Blue Corn Comics -- News from a Multicultural Perspective

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Monday, February 08, 2010

Terrorism Derangement SyndromeThere hasn't been a successful terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The terrorists who were tried in criminal proceedings since 9/11 are rotting in jail. The Christmas Day terror attack was both amateurish and unsuccessful. The Christmas bomber is evidently cooperating with intelligence officials without the need to resort to thumbscrews. In a rational universe, one might conclude that all this is actually good news. But in the Republican crazy-place, there is no good news. There's only good luck. Tick tock. And the longer they are lucky, the more terrified Americans have become.

This week Glenn Greenwald summarized how far the goal posts of normal have moved when he pointed out that "merely advocating what Ronald Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy—'to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against' terrorists—is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists." Upon being elected to the U. S. Senate last month, Scott Brown declared: "Our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation—they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them." As Adam Serwer observed, "This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing. Brown's rhetorical framing, that jettisoning the legal system we've had for 200-plus years represents 'tradition' while granting suspected criminals the right to legal counsel represents liberalism gone mad is new, and I suspect we'll hear it again."*****

Corporations = sociopathsThis last little bit bears repeating: corporations have no responsibility to their country, nor to anything else, save making money for their shareholders. If a real person acted like this—exclusively for their own self benefit and enrichment—we would call them a sociopath or even a psychopath. As Justin Fox puts it in the Harvard Business Review:

If corporations are persons, they are—if they behave as Milton Friedman wanted them to—persons with mental and emotional impairments so severe that any decent judge would feel entirely justified in declaring them incompetent.

Does the court really believe that it is a good idea to give incompetent psychopaths more power in our government? This problem is exacerbated by the fact that our current business environment strongly rewards short term profits over long term ones, making it hard for corporations to invest in their long-term future. Corporations often behave like alcoholics or drug addicts whose only concern is what will drive up their stock price now, and never mind about the consequences tomorrow.*****

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Americans love to kill peopleThe American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

*****

Monday, February 01, 2010

Obama needs better communicationDemocratic Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts said Obama hasn't done enough to remind people that George W. Bush's administration engineered the Wall Street bailouts, the source of so much voter anger. "The more he explains things, it makes it look like he did it," Tierney said, though Obama and congressional Democrats supported the rescue effort.

Obama himself has owned up to a failure to communicate, telling ABC News: "We lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values." But he didn't lay out any new roadmaps in his State of the Union speech Wednesday night.

*****

Conservative judges = hypocritesThe controversy also exposed the impressive capacity of the conservative judicial revolutionaries to live by double standards without apology.

The movement's legal theorists and politicians have spent more than four decades attacking alleged judicial abuses by liberals, cheering on the presidents who joined them in their assaults. But now, they are terribly offended that Obama has straightforwardly challenged the handiwork of their judicial comrades.*****

Canada's banks do it rightOn the other hand, Canada’s experience does seem to support the views of people like Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional panel overseeing the bank bailout, who place much of the blame for the crisis on failure to protect consumers from deceptive lending. Canada has an independent Financial Consumer Agency, and it has sharply restricted subprime-type lending.

Above all, Canada’s experience seems to support those who say that the way to keep banking safe is to keep it boring—that is, to limit the extent to which banks can take on risk. The United States used to have a boring banking system, but Reagan-era deregulation made things dangerously interesting. Canada, by contrast, has maintained a happy tedium.*****

Global warming causes wintry weatherThis winter's extreme weather--with heavy snowfall in some places and unusually low temperatures--is in fact a sign of how climate change disrupts long-standing patterns, according to a new report by the National Wildlife Federation.

The study charts how climate change is linked to more heavy precipitation, including intense snowstorms like the one that blanketed the D.C. area last month. The Great Lakes region is also experiencing more snow, the report says, because during warmer winters, "the lakes are less likely to freeze over or are freezing later [and] surface water evaporation is recharging the atmosphere with moisture."

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

What Democrats should do-- Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy. Rarely does a congressional vote or issue lend itself to this kind of powerful localization. If GOP challengers want to run ads criticizing the recovery act as wasteful, Democratic candidates should lift up the police officers, teachers and construction workers in their state or district, those who are protecting our communities, teaching our children and repairing our roads thanks to the Democrats' leadership. Highlight the small-business owners who have kept their doors open through projects funded by the act.

-- Don't accept any lectures on spending. The GOP took us from a $236 billion surplus when President Bush took office to a $1.3 trillion deficit, with unpaid-for tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars and the Medicare prescription drug program. Republicans' fiscal irresponsibility has never been matched in our country's history. We have potent talking points on health care, honest budgeting and cuts in previously sacrosanct programs. Republicans will try to win disingenuously by running as outsiders. We must make them own their record of disastrous economic policies, exploding deficits, and a failure to even attempt to solve our health care and energy challenges.

*****

Conservative hypocrisy on "judicial activism"The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision holding that corporations and unions can spend unlimited amounts of money in election campaigns is a stunning example of judicial activism by its five most conservative justices. In striking down a federal statute and explicitly overturning prior decisions, the court has changed the nature of elections in the United States. At the same time, the conservative justices have demonstrated that decades of conservative criticism of judicial activism was nonsense. Conservative justices are happy to be activists when it serves their ideological agenda.*****

Blame Republicans for partisanshipThough Stohlberg did acknowledge that bipartisanship cannot emerge from merely one side, she seemed to be blaming Obama for failing to bring about a glorious era of comity and cooperation in Washington.

Reality check. The White House has tried to negotiate with congressional GOP moderates on health care--much to the disgust of some progressives--but Republican leaders have declared their mission is to kill health care reform. Moreover, the House Republican leadership in November hosted a rally on Capitol Hill, where Tea Party-like protesters compared Obama to Hitler, likened health care reform to Nazi death camps, claimed Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds, decried the president as a traitor, depicted him as Sambo, and derided House Speaker Pelosi's looks. At that moment, the House Republican leadership--all of whom were present--essentially merged with a movement that gives open expression to racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. Not very bipartisan--or civil. After this stunt, Obama would have been justified in barring House GOP leader John Boehner and his crew from the White House.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Obama ignores economic angerObama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards—with ever-rising fees.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Why Brown won in Mass.In poll after poll this year, independents have expressed doubts about Obama's health care reform initiative. Enthusiasm for the project remained high among Democrats, but indies were not so keen. During the months-long convoluted debate over this complex reform, these voters have been vulnerable to the most virulent GOP talking points: "death panels," "socialism," "big government." Moreover, by fixating on an inside-game strategy to pass health care legislation (negotiate with Baucus, win over Snowe, accept the Stupak amendment), Obama made the whole she-bang seem messy and difficult to comprehend. It's no shocker that voters who didn't feel invested in this process would be nervous or suspicious about the outcome. And voter worry can always be tapped or exploited. Even by a former Cosmo naked model. When the president appeared with Coakley at a Boston campaign rally on Sunday, he didn't once mention his health care reform legislation. He didn't declare, "Send Martha to Washington so she can vote for this bill." That was telling. (In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent say Obama's health care initiative is a good idea; 46 percent say it's a bad one.)*****

Military rifles with Biblical inscriptionsCoded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Robertson: Haitians made pact with devil[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.” True story. And so the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.