Author: Chuck Young

In the past few months, Obama has had time to play golf. He’s had time to fill out his NCAA basketball playoff bracket. He’s had time to go to Chile, a country prone to terrible earthquakes, and sell them new nuclear reactors. He’s had time to go to Florida and tell Jeb Bush what a great job he did on education. He’s had time to be a “bridge” between John Boehner and Harry Reid.

Obama did not have time to go to Wisconsin.

That would be the same Wisconsin whose unions donated money and turned out for him at mass rallies so that Obama could collect Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in 2008.

That would be the same Wisconsin which was so demoralized by Obama’s first two years of broken promises that Democrats didn’t turn out in 2010, thus dooming Russ Feingold to defeat in the Senate and allowing the election of Scott Walker as governor.

All of which is fine with Obama. Having Republicans in Congress and in statehouses makes it easier for him to break his promises to the voters and do what Wall Street wants him to do. It’s a formula that worked for Bill Clinton, the man from Hope. Why wouldn’t it work for the man from Hope and Change?

I suppose Obama will be shameless enough to go back to Wisconsin in 2012 and ask for votes from the same union members whom he betrayed when they needed him. I also suppose that the people of Wisconsin (and the rest of the United States) will be even more demoralized in 2012. Why should they help re-elect a president when he won’t help them fight a governor who is trying to destroy their way of life?

If I were Obama, I’d be ashamed to go back to Wisconsin. I’d be ashamed to go anywhere.

Will anyone challenge Obama from the left? Seems unlikely in the primaries. Maybe Nader again outside the party. I’ve been voting for him since 1996, but I suspect he’s not too jazzed at the prospect of taking all the abuse again.

That leaves the Republicans, almost all of whom are stupid and insane. I say “almost.” There is one among them who just went to second place in the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll for the Republican nomination. He’s one of the most obnoxious creeps on television. He’s a real estate speculator. He’s a casino owner. He’s a bully. He names all his buildings after himself. He tears up ecologically sensitive areas to build golf courses. He’s written a lot of terrible books, which inspired hundreds of terrible books by other obnoxious creeps. He runs a bunch of beauty pageants. He is the butt of jokes every night on television because of his strange hair. He makes $1.5 million for one-hour lectures at the Learning Annex. He’s one more blowhard in the parade of rich guys who think that hoarding money qualifies them to run the government.

Who is this political savior? Donald Trump.

I would say there’s nothing not to hate about Donald Trump, except that there is one thing I don’t hate about Donald Trump. He is a traitor to his class.

In 1999, when he was vaguely running for president, he proposed a wealth tax.

Donald Trump: Best in class

The prime minister of Japan has said that his government is “not in a position where we can be optimistic” about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Is there any logical conclusion to draw from that statement other than that a large chunk of Japan is going to be uninhabitable?

They’ve got four nuclear reactors right next to each other in various states of disaster and probably meltdown. Two more are damaged. The workers on site are exhausted, sick and dying. The ocean and air around the plant are highly radioactive. The surrounding farms are producing radioactive vegetables. The drinking water in Tokyo is radioactive. If the Fukushima reactors keep exploding and burning and blowing radiation into the reservoirs, how long before Tokyo becomes Jonestown with a population of 13,000,000?

Michio Kaku, the physicist and author, has suggested on CNN that the best option right now is entombment. There’s nothing to salvage, he said, so the Japanese government should get some shielded helicopters and dump sand, boric acid, dolomite and concrete on the reactors and bury them for eternity. This could be done in ten days, he said, if they just got the materials together, which they aren’t doing because the government is not facing the implications of its own declared lack of optimism.

I’m not a physicist, but entombment at Chernobyl was vastly more complicated than Kaku was able to discuss in the time limits of American television. The Chernobyl reactor had to be mostly neutralized before being permanently buried, which meant that 800,000 or so “liquidators” had to run into the plant, perform some menial task in the presence of boiling nuclear waste for a minute or two, and then run out. Most of them are now sick, dying or dead from radiation poisoning.

Perhaps burying Fukushima will be a more complicated process, because it has a lot more waste lying around and four out-of-control reactors while Chernobyl had just one. I don’t know. Either way, there is a moral problem that needs to be discussed.

