American Republican Socialists

Response to Charlie Sykes re his March 3, 2020 Bulwark podcast “Heath Mayo on #PrinciplesFirst”

In the US almost ¾ (three quarters!) of dairy farmers’ expenses were paid by government during the 2005 – 20015 period BEFORE Trump’s additional massive increase of subsidies pushed it above 80%. (https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-equal-73-percent-of-producer-returns-says-new-report/)

In Canada dairy farmers restrict supply to match a formula for anticipated demand. Farmers bid for quota amounts, competing with each other on price. No subsidies, none, zero, are paid to farmers by the Canadian government.

American dairy GOP “conservatives” are hard-core socialists when they are on the receiving end, but believe in sink-or-swim unregulated capitalism for others. Both Democrats and Republicans pander to the fantasy that there is some infinite market for dairy out there. Pump those cows full of hormones! Open up another facility! Vote for me!

I have just been listening to your podcast saying that there are principled intellectual disagreements in the conservative movement about a free market economy as if one had existed in Wisconsin prior to Trump.

Heath Mayo nods to truth by calling out Trumpist pandering to Appalachian white labourers, but carefully avoids naming either local Wisconsin dairy or the vast make-work project that is the American military. You, Charlie, use “conservative” as a synonym for membership in the Republican party.

Republican dairy farmers are subsidized more heavily than dairy farmers in the European countries you blithely call socialist for goodness sake. Your own use of the term “conservative” is clearly not connected to any kind of capitalism.

Mayo warns of philosophical erosion “once conservatism starts catering to interest groups” Starts? Starts!? This did not start with Trump. He doesn’t bother with the inane “Atlas Shrugged” fig-leaf, but the intellectual void that is Trumpism simply reflects back the same set of beliefs and attitudes that they found in the GOP.

The Republican party during my lifetime has been about nothing more than the fantasy that having European roots automatically makes you smarter and more industrious. This supposedly explains your own financial position relative to disadvantaged Americans and excuses you from any need to change the system. You wonder why anything other than blind team loyalty upsets “conservatives” so much. It is because what they want to conserve is not capitalism; It is the playing field tilted in their own favour.

Free Speech De-Toxifies Dissent; Suppression Intensifies It

Trump just gave his first foreign speech. Standing in Riyadh before an assembly of Sunni political leaders, Trump urged them to crack down on extremists and to “drive them from this earth”. He implied that domestic dissent in Sunni countries was due to the malign influence of Iran, a Shia nation. He implied Iran was somehow responsible for ISIS, on the face of it an absurd notion.

Trump had started his speech with a description of a massive arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the United States, followed by a rambling assertion that killing was evil, therefore they should kill more killers. Or something. Anyway that the key to a more peaceful, prosperous and glorious future was more killing. And definitely more arms sales.

He gloated that this arms deal would create jobs. At no point in his speech did he draw a link between 'extremism' and any domestic policies where these acts occur. Lack of jobs there? None of his business. Lack of free speech? He didn't say.

Republican convention nominates Trump

Trump and his most ardent followers do not recognize soft power.  They seem to be saying their plan is to increase the already supremely mighty US military to the point that 5% of the world’s population can hold a gun to the heads of the other 95%. Then they will ‘negotiate from strength’. This is not negotiation. It is Mob-style extortion.

Moral issues aside, Trump underestimates the much vaster scope of soft power and what it does and can do for America. Just as many underestimate the power of slow-moving flood water that nonetheless removes houses from their foundations and sweeps away large vehicles, so Trump mistakes slow and complex multilateralism as weakness. He thinks that inspiring fear gives him more influence than inspiring hope and offering win-win solutions. It is a naïve mistake.

Clinton has only a short time to educate the undecideds. She made a good start Monday with her Charlie Rose interview. She was clear, informed and intelligent but best of all she showed real passion. Anyone who sees it will come away trusting her more than they ever have before. I certainly did.

True Capitalism is Not Racist

Like most Canadians I live up against the American border, have relatives and clients in the States, work and socialize with Americans and am inundated with American media. It is no surprise that American political conversation affects Canadian philosophies and politics.

  

Because we actually admit to our Socialist institutions (schools, laws, roads, water management...) we are just slightly less liable to fall into false dichotomies, but only slightly.
  
It is time to start calling American Republican "Capitalism" by it's true name: Feudalism. This is why it is so comfortable for racists to be Republican; It is inherently tribal and elitist. It champions win-lose economic interactions and coercive social institutions.
  
The American Democrats advocate a Canadian style Capitalism- One which believes in removing barriers to participation in the marketplace, in creating an environment where win-win solutions thrive. 
  
This more modern style of Capitalism empowers individuals to express their own creative energy. It is the future.

How torture works: In defense of America

When Americans were practicing torture after 9/11 up until 2006, the horrors inflicted upon captives usually did not include concurrent questioning. It was done not to extract information at that moment but to deliberately to traumatize the victim in the hope that a particular mental transformation would take place.  We have a self-preserving instinct that can generate a genuinely submissive, passive mindset. This likely evolved in order that we not inadvertently provoke our tormentor.

Pain is not required. Fear alone will produce the Stockholm syndrome of willing compliance. All that is required is the deep understanding that we are helpless in the power of another.

