endorse this!

Check out Rude Pundit's endorsement of Kerry for a fairand balanced view of the man and his real record. It won't be over on November 2. Democracy depends upon the willingness of its citizens to dissent from all official party lines!

All those sanctimonious academics who are trying to cover all their bases while kissing everybody's ass at once in order to prove how non-violent and Other-loving and trauma-sensitized you are, watch out. You''ve prized identity and recognition over work and rights and that has got to change. And I'm going to keep reminding you of this. In terms of scholarship, you misuse theory and ignore history.

the anecdotal evidence

I'm very homesick right now--looking at the images of Kerry in the Mid-West against those broad pale skies and the leafless trees makes me pine for cooler weather. We had highs of 85 degrees in Tainan County today. They call it Autumn here, but it's not the season I know.

From the emails I've gotten from far-flung friends in Florida (who have voted already and are pounding the pavement) and Minnesota (on the GOTV trail and at the Kerry rallies), and from my obsessive prowling on the blogs, I'm getting the distinct feeling that s participatory democracy has taken on new life and that Americans are mobilized to vote in order to protest the present regime in numbers and intensity that will take everyone in the Mainstream Media by surprise.

I think the results on Tuesday will be shocking. The Mainstream Media is pretending to report right now on the campaigns, but I think that the result of the GOTV campaigns are revitalizing our investment in the democratic process.

diversity in the workplace part III: supersize me!

A true story

Once upon a time, I worked at a University in a cold, cold land on a storied river. A bad Dean was replaced by a good Dean, beginning a time of hopefulness and expansion in the College of Liberal Arts, a sprawling unruly division of the University where the most highly ranked department was Psychology. The Dean seemed ambitious and even sympathetic to the demands of his professors, his subjects. Among the initiatives spawned under his reign was the Humanities Institute, the Center for German and European Studies. Increasingly, however, it became clear that the way in which this University as most Universities are governed is this: at the lowest levels, the demand for transparency and accountability is the most stringent, and breaches of democratic process and bureaucratic procedure the most stringently punished.

(We learned this from corporate America; CEO's could order $60,000 porcelain umbrella stands, but woe to the secretary who took an extra sick day, that could be cause for discipline.)

It became more and more evident that the Dean treated his faculty like prize pigs at the State Fair, parading us before Chancellors and parents. Those of whom won the biggest grants and fattened the coffers of the University were granted the places of honor at his side. Those of us who seemed the most to resemble him in facial hair and general air of bureaucratic self-complacency were promoted to positions of power and influence. Mustaches were in. Those of us who complained, who were incapable of growing facial hair, who had a different idea of faculty sovereignty were increasingly marginalized.

He surrounded himself with pale and chubby yes-men and the token minority female associate dean, his own Condoleeza Rice, but in this case she was put in charge of classrooms or something like that.

His rigidity and his lack of appreciation for his faculty was in turn reproduced by his faculty and influenced the way in which people treated each other with the utmost contempt. Like victims of abuse, we abused each other, seeing in our colleague's relative powerlessness and delusions of grandiosity uncomfortable expressions of our own abjection. As under any totalitarian state where dissent is ignored or punished, the victim of abuse was invariably blamed for being too "uppity" like a house Negro on the plantation of the ante-bellum South. The most amazing thing about this system was that mutual censure was the most effective form of top down control. We were like eunuchs at the court of a particularly brutal emperor -- filled with intrigue and ready to accuse the least liked concubine of treachery at any moment -- conformity was the very elixir of our existence.

Point of fact was the way in which the Dean handled the Directorship of the Humanities Institute, to which, at the date of writing he has yet to name an official director, preferring to keep it under the stewardship of an acting director, promoted from the office manager, a perfectly anodyne and nice fellow who has utterly no authority. The former Director resigned because of workload issues and conflicts with the Dean. Those pesky professors! The Director before that refused a second term.

