The Political Economy of the Palin Pick

Nobody has done a better job than Rick Wolff just did explaining the relationship between the decline of capitalism, the role of the religious right in squeezing productivity out of workers while keeping them preoccupied with the next life and the apocalypse, the complacency and ultimate futility of the Democrats' search for capitalism with a human face, and the choice of Sarah Palin to give hope to the McCain campaign. He brings it all together lucidly and calmly. This is a masterpiece of the current election cycle.

...the more "liberal" or even "leftist" Democrats -- could never go very far along these lines because the Democratic Party also needed the money and support of capital to pay the huge costs of political campaigns. The Democratic Party fears that alienating capital would assure Republican victories...the Democratic Party has basically offered the mass of US workers nothing real or concrete to significantly change their deteriorating social and personal situations. ...nothing is likely from the Democrats that could alter the basic components of the workers' deepening crises -- their wage and job prospects, the extent of state programs and supports they can obtain, their collapsing families and personal relationships, their dwindling self-confidence and frightening loneliness....Palin, as packaged, is the concretized fantasy of "home town family values" carefully combined with "personal flaws" to be identified with, enthusiastic patriotism, aggressive celebration of capital's agenda, and status as maligned victim of elite and media hostility. By naming her, the Republicans aim yet again and more dramatically to be seen as the best hope American working people have that something, rather than nothing, may possibly be done for them in this time of looming economic catastrophe.

Divide-and-Conquer-style-Racism dept. (UPDATED BELOW)

This certainly makes the ruling classes happy: the Republican Party chair of Bernalillo County, New Mexico, on why Hispanics shouldn't vote for Obama:

"The truth is that Hispanics came here as conquerors," he said. "African-Americans came here as slaves. Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won't vote for a black president."

His name is Fernando C'de Baca. The Republican Party web page is here.

Who, in this day and age, says something so mindlessly insensitive and stupid? As the race continues to be tight, look for more and more blatant examples of this kind of thinking and talk. Look for whites explaining why it's okay to feel uneasy about Obama's blackness, and look for other identity groups to trade solidarity for hierarchy in the service of Republicans. Don't look for Democrats to have unapologetic and coherent strategies to deal with it, either. We saw many of those Democrats' true colors in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

[UPDATE: C'DE'BACA APOLOGIZES, SAYS HE WAS TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT, AND I GIVE HIM THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT--SEE ABOVE!]

small reprieve for democracy

Happy to hear this news, that charges have been dropped against Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar of Democracy Now, who along with nearly 40 other journalists, were arrested during demonstrations at the Republican National Convention.

This account of what happened more or less says what you need to know:

Goodman was arrested while asking police to release Kouddous and Salazar who had been violently arrested while reporting on street demonstrations. After being handcuffed and pushed to the ground, Goodman reiterated that she was was a credentialed reporter. Secret Service then ripped the credential from around her neck.

Times Online: Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter

If anyone is voting for the McCain-Palin ticket, please explain your choice in light of this.

If anyone wants to know why I think this is relatively important, rather than an ad hominem, I'll be happy to explain. Just ask.

Sarah Palin: The View from Alaska

Justin Racette, a lawyer up in Fairbanks, and a longtime friend, has this to say about the Governor-cum-Veep candidate. Thanks for guest-blogging, Justin!

First, I'll not spend much time on Alaska political culture, but suffice it to say that I think the corruption scandals that have resulted in convictions of several oil industry types, an indictment of Uncle Ted Stevens, and an ongoing investigation of Don Young have barely scratched the surface. The energy and mineral extraction industries have had a stranglehold on the politics here since before Alaska became a state. Ironically, even though Alaska is a national leader in energy production, people here have dealt with crippling energy costs. Our gas prices have been the highest in the country, and along with that food and other necessities have spiked in price and they were already much higher than the national average. It wasn't just a master stroke of propaganda when Hugo Chavez sent foreign aid in the form of heating oil to Alaska villages last winter - people in remote areas really needed the help. By the way, I'd like to correct a huge and somewhat disturbing misconception that liberal types are using to criticize the Palin selection: Alaska is NOT lily white, it's almost 20% Alaskan Native and there are also more black folks than people realize mostly due to several military bases. A much more valid criticism would be to examine how Palin or any other Alaskan politician have mostly ignored the needs of native villages and tried desperately to destroy their lands with mining and drilling.

