More Politics
I see that Olympia Snowe (R-ME) has decided not to run for re-election to the Senate. She’s complaining that it has become ‘too partisan’. And who would be responsible for that change, Senator Snowe?
There also seems to be reporting that Bob Kerrey will run again for the Senate to fill the seat being vacated by Ben Nelson in Nebraska. Bob Kerrey is not something that the country needs at the moment.
It looks like the Mittser finally passed the 15% point with wins tonight in Arizona and Michigan. He has managed to hold off the flood of ‘St Santorum’. People are apparently buying his ‘electability’ scam.
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I think Olympia Snowe is quite aware of who made the Senate “too partisan”, given the many attacks on her by her fellow Republicans for not being “partisan enough”. She basically had a choice of switching to the Democratic party or saying enough is enough and simply quitting. She chose the latter.
The political choice would have been to go independent and let the parties bid for her vote. That would have been the best decision for Maine, as it would have given her more power than she already had, without putting up with the “Party line” crap.
OTOH, the Senate could use some new blood. Hopefully someone with an actual functioning brain.
She’s basically been excommunicated by the religious zealots that are today’s GOP, so she couldn’t shop her bid to them. So she was sort of stuck, she had to go “independent caucusing with Democrats” if she was to remain relevant but she would have basically had no real influence with the Democrats because they would have known that she was caucusing with them only because she had to, not because she wanted to, meaning none of the plum perks that Holy Joe got for caucusing with them rather than the Republicans (one reason why Holy Joe supported McCain in 2008 was to dangle before the Democrats the possibility of bolting the party altogether, in hopes of getting new perks — and it worked). Hardly a recipe for being able to do things good for her state.
Frankly, I think she made the best decision for Maine. She wouldn’t have been effective as a Democrat and she was clearly not going to be able to be effective going forward as a Republican. Time for new blood, as you say.
-BT
At this point I don’t think anyone is going to be effective at anything other than blocking legislation in the Senate. The only thing that would break the dead lock is dumping the filibuster and I doubt the Senators want to give up that much power to democracy. The same goes for ‘holds’. These things may have worked when there were sane people in Congress, but they don’t work now.
Sooner or later there is going to have to be basic changes made. The sooner it happens the less the amount of blood that will be spilled. Pushing every thing until after the election, is just postponing the disaster and making it worse.
Sooner or later there is going to have to be basic changes made. The sooner it happens the less the amount of blood that will be spilled.
That reminds me of why FDR, a scion of a Republican family, a conservative governor of New York State, and a wealthy man himself, behaved in such a liberal manner when he became President. He looked at that exact same calculation and realized that if basic changes were not made, the nation was going to explode and blood was going to flow in the gutters.
Unfortunately I see no FDR’s in our current political system. The Republicans are venal and the Democrats are craven. Those who have the vision to see what must be done lack the courage, and those who have the courage, possess no more vision than a toddler clutching a precious to himself and shouting “Mine! Mine!”. Personally, I do not expect the current political system to be able to sustain itself for much longer, it can be sustained only with ever-increasing increments of force to the point where we have more people in prison both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of population than Stalin ever had in his gulags, and we’ve already surpassed the East German STASI for the number of criminal justice personnel (police, guards, probation officers, etc.) as a percentage of population. The rag is being squeezed tighter and tighter and the tighter it gets, the more desperate people get. It’s a slowly widening pool of gasoline in the middle of the body politic, and when a spark happens… bad things. VERY bad things.
And the only solution of the Republicans is to pour more gas onto the future bonfire, and the only solution of the Democrats is to retire to their fainting couches at the horror of it all. WASF.
– Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
We can see it coming, but the ‘professional politicians’ don’t seem to understand how close to chaos things really are. Things were nearly this bad when there were events like the San Ysidro McDonalds massacre. Desperate people do terrible things, because they have no reason not to. Conditions force them outside of the society they thought they were part of, and then they were cut-off from it by economic circumstances. People snap, and it starts with individuals and grows.
