Legal Recourse

Mother Jones - May June 2009, p. 64

In 1979 as Georgia dairyman named Andy McElmurray started applying locally produced sludge fertilizer to his fields. Over the next several years, nearly hyalf his 700 cows died from severe diarrhea. The EPA didn't test his soil, but McElmurray hired his own experts, who concluded that his sludge contained high levels of thallium. A toxic metal that is the active ingredient in rat poison, thallium rarely turns up in sewage, but it was used as a catalyst by a nearly Nutra Sweet factory. When Elmurray's experts sampled a local milk brand, they detected thallium at levels more than 11 times above the legal limit for d4rinking water. McElmurry sued the federal government for disaster relief, claiming sludge had destroyed his farm He finally won the case last year.

This disaster relief took 28 years while many areas of Texas were immediately declared disaster areas where the pieces of the Challenger fell to earth. As Linda Ellerbee used to say "so it goes."

Strange

The worst thing for the economy is to economize and the conservatives hate conservation. So it goes.

With things the way they are, you would think the Republicans and the Democrats would both want to lose the battle and win the war. Whoever presides over the further collapse will no longer be electable. I may get the proper ID if Ron Paul and Ralph Nader would join forces and run as an independent team. I like Ron Paul but believing people will do right with no laws regulation is nonsense...even little league has referees.

Diverting attention

It was funny how Cain tried to divert attention from reports of his caddishness by breaking into gospel singing. Probably not smart to strike a religious tone and remind people that he was the evil brother. Nein Nein Nein

It is an adage that everyone who thinks they are the first to think something probably hasn't read enough. The fact that Bernie Madoff made off with rich people's money (only the special were chosen - beware when someone tells you that only smart people can belong) and Elena Bobbitt did bob it have always ammused me. I was just reading Scott Adams latest book and he mentioned the same thing with other examples.

Everything old is new again

Richard Hofstadter's essay about the far right in the time of Goldwater could be a description of the current conservative movement. The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt 1954 in part:

Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity. It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released in action, would be very far from conservative. The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . . The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

No doubt the circumstances determining the political style of any individual are complex. Although I am concerned here to discuss some of the neglected social-psychological elements in pseudo-conservatism, I do not wish to appear to deny the presence of important economic and political causes. I am aware, for instance, that wealthy reactionaries try to use pseudo-conservative organizers, spokesmen and groups to propagate their notions of public policy, and that some organizers of pseudo-conservative and “patriotic” groups often find in this work a means of making a living — thus turning a tendency toward paranoia into a vocational asset, probably one of the most perverse forms of occupational therapy known to man. A number of other circumstances — the drastic inflation and heavy taxes of our time, the dissolution of American urban life, considerations of partisan political expediency — also play a part. But none of these things seem to explain the broad appeal of pseudo-conservatism, its emotional intensity, its dense and massive irrationality, or some of the peculiar ideas it generates. Nor will they explain why those who profit by the organized movements find such a ready following among a large number of people, and why the rank-and-file janizaries of pseudo-conservatism are so eager to hurl accusations, write letters to congressmen and editors, and expend so much emotional energy and crusading idealism upon causes that plainly bring them no material reward.

Elmer Davis, seeking to account for such sentiment in his recent book, But We Were Born Free, ventures a psychological hypothesis. He concludes, if I understand him correctly, that the genuine difficulties of our situation in the face of the power of international communism have inspired a widespread feeling of fear and frustration, and that those who cannot face these problems in a more rational way “take it out on their less influential neighbors, in the mood of a man who, being afraid to stand up to his wife in a domestic argument, relieves his feelings by kicking the cat.”5 This suggestion has the merit of both simplicity and plausibility, and it may begin to account for a portion of the pseudo-conservative public. But while we may dismiss our curiosity about the man who kicks the cat by remarking that some idiosyncrasy in his personal development has brought him to this pass, we can hardly help but wonder whether there are not, in the backgrounds of the hundreds of thousands of persons who are moved by the pseudo-conservative impulse, some commonly shared circumstances that will help to account for their all kicking the cat in unison.

