Obama's Neocon Turn Makes A Peace Movement Possible Again

The article: Is a Peace Movement Finally Awakening? by Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation

We know what the New Right is all about: corporate socialism. They call it Big Government Conservatism, and it consists of corporate welfare at home, imperial expansion abroad, and a national security state powered by religious fanaticism worthy of Al-Qaeda. The liberal Left, however, was all but defanged by the election of a black president who talked the liberal talk. But now we know that he walks the neocon walk. Liberals are actually starting to come out of their closets and protest again.

Guess what this means? Now that the Great Black Hope has proved to be just another tyrannical Great White Father, a left-wing peace movement has become possible once again. We antiwar libertarians are starting to believe we won't be so lonely for long.

Where liberals and libertarians part, of course, is in their opinion of government. Liberals, descending from the social democrats of the 19th and 20th centuries, believe that government can be used as a force for good, a weapon against the oppression of the masses. Libertarians are far more cynical: expansion of government welfare leads inevitably to the supreme corporate welfare of war and empire, or the other way around if the empire wants to buy the masses' loyalty. The supreme statement of the libertarian position comes from early 20th century libertarian Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the state."

But now Obama has shown his true colors. He is indeed bent on destroying America — but on behalf of his real owners: the banksters who lead the New Right and fund the TEA Party. He sold us a bill of goods, you see. The liberals are now a constituency without representation. Some of them are beginning to complain. As the war between the US and Wikileaks escalates, and as an increasingly frustrated US government threatens to abolish freedom of speech and unleash Soviet-style secret police tactics in order to defend the empire and its war policy, they may actually start to realize they may have to take to the streets again, perhaps all the way to the barricades.

But until then, antiwar libertarians and socialists will remain the proverbial prophets crying out in the wilderness...

Barack Obama Jumps the Shark

The article: Obama Channels Reagan, and Risks Becoming Carter

Remember when I said, before the election catastrophe, that Rand Paul was over? Well, allow me to eat my words: he's not. In fact, he won. There can be only one reason why Rand Paul is not over:

Barack Obama is.

This time, he's gone too far. He's extended Bush's disastrous tax cuts for the rich! And without spending cuts to compensate. You know, Big Government Conservatism. Remember voodoo economics, the religion of Wall Street? You know, the magical thinking that claims tax cuts for the rich without spending cuts will cut deficits? He's now its most ardent acolyte. He's now defending his support of the Republican agenda against the liberal base that elected him. The people who voted for hope and change in 2008 are now every bit as unrepresented as the British colonials who started the American Revolution.

Even earlier, not long after he rode the wave of hope and change into office, he betrayed the millions of actual liberals who voted him into the White House by going to West Poing to announce a George W. Bush surge in the Afghan war. This war, like any other colonial war against the Middle East, has never been for the purpose of preserving freedom. Its only purpose is profit for the corporate welfare kings, particularly the oil barons and war profiteers. That's when he strangled all his beautiful promises in the crib, promises he never had any intention of ever keeping.

Now the man the TEA Party thinks is a Kenyan-born agent of Osama bin Laden has completed his transformation into a neocon. Yes, he is determined to destroy America. But with enemies like Obama, do Al-Qaeda even need friends? His plan for the destruction of America was written by America's corporate owners on Wall Street and their agents in the Republican Party. This is the beginning of the end of Obama's one and only term as president, for he has now definitively jumped the shark. Only the neocons are left in government now. There is only one party left, the party of corporatism and empire. The US government does not belong to the people, and never has; it is democratic only in theory, but oligarchic in design. Today, America is not its people but its corporations.

Obama's failure is the failure of the Democratic Party. The Republicans may be at each other's throats to the point that it threatens to split in two; but it's the Democratic party that's collapsing. The Democrats are an echo of the Republicans. An echo, not a choice. If the GOP is the Evil Party in the 1 1/2-party system that H.L. Mencken described almost a century ago, then the Dems can only be the Stupid Party.

No wonder they got clobbered by the TEA Party reactionaries in the '10 election! But said rebels are also signalling their eagerness to sell out to our corporate slavemasters. They shouldn't expect to be immune from the populist backlash, either, when the reckoning comes in two years.

