Yesterday on talk radio, I believe that guy from San Diego filling in for Sam Sedar on The Majority Report, for that was when I was listening to that station yesterday, I heard a call complaining that the media is not telling us that Enron gave funds to both Democrats and Republicans. I’ve heard this before. I’ve probably also roiled about this before on this here blog. The host gave an unsatisfactory response on behalf of the, quote-in-quote “democracy” (to use a term that was in vogue to describe the Democratic Party at the end of the 18th century when the print media referred to the Democrats as “the Democracy” and the Republican Party as “the Republic”, perhaps just to give a certain elan to the two gilded age parties that shouldn’t really exist).

The ratio is something to the effect of 80 to 20, or 90 to 10. You give to the Democratic Party because they have some power over the proceedings. Meanwhile, the two politicians we can say are basically marinated in Enron are George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I was curious to check something. So I crack open The Buying of the President 2004 (the book that told me that it was okay to like Howard Dean) and turn to the section on Joseph Lieberman. Sometimes our political system can really be boiled down to the simple matter of who buys whom. It starts with Lieberman’s ties to Big Pharmaceutical Companies. Simple enough. Then it goes on to how Lieberman was compromised by Enron, though in this case via Citibank. Look it up yourself to remind yourself how Lieberman reacted at the time Enron declared Bankruptcy.

But these days we (however you want to define “we”) are trying to expunge Lieberman in a primary contest in Connecticut. That should tell you something about the relationship between the Democratic rank and file and that 10 or 20 percent of Enron funds. The odd thing about this situation is that they are then chided by various officials for kicking out a good, decent, upstanding Centrist and being too ideologically concerned.

Curious enough, that now hated instrument of the old DLC, the New Republic magazine, “gets it”, their defense of Lieberman not withstanding. Or at least they “get it” when it comes to Max Baucus.

The same call, or maybe a different call, went off about conspiracy theories concerning Kenneth Lay’s departure to Argentina. I smile profusely.

Yesterday, July the Fourth, there was this march in favour of Freedom and the Constitution, proportedly lost over the past few years. I gather the general demenor of the march from chalked words I’ve seen on sidewalks in a few spots today, most notably 9/11 Was An Inside Job, 911truth.org sitting alongside Democratic Experiment: 1776 – 2001.

In thinking about this, this idea was likely buttressed over the weekend when it was revealed (leaked by Bush Administration, says I, at a time nobody is paying attention) that the CIA Unit that is going after Osama Bin Laden has shut down its operations. As Bush said a couple years ago, and as Kerry inexplicably did not drill him for saying, “I don’t know where he is. I just don’t spend much time on him.” Assuming that Osama, diaylsis trapped man as he is said to be, really isn’t terribly important in the scheme of things these days, I still would think it’s probably best to keep that several million dollar operation devoted specifically to USL / OSL open, if only because the darker forces of meaning come into play when news comes out that nobody is looking for the man anymore.

Another news item that came in over this weekend, or rather today, is that Kenneth Lay is now dead. Nobody believes this. When they say that Kenneth Lay is dead what they mean is that Kenneth Lay has gone into a Witness Relocation Program, similar to that of the post WW2 Nazis, into Argentina to spend the rest of his days. The creeping thing about this scenario is that nobody believe Ken Lay is dead. I don’t.

And thus the conspiracy theorists have won. Or rather, the Conspirators have lost. Or rather, the Conspirators don’t really care if nobody believes them. Kenneth Lay. Dead. Got that? Good.

I note two items from the Oregonian. One was in Saturday’s paper, a round-up of cartoons. If I could find it with a quick google search, I’d post it, but I can’t so a description will have to suffice. An SS Officer was looking over as a New York Times person was holding up a New York Times with the headline “IT’S NORMADY”. The idea is that the New York Times supposedly just tipped off to terrorist networks that the Administration is using SWIFT to follow international money transactions is comprarable to if they had reported that the Allies were planning a huge military offensive at Normady in World War Two. It’s something you’ll hear if you tune your ears on right-wing opinion.

