Alternate Reality Headline Goes Here
February 27th, 2008More Distortions Hit The Web in Siegelman’s Case
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Sometimes in winter, even when there is rare snow on the ground in Alabama, it is better to sleep late. If for no other reason than to give the other Web publishers time to get their acts together before it’s time to put up the morning headlines.
There are some people in the South who have so little regard for what our esteemed president likes to call “the Internets,” however, that they bungle not only the online version of things, but the print edition too.
Knowing in advance that the Birmingham News was going to try one more time today to attack poor little Jill Simpson, a former life-long Republican from North Alabama, and kiss the ass of disgraced former Bush political adviser Karl Rove, I poured the coffee and began searching al.com for the headline. This is what I found:
Upon the final click for the print version, poor Internet readers who take the time to figure it out finally get to this headline in the Opinion section: Siegelman’s Siege. It’s sort of like the Great Tennessee Valley Blackout of 2008. Obscure the story for the people who are not savvy enough or connected enough to get it.
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| Glynn Wilson |
| Don Siegelman on trial in Montgomery |
But before we deal with that alternate reality, there are a couple of headlines we need to get to first.
The little Birmingham News reporters have gotten themselves a big time interview with Karl Rove, that mastermind of Bush politics who managed to take over the Alabama Supreme Court a few years back - by fooling the Birmingham and Mobile newspaper reporters with assertions of “jackpot justice” and such. You know, the same Karl Rove they used to call “Bush’s brain” - before we figured out he didn’t have one.
Rove denies lawyer’s Siegelman assertion
They bought it hook line and sinker then, and they are still buying it now. Since they don’t read things on the scary new “Internets,” they didn’t follow the story about Rove having to resign from the White House in disgrace last August in an attempt to avoid facing a subpoena to testify under oath before Congress in a host of national scandals.
Surely they ran an AP story about that in the print edition, but perhaps they were too busy to read it.
Foremost among the charges, the one that most directly affects Alabama, you know, the Birmingham News’ home turf, was the very idea that the Bush administration would fire federal prosecutors and even put former governors on trial for purely political reasons. That just couldn’t happen in the, pure as the driven snow, American judicial system, could it? And right here in honest little Alabama?
Scott Horton at Harpers.org does a fine job of refuting these stories, but we are wondering if the good people of Alabama are reading it. You see, it’s only printed on the “Internets.”
The Alternate Reality of the Birmingham News
The Net vs. The Web
Before I get into a more detailed refutation myself, let me first try one more time to explain to people the difference between the Internet and the Web. It is important, whether you get it or not.
I know this causes the folks at the Birmingham News much grief, because they are not in charge of their own Web site. They just crank out the print edition like they always have, and then turn it over to Advance Communications programmers to stick on the Web with what I like to call “shovelware” software at 4 a.m.
Since they have so little regard for the “Internets,” they don’t bother to check their headlines like they would for the newspaper. Thus the headline glitch. Sorry, but I’m still laughing: Internet Headline Goes Here, Insert Anti Siegelman Headline Here, etc.
Just so you will know, the Internet (singular) is the series of wires and computers hooked up by phone lines and cable lines all over the world that make it possible to do things like check e-mail - and get on the World Wide Web to read things like the online version of newspapers. The only way to read anything on the “Internets” is to pull up a Website in a Web browser. So the headline should have been: Web headline goes here.
Or better yet, they should have just put the actual story headline in their like everybody else : )
Since it’s obvious the programmers over at Advance don’t know the difference, and don’t care, that’s what you get.
But I suppose that is a minor thing and a difference that is lost on most people, so let’s get to the other headline.
Alternate reality goes here.
Since you can read the alternate story yourself, there’s not much need to quote from it at length. Let’s just summarize.
The poor little reporters at the Birmingham News, who are mostly relegated to writing unglamorous local stories about two-year colleges and the minor shenanigans of city councilmen in small towns and such, must get their adrenaline going pretty good when they have a chance to talk to someone as “big time” as Karl Rove. I mean he worked for THE PRESIDENT in that big White House in Washington and he is REAL IMPORTANT.
