Although there are not a huge number of sociopaths, they tend to seek positions of power due to their nature and their ability to single-mindedly focus on getting what they want at any cost. History has been writ large generally by psychopaths who decided to get serious about enabling their delusions of grandeur. The thing is, sociopaths really don’t have a great deal of power all on their own. Generally most communities will remove them by death or imprisonment once their social malady is realized. But Objectivism also gathers adherents who aren’t sociopaths but want to be.

I’m not kidding. A much bigger subsection of people on the sociopath side are the enablers, highly selfish people who just want in and are happy to be thugs for the sociopaths as long as they get to feel like big shots and get a cut of the action. This group probably outnumbers the sociopaths by an order of magnitude. But they help conceal and legitimize the presence of insane people who are really running the show.

I know this sounds like a bunch of wild nonsense, but history is full of powerful crazy people. Hitler is a great example for the usual reasons, but also because when you examine the German population as a whole and their compliance with Hitler’s psychopathy you couldn’t conclude that the population was a bunch of sociopaths, but rather Hitler attracted in record numbers the kind of “me-too” bully boys who didn’t have the imagination to have much of a moral sense about anything, as long as they thought they were doing it for some glorious future. Truly it was on the ranks of this enabler group that allowed Hitler to do what he did.

The United States economic and political systems have been hijacked by sociopaths, people who have overwhelming self-interest or at least an interest in keeping their in-group of de-facto economic aristocrats as small as possible.

Usually I would say that the saving grace of empathy is that sociopaths don’t understand it and hence tend to underestimate it. It can often take a lot to get people to start behaving compassionately, but generally when a whole group of douchebag fascists have been identified by a majority they will be dealt with.

So it would seem to me that developing a way to reduce or eliminate empathetic qualities in the general population would be a good way for these pigs to remain in power, because selfish people don’t often have the sense to band together to accomplish things they can’t do alone.

This is one place where technology really broadens the field in both directions. I think the information age both allows the possibility of empathy on a scale like we’ve never seen as well as constructed realities of incredible delusions. Fox News shows the power of technology to allow corporate fascists to propagandize, whereas in the revolutions in the middle east the internet has often proven helpful in organizing people to demonstrate effectively.

The internet has magnified the age long contest between sociopathy and empathy to cold war, nuclear threat levels. The potential for great gain and great harm both exist and in many ways I feel like the social history for the next century will be written by the side that finally manages to reach the next game-changing level in information control and distribution. But who knows?

He was being a bit more philosophical, saying that in a certain sense it was the can-do attitude displayed in China that he envied most. He was also careful to clarify that he envied China’s accomplishments, but not anything else about their autocratic, human-rights violating government. So it would seem.

Anyway, on the whole I thought it was a mildly interesting article and it occurred to me how much ire this man has earned from Thom Hartmann, the nation’s most popular progressive radio host. On a whimsy I typed into google: “why does thom hartmann hate thomas friedman so much?”

Rather than any real returns to THAT question, I saw a blog post saying “How do you deal with Thom Hartmann acolytes?” An unexpected twist, but following random but related links is one of my favorite things about the web (and wikipedia – THE BEST.) Guessing that some right-wing nutbaggery would be afoot, I steeled myself and dived in.

What I found, actually, were a bunch of extremely pie-in-the-sky libertarian arguments for a complete abolition of the state in favor of the free market. Generally speaking, they were the sorts of arguments that blame the state for everything bad that has ever happened in our capitalist society. One or two points seemed reasonable for a moment, before I realized that they were essentially founded on a misconception surrounding the flawless operation of the poorly-named “free market.” The invisible hand guides all, you see. To libertarians, the economy is some sort of perfectly just force that, if just given complete and total freedom, will just make everything all wonderful because everyone gets to keep everything they earn, and everyone will just get along, and bad companies will die out because no one will buy their products, you know, after ten thousand people die from mutated e-coli…and so forth. The problem with this so called free-market is it’s never truly free because we – human beings – are the ones who actually implement it.

You see, no matter how much they say, greed is good – that self-interest becomes useful in a market-driven society – they don’t seem able to comprehend the harm that the market can and will do in the hands of unscrupulous human beings. There are dozens of examples – not just recessions! – of the market as a driving force behind some of our worst catastrophes. The BP Oilcano, the Enron fiasco, completely unjust goddamn wars like Iraq, occupying of foreign countries at the behest of transnational megacorporations – the price we pay isn’t just in recessions – the price we pay for capitalism is the ability of greedy, selfish people to inflict harm on a massive scale. Global warming – why won’t these companies understand that the time they get to do whatever they want is over – we have to start changing our ways, or one day, all of us are going to die. Those extra million dollars will do you a whole lot of good when your grandchildren are gasping for the last breathable air on Earth and cursing your name. But I’m sure if we just freed up the market MORE, why, then we’d be green in no time at all!

