Bush's Solution for every economic malfunction: cut taxes. Dean Baker at 'Beat the Press' does a fine job demonstrating that the Shrub's plan to help Americans suffering from the foreclosure epidemic is not only empty symbolism, but stupidity. Of course, the wealthy who over-extended themselves in real estate speculations will benefit the most. Another classic case of the OverClass's assault on the American Dream - that every citizen can 'build a home where the buffalo roam' - is now getting to be just that.....

Glad that College Football Season is commencing, this Saturday! It should be a civic Holy Day. The NFL does not quite have the 'soul' as football does at the University level; anymore I could care less who gets to the Super Bowl come next February.....

"My Country, Right or Wrong - still my Country." I'm down with that and always have been. Yet Americans generally lack the ability or desire to look into the mirror - especially those who they elect to public office(s). When any citizen takes issue with the detrimental general behavior of their fellow Americans, the imperial hubris of foreign and defense policy craftsmen, the NeoCon lobby always screams that such an analytical citizen is some American-hating Leftist, a 'Fifth Columnist'(?), or some other label. If Americans forget that they are all-too-human like anyone else, how can we ever know when our Country is in the right direction??.....

'What is Above, is Below' - This is another thing that Europe still in part retains whilst Americans have lost the concept of, or never really had - the duality of the macrocosm/microcosm. My fellow Yanks scratch their heads when the totality of Being is discussed;instead we Americans have a worldview of have and do, and think that having and doing something is segregated from the so-called 'great chain of Being'. This is why post WW2 Existentialism never caught on much on this side of the Pond except in academic or bohemian circles; for allegedly being so 'modern', Existentialism is broadly a continuation of the old medieval macrocosm/microcosm interaction, though with heavier emphasis on the micro- individual's role in this. We are supposed to be such individualists here in the USofA, yet we lack the spiritual essence within existence , and often dismiss any heady discussions of Being as gobbly-goop - we got the wrong verbs as guidance, that's why.Finger-pointing? Yup, a man named John Locke - America's 18th Century Enlightenment patron philosopher - for starters...

Spenglerian 'second-religiousness' doesn't apply to spirituality: religion is often divorced from spirit and often have no correlation. If/when we go down the commode, it will be because the spirituality of the macro/microcosm is out of whack, regardless of how many Americans attend church on Sunday to beat the Bible and make some lazy-assed shyster preacher or priest, well-to-do. A total atheist is often more spiritual than your token orthodox true-believer and less susceptible to experience what we in the US has, from Top to Bottom, spiritual death. Even if every American fills the church pews come Sunday morning, it shan't make a bit of difference and hold back the Fall of our own creation(?).....

Was going to do a sarcastic piece on Larry Craig and the Party of *Family Values*(GOP) but anyone can read about it anywhere else, and the writer will probably do a better job of it....

This is to inform any reader that for the time being, posting here will be less frequent. I am in the abyss of redundancy and it is getting difficult to spin any post regarding Free Trade, Protectionism, etc., where I do not wax like some Dittohead merely repeating what His Fat Hypocriteness, Rush Limbaugh( I know.. Mikey Moore is fatter and he recently did a health-care movie.Not seeing it.),spews out daily - which are the same things he said the day before, and before, and before....

Not that Left-Federalist has thrown in the towel, and I'll probably utilize this blog space for unrelated topics; I'm just as earnest on the core issues discussed here as ever. I've not hit a block, but a broken record, and it's time to turn it off for a bit. Unlike Limbaugh, I'm not getting paid to be repetitious, and other things require my attention in this thing called existence......

Another thing that has contributed to the demise of American Working Class culture is that no longer is Joe Six Pack paid for his blood, sweat and tears, weekly. 'TGIF' used to have more significance in that the Blue Collar guy could look forward to getting his wages - now he usually has to wait biweekly for them, and like myself, he is oft not paid on a Friday. Who killed Friday PayDays? I have this theory that a long time ago in a drone mill or factory in Anytown, USA, some lazy accountant who was swapping spit with the Boss convinced him that if payroll was done only twice a month, their beautiful special relationship would only get better. Hence, the meme was passed down to all the lazy personnel in payroll at companies everywhere and it has become adopted, almost everywhere.

It's bad enough that the corporate overclass has to bust up unions, buy off politicians for passage of *Right to (screw) Work(ers)* laws - they then attacked the general morale of the workin' stiff by taking away the joy of all Fridays. Feature that many people do not earn enough to properly budget(what's that?) their earnings in the first place, and this biweekly business throws another wrench into it. And whoever came up with the idea of 'rotating shifts' - that messes up an employee's biological clock - needs to be tarred&feathered, beat with in an inch of his life, then shipped off in a cargo hold full of big rats and presented to trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity.......