I tell you, it's going to get ugly come 2012. Watch the Democratic primary. And don't bet on the incumbent winning it.

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

Wikileaks: The Pentagon Papers Escalating into Watergate -- and More

Remember the BP disaster, America's Chernobyl? It gets better! All this year, Wikileaks has been posting all kinds of classified US government material that was leaked by a single disgruntled Army private named Bradley Manning. I haven't been keeping track of the disaster that's been snowballing for the American Empire here, since in recent months I've been too busy retweeting the news. Thus, I missed the opportunity to comment on what I immediately recognized as the Iraq/Af-Pak War counterpart to the Pentagon Papers (which you can read here). Now that this new Pentagon Papers scandal is exploding into a full-blown Watergate, I have to say something. First: a quick rundown of the events:

• On April 5, Wikileaks released classified video of an American helicopter attack intended to massacre Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, and for no other reason. Wikileaks' name for the incident: Collateral Murder.
• On July 25, they released over 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghan war, collectively known as the Afghan War Diary. This was what reminded me of the Pentagon Papers. Once again, the Empire got egg on its collective face.
• On October 22, they released nearly 400,000 secret US Army field reports in the biggest leak in American military history, known as the Iraq War Logs. This leak focused not just on American massacres of unarmed civilians, but the occupation authorities' tolerance of murders by the Iraqi police and military.
• November 28 was the first day of the most embarrassing leak yet, which Wikileaks has dubbed Cablegate and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com calls simply The Big Dump. The first 291 of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from the US State Department were released. In an attempt to stop it and hopefully destroy Wikileaks, the US government had a cyberagent codenamed "Jester" pull a massive denial of service attack against the site. The attack failed; the site was back up within hours and began releasing the cables. Still, Obama and Clinton warned every single government leader in the world about the leak right before it started.

Al-Qaeda Is A Cult

The article: "Can Utilizing Knowledge of Cults Help Us with Terrorist Groups?" by Steven Hassan

Some of you will surely dispute me on this, the same way people disagree when I insist that there is no such thing as a split infinitive. Some will insist Al-Qaeda is strictly a "terror organization". As with the alleged split infinitive in English, this is really a semantic quibble. I look at it structurally. The Manson Family and Aum Supreme Truth committed some of history's most infamous acts of terrorism, but they have always been seen as what they are: doomsday cults. Structurally, in organization and doctrine, Al-Qaeda is clearly a cult.

The author of the linked article, Steven Hassan, is a former Moonie (Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church cultist) turned cult expert. His experience in a cult allows him to know a cult when he sees it. I decided to write this entry when I read his article and realized that he was saying publicly what I already believed but hadn't told anybody yet (except maybe my mother and brother). He begins: "When is it time to start recognizing that Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups are cults?"

American Chernobyl: The BP Disaster

You've heard all about the BP oil spill, on TV and online, in the business and environmental and political news. Well, guess what? The Republican Party and the TEA Party are loudly defending the sovereign right of BP's corporate raider owners to destroy whatever the hell they damn well feel like, in the name of the "free market". The problem with BP is that the "free market" is hardly free at all. The problem is corporatism.

Corporatism, a form of synarchism, is socialism for giant corporations and the financial elite. Its core policy consists of privatizing profit while socializing risk and harm. To that purpose, the government enacts protectionist laws to restrict competition. Private business is completely embedded in government and should be considered a branch of government.

Yes, free markets exist, even in America. But the oil industry is not one of them. It is controlled by a corporatist monopoly cartel, some of whose members (most notably ARAMCO) are owned by fundamentalist Islamic dictatorships and absolute monarchies.

Corporatism requires state socialism in order to prevent competition. But competition is the lifeblood of any true free market. No free competition means no free market. The oil cartel bought the US presidency for Enron executive George W. Bush with corporatist state socialism as its mandate to him. He corporatized the US government faithfully, going so far as to use the US armed forces as the cartel's mercenaries to pirate the oil from Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon (and this will be faithfully carried out by future corporate lawyer Barack Obama) Iran.

