The French confection

Bob Greene made me laugh this morning, writing about the magazine ad for a Hermès suitcase priced at $27,100. He thought at first it was a joke until the Hermès store in Naples Florida told him that it wasn't even their most expensive bag, which of course is diamond encrusted. This one isn't. It's trimmed in "Evercalf" leather which I suspect to be much like the "rich Corinthian" leather of Chrysler Cordoba fame, which means most of the cost -- at least $27,000 of it -- is in the trademarked name for a perfectly ordinary material. Otherwise it's just a canvas bag, or "officer canvas" as they call it, which means you may have to salute it if you're wearing a Hermès hat.

Why? Greene keeps asking, although I know and you know exactly why anyone would actually buy one at a time when more Americans are cramming their things into shopping carts and Hefty bags and wandering the streets. It's precisely because it cost $27,100 and you can't afford to toss that kind of money away on nonsense, hand stitched or not.

It's not the sort of bag most people would really notice, except that it doesn't have the silly handle and wheels that make our airports seem like farmyards full of goat carts, but then it's designed for another purpose, it's designed both to remind you and to help you forget that there are people -- millions of people trying to support families on one Hermès suitcase a year.

Hey, don't get angry. It's your money and you're taxed enough already. Under Reagan's tax structure you'd have had to make do with Louis Vuitton or perish the thought, Hartmann, so the country owes it to you and you needed to buy it now, before that Marxist in the White House restores the tax rates of that prince of Capitalism -- right?

It's not true

Nothing is true, all things are permitted
- Hassan i Sabah -

No, I didn't watch the State of the Union Address Wednesday and I haven't read the transcript and I don't care what it says because it doesn't matter. As Justice Alito said, "It's not true." Nothing is true, at least nothing that the opposition, the enemy says and we're all the opposition and we're all the enemy, listening only to ourselves and the prophets who repeat what we want to hear. We're all the majority of course; silent or otherwise and if we're also the persecuted minority, vide supra. The other guy is always Guy Fawkes, plotting to destroy order, even though order itself is the enemy and war is the goal and peace is for the weak.

As the persecuted minority, anything we do is permitted; anything even if it means selling our country to global robber barons and promoting 'every man for himself' anarchy and if we fall down, if chaos comes, we will just deny it and chant the doctrine of less government or more government or whatever it is, because nothing is true and all things are justified.

No, frankly my dear reader, I don't give a damn. I was foolish to hope that the dogs of the fallen regime wouldn't bring down the next one and that the cancer it planted in the court wouldn't aid them in setting the stage for our next Republican president, our first wholly owned president and a subsidiary of Exxon or Humana or KBR or Halliburton or the People's Bank of China. It's a small world after all and there are a lot of hungry giants.

Yes, they failed to privatize Social Security, they only partially succeeded in privatizing the military, but the goal of privatizing The Legislative and Executive branches is about to follow the privatizing of the Court. Behold the United States of America, inc - or GmbH or SA or Ltd or whatever floats the global boat. But it's not true, as the judge said. You never really wanted reform, did you? No, it never happened and this isn't happening and it's all going to be all right -- just look at the light.

HOLDEN CAULFIELD, 1919-2010

I heard the news on NPR radio yesterday while driving home in my car. JD Salinger died at the age of 91. Did we know this man? Hardly, but I remember Holden Caulfield, the young protagonist of Catcher in the Rye. It gave my generation our loner preppie attitude, but did little to prepare us for later events that would inform our lives … the civil rights struggle, the assassinations of Kennedy, King, and Kennedy, the Vietnam war, and the never-ending epoch of Tricky Dick.

The voiceover who read the obituary was accompanied by Professor Phony of No-Ho University, whose real names I can’t recall for good reason. “How exciting,” intoned the Professor, “this opportunity to find unknown stories that [Salinger] may have written for himself.”

How dreadful, I thought, to wish someone dead in the interest of academia and necrophilia, to sneak into a deceased man’s underwear and sniff his posthumously defenseless crotch.