Goddamnit.

What’s particularly telling about this whole rigmarole is the site I found these delusional comments on is the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a school that deliberately promotes these sorts of ultra-libertarian views; its stated stance is “complete anti-statism.” Now, surely even I, lefty as I am, never operate to quite that extreme. I’m not utterly anti-capitalist, I’m just anti-predatory capitalism. I’m not in favor of unlimited government – in fact, I may be a socialist but I have definite views as to where the government ought not to intrude (ironically this is where religious screwball teabaggers want government to intrude the most – hypocritical assholes). But apparently this school teaches to complete anti-statism. So I went to wikipedia to see this school.

Now what a goddamn surprise, there’s some controversy about this school being founded by the diabolical Koch Foundation. So let me see if I understand this – one of the richest families in America gives over a huge chunk of money to create a school that tries to indoctrinate as many people as it can into an utterly pro-market ideology…..hmmm….diabolical indeed.

I mean if even a few of these drones managed to infiltrate the economic areas of government, why there’d be things happening like continuous deregulations of banks, uncontrolled economic speculation, and huge recessions caused by multiple bubbles bursting in sequence – but thank god we live in the USA, where that hasn’t…oh.

Goddamnit.

But honestly you don’t even need to know that the Mises Institute is a fascist-capitalist propaganda factory to know that their arguments are bullshit. The anti-statism argument is disingenous at its very core because it draws no comparison between the control of one’s life by the state and the control of ones life by a corporation.

Those that oppose the control of a state or government over their lives don’t seem to see that in reality much of their lives is dictated so much more tangibly by the companies for which they work. When there is a depression, market capitalism becomes a de-facto state all by itself – example: when you are literally in a position where you cannot quit your job – your family is depending on you, you need the health insurance, or what have you – whatever restrictions the corporation puts on your behavior are absolute – you have no choice whatsoever. At least in a democracy, you can cast a vote. But when you’re a worker at a company, your boss is your lord and master, the CEO – a king. And you my friend, are a serf, gladly accepting every pay cut and slashed benefit just so you can hold on to your miserable job.

Why, what’s this? It looks like a government doesn’t it? For when your economic reality becomes literally your whole reality – when you are no longer a willing participant, but have no choice – you are simply a slave. And how is that better than socialized healthcare? Public schools? Everybody pays in – everybody takes out. In capitalism, everybody pays in, and the top 1% scrape off the best stuff and toss the scraps to the starving masses below. Capitalism is feudalism at its heart, and its wealthiest proponents royalists – they are people who long to put those they perceive as below them in their place.

Which explains why this bullshit ideology of anti-statism is simply a front for insane pro-capitalism. When confronted with calamities one after another caused by market-driven ideology, these people just ignore the facts. Errr…market’s not…free enough. Tell me this lads: if a somewhat free market can wreak this much havoc, why would we possibly want to make it any freer?

Feh. Nuff said.

Selfishness.

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to understand that the average Republican feels that they earned everything they have with their own hands. They completely take for granted the society, era, structure, accidents of birth, and other factors that contribute to whatever success they manage to glean. This “pulled up by your own bootstraps” idea is a childish fabrication which grossly oversimplifies the incredibly interconnected modern world. The problem is, many people in America are staggeringly dumb – whether it’s our underfunded education system, religious zelaotry, or just some strange national character, trying to get right-wingers to understand that paying taxes is paying for the very structure of the society in which they live and has benefited them every day for their entire lives is nearly impossible.

This is why the idea of “gub’ment handouts” so infuriate these Teabaggers. Like I wrote in a previous article, they don’t seem to understand that the government is not a malign third party in our society but rather than an extension of the will of the people, or at least it used to be. Until the will of the people started electing black people to the white house. Then, “We want our country back!” There are still people who refuse to accept that the de facto dominance of people with white skin on the globe is finally coming to an end, whereas I say good riddance to bad rubbish and let’s hope some other upcoming culture is smart enough to learn from our mistakes. We sure fucking didn’t.

But I digress. I dismiss all Teabaggers offhand as incoherent racists. My point is that an attitude of selfishness can often come from what I consider a lack of understanding of the interconnected nature of the world. These people do not self-reflect to the extent where they see themselves interconnected as a part of a larger whole than, say a family or culture or (gasp) “race.” The fact that I demand equal rights for gays even though I am not myself homosexual would utterly confuse someone without the ability to understand that I consider what is done to any US citizen as being done to me. That is why I got furious when I learned about the torture. It not only erodes our moral credibility almost entirely, but more importantly it means that me, or a member of my family, or my community, is effectively being tortured. It means that we are inflicting great harm to a human being, someone just like you. But this is completely lost on right-wingers, who are able to condone, support, and even laugh at the idea of torturing people in the name of the United States. In their names.