Although practitioners of fgm cite suppression of female sexuality as its only purpose,  I believe the actual function of female genital mutilation is to cause trauma. The pain of having one’s clitoris sliced off must be horrible beyond words. When your own mother holds you down during this it amplifies the message that you have no refuge.

The function of this trauma is to convert women into slaves; To deny them the use of their own talents and energies or possession of personal ambitions. ..To render them compliant as providers of obedient sexual access and passive labour to whatever ends their masters desire.

Putting out an eye or cutting off their feet would have the same effect, but would be disabling. Further, if you have a cultural reverence for wisdom and abilities magically conferred by the phallus the effects of the process are given an explanation.

Before we condemn the long-halted American torture program, let us reflect on the fact that Egypt, besides ‘disappearing’ thousands of its own citizens, also slices the clitorises of over ninety percent of its women. This is still happening.

Contrast this with the American culture that made it possible to bring even shameful practices into the light, to reflect and to self-correct.

UNICEF Data: Monitoring the Situation of Children and Women  

FGM/C   (female genital mutilation and cutting)

October 2014
Country	FGM/C prevalence among girls and women (%)
Benin	7
Burkina Faso	76
Cameroon	1
Central African Republic	24
Chad	44
Côte d'Ivoire	38
Djibouti	93
Egypt	91
Eritrea	83
Ethiopia	74
Gambia	76
Ghana	4
Guinea	97
Guinea-Bissau	50
Iraq	8
Kenya	27
Liberia	66
Mali	89
Mauritania	69
Niger	2
Nigeria	25
Senegal	26
Sierra Leone	90
Somalia	98
Sudan	88
Togo	4
Uganda	1
United Republic of Tanzania	15
Yemen	19
Sub-Saharan Africa	39
Eastern and Southern Africa	44
West and Central Africa	31

Klinghoffer Komments

... getting caught up before we lose the light on 2014-
Here is something I posted elsewhere on Oct 24

Just saw `The Death of Klinghoffer’ interview on Charlie Rose (10/24)

“Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- On “Charlie Rose,” a discussion about "The Death of Klinghoffer." The opera opened on Monday night at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and is surrounded by controversy. We are joined by two First Amendment lawyers on opposite sides of this controversy: Martin Garbus and Floyd Abrams.” (Source: Bloomberg)

http://www.bloomberg.com/…/-the-death-of-klinghoffer-charli…

Floyd Abrams ‘accuses’ this opera of “Romanticizing” a Palestinian character, as if to dramatize a flawed human in a tragedy is to advocate or defend their point of view. He confuses understanding with sympathy.

Does he believe that productions of ‘Sweeney Todd’ encourage barbers to slit their clients’ throats? Does he believe that listening to the glorious music of Gounod’s ‘Faust’ will encourage members of the audience to make their own pacts with the devil? Does he think ‘MacBeath’ advocates violent usurpation? These are tragedies because humans are making the kind of horrible mistakes that humans make when we let our own anger, greed, lust or fear blind us (‘us’, not ‘them’) to the ultimate consequences of our own deeds. Passion can destroy compassion. This is the sorrow of the human condition.

Mr. Abrams is offended that a Palestinian murderer should be portrayed as human. But villains ARE human.

In the meantime those, who like Floyd Abrams let their own fears distort reason and rob them of compassion, argue that the only portrayal of villains that should be allowed is a kind of hostile caricature. This is the essence of censorship.

Justin Davidson says it better than I can:http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/trouble-with-klinghoffer.html

Democracy vs American Feudalists

The American Republican party is dedicated to exalting the power of owners at the expense of citizens. It advocates neo-Feudalism and calls it democracy.

Democracy elsewhere, including so far in Canada, instead defines the relationship between citizen and state. Rights and obligations fall to the individual in their role as citizen. I owe the wider community a share of whatever resources I momentarily control in order to sustain the environment that makes acquisition of those resources possible. Everyone benefits, me most of all, and I am free of control by any other individual, including my employer. The work I do is contractual and consensual, not coerced.

Taxes pay a pre-existing debt; They were never mine. Their delivery is just a matter of bookkeeping, not a choice I make to ‘give away’ anything that was ever ‘mine’. I know that everyone around me is also paying their share. The political system is just and open to anyone to participate.

Besides providing rule of law and freeing me from personal domination, the state also fulfills a larger public safety role. My food has been inspected. My roads are safe. I have access to good medical care. Universities are sustained.

Americans, on the other hand, seem to be recreating Feudalism. All rights belong to owners; None to the penniless. Medical care is a favour that an employer might or might not bestow on his powerless serfs. They have no alternative but to obey a master who has this power of life and death over them, for that is what medical care is.

People who can’t afford lawyers end up in jail on arbitrary charges. Conviction not only results in ridiculous lengths of incarceration, it also disenfranchises citizens of their vote.

The rich amplify their power election by election. The more the federal state is weakened the more the rights of Americans as citizens are weakened.

This is not a joke. It is the precursor to revolution. Republicans will inevitably discover that no one rides the populist beast and that Feudal control is not a sustainable system. Until the revolution that will sweep it away, Feudalism will progressively starve the commonweal of resources, impoverishing skills and opportunities, reducing the marketplace.

Feudalism is not Capitalism. It is at least as corrosive to markets as Socialism.