About a writer’s relationship with his characters, who lives more vicariously through whom? A fictive character thinks the unthinkable, achieves the unachievable, does the impossible, and travels through space-time defying all laws of the Universe. When the time comes to wave a final goodbye at the dock, perhaps the more fitting tribute is to remember the hero, and give the recluse his due.

If anyone bothers to ask, I would prefer to be remembered as Octopüß and keep my shell middens hidden.

TOWARDS A MORE PERFECT BANANA REPUBLIC

Large corporations owned by the super rich receive government benefits and subsidies that make social welfare programs look like a pittance. Corporate welfare is dispensed in the form of inordinately cheap grazing rights, mineral and timber rights, infrastructure investments, agricultural price supports, and other forms of government largess paid by American taxpayers. Thus, Government works to advance corporate interests and lavishes huge subsidies and concessions on all fronts.

Recently, we have witnessed massive transfers of the nation’s wealth on bailouts and the funneling of trillions in taxpayer dollars to prop up corrupt and/or incompetent businesses while wage-earning citizens see their fortunes decline. Globalization has resulted in trade deals and other concessions that make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate world economies without having any obligation to the people of those nations. Globalization allows American corporations to evade environmental protection and labor laws by outsourcing jobs, manufacturing, and capital to overseas markets. As a consequence, our domestic labor force is coerced into making grim compromises.

Since the first federal income tax was started a century ago, there has always been a progressive tax policy, which treats various income groups according to their ability to pay. Every administration since Theodore Roosevelt, and every Western democracy, practices some form of progressive income taxation. Yet, conservatives attack progressive taxation as 'socialism,' 'communism,' or some Marxist plot. This attitude is best exemplified in the 1992 acceptance speech of Dan Quayle, who asked: “Why should the best people [my bold] be punished?”

Conservative tax initiatives from Reagan to Bush have resulted in massive redistributions of wealth from the middle class to the super-rich, the true centers of economic and political power in America today. The Result? Ten percent of our wealthiest citizens control 75% of the nation’s wealth. To rephrase this another way, 90% of the population shares a mere 25% of the nation’s wealth. Thus, three decades of conservative economic policies have created the world’s largest Banana Republic.

Meanwhile, the corporate PR consultants of K Street and their news media play a central role in providing the “necessary illusions” that make this system appear fair and democratic.  Bullshit in extremis!

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling confers full personhood to these same corporations and removes the last remaining restriction on corporate money in our political life.  If the patient were critically ill before this ruling, the situation has turned terminal.

Time to face facts: Democracy in America is dead. Elections are mere window dressing to mask the fact that Corporate America holds real power in Washington and controls every facet of American life. However, we need not accept this erosion of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; or wait for legislative fixes from a broken government forever mired in Grand Obstructive Partisanship. We must take the initiative and take charge.  Consider this post as a ...


CITIZEN CALL TO ARMS

Move your money from Wall Street to Main Street;

Make a list of corporate bad actors and
their Rhymer Wormtongues in Congress;

Vote with your consumer dollars -
Boycott corporations that abuse the system;

Write letters -
Badger your Congressional representatives.

Here is my partial list of ...

CORPORATE BAD ACTORS
Addidas, Aetna, AIG, Altria Group, Bank of America, Amway/Alticor, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Bristol-Myers Squib, British Petroleum, British American Tobacco, Capital One, Chevron, Cigna, Citigroup, CIT Group, Conseco, Disney, Exxon Mobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Humana, Imperial Tobacco, JPMorgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, Koch Industries, Lockheed Martin, Minerals Management Service, MBNA Corp., McDonalds, Microsoft, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley, Philip Morris, Nike, Northrop Grumman, Pfizer, Premera, Reynolds American, Shell, TIAA-CREF, Union Pacific, UnitedHealth Group, US Bancorp, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Wellpoint, Wells Fargo

Why wait for the Empire to strike back? If you can think of other strategies to counteract this looming menace, please speak up. Any other suggestions?