Who will be the liquidators?

Whether Japan needs a few hundred volunteers to shovel boric acid on burning plutonium, or whether Japan needs 800,000 draftees, as in the Soviet Union, somebody’s got to do it.
Japanese soldiers suit up to help fight the Fukushima meltdown

Review:

The Anti-American Manifesto
(Seven Stories Press)
by
Ted Rall

Lots of books collect all the low-hanging fruit in the abundant orchard of corporate state crime and arrange it into a more or less digestible feast, and then they all conclude with a ringing exhortation to elect more Democrats to Congress, or build a third party, or challenge the legality of war through the courts, or write well-reasoned letters of protest to The New York Times, or impeach whoever is president, or go to more demonstrations, or drip more snark on the ruling class.

The reader sits alone at night with the question, “Is that all there is?”

Ted Rall seeks to answer that question in The Anti-American Manifesto. At the beginning of chapter one (“Kill the Zombie Empire”), he quotes the U.S Criminal Code that advocating the overthrow of the government by violence is unlawful, and then he advocates the overthrow of the government by violence.

“Will you do whatever it takes, including take up arms?” he asks.

Which makes Ted Rall different from almost everyone else in public life who wants the corporate state to refrain from war crimes and destroying nature. He thinks violence is viable and the only real option on the table when the other choice is doom.

I admire Rall. He is prolific writer of good sentences. He is a prolific drawer of bitterly ironic cartoons. He is a serious reporter. He is honest about his own failings and wandering ideology. And he has dusted off the r-word at exactly the right moment in American history. He wants a revolution. And I agree with him. A revolution is exactly what the United States needs. The amount of cultural/economic/political change needed to save the world in the brief time we have left is unimaginable without a revolution. You can argue that the ruling class is evil, you can argue that the ruling class is incompetent, you can argue that the ruling class is both. But it has never been more clear that the ruling class is impervious to reform through established channels and the rest of us can look forward to incalculable suffering unless we get rid of it.

“Revolution doesn’t happen within the system,” Rall says. “Revolution is the act of destroying the system.”

Yup. But I wish Rall had been more thorough in his actual discussion of violence and non-violence.
Syndicated columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall on violence and revolution

So I’m sitting there ready to chill after a long day at my desk when the phone rings. The young woman at the other end of the line wants to know if I am who her computer says I am. Yeah, that’s me, I say. And she starts asking my opinion of how everything is going in New York state, the governor, the legislature, the city council, various politicians, unions in general, unions in specific, public service unions in even more specificity, the city’s budget problems, and finally New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Ah, Mayor Mike. A man of the people, and the 23rd richest person in the world. On the one hand, I applaud his efforts to discourage smoking. On the other hand, I promised myself that I would never forgive him for not allowing the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched by the Republican convention in 2004 to have a rally in Central Park. But he’s refused to be a demagogue about the mosque near the World Trade Center. Can you imagine what that fascist hambone Giuliani would have said about the mosque if he was still mayor? So that’s kinda okay. But he’s a tool of Wall Street and the real estate sleazebags. And he appointed some idiot magazine editor to be head of the public schools…

Sir? Sir?

He’s just another rich guy who thinks a hotshot business executive like himself could solve all our problems if he was president, and he’s getting his name mentioned as a presidential candidate by columnists who figure they might have to write for Bloomberg News some day, because everyone else is going out of business.

Sir? Do you strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, or strongly disapprove of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

I would say strongly disapprove, with the proviso that he’s not the worst bag of dirt in American politics.
Bloomberg sits on $18 billion, making him one of the world's richest men

War Is A Lie
by
David Swanson

War is a Lie

Howard Zinn, probably the most influential American historian ever, had an amazing sense of humor when he lectured or met people in person. He could make fun of himself and the audience in a way that exploded the guilt and ambivalence that so often paralyzes liberals, progressives, greens, socialists, anarchists, communists and everyone else on the more-or-less left. Only occasionally, however, did Zinn use his sense of humor in print. His masterpiece, A People’s History of the United States, had no humor at all, as he himself pointed out, because he didn’t find anything funny about the Trail of Tears and all the other ghastly episodes he wove into a narrative that convinced millions of citizens the United States was something less than what they had believed.