Talking to him might even get you on the front page, so why bother to ask a tough question? Just pick up the phone, hold the receiver and listen as God speaks. Take down what he says and print it as gospel.
And to heck with the word of one of our own little Alabama citizens, a lawyer no less, who HAS gone to Washington and testified under oath.
There was a time in the newspaper business when sworn testimony mattered. It was considered more believable in a “she said, he said” dispute.
Not anymore, apparently. This is the age of the “Internets,” when you can’t believe anything unless the Christian Republicans say it IN PRINT.
Nevermind also that Karl Rove is a Machiavellian atheist, and probably gay, not that there is anything wrong with that : )
But in this alternate reality, as long as our would-be king George W. Bush still loves him, Rove’s word is still as golden as the Good Book itself.
This is for the record and disputes the main allegation in the story against Ms. Simpson, to wit:
Simpson’s latest allegation that she met with Rove is one she had not made publicly before the “60 Minutes” interview, either in published reports, her affidavit or testimony before congressional lawyers.
This sentence, like another one in another Birmingham News story the other day, which I pointed out myself to editors there to no effect, is aimed like a charge at Ms. Simpson as if she did something wrong.
Simpson raised claims she has not made in previous interviews, in an affidavit or in sworn testimony before Congress.
What are they thinking? Do they think Congress wanted to wade into the “gay” mine field on this story? With allegations floating around about Sen. Larry Craig in a Minnisota airport mens room? Of course not : )
It’s as if in this alternate print reality they live in down in that new newsroom of theirs in downtown Birmingham, they just can’t get their heads around the fact that Karl Rove worked his evil politics in Alabama just as he did in Washington.
The politics of Bush and Rove got us into this ill-conceived and costly war in Iraq and now has our economy teetering on the brink of a recession. It’s an Orwellian brand of politics that has the grand reputation of America on the ropes around the world for our willingness to go along with secret CIA prisons and torturing prisoners. And, it’s a type of politics that is willing to destroy the great American criminal justice system by using the courts to eliminate political opponents, even if they have to lie and cheat to pull it off.
There was a time when these things mattered in the newsrooms of America, and Alabama. It’s obvious now that the almighty dollar has completely taken over.
For the record, and I’ve already indicated my willingness to testify to this, I have heard from Ms. Simpson all about her dealings directly with Karl Rove, over and over again and late into the night on the telephone on many occasions. I have seen the documents which back them up.
But Ms. Simpson and her lawyer in Montgomery are not going to release any more documents until Karl Rove and the other participants in this scandal, including assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin, are called to testify under oath. And for good reason. They have a pretty good case building up that might land some people around here in legal hot water themselves, including the new head of the Alabama Republican Party, and Mr. Franklin at the so-called Justice department down in Montgomery.
The House Judiciary Committee has many of the documents already. And the members, including Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham, thought enough of them to call a hearing and not only get Jill Simpson to testify. Respected Birmingham attorney Doug Jones testified under oath as well, pointing out a series of important key events that the poor readers of the Birmingham News still do not know. He said the Department of Justice had indicated there was no case against Siegelman and that the charges were going nowhere, until someone in Washington ordered a top down review of the case - after Mr. Siegelman decided to run against Bob Riley in the 2006 election.
Could that simply be coincidence? Not likely.
Coup de Grâce
Somehow that is all lost on the Birmingham News staff, including the editorial section, where we can now get to the coup de grâce.
Then there was Dana Jill Simpson, a Rainsville lawyer who has been lobbing would-be bombshells for months about the Republicans’ alleged vendetta against Siegelman. On “60 Minutes,” she claimed Republican strategist Karl Rove personally asked her in 2001 to try to get evidence Siegelman was cheating on his wife.
A word about this: It’s not as if Rove hasn’t dabbled before in Alabama politics, and it’s certainly not as if Rove is above playing dirty.
The problem is Simpson. She has dribbled out damaging allegations in such a way as to undermine her credibility….