Recommended reading:

With this post, I am fulfilling a promise made to Southern Beale several weeks ago. The discussion started here and continued over a series of posts ending here.

The Ideology That Screwed The World, Part 1 and Part 2.

The failure of trickle down.

Elizabeth Warren, America Without a Middle Class.

Saved by the cops.

Who knows what Lloyd Woodson planned to do with his room full of weapons; some legal, some very illegal? It's not hard to guess from the little evidence the media gives us, hidden in the boiler-plate harem-scarum hoplophobic verbiage. Newspaper reports seem too involved with making the description of his collection as lurid as possible and not involved enough with evidence about his plans. Indeed, much of What the 43 year old, apparently African-American US Navy veteran had in his motel room was illegal and scary enough: a grenade launcher, for instance and a .50 caliber semi-automatic weapon with the serial numbers filed off. He was wearing body armor. I think we can dismiss the argument that he was not up to no good.

As usual we get the "cache of hundreds of rounds of ammunition" statement, although a recreational shooter intending to spend a few hours at a shooting range might easily go through much more than that. We get "hollow point" as though that's not what one uses for hunting anything from rats at the dump, to rabbits to elk. But, no, Woodson had just come to town, had a map of a military installation and another map of "an out-of-state civilian community." Perhaps you have a road map in your car too.

So was he planning to shoot up a Navy base? Sure sounds like it and I'm sure glad a suspicious bystander reported him and the New Jersey Police arrested him, but what surprises me is that I haven't heard the usual Fox-based outrage that this isn't being sold as a Terrorist Attack and that Fox isn't already shrieking about how Obama isn't running down the street yelling "Terrorist attack run for your lives" as they did when the underwear bomber tried to blow up a Detroit bound airliner.

That just proves that boy in the White House just isn't up to keeping us all safe, after all. The very idea that the New Jersey police would be able to stop an armed assault is part of Obama's plot to sell us on the idea that there's any other way to deal with terrorism than to be terrified into bombing some godforsaken piece of desert. It's a war on Terror, you know, not a game of cops and robbers.

GOOGLE v. THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA

Last week, the dreaded Scott Brown outcome in Massachusetts and the worst Supreme Court disaster since Dread Scott were bad news enough. Less noticed beneath the headlines is the war of words between Google and the Spy Republic of China.  Is the argument between Google and China about censoring free speech, or part of a larger global strategy? Hardly comic relief, the story is worth following for hidden implications.

Background. Although China has one fifth of the world’s population, less than 10% of its 1.3 billion people use online search engines. Before Google entered the China market, the Chinese government crippled Internet access resulting in excessive downtime, slow response times, and crashed browsers. To better serve this market, Google created a local presence in China and launched Google.cn in January 2006. In exchange for approval by the Chinese government, Google agreed to remove certain information from their search results. From the beginning, Google’s decision stirred controversy. In agreeing to the terms of the Chinese government, did Google violate its own credo, which states: “Do no evil?” Was Google acting as an accomplice in the abuse of human rights? Or acting as a change agent in the spread of democracy?

The Global Economy. Economic globalization and interdependence have a moral objective. According to theory, countries that are economically interdependent do not go to war, and countries that engage in free trade are more likely to turn democratic … so goes the argument. Thus, the best way to remove incentives for conflict between adversaries is to co-opt them into a global matrix of free trade.

For decades, these assumptions guided American international trade policy and justified Google’s decision to enter the Chinese market. “While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission,” a company spokesperson said, “providing no information is more inconsistent with our mission.” Although China remains closed in many ways, Google argues, access to information will help open the country in future years. Even Google’s archrival agrees. Microsoft founder Bill Gates defended Google’s decision, arguing that the Internet “is contributing to Chinese political engagement.”