[Also I have this other conspiracy theory about something else: shyster divorce lawyers at some conference in the 1990's were lamenting that since more normal heterosexual couples have opted to just shack-up instead of going through the traditional ritual of pair-bonding - they decided to push this Gay Marriage bit to drum up more business . Given that infidelity is the #1 cause of marital breakups, and male homosexuals are the most promiscuous out of all genders of sexual orientations - divorce lawyers could then clean-up at court. What a bloody racket!]

Spiegel Online has a cooing article regarding Ukraine's economic 'boom' and between the lines said article insinutes that said GNP growth is because of laissez-faire policies - "politics is politics, business is business". Certainly the Free Market Bolsheviks at the Cato Institute have picked up on this info and are strutting about with chub-ons. Well, a time will come shortly that they will need Viagra to maintain them: Ukraine still has its old industrial base which as we know, hard- industry is the key for economic growth and without some form of dirgist public planning, booms will ultimately go bust. Ukraine also has a growing service sector which is anthema to industry and sets out to rob the labor force;if some checks are not put on said service sector, and if Ukraine does not protect its industrial base, watch them slide into Americanization. That Ukraine also has a growing speculative force should be reason for Kiev to have yellow lights flashing now. Plus, the Spiegel article lauds the growing consumerism of Ukrainians. Really now, the last thing that a growing national-economy needs is to adopt the USA's Consumer Cult! Ukrainians should be saving instead of spending on Mickey Mouse gadgets. Yeah, I know that they were deprived of their toys under the horrible, central-planned Leninist State economy of the USSR, but going full-throttle in the other direction is not the answer. Look what happened to us Yankees here, Ukrainians, and learn: autocratic State Socialism isn't the answer, and neither is the neofeudalism of globalist laissez-faire.....

Morris Berman loves to point out how the materialist, hedonistic Consumer Cult has robbed Americans of their soul, yet he omits the role that his side has played in this. Though I don't think that Berman is a cultural-Bolshevik himself, he is a man of the Left, and the Frankfurt School import here was anything but good in post-WW2, USA. But Berman is on par that America as the beacon of liberty was from its inception based on negative freedom: we held liberty as against something else instead of for. But Berman's criticisms of America does not have the hue of his Leftist counter-parts like Howard Zinn and Michael -'let's not pick on Stalin'-Parenti( as I'd love to time-warp Holocaust Deniers to Auschwitz, circa 1944, same applies to Gulag Deniers like Parenti - a logging camp on 600 calories per day in 1930s Arctic Siberia would do him nicely.) and he acknowledges that America was once a good idea and the Federalists of the Early Republic were the real Menschen of classical-republican virtue and retained that benevolent aristocratic meme of organic Europa melded to said 'small-r' republicanism. Berman rightfully blames the Jeffersonians for mucking all of this up, when usually Lefties coo over the Jacobin world-view of TJ. Neither does Berman champion the meme of full-fledged participatory democracy, and he grasps in his own wording what is needed in a healthy society of a nation is a harmony of interests between the Few and the Many - not leveling from either/or. The Few have leveled the USA by hyper individualism in the name of laissez-faire. But a negative harmony does exist : the Many keep voting these cruds in to rule them, or they don't even care to go to the ballot box to do so. The excuse that there is a case of no real alternative, and why should the Commons even bother to vote, rings hollow. Many times in American election history we have had third parties on the ballot that was an alternative to the Demo-Repub duopoly, but few have ever made more than a sharp splash with the voting population. For instance, in 2000 we had alternatives both on the Left and Right(Nader/Buchanan) to Gore and the Shrub - two that few were enthusiastic about and they were roughly the same species - but how many voted for either two of the named alternatives? The excuse that voting for a third party candidate is "wasting your vote" is stupid( as if voting for some corrupt dummkopf that a voter doesn't like isn't wasting a ballot). This is exactly what the Demo-publican party-power structure wants the voter to think, and it works, apparently.
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Notice how Americans with their cult of individualism are actually herd-like within it: they all indulge their consumerist hedonism based on what their neighbor has, or what some cool&trendy celebrities and other aspiring criminals are doing and wearing. For instance, this current tattoo craze originates from that one of the Beautiful People, somewhere, decided to get a Tat one night when drunk, and then subsequently the Sheep were standing in line at the Tattoo Parlor, bleating to get their wool adorned with, (cough) body art.

