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November 22, 2007
November 18, 2007
You can tell when he's mad
Colin McNickle is even more livid than usual today, storing up and spewing forth the kind of righteous indignation that you could only expect if Waylon Smithers saw a threat to the very moral legitimacy of C. Montgomery Burns's fortune. These days Richard Mellon Scaife probably doesn't even have to remind his loyal assistant when to respond with force to an attack; like Pavlov's dog, he does it all on his own, and with peculiar ferocity. The offending comment, this time, is from Warren Buffett, who says: "A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy."
Colin knows what to do, and barks not twice but thrice: "Buncombe! Balderdash! And tommyrot!"
November 15, 2007
Missed Cindy
Cindy Sheehan was unable to make it to the Merton Center awards dinner tonight because of another personal tragedy. She was the awardee, so you figure that would have made things difficult, but it did not dampen attendance.
I'm at best tepidly in favor of her run against Nancy Pelosi, not because it would do any harm (there is no danger of an even worse warmonger winning in Pelosi's district), but because I don't think it's the sort of thing that will accomplish much. Sheehan is also targeting Pelosi specifically on the impeachment stuff, which I think is a tactical mistake. We should focus on the war itself, not to mention other issues; the very nature of impeachment proceedings does not move things politically in our favor, I think. Not that I wouldn't have voted for the pending resolution that Kucinich proposed if I were in Congress myself (ha!).
Sheehan's steadfastness as an activist has been impressive, even after the peak of her usefulness to the movement. To the extent that she's been isolated politically, it is less because of her own mistakes and more because the enemy attacked her so ferociously precisely because she was such a threat.
November 11, 2007
US infant mortality
The CDC reports 2004 statistics that show US infant mortality at 7 per 1,000, but with black babies two and a half times more likely to die than white babies. Save the Children last year ranked the USA near the bottom of industrialized countries in this statistic, tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia and just ahead of Latvia.
The freedom veterans fought for, perhaps?
November 10, 2007
Norman Mailer, RIP
Norman Mailer died today. Apparently he started believing in God towards the end of his life. I wouldn't call him a sellout for this, since old folks are entitled to their foibles (within limits, of course), and in the unlikely event that his cosmology was true, I hope he has a good fuggin time in the afterlife, wherever he ends up.
November 07, 2007
90 years of struggle
On this day ninety years ago, our historical epoch began: the epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Since then there have been great advances and setbacks of world-historical disappointment, but the arc of history is long, and we either get there or we perish as a species under the disasters that capitalism creates.
Since and as a result of the storming of the Winter Palace, Russian rural landlord peonage and illiteracy were wiped out; hundreds of millions were freed from colonial bondage in Asia and Africa and the back of Jim Crow was broken in the United States; and workers in Europe, the United States, Japan and elsewhere were able to move beyond the horrors of the early industrial revolution and its "dark satanic mills." All of these achievements were conceded by capital in direct proportion to its fear of being wiped off the face of the earth forever by the concerted actions of the people -- and to the extent that we have backslid, sometimes drastically, it is because no one is instilling that proper fear in the hearts of the capitalists.
Our decades- and centuries-long transition is not inevitable and will not happen by accident. It requires the conscious action of people who are ready to "storm heaven." And it will happen again, no matter the defeats of recent years. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again, clashing its weapons, and will proclaim with trumpets blazing: "I was, I am, I shall be!"
