First, the nostalgia. I confess to a certain frisson in racing through the ice and snow 12 hours a day, clocking 2-300 miles and covering maybe four or five different campaign events. During the last two cycles, with the boom of the web, it was quite a satisfying feat to cover an event, shoot some video, upload it to YouTube and while it’s being processed you knock out your 6-700 words of copy and, zap, 30 minutes later it’s all posted live.  It is a privilege (if not a horror) to witness all the presidential candidates up close and personal, often in venues of only 25 or 50 people.

It’s heartening to see the level of engagement of the Iowans who take this stuff rather seriously as the window shop for a suitable candidate.  Though the MSM rarely report on it, it’s a gas to watch the sausage making inside the various campaigns. There’s no shortage of self-important twentysomething brown-nosers strutting around with clipboards and cell phones and quite obviously aping the behavior of the stereotypical campaign aide they have seen on movies and TV.

I readily admit to always choosing a campaign staff that I love to torment (I’ve always tried to make a fair choice, picking on those who most deserve it). Independent of my own biases, during the 2008 cycle the difference between the Clinton and Obama staffs were like night and say. Or hell and heaven. The polished Obama folks went out of their way to accommodate the media. Hillary’s crew was a different story — a pack of beltway dipshits who seemed to be in a contest to be the most arrogant. A good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless and who is on a first name basis with Hill and Bill) and I had a devilish good time tormenting these folks after they had acted like the officious a-holes they were.  Nothing like getting in a shouting match with them in the middle of a hotel lobby where the Clintons were lodged and having the Secret Service break it up. Now, that’s some real fun.

And then we’d cap off every evening at the Cero restaurant on Locust Street where ALL the staff of every campaign would ritually gather for dinner and drinks.  You could continue your reporting deep into the night by making the rounds of the tables. Biden’s group over there. Obama’s folks over there. Hillary’s team at the bar and so on.

The caucuses themselves are quite a scene — particularly the Democratic ones. Each one is a mini-debate where neighbors, quite literally, attempt to persuade each other to stand for this or that candidate.  For nostalgia’s sake, let’s toss in steak and eggs at The Machine Shed on the west side of Des Moines. And, um, I’ve heard there’s a poker room at the race track on the east side in Altoona.

I love the gritty eastern edge of the state. The union city of Dubuque and rusted out Davenport.  In between you can drop by the university in Iowa City and, for a moment, swear you’re in Madison — or Berkeley. Along the way, stop by and check out the Amish.  Pretty cool.

So, why no regrets this time around? In short, I don’t think I could stand watching repeated versions of the stump speeches of ANY of these Republican candidates. I saw Romney last time around and I can tell you that, like John Kerry, he’s even more boring in person than he seems on TV (GW Bush was the opposite by the way).  I wouldn’t really want to be in the same room, more than once, with Santorum, Gingrich or, God Forbid, a screaming meemee like Bachmann.  Ron Paul I have seen many times before and I find him — and mostly his supporters– really scary. He’s a nice, sweet avuncular type whose program is a radical departure from any shred of human compassion.

Lefties and liberals who like his views on foreign policy and marihuana are completely muddle-headed and fail to see the big picture. (More about that later if he wins in Iowa — which won’t matter in any case).

Ron Paul aside, none of these candidates have ANY significant political differences among them. Only different styles and tones. Their political records and positions are as much as identical.

Also, I don’t want to be unfairly partisan here, but there is a difference, a big difference, between being immersed crowds of true believer Democrats and militant Republicans. The former have their own particular set of rather predictable illusions about their party and their candidates. At least it’s theoretically about Hope or Change, no matter how hollow.

Republican activists, for the most part, are a different breed. How anybody can stand for an hour and actually resonate with or believe a word that, say, a Gingrich or, for that matter, a Romney says, is really a bit too hard for me to fully grasp.  There are certainly nice and sweet Republicans, they’d be fine as your granny or auntie.  But I shudder thinking of their political positions which have a whole lot more to do with fear and revenge than anything resembling hope. In no way has this always been the case.  I hated the Bush administration, but let’s remember that George actually campaigned the first time around as a “compassionate conservative.” Yes, it was a ruse. His rhetoric, however, evoked some of the better angels lurking among the GOP base. If those same spirits were to show up during any of this cycle’s Republican events, they would be shot on the spot.

I want no part of that this year. Especially bundled in a parka and trying to keep my rental Focus from sliding into a snowbank.

One final observation, indeed, a personal lament about this year’s caucus. Four years ago I was privileged enough to lead a team of citizen reporters working for the HuffPost’s OffTheBus project as we covered Iowa for the final ten days leading to the caucuses. Project Director Amanda Michel did a superb job of online organizing and I can say, with no exaggeration, that because of our effort, HuffPost had the largest contingent of reporters covering the caucuses, peaking at about 25.  Our mandate was to be, in fact, off the bus and report from the ground level, avoiding the official spin and the  predictable horse-race conventional wisdom.

Well, that was then, this is now. In the intervening period I have moved on to become  a full time faculty member at the USC Annenberg School. Amanda moved to ProPublica and recently to the Guardian where she continues her web-based magic.  And the HuffPost, well, its citizen reporting project exists now mostly in name only. And it has merged with the Wal-Mart of media companies, AOL.  If you had told me four years ago that in 2012 the HuffPost would be represented in Iowa by that bottomless font of conventional wisdom, Howard Fineman, I would have told you that you lost your mind. I would have said that has about as much chance as happening as Ron Paul winning the GOP Republican nomination.

I hate to sound like Jake Tapper, but even somebody as sympathetic as me cannot discern what the bottom-line point is of disrupting –albeit non-violently– the campaign operations of different candidates, including Barack Obama.  From what I can make out through the haze is that the “occupiers” are either protesting the shallowness of American elections and/or are upset that the candidates won’t heed their message so they are bringing the message to the candidates. Or is there something I am missing?

I have a question: if elections are shallow and the candidates are deaf, then why bother with them at all? Why not bring your message directly to the people? As the campaigns themselves do, no matter how manipulative and cynical that message might be.  And what is a more perfect place than Iowa? Here’s a small state, flooded with campaigners and canvassers, and with a politically engaged populace which — from my long experience there– sorta likes all the attention the caucuses bring them. This is a population that is not only accessible, but also quite open to retail politicking.  If you knock on their door, there is a good chance they will listen. If you hold a town hall on a Wednesday night in Indianola, they might just show up.

(Indeed, one of the most vivid moments I experienced during the 2008 Iowa caucus campaign was a Joe Biden meeting held on a freezing Friday night, the day after Xmas, at the Elks lodge in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Biden’s staff consisted of his brother and one other young volunteer. Never at a loss of words, Biden stood there for 2 hours and took quite complex questions on foreign policy, no less, from the parka-clad locals. I’m no big fan of Biden’s but it sure was a reassuring moment to see guys in jeans and John Deere caps dialogue with the future V.P. about Pakistan and the Palestinians).

Hundreds, thousands of volunteers– mostly Republicans– are gong door to door as I write this bringing all sorts of cockamamie messages into many more times the number of living rooms and kitchens. Why can’t the Occupy folks do the same? I could be snarky and say they can’t because they themselves are not sure what the concrete message is. Talking about inequality and the 99% are not enough. To be politically serious, you must propose concrete actions that people should take and I’m not sure at all that Occupy has a clue what that might be.

I don’t purport to have the recipe either, but then again I am not occupying anybody’s campaign office. But whatever the message is, shouldn’t the Occupy folks be organizing the 99% around these issues rather than claiming, rather falsely, that they are the embodiment of the 99%?  If pudonk, doomed candidates from Santorum to Gingrich to Bachmann along with interest groups from the NRA to home-schoolers can turn out volunteers to go door-to-door throughout Iowa, can’t the so-called 99 percenters do likewise?

By staging small, disruptive demos in and around campaign headquarters all these folks to is tick people off and demonstrate in full living color their relative impotence (and their rather anemic numbers).

I also said above that I find this to be a somewhat alarming precedent. Look, I know very what a circus these caucuses and much of these elections are at their core. Does someone have, however, a better idea?  Excuse me for being a sap, but I find the campaigning and electoral process to be a rather sacred (if corrupted) part of democracy. If you don’t like what the other side is doing, or saying or if you don’t like any of the sides, fine by me. Then, it seems, your job would be to out-organize them, to being a message that more deeply engages them than the hooey we hear at the hollow town halls and in the attack ads.  But what you DO NOT do is interfere with the citizens’ rights to organize and campaign, no matter how far their heads might be up their asses.