Many other examples exist on how conformist and collectivist Americans truly are despite their 'rugged individualism', and they have the individualism/communitarian dichotomy in all the wrong places, flip-flopped back asswards.

Time to be Thankful

Barak Obama has been showing that he can be John Wayne,too(reference to his comments on Pakistan,etc.). Imagine him and Duncan Hunter getting together and playing Cowboys & Indians in elementary school....this demonstrates that the Democratic Party is the one of *Empire, Lite* and will not change too much the current foreign policy shenanigans of neoimperialism, and neither will they check the power of the 1% OverClass despite their occasional rhetoric to the contrary. Feature that the *National Security State* was created under a Democratic Administration(Truman) in the first place, as Chomsky points out in his lectures. The Dems lone candidate actively endorsing America's full pull-back from Empire and return to the social-market edifice of the New Deal is Dennis Kucinich; if the Midget gets more than 5% of the vote in the upcoming Iowa Caucus - it will be proof that God indeed does exist. He's a joke within the Democratic Party and doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. The GOP's authentic maverick and anti-imperialist, Ron Paul, doesn't either. This is a grim reality that we will probably be looking at President ClintonII in '08, or another *compassionate conservative* like that idiot Morman, Mitt Romney. Start waving bye-bye to the Republic then - because it will be then beyond a doubt - finito . It may have already fled the nest, and we know who is to blame. The sad situation is that most of the American citizenry doesn't give a shit just as long as they have their toys and gadgets, satellite TV with 500 channels of kitsch on it and that there is always low prices at Wal-Mart( yes, it IS this bad); women can qualify for liposuction/cosmetic surgery on their health insurance and the drive-thru is open 24/7 at McDonalds; Johnny can have his Ritalin and there is another sports arena built in their local city for more Bread n' Circuses entertainment - 'A Republic?? I don' care!'

Thank you very much, my fellow Americans, and to the bastards&bitches that you elect as public officials to run the country into the ground(those of you who do vote) -

"...thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."

- William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer

Bretton Woods& Berman

Dean Baker has a nice snippet at 'Beat the Press' about 'Wall Street Welfare Queens' - you get 'em Dean!

Alas, the subject of this post pertains to the current book that I am reading, Dark Ages America. I've read a few other texts by the author before(good ones) and I possess a sense of loyalty to authors that I like. Initially, I was not all that keen on reading Dark Ages given that I am already pessimistic enough about the fate of America, but I do have a hunch that the window is open enough that things can be turned around with the right people conducting the orchestra. Also, one review of Morris Berman's latest book proclaimed that Jimmy Carter is the hero of it, and that kind of put me off - I never could abide Carter much(though Jimma' deserves two thumbs-up for his dedication to Habitat for Humanity, which is also my pet charity.). I waited until the local Uni library had a copy available, and now so I read it.

Morris Berman presents the similar theme with his current one that was in his previous, Twilight of American Culture. Now, he states that the sky is not only foreboding, it is already hailing & raining on us but we do not know it fully as yet. Berman is Spenglerian without ever mentioning Spengler in Dark Ages and he states unequivocally that TINA is the reality, though Berman's TINA has a strong case of STD's - he doesn't like the whore and is not a protagonist, willing Trick for her.

The focal point of this post will be his economic comments of Berman's book, and I found some of them spot-on, though he leaves out some essentials that should had been addressed for his arguments. Namely, Berman regards the demise of Bretton Woods as the epicenter of the end of the USA's economic hegemony which is but partially true. Berman believes that Bretton Woods was the 'check' on globalist laissez-faire and he looks upon economics as a sociologist/cultural historian that he is( we need more economists with this panache). Rightfully he remarks in said text that the post- Bretton Woods era opened the door wide open for this globalist catastrophe that we are witnessing now;the floating-exchange rate of currencies is a predator-speculator's dream come true, and there have been no authentic checks on the ebb&flow of international capital as it was in the post WW2 Era because of said Bretton Woods Agreement.

Morris Berman, like other protagonists for BWA, ignores why the edifice collapsed. Instead, he merely states "...for whatever reason...". This is rather odd given that he is usually a well-endowed researcher, and one would think that if someone felt that Bretton Woods was the Thing, that they'd want to know why, and inform their reader. I covered the *WHY* in previous post, 'Nixon Shock, Revisited', and I'll not rehash it much here. A few months ago, I visited Berman's blog and posted in brief some of these factoids about the collapse of BWA, but he never responded(Berman seems to only reply to commentators who claim to be fellow educators and Ph.D's....I won't call him a snob, but question marks are there.) to it. He should had read George Greider's, Secrets of the Temple, before he wrote on the subject, but that is neither here now there.