Well, I guess someone down there finally got onto the “Internets” and figured out that yes, Karl Rove had been here, in Alabama. And yes, he’s a dirty, sleaze ball political dirty trickster who would make George C. Wallace’s campaign bag men look like kindergarten bullies.
But it still doesn’t matter, right? Let’s just treat is as a funny, insignificant fact…
But the problem is Ms. Simpson, they say, who “dribbled out” damaging allegations? Undermined her credibility?
I mean she told the New York Times, Time magazine and me about them last June, ad nauseum. And she laid them out in the fall in documents presented under oath before Congress. It’s just that no one has reported that particular part of the story until now, and of course the Birmingham News never tried. It’s because of how the national television news media works.
The CBS News magazine show “60 Minutes” liked the part of the story about how Mr. Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to look into Don Siegelman’s sex life. It was what we call in the business “something new” or a “new angle” or “advancing the story” or “new details.” It’s not only sensational and scintillating. It’s downright sleazy. And of course it helped get the national audience interested, and I’m told it worked. The show’s ratings were off the charts - except in that part of North Alabama and Southern Tennessee where it was blacked out, of course : )
Gay Rumors
Quite frankly, I did not want to report on that part of the story because it opened the door to bring out all of the other Karl Rove allegations about Mr. Siegelman, a tactic he’s used in every political race he’s ever been involved in. That is to say, what the “60 Minutes” story points to, without revealing it, was that what Rove wanted Ms. Simpson to investigate was this: Whether Don Siegelman was gay.
In political reality, as opposed to science reality, it didn’t make any difference if the allegations were true or not. The rumor can be enough in politics.
Rove did it to Ann Richards in Texas when he was running George W. Bush’s first campaign for governor, and it worked on her. Bush won. That is well documented.
He has already done it to Hillary Clinton.
And this part is lost on the reporters and producers in New York. The same sort of rumor in Alabama helped George Wallace defeat George McMillan in the 1982 race for governor, the next closest election in the state before the 2002 race between Siegelman and Riley. If memory serves, Wallace won by something like 30 votes per precinct in Alabama’s 67 counties. I know for a fact the gay rumor was floating around about McMillan from the Wallace crowd, because I heard it myself and even repeated it to then Birmingham News managing editor Tom Bailey.
But apparently, in addition to just not liking Mr. Siegelman, the Birmingham News and Mobile Press-Register reporters actually believed the rumors. And maybe they still do. I heard those rumors in the bars of Montgomery myself back in 2004 while researching Bush’s time in Alabama in 1972, when he was AWOL from the Air National Guard and working for Red Blount’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Another reason I didn’t report it initially was because it is a long and complicated story with way too many characters to get down in a newspaper or magazine story. It would take a book to document Don Siegelman’s story - and now Jill Simpson’s role in it.
The other reason is that Ms. Simpson failed to find any evidence of a homosexual relationship between Mr. Siegelman and his long-time aide Nick Bailey. So why bring that to light at all?
When the New York Times and Time magazine first broke this story on June 1 of last year - based on two leaks, not investigative journalism - the focus was on the new affidavit itself that brought out sworn evidence for what Mr. Siegelman had been saying all along: It was a political prosecution directed from Washington.
The Whistleblower
Here was a Republican lawyer acting basically as a whistleblower, willing to swear that it was true, and that neither Mr. Siegelman nor Mr. Scrushy got a fair trial under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Now that is a big story, even in Birmingham, Alabama, which is why I got involved in covering it from that day forward. That weekend, I went to Rainsville and interviewed Ms. Simpson for eight hours and poured over boxes of documents and came away convinced that what she was saying, under the threat of perjury, was true.
The Birmingham News staff, or more likely the management, still don’t believe it, in part because they did not bother to investigate the story from day one. They got beat on the story by the “liberal” New York Times and the little Locust Fork Journal, published on the “Internets.” And they were not going to back down from supporting “you the man” Bush and Gov. Bob “Cowboy Boots” Riley, who have been so good for the state’s economy.