If there were no Occupy movement at the moment (and there might not be), how many liberals and lefties would feel OK about right-to-lifers and gun-rights people occupying the campaign offices of Democratic candidates?

This is a moment in history when Republicans are undertaking an unprecedented effort to block voter participation and discourage civic activism. The last thing we need right now is to have folks from Occupy aiding their cause by clogging up campaign offices.  Bad, bad idea.

When I learned of his death, I was fairly upset, even though I knew it was coming. As fate would have it, I got the news moments after his demise as my daughter and I were sitting in the Fireside Lounge in Las Vegas — the last place we had seen Christopher together (and a bar that Hitch consecrated as surely one of the ten best in the world).

I had been thinking a lot about him lately. Not only because of his terminal illness. But also because staring at me from the top of my desk is his just published 2 lb. anthology of columns and essays that I was commissioned to review some weeks ago. Writer’s block is something I have rarely suffered but something was holding me back from writing the review (which I hope to surmount this coming week).  All I could do since Thanksgiving was mentally mull over what I knew would be the first line of the piece: “How do you review an encyclopedia?”

The breadth and depth of Christopher’s knowledge was absolutely stunning, though that descriptor falls way short. His editor at The Atlantic (and my friend and my editor when I have written there), Ben Schwarz, has written one of the best sketches of Hitch, also marveling at his super-sized scope of knowledge, his amazing memory and his rock-solid discipline as a writer. No, his drinking habits, which were formidable, did anything but impair his abilities. Indeed, he was fueled by drink, perhaps cursed by it, but it was, nevertheless entwined with his soul.

I will mention only two anecdotes in this regard. Back in 2002, after the quit The Nation and was excoriated by what passes for an American Left, he came out to L.A. for the Times Book Festival and Arianna Huffington threw him a party.  Feted by scores of admirers and friends, Christopher was knocking back copious quantities of his favored Johnny Walker Black Label all night.  Around 1 a.m., Arianna called the remaining guests into her spacious living room to toast him and Hitch was visibly supporting himself up against the fireplace mantle. Oh shit, I thought. He’s gonna fall over.  But no. After Arianna’s intro, Hitch — without so much as a stammer or a slur– recited about six stanzas of poetry from an author, I am embarrassed to say, I cannot remember.

A few years earlier, we were together on a Nation fund-raising cruise in Alaska that began with rounds of what he called morning “hand-steadiers” and that progressed until lunch time at which point we made a port stop and were bussed to a salmon bake. After a few more libations, and after a barefoot Hitch chased a bear down a river bed (and I temporarily passed out), we took a long walk to the boat under a misty, cloudy and rather magical sky. He told me he knew 10,000 limericks by heart and I believed him as he reeled off at least three or four dozen in the space of 10 minutes. That night he was lucid enough to write a column on the Balkans war in which, he alone on the Left, called for armed intervention to protect the Bosnian Muslims.

I suppose that brings us to the issue of  his politics.  I offer no hesitation in affirming that he has greatly informed and influenced my views. And while I claim no special insight into his soul, I will say that we have common political roots and therefore I do make the claim of understanding his political trajectory a bit better than your average mope. Hitch was a serious militant in the British section of the International Socialists, a strand of Trotskyism. My own trajectory took me from anarcho-syndicalism in the late 60′s into similar Trotskyist politics when I was active in Salvador Allende’s Chilean Socialist Party (which was an amalgam of currents, including Trotskyists).

This sort of Marxism is fiercely internationalist and fiercely anti-totalitarian (that’s what made it easy for me as a former anti-authoritarian anarchist to join up with anti-authoritarian Marxists).

There’s no need to get too deep into the weeds here so I will cut to the chase. Hitchens’ trajectory since 9/11 and his support for the war in Iraq was much more one of continuity than of any radical shift or lurch. Unlike Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz liberals, Hitchens did not see the world as only a domestic struggle between nasty Republicans and weak Democrats. His view was that of an internationalist, a revolutionary (albeit of the cafe persuasion)  who passionately identified with those fighting for liberation, be it against the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships or the totalitarian Stalinist regimes in Poland or Czechoslavakia.

Those lefties who were shocked and outraged by Hitchens in 2002 when he beat the drum for war in Iraq, those who felt somehow  personally betrayed, must be the same folks who had not been paying much attention to Hitchens’ writings over the previous 20 years. In 1982, while still pretty much a card-carrying Marxist, Hitch supported Maggie Thatcher’s war against the Argentine dictatorship which had tried to seize the British colony on the Falkland Islands. Yes, it was a colony. But the English-speaking inhabitants of the island wanted nothing to do with Argentina and rightly so. Hitch (and I will modestly include myself as sharing that position) saw this as a fight between an incomplete but functioning Tory-led western democracy and a barbaric, anti-semitic, openly pro-fascist Argentine dictatorship that was willing to risk the lives of its conscripts in a nationalist ploy to stay in power. Hitch wrote that if the Argentines were defeated the dictatorship would fall, and so it happened.

Fifteen years later, Hitchens was one of the very, very few voices on the Left urging a Western intervention against Milosevic. While knuckleheads like Ramsey Clark fronted for the butcher of Belgrade, Hitchens (and Susan Sontag and some activists like my pal Ian Williams), clamored for NATO to put an end to the killing fields salted by the Serbs.  When NATO finally did pull the trigger over Kosovo, I found myself on the other side of the issue, opposing the war. Indeed, I helped organize the country’s largest teach-in against the war that drew some 1200 attendees and was broadcast live for 4 hours. I sympathized with the Kosovars but saw the war as a ploy to needlessly rehabilitate NATO.

In retrospect, I am not sure at all that I was right about that war. I can argue both sides of it, if forced to. And I can make the counter-argument to my position quite convincing precisely because I had listened quite carefully to Hitchens and I understood his vantage point even if not completely convinced,

The attack on the Twin Towers was, quite obviously, an accelerant in Hitchens’ trajectory and that of many others, myself included. And how could it not be? What it told us was that Maoist simplicities that argued that the “primary contradiction” in the world was between “the people” and “U.S. Imperialism” were, well, for simpletons. An idealized socialism might, in fact, be preferable to capitalism, but in the meantime we were seeing a rise in armed religious fundamentalism actively engaged in a death cult. An attempt to kill 25,000 civilians in New York City is more than an asterisk in world history. And Western democracy, with all of its flaws, was not something to be sacrificed for “cultural differences.”

When the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq, what Hitchens saw was an opportunity to take out one of the most odious dictatorships on the planet. I spent some time myself in Iraq days before the onslaught of the first Gulf War and I assure you it was one of the most terrifying places I had ever been (and had nothing to do with Michael Moore’s depiction of it as a tranquil playground for kite flyers).  Take it or leave it, love him or hate him, but this was not Hitchens as a neo-conservative, but rather Hitchens as an Internationalist (willing to ally with the neo-cons).  He had long supported the Kurds in their struggle for national liberation and was greatly influenced by Iraqi leftists who had, in obscurity, fought for three decades against the fascist rule of Saddam.

On the eve of war, there was a magnificent live debate on Iraq held here in Los Angeles before an audience of several hundred at the Wiltern Theater. Bob Scheer and Mark Danner argued against the war. The pro-war side was offered up by Christopher and Michael Ignatieff (a liberal interventionist).  It was a wonderful couple of hours of the highest intellectual caliber. My heart was with Hitchens. My head was with Danner. I wrote at the time that if Hitchens and Ignatieff were the U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State I might support the war. But they were not and I did not.  I knew that the Bush administration were the wrong people to trust on this matter and I wanted no part of it.

This did not interrupt my friendship, nor my admiration, for Hitchens even though I knew he was wrong on the war. I felt, on the contrary, that his voice was needed then more than ever. Politics is not a tennis match in which you stand by the side, pick your favorite, and live vicariously through your champion’s wins and losses. It’s about thinking, making hard decisions, and understanding consequences.  Hitchens was wrong about the war in Iraq. But many of those in the anti-war camp were also wrong about Iraq. Jeremy Scahill, darling of the hard Left,  hosted on one of Saddam’s dog-and-pony junkets, was doing radio reports about how fair Saddam’s regional elections were. Ramsey Clark who was defending Milosevic at the time, was fronting for the ANSWER cult who were organizing the anti-Iraq war demos and simultaneously praising North Korea.