What Zinn went for in his writing—always—was clarity. I’ve got most of his books, and there isn’t an obscure, academic, post-modern, high priestly syllable in them. Anyone of normal intelligence over the age of 12 could understand him. Which is not to say that Zinn wasn’t misunderstood. He was, of course. But it was always willful misunderstanding. Establishment historians always misunderstood him, because to admit the validity of the story Zinn chose to tell was to understand that the careers of establishment historians were pathetic, if well remunerated. So they never answered his arguments. They either ignored him or caricatured him and tried to demolish something that wasn’t there.

David Swanson writes in the tradition of Howard Zinn. He always goes for clarity, both in his relentless orchestration of the facts and his ethical vision. War Is A LIe is as clear as the title. Wars are all based on lies, could not be fought without lies, and would not be fought at all if people held their governments to any reasonable standard of honesty. The book is easy to understand, easy to read, if you have the will to face a vast array of facts that hold the United States government to a reasonable standard of honesty.

Also like Zinn in A People’s History, Swanson doesn’t let you off the hook with jokes. There are many passages of bitter irony, but when you consider the carnage and ruin that have have flowed from all the lies Swanson discusses, the main emotions are revulsion and anger. If you want laughs with your tragedy, read Gore Vidal.

So in August I went back to Wisconsin, which was glowing green under a brown cloud of mosquitos. Lotta water this past summer, and the most mosquitos since, oh maybe 1965, which is when the Schmoes first played in public at the ninth grade Halloween dance at Van Hise Junior High in Madison. We were called the Misfits then, and have been through a few name changes and personnel adjustments, but it’s basically the same five guys playing the same three chords for 45 years. After performing at our high school reunion party (Class of ’69) every five years over the decades, we figured, “Who knows these three chords better than we do? Isn’t it time we recorded an album?”

And we did. Three Schmoes (Bo Bally Schmoe, Timmy Schmoe and me, Chuck E. Schmoe) came back to Wisconsin, and joined the two Schmoes (Stevie Schmoe and Eddie Schmoe) who were still living there, and we recorded a whole album guided by the same light that has always illuminated our aesthetic path: No Good Songs Have Been Written Since We Went Through Puberty. I mean, why write new songs when Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs already wrote all the good ones?

The Schmoes on their new (and first) album cover

Anyone who claims that if you don’t know your history, you are doomed to relive it, is boring.

Anyone who claims that you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts is boring.

“Anyone dumb enough to wanna be in the military should be allowed in,” said the late great Bill Hicks. It was one of the few things he got wrong. Anyone dumb enough to wanna be in the military is too dumb to be trusted with a weapon. So getting gays into the military is not the issue. The issue is getting heterosexuals out of the military. They’re the ones who are shooting civilians for sport and taking trophies. Anyone who gets jazzed about equal rights for war criminals is boring.

As the Huffington Post gets bigger and bigger, it gets harder and harder to find the stuff that’s worth reading, unless you’re actually interested that Kim Kardashian bought a purse for $30,000.

#1: I don’t know why the Left is so so jazzed about FBI raids on the anti-war movement. Shouldn’t we be thanking them for finding it? I mean, that was some serious investigative work. I’m 59 years old. I’ve been going to anti-war demonstrations most of my life. Since a few a biggies in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the peace demonstrations I’ve attended have repeatedly attracted the same 34 people, all of whom hate each other because of differing interpretations of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, and they’re surrounded in a “free speech zone” by barricades and police on horses, and they always have a terrible sound system, so that pedestrians wince and go to the other side of the street. 

The FBI thinks the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is a threat to the corporate state? Where do I join?  

#2: A few months ago I was wandering around Barnes and Noble and found this giant, remaindered book of New York Times front pages down through history. I was astonished to find one from 1968, the day after a big antiwar demonstration in Washington, and the Times had splashed five big stories about the demonstration across eight columns on the front page, and most of the rest of the stories concerned some tear in the social fabric. 