Chernobyl was the inevitable result of Russian state socialism under the Soviet Union. I've heard tweets that the BP disaster is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. It is not. It is American corporatism's Chernobyl. It is destroying the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea the same way that nuclear meltdown destroyed a corner of Ukraine. It's not just BP that's to blame. The entire oil cartel, the US government, the irresponsible financial elite, and the entire system of corporatism are to blame. The bad karma is theirs, and that of their "populist" apologists for corporate dictatorship.

Chernobyl was the omen of Communism's collapse. The BP oil disaster, the American Chernobyl, is the same thing. Soon American Corporatism will follow Russian Communism into the trash compactor of history.

Rand Paul Is Over: or, Why Conservative Libertarianism Is a Contradiction in Terms

The article: "Rachel Maddow Demolishes Rand Paul" by Joan Walsh, Salon

Yesterday, "fighting liberal" MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow interviewed Kentucky senatorial candidate and "TEA Party" favorite Rand Paul on her show after he crushed his establishment opponent, secretary of state Trey Grayson, in the Republican primary election. Joan Walsh insists Maddow won big. Ray Beckerman is not so sure. Me, I had to see for myself. So I read Walsh's article and watched the interview. When it was over, I realized that Walsh was spot on. Toward the end of the interview, I got the feeling that I was witnessing a fatal car wreck as it was happening and watching the driver die right in front of me: what I witnessed was the complete self-destruction of the New Right's rising superstar in the span of half a minute. In effect, even despite himself, Paul defended the nasty racial protectionism called Jim Crow, convicting himself of not just racism but statism. He outed himself as a conservative. He didn't sound libertarian to me: he extolled the economic freedom of corporations, pointedly including racist owners of lunch counters, while spitting on individual freedom in the form of consumer choice, which Jim Crow was designed to restrict. My verdict: Maddow crushed him, ending his political career in front of the whole world. Rand Paul is over.

Ayn Rand, Religion, and the Problem with the New Atheists

You've probably heard of the so-called "New Atheists": Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Their books against religion are red-hot in a still religion-mad America. However, there's a shrillness about their tone that outrages even many atheists. That shrillness, especially in Harris, struck me immediately as very familiar. It's the same tone you find in a figure I discovered three years after her death (i.e., in 1985); one whose books have been remarkably consistent bestsellers ever since they were published in the mid-to-late 20th century; one whose heavy influence Harris openly acknowledges: Ayn Rand. Problem is, Rand is notorious as the guru of a cult.

Rand was one of the true founders of the New Atheism, one of its two twentieth-century godmothers. The other was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, who dedicated her life to relentless struggle against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren't fighting a new battle; they have simply picked up the swords left by the founding mothers of their movement.

I was once a closet believer in Rand's philosophy, unknown to anyone in the movement. (In my first decade on the Internet, roughly 1995-2005, I was strictly a lurker, keeping my presence hidden; I similarly didn't reveal myself to the online Objectivists.) I'm familiar with her writings, not just her three major novels but her many books of essays. I also studied the history of Rand, her philosophy which she named Objectivism, and the movement she founded on it. I'm as familiar with the philosophy as just about anybody in the movement. My entire realist worldview derives to a very large degree from Rand's. But there's something about how Rand led the movement, and in how she wrote, that is suspiciously religious. Many have gone so far as to call Objectivism a cult: Murray Rothbard (the free-market economist and a former Rand associate), Michael Shermer, Albert Ellis, and Jeff Walker, among others. Even no less a figure than Rand's one-time protégé, Nathaniel Branden, has made a detailed critique of Rand's philosophy, pointing out its weaknesses, which happen to be the most religious of her tenets.

It's Official: No, Obama Can't, And He Never Wanted To Anyway

The articles:

1. Tom Sullivan: President Obama Loses His Base: He Just Ran Out of Slack
2. Glenn Greenwald: White House as helpless victim on healthcare and The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
3. Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout
4. David Sirota: The "Candidate vs. President" Canard

And now it's official at last:

1. Barack Obama is not a progressive.
2. Barack Obama is a bought and paid-for conservative Clintonite corporate shill who is selling out American democracy to corporatist dictatorship.
3. Barack Obama has officially jumped the shark.