Scum.

When America’s engine of prosperity really got going, postwar, tech boom, etc. the eighties were upon us and it looked like everyone was doing just spiffy. So spiffy, in fact, that there was plenty of money for all. Even those who wanted much more than their fair share. So we began a series of economic adjustments to this country that were based on an incredibly selfish rationale dressed up in “free market capitalism.” Whereas just thirty years ago the top 1% in this country were pulling in maybe twelve percent of the incoming in this country, three years ago it was up to almost 25%.

Who is looking at that number and shrugging? Who feels nothing when they see the gross inequality in terms of the money produced by us, the American worker, the labor of this country, the ones who actually do the things, compared to the massive raking off of this very wealth by the capitalist masterclass? The fact is all of us see this as acceptable, because somehow one day in America we all decided that rich people were better than us. The rich deserve to stay rich. After all, they GOT rich right? That’s the America Dream and they should be able to ride that goddamn gravy train to the end because they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps…oh wait.

The fact is, the people raking in this wealth are not the ones that actually PRODUCE it. Even in service industries, the people in the company who actually do the work are the ones that produce money that all the executives point laser pointers at and compare in charts and rake off in millions for their own bank accounts. But does the VALUE of their labor, leading the company, necessarily entitle them to some pyramid-scheme compensation just because they happen to be steering the helm of this money producing entity. I tell you hell no.

I tell you, in fact, that this neo-feudalistic capitalism is incredibly anti-American and anti-democratic on its face. As these libertarians will tell you, they simply want to enjoy the fruits of their labor without government interference – and yet the truth is in a democracy government interference is simply those pesky workers redistributing wealth to benefit all of them instead of the lords and kings of Wall Street. These people at the top are NOT entitled to what they take, and when you understand that, you can understand that we are condoning a form of robbery with this insane cult of capitalism. If these Ayn Rand types REALLY wanted to be entitled to what they earn, they would support unions, not oppose them, support taxes on the wealthy, not oppose them, and be in favor of widespread social programs because of we the people don’t take our money away from the feudal capitalists by goddamn force (taxes) we are not going to get it AT ALL.

This is why right-wing ideology and philosophy of government is nothing but a series of pseudo-rationalizations for a form of government that operates for the benefit of a small elite instead of the majority. They are oligarchs. And they want America labor so stomped down that they can have labor cheaper here than even in Vietnam. When that happens, America will truly enter a new era of feudal capitalism. The serfs will work at the wages chosen at whim by the capitalist lords. This is the true end result of unregulated capitalism. And this is not happening by chance.

And it is is exactly what they want.

In a monarchy, this dichotomy holds – the government consists of a ruler (and most likely noble class) which has responsibilities and priorities towards it’s citizens, but these are determined by the ruling class. In similar governments, like dictatorships, the social policies and institutions are likewise tuned to the aims of the leader, and not necessarily the aims of the citizenry as a whole.

But in a democracy, the government IS the citizens. I know this is a naive-sounding simplification, but if you believe in democracy then you implicitly accept that our elected officials are there to represent us in the business of governing the country. I know representative democracy does muddy this a little bit, but this is fundamentally about how democracy BY DESIGN eliminates the historical divide between the ruling class and the others. We, each American, are simultaneously in the ruling class (by proxy) as well as ordinary citizens. That’s the whole point.

Because of this fundamental democratic connections, it is foolish to paint government as an enemy of the people by default. It’s true that there is no small risk of corruption, inefficiencies, mistakes, and other problems, but those are inherent risks run by a system where anybody can be president. And admittedly, the risks are far greater when anyone with a huge amount of money can become President.

My point is, the only way to have a sane discussion about implementing social programs is whether we think that it is better left to private industry or to us. When people say “I’m against government-run healthcare” what they are effectively saying is, “I don’t want to be in control of my own healthcare. I don’t want an agency, created by me and only looking out for my best interests, in control of getting me the care I need. I don’t want a system that operates at a fraction of the overhead because their only goal is to efficiently dispense claims. What I want is a for-profit corporation to take my money, deny my claims, drop my coverage, and just generally fuck me around because god damn it, this is the United States of America!

People who are against government are such cowards. They have no understanding of any of the issues surrounding democracy, or even shed a single thought as to what it being a citizen of a democracy actually entails. They are certainly right to be wary of excessive government, but as citizens it is our duty to create a system where those things are minimized because WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. All right-wingers want is a king to tell them what’s what, so they can just align themselves with the leader and collapse the difficult process of improving government into a simple, emotional jingoistic loyalty to a person. Think Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh. Like moths to a flame, these personalities gather fanatical followers because they appeal to people who don’t understand the actual issues on a purely emotional level. It’s less about what they say (much of which is pure nonsense) and more about how they say it. Some people have been, and still are, guilty of this with Barack Obama. (He’s a great speaker isn’t he… So it’s not even just on the right. Eep!) Sometimes I think this business of self-governance is so far beyond the average American’s imagination that they don’t even understand it.

