Archives for category: Politics

Scotland!

September 16, 2014 //

September 16, 2014

Yesterday’s adventures included finally finishing the Essentials training for the software I’ve been documenting for a year. Training, until a couple of months ago took a back seat to just catching up with the astounding amount of writing that had to be done. My manager agreed with me that I could take Mondays as my training day. It’s nice that the same week that I sign a permanent contract with the company, I finish the prerequisite for all the advanced training.

For several years I refused to utter the word ‘barbecue’ because I felt it jinxed things. Invite your friends over for a barbecue and rain is guaranteed. So I started calling such events OGFEs: Outdoor Grilled Food Experiences. This past summer, after having a couple of OGFEs rained out too, I decided to chuck the word. Yesterday evening, my friend Cara invited me over for a barbecue – her man Trevor built a brick grill in front of their place and in fact, his dad was in town from Australia, and her folks and sister came over as well. Her sister’s man (John? I think so) is another American, from a small town in Illinois. Always good to expand the American contingent abroad, I say.

Right. Cara’s Scottish. I told her I had no dog in the fight, but I was curious what she and her folks felt about the referendum. Having lived in the Netherlands as long as they have (30+ years), they don’t have a vote, but are solidly pro-independence. It’s an exciting time and I’m pretty sure I’d vote for independence too, given the opportunity. This is a gut thing that has a lot to do with the amount of wealth from Scotland that moves to London without the Scots getting much in return. I also feel that modern conservative governments in the UK (and there hasn’t really been a liberal one since before Thatcher) haven’t done well by the citizenry in general and any chance not to have the banks of London set your monetary policy is a chance to take and run with.

The old political dictum, cui bono holds sway in England as it long has in America. Translated strictly as ‘to whose good’ or ‘who benefits’ it more loosely means ‘follow the money’. You don’t have to follow it far to know that the US no longer has any semblance of a democracy. Policy is about who contributes to the campaigns, who offers the greatest future lobbying salary to current congress-critters. Eric Cantor, case in point.

I’m pretty sure it was Tom Robinson who said, ‘When you see a politician speaking, you have to ask yourself one question: Why is this asshole lying to me?’ When the powers that be in Whitehall, today that being the leaders of the three main UK parties, plus former PM Gordon Brown (a Scot), say ‘We’ll make things better for Scotland, the question is ‘What aren’t you telling me about how union benefits your bottom line?’

There are numerous graphs online that detail how much tax money flows from Scotland to London and how much Scotland gets back in services. The ones I’ve seen tend to have a Scottish bias, but this has a lot to do with self-selected sourcing. I know I’m biased and that the blogs I read and the articles I tend to finish agree with my own points of view. That said, the numbers I’ve seen recently indicate a deficit of 10-20 billion pounds per year. Even if the Scots forego any kind of currency union, that’s a number they could make up pretty handily (says your humble reporter who has no background in economics at all).

It’s sad, however, that the heard sane voices of conservatism tend to favour the establishment and that the heard less sane voices of English conservatism are folks like Nadine Dorries and the BNP. Dorries gets quoted talking about Scots who ‘are paid to eat deep-fried Mars bars’ which does little to help the Yes camp. parties, plus former PM Gordon Brown (a Scot), say ‘We’ll make things better for Scotland, the question is ‘What aren’t you telling me about how union benefits your bottom line?’

It’s sad, however, that the heard sane voices of conservatism tend to favour the establishment and that the heard less sane voices of English conservatism are folks like Nadine Dorries and the BNP. Dorries gets quoted talking about Scots who ‘are paid to eat deep-fried Mars bars’ which does little to help the Yes camp. Source: http://www.bedfordshire-news.co.uk/Mid-Bedfordshire-MP-Nadine-Dorries-gives-view/story-22927469-detail/story.html

My feeling, if you haven’t cottoned onto it yet, is that I’d rather see a new experiment in democracy come out of the referendum, and perhaps see London look to new ways to be more representative of the people of England rather than less. I’d like to see the Conservative party live up to what they’re promising in the last days of the campaign – more power devolving to the territories and greater representation and less power in the hands of the House of Lords. If they really believed such things would be to the greater benefit of their voting constituencies, however, they would have campaigned on them several years ago. And followed through. The fact is the constituencies of the PM, the deputy PM and the opposition leader are the banks and the other denizens of the City of London. Follow the money.

Categories Europe, Politics

September 12

September 12, 2014 //

A note from today’s Skimm:

Syria…Well, hello there…The government of President Assad (the man Obama says ‘must go’) thinks it’s great if the US crushes ISIS but only if the US coordinates with the Assad administration. Rock meet hard place. Meanwhile, the rebels – the ones Obama hopes to support – think airstrikes could do a lot more harm than good.

September 12, 2014

I use the word We a lot in this entry. I’m not sure who I mean by We. The United States, certainly. American citizens as participants in the remnants of the American experiment in democracy, absolutely. Citizens of Western Democracies (tm?) as a whole, definitely. Citizens of the world who hate the idea of getting into another war or cheerleading for it, or who are indeed ready to go out and fight it. A hundred years after the opening of the War to End Wars, The Great War, The World War (to which we had to add a number when 25 years later we let it all happen again. When I say We, I mean all of these things.

13 years on, we’re doing it again. Of course there were those who knew in 2001 that we were going to war and all we needed was the pretext. The facts behind what happened with those four airplanes are documented. The missteps, the selling of the wars, the anger as we went to war unprepared are all in the record.