Progressives, you've been had. Big time. That "change agent" you (and, shamefully, I too) elected? Not to be seen. He suckered the American people for everything. The ex-community organizer just proved himself to be one of the worst of the neoconservative Blue Dogs. For all we know, he planned the total abortion ban in the corporate welfare health care "reform" (sic!) bill. Turns out the libertarians were right after all.

On the other hand, he's actually done some things right...

The page: The Obameter: Obama's Campaign Promises that are Promise Kept In previous posts entitled "No He Can't" (part 1 and part 2), I've harshly criticized President Obama's insistence on continuing his predecessor George W. Bush's imperial wars and white-elephant bank bailout, and his willingness to sign a health care reform bill that is little different from Bush's corporate-welfare Medicare reform bill. On the really big issues, then, it seems he's the typical cowardly Democrat who kowtows to Operation Permanent Republican Administration. It's the little issues where he actually succeeds, as this entry's featured link should prove. (And it helps that he doesn't like Bush any more than I do.)

Now click that link again and pay close attention. On the war, promises 134 and 167 are the ones I'm so harshly criticizing. But remember, he actually did promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan till Osama bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is annihilated, and the Taliban crushed. The last is impossible, though, since the war itself is empowering the Taliban extremists. Colonial war tends to do that. Think: Viet Cong. Still, he's criticizing the Bush-Cheney cowboy chauvinism and fundamentalist Americanism. But still, by escalating the Afghan war and spreading it into Pakistan, he's created his Vietnam. Remember, the Vietnam War destroyed not one but two presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Even so, he's promised to end Bush's pet war, the one in Iraq (promises 119 and 125), though so far he hasn't gone so far as to actually de-escalate it, at least not yet.

I like promise 222, loosening restrictions against Cuba. Still, he should end the embargo completely and restore diplomatic relations; that would eliminate the perceived necessity for all that Cold War nationalist bluster on both sides.

He's also kept his promises on other issues, some dear to liberals (or which should be), others reversing repressive, theocratic, and anti-scientific decrees and laws signed into law by Bush. So you can't say Obama hasn't done any good things as president — unless, of course, you're an irrational wingnut neocon or born-againer who hates his guts, thinks he's not even American, and maybe even wants to kill him (the Psalm 109:8 controversy).

It's only on the big issues that he's failed. (With one exception: little by little, he's starting to take little steps toward ending the long-standing and destructive policy of drug prohibition, though it's partly because of the increasingly violent drug war in Mexico.) But it's the big issues that threaten to destroy not just his presidency, but the country. Ultimately, the oligarchic republican system established in 1787 is unsustainable, and will have to be superseded by something far more democratic. The criticism and praise will continue as his term progresses and he keeps or breaks his promises. Keep your eyes peeled, your ears to the ground, and stay tuned...

No He Can't, Part 2: Obama Says War Is Peace, Jumps The Shark

The article: Nobel-winning Obama defends war in call for peace - Yahoo! News

So the latest chickenhawk warlord who rules the world, who might as well be called George Bush III because he loves loves LOVES war so much, the neocon in liberal's clothing called Barack Hussein Obama, accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in order to defend the negation of peace. He pays lip service to the peacemakers, then defends his true calling, All-Conquering Khan of the World, his true title. Apparently God's got him on Shrub Bush's hotline! "Some will kill; some will be killed." But what's important is that the killing must must MUST continue, at all costs! For the infinite glory and profit of America's corporate welfare kings!

Barack Hussein Obama, the smooth-talking Chicago conman who convinced us that he's a liberal but is really the second coming of Emperor Shrub, has now definitively jumped the shark. If you remember the 2008 US presidential election, Obama was elected by an antiwar majority. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going badly and bankrupting the country. But not only did the new president continue Bush's bailout of his big banker friends, he escalated both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is waiting like Bush for the perfect excuse to invade Iran in order to save damsel in distress Israel. He ended up being more of the same, only with the silver tongue of the Devil and a convincing liberal façade. The neocon warhawks are having multiple orgasms over their former seeming enemy's total conversion to the cause of empire.

Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.

Going Public Again

I've neglected my opinion blog here since, actually, Inauguration Day. For some reason, despite my strong opinions and my desire to keep up with current events, I couldn't think of anything to write. I've posted lots of entries on my main and opinion blogs in the past six months, but nothing here. Since then, my attitude has mellowed some; I'm no longer quite the "angry young man" I was last year (this post on my main blog explains part of the reason). But now I feel I'm ready to take on the world again, so I intend to post here regularly now.

Here's a few of the current events that I'm keeping up on right now:

1. The Iranian revolution in progress. Right now, the massive and frequently violent protests over the perceived rigging of the recent presidential election have died down considerably, but the theocratic régime is increasingly divided.
2. The anti-abortion movement seems to be breaking up because the "pro-life" organizations are increasingly far more conservative than the majority of Americans opposed to abortion.
3. The rise of the conspiracy theory of the "birthers", who claim that President Obama is not an American citizen and therefore cannot legally be President. They even have their own website! The big problem they have with Obama, it seems to me, is that he's black. The "birthers" are neoconservatives who are almost all white; they ruled America till January 20 this year, but now they are bitter and even willing to call for violent revolution.
4. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, of course.

And other issues of the day, in their context.

But I'm not going to neglect my opinions and philosophy, either. This blog isn't purely political; I don't call it my opinion blog for nothing.

I hope to post at least once a week at minimum.

Update: Sarah Palin wants her own radio show! Interesting choice for someone who keeps attacking the media. Even so, whenever people ask me about the Alaskan ex-governor's future, I always tell them "Fox News". I have to say it: I told you so!

Inauguration Day 2009: The Day Everything Changed

Is it just me, or do you too think it highly significant that Inauguration Day this year came the day after Martin Luther King Day? MLK Day is an American government holiday established to honor the legacy of the martyred civil rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the 1963 March on Washington, he gave voice to the idea of equality between Americans of African descent, most of whose original ancestors were brought to America as slaves, and their European-descended fellow citizens. Today, the dream has still not been fully achieved. However, today represents one big step closer.

Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African immigrant, has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Hell has officially frozen over.

What I missed by not posting here for so long...

I haven't been posting here often. In fact, for almost four months last year, I didn't post here at all. And so I missed a whole lot of things, including some very important events. Here's what I missed:

1. First and foremost, the American election, and especially the long process that led to the historic election of Barack Obama as president.
2. The sudden and cataclysmic collapse of the American financial industry and the total extinction of the investment banks, which has all but plunged the world into economic depression. Recently, this was complicated by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's gigantic pyramid scheme.
3. The big December 2008 snowstorm that paralyzed Seattle and the Northwest, with its January sequel. (However, I did take pictures...)
4. And other things that happened, but which I've already forgotten.

There are advantages to keeping your readers informed about current events, or at least your take on these events. The tradeoff, however, is that this is time-consuming. I have limited time, and much of it is taken up by writing my novel. So I haven't really been keeping up lately. For almost four months, I hardly even touched my computer at all.

I hope to get myself informed enough to comment more often here. Since it takes time to do so — that is, to research what I'm writing about, for one thing — I probably won't post as often as I'd like. Still, I should at least try...

Finally: This Blog Gets Its Final Name

At last, I found the right name for this opinion blog. It is "Take Nothing On Faith", which just happens to be the motto I live by, just as "with great power comes great responsibility" is Spider-Man's. Now, how did I come up with this title? Archetypically: it came to me while I was brushing my teeth.

Also, I found out why my recent posts look so screwy in their layout. I found out when I was preparing to post this very entry. It was the post template, something that can be corrected in my settings. Believe it or not, it's a bug in the regular Blogger, one that amazingly does not exist (or has been corrected) in Blogger in Draft. Somehow regular Blogger has been turning my newlines into spaces. I corrected the problem manually in this post, then I corrected it definitively in the settings menu — in Draft, of course. Problem solved. Now I'm ready to start posting here again. Stay tuned...