And sometimes, in the dark of night, thinking about the millions of barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf, I crave, in the recesses of my soul, a philosopher-king.

Man this democracy thing can be tough sometimes.

First of all, some people, those who I expect think of themselves as rationalists, see a strange and wondrous force in the world of economics. Supply and demand, micro and macro, imports and exports – the numbers dance across the world and commerce occurs. It seems so wonderful. And all these basic principles are absolutely self-regulating – or so the lie goes. Follow the money: capitalism is a system whereby those who succeed in acquiring capital become more powerful – in fact, pure capitalism demands that you acquire more stuff than your competitors to distinguish yourself from them. Money is the only measure of success in a purely capitalistic society. Therefore, a high-paying job is not simply a means to and end: i.e. raising a family, retiring mad early, etc. but a status symbol in itself. After all, your job is literally how much you are worth to somebody, or to the system at least.  See how these egotistical wall-streeters became that way? They have been taught to value money as an end in itself. They honestly believe they are worth the mind-boggling money they bring in. They’re not. I’m not just saying this because I hate these people. Most of the high-risk products that these people work in are high-risk, high yield but they hide the risk in this composite derivatives system – literally allowing ordinary banking institutions to gamble with money that, on the surface, appears to be safely invested. But as you can see, all this wheeling and dealing can have negative consequences when these derivatives turn out to be the illusion that they are. Because these people could not rake it money fast enough the safe way, they figured out a treacherous back door (Paul Krugman has called it “shadow banking”) so they could keep paying themselves obscene amounts of money. This sort of money shifting does not produce anything of value, it’s simply rearranging money and skimming off a hearty portion for yourself. Sounds a bit like the health insurance industry, doesn’t it?

If you tack on some of Ayn Rand’s “rational selfishness” onto this economic fairy tale – suddenly you have what appears to be a philosophy that allows you to loot other people blind and yet you are perfectly justified in doing so. In fact, this poisonous philosophy is often waved about by right-wingers without any real understanding of the issues at hand. They bludgeon people with “Atlas Shrugged” not realizing that they themselves are the very dross that the industrialists in the book abandon utterly. This has a lot to do with this pernicious idea that Republicans have thrown around: you can’t tax the wealthy because one day you’ll be rich too! However, most people don’t end up hitting it big – certainly not enough to justify this me-too chicanery. Taken as a portion of the population, holding up a meager 1 or 2% as a model simply due to their socioeconomic status is completely nonsensical. You won’t be likely to find the average American there – but somehow that’s what they want us to believe.

Into this seething cauldron of greed for greed’s sake let’s add the funtastic world of the Christian fundamentalist. You really double the issues all over again when you’re dealing with people that believe their fortunes in life are handed out by a third party. Why, surely what happens to others can hardly be your fault – God gave them their due in life. You’re only the lucky one because God likes you.

Note the lack of the trademark Christian compassion? True followers of Christ would reject this wealth-mongering out of hand, but there’s nothing that bastards like Robertson and his ilk can’t corrupt and twist to suit their ends. If you don’t believe that Christian fundamentalism is part of this composite hyper-capitalistic plague, you should check out the Family – not the mafia, but rather pseudo-Christians who believe that Jesus had a separate message to the rich and powerful – the movers and shakers of the world. That message was to due whatever it takes and take whatever you want. Members of this delusional and filthy cabal are in some of the most powerful positions in America, both public and private. And they command legions of brain-dead frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalist Christians who will maim and kill in the name of peace and love.

Really, does it take any more than this utter defilement of what is (or was, originally) a pretty chill religion to prove that there is nothing sacred about religion? Indeed, that they are constructs of man and are (as they always have been) used to control people who like easy answers over tough choices.

I wish I could say I was overstating my case here. I am being a bit hyperbolic, but the danger that this venom represents to American values is very real indeed. The decline of these values is inextricably linked with our vanishing middle class. You see, the basic idea of the middle class is you have a job where you can work hard, raise kids, retire, and all in all leave your kids a little bit better off than you were. This pattern repeats, and it does (as it did from the 50′s to the 80′s) bring about huge GDP growth in America because while it is slow, it is very, very steady. The trick in these sorts of values is that other than perhaps a few aspirations towards property ownership and perhaps some retirement-oriented investing, money is not the main goal per se, rather it is the means towards and end. As long as you have a decent job, you should be able to accomplish these things. Remember when single-income households used to be the rule, rather than the exception? That’s because living wages were all the rage back in the distant past.