And even in the face of an extensive investigation by the producers at “60 Minutes,” they will not take a good long peak into the reality box. They have to stay in their unreality box, handed to them by loyal Bushie Republican operatives, because it is the economic box that supports them.
There’s really no other way to interpret the delusional reporting that goes on around here, except for maybe the snow. I know for a fact that some of those folks learned a better form of journalism in the universities of the South. But for the sake of the money, they will go on reporting it wrong, either because they have convinced themselves it is right. Or because their conservative bosses demand it.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
As if these so called journalists are going to read myriad documents and interview someone for 8 hours. Just is not done by these purported members of the 4th Estate. Eight hours is writing one story, coffee, cigarettes, more coffee and then lunch. Well, done Glynn. Smack thoses asses.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Can’t wait to see how they deal with the “gay” Republican issue in that family newspaper…
February 27th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
In the usually “gay family way” I’d suspect! They are still uncomfortable with the sexuality issues and one can only surmise why!
February 27th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Because people in this state don’t get laid enough. Sorry, Henry. Someone had to say it.
February 27th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Oh, and Glynn, in case no one’s told you today, I’m really glad you exist. I read the paper because I read compulsively and I really do care about my community, state, and country. I’m just bright enough to read through the ruse that passes as news. With you, I don’t have to decipher. It’s really refreshing.
February 27th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Thanks, Melissa. They’ve told me a few times, but it’s always nice to hear…
February 27th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Knew that, just hoping someone else said rather than me! Right on, Melissa!
February 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am
From the Daily Kos:
My close call with Rove
by bolgia7
Fri Oct 22, 2004 at 10:38:09 PM PST
I was a student at the University of Alabama School of Law in the early to mid-90s. Sometime during my second (I think) year, I took an inellectual property class from a professor I liked a lot named Harold See. As it happens, he had just launched his campaign for the Alabama Supreme Court seat of Mark Kennedy, and I had just written kind of a puff piece about his candicacy for The Column, the law school’s quarterly newspaper.
After class one day, Prof. See asked me to stay afterward and told me he liked my story. He said he was trying to get his campaign put together and wondered if I’d be interested in being his press secretary. Needless to say, I was flattered. I mean, a respected professor running for a seat on the state Supreme Court? What better connection could a law student ask for?
* bolgia7’s diary :: ::
*
We chatted about it for a bit, and then it dawned on me that there was no way this could work. He’s a Republican, and not only was I a Democrat (a less partisan one than I am now - thanks, Bush), but I’m gay.
I told him that. I told him that it was no secret, and that I had a lot of friends active in Dem politics back in Montgomery who knew. I told him I didn’t march in parades and such, but –he finished my sentence, “you don’t hide it either.” I explained to him that I understood how campaigns work and that I didn’t want my private life to be political hay in a campaign. (IOW, I didn’t want to be the Mary Cheney of the Alabama Supreme Court race.)
We parted, agreeing to think about it a little more before either made a decision. In the meantime, though, he asked if I would, as a favor, write the press release officially announcing his candidacy. I did so, without hesitation. As I said, I liked and respected him at the time, and I didn’t think it would hurt.
Later that night, Prof. See and I spoke again, and we mutually agreed that my being a gay staffer on a conservative Republican’s campaign wouldn’t be good for either of us. For me, it was self-preservation. For him, well, I guess it was the same thing, but a bit less nobly so.
Imagine my surprise when I read the following on Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo a few weeks ago. It was an excerpt from a forthcoming Atlantic Monthly article about Karl Rove’s dirty tricks. Seems his fingerprints were on that very campaign, the one I almost got involved in.
When his (Kennedy’s) term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove’s signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.
Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out–he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”
Besides feeling creeped out that my law school was used to spread this crap, I wonder whether See at the time knew his campaign would be taking this approach. Was a queer on his staff bad politics in general, or was it specifically inconsistent with the campaign tactics he and his strategist planned to employ?