And we’re doing it again. For all the same reasons and many more, to be sure. Though in this year that the War celebrates its bar mitzvah, for it is male, there is little doubt, the army is definitely better prepared. Though I don’t suppose Donald Rumsfeld could have rammed the thing through quite so well had he prepared the armed forces first.

ISIS, ISIL, IS, The Caliphate. Whatever you want to call it, it’s not only our baby, it’s going to be very difficult to defeat with any integrity. ISIS has declared its opposition to the government in Syria, making it our ally, no? But the group beheads American journalists on video, making it our enemy.

We talk on occasion of Syrian moderates. Who are these moderates? The ones Senator McCain thought he was meeting several months ago who were fighting against Bashad’s forces? It came out this week that those moderates were members of IS, and are happily using the photo op McCain provided them in their press releases.

Why war, over an over and over again? Why all the isms (militarism, sexism, racism, fascism). The bottom line from my point of view, and this isn’t any kind of original thought, is that it’s lucrative to gin up cases for war and hatred. From the small-town bullshit in Ferguson, MO where the city financed itself on the backs of poor citizens terrorised for years by the police force, back to the late 19th century agreements that led to the Great War and forward to the idiotic arm-twisting that created the Versailles Treaty and the back room discussions that formed both it and Sykes-Picot.

Yeah, the agreement between the UK and France that divvied up their colonies in the Middle East and Africa into all those weird shapes with all the very straight lines. Iraq? The Lebanon? Syria? Iran? Palestine? Saudi Arabia? Yeah, Those didn’t exist before the 20th century. And divvying them up like that was (again) to the financial benefit of a few and to the detriment of millions. What was it British Petroleum used to be called?

Follow the money. A few people got very very rich and many people got moderately wealthy off the wars we started in 2001. Dick Cheney is one good example, but there are many in the Bush administration. The creation of American Security Theater benefitted a great many people as well. Industries that were doing well suddenly did amazingly well.

And please don’t go all Godwin on me here when I bring up that Hitler distinguished the system he was creating from fascism by suggesting it should be called Corporatism – the joining of the the mechanisms of industry with those of state.

The selling of the Iraq II is well documented, but the thing didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t that those in power ginned up the case for war in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. If you believe the gent who writes The Far Left Side, what happened to WTC was part of the planning for the wars. So many questions got pushed aside and so much protest unanswered. Source: http://farleftside.com/2011/9-2-11-911-unforgotten.html

And now American Democracy has had 13 years of Free Speech Zones and the absolute gutting of the principles upon which the country was supposedly based. I try to keep in mind Howard Zinn’s assertions that the US based itself not life, liberty and the pursuit of propertyhappiness, but those were the slogans that sold a system that benefitted the few and disenfranchised the many. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence reflected his own self-interest, as did the Constitution (agreed upon in secret conferences from which no written minutes were released) that of its creators.

Categories Politics

A little about the shutdown

October 3, 2013 //

Last new year I was discussing the American scene with my friend Ellen, who teaches English to high school students in Norway. At the time I promised I would blog a bit about American politics so that her students might get a different viewpoint from that of the Norwegian press/BBC. What with one thing and another (starting a new job, starting another new job, and a few other things), I haven’t yet gotten down to it.

That said, yesterday my friend Kevin posted a really succinct take on the US government shutdown that he said I could share with Ellen’s class, with a bit of a gloss. I’ll try to do some of this kind of blogging with some regularity as well.

As noted, this is for students of English, so a little preliminary vocabulary is in order.

GOP – Grand Old Party, a nickname of the Republican party.
Barry Goldwater – Fiscally conservative Republican senator who lost the 1964 presidential election to Lyndon Johnson.
Dominionism – Dominion Theology or Dominionism is the idea that Christians should work toward either a nation governed by Christians or one governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law.

Let us be clear about what is happening to our government, shall we? While it is true to say that through a combination of arrogance and obstinacy the GOP has shut down the government, this was not the intention of the GOP as a whole. Indeed, the GOP is not whole. It is a coalition of distinct factions; the old style Republicans, the wealthy oligarchs, the neo-cons, the religious conservatives, and the tea party libertarians.

Since the 80s the old Barry Goldwater Republicans and the oligarchs had a hard enough time holding the religious conservatives inside the party while making minimal progress on their theological agenda. The extremely wealthy don’t have that much in common with the people that the leaders of the religious right rely upon as a base – once the born-again trend that swept the middle class in the 70s and 80s was over, they were left with a large majority of poor working class folks.

But they truly made a deal with the devil when they brought the Tea Party and the NeoCons into the party – these groups don’t just want smaller government and lower taxes, they believe that the government itself is the root of most of the country’s problems, and that we’d all be better off without it. Combined with the Dominionists amongst the religious right, who believe that the separation of church and state and inability to institute religious laws is a restriction on their religious freedom, this view is now held by a very large percentage of the Republican Party.

For these people there is no downside to destroying Obamacare or to shutting down the US Government – both are a win in their eyes. One would scale back the government, the other would demonstrate to the nation that it can survive without the federal government. And because they have the power to unseat Republicans who do not adhere their line by challenging them at the ballot, either taking their seats or handing the Democrats a win, the Tea Party, Neocons and Dominionists were able to make the resistance of any objectors in the party ineffective. So while the more moderate Republicans learned from the arrogant gobsmacking idiocy of Newt Gingrich, their hands were tied.

And this is how a handful of fanatical ideologues were able to dictate the policy of a national party over cooler, more rational heads, and crash our government.

Categories Politics, United States