But hypercapitalism demands profit – so much so that we have to go overseas and employ foreign workers because how can we honestly expect to make money when we have to pay for things like health insurance for workers (note: I realize that this system is a rip off for employers too), vacations and so forth? How many more handouts could our drones possibly want? They should feel lucky just to have a job! Especially when they’re just a hair’s breadth away from having their job done for them in Thailand!

The automakers were one of the few remnant companies that made any effort to bolster the middle-class standard of living in the face of these transnational money-whore megacorporations. They actually tried to insure and provide pensions to everyone, which is one of the the reasons why they tanked (other than extremely poor marketing decisions regarding fuel mileage). Now if we had single-payer government healthcare, employers wouldn’t have to pay out monstrous amounts of money to companies who are literally delivering sub-standard coverage and pocketing the difference.

It’s amazing how everything is related isn’t it?

But from the very beginning of life these days, children are inundated with how they should get a high paying job so they can afford a bunch of stuff that they don’t actually need. The lifestyles of the extraordinarily wealthy are held up as some sort of guide for the rest of us to aspire to, rather than treated as the extreme minority of the population that they actually are. The consumer culture in America may be responsible for a great deal of it’s growth, but it also encourages people to live beyond their means in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. Hence, credit card debt for all. By the way, credit is not counted as “real money” by the Fed’s market calculation – since you’re technically just moving money around, credit does nothing to improve the GDP from an individual lendee perspective (it does for companies inasmuch as credit allows them to actually function at all, but that is an indirect result).

So here I am, feeling extremely countercultural with no viable options. There are two political parties – The Corporate Fascists, and The Corporate Fascists Lite. They drown out sensible people like Dennis Kusinich – one of the few people who actually expresses outrage at the tepidity of recent health care reform, since he knows full well we could create a fantastic, efficient, and money-saving single-payer healthcare system if these fallen politicians would stop fellating their corporate masters for two goddamn minutes.

I’m gonna have to start voting third party. It may be a joke, but I refuse to vote for these hyper-capitalistic whores for even one more goddamn minute. I’m sorry to good old Dems like Mr. Kusinich, but you’re being drowned out by obstructionists who aren’t even trying to hide their utter contempt for the fates of their constituents or their shameless endorsement of all things corporate.

What is it like to wake up one morning and realize that the evil empire was really us, all along?

Later.

Until recently, I never realized how easy it is to buy a politician. But you all watched Obama’s speech, or the gist of it. There were a bunch of empty generalities and vagaries followed by some sort of moral call to action, with a dusting of sugar in a planned withdrawal. Now I’m all for withdrawing (immediately) and I’ve never bought the war hawks’ argument that it “tells the enemy when we’re going to leave.” But what this appears to be, if it can be taken at face value, is a misty-eyed hope that things will clear up in a year and a half and since everything will be so much better (as if these wars haven’t been defying the predictive powers of our so called military leaders for eight years) we can start getting out.

The truth of it is much simpler. Things are going to keep deteriorating because there’s nothing we can do militarily to improve this situation. There are other routes – civilian, diplomatic – routes I would have thought Obama, with his community organizer past, would be at least marginally aware of. So in a year and a half, we’ve gotten a bunch of our soldiers killed, murdered another heap of civilians, and we’ll all be left scratching our heads as to why we didn’t get the fuck out a year and a half ago. That is, of course, assuming that Obama doesn’t decide we need to stay longer to “get the job done.”

Speaking of which, this is what led me to understand the true use for war in Afghanistan. You see, the war is utterly counter to any real interests the US may have. As Iraq has already shown, occupiers increase the support for fanatical terrorist acts – it does not prevent them. Nothing pisses off people more than an occupying force that honestly has no right to be there. The idea that we fight terrorists by occupying a country that’s somewhat in the area that they might be operating maybe is absurd. They don’t need a nation – they’ll go whatever they need to and do whatever they need to. That’s their MO. It appears that all we did was force them further into a nation with nuclear weapons. Great move, geniuses. But if you listened to Obama’s speech, there was no definitive reason for this war given anywhere within his speech. Nothing that any reasonable person would latch onto as a justification for billions of dollars and thousands of live. People at home can barely get a job, the infrastructure is crumbling around us, the robber barons are back to their old tricks, and what does Obama do? Add another 100 billion to the military budget. But why? Why?