More to the point, there were (and are) way too many American lefties who argued that the U.S. had “no right” to intervene against totalitarian states under any circumstances because it would be a violation of national sovereignty of the dictator in question. Others refuse to believe that there could possibly be any evil greater, or any evil at all, other than American Imperialism. They believe that only a “police action” was necessary to crush Al Qaeda (I never understood that one. Were NYPD detectives supposed to serve search warrants on the Taliban in Kabul?).  And, then there’s the Truthers who, I am afraid to say, were never actively expelled from the ranks of the Left.  Hitchens voice was more necessary than ever as it was needed as a counter-balance to some of the more witless crap coming from many quarters of the antiwar crew.

When Hitch quit The Nation a year before the war in Iraq, he said the straw that broke his back were the letters to the editor the magazine ran in the wake of 9/11. I remember reading those same letter and feeling sick. Way too many of them were laced at least with a tinge of trutherism, at least to the point of identifying the victim of 9/11, the U.S, as the deserving perpetrator of the event. If not materially, then at least morally. The Official Left was mired in the 60′s and would not budge. All roads lead back to U.S. Imperialism.

There’s a fascinating if somewhat stilted essay that was published by the small neo-Marxist “Platypus” group a couple of years ago that while not wholly uncritical of Hitchens, certainly takes pains to understand his political positioning from a Marxist view.  I recommend you read it.  It’s not fair to sum up its complex arguments in a few sentences. But I would say this much. In many ways, Hitchens’ desertion from what passes for the Left tell us more about the latter than the former. There is no credible American Left. And it’s not so much that Hitchens left the Left as the Let left him (notwithstanding his mistaken position on Iraq).  I think more salient, as the Platypus essay argues, the Left has no self-awareness that the continuity between the progressive and socialist movements of the 20th century, especially the first part of it, have been ruptured and severed. The world has changed and continues to change. U.S. imperialism, if you prefer, certainly continues to exist. But so does Chinese Imperialism. India and Pakistan have nukes and millions of adherents to a religious nihilism. Russia has spiraled into an aggressive and dictatorial nationalism. Iran IS building nukes. Israel has 300 of them and this little problem will not be erased by chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Hitchens’ voice was necessary because so much of what was left of the Left, both liberal and radical, had turned so insular and myopic.  Consider this passage from the Platypus essay. The quoted material is from Hitchens:

Those on the Left who tacitly defended Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did so because of an inherited moral and intellectual rot. A consequence of this was that “instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism” [108], one manifestation of which was the anti-war movement’s willingness to bracket out of consideration the fate of Iraqi Leftist or oppositionist parties and trade unions, if not to condemn them outright as U.S. “stooges.” For their part, groups like the ISO and Spartacist League,  by simply dusting off the slogans of earlier struggles, ignore the historical gulf that separates the current anti-war movement from, say, the movement that opposed the Vietnam War. The claims of such groups that, as they would put it, blows struck against American imperialism are blows in the interests of workers and the oppressed worldwide, have become unmeaning mantras by the muttering repetition of which such groups on the left withdraw into insensibility. Others on the Left are more vulgar, hoping that an Iraqi quagmire would allow for the emergence of Europe as a substantial counter-hegemonic force (as, for instance, in Habermas and Derrida’s joint letter of May 31, 2003). Regarding such Leftism, Hitchens remarks, “I am very much put in mind of something from the opening of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It’s not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce. It’s the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know” [55]. Unable to so much as describe the present, the Left has lost its currency for an entire generation. “Members of the Left, along with the far larger number of squishy ‘progressives,’ have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought” [57]. Today’s conservative leftism, with a long pedigree stretching back into the 1960s, first became dominant by couching itself in anti-imperialist language. But, as Hitchens comments, “My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones” ["'Don't Cross Over if You Have any Intention of Going Back'" Interview with Danny Postel The Common Review 4:1, 7]. The merits of this critique stand, regardless of Hitchens’s position on the Iraq War.

How prescient. I have been revolted this last week by the number of liberals and “progressives” who are running around saying how much they love, just love Ron Paul’s “anti-interventionism.” I believe this is precisely what Hitch meant when he said: “My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones.” Hmmmm.

Well, Hitchens needs no further defense from me. As I thumb through this daunting, final anthology of his, he does a far superior job even from his fresh grave.

What has nauseated me the most over the last decade is the vile calumny and endless bile heaped upon him because he chose to divert from the party line on Iraq. That’s an odd reaction from a rag-tag and impotent Left that willingly allows all sorts of screwballs, sectarians and rather unstable elements in its ranks (as does the organized Right, quite obviously).  The reaction that Hitchens’ position on Iraq evoked from those who thought he left “the team” tells you exactly that. These are folks who look at politics as a spectator sport.  These are the folks unable to stand up on their own, incapable of challenging or defeating Hitchens (or likely anybody else) in debate. These are the poor, wretched souls who affirm their very self-identity by– and actually believe it is a political act– to read a tract by Chomsky, see a Michael Moore movie or listen to Amy Goodman plead for money.  They collect political heroes as if they were hoarding baseball cards. And God help them if one of their favorites fumbles a ball or whiffs in the 9th.

I knew Christopher not only as a startling and prolific writer and thinker but also as a compassionate, generous and loving friend.  He was a ruthless debater and he was ready to dish it out rather savagely. He loved to overwhelm his opponents and he relished the oratorical victory. What he loved more, however, was the process, the debate, the tussle, the engagement. He loved it because his mind never shut off, never shut down and never entered into a drunken stupor as his more petty critics contend.  If I knew I could write a tenth of what he has, if I could argue at 10 percent of his strength,  I would gladly sign a deal tonight with the Devil to drink a quart a day of booze and to check out a year from now when I reach his age of demise.

Christopher leaves a large hole in his passing. He leaves behind, quite literally, millions of admirers (the English edition alone of ‘God Is Not Great’ has sold something like 400,000 copies). He leaves behind probably thousands of friends in concentric circles of relative intimacy and degree.

I miss him sorely and it’s hard for me to imagine the world without him. I am heartbroken for his children and for his wife Carol who so many of us in L.A. have known forever.

And, damnnit,  I can’t remember a single one of the dozens of limericks he recited that beautiful, cloudy afternoon in Alaska. I am left only with a near empty glass of Johnny Walker Black.

Or, better said, aggravating. Maybe “insane” is a better descriptor.

As you have probably heard, the big news story coming out of the recent GOP presidential debate is that Mitt Romney offered to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry over a dispute about what is and what is not in one of Mitt’s massively-ignored books.

Gasp!  The cavalry of Conventional Wisdom Pundits have come galloping out of the bars and cafes to tell us how much potential damage Mitt has probably inflicted on himself by flaunting so much dough.  Here’s just one random example of such genius as quoted in Politico:

ABC correspondent Jake Tapper noted after the debate how Romney’s bet, while safe, left him looking out of touch.

“The bigger issue, I think, was the fact that Mitt Romney was trying to wager a $10,000 bet in a debate in Iowa,” Tapper said. “The median income in this country means that $10,000 is roughly three months income. Even though he was just joking around, I think that probably did not help him. Even if he won the letter of the bet, by making the bet … he probably lost the bet.”

It means that there is NO split between the so-called Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. The Tea Party is the Republican Establishment.

Likewise, as Newt is now the favorites of the GOP/Tea Party, it means that every excuse, apologia and rationale for the Tea Party has been dead wrong.

The Tea Party hates insiders? But the Tea Party is now backing a former House Speaker whose entire commercial-political enterprise has been based in Washington for the last 25 years.

The Tea Party is for clean government? Gingrich was charged with nearly three dozen ethical violations as Speaker, fined $300,000 and was forced out of his post by the rank and file of his own party.

The Tea Party hates hypocritical pols and prefers candidates of high personal integrity? Newt is a serial philanderer whose divorce request posed to his cancer-stricken wife is now legend.