Anyways, its against this backdrop that Sarah's time as governor must be evaluated, because energy has dominated her policy focus. She's really spearheaded two main initiatives in the realm. One is the "gas pipeline," which she mentioned in her RNC speech. It was a huge issue in Palin's campaign against Murkowski - probably even more so than the ethics issue. People of all walks of life here are clamoring for a pipeline to be built from the North Slope to get natural gas to market, and it has to do only with the boom (of questionable size) that would come about if it were built. The oil pipeline made a lot of people rich and a lot more working folks made money hand over fist and think that the gas pipeline would be a second coming of the halcyon days of the mid 70s. It's hard to overstate the importance of the original oil pipeline in the collective consciousness here. It's been documented elsewhere but it's worth mentioning here: Sarah totally misled the public in her speech about the pipeline. Construction hasn't started and won't for several years, if at all. All she did was promise a bunch of money to a Canadian company if they figure out how to build the pipeline. That's it.

The other energy related initiative she has pushed was a plan to reduce energy costs for Alaskan citizens. The ultimate plan gave all Alaskans $1200 in an "energy rebate" and changed some regulations regarding cost equalization so that rural Alaskans hopefully don't have to pay 2-8 times as much for their electricity as they do in urban areas. The final plan is pure populism, but the original plan was all voodoo economics. She originally proposed giving Alaskans a monthly debit card to spend on energy only, and the plan also included huge subidies to oil and gas companies so that they could "pass the savings on to consumers." The final plan is nothing but a bandaid. The costs of gasoline and heating oil are so high and many poor and working poor Alaskans depend on their PFDs for so many other necessities, and this plan doesn't do anything to address the broader issue of creating an economy that isn't dependent of fossil fuels for energy and economic livelihood.

So overall that is the big problem with Sarah Palin from a policy standpoint when you just evaluate what she's done in her time in office: She's just another Republican oil crony who lacks the vision to take real action to move an economy beyond fossil fuels because the oilmen are the ones who pull the strings. Sound familiar?

I have to say in fairness that Sarah did raise windfall taxes on oil extraction, and so in that sense it is true that she "stood up to the oil companies" or whatever she's trying to claim. On the other hand, she wants to drill f*****g EVERYWHERE, which really tells me where her allegiances are. She's basically saying to the oil companies, give us a little cut of the action and I'll get you access to every possible oil field in the state.

And while we're on the environment issue, she has sued the Bush administration over the EPAs decision to consider polar bears endangered. Yes, that's right, the Bush administration is really too protective of the environment for her tastes. She also denies that humans have any part in global warming. These are all interesting stances for someone who also believes that the earth is 6,000 years old. She seems to have an even greater disdain for science than even W.

The big picture problem with Sarah on the energy/economy issue is that she doesn't even pay lip service to the need to transform the economy to a post-fossil fuel one. Most people on some level recognize that oil won't last forever. That's an extremely important fact in Alaskan life - if we don't figure out what is going to drive this economy once there isn't any more oil, this place will collapse. That sort of shortsightedness is even more problematic when we're talking about the national economy. The GOP heads are all talking her up because she's been an executive of a state that is a linchpin in the energy economy but to me that is what is so scary: She's been in office here for a year and a half and the best evidence I have is that she has no clue what a post fossil-fuel economy would look like, no vision of the future that doesn't include continuing to drill for oil and gas in every conceivable location.

Other things about Sarah that have been documented elsewhere but bear repeating as much as possible so that people know exactly what we're dealing with. She is a ruthless authoritarian who does what she can to purge opposition to her points of view. If you disagree with her she'll take it personally and get rid of you if she can. I refuse to believe that this is a person who will help the country get beyond "bitter partisanship."

When she was mayor of Wasilla she tried to get the librarian to ban some books, and then fired her when she said no. It took a movement of outraged citizens to get the librarian reinstated. I mean, Jesus H Christ, she tried to ban books from the CITY library, not even the school library where most of the culture warriors focus their attention.

I know Obama has said families are off limits but I disagree - she's parading her kids up there on stage as props every chance she gets, and those cynical jackasses even flew the father of Bristol's kid out to the RNC to get on the stage. I mean, really, if you're going to be so brazen as to make your daughter's shotgun groom-to-be a stage prop, you at least deserve to get the obvious smackdown on your idiotic abstinence-only stance on sex ed. How did abstinence-only work out for YOU, Sarah? This should be fair game as far as I'm concerned.