While ‘officials’ are watching Kosher delis owned by Iranian Jews, or the Occupy movement, really dangerous people who already have the means in their homes and hiding places, are free to work themselves into a frenzy fueled by the statements of people running for political office.
The riots in Athens are minimal compared to what happened in Watts and other large American cities. If things don’t change we will see those times again.
Bryan, if we didn’t have the bottom 3% of our population in prison right now (with another 2% on probation at any given point in time), Watts II would already be underway. See the story on my web site about the kid in Detroit who gets to eat supper only every other day because there isn’t enough food for all the kids in the family, and the two-month waiting lists to be allowed to use the food pantries in Detroit. That’s the breaking point, when there isn’t enough food despite full shelves at the supermarkets, and we’re there. The 5% is what I mean when I say that this is unsustainable, the only way that the system is keeping the explosion from happening is by putting more and more people into prison, but past a certain point you can’t afford enough prisons and enough police and enough guards and enough parole officers to make that a viable strategy… not without turning the whole nation into a larger-scale version of North Korea, anyhow. And I don’t think that’s possible, there’s just too many guns floating around this country and no Confucian culture here for that to be a viable end-game for the oligarchy.
But sometimes I think our oligarchs want that explosion, why is the GOP government of Michigan kicking people off of food stamps when children go to bed hungry? Sure, they’re heartless automatons who have no idea what it’s like to actually be hungry (except voluntarily on one of the fad diets they’re so fond of), but they must know that sooner or later things will boil over. Do they *want* this to happen, so that they can get rid of Posse Comitatus and have the Army do a Fallujah on Detroit? They’ve been upset about all those blacks in Detroit soiling their Aryan state ever since the blacks moved up during WW2 to work in the tank factories, is this their end game of a genocidal plan? Do they *really* think they’ll get their desired result? Yes, the Army is mostly Southern crackers now, but still. The *President* isn’t a Southern cracker, and the Army still obeys the President. I hope. Because if that’s not true, we’re *really* fucked.
Badtux the “Is it paranoia if it really could be true?” Penguin
Basically you have the 1% making decisions, and they aren’t very smart. I don’t think they really understand where this is heading or how close we are to the edge.
Yes, there are a lot of Southerners in the military, and the South has a ‘thing’ about Federal troops being used for civil purposes. That is rather ingrained. They might go against ‘evil foreigners’, but I don’t see them ready to go against Americans. The National Guard is about as far as they can escalate.
I wouldn’t want to fight in an American city without air support. There are a hell of a lot of guns in most of them, and any action like that would set off the militias and survivalists. Things would escalate very quickly.
Well, in Fallujah the Air Force made the rubble bounce, the Army would advance, take fire, call in the Air Force, and a few hundred yards of urban renewal later would advance into the area that’d just been ‘cleared’ — almost literally, pink mist and all. A couple hundred American soldiers died in that operation, but if they’d not had air support the death toll would have been much higher.
I’m not as sure as you about the antipathy of Southerners about the Army being used domestically. I recall that when the Army was deployed into New Orleans post-Katrina, there was a lot of support for arming them to deal with the “savages” (a.k.a. African-Americans) who were supposedly running wild like some stereotype from KKK literature. Southerners may recall General Sherman and Little Rock, but they also loves them some keepin’ them darkies in their place, yo, and that’s Detroit — New Orleans North when you look at the demographics.