The Tea Party shuns big-spending celebrities and stands for fiscal austerity and prudence? New apparently spent his disposable income running up half-million dollar tabs with the most elite jewelry store in the world. More to the point, he has constructed a successful multi-million dollar merchandising empire that would be the envy of any huckster televangelist. Six figure speaking fees, videos, bullshit books, posters and CD’s.  His notorious K Street-based scam based on blast-faxing businesses and offering them Newt-signed certificates for a $5000 fee now owes $20,000 in back rent, has closed its doors and is the target of eviction from its landlord.

The Tea Party hates lobbyists? Newt pocketed almost $2 million front for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Capitol Hill while his own front groups made many more millions in lobbying.

The Tea Party shuns social issues and is concerned over solely economic issues? Newt has played every social conservative card in the deck and most recently has retooted his racist dog whistle about putting ghetto kids to work as janitors (if not put into orphanages as he once prescribed).  He has climbed up the ass the overtly xenophobic birther-in-chief, NBC clown, banruptcy artist and all-around sonofabitch, Donald Trump.

Truth is, Newt Gingrich is the perfect and most appropriate candidate for the modern Republican Party.  There is no search for any real alternatives to the policies of Barack Obama. There is a search, instead, to reside in the alternative universe the Republicans have constructed for themselves. Nominating the mephistophelean Gingrich would be the way to most vigorously endorse the hurricane of propaganda that has passed for Republican discourse for the last 4 years. Nominating Newt would mean that Obama REALLY is a socialist. That Obama really embodies the horrid “anti-colonial” ethic of Kenyan Mau-Maus. That Obamacare is really a Soviet-like plan. That the oppressors in current America are the lazy and un-deserving poor (and some unionized teachers and firemen) and that the truly persecuted among us are tax-paying White Men, especially those preyed-upon “job creator” multi-millionaires  whom Gingrich has relentlessly and loyally served.

Newt is the candidate of blind rage and revenge. He’s perfect.

He also guarantees the re-election of Barack Obama.

Charles Horman

A Chilean judge has indicted the former U.S. military group leader in his country for being linked to the murder of two Americans in the days immediately after the 1973 coup.  I am VERY pleased to say that the official indictment and request to extradite retired U.S. Navy Captain Ray Davis cites testimony I gave to a Chilean judge and homicide detectives in 2003.

The two Americans murdered, whom I both knew, were Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi.  Horman’s story was the basis for the award-winning Costa Gavras film, “Missing.”

As the Telegraph reports:

According to the indictment, a US government agency had told the FBI that Mr Teruggi had close links to an organisation called the Chicago Area Group on the Liberation of the Americas.

Frank Teruggi

He was said to have been producing leftist propaganda to be distributed in the US. Mr Zepeda alleges that the two killings took place as US officials conducted a secret investigation into “activity that US agents considered ‘subversive’” by Americans at home and in Chile.

Justice Zepeda said Horman may have also been killed because he inadvertently found out about US “collaboration during the military events unfolding” with the coup.

Davis is now in his mid-80′s and is reportedly suffering from Alzheimer’s in a D.C.-area rest home.  I see no way he would be extradited, but the investigation by Judge Zepeda in Santiago is shedding new light on this four decade old unresolved case. If you can speak Spanish, you can read the full text of the indictment here, including reference to my testimony.

Here is the excerpt from that indictment that refers to my testimony on file:

TOMO IX del proceso.-
m) Orden de investigar de la Policia de Investigaciones de Chile, de fojas 2.843, en cuanto contiene las circunstancias relatadas por ciudadanos estadounidenses, de que la vi?ctima Charles Edmund Horman Lazar, antes de ser sustrai?da y muerta, estuvo acompan?ada por Ray E. David, Capita?n de la U.S. Navy; que Charles Edmund Horman Lazar, antes de su sustraccio?n concurrio? y pidio? auxilio para salir del pai?s sin resultados a la Embajada y Consulado de los Estados Unidos de Ame?rica en Santiago y las circunstancias que rodearon su posterior privacio?n de libertad e inmediata muerte; para ello, en la orden se tomo? declaracio?n a Terry Ann Simon, a fojas 2.890; a Joyce Horman, a fojas 2.896; a George Irving Platt, a fojas 2.929; a Patricia Marie Garret, a fojas 2913; a Marc Errol Cooper a fojas 2.922; y a Frank Manitzas, a fojas 2932;

I have no personal knowledge of what Capt. Davis’ role may or may not have been in the death of the Americans.  The testimony I offered focused on the refusal of all American Embassy officials refusing to provide any assistance to threatened Americans living in Chile at the time of the coup. My appearance before the judge resulted in a face to face confrontation (careo in Spanish juridical terms) with the former U.S. Consul Frederick Purdy. Purdy has the misfortune of retiring and living in Chile and therefore was forced to respond to a subpoena and offer counter-testimony to mine.  In the middle of the process, he was interrupted by then-Judge Guzman Tapia who upgraded his status from “witness” to “suspect.” He was never indicted, however.

The current indictment clearly suggests that the evidence gathered over years of investigation establishes a clear clink between the murders and collaboration between U.S. and Chilean military intelligence with Capt. Davis in the chain.  My reading of the indictment is that the investigating magistrate believes that at a minimum, Captain Davis could have prevented the murders carried out by Chilean military officers. Also indicted is a former Chilean Brigadier General already serving time for human rights abuses.

When I have been asked about American involvement in the killing of the two Americans I knew, I have always said the Nixon administration bore moral guilt for feeding and oiling Pinochet’s death machine and, specifically, for turning a blind eye to the fate of Americans living in Chile at the time of the coup. I leaned toward NOT believing that any U.S. officials, including Davis, were somehow directly involved in the assassinations as it would take only a drop of common sense for them to have understood that it was politically volatile to do so and, frankly, not worth it (from their perspective). At least that second part has turned out to be true as this case lives on in infamy 38 years later.

Perhaps, now, we will learn about the first part of that equation. Were some American functionaries, including Davis, actually craven and stupid enough to stand by and watch two young Americans senselessly murdered in Santiago?

To be fair, the Mayor’s tone was anything but threatening or aggressive. A former trade unionist and former head of the local ACLU board, the Mayor paid warm homage to the goals and sentiments of the OWS movement but said it was “unsustainable” to maintain the encampment of a few hundred protesters indefinitely. In his view, two months was enough.

There was an immediate reaction from inside the L.A. camp as documented here. I had a couple of friends who listened in on Friday’s General Assembly and they basically told me you need to be an Sanskrit interpreter to figure out what was really decided. These folks aren’t kidding about this being a leaderless movement. Directionless might also apply.  What could be garnered is that some protesters are just gonna quietly split when the cops show up. Some will sit down, passively resist, and hopefully no knuckleheads from the RCP or the Black Bloc will start chucking bottles and rocks at the cops.

The city and the LAPD, to date, have treated the OLA camp pretty much with kid gloves and it seems to be a point of pride among them that they are going to avoid the sort of Cops Gone Wild stuff we’ve seen in NY, Oakland, Atlanta and Davis.  The Mayor has promised there will be no surprise “raid,” that the shut down will be calm and patient, and the social workers will be on hand to provide public services for those in need. The city is also providing free parking so people can gather up their tents. And 50 to 100 beds are being made available for the homeless who have joined the camp, which numbers about 3-400 or so.

All in all, it’s not a bad deal. Indeed, I think the city may be giving these folks a graceful exit strategy. Okay, you can gather your rotten tomatoes and jagged rocks to throw my way, but if **** I **** were a leader of this local, movement, I would declare victory, go home and abandon the camp before the cops even arrive.

(Slideshow by Alan Mittelstaedt shot Friday night)

As I have said repeatedly, the OWS and OLA movements have had quite a positive impact on pubic consciousness.  Chalk up that victory and now CAPITALIZE on it by doing some real organizing instead of beating on drums.

My fear, is that the rump group left at the City Hall steps may be determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  What is to be gained at this point by standing the ground against the cops and the city? More people show up to a well-organized wedding than the number currently camped out at OLA.  The “masses” are not participating.

What would be the point of even mass arrests? What principle is being defended?  This is not the Woolworth counter or Apartheid South Africa we’re talking about where the fight for physical space is central to the core struggle. This is a public lawn on City Hall in the middle of the city which is theoretically open to everybody. I repeat, everybody.  OK, taking it over for a few weeks or in this case a few months might make sense to dramatize the issue of economic inequality. But the space itself means nothing. Well, it means a little bit. Like, how sympathetic would we be if the Tea Party decided to appropriate this public, common space for itself for an indefinite period? Not very.

