For all the good it is doing him. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
as symbol of change, he's got it wired, and that's the job he's paid to do. actual change is coming, but more because of popular outrage and despite politics. it's too bad he doesn't use the executive order, before killing it, along with the filibuster. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
weeell, i oscillate, that's why the Janus references.
absolute pragmatism is not pretty, it walks and quacks a lot like expediency... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
His objective is to fix the car - or get it running some way or other - but it has been stuck in reverse for quite a while and the gearbox is shot. When you're up to your neck in engine oil is easy to forget that the original objective was to change the engine... Index of Frank's Diaries
I don't know that he comprehends the enormity of what has been done, that the existing system cannot and will not survive as constituted or just how destructive what is to come next will be. If he did I believe he would, at minimum, be concerned for the lives his daughters will lead, even as part of the elite of the society they will inhabit. For all of his intelligence and the diversity of his background he seems amazingly culture bound and the culture to which he is bound is that of the existing financial elites. How can continuing to serve them help anything, even them? They need to be saved from their folly, which is leading us all to ruin, and he looks to them for direction?! As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for mediation and have spent a lot of my life doing it in various ways - but there are times when mediation doesn't work: when the other guys don't want to settle because they think they can have it all their own way and see no reason to settle for the half way solutions mediation often results in.
For mediation to work, the protagonists actually have to recognise each other as having a legitimate case to argue - even if, and indeed especially if, they disagree strongly with each other. The problem Obama faces is that the wingnuts don't realise they are really the mirror image of the commies, terrorists, gays, atheists and liberals they so fear and despise. Their goal is to conquer, not compromise; and in that context mediation simply isn't possible. Index of Frank's Diaries
It was partly a provocation, of course. But I did have a more substantial reason: Chamberlain actually tried (more or less) to work within international law. At almost any other point in history, he would have been a superior statesman to any of his contemporary European peers. The fact that he lived at a point in history where he really didn't have any good options should not be held unduly against him.
For all my irritation that Obama isn't handing out torches and pitchforks to the "burn Wall Street and soak the rich" crowd, I have to note that in almost any other political environment, he would have been a very good president. He's reasonably careful, he has a reasonably diverse cabinet, even if it is slanted towards "centrists," he hasn't presided over the start of any new wars, which for an American president is a major accomplishment in and of itself, his administration does a lot of good things on civil liberties, he did get a stimulus and a health care bill passed and he has even shown a little actual spine vis-a-vis Israel.
He's no FDR, of course, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to hold this against him - it's not really his fault that he lives at a time where you have to not only be as good as FDR but actually quite a bit better to accomplish something worthwhile. (FDR came to power after the stock market crash and Hoover's disastrous policies had already accomplished a levelling of the national wealth comparable to that achieved by Lenin in Russia - even if Obama had the inclination to be the next FDR, the Masters of the Universe have not been so conveniently weakened this time.)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
At one point, I was asked about my political heroes, and one of my answers was "Neville Chamberlain."
Now Commie Vietnam is a tourist Mecca for young USians - and remarkably, the Vietnamese don't seem to hold agent orange and cluster bombing against visiting Americans. How disorientating is that?
The entire Teabag movement should be offered a free holiday in Vietnam and asked to explain. Their explanation would probably be on the lines of "the commies realised that we were right all along".
So why did you kill them by the million?
"to teach them a lesson - it shows that bombing works as an education tool".
So is that why you learnt nothing and went and repeated the mistake in Iraq/Afghanistan?
"the Iraqi's/Afghanis will learn that we were right all along as well"
So if someone wants to teach you a lesson, the only way is to bomb you?
"we have nothing to learn from these terrorists and will just use bigger bombs if we have to"
The vacuous, self inoculating logic of those who believe they have a right to use violence to achieve their objectives...and that their greater access to weapons of mass destruction proves that they are right.
"God is might and might is right and we have might so we must be right" Index of Frank's Diaries
That fact that the theory failed does not show it was a bad one to try, other then from an omniscient point-of-view. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Indeed you could even make the converse case: that the Nazi party rose to power because Versailles wasn't sufficiently draconian or enforced to keep people like the Nazis down.
I don't subscribe to either theory. WWI was an abomination against all peoples, and virtually all national elites were almost equally to blame. Putting the blame almost entirely on the losers certainly saved the ruling elites of the victors asses and set the scene for a rematch.
But Germany could also have responded positively to that defeat in WW1 - as it did after WW2 - admittedly largely because of a much more positive US input. And then saving the winning ruling elites asses didn't do the UK any favours whatsoever.
But the greater problem is class war and the industrialisation process which created such savage tensions. It seems that now - after 40 years of heeding those lessons we are back on the same old road of increased inequality and class war - leading almost inevitably the wars - now almost global in scope.
Why is it that the lessons of even a world war only seem to last for a generation or two? Index of Frank's Diaries
The initial nationalist impulse may have been triggered by Versailles, but without economic chaos - and class war, and funding by both German and US industrialists - the Nazis would have remained in the crank corner.
If anything, the Nazis were a creature of the Depression. If the US Depression hadn't kicked the legs out from under the German economy, it's unlikely they'd have been more significant than the Tea Baggers have been so far - if that.
I don't think he is able to think outside the parameters of the "existing system", and I suspect that's why he was the favored candidate of the financial elite.
Those who claim he is a son of Alinsky deeply misunderstand both. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
I see him as more of a mechanic - who doesn't have a particularly well equipped workshop and can't quite raise the capital he needs to get all the tools he needs.
no net like metaphor to try and capture the elusive butterfly...
if internet is the web into which will fly the enlightenment of humanity, weave on! (nice and sticky, please.)
back to biz... did i insert the apparently missing 'can't' correctly?
aren't the tools to 're-mantle' capitalism baked into all these discussions about smith, vebner and keynes, the history of mercantalism, the honeypots and cash cows of compound interest, the morality of banking, and the work of bloggers to decode, sterling newberry, numerian, jerome, migeru, yves, steve, paul, you and all?
what seems missing is the political will to be daniel in the den.
put another way, this david is up against a slew of goliaths with a sling full of feathers. his best bet may be to let them all continue to be (all too) slowly revealed, until the naked truth is obvious to a tipping point number of voters.
taking on the mob too directly was JFK's fatal mistake.
he's sure up to his ears in BP oil, and yes the gearbox is shot and stuck in reverse, and to get it going again on the wrong fuel would be just deja vu.
i think he has to turn the whole chassis around, and the economy will have to go really slow for that!
meanwhile the stock market needles way jammed into red, ungoverned race to meltdown. how to pour cold water on it without making it seize?
maybe like addled adolf did with the beetle, he needs to put a little tesla in every garage! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