Berman's hero of Bretton Woods is the British delegate at the conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes. Yet, Keynes was not at all onboard on all the final accords reached there - BWA was essentially that of Harry Dexter White who was not a 'Keynesian'. True enough, Keynes does deserve accolades. One of the most major misconceptions about Keynes is that he was a socialist - far from it. He was a capitalist who wanted to put a 'human face' to it and he himself got immensely rich with sound investments in stock( it's ironic that most professional economists often loose their ass in their own personal speculations). Another Keynesian myth is that the current status qua of deficit-spending with gargantuan debt is all based on his plan - Keynes only sanctioned deficit spending as a temporary measure during severe economic downturns as remedy instead of raising taxes;Keynesian prescriptions during 'good years' called for balanced-budgets, federal restrictions on spending, national debt reduction and the necessary tax hikes to reach these ends - basic common sense. JMK met an untimely death in 1946 because Vienna School predator, Friedrich August von Hayek's magnum opus,The Road to Serfdom, was actually a declaration of war on Keynesian economics and Keynes was up to meeting the challenge. If he would had lived longer, Keynes would had undoubtedly cleaned the clocks of the minions of the Mont Pelerin Society (Wilhelm Roepke, excepted.Roepke was closer to Keynes than he was to his neoclassical colleagues in said MPS;Roepke is the genius who found the synthesis of neoliberalism &neosocialism, some say). The Vienna School would had been discredited and laissez-faire would had remained deader than fried chicken as it was by 1945 - ass-up-end into the dustbin of economic history where it belongs.

Morris Berman, a Leftist and Red Diaper Baby, waxes like a fiscal conservative in his narrative, and correctly identifies LBJ's costly Vietnam War and Great Society(yes! a lefty critic of of Johnson's spend-thrift, Guns n' Butter,pipedream to end poverty!) for the inflationary spikes that led us up to August 15, 1971. However, the author omits Kennedy's role in this morass: JFK began the policy of deficit-spending within productive economic times and he also cut taxes for the wealthy Overclass - a prelude to Reagan twenty years later. The Kennedy-Johnson Administrations were the main culprits in the Bretton Woods debacle, and all of this was thrusted into Nixon's lap.

The author sighs over Bretton Woods's collapse, but unlike other partisans of it like Ravi Batra and James Tobin, he doesn't believe that it can be re-instated. Berman also demonstrates that branches of the BWA such as the IMF and World Bank has become the antithesis, the alter ego of its original benevolence. They are now the Enemy after the laissez-fairists have taken them over and now their program is to install cosmopolitan corporate feudalism(or fascism?) all over the Blue Dot, and they're making a fine job of it.

The year Nineteen-hundred-seventy-three, being held as the epicenter of the end of America's hegemony internationally( a horrible, shitty year indeed; nothing good came out of '73.Nihil.), plus the omega of the USA's 'human-face capitalism', the Dark Ages America directly lends acquiesce to this. Nixon did try to re-set the Dollar at a fixed-rate as before, but no international consensus could be reached to restart Bretton, thus the 'floating-exchange ' rates of currencies was officially adopted, which has become a predator-speculator's nirvana. De-industrialization in the USA took off with a passion, real wages have plummeted and have not moved of any significance since 1968( to get the real wages to '68 levels, our current federal Minimum Wage law would have to be set at $8.08 per hour. Scandalous!), and inflation has literally ate us alive since them. But Berman and others must know that Bretton Woods should not have been set up as a permanent international order, and the real cause of America's economic demise was lack of protection. I can't write this enough.

*****

Here's a harebrained idea where internationalist BWA nostalgics and tariff protectionists such as myself,perhaps all can reach an accord to turn-back the globalist monster, beat-it down and have a pseudo-cosmopolitan economic order as well: given that Bretton Woods was primarily oriented for economic recovery of Europe and to avoid pitfalls of laissez-faire, why doesn't the powers-that-be in DC say to Brussels - "hey, it's your turn." ? In this here simplified form, all participants agree that the Euro should be the reigning fixed-rate reserve currency backed by a species of gold from reserves from all said participating nations. Convertibility of Euros to gold are conditional on majority vote and with limits on the transfer of gold reserves from one nation to another. The US Dollar remains constitutionally sovereign but stabilized in this format. Tariff rates(yes) will be assessed based on the current fixed-rate of the Euro compared to the value of the Dollar. In short, this is a reverse- Bretton Woods with many of the holes of the BWA plugged. Nations will be allowed to unilaterally raise and lower their own tariff-rates to rectify their own trade imbalances or for policies that require internal improvements or their vital industries that are getting hit with inordinate foreign competition. Both the fixed-rate reserve currency and tariffs will cover one another in this sequence. As for the IMF and World Bank and WTO - to the graveyard they will go.