Now we run the chance of a pointless confrontation on Monday morn when the LAPD will probably begin moving in. If it turns violent, it will grab headlines and polarize the public but will do nothing to help solve the underlying issue.  That issue is, of course, a complicated one and will take a generation or two sort out, if ever.  But you begin somewhere.

OWS was a great beginning. The end of that beginning is now at hand.

Nobody said it was going to be easy to change the world. Beating drums and turning the focus on cops is but a sideshow.

Answer: A lot of things.

That some Americans have finally woken up to the fact that we are living through the most radical transfer of wealth upward in history is a very, very good thing.  That some people are willing to do something about, even if it is only pitching a tent, well that is also a really good thing.

That OWS has informed the entire national debate and all of a sudden everyone from politicians to a sleepy MSM has discovered that there’s a growing wealth divide threatening a new generation is very good news.That it is no longer cool to be a Gordon Gekko-type a-hole is refreshing,  All of these should be chalked up as victories by OWS.

Now, comes the hard part. When engaging in politics, one should never confuse a tactic with a strategy. And that’s the danger facing OWS. Here’s an historic case in point:

Let’s go back to The Battle in Seattle around the WTO in 1999. Here’s a giddy piece I wrote for The Los Angeles Times from the scene if you can’t remember exactly what happened. Rather magically, the first great mass demonstration against “globalization” materialized in the streets of Seattle and unionists and greens stood shoulder to shoulder through the tear gas as the police predictably over-reacted.

For the next number of years, young activists replicated these tactics by massing every time the WTO or G8 met and the symbols of the movement became handcuffs and tear gas masks. But what was the strategy? A few hundred or even a few thousand protesters clashing with cops from Cancun to Seoul to Toronto and back was a pain in the butt for the global elite but it hardly impacted their own strategies. What made some difference, however, were those less dramatic but more effective campaigns (usually unsuccessful) to stop the onrush of free trade agreements and preferred trading status for China.

Certainly, there was some overlap among the street fighter and the legislative crusaders as there damn well should have been ( a suites/streets strategy).  When it came to free trade, Seattle and some of the other protests put the issue on the map, but it took a much larger and strategic coalition to try and actually do something about the issue. Back in those early days of the of anti-globalization fight, I attended a ton of the street heat meetings as a reporter and I am sorry to say that the discussion rarely, if ever, went beyond tactics i.e. how to get arrested, how to sit-in, whether or not it was OK to smash windows (thanks to the so-called Black Bloc anarchists and so on).  It was mostly the trade unions, however, working with some populist politicians who did the heavy lifting on the policy front.

I think we are now at that same crossroads with OWS.  It was an absolutely necessary eruption that forced the central but unspoken issues of our time on to the center stage. Indeed, what has been achieved is so important that it is now imperative that the victory not be sacrificed by continuing to focus on tactics. Translation: letting this movement descend into a prolonged cat and mouse battle over physical space, tents and parks would be tragic. The fight for physical space is not only unsustainable, it is also politically insufficient and ineffective.  The more OWS becomes about itself, the more it looks inward, the more pointless it will become.

OWS must look outward. It must build real coalitions.  To say it represents the interests of 99 percent of Americans might be a political truth. To say, however, that OWS is the 99 percent is ridiculous and only serves to self-mock the movement.  In New York, a few of the protest marches might have involved 20-30,000 people. But in most cities, and certainly here in Los Angeles, the campers and overnighters rarely reach beyond the hundreds.

If OWS aspires to embody the 99 percent then it is going to have to do the dirty work of reaching out to that other 98.9 per cent who have not yet participated. OWS is going to have to make itself more accessible to folks who are NOT full-time activists. The tribal aspect of OWS, the concentration on camp kitchens, libraries, etc. are quaint but wholly irrelevant. They are ingrown and exclusionary.

As Lennon and McCartney said, “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you’re not gonna win anyone over anyhow.” For OWS, this means, yes, mainstreaming itself some more. It means not insisting that you join a tribe and participate in a human microphone to be part of it. It means looking for allies and meeting them half-way or at least part of the way.

This is not a covert suggestion, by the way, that OWS convert itself into some sort of electoral vehicle — at least not exclusively one. Who can have faith in the political system? Yet, it happens to be the only one we have. So figuring out how to influence and impact that system of power is a looming question for OWS.  It cannot just be ignored. After all the system is the power. And we are talking about power, aren’t we?

I have no prescriptions or paint-by-numbers scheme for OWS. I can’t tell you exactly what it should do next. I only know what it shouldn’t do. It must not close in on itself and make itself the issue. The parks don’t matter.

Power matters.

Scanning the news reports, it seems I made the right decision (which was to watch Sunday’s TiVo’ed episode of the fabulous Boardwalk Empire). Politico found six, count them, six (!) important takeaways from the non-debate. I suppose the folks over there felt compelled to write something Insightful about this piece of kabuki. Bless their hearts.

I was much more amused by the headline in the Guardian which reads: “Newt Gingrich calls for ‘humane’ policy on illegal immigration.”

I don’t care whether it is intentional or not but I love the way the word humane is put in quotes when attached to the name Newt Gingrich.  This is, indeed, a wonderful sign of where we have come to in Republican politics. A (temporary) front-runner saying he is “ready to take the heat” for proposing what he thinks but what is not in reality a humane immigration policy.  Newt’s right, of course. He is going to take heat from a constituency-gone-mad that applauds mass executions, boos gay Marines and wishes for the death of those too poor to afford health care. Newt Gingich, Fearless Moderate!

With the exception of the invisible Jon Huntsmann, the existence of a moderate Republican Establishment at odds with the Tea Party has become a myth. That GOP Establishment has been pretty much replaced by the Democratic Party and whatever was left over was captured lock, stock and barrel (no pun intended) by the Tea Party.  Look no further than the supposed leading “moderate” alternative to the right-wing fringe, one Willard Mitt Romney.  It’s one thing to be a serial shape-changer, an art he has mastered. But Mitt crossed into new territory today when he decided to become a bona fide sewer dweller.

His latest TV spot in New Hampshire is destined to become one of the most damned and notorious, right up there with the Willie Horton garbage. He outright lies about what President Obama said, egregiously quoting him out of context. Take a look at the report below and tell if Lee Atwater isn’t grimacing in his grave. At least when Atwater was on his death bed he repented for the sleaze he manufactured. Romney is wallowing in it.  Wake me up, please, when the next “debate” airs.

All I can say is: Duh.

The MSM  has always treated socialism (or anti-capitalism) as some sort of aberration and tinker-toy affliction and maybe it would be better if it continued to do so because pieces like this one are actually embarrassing.

The entire piece is devoted to the same single point that capitalism has failed because in Europe and the U.S. it can no longer provide job stability let alone upward mobility.  This is, of course, true.  It’s also been true for most of the last 35 years. It’s just a little more evident nowadays.

What makes me laugh about this piece is its rather off-putting myopia.  The most dramatic failure of global capitalism is certainly not because Spanish workers will see their pensions cut or even that effective unemployment in the U.S. might be 15 percent.

Much more importantly (and perhaps the subject of a sequel piece by the Beeb) is that capitalism has utterly failed to provide a humane standard of living for way more more than half the global population.  Something like half the world lives on a dollar a day and last time I checked 60 percent … that’s right 3 out of 5 human beings– have never even made a telephone call.

Since the advent of Marxism a century and a half ago, about 20 countries, (give or take) have at some point or another self-identified as “Communist.” No question they all failed as viable alternatives to capitalism (Let’s not get too deep in the weeds but by Marx’s actual criteria, and contrary to Mr. Gray’s ignorant assertions, none would really be considered socialist let alone communist by the Old Lion. Marx envisioned socialism as a global system built on top of societies of capitalist abundance — not as backward, isolated Third World outposts).

Nevertheless, no self-proclaimed Communist country has prospered as such.

Subtract the 20 that called themselves such and that leaves (give or take) another 175-200 countries in the world, especially if u want to start counting Palau and Grenada.

So, a simple question?

