Tuesday Trio

Today is Tuesday, 22 February 2011.

1.

The second largest shareholder in News Corporation, after Rupert Murdoch and his family, is Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if bin Talal and/or Murdoch are personally anti-Semitic, but it is interesting that Fox News features the anti-Semitic ravings (especially about George Soros) of Glenn Beck.

2.

As I’ve before noted, it is the height of hypocrisy for American media figures to continue to use the term, “Big Labor”, considering that only some 12% of the USA/USE workforce is currently unionized.

Given that many, if not most, of the gains in income and benefits enjoyed today by the American workforce are the direct result of the struggles of unionists, the current attack by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), and others of his ilk, on the unions of state employees, it is evident that these attacks are meant to continue and accelerate the stagnation and rollbacks of income and benefits for all working Americans, which have taken place since the institution of “Reaganomics" in the 1980s.

Many “middle class” Americans enjoy looking down on what they perceive as the “working class”, the “lower class”, or “blue collar workers”. They must awaken: unless one is part of the tiny upper class, and can live solely on the fruits of invested capital, one is working class.

America is, in reality, a two-class society.

3.

The uproar when Dick Cheney referred to Hosni Mubarak as a “friend” to the USA/USE was entirely misplaced. Of course, an administrator of a corrupt Third World dictatorship, no matter how squalid, can be a friend to the American Empire, so long as that dictatorship serves American interests. Had the accidents of history been different, M. Gaddafi would have been gladly accepted as a partner by regimes Democratic as well as Republican.

Gaddafi’s behaviour has always been, to be polite, “eccentric”. His Mary Poppins-like brief television statement last night was particularly troubling: sitting in a vehicle in the rain with umbrella, rambling about, “I intended to stay up late with the young people in Green Square, but it started raining”. Today he was back in his old form, ranting about “drugged rats” controlled by “foreign agents”, and promising to die a martyr, if necessary. (I was put in mind of Glenn Beck, were the latter to adopt Bedouin drag. All Gaddafi needed was a whiteboard and a George Soros effigy.)

Gaddafi has never been a revolutionary; he has always been an opportunistic peronist. Perhaps his martyrdom could not come too soon.

Hosni Mubarak Is Alive and Well and...

Today is Friday, 18 February 2011.

… living in Wisconsin and Idaho.

In Wisconsin, the Republican governor and Republican-dominated state legislature are doing their damnedest to destroy the collective bargaining rights of state employees.

After all, if working six days a week for low wages was good enough for the Foundering Fathers, it’s good enough for us.

The Idaho State Board of Education has suspended the Faculty Senate at Idaho State University, as part of an attack on faculty self-governance and, ultimately, tenure.

No word on if the world is flat.
_____________________________________

Addendum: Be certain to read the comment by "rtr", detailing the consequences of the destruction of collective bargaining rights.

And keep in mind, as implied above: most of what is today taken for granted in the workplace (the 40-hour week, employer-assisted health insurance, etc.) was not the gracious grant of kindly employers. These were victories won against the power of employers and the State, victories won by the sweat and blood of workers who organized and forced the right to bargain collectively upon reluctant exploiters.

Obama and the King of Bahrain

Today is Wednesday, 16 February 2011.

Bahrain is a vicious and squalid royal dictatorship, which for large amounts of American taxpayer dollars serves as the base for the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy.

As I write, the government is brutally attacking citizens who gathered to demand that the absolute monarchy transform itself into a constitutional monarchy. At least two citizens have been assassinated by the police.

Will Obama publicly condemn this state terrorism, and threaten to cut off the cash, or will he be more concerned with preserving the projection of American state terror through the Empire's Fifth Fleet?

Whose side are you on, Obama?

Three Thoughts

Today is Tuesday, 15 February 2011.

1.

Hosni Mubarak is “breathing”, according to a “military source”. Other sources claim he is “ailing” or “in a coma”.

How convenient: at this point in history, Mubarak just happened to eat some very bad falafel.

2.

It’s official: Deutsche Borse is buying the New York Stock Exchange.

Typical.

While white con-servatives rant about the Yellow Peril, the Aryan Menace continues its march toward world domination.

3.

Pleased to note that the Office of Congressional Ethics has been challenged to investigate “my” member of Congress, John Sullivan (R-OK), for misusing my tax dollars by sleeping in his Capitol office. The IRS should also investigate to see if Sullivan is paying taxes on this fringe benefit.