But the U.S. military isn’t going to go into Detroit this year, so why are the oligarchs trying to create riots in Detroit this year? Unless maybe they’re nervous about Obama, and want to create an incident that will embarrass or “discredit” him and cost him the November election, but given the clowns the Republicans are running against Obama this year I can’t think that the oligarchs are seriously displeased with Obama, otherwise they would have cut off his money and funded a real Republican candidate instead of the circus sideshow they instead funded. Plus once summer starts Detroit grows its own food — a large percentage of the vacant burned-down houses have been cleared and turned into community gardens — so the riots would have to happen in the next few months otherwise the food from the community gardens will ease things enough to keep the riots from happening, and if they happen in the next few months Obama has plenty of time to spin that around to “see what happens if you have Republicans in charge?”, so I can’t think this is the oligarchs’ plan. Unless they want the riots to happen, *then* blame it on Republicans, just to ensure that Obama gets re-elected by margins large enough to give him a mandate to push through the oligarchs’ plans, i.e., they’re playing a double-Machiavelli here…
But probably I’m overthinking this. Our oligarchs are, by and large, *dumb*. They mostly got their wealth by being winners of the lucky sperm club (i.e., inherited it), not through hard work and intelligence. Chances are they really *don’t* expect riots to happen if they cut off the supply of food to the majority of Detroit’s residents, they really *do* expect their beautiful police state to be able to lock up more and more people, despite the number of people *already* locked up being at historical highs not seen in even the most tyrannical police states of the past. In which case they’re going to be woefully surprised when the whole edifice starts collapsing… sadly, they’re like cockroaches, they’ll just scurry off somewhere else rather than be guest of honor at a necktie party. Sigh!
The main problem for the future is that more and more of the ‘leaders’ of the country in all areas haven’t got a clue about how things really work. The CEOs don’t know what their companies actually do; the political leaders don’t know how government functions; no one seems to know anything about how the economy works; etc. There is a total lack of practical knowledge about the world. Ideology has replaced facts. There are a lot of facts I don’t like, but that doesn’t make them any less true, but too many of the people with power, do think that only the facts they like are real.
We definitely do not need a long, hot summer. Bad things happen during those periods, and things spiral out of control.
That’s what happens when the majority of the owners of the country inherited their wealth and have never worked for a living. They have no idea what the companies they own do, just that they’re money generating machines, and thus no way to hire people to run their companies who actually know what they’re doing, and the same goes with the politicians they fund for election (who are the usual winners of elections thanks to the propensity of Americans for voting for the candidate with the slickest / most omnipresent ads rather than the best candidate). Ideology is all they have to guide them, because ideology is the only thing they have that excuses their possession of all this unearned wealth.
Detroit may be an exception to the long hot summer thing. Government has pretty much ceased to exist in Detroit outside of a small part of the city core, so summers in Detroit are a busy time for young men and women as they clear abandoned houses to make room for community gardens (not to mention planting and caring for those community gardens), make whatever makeshift repairs they can make to the infrastructure to keep the water and sewer working, and otherwise live the libertarian dream. Thing is, they don’t exactly view it as a dream. More a dystopian nightmare where they’re working harder than Americans have had to work for decades just for survival, gone back to being peasant farmers squatting on unwanted land like some Latin American dictatorship dominated by latifundia. I don’t think there’s going to be riots in Detroit in the summertime. Everybody’s too tired.
There are so many places in such bad shape that the trouble could start anywhere. That’s why things like the CCC and WPA were important – they kept large numbers of people occupied, as well as doing something useful for the nation.
Too many of the people with power have no real connection to the country anymore, and multinational corporations certainly don’t have loyalty to anything but themselves. We have ‘free-traded’ that loyalty away.
Detroit may be the future of US urban areas, especially those that are dependent on personal vehicles, with the suburbs not far behind. Growing your own food may be the only way you can be sure of not being poisoned by corporate agriculture. I wish them well.
It reminds me of the final days of the Roman Empire. The empire is collapsing, and the rulers continue to prance around in their palaces as if all is well, completely divorced from the reality around them, even to the point of beheading their last decent general after he loses a battle because they think he threw the battle despite being outnumbered horrendously by the invading barbarians.
And I shall sign off on that note.
Maybe the ‘fat cats’ will clog the drain before we get there, Badtux. That’s about as optimistic as I can get.