There is no 'New Deal' in today's America - Financial Times It's over,
If a crisis on the scale of 1929-32 strikes the US now, the country would not find an FDR with a New Deal programme to run against the Republican's Herbert Hoover.
Billmon writes:
"The fact is that the country didn't find an FDR ready with a New Deal program when the Great Depression hit -- he and his brain trust basically made it up on the fly. Roosevelt's initial policy was, of all things, to try to balance the budget (Rubinomics has deep roots in the Democratic Party) It was only after it became obvious that that wasn't working that the New Dealers started groping towards a Keynesian reflation program.
My point is that it's not surprising the system isn't addressing the "big issues" -- the system NEVER addresses the big issues, until there's a crisis. The real question is whether it still has the flexibility and dynamism to change quickly after the crisis hits. But the aftermath of 9/11 suggests the news is bad on that front, too. The habits of empire (create your own reality, ignore anything that doesn't fit in that reality and rely on size, power and inertia to carry you through) are too deeply engrained now."
"What's the matter with Bush?" Which is a moment I've both been waiting for and kind of dreading for a whle now. These people aren't going to move to the left just because their idol has been revealed as just another GOP corporate whore.
There's a big, amorphous movement out there -- the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" movement. It's always been there, but since 9/11 the more ideologically conservative elements in it have been lined up behind Bush. Now they're falling out. If the shit hits the fan -- the kind of shit Anatol Lieven was talking about in that FT piece -- the pieces are all going to be in place for the rise of an angry, right-leaning populist third party -- like Perot's Reform Party, but with much higher wing nut content.
That could be good -- if it splits the Republican base and allows the Dems to win with a plurality, as in '92. But an angry, right-wing protest party that's big enough to play the role of spoiler (even if it's not big enough to win power directly) can be a dangerous thing in a bourgeoise democracy. Just ask the Germans.
Enter: The New Merika
America has reach the backside of the event horizon of organised, institutionalised corruption and fraud on every level. Where protection rackets, embezzlement, larceny, confiscation, entrapment, misappropriation, and rico crimes, as well as murder have become the norm; by bullies, fraudsters, pervert class elites, politicians with their sykophants*, lobbys, lawyers of the Kelptomania class who run everything. A litigation nation where truth is treason, justice is a mockery, and liberty is for sale to the highest bidder, where action of the State, arising from suspicion and not from proof, has degenerated into the satisfaction of vendettas by a "coin-operated congress", a "blue-blooded-aristocratic Senate" and finally, a power hungry blood thirsty executive branch- a general system of tyranny, all in the name of "public safety."
The general public means nothing to them, we have been and are being, carved out like a pumpkin, the seeds spit in our faces, while they laugh at our poverty. "The essential political choice is the same as it always was: "freedom or security" nor, is the blame entirely with the warmongers, plutocrats, and demagogues.
If a people permit exploitation and regimentation in any name they deserve their slavery. The law has always been perverted to serve the "haves" and not the "haves-not", only not always as heavy handed as it is now. We have made progress in the recent past with "the New Deal", labor unions, civil rights, and the constitution. Only within the last few decades have the ruling elites pushed back, with their hatred of liberal democracy. What once existied in ancient Athens - now hold sway in America and Britain , (it's transatlantic and trans-national now ) where powerful and corrupt individuals, organizations and corporations are routinely using threats of vexatious and malicious litigation to bully and oppress ordinary innocent and working class people.
Coercion seems to be covering-up greater crimes committed by these individuals / organizations. Their corrupt misuse of Law takes the form of restraint of trade and prevention of free speech, eminent domain, tax cuts for the top 1%, hidden fiat/poll-taxes, money laundering in off shore bankings and usury interests and loans. All nothing more than hypocrisy, hiding behind law.
Take for instance, What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11. Nor, does it want to know. I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other examples but make no mistake, "the Class War" has shifted and started a dramatic new phase of Supernova proportions with The Rise of Rove's Republic. And the one thing that todays "New America" has in common is the elite stranglehold on Politics, medicine, law, policing, media, bureaucracy etc. where, they are all "self-regulating". Further, and not so coincidentally, all these 'trades' tend, more or less, to control their own incomes at the top levels. [i.e. the fat cats decide their own].
Saudade
The Portuguese word "saudade", loosely translated,denotes "longing", "melancholy", or "nostalgia." In the context of Portuguese, however, the term connotes a meaning that is irrevocably lost in translation. In his book In Portugal of 1912, A.F.G Bell makes a few disquisitional remarks on the meaning of "saudade" given its intended context:
"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."
Whereas a decontextualized reading of the "saudade" insinuates a rather dreary and destitute nostalgia for an impossible object, Bell's recontextualization posits saudade's meaning as a nostalgic yearning for an impossible object, only slightly tinged with the hues of melancholia.
Finally, Saudade is something you feel about somebody or a special place. Maybe it is some kind ill erotographomania I get on bourbon filled lonely nights, that pains me to watch as my ideals of this country becomes what I fear. It is sad when we lose our illusions. The bottom drops out and leaves us disenchanted. When German movie director Wim Wenders wrote of America, in that, "America" always means two things: a country, geographically, the USA, and an idea of that country which goes with it. [The] "American Dream", then, is a dream of a country in a different country that is located where the dream takes place... "I want to be in America", the Jets sing, in that famous song from West Side Story. They are in America already and yet still wanting to get there. (Wim Wenders 1989, quoted in Morley 96, p. 94)., it make me want to weep. The dark night of the soul or chapel perilous, as it's sometimes know as, shouldn't be something one gets stuck in. The great W.H. Auden said "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which we all have been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another- in order that life come a serious matter." "My American" now reads as a death certificate. It presents itself now as a cautionary tale, as a list of ingredients in a witches' brew, it reads as a coroner's report, or a message on a sandwich-board worn by a wild-eyed man who states, "The end of the world is at hand." It is a hoarse voice in the dark that croaks, "Beware . . . beware . . . beware."
Worse to come, so says Dante.
*SYKOPHANCY - "Generally, sykophancy has been viewed as an "inevitable disease" that plagued a society "where the chances of perverting justice were so numerous because of the character of the courts" (Lofberg 1917, 10).