Gradually, we began to realize that we were all totally instrumentalized at different salary levels albeit, in a system in which any kind of autonomy or dissent on the part of a faculty member was seen as insurrection. He responded to our innumerable complaints with the New Age answer, "Thank you for sharing." Code for "I've just erased you from my memory bank." Utterly indifferent to intellectual content or critical evaluation of his faculty and our morale or working conditions, he made it apparent that his decisions were based upon expediency and managerial concerns -- and that there would be nothing like transparency or democracy to legitimize what would be his decisions only.

Suddenly, during a year when I and my husband were both interviewing for jobs at different universities (most of which were more highly ranked than my underfinanced, but ambitious department), he announced that the College of Liberal Arts was about to embark upon SUPER SEARCHES -- for the BEST Humanities Professors in the country. This was code for "We have a budget to compete with NYU and USC to hire 'stars' and instantly raise our fundraising profile to potential donors hot and heavy to get in bed with the already over solicited heavy hitters like who knows? Cornel West? Judith Butler? The famous Andrew Ross? Stephen Greenblatt? Homi Bhaba? Why value your own faculty by giving them more support when you can pump up the salaries of big names.

In the absence of any call for retaining me since I hadn't scored a concrete offer and was therefore a loser in the gladiatorial battle called the Modern Languages Association, I could only assume that I was being left to toil in the shadow of the SUPER professors who would be brought in at many times my pitiful salary. "Am I not Super?" I wanted to ask, but the answer was quite evident in the Dean's demeanor.

With adrenaline flowing through my veins, I railed that I would rather work at McDonald's. At least I would know from the outset that I was going to be treated like dirt and forced to wear double ply polyester.

Weekend Update for the Administrators of the University:

If you want to SUPERSIZE the reputation of the University's College of Liberal Arts, it will take more than a few brand names to change the rank atmosphere of mutual contempt that reigns between professors and the quality of education the students receive.

I have been trying to see in this whole parable an allegory of the disease that eats away at our souls when we work in overmanaged vast bureaucracies with no democratic processes, but much rationalized 'accountability' in the form of paperwork. A newly formed Forum for a Democratic University deserves mention here: forged in the crucible of the clerical workers strike, it forces the issue of democracy in a place where bureaucracy has replaced all other forms of rationale.

In my fantasies. I said to the Dean and his many mustachioed minions, "Supersize This!" pointing to my still polyester free behind as I headed for the nearest door.

culture wars without end

Well, apropos and I have been spitting in the wind with regard to self-interest, or at least we've been preaching to the choir while talking to ourselves.

According to the latest polls, Americans on both left and right are voting squarely against their wallets!

"Lower income whites like Bush's proposal to ban gay marriage but only a quarter believe his policies have been good for the economy. In contrast, affluent whites who have benefitted the most from the Bush tax cuts believe Bush's policies have hurt the economy. In short, far more than in previous years, economic policy is taking a back seat to cultural issues. The real divide seems to be between deeply religious lower income, lower education, voters living in small towns and rural areas who have conservative values on abortion and gay marriage versus higher income, higher education, secular, urban voters who have progressive views on cultural issues."

From electoral vote predictor October 27 --

The racialization of American politics blocks any rational class identification on the part of poor whites. In turn, the economic interests of the plutocracy are well served by its exploitation of lower middle class whites whites, who would rather identify with white than poor, even when it is against their own interests to defund the very public services (public schools and public works) upon which they most depend.

From the LA Times article and poll of October 26, 2004

"For all the Democratic promises to protect the middle class — despite the traditional GOP identification as the party of the rich — Bush runs best among voters clustered around the nation's median income of roughly $43,000 per household, and Kerry is strongest among the least affluent and the most comfortable, the survey finds.

This pattern is vividly illustrated when minority voters, who tend to vote heavily Democratic, are separated from the results. The president dominates among white voters earning from $40,000 to $100,000 a year, winning about three-fifths of that group.