I might have to write him a letter and ask.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2004/10/23/1389/0330/292/63781
February 28th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Thank You Glynn! Great job! Keep on keeping it real!
February 28th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Pass it on, brother. We’ve got to get more people in Alabama reading this stuff, as opposed to that new Press-Register editorial on the news page accusing CBS News of “bad journalism.” Give us a break.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but the more people we get online reading this, the sooner we can turn things around…
February 28th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
All of this — Siegelman’s wrongful imprisonment — the recounting of Karl Rove’s evil hand in Alabama politics — all re-validate the libertarian ideal of getting politics out of as much of human affairs as possible.
That’s not done through making government larger, more pervasive, more powerful to deal with real or imaginery human problems, or electing would-be saviors or would-be national nannies to important public offices.
It’s done by drastically limiting the power of government to intervene in peaceful, voluntary activities of adult humans. It’s done by taking so many resources and so much power away from government that it will not attract politicians who are meglomaniacs or otherwise have mental problems or personality disorders.
It’s done by reducing government’s function to that of protecting individuals, not managing their every activity to achieve social goals arrived at through political compromisedeals made by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Trent Lott and Kay Bailey Hutchinson.
It’s done by making politics so inconsequential that folks like Karl Rove wil not participate in governance at all but opt for careers in direct crime, where they will be easily caught, prosecuted and jailed.
Governments operate through the use of force and coercion. As long as the limits of that use are profoundly limited, a civil, rational society is possible. When the limits are unknown, we all become prey to hordes of barbarians wearing the guises of saviors, social workers and saints.
Now, government has virtually unlimited access to resources and power. But we are a democracy, right? Democracies with no limits, historically, fall ultimately when charming demagogues on horseback arrive to save us from the excesses they and their colleagues created, and which we allowed to be created.
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” according to P. J. O’Rourke.
The very system itself — one which Don may now be questioning while he survives his imprisonment on trumped-up political charges — is at issue. It’s a system which has long since ceased to operate within any constitutional, or ethical and moral, limits.
That individuals like Karl Rove should emerge to take advantage should be no surprise. Our only surprise should come from those suggesting we fix it by further expanding the powers and resources available to government, and thus to the political elite.
If that continues, those who come in Karl’s footsteps will make him look smalltime by comparison.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Again, I would like to hear your suggestions on exactly how we do that.
That’s the theme the Republicans have been running on since Barry Goldwater, but when they get into office and power, they just make matters worse.
It seems to me the Constitution is a pretty good guide on providing limits to government. But the party that champions those limits the most seems to obliterate them the worst.
In other words, as Bush likes to say, saying it ain’t enough. Where’s your white paper on how to do it.
I think government has a role to play and the more we push to get government out of things, the more the giant, multi-national corporations move in for profit. I would rather live under a government that works, like we had in the 1990s, than one that doesn’t, like now.
Bush was blabbering on TV again this morning about getting the House to pass telecom immunity to protect AT and T from lawsuits. What he’s really trying to protect against is the information that would come out during the discovery phase of those lawsuits about HIS illegal spying operation, the most intrusive violation of civil liberties in American history - by far.
Somehow all this is lost on the Newhouse press in Alabama. They are not for limited government. They are for a form of corporate fascism that controls us all, as long as they get to have their little day jobs and their pink houses in Vestavia. They have no problem with the oil and power companies having all the power, as long as they keep those advertising dollars flowing to keep their printing presses running.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hear Hear, That’s exactly right Reverend Wilson.
The GOP bitches about the SIZE and POWER of the Federal Govt and let’s keep those tax and spend Democrats out of power while they “SPEND SPEND Spend”. Let’s cut taxes again they say, which is just what the poor good ole boys here in Alabama want to hear, then they spend more money on wars and defense.
“If we don’t spend more on defense the terrorists will kill us all.” Bullshit!!
The largest tax increase in history took place in old bulletproof Ronald Regan’s administration. They called it “Tax Reform,” that’s where they took our interest deductions away among other things, closing loopholes for the “middle class” and poor while trying to cut corporate taxes.
