Ol Gringo Rides to the Explanation

*gallop*

Social Basics

To: New York Times
Re: Obama's New 50 billion Job Stimulus


Whether Hoover/Roosevelt's WPA or Hitler's Arbeitsdeinst, everyone has understood the necessity and utility of public works projects. The defect in the Administration's policy is that it conceives of such programs as temporary, stop-gap measures. They are not; such programs are only the beginning of economic recovery and stability.

A truly social conception flows from the premise that every citizen is directly entitled to a guaranteed standard of living in terms of: education, employment, housing, health-care recreation and retirement.

This is not a question of "welfare" or "minimal scroungables". It is a question of building a society that has as its broad basis (not as its limit) a soci-economic egalitarianism that protects the integrity and develops the potential of the whole person.

National Socialism understood this from the beginning. FDRoosevelt promoted this concept at the very end in his April 1945 speech about an "economic bill of rights"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effDfpKYcVo)

And of course, economic rights is the social premise of communism and social democracy. Everyone has understood the concpet except for the US ruling caste from and after LBJ. The neo-liberal premise, espoused by all administrations from Reagan to and including Obama, is that if we throw enough goodies at the rich enough of it will miss its mark and actually hit the poor...sometimes, maybe. I seem to recall that Eduardo Porter of this paper's editorial board once wrote an article entitled "Feeding the Rich feeds the Poor."

The time for this kind of thinking has come to an end. It is not necessary to abolish capitalism, but only to regulate so that it becomes the servant of society not its master.

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Supposing Truth out of Hysteria

To: Truthout

Re: John Pilger's Article on Propaganda

I'm not sure Bernays was the first to invent propaganda ... after all, Manifest Destiny was a propaganda as much as Cromwell's 'liberation' of Jamaica from the oh so dastardly Spanish.

Behind every 'liberation' there is a bete noire and what is really interesting is to hypothesize that perhaps the bete was blanc.

So returning to Bernay's 'magnum opus' ... suppose the 'dastardly' Germans never sank the Lusitania; suppose the Kaiser was right that it was the French and the Russians who started the Great War; suppose it was the dastardly English who inhumanely sought to starve the German civilian population in submission.

Suppose, Hitler was right that the Allies sought to impoverish Germany with chains of debt and to encircle her with meancing armies while she was prohibited from self defense. Suppose Canada and Mexico lopped off chunks of land from the United States and Canada held a 'corridor' from Montreal to New York City. Suppose as Chamberlain said and John Foster Dulles implied, a 'war party' in the U.S. and Britain in fact were the guilty parties who precipitated the World War.

Most people -- in fact 99 percent of them -- are almost congenitally incapable of asking liberating questions. Most of what people are taught as history is really hysteria -- that is, propaganda and myth which it is taboo to so much as question.

However, once you do start to question, you will never see the world in the same light again.

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Worshipping One's Golden Ass

To: Truthout
Re: Article on Jewish "Exceptionalism"

In the West, "Exceptionalism" -- also known as stuck up self-righteousness -- is particularly prevalent among Protestants and Jews, the main difference here being that between a sneer and a whine.

The Nazis too were steeped in exceptionalism, and Pope Pius XI's words to them in 1937 are particularly appropriate:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State or any other value of the human community— however necessary and honorable their function -- above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God and is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in anoble love of freedom and loyalty to their country [But] None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God and of a national religion, or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah XI, 15).

In so saying, Pius went to the heart of the matter: i.e. that exceptionalism which by extalting self (or tribal self) goes beyond a happy pride and ends up debasing and destroying others.

Whether this exceptionalism is Nazi, Protestant, Jewish, or German, Anglo-American or Israeli, it is all cut from the same cloth and is equally obnoxious to the rest of us.

One of the true virtues of Catholicism is the belief in Original Sin, which counterbalances individual and tribal ego with sentiments (in Latin) such as "Who am I, when the Just are mercy needing?"

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The Silence of the Monster

To:-- Truthout.Org

Re:-- U.S. Government Conspiracy of Silence Covering up Murders a Guantánamo

Since 2003 we Woodchippers have demanded that our elected representatives speak out against the Governments barbarities.

Back in June 2006 we wrote to senators (the ultra 'liberal' Barbara Boxer included) demanding that they speak out against the ongoing torture at Guantanamo. Of course we had no way of knowing that the suicides were murders. What we did know was that Washington's dismissal of the suicides as reflecting "no regard for life" was a "depravity" that bespoke the "moral putrefaction" that pervaded the government.

Back in 2005 we protested the "pulpification" murder of a 22 year old Afghani cab driver by US Army goon interrogators who strung him up at beat him to death over a four day period; and back in 2003 we excoriated the beyond belief brutality of the Guantanamo camp commander who dismissed detainee suicides as the acts of psychiatric cases with mental problems... Problems caused by US provided torture.

So when the 2006 "suicides" came to light we wanted to know: "When are you and your supine colleagues going to show some impulse other than craven ambition and political cowardice? When will you recover a sense of shame? When will rise up and speak out against the depravity of this Administration and the culture of thuggery that has seized Washington?"

We never received an answer. We never heard a peep.

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A Zig Zag Wall

To:--Truthout

Re:--A report on the Christians Only hiring policies of "World Vision" an international NGO charity that receives public US funds

1) I am *very* suspicious of anyting USIA is involved in. 2) I was never fooled by Obama's pseudo-progressivism. 3) I am not entirely at ease with fundamentalist networking in the Pentagon and other branches of government.

HOWEVER, I would put a brake and a gag on anti-clerical, atheist, secularist rants. The idea of a "wall of separation" between Church and State is yet another absurdity from the lexicon of Jeffersonian Conceits. Church and State intersect all the time and always will. The delicate rule fashioned by the US Supreme Court is that state action (1)must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion and (3) must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion. --

In applying this standard to World Vision, the following should be taken into account: 1) what percentage of its operations are overseas, and not in the USA and 2) what the taxpayer monies specifically fund. The Establishment Clause was directed against the oppressiveness of officializing a particular creed and requiring religious conformity for office holding and receipt of government benefits. I do find it hard to see how those evils are implicated here.

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Badgering Peter to Pay Back Paul

To:-- San Francisco Chronicle

Re:-- Jewish Complaints about Pope Benedict's Upcoming Visit to a Synagogue in Rome

It is irrational and obsessional to be grinding an axe against Pope Pius XII for supposedly "not doing enough" to "save the Jews." What was he supposed to do, with what? when? and on the basis of what knowlege?

Jews who harbor these resentments seem to think that the entire conflict revolved around them and that "saving the Jews" ought to have been everyone's top priority. This is petulant nonsense. The actual nature and extent of Nazi exterminations was not known until 1945. The Pope was the spiritual leader of Catholics who were embroiled in the conflicts and were themselves (laity and clergy) persecuted by Nazis. The entire continent was being blasted into rubble as millions were slaughtered in battles and bombings and dying of starvation as refugees -- and what? Pius was supposed to what? Climb some mountain and say "Stop, I say, stop! whatever you are doing to Jews!!"

Benedict should give up on "relations" that boil down to no more than Jewish bullying and badgering.

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Discovering Obama

To:-- Socialist Worker

Re:-- Waking up to the Disappointment of Obama

One did not have to wait for the summer Onion crop to cry over Obama. Back in November 2008, we chipsters wrote: "We are sorry to rain on the party, but Obama is not going to introduce any fundamental change to the neo-liberal regime... Domestically and diplomatically Obama will provide some emollients and better manners, but I doubt little else."

There will be no change until Americans wake up to the reality of what they call "their" country; and this will require them to discard 90% of what they believe to be evident and true.

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