She cut funding by 20% by way of line item veto for Covenant House, which is an outfit here that services troubled teens and is the number one support system for teen mothers in Alaska. Beautiful. If all teen mothers were as privileged as Bristol Palin I guess that move would be justifiable.

She's flat lying about the "Bridge to Nowhere," I can't believe the GOP machine is stupid enough to let her claim she opposed it. I guess McCain didn't really click on all the links when he did his Google searching. She was absolutely in favor of the bridge until it became a punchline in Washington and everyone else started wondering why Alaska got so much more federal money per capita than any other state as it was. There's even photographic evidence of this fact. Even after the bridge got canned by the feds she still took what money they did give her and built a road right up to where the bridge was going to go.

She's also lying about the "pork" issue in general - as mayor of Wasilla she hired a lobbyist that was affiliated with Abramoff to scare up $3,000 per citizen of Wasilla in federal money.

She has demonstrated no actual competence in managing a budget - she inherited a balanced budget when she took office as mayor of Wasilla, raised tax revenue (in part by way of a sales tax), and left office with Wasilla $22,000,000 in debt, mostly in the form of bonds to pay for things like a sports complex instead of truly necessary infrastructure projects. And she was also the first Mayor of Wasilla to hire a city manager, so she apparently didn't even feel comfortable doing the day to day work of running the city.

There's plenty more stuff out there about Sarah for those who want to look for it but I'm tired and I think I've hit the high points. She's probably to the right of Bush, certainly not to the left of him. And that's based on what limited knowledge we have regarding her stances on the pressing national issues of the day. I can't really fathom the idea that she is this close to the White House, it scares the shit out of me. To say that she isn't qualified to be president isn't even really accurate. She's totally unfit, and all the experience in the world won't change that.

The preceding analysis was from Justin Racette, not from me. But even though I'm not from Alaska (my mom is...) I couldn't have said it better myself. Thanks again, Justin!

Update on the post below

I'm so glad the Obama campaign listened to me on this. Clearly, they are smarter than I gave them credit for, and they should hire me to be David Axelrod's personal assistant.

Obama mobilizes the network to help with Gustav while McCain makes photo-ops!

The Stupidity of the Obama Campaign and Democrats in General

John McCain and his neophyte running mate Sarah Palin will go to Mississippi during the onslaught of Hurricane Gustav. Even if they are doing so solely for the photo-op (and I don't suspect otherwise), they are, in fact, going there. Similarly, Bush and Cheney, in a sudden attack of deathbed sensitivity, announced that they wouldn't attend the GOP convention this week, because of Gustav.

Meanwhile, in the "please stop doing us any favors" department, Michael Moore (whom I have defended in the past) went on MSNBC and said Gustav was a blessing from God, designed to make the Republicans look bad in an election year.

All of these gestures, as empty and meaningless as they are in the scheme of things, will effectively exorcise the specter of Bush's failure and McCain's birthday insensitivity during Hurricane Katrina. It will be seen as repentance and atonement. It will no longer be seen as "fair" to attack the Republicans concerning Katrina.

Obama and Biden will do no such thing. They are headed to Ohio and Michigan. Obama condescendingly sent out a statement urging the citizens of New Orleans to evacuate. Wow--the innovative wisdom of such a statement blows my mind.

Chalk this up as a win for McCain-Palin and as a guarantee that the Republicans will never have to answer for Katrina again. Chalk this up as a colossal, arrogant error on the part of Obama-Biden. I understand that it's ridiculous, objectively speaking, to believe that a visit by a candidate helps anyone besides the candidate; I understand that this whole moral pissing contest is disgusting, but for those of you on the left who want to play that game, your candidate is not playing it well at all. If you don't like the rules of the game, then walk away from the two-party gameshow sham. But if you're going to stick around, then you should be seriously disappointed in the way your golden boy is playing.

Examining Inequality, The Outspoken Women of Islam and More on Shared Sacrifice!

Find out why Shared Sacrifice is the hottest progressive radio show on the internet. Listen this Saturday, from 12:00-2:00 PM MT. Call in at (347) 327-9615.

Matt is back from Korea with interesting stories to tell (where he survived such adventures and misadventures as appearing on Korean television, and being hit by a car). Gary is back from the Democratic National Convention, thoroughly disillusioned with mainstream politics. Join us for an unprecedentedly exciting and provocative edition of the show:

Inequality as a threat to democracy: Gary and Matt interview Sam Pizzigati, editor of Too Much, an online weekly on excess and inequality, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Mr. Pizzigati has written widely on America's economic divide, with op-eds and articles appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and a host of other newspapers and periodicals.

