File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0211, message 43


Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:27:24 +1000
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: readings on the 11th september


Eric/All,

Comments at **

Eric wrote,
>
> Last week I had the uncanny sense of having crossed a threshold.  Never
> in my lifetime did I ever expect America to sink so low as the nation
> has during this past week. I feel something sinister and cynical is
> occurring today within the American republic.
>
> Since I recognize such statements might sound extreme, I want to clarify
> what I mean.  It is not just that America has become more conservative
> or Republican in spirit.  Rather America is now in the grip of a
> fundamentalist ideology.  A minority position has quite visibly assumed
> power over the majority and it can be assumed we will make serious
> retreats in areas such as the environment, woman's right to choose,
> education, civil rights and affirmative action.  It is no longer a
> question of rational argument, but rather of some weird belief.
**Agree,
>
> Even though I have usually disagreed with conservatives, I read many
> such writers, on occasion, with great interest.  I found the works of
> Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich A. Hayek insightful at times
> and recognized that any progressive thought that wished to "save the
> honor of thinking" was compelled to deal seriously with their arguments.
>
> It should be recognized that Hayek and Friedman both acknowledged that
> not all social problems could be resolved through the market alone.
> Friedman, for example, went so far as to propose a variation of a
> Guaranteed Annual Income program he termed the negative income tax which
> actually came close to passage during the Nixon administration.
**Surprising!

> Of course the other side of conservative thought entailed such things as
> Hayek advocating authoritarian institutions and Friedman apologizing for
> sweatshops and advising South American dictatorships.  In spite of these
> obvious problems, however, at least the earlier conservative movement
> attempted to make a rational case for its positions.
>
> More recently, capitalists such as George Soros and some of the
> delegates at the recent Davos convention have also argued that free
> trade alone cannot overcome the conditions of poverty and hopelessness
> that remain the breeding grounds of terrorism.  They have acknowledged
> real problems exist in the wake of globalism and have called upon
> Nation-States to assume more responsibility for resolving the many
> issues the world currently faces.
**The opposite of what WTO and other international agencies advocate.  The
opposite of  secret deals and measures to prevent Congressional review and
action.
>
> What is so depressing about politic life in America today is that even
> these fairly conservative positions would be regarded as far to the left
> of anything that could now be advocated by either the Democratic or
> Republican Party.  In its place is substituted a kind of market
> fundamentalism; one that believes free markets already exist in America
> (ignoring the huge state support and subsidies large corporations
> currently receive) and that the market alone is the only force capable
> of solving our problems.  This tends to be coupled with a strong
> Christian fundamentalism that openly wishes to create a new theocratic
> order.
**In a recent TV program, Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's,
said that Corporate Welfare greatly exceeds the cost of all welfare for poor
citizens.  He refers to high-income Americans well-established by their
social and political connections as the "oligarchy".
>
> In the past I have argued that the American presence contradicted Negri
> and Hardt's concept of Empire, but now I tend to see the current
> American response as symptomatic of what N&H called fundamentalism in
> that book. Namely, it is a reaction to an emerging condition in which
> America is no longer the sole dominant power.  In short, it is a
> desperate attempt to recover lost prestige in the face of the new
> emerging paradigm through an exercise of military might alone; triggered
> by both fear and xenophobia.
**America is the sole dominant military power, but it can't fight everyone
everywhere all the time.  George Bush's Administration could
become leader of the United Nations instead of its greatest embarassment.
>
> When George W. Bush spoke about "compassionate conservatism" during his
> presidential campaign apparently all he meant by this phrase was a
> rather vague feeling of abstract good-will towards humanity and not any
> real tangible political program.  So far the only concrete proposal he
> has actually made is that government should provide federal funding to
> religious groups so they can minister to the needs of the poor in place
> of the current secular government agencies. Presumably this is in order
> to encourage the poor to passively accept their condition through a
> renewal of faith and charisma. Marx's opiate of the people mandated
> through disproportionate taxation.