Second is from today’s paper, this letter to the editor laying out the “Loose lips sink ships” idea:

Stop the loose lips

STAN FRANKLIN Tigard

I’m a bit at a loss. This is comprarable to some outrage we heard after the vice-presidential debate that John Edwards “outed” Mary Cheney. Mary Cheney was already out. And there is no way in Hell that al Qaeda does not know from SWIFT.

Some partisan battle-lines have been drawn. Vallerie Plame was outed in the media from an approved leak from the Administration. And I’m going to have to dig back to what happened just before the Democratic Convention. Something is preposterously out of whack in the balance of the concerns.

I don’t know if you remember this (actually I do know that you don’t remember it), but in 2004 Nancy Pelosi released a Democratic Party platform “Compact for American Families” of 7 items — I believe it was seven — that…

… meant absolutely nothing electorally. I don’t think the DSCC even seriously floated it. I don’t have a clue what the purpose of it was.

We can blame Newt Gingrich and the “Contract With America” for every subsequent attempt to throw forth this set platforms. Rumours are that the Democratic Party is doing the same for 2006. More sinister rumours are that the Democratic Party already has — this “sinister” in the sense that if I only have a vague sense that it might have been floated out there, it probably didn’t say much.

The Republican Party for it’s part has given us an (ahem) “American Values Agenda”. This is quite a piece of work, a collection of pointless wedge issues the message of which is that they don’t deserve office, for anyone who pledges this as their agenda shows that they are not serious individuals.

I note that there are TWO, count them, TWO proposals to protect the flag. In fact, they top the list.

Pledge Protection Act (HR 2389; Akin)

Summary: Ensures an individual has the right to display the U.S. flag on residential property.

The canard. Whenever the Senate just wants to waste a couple of days, turn the Senate over to Orrin Hatch, and he’ll dig into his bag of tricks. Recently he did the Flag Desecration Act thangamajing. I note the New Yorker has weighed in on this on-going stalement of lunacy. Relevant line:

The proposed amendment is a one-liner, though lacking in comic punch. It goes, “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Now, really—is that so terrible? It doesn’t even prohibit flag burning, it just authorizes Congress to pass a law prohibiting it. As opponents point out, that would put the United States in the company of China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, pre-invasion Iraq, and other tyrannies. But it turns out that France, Germany, Italy, and India, all of which are reasonably free countries, also have laws against insulting their national ensigns. (Japan, Norway, and—cartoons notwithstanding—polite little Denmark forbid the burning of foreign flags but not their own.)

After the Senate vote came in with one short — 66 to 34 it be, Orrin Hatch said that if all Senators had voted their conscience or personal political fortunes, it would have passed with 80-something votes. A bizarre whipping job, that be. Imagine it passes. All of a sudden we have 50 states bouncing about playing around with this constitutional amendment. Why, pass it on to the Voters! That would, I assume, benefit the Party of God and Country, bringing in this vast swatch of voters mobilized to stop the half a dozen flag burners that have been spotted over the past decade.

I’m not sure what the correct vote I want my House Members and Senators to vote on matters such as this one, along with the majority of the “American Values Agenda” items. It’s either a “no” vote or simply no vote. By no vote I don’t even mean a “present”, I mean don’t even bother to show up for roll call. Let that be known for the Senate’s tact on the matter, so that the Democratic Whip will just have to proceed to the next person on the list to cast a “no vote”. No voting was my perferred stand when the Congress took up the Terri Schiavo matter.

I say this, casting it as meaning: to bring this up is a sign that you are not a serious person, and this body of government is presumably supposed to go forth with serious matters.

This day in 1867, Canada came to a mutually amicable agreement with Great Britain to secede and go their own way.

God Bless those feisty Canadians and their agreeable nature!