Let’s reduce the size of guvment they say while creating agencies like Homeland Security to spy on “We The People” in the name of patriotism. This administration just thumbs its’ nose at the Constitution “just a damned piece of paper” according to would-be King “George the Simple.”
Come on all you other “We the People” out there, let’s quit taking this crap, quit believing the lies that They try to scare us with. Throws these crooks in jail wherever they belong.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:24 am
What happened with the Republicans was entirely predictable. They mostly talked a good game until they actually got into power. Suddenly, in the majority in Congress, and then with a Republican president in the White House, they did exactly what Democrats had done in similar situations under FDR and LBJ.
Goldwater was the last major Republican figure serious about limits on government. His voting record in the Senate reflects that. Reagan compromised regularly with the Democratic majority in Congress, as did Bush senior.
Meantime, the neoconservatives took over the Republican party ideologically. They have no problem with big, oppressive government so long as it’s implementing their agenda. It helps to remember that Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, and his friends were one and all former big-government leftists who’d previously supported the FDR-LBJ vision of an interventionist, populist government.
In other words, the Republicans of midcentury were a completely different group from the neoconservatives who came later to seize control of the party. By the time Reagan left office, the neocons were firmly in charge.
That was revealed dramatically when, after leading the takeover of the House in 1994, Gingrich and company were firmly pro-big-government and pork-barrell spending by 1999 at the latest. They only refused Clinton requests for more spending because he was a Democrat. As soon as Bush junior came into office, they went on a spending binge, along with giving Bush free hand to initiate the Iraq War.
Bottom line, again, is that neither major party has any kind of ideological commitment to constitutional principles worth noting. All of the major leaders of the two parties act as if the Constitution were written by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, and as if America were intended to be a unitary, majoritarian democracy and not a limited constitutional federal republic. The notion that there should be limits on executive and congressional power is entirely foreign to them. Their culture is not the authentic American motif of Thoreau, Douglass and Spooner but a sort of regurgitated social democrat European one more similar to that found in the UK, Germany or Italy.
So, please understand that I am very far from acting as apologist for any political leaders in this country. One and all are far from the mainstream of authentic American political thought, which found perhaps its purest expression with some of the 19th century names cited above, and more recently with folk such as Rose Wilder Lane and Robert Heinlein, among others.
However, collectivist cultural memes have so long permeated the media, academia and popular culture that most Americans now accept the current situation as normal. Oh, they may want different people in office, but they generally do not question massively-interventionist government nor politicans who position themselves as society saviors or national nannies.
A poll just out today shows almost two-thirds want the government to provide universal health insurance, the ultimate warm and fuzzy social ideal, but which, if enacted, will be a catastrophe of epic proportions, surpassing the soon-to-happen baby boomer Social Security catastrophe.
This expectation is culturally-driven. Prior to FDR, people did not expect government to house, feed and otherwise tend for their every need. They did that themselves, as families, or in voluntary concert with others through any number of religious and mutual aid organizations.
After twelve years of clever manipulation by FDR, most people had come to believe that the government “should” address a broad range of real and imaginery problems aggressively. It is no accident that beginning with FDR, we have also been involved in the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history, and carried out an imperialist, militarist agenda abroad. The two go hand in hand and have ever since the time of Octavian Caesar or before.
Government uses force and coercion to achieve its mission — that is the history of all kinds of government since the dawn of recorded history. Strictly limited to protecting peoples lives and rights, and that only, government is a useful although always-potentially evil tool.
Unbound from those limits, and given the additional mission of universal social services agency, government is direct menace to the health, lives, belongings and happiness of people. Again, look at the record of just the last century if there are doubts about that.
Suddenly, because we elect the “right” president, this is all going to change? This fearsome monster, which has always been a fearsome monster whenever unleashed in this way for five millenia or more, is suddenly going to become a fuzzy, obedient, wonderful friend to us all?
Impossible. It is the culture of deference to and dependence on government that gives rise to the abuses and despotism, and that will not change by simply changing from despots who appear cold and prickly to despots who appear warm and fuzzy. In fact, the latter are even more dangerous because they don’t seem so dangerous.