It was astonishing. The Left? In The New York Times? All over the front page? Those were the days, my friend. Maybe the fact that The New York Times actually covered the recent FBI raids will signal the rest of corporate journalism that they can go back to scapegoating the Left instead of ignoring it. Publicity is publicity.

So here we are in the eighth term of the Reagan administration, in the middle of a heat wave, in the middle of the hottest year on record, in the middle of a likely mass extinction event.

It’s not quite time to say good-bye to your friends and family. It would be time to have a general strike, except nobody’s doing anything, so it’s hard to get jazzed about the prospect of overthrowing the corporate state. Doom is almost certain, yet not imminent enough for focus. What to do until there’s focus?

Me, I’m going to play the guitar. After many years of practice, I still kinda suck. I’m maybe a B-level fingerpicker. There are probably 50 children under the age of 5 on YouTube who play better than I do. That gets really discouraging. But I plod along. Nothing gives me a sense of satisfaction like learning a new move on the guitar neck.

Most of my repertoire consists of songs by John Fahey and the Reverend Gary Davis.

So here we are in the eighth term of the Reagan administration, in the middle of a heat wave, in the middle of the hottest year on record, in the middle of a likely mass extinction event.

It’s not quite time to say good-bye to your friends and family. It would be time to have a general strike, except nobody’s doing anything, so it’s hard to get jazzed about the prospect of overthrowing the corporate state. Doom is almost certain, yet not imminent enough for focus. What to do until there’s focus?

Me, I’m going to play the guitar. After many years of practice, I still kinda suck. I’m maybe a B-level fingerpicker. There are probably 50 children under the age of 5 on YouTube who play better than I do. That gets really discouraging. But I plod along. Nothing gives me a sense of satisfaction like learning a new move on the guitar neck.

Most of my repertoire consists of songs by John Fahey and the Reverend Gary Davis. Both were Christian mystics, Fahey through several levels of irony and existential philosophy, Davis a pure Pentacostal. Both created astounding, eerie worlds of beauty by absorbing and reconfiguring just about everything in American music in the first half of the 20th century. Both had difficult lives, Fahey struggling with addiction and inability to deal with the onerous details of normal life, Davis traumatized by blindness, racism, poverty and homelessness. Fahey lived from 1939-2001, Davis from 1896-1972.

I’ve been listening to Fahey since college. I could hear him from the first note. Davis has been a more recent acquisition. I didn’t get him for a long time because of his singing, which borrows heavily from his preaching, which is to say that he bellows and roars a lot. It takes a little getting used to. I did not really understand how great his musicianship was until a brilliant guitarist named Ernie Hawkins put out five sets of DVDs teaching a portion of Davis’s huge body of composition. I bought them all because I knew from his other DVDs (teaching Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb and Blind Willie McTell) that Hawkins was one of those very rare birds who can both teach and play. There are a lot of guitar teachers wandering around out there in the digital wasteland, and most of them aren’t all that useful. Hawkins really has figured out how everything fits together on the guitar neck and how to explain it. Even more important, his love and gratitude for Davis’ music pops though the television. You can’t help but get swept up in it.

At some future date, I’m going to write something about John Fahey in this space. In the meantime, the place to get started listening to Davis is an album called Harlem Street Singer, which is available on iTunes or Amazon.

Davis has many wonderful disciples out there in the acoustic steel-string guitar subculture, most prominently Jorma Kaukonen (in Hot Tuna and solo), Woody Mann, Roy Bookbinder and Stefan Grossman. Hawkins is probably first among equals there. The guy plays amazingly pristine renditions of Davis, plus other songs done in the Davis style, often called “Piedmont blues.” Hawkins’ singing is a little bit of an afterthought—he gets this beatific look on his face when he’s nailing it all over the guitar neck and it seems like he doesn’t want to interrupt all that virtuoso fingerpicking with mere vocalizing. But who cares? The guitar is transporting, both for him and the listener. If Davis were the Messiah, then Hawkins would be St. Peter, Jorma the Apostle Paul.

“No one plays Rev. Gary Davis better than Ernie Hawkins,” says Stefan Grossman, a direct student of Davis back in the 60s.