Nevertheless, several American-based companies (including Cisco, Microsoft, and Yahoo) have been selling online and information technology products to the Chinese government, which uses the same technologies to enforce censorship and conduct online surveillance. In at least one instance, Yahoo released information about a dissident blogger, Shi Tao, whom the Chinese government arrested and imprisoned with the aid of Yahoo-supplied information. The online community and human rights watchers have reacted bitterly to what they call “the export of censorship and human rights abuse technology” by American firms.

Arrogant Overreach. The controversy over trade in “human rights abuse technology” might have smoldered just below the surface of headline news until China made this audacious play:

Exactly 4 years to the month since Google started operations, Chinese hackers penetrated Google’s e-mail servers in a politically motivated attempt to gather intelligence on known or possible dissidents. It is one thing to censor search engine content; hacking into company-owned systems to steal proprietary data ups the ante on a long festering argument. Stealing customer data is a twofold evil ... providing Google with more than ample justification to withdraw from the Chinese market.

Please note this regrettable irony: The U.S. government may have aided these hackers inadvertently. In order to comply with government search warrant requests on user data, Google created a backdoor access to e-mail account information. Nothing unusual here, many Western governments have passed laws giving law enforcement new powers of Internet surveillance. Chinese hackers subverted the access system Google had put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders.

The surveillance infrastructure that aids totalitarianism around the world has been exported by Western businesses. Nokia and Siemens built Iran’s surveillance system, and American companies helped put in place China’s police state.

Late last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named China, among other countries, as places where there has been "a spike in threats to the free flow of information" over the past year. In addition to China, she named Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. In response, Beijing accused the United States of damaging relations between the two countries by imposing "information imperialism" on China.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu defended China's policies regarding the Worldwide Web, saying the nation's Internet regulations were in line with Chinese law and did not hamper the cyber activities of the world's largest online population. "Everyone with technical knowledge of computers knows that just because a hacker used an IP address in China, the attack was not necessarily launched by a Chinese hacker," said Zhou Yonglin, deputy operations director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, in an interview carried in a number of Chinese newspapers.

The Iran Connection. The Chinese response did not end with denials of cyber attacks by alleged hackers close to the Chinese government. Within days, the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party, accused the United States of mounting a cyber army of social media such as Twitter and YouTube to foment unrest in Iran.

In other words, efforts by the West to pressure Iran into compliance on nuclear arms treaties and human rights abuses would be met with diplomatic resistance by China.

This is not the first, or the last, time China attempted to stymie efforts by the West to address human rights abuses around the world. From Myanmar to Iran, China has always asserted a “keep-your-nose-out-of-internal-affairs” policy with respect to human abuses because, to acknowledge any such abuses, would eventually point blame directly at Bejing.

Perhaps it is time to admit one more American international trade and foreign policy failure. Trade with China has resulted in the export of our manufacturing capacity, the outsourcing of our labor force, a woeful imbalance in trade and sovereign debt, and the impoverishment of our people. Perhaps it is time to face facts: Our international trade policy as a change agent is self-delusional, self-destructive, and unworthy of our values.

WTF America?

I discussed the Supreme Court campaign reform case back in September and you can read it here.

I thought at the time that this was the one issue that could rally all Americans together....but I was wrong and all I can say is "WTF America?"

When a liberatarian blogger whom I respected comes out in favor of the Supreme Court decision then its obvious that Americans no longer THINK but rather react to everything based upon where Obama stands on an issue.

Its obvious that the bogeyman known as "Liberalism" and or "Liberals" has totally dominated our way of thinking to the point where we have quit thinking and just react. We have allowed ourselves to be dumbed down to the point where we have become the human equivalent of Pavlov's dogs.

When college educated human beings, who claim to be all for individual rights and smaller government, who end up giving up their responsibility to think for themselves and are reduced to the intellectual equivalent of a knee jerk reaction everytime they hear 'Obama,' 'liberals,' and or 'liberalism,' then obviously the issues facing this country are beyond our own ability to deal with them.