Politics is not the answer. A President Obama - despite his profound self-delusions on this subject - a President Hillary - despite her equally profound delusions - or a President McCain will not change things one whit, if one is paying strict attention after next January 20th. No fundamental changes will happen; new makeup will be applied to the monster and he will appear, for a short time, harmless.
Rather the solution is for individuals who want a different future for themselves and future generations to take peaceful, but assertive action to regain control of their own lives and help create a culture of ethical behavior in a context of self-reliance.
Want universal health care for everyone? A noble goal, even nobler if someone would put together a Red Cross or United Way style nonprofit that would offer free health insurance to any who need it, funded by voluntary contributions. I’d contribute. It would be far more efficient, far more likely to help people who actually need it, and best of all not be controlled by politicians in DC - which is what will happen if universal care comes from the government.
There are workable, ethical, humanistic solutions to almost all human problems. But expecting governments, whose millenia-long culture is use of force and coercion, to be the best venue for solving them is a little bit like expecting a pack of wolves to be the best guardians for a flock of sheep. Oh yes, the wolves would certainly keep other predators out of the fields, but…
Finally, American leftists need to return to their roots, the New World roots that include Paine, Thoreau, Emerson, Douglass and Spooner. There are profound differences in that legacy and that of European social democrats. The authentic American left is libertarian, not coercive-collectivist. The authentic American left sees big government as a big obstacle to human freedom and equality, not its best friend.
It’s all about our culture and our expectations. Generally now we are operating under a wide range of delusions, kept alive by refusing to take a sober look at the emperor and see that he does, in fact, have no clothes.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:37 am
A long screed, and well informed, if incomplete.
Thoreau is our inspiration, but I would just point out one little thing about FDR and his time. Run amok corporate capitalism and the greed of Wall Street then, which pales in comparison to now, left this country in a massive Great Depression. The poor people of Birmingham were so hungry they were eating their leather shoes (I’m not making this up. You can find it in a library if you look long and hard. You won’t see it reflected anywhere in the Birmingham News).
So the only way out of it then, and it worked, was to start government programs to give people jobs so they could eat number one and also spend money and get the economy going again. The entire American South had been clear-cut from North Carolina to Texas by the logging companies, so FDR started the CCC to plant trees and such.
I understand your point from a philosophical point of view, but as a practical matter, we are on the verge of another Great Depression. And I don’t think self reliance is going to get us out of it. We have neglected education and other problems for too long. And the corporate press knows it’s final years are at hand - and they will do whatever it takes to survive and profit, even if that means forsaking the responsibilities that go with their special rights under the First Amendment.
Maybe we can save the world here in blogland, where we can have this kind of a wide open discussion and inform some of the people at the same time : )
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Wall Street greed did not leave the country in the Great Depression, Glynn. That is pure fable.
Two major factors helped create the Great Depression. Prior to 1929, there had been periodic recessions in the economy. These recessions were temporary, and the markets recovered with little, if any, government intervention.
The 1929 market crash was exacerbated by the Federal Reserve - which had been established in 1912 - pumping huge amounts of credit into the marketplace, fueling wild stock speculation. A further exacerbation was the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff passed under Herbert Hoover, protectionist legislation which effectively closed U.S. markets to many foreign products. Retaliation by those nations followed.
By 1931-1932 the Great Depression was on in full force, made many times worse than it would have been courtesy government intervention in the market, first with the Fed credit flood, then with Smoot-Hawley.
But, you might reply, it was all those greedy folks on Wall Street who took advantage prior to the crash. Mostly, it was small, uninformed investors trying to make a quick buck who drove the wild stock speculation. My great grandfather was one of them — he lost the family farm near Anniston as a result and spent the rest of his life giving music lessons to earn an income.