Shattering Western stereotypes: Matt interviews two female muslim debaters and debate coaches, Lin Kamaruddin and Adiba Shareen. Outspoken, critical of both the West and the Taliban, bitingly funny, these women will make you think twice about buying into the stereotype of women in Islam as silent or submissive.

(Sharmila Parmanand, Lin Kamaruddin and Adiba Shareen, Seoul, 2008)

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What can you do to help Shared Sacrifice continue its ascent to the top of progressive politics and internet radio?

-LISTEN! Listen live, from noon to 2PM mountain time, every Saturday.
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Humiliated Events

Human Events is one of the few magazines, online or otherwise, that continues to publish the screeds of Ann Coulter after she has managed to alienate all the reasonable conservatives in the world (seriously, I know a LOT of conservatives, and none of them like her; most are embarassed by her). Human Events publishes a lot of equally shitty material, from pieces by Bill O'Reilly to various nationalist manifestos by the increasingly irrelevant Pat Buchanan. But even by the already sub-basement standards of Coulter, O'Reilly and Buchanan, today the magazine sunk to a depth so low that its own readership absolutely freaked out.

They ran an audio spoof piece by Matt Fox and AJ Rice, writers and producers for Talk Radio Network. TRN broadcasts several right-wing haters, the most notable being Michael Savage, who, among other things, mercilessly attacked kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart on the air, and who called news anchor Diane Sawyer "a lying whore." The spoof is of little Sasha Obama, who told her father she loved him on live television last night following Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention. The spoof piece has her insulting white people, asking about Reverend Wright, and announcing her intention to go to PDiddy's champaign after-party. Sasha Obama is seven years old.

With tails between their legs, Human Events took the audio piece off the site, but left the empty shell of the link there, along with several dozen comments from shocked conservatives, wondering why their flagship rag had sunk to that depth (and a few comments calling for more attacks on Obama's children on the grounds that, since said candidate has children, and has allowed the media to photograph and interview those children, those children are therefore "fair game"). [UPDATE: THE SPOOF RECORDING IS BACK AT THE SITE. IT WAS EITHER TAKEN OFF IN ERROR, OR RESTORED. EITHER WAY, IT SEEMS NOW TO BE THE OFFICIAL POLICY OF _HUMAN EVENTS_ TO BROADCAST REPRESENTATIONS SPOOFING A SEVEN YEAR-OLD GIRL, IMPLYING ALL THE THINGS I LISTED ABOVE. THIS IS BEYOND DISGUSTING.]

The superintelligent and nuanced (that's sarcasm, folks) "Democrat=Socialist" web site still has the piece, and makes no apology for running it.

A big thumbs up to all the conservatives that are criticizing Human Events for running the spoof clip in the first place. I continue to be impressed by people who are willing to transcend party lines in order to do the right thing. But will those same conservatives swear off the votes McCain gets from racists? Will they swear off talk show host (and Ronald's son) Michael Reagan, who has repeatedly issued death threats on his show? I'm not holding my breath--and I'm not giving Democrats a free pass either--anyone who sends me information about Democrat house organs doing anything similar to what Human Events and TRN did to Sasha Obama will be rewarded with my publishing that information and condemning any such attack without hesitation. Bourgeois politics makes such attacks inevitable, since neither side can really afford to discuss the issues--the conclusions are too systemic to be comfortable or convenient.

another fun McCain fact..."How many houses do you own, Senator?" ... "Um...ummmmmmm"

John McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns. This is both hilarious and enraging.

From Politico.com: "Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own. 'I think — I'll have my staff get to you,' McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. 'It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you.' "

It's okay, really. He just forgot, that's all. Perhaps the Republicans should have chosen someone a little sharper...Fred Thompson, perhaps?

potentially explosive news: McCain may have lied about his POW experience

If this is true, it could seriously undermine the McCain camp. The exposion of vitriol by the right (read the readers' comments in the linked article) in response to this allegation leads me to suspect it just might be true.

Why is this important? Because, in the words of Paul Waldman:

Many journalists decided long ago that McCain is just different from other politicians. They declare McCain innocent of all the sins they associate with other members of his profession, no matter how often he commits them. They testify that McCain is too modest to mention his POW experience in Vietnam, but McCain now brings it up all the time.

We will most certainly continue to follow this.