Nihilism and Three Levels of Mindsets

In my previous entry Atheism Without Nihilism, a pious Christian posted an anonymous comment that, in retrospect, made me realize that between people with differing mindsets, no communication is possible. To the religious mind, atheism is defined as nihilism. Why? Because of religion's definition of "value": all value is of God, and is therefore supernatural by definition. If God doesn't exist, then value doesn't exist. Ergo, atheism = nihilism. period. And so if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, to avoid nihilism you must redefine the meaning of value so that it refers to this world and not the world above. However, you can only make the redefinition if your mind has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity. Thus, I need to speak of mindsets.

I learned about three evolutionary levels of mind by reading Richard Brodie (his site here), specifically Virus of the Mind. These levels are:

1. gene-driven, meaning concerned only with one's instincts and appetites;
2. meme-driven, meaning concerned with one's ideology or religion, sometimes at the expense of life itself, one's own or others'; and
3. self-driven, of a sufficiently high level of consciousness that one can define the way one defines their life.

These three levels of consciousness are obvious enough if you observe people long enough. They were first described by, believe it or not, the ancient Gnostics, who were notoriously unworldly but who saw the effects of people's level of consciousness and divided them into "hyletics" or materialists, "psychics" or conventionally religious people, and "pneumatics" or truly spiritual people. Modern science made the "pneumatics" into objective realists, people who treat reality and themselves with objectivity. The religious mentality has become every bit as apparent among Gnostics as among more conventionally religious people. So the schema itself has evolved, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Now the thing about mindsets is that minds operating on a higher level can understand those at lower levels, but lower-level minds cannot understand those at higher levels. The religious mind cannot understand the scientific mind; people who operate according to dogmas (religious or ideological) defined as Absolute Truths cannot possibly conceive of the higher mindset in which people submit everything to objective inquiry and take nothing on faith.

So, to answer the question as to whether atheism is nihilism: yes &mdash but only on the second, meme-driven, dogmatic (religious and ideological) level of consciousness. But on the third, self-driven, scientific level of consciousness, definitely not. Indeed, the Level 2 belief in a Supreme Being, or at least Absolute Truth, strikes the Level 3 mind as itself nihilistic, because it drains all value from the world and leaves it a desolate wasteland from which Level 2 longs to escape to the world above. So Level 2 minds like my anonymous commenter's and Level 3 minds like mine are doomed to talk past each other. Less tolerant Level 2 minds simply declare "holy war" against all other minds that are like them, and become terrorists.

Why do I need a new opinion blog?

Because, for one thing, I realized that the URL I chose for my original opinion blog, The Space Helmet Show, didn't quite fit the opinion blog mold. And the name "The Outside View" that I chose all the way back in 2001, when I was merely considering blogging (I didn't actually set up my first two blogs till March of this year), turned out to be so common as to be utterly cliché. And so I'm going to abandon that overly common name "The Outside View", repurpose The Space Helmet Show as a repository for my more miscellaneous stuff, and transfer the more political posts on TSHS here.

I like to keep each of my blogs focused on a single range of subjects. That way, I can keep them in order. I have a few more blogs I want to set up, since I have a few more subjects I can use them on, including myself. All of them will link to the other in my list of "Links to My Sites".

Soon, I will create both my main homepage and my project page. I'll use my main site as the central hub for all my sites, including my blogs and my future social network accounts. Some of this is in my list of Big, Fun, Scary goals I drew up for NaNoWriMo, and some are not. From now on, my politically incorrect opinions go here.

The Oligarchic American Constitution

The official spin is that America is a democracy. It's a crucial part of the national mythology. Well, guess what: This is nowhere near the truth. The Founders never said they were setting up a democracy. In fact, in The Federalist, three of them argued repeatedly against democracy. The republic the Framers set up with their 1787 Constitution was intended to be an electoral oligarchy. What else would you expect from a constitution that originally gave slavemasters extra votes representing 3/5 of each of their slaves?

On the other hand, there is a lot of democracy below the federal level: in most states and localities, direct democracy has been implemented in the form of initiative, referendum, and recall. It's not quite as participatory as the Athenian assembly, in which all the citizens met every month or week to do what legislatures and city councils do today, but it's actually far more democratic than the US federal government, which restricts democratic participation to electing a limited number of officials and was far more restrictive in its unamended original version.