>
> It is not that Americans hate the poor.  It is simply that they no
> longer exist in America because they don't show up on television. They
> have become our contemporary invisibles. They remain politically
> unorganized. They don't vote. Contemporary laws and working conditions
> have made any kind of unionization difficult to achieve. So they have no
> voice and no presence.
> **Officially, illegal immigrants are unwelcome.  A young actress told
Letterman
she had lived in a Greenwich Village building where women garment makers
were chained to their machines.  Dave seemed a wee bit surprised.

> I have read that Wal-Mart closed down all their butcher departments
> because one became unionized and that besides the conditions of poor pay
> and benefits they offer to employees, they also force them to work extra
> hours without pay and falsify overtime records to avoid paying time and
> a half.
**This has also been exposed on TV.  When you check the billionare roster,
you find the combined Walmart family fortunes at about $17B per member,
exceed Bill Gates loot.

Currently, Safeway is threatening to close all the stores of
> Dominick's, the large Midwest grocery chain, if its employees decide
> upon a union to protect their rights as workers.
>
> This exploitation allows the rest of us to enjoy a comfortable middle
> class (or better) existence. After years of dependency fostered by
> 'ill-conceived, liberal' welfare programs, now at last the poor enjoy
> the freedom to become our servants and re-learn their place again.
>
> While the poor are ignored, the interests of the Corporation, Media, and
> Government have coalesced into what C. Wright Mills prophetically named
> the Power Elite.
**Professor Paull Krugman recently wrote a feature article about the
re-distribution of income to the wealthy in the Sunday Magazine of the NY
Times
.>
> This convergence has noticeably decreased the scope
> of our national discourse. The middle class becomes more easily
> manipulated as it is subjected to the condition of being simultaneously
> divided, distracted and distraught.  Michael Moore in his movie "Bowling
> for Columbine" has spoken eloquently of this culture of fear and the
> various ways it tends to be inherently racist, self-limiting and subject
> to enforcing external controls.
**Moore's book about stupid white men was on the Best Seller list for about
30 weeks.
>
> We look for strong leaders and easy answers rather than confront the
> grim reality of our current situation.  Certainly the impending war with
> Iraq is a good example of this.  The CIA has reported that no link
> exists between Hussein and Al Quida, so Bush appoints a special task
> force to make the facts fit the theory. The New York Review of Books
> (hardly a marginal leftist publication) revealed in a recent story
> Irving Kristol and Dick Cheney both wrote position papers back in the
> nineties which advocated intervention in Iraq for various geopolitical
> reasons such as the control of oil distribution and the protection of
> Israel
**No surprise..
>
> So it seems the current war isn't really about terrorism at all as much
> as it is about manipulating the America public to buy into a
> pre-conceived political agenda fostering special interests that risks
> destabilization of the Middle East situation and escalating it to a new
> level of crisis
**Yes..
>
> What is even more frightening is that America is becoming a closed
> society led by fundamentalist interests that opposes Empire because it
> wishes to maintain its own local brand of hegemony.  This desire has
> something antinomian about it.  The attitude seems to be that if America
> doesn't triumph the world deserves to fail.  Once James Watt, the
> Secretary of the Interior under Reagan, joked that there was no need to
> worry about the environment since Jesus was coming back anyway.  This
> idea has now become global.
>
> The tragedy in all of this is that a high road is still possible.
> America could strengthen the rule of international relations, utilize
> the soft power of diplomacy, work to de-militarize current conditions
> and seriously cooperate with other countries to overcome the effects of
> poverty, disease and pollution. This would tend to make the world a
> safer place and help contain the threat of both terrorism and blowback.
> Unfortunately, this is unlikely to take place in the near future
> because, in order to accomplish these goals, America would need to
> become something more like France and less like Mississippi.  The sad
> truth is the flag of the Confederacy still flies high over the white
> soul of America. We speak of freedom and democracy as we stab the world
> in the back.
**Harry Browne of the Libetarian Party suggested that the Northern States
were upset at Secession because a great deal of money came to the US
Treasury
through import taxes collected in Charleston S.C.  I'd never heard of that
before - also never head of any Constitutional provision forbidding States
who joined the Union to secede.

regards,
Hugh



   

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