Whites earning $40,000 a year or less split closely between Kerry (46%) and Bush (50%). Among white voters, Kerry leads only among those earning at least $100,000 per year — who prefer him over Bush, 52% to 45%."

didion's take

For more balance on the strange turn of politics in the US, Joan Didion's piece in the NY Review of Books is a nuanced, critical view of the Republican and Democratic conventions and the subsequent media coverage. If Kerry loses or wins, this is one take on the political scene that will resonate for me. In a way, Didion is an anti-blogger -- she is all about the slow take here and I appreciate it.

Two salient points -- Why did everyone agree with Elizabeth Edwards that people hate negativity? I hate it when Democrats try to rise above the fray. Muting any critique of Bush & Co may be seen as a critical tactical mistake.

Second, the 9/11 commission despite its apparent dissension with Bush & Company has offered even greater consolidation of executive power, and thus serves the sitting president's agenda very well. No one seems to have objected to the commission's recommendations for placing the central anti-terrorist intelligence gathering agency under the executive branch.

Didion is suggesting that we have all gone along with the Bush administration's remaking of American government in reaction to 9/11.

But I'm predicting a Kerry win. In fact, I am predicting that Kerry wins Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. Of course there is Florida, whose voters may again be disenfranchised on a massive scale, but the Dems may not need Florida to win, which does not solve the problem of Florida's democratic institutions, but there you have it...

Dick Cheney: X-treme Makeover

Warning: the following material may be offensive to certain readers:

I think I have a psychological read on Dick Cheney: I know what you're thinking -- he has no psychology, but that's just not true. I watched a CNN profile on him the other night and I GOT IT: he was a wild thing who was pussy whipped into submission by Lynne, who forced him to give up the wild life that led to this dwi#1 and dwi#2 to settle down. She gave the guy an ULTIMATUM and he folded and shut down. Lynne is killing him, she is choking the lifeblood out of him. And once he bent over for her, he was ready to submit to others...

Now his form of Adlerian masculine protest is to invade sovereign countries, to prove to some one that he is his OWN man.

Dick, Dick I'm talking to you now! I's not too late. You need an X-treme makeover and you can have your life BACK, the one you were living when you were twenty, when you were working union jobs in Wyoming, when you had a taste of wilder things than Lynne Cheney! Your blue collar sense of inferiority got the best of you and you thought you had to CHANGE to satisfy your GIRLFRIEND. What was that about? There were other girls out there! When I saw those photos on CNN when you were young, and you were HOT! You can still be HOT. You just got scared of your own feral sexuality and signed on the dotted line of matrimonial castration!



When W loses the election, just leave that harpie behind. Your daughter will embrace your new lifestyle. I promise. If she doesn't, I will. Shave your head -- who likes that half tonsure look anyway? Lose the wire frames. Go for something sleeker, more Italian, or even French. Who cares? Go wild! You've got those Halliburton dollars burning a whole in your khakis. Lose the khakis! Flat front, no pleats! Tummy tuck, maybe some botox, not too much, because we like that rugged lived in look in a man.



Your willing submission to bigger males egos (Rumsfeld, Nixon, Bushes I & II) has gone far enough. (I heard that as White House Chief of Staff, you were picking out salt and pepper shakers for Nixon and distributing pillows on Airforce One.) Free your ass, your mind will follow!

The crazy, good looking kid in Cheyenne who was howling at the moon is still in there somewhere. And he's ready to emerge as the ultimate metrosexual! There are SO many babes in and outside of the beltway who would love to take you on and take you home -- after you and Lynne split up of course. It's never too late to start over Dick, because you know what? We're Americans!

Political Parties and the Stock Market

Again and again it's touted as "common wisdom" that along with "Wall Street" voters should prefer a Republican President. Let's not bother, for now, with the gross simplification that pretends Wall Street or common wisdom are easily identified and circumscribed as such. The point is that people are trying to hoodwink you into thinking the Presidential contest is ultimately about delivering cash to your wallet, and what's more: to hoodwink you into believing that somehow a Republican President will make that happen. At least two things are wrong with that: one, you ought to vote your conscience, or consider what you think you and your fellow citizens wish to see put into effect - not according to fear and greed, let alone other base emotions. Second, it's not supported by an evidence, neither in current or recent or proposed policy nor in history, that a Republican would do better for the investor. Let's look a little closer at how that argument pans out.