Real Olympic Memories: 1968

Already tired of the political sterility of the 2008 Olympics? The complicity with Beijing's slave labor and seemingly eager turn towards fascistic capitalism? The sad spectacle of American television commentators falling all over themselves? Take a trip with me to 1968...



If you're not altogether clear on the significance of this picture, read about it here.

That's Tommie Smith in the center and John Carlos on the right.

Lest you think that they paid no price for this...

Smith and Carlos were largely ostracised by the predominantly white U.S. sporting establishment in the following years and in addition were subject to criticism of their actions. Time magazine showed the five-ring Olympic logo with the words, "Angrier, Nastier, Uglier", instead of "Faster, Higher, Stronger". Back home they were subject to abuse and they and their families received death threats.

A forgotten hero in all this was Peter Norman, the Australian on the left, who wore a human rights badge (he knew it wouldn't be appropriate for him to raise his fist) to honor Smith and Carlos. Peter Norman may have paid the stiffest price of all.

Norman, who was sympathetic to his competitors' protest, was reprimanded by his Country's Olympic authorities and ostracized by the Australian media.[10] He was not picked for the 1972 Summer Olympics, despite finishing third in his trials. He kept running, but contracted gangrene in 1985 after tearing his Achilles tendon, which nearly led to his leg being amputated. Depression and heavy drinking followed. He suffered a heart attack and died on October 3, 2006. Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~Frederick Douglass

"Liberal" Media Update

I'm blogging this so it doesn't go down the memory hole when Democrats do a postmortem and ask why Obama lost to the train wreck that is McCain.

The Washington Post, a newspaper labeled "liberal" by the right, headlines an article "Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds" even though the article itself contains, in a single paragraph, the fact that McCain would balloon the deficit even more. The headline doesn't mention McCain, the two plans aren't compared, and the entire article, except for that one paragraph and its minor detail (that McCain is worse on this question) is devoted to criticizing Obama.

Bradams at Daily Kos explains it all here. In short:

...we have Obama'a plan that according to the article would add $3.4 trillion and we have McCain's plan that would add $5 trillion. Yet the article contains a single sentence about McCain's tax plan and instead goes out of its way to imply that Obama is misleading voters.
The way the headline is written also has an obvious anti-Obama, pro-McCain bias. Even though the headline doesn't mention McCain, saying one candidate's tax plan is bad news for the deficit implies that the other candidate's tax plan is not. And that is the only message that casual readers, who don't read the entire article carefully, will walk away with.

I can understand progressives' frustrations with Obama. What I can't understand, and what someone can explain to me is why the so-called liberal media doesn't want Obama to win this election. I mean, I have ideas about that, but a lot of my white friends get angry when I bring them up.

KBR, Rape and the Colonial Unconscious

On an earlier edition of Shared Sacrifice, my co-host Gary talked about the scandal involving non-grounded electrical components, causing the deaths of some U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The company responsible for those disasters is KBR. But KBR allegedly has more than one way of destroying people's lives.

Some background: KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root) is an American engineering and construction company, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR employs 14,000 U.S. employees in Iraq, ostensibly to provide logistical support to the U.S. armed forces. In the past two years, several female employees of KBR claim to have been raped in Iraq by co-workers. They have further alleged that they have been instructed to "keep quiet" about the rapes, or otherwise prevented from, or threatened away from, pursuing remedies for these assaults. The most notorious case right now involves an alleged gang rape of Jamie Leigh Jones. in July, 2005. Jones was allegedly drugged and raped by her coworkers, then confined to a security container without food, water, or medical treatment for a full day before a guard gave her his cell phone and allowed her to call her father. Jones' father then contacted Republican Representative Ted Poe. Representative Poe approached the State Department regarding the matter and secured her release. Because of contractual restrictions, Jones was barred from suing her employer. However, in May of this year, a Federal judge ruled that Jones can take her alleged perpetrators to court, as well as their company. She has testified before the House Judiciary Committee--and you can watch it on You Tube.

As the Times Online reports: "After she reported the alleged assault, she said she was confined to a shipping container and told that if she left Iraq to seek medical attention she would not have a job on her return." This is similar to the story of "Dawn Leamon, an American paramedic working for a foreign subsidiary of KBR at Camp Harper, near Basra." Leamon "testified that she was abused by a soldier and a coworker after drinking a cocktail. She told The Times that KBR employees discouraged her from reporting the alleged rape and pressured her into signing a false statement."

Besides categorical denials, KBR's chief response to these allegations has been to ban its employees from using cell phones.