How many of THESE capitalist societies have prospered and functioned to some reasonable degree? Well, there’s the G8 — as in eight!  And let’s be very, very generous here and toss in the BRIC countries. the Asian tigers, and, just to be be diplomatic, we can marginally add in another handful or two.  Let’s really be nice and round it off to, say, 35 countries. That still leaves about 150 or so unaccounted for.  What do folks in Malawi, Mongolia, Haiti, Botswana, Burma and Tunisia and so on and so on think about the efficacy of capitalism to meet their basic needs?

None of this even takes into account the gross inequalities that exist inside the most successful capitalist societies. Didn’t Ayn Rand teach us that capitalism is all about getting the other guy before he gets you?  Is there anyone who actually believes that great wealth can be generated without extracting it from the work of others? (Yes, there are tens of millions all around me who partake in this civic religion — as bogus as any other religion).

I cracked up reading Gray’s concluding lines which I am sure he thinks were ever so clever:

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn’t communism that did the deed. It’s capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.

Um, actually, no. Marx never predicted that something called “communism” would rise up to destroy capitalist society. All of his writing and theorizing is based on the postulate that the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself would eventually make it obsolete and would produce its own collapse. The old world is pregnant with the new and all that stuff, you know.

Coming next from the BBC: Poor people are not rich. A five part series.

It was a foregone conclusion that one of the moondoggies was going to win and so it turned out.  Ron Paul, who would pretty much abolish the federal government, came within a whisker of outplacing Michele Bachmann who would do pretty much the same — except she would also ban most of the first ten amendments to the constitution.

Wolfman Jack wasn’t running nor was Muamar Kaddafi so they both got beaten by write-in howler Rick Perry, the Pizza Guy, Mr. WhoIsPalenty and Mitt Romney — the latter who has been given the title of front-runner because I guess somebody has to have it so the press has someone to talk about.

Driving in from LAX and toward meeting someone for dinner here in L.A. in the afternoon, I was listening to the post-poll chatter on CNN and it was beyond absurd. Those poor predictable babbling boring pundits had to fill like 90 minutes tut-tutting about what is dead obvious and what can be summed up in about 25 words:

Bachmann and Paul appeal to the fringe of the party, sometimes mistakenly called the base, and while at least the latter MIGHT be able to win the nomination, she would have to go through a brain transplant to be a viable general election candidate.  Ditto with Mystery Man Rick Perry. And, Ron Paul?  You gotta be kidding.

Period. End of analysis. Toss it live to Wolf (Blitzer).

Republicans may be crazy but they are not stupid. The real base of the party knows it needs someone who won’t scare little children to confront Obama in any real way. It ain’t gonna be Bachmann.

There’s really nothing, absolutely nothing else, to be said about the importance of the Iowa Straw Poll.  Stick a fork in it.

Oh… except for one thing. Back in 2008, John McCain didn’t even participate in the poll nor even really in the caucuses a half year later. And if I remember correctly he won the nomination of his party.

Small detail.

Photo: Natasha Vargas-Cooper

The final results are not all in but the decision appears to be cast.  Democrats have come up one seat short of winning back the state senate in Wisconsin. As of late Tuesday night, it appears that the GOP will hold on to four seats and the Dems will take back two. They needed three to flip the majority in the state senate and really take on Gov. Scott Walker.

We’ll know in the next few days if efforts will go ahead to attempt to recall Walker when he becomes eligible for such action in January.

In the next few days we are also bound to hear a lot of scapegoating by Democrats as to why they came up short. There IS some funny business again in delayed vote counting and this will lead to charges of a stolen election. And the GOP SuperPacs pumped literally tens of millions of dollars into these small-time races and that will lead to charges of a purchased election.

I have a different takeaway.  The Democrats, apparently, did a great job and they lost fair and square because there’s a sizable portion of the Wisconsin –and national– electorate who actually believe in the bullcrap put forward by the Republicans.

Wisconsin Democrats and their union allies did everything right in this case.  Everything that some pwogressives demand that Dems and Obama need to do at the national level. They pushed back real hard on Walker’s conservative agenda.  They organized, mobilized and protested en masse for weeks and months on end. The union-backed protests forced Wisconsin Democrats to take militant and tough positions they probably ordinarily wouldn’t have dreamed of.

After the GOP ramrodded Walker’s budget bill through a rump legislature, unions and Democrats pulled out all the stops to get these recalls on the ballot.  A small army of volunteers ran a tough ground game for weeks leading up to Tuesday’s voting. And while they were outspent on the other side, unions opened up their treasuries and helped fuel the six Democratic challengers.

So, in short, this was the sort of Democratic faction of the Democratic Party movement that so many have been calling for.

In the end, they performed honorably but they still lost. Yes, these were all Republican districts so some succor can be had in winning in two of them. But four of the challenges were unsuccessful.

Conclusion: Republicans also have grass-roots support.  They also can produce impressive GOTV. They are not all mindless robots responding to Koch brothers backed advertising.  They actually have agency.

My point, then, is not to blame Democrats for failing. Instead, this should be a wake-up call that even when you do things right, even when you have worked the ground as was done in Wisconsin, even when your electoral push is fueled by an authentic social movement, you don’t necessarily win. You don’t because there are still tens of millions of Americans out there who believe in all sorts of rubbish… and who vote.  Many of them are unreachable and, in fact, might as well be robots.  But many others, excuse my jargon, need to have their consciousness raised.

It means PART of the work of those who consider themselves on the Left includes having to find effective ways to actually convince and persuade these folks to think more clearly.

Simply demonizing them won’t make them disappear.

The long ground-level reporting piece my daughter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, wrote for Slake is now online.  It’s a good and prescient read written back in late April but just published last week.

She’s all for the unions but in no way predicted any sort of easy victory as we saw tonight.

Let me clearly state that I am NOT an economist, thank heavens, but this was not hard to see coming. Indeed, even though I am someone who started saving relatively late in life and I was, therefore, invested 100 percent in securities, I took all my retirement funds out of the market three months ago and put it in cash.

I had no formal financial advice. I did no research. I merely looked at the macro indicators all around me and the decision was easy. No way could I see that we were in for any period of recovery, let alone prosperity.  Both parties had taken a course of austerity at a time when we actually need a new WPA.  Democrats had retreated into Reaganism. Republicans took shelter in the economic wisdom of Herbert Hoover.  One out of six Americans have no real job. And little prospects. Manufacturing has disappeared.  Corporate management has acquired a taste for keeping things as lean as possible. Credit is still stiff. Consumer spending as portion of the GDP is at an all time low, reducing driver demand to impotency.  Spending on the military was to remain at an all time high and there was no chance of taxing the wealthy.

The market was OBVIOUSLY over-valued and it was only a matter of time that it would crash.  The perfect storm of the manufactured debt ceiling crisis, the tottering economies of Europe (punctuated by various riots here and there) and the credit downgrade all converged to break the back of the Dow.

One can play a guessing game, as one will, whether or not the plunge will continue, level out or even slightly reverse itself. One thing I am certainly sure of is that there is not going to be any sustained upswing any time soon. And those who talk of a “lost decade” may be understating things.

I was grimly entertained today by the flood of re-assuring advice on what to do about the market spewing forth by business editorialists, brokers and financial analysts.  I had to chuckle when I got a mass email from my Ameriprise brokerage urging me not to panic, encouraging me to see its counsel, and trying to soothe me by saying their experts were “closely monitoring” the situation.

LMAO.

If they had been monitoring closely enough, they might have forewarned their clients about the disaster in the making.

I also got forwarded an email that a friend received from his very, very respected fund manager.  This friend, already past retirement age, was advised to NOT even think about pulling out of the market as investments should be made in a way that they could weather a variety of different scenarios.

Right.

The only scenario that is never considered is that there just might be some tectonic shifts in the global economy and that the next 25 or 50 or 75 years could possibly be different than the previous. Really?  Typical of this religious faith in the perpetuity of stable global capitalism is this doggerel from today’s New York Times. Economics writer Ron Lieber offers this nonsense:

So ask yourself this: Why are you investing in stocks in the first place? The answer should give you a sense of whether you should stay or you should sell.

If you need the money soon, for a down payment on a house or living expenses in retirement, you shouldn’t have had much of that money in stocks in the first place. Selling now means locking in your losses, which will not feel so good if stock prices go up again in the next couple of months. Still, having most of your money in a savings account now would be better than having your stocks fall another 10 or 20 percent and then losing your cool and bailing out then.