Because, my fine friends, military contractors, weapons manufactures and their ilk need wars to make money. Without wars, wonderful missile production plants would be shut down, and rape-condoning military contractors would be forced to find work within US jurisdiction. But we can’t do that, can we? Capitalism can’t be restricted just because the vast majority of Americans don’t know why we’re fighting there and are tired as fuck of spineless cowardly politicians  who have neither the resolve nor moral compass to do what is necessary and just cave repeatedly to general’s requests for more troops. Generals are conditioned to keep asking for more resources until they achieve victory – they do not consider the possibility of defeat. Our commander-in-chief, a civilian, is head of the military for a good reason – he should be able to see when a war is unwinnable and reign in the warmongers. For such a savvy politician, Obama just gave the bird to his progressive base with a move that we could have gotten had we elected John McCain. The rosy glow of eventual troop withdrawal, even if it does end up happening, does not justify the money or blood we will spend to get to that point.

Goddamnit, Barack. What the hell are you doing?

I’m sorry, but it’s the end for Obama as far as I’m concerned. We have a one-termer, unless he runs against Palin. And even then, I’m reminded of an interesting call on the Mike Malloy Show the other day. A leftist voter called in and asked why should he even bother voting Democrat if they end up acting Republican. He asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to vote for a Republican that at least I know is going to screw me over? At least then I won’t feel betrayed when they start sending the country straight to hell.” I can sympathize with that point of view. When did the Washington elite collectively decide that progressive politics were not in the interest of the people?

Oh that’s right. When morality or even decency takes a backseat to capitalism. It’s been fifty years in the making, but here it is. Even a Democrat won’t reign in the banks, help create jobs, or stop a pointless and tragic war. They’re all too far down the dark side of capitalism.

Grit your teeth and crack a beer. This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Each stunt was fairly memorable – the opening one can be grasped most easily. They managed to score a major interview on the BBC using a fake website called Dow Ethics – posings as some sort of ethical practice subdivision of the world’s biggest chemical company. They had, in the video (I assume this was a few years ago, I’m not sure) just merged  with (i.e. bought out) Union Carbide, who were the owners of the chemical plant in Bhopal where a major industrial accident occurred on December 3rd, 1984, killing a few thousand people outright and crippling many many thousands more for life. Union Carbide managed to wriggle out of any sort of appropriate compensation – the list of failings in this regard is somewhat long and rather than write them all out here, feel free to look into it more on wikipedia or what have you. Suffice to say, Union Carbide was only trying to protect its pocketbook.

The Yes Men come into this because Dow bought Union Carbide just a little while before the 20th anniversary of the accident, and the BBC contacted their fake website with a request for interview on the upcoming anniversary, perhaps to identify whether Dow would actually make any efforts to provide realistic compensation now that they essentially are taking over UCC. What Andy Bichlbaum (one of the two Yes Men) said on the BBC, while posing as a Dow spokeman, was that Dow would essentially liquidate all or most of Union Carbide, providing 12 billion dollars which would go into a fund to genuinely compensate victims of the accident.

Now of course, such an action is unheard of in capitalism, and once it was learned that it was a hoax, of course Dow had to put out a statement denying any plans to aid the vicitms whatsoever, which made them look doubly bad. The media, of course, claimed that it was a cruel hoax to give these victims “false hope.” But when the Yes Men took a trip to Bhopal to see whether they had actually offended anyone, the vast majority were overjoyed that it garnered such media attention, and were grateful for it. The fact of the matter is, the press are calling it a cruel hoax because they got duped. As the Yes Men are fond of saying, they tell the truth through lies. By demonstrating what a company ought to behave like, they get a powerful message across.

There were a number of amusing stunts where they use reductio ad absurdum techniques to try and shake die-hard capitalists out of their financial stupor – for example, showing the insanity of trying to profit from global climate change (rather than trying to prevent it) with extremely expensive all-purpose disaster suits, or using human bodies as a source for eco-friendly fuel. It is so depressing how little outrage these ideas cause, even though it’s clear a few people in the audience know it’s a joke, and are often laughing or grinning the whole time.

They also put out one fake copy of the New York times, with headlines of things that people actually want to see, like “Iraq War Over: Troops to Return Home Immediately,” “Bush Indicted for High Treason,” and other gems that progressives and those who respect the rule of law would just get choked up looking at. It speaks clearly to how out of step politicians are with the populace, though it’s tragic that they can get away with it. At least sometimes.

What’s fascinating about the Yes Men is it shows where performance art and activism can overlap in a very positive way. Even if they’ve only made a small difference in these circumstances, they essentially con men who are still accomplishing a good end. And we all love to see that, when the victims are gigantic greedy corporations.

Man, I’m in a populist mood lately. I wonder why?

