For over a decade of ups and downs, chaos and dedication, arguments and agreements, The Agonist has earned a place in the blogging community. We have had some marvelous writing, outstanding posts and spirited (to say the least) conversations.
We are contemplating compiling a Best Of Agonist ebook, to be made available free of charge.
We are investigating several distribution methods and will pick whatever provides the widest availabilty.
To that end, we hereby invite all members to submit their favorite posts/writers and let us know via the site Contact Page, since relying on comments here might result in overloading the comment system and emails are easier for me to keep track of.
Once we have assembled a reasonable list of posts, I will copy/paste/edit them by hand, since all the software I’ve seen to automate this process creates a very ugly and nearly-unreadable product. It will therefore take some time to put together.
If there are those who specifically do not want their own posts to be included, we will certainly respect their wishes.
Furthermore, we will only publish comments on an Opt-In basis. Your comments will NOT be included unless you specifically give us permission.
Nota Bene: There may be posts whose names you recall and which show up in a search but turn up missing when clicked on. (We have an issue in the site database). I may be able to retrieve some of these posts from the clone site, as the export/import seemed to have resolved the issue on the clone site. If your favorite post doesn’t display, note it anyway and I’ll try to track it down.
In addition to providing the posts/comments, we may also ‘blurb’ the writers if requested, so that those who blog or write elsewhere may get a little ‘boost’ in visibility for their non-Agonist world. If that category includes you, feel free to provide us any bio or links you would like us to include.
The shocker victory of Republican governor-elect Larry Hogan here in deep blue Maryland is a vivid example of how the Democratic Party is paying the price for having sold its base down the river. Here is WaPo on the physics of Tuesday’s gubernatorial Democratic unraveling here in the Free State:
With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, [expected winner Democratic Lieutenant Governor Anthony] Brown was winning handily in [heterogenous] Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, and he was well ahead in the city of Baltimore. But turnout appeared fairly low in those populous jurisdictions. And Hogan led everywhere else, including in the Baltimore suburbs.
That is the gist of how Brown, the anointed successor to two-term Democratic governor and presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley, became the latest poster child for his party’s haplessness in the face of an auspiciously divisive Republican Party. Hogan will be only the third Republican Maryland governor since Spiro Agnew. The secret of the Dems’ undoing in this election? Inspire your base to stay at home while the Repubs fire up angry voters to stride into the voting booth and whack away at false enemies.
These mid-term elections were never going to be easy for the Democrats. They had way too many seats at stake in the Senate, many of them Democrats who won reliably Republican seats during the enthusiasm for Obama in 2008. Their chances in the House were dismal to non-existent, since gerrymandering has carved up almost all of the 435 seats into a lock-proof majority for the Republicans. Still, in cases where there was some hope for the Democrats, the Republicans pulled through, even handsomely, as with the reelection of Governor Sam Brownback, the man who broke the back of Kansas with his “experiment” in neoliberal, supply-side economics.
Does this mean Kansans are happy with the disaster that has befallen their state budget and resulted in cutbacks in education, police and fire services, healthcare, and pretty much anything else the government can provide? Probably not. But what are the voters to do? Vote for the guy who is going to raise taxes, even if only on the wealthy? Republicans in a die-hard Republican state like Kansas have been trained all their life to reject any candidate contemplating raising taxes. It’s the Grover Norquist principle at stake. And even if it weren’t a matter of principle, Republicans in Kansas are like Americans everywhere – poorer, and less able to absorb any further taxes. Continue reading Let the Recriminations Begin!
Someone here at The Agonist once asked me to describe what this “neoliberalism” thingy I kept talking about was. So I rattled off the usual hot-button words like the Washington Consensus, the Chicago School of Economics, austerity, class-warfare, the Shock Doctrine etc. and then sputtered something along the lines of, “it’s like economic porn, you know it when you see it.”
Obviously, that was tongue in cheek, but at the same time an admission that it was actually pretty difficult to describe what neoliberalism is.
This two year-old conversation left me with one long-term brain nag.
Two weeks ago I was having a twitter conversation about the French historian/philosopher Michel Foucault. During the conversation an American intellectual and economic historian at the University of Notre Dame, Phillip Mirowski, came up. My interlocutor suggested I read his book on neoliberalism, “Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste.”
After the conversation ended I went to google books, read the first few pages and immediately ordered it from Amazon for next day delivery. (No, it was not available at any local bookstores, I called around first before I went to Amazon.)
All I can say is this: go get that book. It’s heavy. It’s profound. You’ll get bogged down in theory. You’ll have a hard time breathing the rarified air. You will have to work to read it. It’ll make you reach for the dictionary thirty times, as I have already done so. It makes demands on you. It is a book of serious scholarly criticism from the real Left. Filled with hilarious bon mots and aperçus as it is it’s the multiple explanations of just what neoliberalism is and the dissection of its intellectual provenance that finally puts into words that hitherto inchoate gut feeling I was sputtering on about two years ago. Trying to understand how Hayek and Friedman led to Bernanke and how Hayek and Friedman and Rand gave us Greenspan and so much more. It’s an historians connect-the-dots whodunit on just how our finance and banking and so-called “efficient markets” gifted us this hideously opaque, protean post-modern dystopia of self-made entrepreneurs instead of a republic of citizens.
Last week the Japanese central bank announced it was buying most if not all of the next issue of Japanese Government bonds. Aka: Government debt.
Stock markets wet sharply up around the world at this “good news”. We’d point out the timing of the “good news” by a US ally just before a US mid-term election is probably just a coincidence.