If you can’t sleep at night or concentrate during the day, then that’s a sure sign that you did not belong in stocks in the first place. There is nothing like a quick market decline to provide a real-world test of risk tolerance. But so far, this is nowhere near as bad as what we experienced in late 2008 and early 2009. If you survived that, then you’ll probably endure whatever happens next.

You can read the other 300 words if you like but I can save you some time. Here’s the one sentence translation:  Keep putting money in the market so long as you have no interest in what happens to your money.

Meanwhile, the riots continue in Great Britain. The ECB is trying to shore up Italy and Spain. Moody’s is considering its own downgrade of U.S. Treasuries. Gold crossed the $1700 mark. Barack Obama said he has a plan but didn’t say what it was. And Eric Cantor wrote to his colleagues telling them not to cave into any post-crash pressure to raise taxes.

But don’t worry. You’ll probably endure whatever happens next.

These people desperately need some sort of hobby — or some very strong medication.  In the meantime, I respectfully ask them to stop praying for me. Send cash instead!

Let’s start with the notion that ONLY Christianity is a valid religion. Sick sonsovbitches.

It could be a very interesting morning on Monday.  We will find out if the S&P downgrade was already priced into the Thursday crash of the Dow …or…if we can fall another 500 points or so by noon.  Aww, that mysterious market that rules our lives and dwells at the center of our civic religion is, well, so mysterious that nobody has a clue.

Early indications are not so great, however.  The Israeli market, which functions on Sundays, delayed it’s opening by 45 minutes to avoid a panic but everyone still went misshugah.  When we last looked, it was down about 7%.  In the next couple of hours we will see how the Asian markets fare on their Monday morning.

The Dow, of course, is only one very unreliable indicator of how the real-world economy is doing.  It’s been booming this last year as most Americans kept skipping ever backward, as growth sputtered and real unemployment stayed put at about 16 percent. The price of guard dogs for the rich went up to $320,000, however. Maybe that was market driver!

The deeper problem we face is not the rather sterile debate over whether Barack Obama has any backbone or not. It rather should be a debate, a challenge, amongst and to the American people over whether we want to continue living in a society of gross economic inequality and simply waltz into the abyss or if we want to come to our senses and fight for basic social justice and a future for our children.

In this regard, I am delighted to welcome back to the blogging community my USC Annenberg colleaague Jon Taplin who has unleashed a rip-roaring essay on this topic. I urge you to give it a full reading.  Here’s a bit of teaser:

After Thursday’s stock market crash, we find ourselves staring into the abyss of a potential double-dip recession. Republican’s, having ignored the history lesson of the business lobby 1937 Austerity Push, which managed to push America back into depression, seem to be clueless to the fate of most Americans. Of course, As the New York Times reports, their financial base is doing very well and luxury spending is reaching new highs. But America’s economy lives and dies on the confidence of the average consumer. In the go-go years of the late 1990’s the concept of “mass affluence” and “affordable luxury” dazzled marketers into believing that “aspirational marketing” was the path to the streets of gold in which the majority of citizens would have 60” inch flat screen TV’s running 500 channels of cable TV and 100 MBPS Broadband services, even if they had to hock their house to get it. But, as a new White Paper from Ad Age entitled, “The New Wave of Affluence” points out, “In 2011 however, in the wake of a massive reset, it appears that mass affluence may be a thing of the past.” Ad Age goes on to suggest that marketers concentrate their attention on the 3% of the American population earning more than $200,000 per year, “who account for almost 50% of consumer spending.” The esteemed Telecom analyst Craig Moffett, in a report titled “How the Other Half Lives” chose to look at the darker side of this picture. “After paying for food, shelter, and transportation, the average bottom-40% family is left with…. wait for it…. just $1,215 per year, or $100 a month, for everything else.  That’s $100 per month for all discretionary purchases, telecom services, cable or satellite TV, movies…  and everything else.  Indeed, after Healthcare, the number drops below zero.” A recent report on consumer discretionary spending from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows “this time is different.” Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

There’s  a lot more. One point Jon makes, in passing, is the level of mass consciousness around this core issue.  He has touched on one of my favorites themes: the two conflicting visions of a totalitarian society. Orwell’s 1984 where Big Brother watches you and Huxley’s Brave New World where you spend most of your time voluntarily watching Big Brother and putting yourself and your kids on Prozac.

It’s this last option that really ought to be of concern to us, way beyond a Marxist fart-sniffing salon on whether or not Obama is a neo-con or a neo-liberal.  I want to know where the American people are as our society gets stripped and looted.

One uplifting note is to watch what is happening in Israel, of all places. Some 90% of the country is backing the largest street protests in national history — protests against basic austerity and in favor of basic social justice.

What a concept!

If service isn’t up to snuff, if our needs are not attended to with the deference we expect, we lodge a complaint at the front desk and then next time we choose a different place to stay.  Unlike two decades ago when Lapham wrote the piece I have in mind, one thing has changed.

After our respective disappointment, just as hotel guests write a nasty Yelp review, we  can now also write a derogatory post: We have been gypped, dissed, betrayed, sold a bill of goods. Horrors!

Now, there are truly bad hotels and even worse politicians. And both room guests and and voters have a sacred right to bitch.  But, folks, there’s a world of difference between a consumer and a citizen.

I am not offloading the weakness of our political leadership onto the shoulders of an already burdened citizenry. Yet, the republic is ours, if only we can keep it.

There are some, few, Americans who get actively involved in politics. Too few. And some of them, I fear, are engaged more for therapeutic reasons rather than in any real attempt to build organization and constituencies.

So among all of our disappointments, let’s not please relieve the masses of their own responsibilities.  If the Kardashians or the Patriots really are more important in their lives than medical care and a dignified retirement, then why should any politician stick his or her neck out to show real and courageous leadership? Just exactly to which powerful constituency would he or she be responding?

It’s very easy to get on the Web and post a negative review of this or that elected leader. “Hey, I voted for this guy based on the brochure he offered but then he really screwed me. The bed was uncomfortable, the wall were too thin, the meals were over-priced and the glass was half-empty. I am one real dissatisfied customer and I recommend that none of you ever vote for this guy in the future. Spend your money elsewhere.”

OK, now consider this… consider WHO actually got up off the sofa last week and actually mobilized to participate, albeit minimally, in the national debt “debate.”  The Pew Center has all the stats.  A friend writes with a quick summary of them:

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press offers a clue today into why the battle in Washington to raise the debt ceiling ended up with a deficit-reduction deal that would just cut spending with no increase in taxes. Those who wanted budget cuts paid the most attention. In the last week in July, the story accounted for 47% of the news coverage in newspapers, TV, radio and the Internet; that was appropriate at a time when 41% of all adults considered it the most riveting development according to Pew’s weekly survey of public interest in the news. But if you look more closely, you’ll find that 66% of Republicans and supporters of the Tea Party closely tracked the budget negotiations vs 34% of those who held different views or had no opinion. What’s more, about 20% of the Tea Party supporters contacted an elected official. Only 5% of those who disagreed with the group did so. Interestingly, young people — who had the most at stake in the debate — were least motivated to try to influence the outcome. Only 19% of adults between 18 and 29 followed the story closely and 1% contacted an elected official. By contrast, about 54% of people over 50 kept up with the budget debate with 16% contacting an official. Pew’s findings come from a telephone poll of about 1,000 adults (including both landline and cell customers) and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

What does that tell you? A lot, IMHO.

We certainly saw John Boehner capitulate to the pressure from the tea-baggers. To what pressure were the Democrats exposed?

I understand quite well the alienation that Americans and, especially, young people feel about the political process.  That’s not a good enough excuse, however, to let the country go to hell in a handbasket.

In the meantime, Please Do Not  Disturb.

What’s noxious is that the Republicans got their way in forcing a manufactured crisis and in watching the whole political and chattering class play along with them.   That we are even talking about social spending cuts when economic growth appears to be brink on a double dip recession is nothing short of obscene.  That Democrats have capitulated to Republicans by expunging the word “taxes” from the political lexicon and replacing it with the obscure term of “revenue” is equally obscene. That ANY cuts whatsoever, needed or not, all fall on the lower income and tax categories while the wealthy continue to have a chuckle is nothing short of revolting.

What are the takeaways?

Doom and Gloom.

This horrid side show goes right into the record books as one of the most stunning displays to date of an entire political system rotten and corrupt and unresponsive to the core.

