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The Crisis Papers on DU
Ernest Partridge
The Crisis Papers
With the Supreme Court Ruling, Citizens United v. FEC, the government of the United States has, in effect, become a subsidiary of Corporate America.
So isn't it time to rethink a few of our government institutions?
After all, the American public has a well-deserved reputation for discarding shopworn institutions that have ceased to serve any useful purpose, and to replace them with imaginative and appropriate innovations Thus passenger railroads were replace...
The temptation is great to stick to the minor, more gossipy items in the political news. The Larger Issues (here are seven) are damn difficult to deal with. Are there political leaders ready to take them seriously? Or do we continue slouching toward
l Bernard Weiner l
Sometimes when I'm on a photo shoot, I change my camera focus to close-up, which puts me just inches, say, from the inside of a flower. I can spend much time in-tight like that, marveling at the complexities of a leaf, pistil, stamen, occasionally even a bumblebee inside stuffing its pollen sacs.
Sometimes when reading the news, I find myself caught up in the close-up mode: deep into the details, the news-of-the-day stories, the gossip, the momentary winners and the losers,...
Ernest Partridge
Along with the rest of you, I am amused and entertained when Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, et al, lampoon the tea bag brigades. It is so easy to target those poor souls, with their stupid signs, their incoherent slogans, and their appalling ignorance of fundamental political and historical facts.
Ridicule the tea partyers? A cheap thrill, to be sure.
But also lousy political strategy!
News flash! Most people react negatively to insults, and turn against t...
l Bernard Weiner l
Pundits of all stripes are calling this past decade a thoroughgoing disaster, one of the worst in our nation's history. True, but there's another way of evaluating the CheneyBush era.
Sure, lots of horrific things happened in the years between 2000 and 2010: a massive terrorist attack, our country lied into a disastrous war in Iraq, the Administration colluding with corporations in looting the treasury and polluting the air and water, a great recession brought into being at...
Ernest Partridge
"Reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Richard Feynman
The same sort of public relations wizardry that once convinced a sizeable portion of Americans that cigarette smoking was harmless, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had a hand in the 9/11 attacks, that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, and that John Kerry's war record was fraudulent, is now convincing an increasing number of our citizens th...
Bernard Weiner
Dear Diary:
It's been helter-skelter around here these days. Actually, there is no
"here." I'm on the road every day, mostly at book-signings for "Going Rogue."
Turns out I'm real popular in the real America. You betcha.
Lots of liberal commentators are assuming I wrote the book to make money.
They're right: If I'm lucky enough to get my 15 minutes of fame, you're darn
tootin' that my family and I are gonna cash in now on all that celebrity.
But there's also an assumpt...
| Bernard Weiner |
Maybe this happens to you, too. You go away on vacation for a few months, come back and sort through your snail/email and back copies of magazines and 'net stories, only to find that a good share of the mail is third-class junk/spam and not all that much has changed in the news.
That's the way I feel these days. After pumping out about 300 essays since 9/11, recently I more or less took a three-month leave from publishing political analyses on the internet in order to recon...
| Ernest Partridge |
Last Wednesday, in hundreds of "tea party" demonstrations from sea to shining sea, the word was proclaimed: "Taxation (with or without representation) is tyranny!"
The People (well, maybe a small fraction of one percent of them) have spoken, however confused and inchoate the message.
And so, in response, I have a simple proposal: let’s make all tax payments voluntary.
Grover Norquist of "Americans for Tax Reform" proclaims that he wants t...
| Ernest Partridge |
I suppose that I might be described as a "leftist." However, after more than a century of abusive propaganda that has been dumped on "the left," I can't say that I am comfortable with that label.
Some time ago, I heard an anonymous caller to a talk show remark that it is no mere coincidence that the word "right" refers both to the political "right" (self-described "conservatives") and to the moral right. In point of fact, it is exactly that: a mere historical coincidence,...
| Bernard Weiner |
Reading Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (Penguin Press, 2008) is yet another reminder that all too often those who were right early on about the massive dangers facing American society under the CheneyBush Administration were ignored, marginalized, reviled, often punished.