Why do the pseudo-conservatives express such a persistent fear and suspicion of their own government, whether its leadership rests in the hands of Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower? Why is the pseudo-conservative impelled to go beyond the more or less routine partisan argument that we have been the victims of considerable misgovernment during the past twenty years to the disquieting accusation that we have actually been the victims of persistent conspiracy and betrayal — “twenty years of treason”? Is it not true, moreover, that political types very similar to the pseudo-conservative have had a long history in the United States, and that this history goes back to a time when the Soviet power did not loom nearly so large on our mental horizons? Was the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, which was responsibly estimated to have had a membership of from 4,000,000 to 4,500,000 persons at its peak in the 1920′s, a phenomenon totally dissimilar to the pseudo-conservative revolt?

What I wish to suggest — and I do so in the spirit of one setting forth nothing more than a speculative hypothesis — is that pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity. Normally there is a world of difference between one’s sense of national identity or cultural belonging and one’s social status. However, in American historical development, these two things, so easily distinguishable in analysis, have been jumbled together in reality, and it is precisely this that has given such a special poignancy and urgency to our status-strivings. In this country a person’s status — that is, his relative place in the prestige hierarchy of his community — and his rudimentary sense of belonging to the community — that is, what we call his “Americanism” — have been intimately joined. Because, as a people extremely democratic in our social institutions, we have had no clear, consistent and recognizable system of status, our person status problems have an unusual intensity. Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty. We boast of “the melting pot,” but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have been melted down.

The American pattern of occupational mobility, while often much exaggerated, as in the Horatio Alger stories and a great deal of the rest of our mythology, may properly be credited with many of the virtues and beneficial effects that are usually attributed to it. But this occupational and social mobility, compounded by our extraordinary mobility from place to place, has also had its less frequently recognized drawbacks. Not the least of them is that this has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them. It is a country of people whose status expectations are random and uncertain, and yet whose status aspirations have been whipped up to a high pitch by our democratic ethos and our rags-to-riches mythology.6

In a country where physical needs have been, by the scale of the world’s living standards, on the whole well met, the luxury of questing after status has assumed an unusually prominent place in our civic consciousness. Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected...Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action.

The primary value of patriotic societies and anti-subversive ideologies to their exponents can be found here. They provide additional and continued reassurance both to those who are of old American ancestry and have other status grievances and to those who are of recent American ancestry and therefore feel in need of reassurance about their nationality. Veterans’ organizations offer the same satisfaction — what better evidence can there be of the genuineness of nationality and of earned citizenship than military service under the flag of one’s country? Of course such organizations, once they exist, are liable to exploitation by vested interests that can use them as pressure groups on behalf of particular measures and interests. (Veterans’ groups, since they lobby for the concrete interests of veterans, have a double role in this respect.) But the cement that holds them together is the status motivation and the desire for an identity.

Sociological studies have shown that there is a close relation between social mobility and ethnic prejudice. Persons moving downward, and even upward under many circumstances, in the social scale tend to show greater prejudice against such ethnic minorities as the Jews and Negroes than commonly prevails in the social strata they have left or are entering.12 While the existing studies in this field have been focused upon prejudice rather than the kind of hyper-patriotism and hyper-conformism that I am most concerned with, I believe that the typical prejudiced person and the typical pseudo-conservative dissenter are usually the same person, that the mechanisms at work in both complexes are quite the same,13 and that it is merely the expediencies and the strategy of the situation today that cause groups that once stressed racial discrimination to find other scapegoats. Both the displaced old-American type and the new ethnic elements that are so desperately eager for reassurance of their fundamental Americanism can conveniently converge upon liberals, critics, and nonconformists of various sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists. To proclaim themselves vigilant in the pursuit of those who are even so much as accused of “disloyalty” to the United States is a way not only of reasserting but of advertising their own loyalty — and one of the chief characteristics of American super-patriotism is its constant inner urge toward self-advertisement. One notable quality in this new wave of conformism is that its advocates are much happier to have as their objects of hatred the Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Ivy League intellectual gentlemen than they are with such bedraggled souls as, say, the Rosenbergs. The reason, I believe, is that in the minds of the status-driven it is no special virtue to be more American than the Rosenbergs, but it is really something to be more American than Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles — or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The status aspirations of some of the ethnic groups are actually higher than they were twenty years ago — which suggests one reason (there are others) why, in the ideology of the authoritarian right-wing, anti-Semitism and such blatant forms of prejudice have recently been soft-pedaled. Anti-Semitism, it has been said, is the poor man’s snobbery. We Americans are always trying to raise the standard of living, and the same principle now seems to apply to standards of hating. So during the past fifteen years or so, the authoritarians have moved on from anti-Negroism and anti-Semitism to anti-Achesonianism, anti-intellectualism, anti-nonconformism, and other variants of the same idea, much in the same way as the average American, if he can manage it, will move on from a Ford to a Buick.