(originally posted Oct 31)
This week the Federal Reserve put an end to their fourth round of Quantitative Easing, having exploded their balance sheet from $800 billion at the start of QE, to over $3 trillion today. Everyone thought that the financial markets would now have to live without the monetary dope that has been fueling euphoria in stock markets in the U.S. and elsewhere. Everyone was wrong. In a completely unexpected move, the Bank of Japan announced it was expanding its Quantitative Easing program from 70 trillion yen to 80 trillion yen, bringing its monetary base to the equivalent of $750 billion. The purpose of all this liquidity? The Bank of Japan is desperately trying to achieve its target of 2% price inflation. Continue reading Just When You Thought QE Had Ended
Here are some teasers…, you really should see/read the whole thing.
BERNIE SANDERS: The idea that you have these working-class people who are voting for candidates who refuse to raise the minimum wage, who refuse to provide health care for their kids, who want to send their jobs to China, who want to give tax breaks to corporations, it blows my mind. And that is the issue that we have to figure out.
… BERNIE SANDERS: You have to bring people together who may not agree on every issue, but who understand that the middle class is collapsing and we are moving toward an oligarchic form of society, where the billionaires will control the economy and the political life of this country.
So, that means reaching out to people from different walks of life and say, you got to overcome this difference and that difference. So, I think what we have to do, Bill, is lay out an agenda which says we are going to take on the billionaire class. You know what? We’re going to overturn Citizens United. We’re going to move to public funding of elections so these guys don’t buy elections.
… BERNIE SANDERS: Right now, we’re engaged in a huge fight. It is the economic struggle against the billionaire class who wants it all. They want to kill Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the whole thing. Can we beat them? We can.
… BERNIE SANDERS: Yes. The only point, there is a difference between social issues and the economic issues. And I will not deny for one moment that taking on the ruling class of this country and the billionaire class, it’s tough stuff. It is tough stuff. So I don’t have any magical solutions. But what I do know is that if we do not create an economy that works for ordinary people, if we do not end the fact that 95 percent of all new income now goes to the top one percent. We’ve got to end it, and the only way I know to do that is to rally ordinary people around the progressive agenda. So our job is to create a 50 state, grassroots movement around a progressive agenda.
… BILL MOYERS: What’s wrong, what’s gone wrong with the Democratic Party? BERNIE SANDERS: In one answer I’d say money. Time after time we see a hesitancy on the part of the Democratic Party to stand up to the billionaire class because you can’t do that when you’re out hustling campaign contributions.
So whether the issues are disastrous trade policy, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, all of these special interests have enormous power and influence to the Democratic Party. Instead of having public meetings with people, you have Democratic candidates running all over the place, trying to raise money to keep up with the Koch brothers. So I would say, you know, money is corrupting, certainly has taken over the Republican Party, has significantly impacted the Democrats.
WASHINGTON — If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
Documents unearthed this week revealed that the FBI compromised the computer of a 15-year-old student in 2007 in an effort to positively identify the person thought responsible for sending bomb threats to a Washington state high school. Yet while questions were quickly raised after that revelation about the ethics involved in letting federal investigators conduct full-fledged hacking, how exactly the FBI installed spyware on their target’s computer — by sending the suspect a link disguised to look like an AP article published by the Seattle Times — has now alarmed not only the news wire, but a leading lawmaker in Washington.
Only days after details of the 2007 operation were disclosed this week, the AP and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, both sent letters to Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday expressing their concern over the FBI’s conduct.
With all the apparent ills and impending doom in this world, our worst enemy can be paralyzing fear. At some point, the symptom becomes the disease. It has afflicted me of late. Lucinda Williams sings a song on her latest that helps heal my wounded weary soul.
I have no idea of the veracity of the following. It is almost as long a read as War and Peace. If legitimate, a fascinating look at Russia’s’ world view.
From Ian’s October 27 blog entry:
…For years I lived in a state of rage. Not even anger, but rage. Rage at those like Bush and Blair who were mass murders. Rage at those who did not stop him who could have. Rage at those who believed all the lies: whether about economics or war or crime.
I see many who come to my blog, a place where scenarios are explored which are both bleak, and often, very likely, giving into despair or rage themselves. The world is big, the powers that are leading it to ruin are overwhelming, and we look out on a future which seems to get worse and worse the further ahead of us it is. Even countries now on the rise, like China, will suffer massively in the decades to come.
It is perfectly natural to be angry. It is even useful to be angry. Anger or rage are adrenaline shots to the system. They push you to do what must be done; to tell the truth; to push ahead, to tackle the big enemies. But they are toxic in the long run. Like adrenaline they are useful for shots of energy, but if you are angry all the time at anything, it will hurt your body and eventually your mind. You will burn out, and if you aren’t lucky you may burn out permanently or you may die.
Sen. McCain Calls Admiral an “Idiot” – Why Do Media Promote That?
Context doesn’t matter with clever kitty videos, but politics is different
BuzzFeed, moving up from cute-cat-tricks to catty-Senator-tricks, caused a few ripples in the political swamp on October 22 with its belated, skewed reporting of Republican Senator John McCain calling U.S. Admiral John Kirby an “idiot” on a rightwing radio show in North Carolina on October 15. OK, nobody really expects BuzzFeed News to publish honest news.
Less defensible, though hardly surprising, is the way the Washington Post and other less well known media outfits picked up the “idiot” story fragment and ran with it as if it was the whole story, without further context, much less identifying Sen. McCain’s own idiotic statements and falsehoods in the very same radio interview. Continue reading John McCain’s Big Lie