I am not going to defend Obama’s posture and position in this crisis as it seems rather obvious he could have done a lot better.  He certainly could have framed this whole issue properly from the beginning, he could have called out the Tea Party for the blackmailers they are, and — perhaps– he could have recurred to the 14th amendment and told the House to go fuck itself.

It certainly would have FELT better.  I cannot, however, in good faith affirm in any way that it would have worked out any better.  I know what the polls say. I also knew what the polls said about Reagan’s policies (and they no real-life effect).  I don’t know that an American president remains viable by being a tribune for higher taxes and and by telling the country the truth about deficits i.e. at this point in history they should not be our primary concern.  Is there a majority constituency for all that?  Could Obama have built one? Well, go ask Don Rumsfeld, the expert on Unknowables because I sure as hell don’t know.

I do know there is plenty of guilt to go around here, enough to make this whole episode a national shame.  It goes way, way beyond Obama.

We can look at the large financial houses that have become the primary funders of the Democratic Party.  We can look at House Democrats who, in majority, are actually OK with this bill. We can look at Harry Reid who authored a measure not terribly different than this one.  We can look at a Democratic congress who, until 2010, didn’t have the fight to to the mat over repealing Bush tax cuts and kept on gorging the Pentagon budget.

I wouldn’t exactly look at the Republicans in this case. More fitting is to take a dump on them.  A truly lunatical fringe grouped together in the Tea Party first took the rest of their feckless party hostage and then went on to hold the entire country as captive.  John Boehner could have stopped this cold, but then again he probably would have lost his job.  So he willingly joined his captors in highjacking the government and using the GOP hold on the House as a cudgel to beat up Obama and everybody else in sight.  I am not convinced he had any more room for political maneuver than Obama did.

This is a morally bankrupt party that holds no concerns whatsoever except for serving the wealthiest one percent of the country (and, yes, opposing abortion clinics).  That’s about it as far as I can tell. And I think Michelle Bachmann would be the nominee that best embodies the current soul of the GOP.

A special  dose of onus must be reserved for the MSM which, in my view, has performed as miserably during this crisis as any time in recent history including during its squalid performance during the run up to the war in Iraq.  The simple fact is that the media never reported the underlying story i.e. that this was a stick-up by the Republican Party which purposely confused two separate issues. This story was consistently reported as some sort of tennis match between the two parties with detailed descriptions of every lob, serve and spin of the ball. Nice color. No substance.  I come out of this episode with the firm desire that more networks and newspapers close down as we will be missing nothing when they do.

A few words about the American people:  They are certainly the hapless victims in this horror show.  But, heaven knows, they are an easy mark.  Try and raise the retirement age by 2 years or cut medical services by 3% in France or Italy and all I have to say is, stand back!  Many have tried and many have died. Within hours this is a general strike with 5 million citizens in the streets.

I have read of NO popular mobilizations to defend our own social welfare programs in these last few months.

Use them or lose them.

We are all losing something this week. Maybe not as much as some feared — or in perverse ways hoped for.  But we’re most definitely on the slippery slope.

Well, nostalgic Marxist-Leninists have nothing on conservative ideological zealots who have now locked in the term of “job creator” to replace the more accurate terms of  “the filthy rich.”  Turn on the tube or the radio and you can now hear this obscene term bandied about dozens of times a day and always in the same context: “Oh, heavens, we can’t tax the Job Creators!”

The Job Creators? Here I thought the big economic lesson we were taught by the Ginrichoids and Reaganites over the last three decades is that only pussy liberals worry about maintaining jobs and that Real Men, the Smart and Hairy Alpha CEO’s, had as their principal task defending the stockholders.  Isn’t that what the last 30 years of globalization, de-industrialization and mergers and acquisitions have as their underlying basis?

Weren’t the really admired CEO’s were those who knew how to takeover, dismantle and strip the competition?  Wasn’t it some sort of great honor when this or that corporate management “shed” excess jobs and pushed up stock prices?  Isn’t it the corporate class that has fought tooth and nail to oppose minimum wage increases for all those jobs they supposedly created?  Where have all these “job creators” been as literally millions of middle-class jobs got exported (by them) overseas?

You have got to be kidding. Not to go all Marxist on you, but value in commodities is actually created by the labor invested in them, not by the fluid movement of capital.  If private sector chieftans are now to be crowned as “job creators” in the public discourse, shouldn’t ordinary workers now be recognized as “wealth creators?”  How do conservatives THINK the wealthy get rich in the first place? Adam Smith understood this long before Karl Marx. They get rich by extracting the value produced by the labor of others….that’s what we call profit (and/or exploitation).

Let’s toss in some ad hominem while we’re at it.  I have interviewed a LOT of corporate managers and bigwigs in my life and I have met  almost none whose first priority is creating jobs. Their first priority is usually getting richer and usually by any means necessary. The most successful are disproportionately highly-driven, ambitious, greedy and rather ruthless ego-maniacs.

One wonderful case study of a once hallowed “Job Creator” is found in John Ronson’s book, “The Psycopath Test.” Check out this excerpt from a recent NPR review of the book.

Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Ronson is the author of a new book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The titular test is called the PCL-R. Invented by Hare, it’s a checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths: things like glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, manipulative behavior and lack of remorse.

Picture a psychopath and you might think of Norman Bates. But Ronson says successful businessmen can also score high on the checklist. While researching his book, Ronson visited the Florida home of Al Dunlap — known as “Chainsaw Al” — who as CEO of appliance maker Sunbeam was notorious for his gleeful fondness for firing people and shutting down factories.

“So I turned up at his house, and it was full of sculptures of predatory animals,” Ronson says. “And he immediately started to talk about how he believed in the predatory spirit, which was word for word what Bob Hare writes about in the checklist: Look out for their belief in the predatory spirit.”

But Dunlap managed to turn the psychopath test on its head, Ronson says.

“He admitted to many, many items on the checklist, but redefined them as leadership positives,” he says. “So ‘manipulation’ was another way of saying ‘leadership.’ ‘Grandiose sense of self worth’ — which would have been a hard one for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself — was, you know, ‘You’ve got to like yourself if you’re going to be a success.’”

Job Creator! Get that man a tax break.

P.S. Is it an accident that America’s most iconic “Job Creator” has burnished his fame by shouting “You’re Fired!” not “You’re Hired!”?

Problem is, that dang “View From Nowhere,” as Jay Rosen puts it, pollutes the whole damn thing.

I readily concede Thrush’s rather obvious point i.e. that both Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this event to their respective benefit. There MIGHT even be a symmetry to who is spinning more (though I seriously doubt it).  So to read Thrush’s piece you are being asked to conclude that this is basically some sort of partisan, political fight for electoral advantage and that because both sides are more or less or equally dishonest there is NO moral dimension to the fight.

To assert otherwise, in the asinine logic of assumed impartiality and the hypocritical ethic of “neutrality,” might mean that Rush would actually tell you what is really happening and who is and who is not morally culpable.

Legislation often has a moral or –  more often– an immoral foundational basis. Every great legislative battle is infused with justice or injustice. Take two extremes as examples. The Civil Rights Act and the vote to authorize war in Iraq.  In both cases, as true in the fight  over default, both parties took advantage of these measures in whichever ways that could for partisan ends.  That did not mean that passage of the Civil Rights Act was a great moment of justice and, likewise, the authorization for war in Iraq was a great moment of national hubris and shame.

The default issue has a sharp moral dimension — one completely missing from Thrush’s sum-up of myths versus realities. He simply ignores the greatest reality of them all.

The entire nation is being held hostage by a group of Tea Party-driven know-nothings who seem more than willing to walk us all off the cliff. Period.

That reality trumps all the other he said/she saids that pepper the Politico piece.

Raising the debt ceiling has never been the matter of any debate and has been an automatic necessity that has been quietly carried out scores of times in recent history.  The Republican Right, this time around, has seized on the issue, strapping dynamite onto their chests, and threatening to push the button if benefits to to the poor are not cut and handouts to the wealthiest are somehow curtailed. Sorry, but this a textbook example of gross immorality.

This is not to give Obama and the Democrats a blank check to play politics. But, I think we sort of expect that from both sides at every possible moment.

We need to be focused on the underlying issue. And that issue is that if the Republicans don’t act with some modicum of decency and common sense by sometime Sunday afternoon, we will see the Asian markets open with a very loud boom.