Corporations are legal entitites which are formed under and by government fiat. The first modern day corporation was not established until 1844 and thus when our Founding Fathers established the concept of Freedom of Speech they did not mean to include corporations because the concept did not exist at the time.

Corporations were formed to protect investors from being liable for the debt of the business entity above and beyond their investment. They are nothing more than legal and or economic entities and it is the government's responsibility to regulate and police them.

If the investors in a company want to influence the political system then they can do so as individuals. If unions want influence politics then they should do so through their members acting as individuals. With the influence of lobbyists, special interest groups, with policies being written by representatives of corporations on K Street, and with the flood of disinformation being unleashed through all the not for profit 'educational' single issue corporations that are established on a daily basis the individual has become irrelevant.

The fundamental purpose of government is to protect and defend our country. We have a military to protect from foreign threats and we have fire and police departments to protect us from internal threats. But who protects us from the threat that greed and irrational self interests that can and does arise from the creation of wealth?

We have seen the effect of corporations and special interests in this country: From deregulating Wall Street, to tightening the personal bankruptcy codes, to turbo charging the mortgage industry by changing how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work to bailing out Wall Street because they are "Too Big To Fail...."

The impact of these changes has and will severely destabilize this country.

For quite sometime money has controlled the two major political parties, limited the ability of third parties to develop, and influenced the decision making process of our elected officials. Yet Americans want to protest the growth of government without acknowledging that that growth was funded by and benefitial to corporate interests. These same economic interests will not allow government to get smaller nor will these same interests allow government to spend less.

A large portion of these major corporations, those that make up the Standard and Poor's S&P 500, either do not pay taxes and or pay more in foreign taxes than they do in taxes to the United States, are not encumbered by the debt being incurred on their behalf BECAUSE THEY DO NOT PAY TAXES!

Now, the Supreme Court has decided that these same corporations can promote their own candidates for elected office and of course this ruling will benefit the Republicans dramatically.

I did not realize that Conservatives and Libertarians were such 'Corporatists' who were willing to sell their soul to the corporate interests to escape statism: Nothing like jumping from the frying pan into the fire....

You can only wonder what our economy would be like if corporations actually ran their businesses instead of trying to manipulate and control our political system; I wonder how profitable companies would be if they didn't spend so much money on trying to influence and control our poltical system.

Its time we quit quoting the Founding Fathers and Ayn Rand and its time we look to George Orwell for any direction in regards to our future. Conservatives and Libertarians that support this ruling by the Supreme Court fear big government because they fear...WE THE PEOPLE.

The government was the only means we had to balance the economic power of corporations and the conservative, strict constitutionalists just sold us all out!

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND A SURVEY

COMMENT MODERATION:
You have probably noticed an increase in spam-bot and troll traffic cluttering our e-mail boxes. Shall we switch on comment moderation?  Please note: Comment moderation will give us a chance to screen all incoming comments BUT will not keep annoying comments from filling up your e-mail box. Furthermore, it adds an extra administrative burden: Some or all of us will need to approve comments, and a degree of spontaneity is lost.  What say you all?  Shall we live with annoyances or switch on comment moderation?

SCHEDULING:
Blogger features a scheduling screen. I have no idea how it works; but my thought is this:  Anarchy is a Swash Zone utopia: No rules, no regulations, no guidelines; no telling people what to do; it is a relationship based on harmony, peace, and mutual trust. There are times, however, when a writer may have worked harder than normal on a post, or believes a certain topic is important enough to merit more exposure, and may want her/his post to remain at the top of the stack longer than anarchy permits. That is where the scheduling feature comes in handy.  Not having used it, however, I have no idea if this will accommodate our state of anarchy with scheduling.   What say you all?   Worth a look or fahgettaboutit!