Recommended Extra Features on DVDs

Jesus Camp deleted scenes. Rachael (the little girl that mocked mainstream religion as boring) also appears here in an even more disturbing light, plus you can see Ted Haggard again if you want.

World's Fastest Indian. Early interview with the Australian man that set the fastest motorcycle record on the sand flats is extra feature. Movie is just reenactment.

Temple Grandlin Her commentary is even more interesting than the movie.

Wall Street Some interesting views by Oliver Stone about the economy - this refers to the original movie not the later return of Gecko.

Thin Blue Line Interview with a disturbing disturbed psychiatrist that blames rise of gruesome murders on woman's movement. Finally ordered (from Netflix) this old documentary on the justice system of Texas in a singular case. It is nearly always recommended as a documentary to see and I agree. Eventually succeeded in freeing an innocent man.

Inside Job Deleted scene of speaker talking about how Pawlenty said God was running the economy and how Alan Greenspan quoted the speech often.

What Are They Thinking?

On first glance, the British riots don't make sense. The Norwegian camper murders is another example of irrational behavior at first glance, but both are pretty human actions.

Did the Columbine killers get up in the stands during football practice and blast away at the athletes that relentlessly bullied them? Hell no, they went to the library and killed the quiet kids who were able to read.

Did the Oklahoma federal building bombers attack the ATF or FBI because of anti-government rage about Waco? Hell no, they blew up some low level cubicle drudges.

Did the Americans of African descent attack the homes of the brutal police or burn the court of justice that could dismiss a crime caught on film as inadequate proof? Hell no, they attacked stores and beat up working stiffs.

Did the Islamic fundamentalist attack the military bases in Saudi Arabia for invasion of their holy land? Hell no, they attacked office buildings (well, the Pentagon makes a little sense) and we retaliated by attacking one war torn country and one country decimated by sanctions.

Did the Germans eliminate their military machine after World War I bankrupted them? Hell no, they built cohesion by torturing gypsies, political dissenters, and unpopular religions.

Did America attack Russia because Communism was so evil that loyalty to the state could warp family values so that children reported on their parents? Hell no, we attacked Korea and established the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

When Reagan was in trouble for selling drugs and guns to fund a private war, he ordered an attack on Grenada.

When Clinton was in trouble for his wayward asparagus, he ordered an attack on a medicine manufacturer.

When America's delusional economy met reality, did we impound the property of the tricksters that created the financial fraud instruments and make the populace who bounces from one bubble to the next pay their debts? Hell no, the unions and the national pension plan for working people must go and poor people cause all our problems. Middle America is so white that kids stare at brown complected people. They think all non whites spend their time shooting heroin and squirting out welfare babies. Greg Palast called America an "Armed Madhouse" but all the gun-toting fearful fanatics should worry about the people who have more. Bad things trickle down, good ones seem to percolate up and only rarely.

According to Christian lore, humans lost paradise by disobedience and can be saved by persecution and death of an innocent. Religion finally makes sense to me - it fits with blind obedience and bullying and is human from kids at school to Karl Rasputin Rove's strategies.

Temple Grandlin is right. Humans just don't make sense.

All the Predators

All these Wall Street lawyers are running the system according to Buckminster Fuller. After World War II they took most of the money out of the United States, they drained the blood out of the United States and put it abroad, overseas capital…. Fuller calls it Lawyer Capitalism, the lawyers run the show. Tax laws are the key. In the postwar years, tax law allowed US capital to go abroad…. It all fled the country and stayed abroad and America changed tremendously…. We became a world power, yet a rapacious one, with capitalists really doing a major theft of our money…. Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1972 because America went bankrupt…. All these recessions in the 70’s, 80’s…. My father got wiped out on Wall Street

- Oliver Stone's commentary on Wall Street

Don't have a lot of time on the computer at the library, but I was looking for the article from Buckminster Fuller that was mentioned in the commentary to the original movie of Wall Street. I think Stone said the article/book was called Higgety Piggety.

This weekend's "This American Life" was about the patenting of software and the scam it has turned out to be. It is so discouraging that no one wants to make things or produce anything, just cannibalize the ones who try to.