Maybe this plan has glaring caverns in it as well, but it is worth a try to tweak and should be satisfactory to both economic-nationalists and those who are hung-up on international stability of a consensus. Berman's declaration of an impeding dark age may be halted economically.

Don't Heart Huckabee(s)

Anyone wonder which GOP Presidential campaign that Karl Rove will try to latch himself to? Anytime that a public official proclaims his/her resignation to "spend more time with my family" one should know enough by now that this is a code-phrase meaning that he/she wants another job. These politicos would probably end up killing their families if they spent time with them anyway. Rove will write his book but keep his name out in the meantime. If there are no takers for his services with the GOP hopefuls, there are plenty of lobbyists that would hire him.......

Our current system of electing a President is sick. Sick! Sound-bites, one-liners, are what matters instead of serious discourses on issues and above all a candidate needs the endorsement of the One True God of the United States - Mammon. Though the Primary system was originally intended to have more democracy in the selection of Presidential candidates, it has become perverted and has degenerated into a funding sweepstakes. Besides, the rank and file of voters usually stay at home during the Primaries. Give me back the smoke-filled convention hall, or at least have a one-day National Primary in late summer, or a run-off, in an election year......

According to an article at American Prospect, the Religious Right are finding their Anointed One in Mike Huckabee - a charismatic Southern Baptist who also belongs to the Amen Lobby; the AL believes that the foreign policy of the USA should be merged with that of Tel Aviv. I would think that the Israelis themselves should be reticent in taking such praise and devotion from this group of Fundy bipeds: if it wasn't for their 'Rapture'/Armageddon mythology, these are the same people who'd be charging the Jewish people as 'Christ-Killers', and would had been cheerleaders for pogroms at ghetto gates back in the Old County in another time.As Michael Lind pointed out in his 'Up from Conservatism', Christian Zionists such as Pat Robertson have a strong dose of Anti-Semitism and Reverend Pat himself believes firmly in the Jewish Banker/Freemason/Illuminati (?)conspiracy......(I guess that includes 33rd Degree Mason, George Washington, Pat??) The Religious Right have nothing in common with the traditional non-aligned foreign policy of the United States and they're also for the most part have the economic and trade line of The Wall Street Journal (now owned by the globalist-predator &Free Market Bolshevik - Rupert Murdoch).....

Notice that even the Black churches are getting in on the *Prosperity Gospel* act when previously American Black churches had been a bedrock of Liberal Christianity and the Social Gospel(that is more in tune with the message of the New Testament that I've read). Jesus not only wants you with him in Heaven - he wants His Sheep with a BMW parked inside a three car garage in a overpriced home in the suburbs too. Jesus at the Second Coming wants to Rapture the faithful that have Rolex watches on their wrists, with sound Stock investment portfolios. This is nothing but a recycle of old Calvinism and Elmer Gantries in three-piece suits. Naturally, the Reverends want a rich flock to fleece because it will mean more tithes & offerings for them - so they can live affluent without having to do any work for it. These preachers touting the Prosperity Gospel heresy are nothing but parasites, regardless of their racial classification......

Am currently working on the pages of Morris Berman's,Dark Ages America, where the cultural historian takes a Spenglerian hue and proclaims we are are done for here, and he washes his hands. I do think that he is being unduly defeatist, but the message of the text is grim and compelling. Berman rightly assigns the blame for America's demise when we had transformed ourselves into a National Security State and simultaneously pushed globalist laissez-faire as essential ingredients of Pax Americana. American exceptionalism is filled with contradiction: the first nation to wipe-out the institution of titled-nobility(good), but forfeited the old organic noblesse oblique in the process, which was the benevolence of European aristocracy. That we are from birth a bourgeoisie country that didn't endure feudalism has come back to bite us on the ass, according to Berman. The author, a Leftist, did mention that the Federalists of the 1790s came close to finding the synthesis between collectivism and individualism but the pre- McCarthyite demagoguery of Jefferson's Republicans kept it from forming because anything slightly resembling the governance, social aspects and financial apparatus of old Europa was regarded as 'monarchist'.....too early for a long book review yet, and I don't know if I'll do a complete one on Dark Ages America....