“The Fireside Chat the FDR Threw Away”:

…
As frightening as life had become since the Great Depression began, this was the bottom, though no one knew that at the time. The official national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, but that figure was widely considered to be low. Among non-farm workers, unemployment was more than 37 percent, and in some areas, like Toledo, Ohio, it reached 80 percent. Business investment was down 90 percent from 1929. Per capita real income was lower than three decades earlier, at the turn of the century. If you were unfortunate enough to have put your money in a bank that went bust, you were wiped out. With no idea whether any banks would reopen, millions of people hid their few remaining assets under their mattresses where no one could steal them at night without a fight. The savings that many Americans had spent a lifetime accumulating were severely depleted or gone, along with 16 million of their jobs. When would they come back? Maybe never. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked by a reporter the previous summer if there were any precedent for what had happened to the world’s economy. He replied yes, it lasted 400 years and was called the Dark Ages.
…

That word—“dictator”—had been in the air for weeks, endorsed vaguely as a remedy for the Depression by establishment figures ranging from the owners of the New York Daily News, the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, to Walter Lippmann, the eminent columnist who spoke for the American political elite. “The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers,” Lippmann had told FDR during a visit to Warm Springs on February 1, before the crisis escalated. Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, recalled with some exaggeration that “during the World War we wrapped the Constitution in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over.” The Depression, Smith concluded, was a similar “state of war.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, privately suggested that a “benevolent dictator” might be what the country needed. The vague idea was not a police state but deference to a strong leader unfettered by Congress or the other inconveniences of democracy. Amid the crisis, the specifics didn’t go beyond more faith in government by fiat.

Within a few years, “dictator” would carry sinister tones, but—hard as it is to believe now—the word had a reassuring ring that season. So did “storm troopers,” used by one admiring author to describe foot soldiers of the early New Deal, and “concentration camps,” a generic term routinely applied to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps that would be established by summer across the country. After all, the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini, in power for a decade, had ginned up the Italian economy and was popular with everyone from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers to Lowell Thomas, America’s most influential broadcaster. “If ever this country needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” said Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania, outgoing President Hoover’s closest friend on Capitol Hill. The speech draft prepared for FDR brought to mind Mussolini addressing his Black-Shirt followers, many of whom were demobilized veterans who joined Il Duce’s private army.

…
The most powerful American publisher, William Randolph Hearst, seemed to favor dictatorship. The Hearst empire extended to Hollywood, where Hearst that winter had personally supervised the filming of an upcoming hit movie called “Gabriel Over the White House” that was meant to instruct FDR and prepare the public for a dictatorship. The movie’s hero is a president played by Walter Huston who dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad. FDR not only saw an advance screening of the film, he offered ideas for script rewrites and wrote Hearst from the White House that he thought it would help the country.
………

In the days ahead, FDR moved far from where that unused American Legion draft would have taken him, passing the word on Capitol Hill that he did not believe in a constitutional dictatorship and asking his friend Felix Frankfurter to tell Lippmann to stop hawking dictatorship and disrespect of Congress in his columns. It was not as if Roosevelt was letting the cup pass; for the next 12 years, he would fully exploit the authority of the presidency, sometimes overreaching to the point where his enemies accused him of becoming a dictator. He would flirt with fascistic (or at least corporatist) ideas like the National Recovery Administration and in 1937 try to pack the Supreme Court. But even then, he would do so in the context of democracy, without private armies or government-by-decree. Even at his worst, he would eventually submit his schemes for the approval of Congress. Instead of coercion, he chose persuasion; instead of drawing the sword, he would draw on his own character and political instincts. He would draw, too, on the subconscious metaphor of his own physical condition. Although it was only rarely mentioned in the press, the American people knew at the time that he had polio (though not the extent of his disability) and it bound them to him in ways that were no less powerful for being unspoken: If he could rise from his paralysis, then so could they.

II. Hmmmm….

3) Bush II seems to be working real hard to create a disaster similiar to the Great Depression in the 21st century. Somehow, I don’t envision him as having the `strength of moral character’ that Roosevelt employed to avoid going the dictatorship route. Rather, he would embrace the dictator route, and so would those pulling his strings (he is a puppet, afterall).

