Conspiracies, Japan's "recession," voting fraud and other nonsense

This rather moving essay by an immigrant engineer tells of her shock - at first - over something rather simple.  She had seen American cars, houses and streets on TV and in films -- (along with hugely exaggerated violence).  But what stunned her most, apparently, was the reliability of infrastructure.  Like how smoothly citizens rely on the Postal Service, taking for granted and even maligning what she found miraculous. And libraries. And utilities and streets and all the gracious-relaxed assumptions that we hold, that stuff will just work.

"Almost every aspect of the most innovative parts of the United States, from cutting-edge medical research to its technology scene, thrives on publicly funded infrastructure. The post office is struggling these days, in some ways because of how much people rely on the web to do much of what they used to turn to the post office for. But the Internet is a testament to infrastructure, too: It exists partly because the National Science Foundation funded much of the research that makes it possible. Even some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Google, got a start from N.S.F.-funded research.  Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other."

You'd expect this to resonate with me.  It is there on the pages of The Postman, how most of us would not respond to a collapse of civilization the way masses are depicted doing, in Hollywood fluff.  (Especially the latest, wretchedly-stupid, Max Max flick.) Rather, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A Paradise Built in Hell, millions of us would have one priority we would put ahead of our own lives. 

On a more mundane level, I have spoken often of the "miracle of the four-way stop sign intersection" -- how just standing there (at least in California) leaves you in awe after a short while, at the stunning ability and courtesy and blithely unaware citizenship that 99% of drivers display, with scarcely a thought.

Civilization. Preserving it. Saving it and bringing it back. Confidently defending it from those who deny it's even possible.

Let's do that, this year.

==  Conspiracy Theories – the great uniter of crazed left and right ==

Both ends of the political spectrum feature righteously angry personalities who indulge in demonization that extends into conspiracy territory.  I've elsewhere dealt with left wing fantasies, like “Loose Change” mania about the 9/11 attacks. But I spend less time there because (1) a very small number of their paranoid ravings do have some basis in fact… and (2) because the far-wingnuts of the left have almost zero influence at national or state levels of the Democratic Party, and hence no access to state power.

In sharp contrast, the litany of stunning, schizo-level conspiracies credited on the American right, by majorities of GOP voters, as well as most candidates and media pundits, is simply appalling.  From “birthers” who have never come up with even a hypothesis why Ann Dunham would have traveled (without leaving a trace) to Kenya to give birth, while her parents conspired to put a false birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser….  

… to ACORN, Benghazi and Planned Parenthood… all the way back to Bircher screeches about flouridation, DDT and Dwight Eisenhower being an agent of the Kremlin.  This article – while one-sided – gives an excellent run-down on a frenzied history of what, alas, is often the conservative mainstream.  

Which I deem a tragedy!  Indeed, there are versions of American conservatism that very much belong at the negotiating table of U.S. political process, as we try to find ethical and practical ways to make a better society for all.  I know some conservatives who are right-on as often as anyone I know… except for their myopia on one issue. Despite having all withdrawn in disgust from the Republican Party, most refuse to admit just how crazy the undead elephant has become.  Not one of them has admitted the obvious -- that it is time for sane conservatives to stand up and loudly rebel against the hijackers of their movement.

This article is, as I said, somewhat biased. Its excoriation of NAFTA, for example, leaves out the way NAFTA has bootstrapped Mexico toward a rapidly enlarging urban middle class, which ought to be the number one U.S. foreign policy objective, for a myriad overwhelming reasons.   (And it is working, spectacularly as the Mexican middle class rises and net immigration to the US has turned negative.)

Strangely, the very worst rightwing nut-theories are left out… e.g. the long chain of pyrotechnic campaigns against science, from “cars don’t cause smog” and “tobacco is wholesome” and "marijuana makes you go kill your loved ones,"all the way to climate denialism. That reflex - to obey oligarchs seeking short term profit - has led and will lead directly to millions upon millions of deaths.  The GOP’s deliberate sabotaging of science R&D, including banishment of Congress's own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), can only be explained either by insanity or else outright treason.

Read it.You’ll come away stunned and appalled… and better armed to deal with your crazy uncle.

== What's actually up with Japan? ==

A book by my colleague Scott Foster – Stealth Japan - "shatters the myth that Japan is a 'basket case' that has fallen hopelessly behind in the digital world of the 21st Century and makes a strong case that Japan may in fact have created the most successful economy and society in the world today."  

