liberal, open, tolerant society has existed and as it continues forward, it shows a disturbing tendency towards being a system with no characteristics.

Optimism, Confidence, and Self-Aggrandizement

A short biography on Bob Dole has come into my possession. It is by a very good writer, Richard Ben Cramer, and it is called "The Faith to Endure." As I was glancing at this title I thought of another title, that of the recent Mitt Romney book: I think it was called "No Apologies." The titles struck me as being somehow similar to one another. Then my mind linked all of this to this one front page feature I saw in USA Today. It was all about optimism and how Americans are congenitally optimistic, etc.

All strikes me as somehow the same thing.

Tobacco Pentagon Virus

"The Pentagon is backing a plan to use tobacco plants to make H1N1 vaccine.." WSJ, Wed. Feb. 24th, 2010

That's on the frontpage in the sidebar part or the part off to the left in the paper, consisting of brief news "flashes."

When I read something like that, my thoughts tend to be of all kinds of ominous things like: which country we will now invade to corner the market on tobac? Will we not have to invade some other country to gain access to their "tobacco markets"? Is that what's next?

Attacking people to subjugate their political systems is one thing. Are going to attack in order to get their plants now? Blood for tobacco?

Breaking News from Af

I like Afghanistan. I owned a book about it years before it became a popular countries for hot news breaking dispatches, but the latest WSJ dispatch from Af relates that Hamid Karzai has kicked (over or kicked) out the independent elections board.

A real good move, buster. Or does that sound insulting? To say to a president? Possibly I would not get far in Af politics, but, at any rate, it says in this prestigious paper called the Wall Street J that Hamid K -- his father was assasinated but nevertheless I seem to have never heard a good word about him from any informed source -- not the ones that I trust, anyway -- and who mainly seems to think we will like his hat or his green whatever that he wears (honestly, all that I do remember is green) that he was photographed in...

Alright. Sorry. That is a run-on sentence. The point is: persons are very shall we say individual, or non-affiliated, in Afghanistan. Individual or wild or independent or regional or tribal---whatever. It is known as more of a collection of feuding warlords or something. Now here comes K. and he says he is unifying the whole thing.

Oh all right; but, historically shpreeking that's no easy trick.

Man, pol blogs are sure easy to write.

-j.S.

p.s. - right. but the way to do it is by kicking out the independent election overseers. Oh right. So that is the first step towards unifying Afghanistan? What OTHER evidence does Karzai have that "today Afghans are ready to take over the leading role in every aspect of governance........" That's Hamid Karzai's spokesman, Hamid Elmi, reports the WSJ. What does that sound like? Smooth. It sounds too smooth. It sounds like somebody went to an American university and learned how to talk. To learn how to talk like elites. Like he learned how to talk the talk. Karzai is a dignified, proud-looking person, who wants to form a government of Afghanistan. But can he? (and I still say this shit is easy to right) ...So he mastered the American language, big deal. (I'm still reeling from this brilliant insight of mine. Can I please take over America now?)

View (From the Other Side of the Screen)

Real-Time transcription of T.V.-watching by Jack Silverman

It's called Breaking News. That's what it says on the screen. In the middle of the morning CNBC brings us some kind of public meeting between the nation's assorted political expertologists.
___________________________________________________________________________________
The politicians on T.V. are worried about something going wrong. They appear to be Vigilant. Apparently vigilantly watching the economy.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Here are Bernanke; and, various Congressmen. I'd like to see the private meetings and not just the televised ones. The Fed is a controller of interest rates and money supply. Abstractions. Which, we believe, matter.
____________________________________________________________________________________
What we see.
Various members of the legislature declaim their profundities. Bernanke. Well-trimmed beard. B. replies to a bald-headed congressman. We see nothing on the screen - no words I mean - to identify him; to clarify. Which is he? Dem. or R.?
____________________________________________________________________________________
The philosophy followed by the Fed -- and others -- is that the fundamental choice is between easing and tightening credit.

_______________________________________________________________________________
------------....-------- ......... Tightening or Easing: what's it gonna be?

___________________________________________________________________________----------
It's as tricky as a three-cornered hat.

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Repub's don't care about content. They care about posturing. But they don't even know it themselves. It's not that Democrats don't posture. Andrew J. invented it (the first president to use marketing techniques). The R's tried to corner the market on decency and sobriety and straightness --- they've been out-cornered by reality itself.

Now we see 'em in their pink ties... (btw, I had wrote more, but I decided to cut it off here)
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MSNBC WEBSITE

"...announcement [that Sunnis have quit election, etc.] raises the likelihood that the results of the vote will be called into question. U.S. and United Nations diplomats have expressed fears that a Sunni boycott that hands victory to Shiites would throw the results of the election into doubt. In turn, that could open the door to a new round of violence" [this quote is from msnbc]

Naa...

Violence is how Iraq works

"Violence"? Come on! They stoppped counting at 500,000 dead Iraqi civilians. There is practically no one left standing in the entire country! So the Sunnis are boycotting the election. Boo hoo. Let them boycott. That's how Iraq works. They work by violence, not elections. Come on, msnbc. You are awfully easy to reply to, you know that? Ha ha ha. This is all part of an ongoing Iraqi process.

We all know what Iraq's main concern is ---- to limit or end the violence. That is important. Violence and elections go hand-in-hand, and I do not mean just in an election season. But ongoing, year upon year, there is no qualitative difference between elections and violence in Iraq. It is all wound up in the same fabric.