III. Yes But,

We get around the law during a crisis by creating a facade and re-interpreting said law.

First, because the president had no explicit power to close banks, they urged him to use the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, an obscure wartime provision that was intended to prevent gold transfers that could help the Germans. The original wartime measure was temporary and had long since expired. But when economic conditions worsened in 1932, a clever legislative draftsman at the Hoover Treasury had dusted off the bill and taken the legally questionable step of changing the “implementation language” to make the 1917 act permanent.

This was probably illegal, but the Hoover men were frightened and not in the mood for legal niceties. FDR agreed, and invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act to declare a national bank holiday. Second, the group, under the leadership of Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills, developed banking reform legislation; FDR called Congress into special session to pass it.

Fluid as all get out.

IV: When Hoover, Roosevelt, Lincoln, ect `stepped outside the bounds’ they did so with the clear and limited intent of `fixing’ problems that were so nasty they had a good chance of destroying the country.

On the other hand, when the the Bush II crew has `stepped outside the bounds’ their decisions have been anything but `clear and limited’. Some of them (Homeland Security) have the potential to make things much, much worse.

V: As per Roosevelt. I read through a batch of news articles from the era, and ran into an obituary for a deceased dictator, circa 1935 or therabouts, from Venezuela… apparently ran the place for 30 years, himself or via thinly disguised puppets. The upshoot is the tone of the orbituary, which congratulated him on his endurance and tenacity to cling to power, and suggested that in “previous time” we’d not admire his traits, but “these days” the practical benefits of a concentration camp and a ruthless tyrant, et al, have been manifested in the world at large.

Here’s a question: just how close did David Duke actually get to being elected either US Senator for Lousiana or Louisiana Governor, in the early 1990s? The answer is that if he were any other candidate, not terribly close, but because he’s David freaking Duke … close enough to warrant a chill down the spine.

His best chance would have been if the election were held just after the first debate with Edwin Edwards, a lackluster performance by Edwards and a strong effort by Duke. The bumper sticker went “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important” — an acknowledgement that you’re holding your nose to defeat a Klansman, but really… please don’t sit this out. The second debate completely flummoxed David Duke, and Edwards better articulated the moral hazards of David Duke…

… while the state was swamped with advertisements serving as mainly an economic appeal. The hazards of David Duke’s brief moment in the limelight was that the lowest common denominator for defeating him turned out to be simple dollars and cents: Elect David Duke, and nobody will want to do business with Louisiana. And venturing into the harm that his Klu Klux Klan associations met with the public, everything suggests that it his anti-semitism was the real negative for Duke — the hue and cry against Blacks was something of a double edged sword. Affirmative Action? Racial Quotas? Bussing? Welfare? Crime? You can slide into this arena with the Republican Party, trying to keep his supporters while doing away with David Duke, by saying that he “touches on many issues dear to Conservatives” but “his real motives are odious.” Indeed, Pat Buchanan is credited with putting a stake in his political career by running for the Republican nomination for President in 1992, and thus sucking out the air from David Duke, because realistically if you align Duke’s platform with Buchanan’s — they are strikingly similar.

Had David Duke only steered clear of his swastikas during his times as Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard and head of the “National Association for the Advancement of White People”, maybe he might have won something.

The story of David Duke, between 1988 and 1992, was the story of his political foes not wanting to take him on, because they figure that in the next go-around they might win over his supporters. Thus the Louisana Republican House leader saying that he won’t judge Duke for what he did when he was a Democrat. And thus his ability to squeeze through the vaccuum when Governor Buddy Roemers’ switch from the Democratic Party to Republican Party failed to follow with full support from the Louisiana Republican Party apparatus, and as his aloofness turned sour — the story being that he started to take advice from the book ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN.

A strange story, that. File the discontents of a bunch of politicians nobody likes and the politicians it allows for into a sequel to the book “Forerunners to American Fascism”.