I will forgive Obama some of his what I would consider mistakes (based on my political views) and I’ve not given up hope, but I have given up on expecting any genuine surprises whatsoever from him. Additionally, there are three things that I find ridiculous, and will forever mar his presidency if he does not fix them somehow (I doubt that he will):

1) Inability to restore the Constitution and the rule of law. For Christ’s sake, Obama is a constitutional lawyer – there’s no way that he is ignorant of the last administration’s war crimes, disregard of the Constitution and international law, and plain old human decency. The fact that the President gets a free pass may just be the reality (meaning that the Constitution really is just a piece of paper) but frankly his insistence on turning the page and whitewashing over what is quite obviously the most blatantly criminal administration in our history is unconscionable. If we can’t string up any wrongdoer, even the head of the executive branch, then quite frankly that part of democracy is already dead. And maybe it was never alive – but we impeached Nixon for far less and NEARLY impeached Clinton for nothing whatsoever. So we know the tools are in place. I find it hard to believe that Obama believes in the imperial presidency if he is a constitutional scholar. So I have to imagine that he thinks that burying the past and moving ahead is the only way to get on with fixing the hundred and one things that are wrong. I ALMOST understand, but find it utterly misguided as protecting the Constitution is the President’s #1 concern, and that includes prosecuting lying, torturing cowards like Cheney and Co. This irks me more than everything else.

2) Handling of Wall Street bailouts. The top three companies just doled out $30 billion in bonuses to their filthy, greedy top executives – did they somehow forget that they reached into OUR pockets for help? Timothy Geitner, even if he means well (and he may, in some misguided fashion) is far too deep in the Wall Street system to create the changes and tools we need to prevent these thieves from returning to their pillaging. Obama was misguided in appointing anyone other than a hardcore populist – who in the name of God would fear “too much regulation” when these douchebags just destroyed our economy? Obama, apparently, since he’s bought into all the “free market” garbage that sounds great on paper, and in practice brings out the worst in human beings. Capitalism is an utterly amoral system, and when all that matters are profits, profits, profits, who cares how many insect-like people you crush to post that stock gain next Monday?

Of course, that last point is tied closely into the fact that these fuckers have too much money, and as such, can buy politicians left and right. We’re probably not seeing a philosophical divergence (that’s probably giving the lot of them too much credit) but rather the simple fact that Washington has fallen deeply into the pockets of these bastards and seems unable or unwilling to climb the hell out.

Damn it all to hell. I’m too mad to keep writing about this at the moment. But I got plenty more rage on this topic.

3) Anyway, the non-ending of the war in Afghanistan is another sore point with me, but practically all wars are because whatever it is we think we’re doing there does not justify the deaths of our own brave military or the Afghani populace. It never has, and everyone is too cowardly and afraid to stand up and say, “Yes, these selfless and courageous individuals have died not to protect this country, but rather to line the pocket of the military contractors and help secure oil for transnational corporations. But not one more. NOT ONE MORE. Bring them home NOW.”

Just that simple. And don’t tell me it’s not that simple. It is. 800 BILLION dollars, over 80% of our federal tax money, goes straight into military spending. We spend most of our money on murdering ourselves and others, death and destruction. And these corporate whores in the Republican party, these soulless ghouls with no compassion or common sense, have the nerve to say that universal health care is too expensive.

Well, sure it is! Why should we spend dime one of our own money on taking care of our citizenry when we could be bombing and maiming women and children in a country we have no legal right to invade? Arrrrgh! In summary, let me borrow a quote from Mike Malloy:

Have I told you lately how much I hate these people?

What spurred my vainglorious return to blogging? A fair question. Considering that I get an average of perhaps 3 or 4 views a day, my best day being a whopping fifty views some two years ago, it is only sheer arrogance, or boredom, or anger, or most likely a combination of the three, that drives me back to the old b-sphere. Even if no one ever reads this goddamn thing, it is technically publically available so I can be sure that my self-indulgent ramblings are in theory readable by anyone, so they can learn more about me, what I like, what I hate, and what the hell is going on in my brain. I often wonder if blogging would take the mystery out of courtship. Want to know everything about me? I just direct my prospective date to my site and drive her away after just a few entries. But if they stick around – well, a woman who wants to listen to my rants and perhaps believes that I possess a modicum of wisdom, or god forbid is even entertained by them, is probably the most I could ask for. Of course, wisdom is relative. I think five years of cynicism is equal to about one year of genuine wisdom-accrual. But as I’m about 100 years old in cynicism, it’s no wonder people have trouble telling the difference.

One of the benefits of cynicism (and skepticism, my default position vis a vis everything) is that no one can fool you. The problem is that it causes you great irritation when you see other people being fooled, and fooled easily at that. My ire at the “health care debate” is so great it will have to be parcelled out over several articles here – suffice to say, when people are so manipulable that they compare the Daschau death camps to quote-unquote “socialist” healthcare (i.e.  the bare-minimum public option that they so manifestly desperately need), and are defacto crying out that they’d rather keel over dead from easily preventable conditions that negatively affect the profits of people whose sole business is to deny health care to policy holders and rake off the profits into the pockets of CEO, well, there is no other word for it than INSANITY.