After all, Sullivan must pay taxes on the free parking space fringe benefit, to lodge his car at the Capitol, so why not to lodge himself?

You may recall a previous mention of Sullivan in this space. The last time he needed substance abuse treatment, he threw a tantrum, expecting taxpayers to foot his bill at the star-studded Betty Ford Center.

Egypt: A Tiny Step

Today is Friday, 11 January 2011.

It’s no surprise that capitalist and other statist media always try to deflect attention from over-arching social/political/economic realities to the most narrowly individual. The latter allows them to attempt to convince people that the problem is one bad apple in the barrel, and not the barrel itself.

Hosni Mubarak wasn’t the “problem” in Egypt. The “problem” is, as previously noted, that the country’s entire social/political/economic infrastructure is highly penetrated and largely controlled by Egyptian Military, Inc. Mubarak was merely the thug and thief temporarily occupying the top rung of a vast conspiracy of thugs and thieves. Until the Revolution in Egypt is accomplished to the very depths, across the breadth of the land … well, again, Yeats put it best:

“Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
'Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.'”

I wish the Egyptian people all the best, but this moment is only the slightest beginning to a very long march indeed.

Reagan at 100

Today is Sunday, 6 February 2011.

I believe that it was when Gerald Ford died, and I wrote a scathing analysis of his long life of political wickedness, that I was excoriated for speaking ill of the dead. Piffle. Public wickedness, in particular, must continue to be denounced. Otherwise, we should all forget the “Jew” thing, and instead remember and thank Mr. Hitler for that cute little car.

I never saw any evidence that Ronald Reagan thought deeply about much of anything, nor had any interest in introspection or self-understanding. He appears to have carried through life a small cluster of prejudices (such as white supremacist racism) and was fortunate, when his minor career in Hollywood was fading, to be taken up by political operatives who shared those prejudices, and realized that Ronnie had an unusually large measure of the skills of the sophist: “to make the worse appear the better”.

Thus, Reagan could roundly denounce Big Government spending and deficits, while his regime nearly tripled the national debt. “Tax and spend” was bad, but “borrow and spend” was good, as if taxation would never be required for repayment of borrowed monies. Thus, Reagan could denounce tyrants and deify “freedom”, while his regime allied with Iraq to kill hundreds of thousands in a bootless attempt to conquer Iranian oil fields.

As are many non-reflective movie actors, Reagan was good at taking direction and loved being flattered. Thus, when told that regulating greed in the financial markets was bad, and that he could be a hero by “freeing the markets”, he threw his weight behind de-regulation, and his minions and myrmidons in the Republican Partea enacted the laws which would result in the Great Crash of ’08.

But, at day’s end, what matters his degree of knowledge and sources of motivation? Reagan was a long-time supporter and practitioner of state terror, complicit in the deaths of millions in Indochina, Latin America, Africa …

For that alone, as the Good Book says, he would have been better off with a millstone tied around his neck, and flung into the depths of the seas.

I pity the vast majority of those Americans who venerate Ronald Reagan on this, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Only a minority profited from the policies and scams for which he fronted. The majority got screwed, and still they revel in the falsehoods. And drag the rest of us down.

A plague on Reagan, as well as on his brother, Mubarak.

Egypt: Instant Analysis

Today is Tuesday, 1 February 2010.

So, the board of directors of Egyptian Military, Inc. (EMI) has told the Chairman that, for the good of the corporation, it’s time to let another general have a turn.

I’ll have to wait for a final translation of Mubarak’s speech of a few minutes ago, but in one section he seemed to suggest that presidential elections, which are scheduled for September, should be expedited. Were I advising the EMI board, I’d probably suggest this. The sooner the election is held, the better for them, since the opposition movements would have less time to prepare. The fact that the EMI’s political arm, the National Democratic Party, controls 82.6% of the seats in the lower house of Parliament, can’t hurt.

Much will depend on whether or not Mubarak’s not standing for re-election satisfies most of those who’ve risen, or whether they will continue the uprising, demanding significant disestablishment of EMI.

In this regard, see an article in today’s The New York Times, regarding the parlous state of the Egyptian economy: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/world/middleeast/01economy.html?hpw