There were scores of us in the media, most on the internet but a healthy handful inside corporate mainstream journalism, who from the very beginning were warning of a power-hungry Admin...
| Ernest Partridge |
If the Obama economic goals are to be met – a repaired physical infrastructure, educational pre-eminence, health care for all, international leadership in science and technology, etc. – we, the public, must retrieve the cash that was effectively stolen from the public treasury. A bank robber does not gain legal possession of his loot. Neither should today's "robber barons," notwithstanding the fact that the theft was accomplished under the guise of quasi-legality. The loot ...
|Bernard Weiner |
It's like watching someone being sucked down into quicksand. I'm referring to the sad, desperate struggle of the Republican Party to try to resurrect its electoral fortunes by championing the exact same policies that took them to embarrassing defeat in the Obama/Democratic landslide. By their actions, it's plain they got nuthin'.
Nothin' except to flail about in self-destructive obstructionism, basically in temper-tantrum mode. If we can't be victorious, they seem to be telli...
| Bernard Weiner |
I was shocked. For six years, I had been meeting secretly with the GOP mole I called "Shallow Throat"** -- a high-ranking official in the Bush Administration -- and each time, ST made sure to wear different wigs and scarves and dark glasses. Now, here was Shallow Throat in front of me, at a Smithsonian cafe, with no disguise. Except this time wearing a smile a mile wide.
"You've outed yourself," I said. "And you're grinning like a banshee. Has Obama's election liberated you?...
| Ernest Partridge |
Regressives (i.e., self-described “conservatives”) have a nasty disinclination to learn from history, as they routinely promote policies that have failed spectacularly in the past. Today, with the advent of a Barack Obama administration and a solidly Democratic Congress, this is no time for progressives to imitate the regressives. For, as George Santayana famously warned, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
And what does history teach us?
When...
| Bernard Weiner |
One definition of mental disease is when someone repeats the same counter-productive behavior again and again and again and expects different results. Which brings us to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This time it's centered in Gaza, but the ramifications threaten to engulf much of the Arab Middle East, and Iran, and possibly beyond the region.
Each side believes that with just a bit more violent pressure, one more attack, one more mass bombing, one more unleashing of the...
| Ernest Partridge |
An economist and his guide, while hunting in Africa, fall into an elephant trap: twenty feet deep with vertical walls.
“That does it,” says the guide, “we’re done for. No escape, no food, no chance of being found in time.”
“Nonsense,” said the economist, “I can get us out of here.”
“And how do you propose to do that?,” the guide asks.
The economist replies: “Well, first we posit a ladder.”
Economists are no more inclined than the rest of us to live in a fantasy world –...
| Bernard Weiner |
Psychiatrists will attest that it is during emotional depression that real strides can be made in radical alteration of behavior and philosophy. Trauma, in other words, can be a great teacher. Everything is stirred-up, topsy-turvy, and thus can rise to the surface and become manifest and workable. In such a tumultuous time, can be, and must be, dealt with.
I suspect much is similarly true with great upheavals in the body economic and body politic. One is no longer in a safe,...
| Bernard Weiner |
Below are four suggestions for what ordinary citizens can do in our current and growing economic/political /social crisis. But first let's place what follows in some historical context.
Back in the day -- for me the decade-and-a-half known as "The Sixties" -- we dissenters railed against the corrupt "System." It seemed clear to all of us in "The Movement" that all the institutions that affected our lives -- government, academia, business, religion, the political parties, mas...
| Ernest Partridge |
Barack Obama is President-Elect, the Democrats have significantly increased their majorities in Congress, the Supreme Court drift to the right has been halted and may soon be reversed, and the Republican Party is in disgrace and disarray.
So is it time, at last, for the Obamaphiles to retire from politics, return to their private lives, and just let Barack be Barack?
If that is to be the prevailing attitude among the millions of ordinary citizens who fell into line and po...
| Bernard Weiner |
We most likely will never find out what really happened inside the CheneyBush Administration until after January 20, when ethically-motivated insiders feel they can spill some beans without violating their oaths of loyalty, but here's my surmising:
I think key officials inside the Administration knew that the financial system was swirling inside the economic toilet bowl and would undergo a massive meltdown; after all, there were numerous economists, inside and outside the go...
| Bernard Weiner |
Let's face it. Countries, like individuals, get lost sometimes -- really lost, ignoring the maps of morality and civil behavior, bringing shame and disrepute on themselves.
In terms of individuals, good people do weird stuff on occasion: run off, or inexplicably go on a bender, or visit purveyors of easy virtue, or get addicted, or use hate-speech in extremis and so on. Stuff happens.