There are all kinds of popular myths about the Great Depression, including the main myth - that FDR brought the country out of it. The main myth is factually false. By 1938-1939 the Depression, for all Roosevelt’s social engineering, was worse than when he entered office. What brought the country out of the Depression was World War II and Lend-Lease activity leading up to it, plus the market finally being able to make corrections it would have years earlier but for government intervention in the first place.
We may indeed be on the verge of another Great Depression. If we are, and if the politicians try another Roosevelt-style rescue, the end result will be nastier than most of us can imagine.
The U.S. government already has tens of trillions in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities. It is hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, growing by the year. You cannot tax your way out of that debt, because raising taxes too much will destroy the economy you’re counting on to generate taxes to pay it off. You cannot fund trillions in liabilities by killing off the economy you expect to generate taxes to pay those liabilities.
The only solution that works in the real world is a low-tax, low-regulation scenario that creates the economic growth necessary to pay for it. This is not a matter of ideological argument, it is a matter of real world experience. High taxes and restrictive regulations bring out economic stagnation and spiraling public debt. Low taxes and less regulation bring about economic growth.
Even the Chinese Communist Party understands this. They have made a “grand bargain” in which the party keeps control of government, but the market is given very wide freedom. The result is an explosion of growth in China, which is arguably wealthier today than at any time in recent centuries. It is set to become the economic power of the world, not because of socialism but because of a market system.
It would be supreme irony if while that happens, America descends to the level of a second or third world country with a government seizing and transferring most income based on political considerations.
Also note that former Soviet countries which are doing well are those which have adopted true market economies, such as Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Those that are not doing so well, such as Belarus and Kazahkistan, have retained Soviet-style command economies.
The blogosphere can be a source of evolutionary goodness, if the bloggers resist the impulse to pander to coercive collectivism. Many don’t, unaware or not caring that any collectist system whether of the “right” or of the “left” will be run by an elite for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else, who will effectively have no rights the elite need respect.
Whether the bloggers will fall for the deception of the “leftists” who will claim this is being done for the “benefit of the people” is critical. If they do, they will help usher in a new round of Caesarian autocracy followed by a new round of Dark Ages.
The Internet has brought about profound potential for decentralization of power and autonomy. It would be tragic if bloggers inadvertenty helped pave the way for something quite like what Orwell imagined in “1984.”
Because of our millenia-long fixation with government, human beings during the last century have seen the very worst, although entirely logical, end products of the “hard power system” that traditional government structure has to offer. This includes, of course, not just our own but other governments around the world.
As noted in my earlier post, government works on the basis of coercion and force, except perhaps at the smallest level, such as New England towns, where everyone really knows everyone else and policy really is a consensus of all the governed, etc.
But most governments operate on this principle, and certainly all national and provincial governments.
In contrast, there is a growing trend toward “soft power” around the world, the use of dialogue, discussion and persuasion, followed by voluntary action, to bring about change. This is ultimately more effective than hard power because it rewires the culture.
It seems to me quite logical that the truly great revolutions of the last century were non-violent, or “soft power,” movements led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The most important things those movements accomplished was cultural rewiring. African Americans, for instance, theoretically had equality of rights after the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. But the dominant culture of the day was not willing to support those rights.
The movement Dr. King led resulted in legislation, to be sure, but its most important consequence was rewiring the dominant culture to view racial discrimination and hatred for what they are - evil.
Another note: neither Gandhi or King ever held, or even aspired to hold, political office.
Ultimately, the sum total of individual values determines what the dominant culture is going to be. And that determines what societal organization and governance will look like.
If our values are rooted in what I call the “external savior” system, we will look for others to solve our problems and bring us happiness. This approach has been tried over and over again without any significant reduction in human suffering.
Conversely, if our values are rooted in what I call “I am responsible for my own life and happiness” system, we will not look to “external saviors,” and certainly not politicians, to make us happy. Human suffering can be significantly reduced with this cultural “soft power” premise, otherwise we are fated to continue beating each other up, taking each other’s stuff, and physicially and psychologically abusing each other.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
More of the same. I think you’ve made that point. Now what to we do about it?
July 17th, 2008 at 1:04 am
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