These people are stupid, yes, but their level of intelligence is actually irrelevant because they have lost their minds. I’m not even exaggerating. The propaganda arm of the Republican Party (read: Fox News) has whipped these people into a frenzy, and the only reason I believe they can be so easily turned into tools of corporate fascism is because they lack education, a result of which is (in theory, I’m not sure about this) critical thinking. You know, collecting facts in order to make informed decisions, a process often referred to as using your brain. Sigh.

You may find that my rhetoric in regards to the right-wing has hardened somewhat, if you can believe it. This is partly due to the fact that rather than disappearing after we elected Obama, if anything they have gotten stupider, louder, and angrier, and have presented themselves unabashedly as an obstacle to human progress. The other reason is I have been listening like a madman to Mike Malloy, an obscure leftist talk show host who I feel an immediate kinship with – no one can fool this man. If he’s a little crazy, well, the world is a little crazy, and I’m a little crazy, and that all suits me just fine. Except the world. But I deal.

I’ll talk more about Mike Malloy’s show later on. You should check it out at www.mikemalloy.com. Be warned – your capacity to enjoy his show is proportionate to your ability to enjoy black humor – it simply depresses some people. But I believe that even if the truth is painful, and depressing, and irritating, well goddamnit, it’s the TRUTH, and at least when this country finally collapses inward on itself you can dust yourself off, stand up straight and say, well, it wasn’t me.

Well, I’m back. And aren’t you overjoyed?

One such adaptation was Advanced Civiliation. But let me back up. The original Civilization was a board game by Avalon Hill. Sid Meier played and liked said game; in fact he liked it so much he stole/adapted/altered the design for his own game, also titled Civilization, albeit with his name plastered in front of it. It has a decidedly military focus compared to the original Civilization by AH. Perhaps in response to this release, and also partly because the original Civilization had some balance issues, Avalon Hill released an expansion of sorts called Advanced Civilization.

Unlike Sid Meier’s games, Advanced Civilization is won mostly through clever trading and expansion. Military conquest is difficult and inherently balanced out by the games’ population system. No empire can expand indefinitely since the players use the same set of tokens for both population and treasury money. Expand too far and your cities will have tax revolts; but expand too little and you will not be able to operate at maximum efficiency.

The goods and trading system is at the heart of what makes AdCiv so special – each city generates one trade card per turn that represents a type of good. For example, if you have 1 city, you draw a card from the first of nine piles – so you’ll most likely receive an ochre or hide trade card, worth 1 point. If you have 2, you’ll draw one of two types of cards worth 2 points from the second of nine piles, and so on.

The brilliance of this system lies in the fact that cards are exponentially more valuable in sets than singly. What this means, for example is that a set of four hides, each worth one, is worth sixteen as a group (it’s the square of the number of cards times the value of the good). What this means, then, is that a fifth hide is actually worth 9 points to you (that raises the total to twenty-five), which means you would be willing to trade a good worth much more, say 7 or 8, just to get another value 1 good. Everybody benefits from this system, and no player is out of the game just because they can’t generate high-value goods – it’ll be worth something to somebody.

The other fact is that it’s not all goods in the trade decks – on occasion, you will draw a calamity card. Some of them you can’t do anything about, but others can be cleverly passed off to other players by bluffing during trading. You must trade at least three cards, and you must be truthful about two of them, but any other number of cards can be outright lies. This makes every trade exciting, because you never know if you’ll be screwed over; on the other hand, if you know that even if only two of the cards in the trade are very valuable to you, even if you get a slave revolt or treachery inflicted on you, it’ll be worth it.

Brilliance I tell you. You use these trade cards and some spare money from your treasury to purchase civilizational advances, some of which give you new game mechanics, such as winning conflicts more easily or allowing you to use money to help build cities, and some simply mitigate the effects of calamities so they don’t hurt you so much. Also, advances (called tools in the game) give you credit towards certain other advances, helping you afford the more expensive ones later on. The game ends when one player makes it to the end of the archaeological time table by fulfilling certain goals during play, though the player who ends the game may no necessarily win it, thanks to a balanced and complex scoring system.

The PC adaptation’s AI is brutal, even on its easiest setting. I have yet to end any higher than third place in a game, and I’ve played half a dozen of them by now. This game is abandonware, so it’s easy and free to get – but it’s old and you’ll need DosBox to run it (a free Dos emulator for Windows). For fans of the Civilization series, get ready for a crazy shock when you realize how a simpler and more elegant game can deliver all the addictiveness of the often overly complex Civilzation series.