Nations, too, often take leave of their senses. Crises occur. Citizens get frightened by s...
| Bernard Weiner |
Our men's group, currently in our 17th year, is composed of middle-class professionals -- lawyers, educators, therapist, writer, corporate manager, doctor, etc. -- and each of us in this perilous economy in recent months has taken a deep financial hit of one form or another or knows (or has heard of) someone personally who is struggling to hold onto or already has lost his/her job.
The general conclusion based on our personal knowledge, on the relevant economic indicators, a...
| Ernest Partridge |
Over the past decade, I have written and published numerous essays critical of Libertarianism. In fact, much of the focus of my book in progress, , is a critique of the libertarian doctrines of market absolutism, social atomism, and negative rights.
And yet, I would describe myself as a "semi-libertarian," in that I endorse the libertarian positions on personal liberty – of association, of religion (or lack thereof), of sexual preference, of free expression, etc. Thus the ...
| Ernest Partridge |
Three times they met, face to face. The 72 year-old military and political veteran, and the 46 year-old "rookie." And after the final debate, there was little doubt in the minds of most of the sixty million Americans who watched which of the two contenders was the grown-up.
Throughout the years, I have lamented the length of the American presidential campaigns. Not this time. It took the full twenty-two months for a majority of the public to comprehend and appreciate the m...
| Bernard Weiner |
As with most Americans, my emotions were on overdrive last Tuesday night as the symbolic and actual enormity of Obama's victory hit home. So much to think about, but for the first few days I felt as if I were wandering through a dream-world and was somewhat fuzzy in the head.
Now, after a week of coming down and ruminating on the meanings to be derived from this tumultuous event, here are five observations that may resonate with (or perhaps even provoke) you.
1. OBAMA THE S...
| Bernard Weiner |
(RENO, NV.) Politics is one of the few activities that matches sports in uniting unrelated peoples in common, competitive, exciting endeavor. That truth struck me yet again over the weekend while my sister, my eldest son and I were canvassing for Obama in Nevada.
The thousands of volunteers pouring into Nevada from California, and also those who drove down from Oregon and Idaho and elsewhere, were often quite different from each other in educational background, ethnicity, ag...
| Ernest Partridge |
In another week, more than one-hundred million American citizens will go to the polls to choose their next president.
Or so most of those citizens believe, along with all of the corporate media and, of course, the candidates.
But might it be possible that the decision next Tuesday lies, not with those 100-plus million voters, but instead with a few dozen programmers who write the secret software for the voting machines that will record some 30 percent of the votes, and al...
| Bernard Weiner |
As I write this, things are looking good for an Obama victory, perhaps one of huge proportions. But well aware of the GOP's history of massive voter-suppression and voter intimidation (examples of which are in the news each day**), and the below-the-radar vote-counting manipulations, and quite cognizant of the dark strain of racism in American society, I'm not assuming the election's in the bag.
A landslide Obama turnout may not be enough. It may take an electoral victory of...
| Bernard Weiner |
I've sent the letter below to relatives and friends around the country who I know or suspect still are on the fence or are leaning toward the Republican candidates. You may know friends and kin who likewise are undecided or leaning toward the McCain/Palin ticket, and if you think this list might prove useful in perhaps leading them to vote for Barack Obama, feel free to pass it on.
I do a lot of political writing on the internet and for books, but I don't normally express my...
| Ernest Partridge |
Millions of American citizens who identify themselves as "Republicans" are coping with a daunting question: "What is the primary object of my loyalty? My Party? My Country? My religious faith? My conscience?"
The question is implicit, for few American citizens of whatever political persuasion would openly admit to themselves that loyalty to their party trumps loyalty to the United States. Instead, to the degree that they support their preferred party and its candidates, th...
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About the Crisis Papers
Ernest Partridge and Bernard Weiner are co-editors of The Crisis Papers, and have published their essays on Democratic Underground since 2001. Bernard Weiner, an activist journalist and public speaker, holds a Ph.D.in government and international relations, has taught at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers. Visit Bernard Weiner's blog Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website The Online Gadfly and co-edits the The Crisis Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a Progressive, which can be seen in-progress here. Visit Ernest Partridge's blog Visitor Tools
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To view the Crisis Papers archives from March 2005 to March 2006, click here. To find Bernard Weiner's earlier essays on DU, click here. To find Ernest Partridge's earlier essays on DU, click here. Random Journal
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