BEYOND BLOGGER:
As some or all of you know, The Swash Zone may have sprung from humble beginnings but has grown into a popular weblog with a large daily following.  Is it time to take ourselves more seriously?  Shall we be more academic?  Are we more than merely foot soldiers in the culture wars?   Shall we continue our freewheeling ways or infuse ourselves with a sense of mission and purpose.  There are also technical considerations: Shall we move to WordPress or TypePad, or stay with what we have?

NAME UPDATE:
One more question: Is The Swash Zone a good name for us, or does it cause confusion because most folks don’t know the technical term for the place where waves break upon a beach. Please note: We can change the name of the our weblog WITHOUT changing our URL address. This means all folks who link to us will not have to update their links list. A name change is the simplest change of all. What say you all. Shall we try another name, and if so, suggestions please?

Back to the future

Only a year into Ronald Reagan's first term, some pundits were calling him a one-term president. Only hours into Bill Clinton's first term many were saying the same thing.Barak Obama hasn't been spared the would-be self fulfilling prophecy either. Republicans and the corporate interests who own them have been focusing on the upcoming elections since November 2008 and now, the Supreme Court has given them what may be just what they need to make their reconquista possible. Indeed the midterm elections may have their outcome affected by new, less restrictive rules regarding campaign spending by corporations.

"Our nation's speech dynamic is changing, and informative voices should not have to circumvent onerous restrictions to exercise their First Amendment rights,"

wrote Kennedy for the majority, setting aside a century's limited progress in separating the power of money from the power of the vote. By "informative voices" of course, he means The Insurance industry, the Health care industry, The Oil Companies and all who seek to profit by influencing and restricting our choices. That's one small step forKBR, Halliburton, United Health Care, Exxon and Cargill -- and one giant step backwards for you and me.

At a time of national outrage as concerns the true loyalties of our elected representatives, could this affirmation of the power of money over the power of the individual come at a worse time?

Today's ruling, by Big Money's representatives in the court may not change much, considering the ease with which corporations have been able to influence every last detail of our lives as it is, but it's a bad step in a bad direction.

The unbearable luxury of truth

"and how much more falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure myself regarding the luxury of my truth."

-Friedrich Nietzsche-
________________

Quick, hurry, watch this video right away before "they" pull it. Watch it before "they zap it off the internet" because it's a video of Obama admitting that he grew up with Muslims and is "one of them." Watch carefully and you can see where it was edited. It's the third one in my in-box this week and the week's not over. Videos about impaling Christian babies on the "Scimitar of Muslim justice." Obama in a Ukrainian porn video -- hurry, before it gets pulled as part of his obvious Marxist agenda! Even a dog knows better than to swallow anything from Obama, but we swallow the slander with infinite glee. In YouTube we trust and ain't it fun to hate Obama?

How many thousands of years ago was it that merely saying President Bush was embarrassing was enough to ruin your career and get you excoriated on Fox News, and reading the names of the fallen in Iraq was an outrageous attempt to criticize the president that bordered on treason? Go back and look -- quickly -- before history is rewritten.

UnitedHealth, the largest US health insurer by market capitalization, posted earnings of $944 million in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from $726 million in 2008, it was announced this morning. That's a 30% increase -- what recession?

Last week I got a bill for over $700 for some routine blood work. Good thing I can afford Blue Cross at $1500 a month with a $2500 deductible, but still, I pay in far more than I get out of it seeing as that's how private insurance works and how they need to make 30 or 40 percent to keep the stockholders fat. Good thing for UnitedHealth if the Sleaze Lords defeat "Obama's" Marxist agenda!

America hates the President, America hates the courts, hates the Congress, hates the Government. America doesn't trust science, doesn't trust educated people, doesn't trust Liberals. Americans believe they're smart, that their opinions are valid; their superstitions, their fears, their prejudices and that they're being oppressed by everyone but those who get rich from their suffering. America trusts anonymous e-mails, Rush Limbaugh and YouTube. Americans love comfort, security and luxury, especially if they have more of it than their neighbors. Of course paying for it with cash is Communism, but what's a little falsity? It's free and abundant -- and it's fun!