Will guys like Brown be able to replace the Republican Jokes?

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Here is a somewhat belated entry about the victory of soon-to-be Sen. Brown of Mass. I admit it. I'm hoping to see the new Republicans. For example, I would rather have folksy Huckabee than connected rich wombat Womney, although this is only a sentimental projection of my feelings, as Huckabee would certainly be incompetent.

I do not really find such a victory as Brown's all that hard to understand. Then again, maybe this is because I am better than I know at the political game. I am pretty good at political thinking. Such a genius. Or am I too just a Silly Wabbit? Here's my brilliant post, then, for today, that I wrote already but then forgot to POST~~~!!! (silly wabbit!!!):

* * *

People don't like Democrats. What we may have, and we should, is a new kind of Republican. We need this because Joke Republicans are insufficient for a great country.

Untitled

As I enter the BP convenience store -- it is the store connected with the pumps where you pour gasoline -- I think that they are like fascists here and that the persons running the BP do not want the customers to have personal contact. I think that the operators of the gas station do not want the human beings to socialize. Of course, there is a lot of truth to these observations of American society. I experience it that way and I imagine the clerk barking out to customers: "you are not allowed to interact!!" I do not like the world. I am disturbed by it.
But yet I am not sure that the BP store is intentionally reducing human social interaction. I'm going a little bit too far? Maybe the Pope smokes dope, too, it's not impossible. It's a relationship --- between the BP store and the customers.
And (a slightly different query) what is the relationship that involves both capitalism on the one hand, and sociality on the other?
Sociality first of all is not against the law --- you could not outlaw it --- it is not something under the purview of the law at all. Sociality is not regulated by law, and neither can the law can induce it, or create it where it is not. That is not really what law does.
Social contact is not under the purview of law because it is more up to the persons themselves. Socializing is your own choice. Isn't it? It is more something people do on their own. But my theory is this.
It is that this however is not to say that white people do not need a little help socializing. Oh there I go being controversial. But they are just too cut off from one another; and capitalism helped them get that human contact, in a round about fashion. There are the known attempts to regulate socialization. But these attempts to control human sociality are authoritarian, and they are extremes. Of these, first we come to fascism (or I could also call it the fascistic kind of authoritarianism), which attempts to regiment people and regards social behavior as a weakness; then the other main method is what we call socialism, which goes the opposite way and promises utopia trying to force or induce cooperation. But at any rate, both wind up in the losers' circle, as far as I am concerned. They are authoritarian, with the caveat that the left does dress itself up in the sily dress of a kind of fancy talk. They might have a more compelling silkier dress with lots of fancy theory. It's a fancier version of fascism. I'd better truncate this discussion at risk of becoming a fancy Dan myself.
Social interaction in most cases needs to be improved. Obviously the BP is not doing that. It is questionable that the state is the one to do it, either. On the other hand there must be something someone can do to keep us from being so isolated and alone.

How would one preserve the peace?
How would one preserve the freedom?

The human system is always a hard thing to understand. We normally live in it --- rather than it being the case that we “understand” it. That is to say that the kind of understanding that is relevant is participatory rather than being judgmental. We do not necessarily understand it and we do not necessarily have access to any kind of an aerial snapshot or theory about life, because we are of it and “in” it.

I am interested in the overall society. I am interested in how the persons that normally interact with and relate to one another, and who make up what we call society, can simply do so without killing one another. So how do you do that? The alternatives on society's plate for regulating (a word substitution might be "governing") the situation are quite limited.

Go to my economics blog; you could perhaps get a few hints there.

Tweet-Style1

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Jack says:

America is a concept that should be shared with the world;

Not a "confidential memo" Palin sends to her spoiled brats.

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Always Two Groups

Life the way we know it could be called our collective experience. We know all about Western civilization, meaning all of the white societies. Confining ourself to just those, and to this collective experience, what can we say about these societies? What can we say about those societies we can definitively testify about, the white ones? White societies -- when you study history -- are all divided into two groups. That is so. It could be more, too, I know, but let's basically say two, for simplicity, OK? At any rate, there's a basic division that is always there, although in the U. S. we have something unique --- a tendency to deny it. As if we are all "equal." The truth is that there are these two (or could be more) classes of person in all the human societies we know about -- the ones we know intimately. I can tell you what they are, but just think for yourself, OK? Is that hard? It must be very scary.

Think about your experience of life and YOU can be the expert instead of me.

We don't need to get anthropological. Our societies that we know all have something in common and this is that there is an official group and a low-income group. One gets into the record books, as it were. There is a record of "the Romans," not the slaves, who, come to think of it, would be called Romans, too. But the name of a slave is only recorded once in awhile. The system is not set up to record their existence. But we know they do exist -- this other group exists, and we know it quite well, but it is one that everyone ignores. They are as if part of the woodwork. Something like that. So one group is "famous." The other is not even official -- officially included in our cultural discourse. As if they are totally unknown.

But I am not saying excluded. That would be something different.

They are not important enough. So, I couldn't say excluded. They are ignored, not excluded. They are not important enough spend that much time on. Persons are too much of a reality to be excluded. Anyways, the lower classes have an important role. Therefore: your society has to include everyone but some are relegated to the lower class.

It is that they are not usually important enough to be written about. Oh yeah, I know about "Children of Sanchez," by Oscar Lewis. So that's why I am not in college. And the next volume he wrote was "Pedro Martinez," which I recently purchased. Used.

Still, I am basically right about this. And: How can we pretend everyone is equal when they are not?