A Partisan Journal

A Partisan's Journal

Tuesday 15 May 2012
          The Peter Principle at work: JP Morgan Chase has managed to lose 2 billion (with a ‘b’) dollars. CEO Jamie Dimon asked for the resignation of underling Ina Drew to show that he is on top of things in the lush offices at Chase. I’m surprised that he didn’t find a mailroom clerk guilty of the crime. Dimon says he is considering the clawback of exorbitant bonuses paid to his executives for their incompetence. Could it be that the financial industry is finally coming around to accepting semi-responsibility for its crimes?
          The clawback is not likely, though. Dimon risks having a disgruntled employee blow the whistle on the psychopathic criminal culture in his organization.
          I have the perfect solution to the problem with incompetence and criminal behavior in the “too big to fail” industries”: Nationalize the offending organizations and sell them off in pieces small enough to fail and too small to bring down the working class and the world economy.

Quotes of the Day:
“I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.” –Jon Stewart
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” –Edward Gibbon

Saturday 24 March 2012
          I live in a mixed-race neighborhood. I see, everyday, men stand in the cold and rain, waiting for the arrival of their day-labor employers. I see Hindus in saris walk with Hispanic students and Black women greet Asians at the corner strip centers. A small group of men in a neighboring apartment complex pushed an ice cream cart along the street, every day, from February to November. Last summer, they scrapped the pushcart for a Chevy van. In the nearly three years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen day laborers—working six days a week for under-the-table cash for less than minimum wage—build enough wealth to purchase beat-up used cars that gave them a greater range to market their labor. Up on the corner, immigrants and first-generation Americans operate small eateries, grocery stores, beauty salons, and shops whose products and services change with the needs of their customers. Shabby, rented storefronts in low-rent neighborhoods house the new American entrepreneurial class. Some, like the restaurateurs in the Maple Avenue barrio, grew their businesses into respectable restaurant chains frequented by the same comfortable middle-class whites who feel only they have a right to the American dream.
          A return to college in my retirement has exposed me to the work ethic of the twenty-something generation which came of age in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. On the campus, I see the same cooperation among races and economic groups that I have experienced in my neighborhood. Students of Anglo, African, Hispanic, and Asian descent study together, work together, offer tips and aid in their drive to succeed in an economic environment in which their representatives in Congress and a corrupt Supreme Court seek to hold them to limited opportunities and a life of low-wage labor. In their youthful exuberance, they feel they can overcome the obstructionists in Congress and the selling of their government to the plunderbund by federal and state courts.
          As a representative in the classroom of their grandfathers’ generation, I cannot share their hope for the future, though I do not openly express my doubts. I see a groundswell of an evangelical right-wing movement that pushes the government to marginalize women, ethnic groups, workers, the poor, and political-religious dissent. When I look at the current crop of presidential primary-election candidates, I see a future of an aristocratic rule our Founder warned us against. I see a burgeoning entrepreneurial class crushed under a renewed gilded age—a ruthless breed of robber barons who want to replace their seven-cents per day labor in Bangladesh with American workers deprived of workplace safety, collective bargaining, and any opportunity to use their own entrepreneurial skills to break free of the prison of cubicle culture, low-wage service jobs, and sweat shop manufacturing work.
          But I can see beyond that dismal view. I keep in mind that the progressive era followed the excesses of the gilded age. I know that we will not long stand for a privileged class that lives in opulent splendor on the backs of our labor and our taxes, while we stew in poverty. Even the evangelical crowd will come to see that their anti-science, anti-education, anti-intellectual stance works against them, they will sacrifice their power to force their beliefs on others for a return to a country that the world looks to for hope of a better future.

Thursday 15 March 2012
          A group of intellectually impaired Democratic Party members in Florida have
decided it would be a good idea to fly an American flag emblazoned with the
likeness of President Obama over their party headquarters. Did these geniuses
not see that their action as playing into the right-wing propaganda machine?
Could they not see that Americans, in general, worship symbols--graven images
-- that they substitute for reality?
          The dufus who approved of the use of the flag in such manner is guilty of the
crime of supreme stupidity. While all of us possess the right to do what we will
with an object, as long as it does not harm others or endanger public safety, we
might also regret the lack of rational thought in the people behind the action. If the
Florida Democrats paid for the altered flag with their own money, it is their
property to dispose of at their will and whim. We can forgive the method by
which a group of partisans choose to exercise their freedom of speech, but we
can loathe their self-destructive intellect.

Tuesday 13 March 2012
          Our ancestors and Founding Fathers have place on us a sacred trust: to give
an honest and fair appraisal of their lives and times. Any attempt to distort those
lives in order to promote an ideology amounts to a deception--a lie. It invalidates
the lives of those who lived during the times the pseudo-historian alters for his
benefit. If, at times, egalitarianism or authoritarianism, mass hysteria or noble
pursuits ruled the zeitgeist, then let us see it for what it was, rather than what we
wish it.
          People who would kill our history and those who came before us by replacing
them with imaginery figures are too often the same people who tell us the lives of
the unborn are sacred. They would have us beleive that a zygote has a greater
right to life than our ancestors. Their concern for life does not extend to those
who have passed.

Saturday 10 March 2012
          I awoke one morning, simultaneously bored and irritated with the Republican
Party's pandering to right-wing nut jobs. With each election cycle, the right
dumbs down it message, offering ever more simplistic solutions to increasingly
complex issues. I've come to see the anti-science, anti-intellectual disregard for
reasoned thinking in discussion cannot be countered with intelligent and rational
debate. Partisan extremists understand only the shout-down and the Big Lie.
          My concern with right-wing political posturing lies in the use of the Big Lie and
its heavy-handed use in the propaganda machine. Pseudo-historian David Barton
represents the use of propaganda devices that would have won for him the
admiration of the rulers of wartime Germany and cold war Russia. His outrageous
claims--designed for the consumption of the gullible--about the motivations of the
Founding Fathers reveal themselves on inspection as nothing more than fabricated
and self-seving "facts." As a result, he has achieved stardom among the True
Believers and those crippled by an inability to think critically or perceive the
immorality of the use of made-up facts as a rhetorical tool.