Predictably, the usual round of reactionary conservatives reflexively attacked Ms. Jones and defended KBR. The editorials from conservative bloggers and commentators that doubt her story, that accuse her of lying, are universally made by men (except for Michelle Malkin, who considers Bill O'Reilly to be her mentor). And there are, in fact, some questions involving finer legal discrepancies. But those discrepancies do not include the evidence in her rape kit, the fact that her father had to intervene to get her released, the bruises and wounds she suffered, or the fact that KBR banned cell phone use after she called her father on the cell phone. All those are undisputed facts.

To their credit and honor, a few conservative writers actually acknowledge that the evidence strongly supports a rape allegation. The smartest among them, attorney Ted Frank, even says:

If the implant rupture and other physical injuries are true, I’m inclined to believe that she was raped, perhaps even gang raped. (Machismo environments like fraternity houses and athletes’ dorms are responsible for a disproportionate number of gang rapes, which is why the Duke Lacrosse allegations had so much weight in the early going.) I’m inclined to believe that there was a hostile work environment, and that it was possible that KBR was not doing enough to correct that problem. I’m not currently inclined to believe that the criminal action was the employer’s fault, unless the employee in question had shown signs of criminal behavior while working for KBR. And it is entirely consistent with what I know about government if Jones’s allegation that the government botched the criminal investigation is true.

Still another level-headed conservative blogger writes:

Here's the truth, according to my friends: women who are working in the green zone, even non-contractors, are particularly careful to never walk anywhere alone. Not because they are worried about being bombed or attacked by the enemy: they are worried about the men who are there. Men who are supposed to be their fellow comrades and friends, who are supposed to treat them with respect, but instead are ever-present threats. So try for a moment to understand that not everything in Iraq is flowers and candy, and that sometimes American men do terrible things, and American companies let people slip through the cracks.

Now, what does this have to do with colonialism? Well, even the staunchest defenders of militarism will tell you that the mindset required to execute the duties implied in the occupation of a sovereign nation call for a mindset of brutality. But you can't turn that brutality on and off, and even though most of our soldiers are no doubt decent people, many of them are not. Occupation attracts people with an occupier mentality. And occupation instills a destructive, reverse-occupied mentality on those who might otherwise be nonviolent people. Franz Fanon, a revolutionary anti-colonialist author who died in 1961, concluded from his extensive analysis of the French occupation of Algeria, that occupation and colonization brutalize the colonizers as well as the colonized. Other critics of imperialism and colonialism have said the same thing. One of my favorite quotes in this context comes from George Orwell, in his extremely effective essay "Shooting an Elephant." Orwell writes:

when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy...He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

This is what has happened in Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's more likely to happen with the increased presence of private contractors too, since they are subject to considerably less discipline than their military counterparts. Predictably, the Bush administration exacerbates this problem. For example, the Bush administration has granted immunity to Blackwater guards in a mass murder case.

Imperialism creates victims on the outside, but it also colonizes itself on the inside. In so many ways, from hatred to divisiveness to violence to poverty and alienation, we are a colonized and brutalized civilization. The solutions must be found in our collective self-criticism, solidarity, and emancipation. And we must get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible--not merely because of the harm our presence does there, but because in order to survive a transition away from our status as empire, we need to learn humility. The strong possibility that Jamie Leigh Jones and other alleged victims of rape are paying the price for that lack of humility is an all-too-predictable tragedy.

Wal-Mart Pees Its Pants

Wal-Mart executives are terrified that an Obama victory will spark a nationwide unionization effort. They're so scared that they're warning their managers about it. This raises some very important, nuanced political questions. I will try to list them as eloquently as possible:

1. Can a corporation piss itself?
2. Are Wal-Mart's leading executives pissing themselves?
3. If Wal-Mart's leading executives are, in fact, incontinent, can they purchase adult diapers at employee discount rates?
4. Will a McCain victory embolden Wal-Mart executives to bash their workers in the head with baseball bats?
5. Will those baseball bats be purchased from Wal-Mart, at the employee discount rate?
6. Has Obama ever been inside a Wal-Mart?
7. Do they sell caviar at Wal-Mart? (trick question because I know the answer)
8. Will McCain piss himself just because?
9. If Obama promises to continue to sell out minorities by promoting the capricious, error-prone, racist death penalty, will Wal-Mart stock go up?
10. Would Obama like to open up a few Wal-Marts in Afghanistan?