By offshoring much of their production and paperwork, Japanese corporations have been able to effectively keep two sets of books. In one set, shown to the world, the nation has been in recession for two decades. Yet, Japanese citizens easily afford every toy and gadget, innovation continues and social unrest is nil. Read Scott’s fascinating revelations about Japan’s second set of books.

== Voter ID laws and other cheating ==

And now this: "A federal appeals court unanimously struck down a voter ID law in Texas, saying it violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act to discriminate against minority voters." 


Let's be clear.  I do not mind gradually ramping up voter ID requirements. The Left is wrong to oppose them in principle, over reasonable time. 
No, the test of sincerity is whether the state eases-in such laws and provides all the help voters need, in order to comply with a new, state-imposed burden. Have new voter-ID requirements been accompanied by state assistance for poor folks, women, minorities etc to get the needed ID?  Not only for voting but to help them in many other aspects of life?


The answer is... no.  Hypocritically, these states have funded ZERO $ to this.  Zero, in every single case. Not even token or figleaf efforts. 
 Funny how Republicans scream over government imposing new regulatory burdens on rich oligarchs and corperations. Goppers regularly demand appropriations for Compliance Assistance to corporations, yet fund not a penny to help poor Americans retain their vote.

This is hypocrisy of staggering dimensions. Failure to allocate compliance assistance proves their aim was never fair voting. Pure and simple, they are cheaters.  Gerrymandering cheating-lying cheaters.  See it explained here. As for Democrats?  Their inability to parse this and ever mention compliance assistance as the smoking gun? That failure, clearly, convicts them of a different sin.  

Stupidity.

== Obama the "feckless" ==

Yep, that's the latest buzz word.  Feckless. And cowardly.  Unable even to maintain the old "socialist" malarkey with a straight face, even on Fox, they have switched to calling a wimp the guy they earlier accused of being about to black-helicopter America with Leninist martial law.

Some memes only spread through repetition. The “Obama is a wimp compared to Putin” narrative is spewed so relentlessly by Fox & comrades that is has become as accepted as breathing, not only on the right but also on the left.  Against such a tsunami of repetitive incantation-propaganda, I can only reiterate: “To be clear, the Russians themselves are not as stupid as Fox commentators. They do not ignore the devastating setback in Ukraine." 

They deem that blow to have been a hugely aggressive and successful assault on Russian interests by Barack Obama to have been vastly, vastly more significant that Putin's subsequent nibble-back of Crimea. Putin and the Russian media relentlessly portray him as anything but the wimp he is depicted in right wing American press.  They view him as the "most aggressive and successful opponent they have faced, since Reagan.”

The incredible density of our media at failing to report this is so obtuse that Obama was forced - in his recent Stat of the Union Speech - to say what should never have been necessary for a president to say.  To be the one to remind his critics that this "feckless" commander in chief killed... Osama.... bin... Laden.

And our service men and women are dying at a rate one twentieth the average during either Bush Administration.  And the readiness levels of our military units are back at Clinton era levels -- near 100% -- instead of the ZERO percent for major marine and Army units that Clinton and Obama inherited from Bushes.  Sincere conservatives would notice this stuff.

To be clear, what did the GOP do, back when they controlled every single U.S. lever of power?  From 2001 through 2007, they had locks in the White House, Congress, the bureaucracy and the Courts. So what did they do with all that power?  Did they pass immigration or health reform? (Even versions based on conservative values?) Did they balance the budget or bring entitlements under control? (Deals were on the table and ready, but Fox shrugged them aside.) 

Did they even do a thing to make abortions harder to get? Or seal the borders? Or increase aid to Israel?  None of those things.  In fact, those Congresses are documented as the laziest in the history of the republic, meeting the fewest days, holding the fewest hearings, issuing the fewest subpoenas, passing the fewest bills… despite continuing rhetoric and anger, they did nothing to decrease the size of government.

Their only assertive efforts were (1) Bushite wars that bankrupted us and (2) tax favors for the super-rich. Then more, then more for oil and coal, then more for Wall Street.

Please.  If you are a sincere conservative or libertarian, you should be meeting and conspiring to rebel against the Murdochian-Saudi hijacking of your movements.  The rise of Trump and Cruz shows that the conservative masses know something is wrong with those oligarchs and their lies. But they are being given no alternative by real adults.