Naturally, there's a huge contradiction that is undermining the entire creaky 18th-century American system. On the one hand, you have the oligarchic federal government which has over the decades become increasingly monarchic. On the other, there's the long-term trend toward democratization which has led to the universal right to vote and to expanding civil rights for women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and immigrants among others. The democratic trend also involves the expansion of the vote until now all adult citizens can vote, where originally only propertied white males were eligible. Increasingly, these two opposite trends are working against each other. Eventually they will not be able to coexist, and one or the other must prevail at the other's expense. At that time, a revolution will be highly likely. That time will be when the colonial conquest campaign in the Middle East is lost and the troops come home.

The 1787 Constitution is obsolete. There might be a way to save it: state nullification, the right of any one state to veto or nullify any federal law, regulation, and decree. Thomas Jefferson himself came up with that, and insisted that it was the only thing that would ultimately prevent the American republic from degenerating into a tyranny. Now would be a good time to revive the idea. It would make an excellent 28th Amendment. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to scrap the dysfunctional federal system entirely, and replace the current 1787 Constitution with something at least as good at protecting rights but far more democratic.

The problem with an oligarchic constitution, you see, is that an oligarchy ultimately loses touch with the mass of ordinary citizens. Oligarchs are unaccountable to the people. Increasingly drunk on power, they lose touch with reality as well. In the democratic age, good government requires the rulers to be accountable to the citizens, or they will rule arbitrarily and tyrannically. So a modern constitution must make the government accountable. That means democracy in some form. Some critics of the current constitution advocate a European-style parliamentary system elected through proportional representation instead of the current setup. What was originally the equality of the executive and legislative branches has degenerated into the monarchic supremacy of the executive, or "Imperial Presidency". European-style parliaments subordinate the executive (usually called a "prime minster") to the legislature. This may be more workable. However, it still proves oligarchic in practice if it doesn't have at least some features of direct democracy (initiative, referendum, recall, nullification). But we won't know what we'll come up with till the revolution begins and the Fourth Republic is born.

The Third American Republic

Now let's talk history for once. Sometimes I speak of "the Third American Republic", numbering American republics like French ones. I have to explain it to most people. Some historians and pundits measure it differently, but in fact the periods of independent American history fall into three periods which can rightly be called republics:

• The First Republic is the period from independence to the adoption of the Constitution, 1776-1787, including the period of the Articles of Confederation.
• The Second Republic began with the ratification of the Constitution and ended with the Civil War: 1787-1861.
• The Third Republic was established by the Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 and is the government still in power in Washington, DC today. Because the American Empire was built during this period, it is also known as the Imperial Republic. There is strong evidence that it is coming to an end.

A Fourth Republic would be a good idea, as long as the power shifts from a bloated federal government back to the people.

One hallmark of the current Third Republic is a presidency far stronger than in any previous American republic. In fact, right now the presidency is being transformed into something of an elective absolute monarchy. Another is our not quite so laissez-faire form of capitalism in which corporations are defined as "legal persons" which in practice gives them greater rights than mere puny humans; right now, this is transforming into a full-blown state capitalism.

Counter to trends like these is the growing trend toward full civil rights for ever wider sections of the American people since the Civil War. This trend started in fact with two amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth, which bans slavery, and the Fourteenth, which promises full civil rights (or at least voting rights) to all men regardless of race and also extends the Bill of Rights to the state and local levels. It took some time for the full effects of these (and subsequent amendments that extended full civil rights to women and others) to sink in, which is why most of the great advances in civil rights were made in the 20th century.

Now consider the contradiction: a basically authoritarian federal government with an imperial obsession, opposed to a still growing trend toward democracy and civil rights for all. This contradiction is at the core of the problems in the later stages of the Third Republic. By now, the trends toward democratization vs. world empire have diverged so completely that they have begun to clash. Soon the contradiction will tear the country apart. It could get nasty before we get a Fourth Republic, but let's hope not.

I hope that's a good enough explanation. Hopefully it's not merely a private reference now.