Every few years, history buffs and Wall Street sages parse a vast amount of market data to study the influence of the four-year Presidential cycle on investments. Following up on my recent post about voting your pocketbook, consider the historical take on who really is better for the stock market - Democrats or Republicans. Monthly values for one bellwether, the S&P 500 index, are available for the entire 20th century. If you tally the nominal gains for each Presidency, you can construe an average nominal return for Republicans vs. Democrats. - First glaring problem with this method: while the Standard and Poor numbers are popular, they do not represent the broadest index one might consider. Second obvious caveat: congressional control is not factored in, although it should be obvious that occupants of even the more empowered governmental position may not be the difference that makes the difference Nevertheless, it is entertaining to break things down into cycles; tech-heads on Wall Street do it all the time, and when I was in finance, I carried such charts on every appointment. Without further ado: here's the gist.

Of the 18 Presidents over the course of the past century, 11 were Republicans and 7 were Democrats - of course the length of their terms differed... but let's not pretend this is rigorous stuff here, okay? What I'm blogging here is this: as I indicated in my earlier post, contrary to wide-spread and false assumptions, the Democrats had the edge, booking a total gain of 66 per cent, versus just under 40 per cent of all Republican presidents together. The biggest increase, as most people remember, occurred under Bill Clinton: over 200 per cent; Calvin Coolidge won Silver in this race across history with 175 per cent during the roaring twenties - another bubble period, as we should always be reminded (he was a Republican, if you want to uphold the fictional continuity of political parties over such a time-span). Hindmost was Herbert Hoover, and his elephantine markets were taken for 71 per cent by the devil of the depression, while donkey Woodrow Wilson entered this spurious history as the second-worst performing President in the S&P 500, losing 27 per cent over his term. So you just cannot believe a Republican is going to be "better for the markets"!

(At this point, in case clients are desperate for a crystal ball, out comes the chart that says uncertainty is good for the market: as long as the markets don't know who is going to tinker from within the Beltway, they're off and running... but that's the ugly specter of market timing... Hey, in case you're trying to read between my HTML: I never ever said the last year of a presidency is better or worse than any others in the cycle, but lots of people argue that it is.)

Now before you want to call this two-way race across a century of numbers a tie, wait just one moment: yes, maybe in the face of the best and worst efforts by policy wonks or technocrats, voodoo economists or faith-based tinkerers, visionaries or retro-reformers, the markets seem to follow their own tune - yet, beyond the playful numerical comparisons, it's always and especially now a good a idea to balance this kind of rear-view mirror pop-analysis with an actual study of market data and their selection and motivation, such as the economically astute After the New Economy by Doug Henwood, or the new (and important in other ways) My First Recession by Geert Lovink.

Beware critiques of Eurocentrism

In Asia critiques of Eurocentrism are made by authoritarian governments in Singapore, Malaysia and China in order to justify the state policy of capitalism without democratization. Eurocentrism is code for democracy and people in Taiwan have a healthy disregard for this epithet because well, people here value their democracy, and they don't seem to have a problem with the fact that as a political system, it was not invented by the Han Chinese.

In academia, a good deal of mystification has been performed in the name of anti-Eurocentric critique. Once a very well-known critic recited a poem in Bengali for ten minutes of a thirty minute talk to an uncomprehending but completely shamed audience of mostly middle class white academics. It was apparent that her busy schedule did not permit her to prepare a proper paper, so she decided to perform her talk by putting pressure on our points of ignorance. Then there was the time a lesser known post-colonialist condemned another academic for his comparison of the ethico-aesthetic position of German Romanticism with the practice and philosophy of yoga. It may indeed have been tendentious and unnecessary of the accused speaker to draw an analogy between German Body Bildung and Vinyasa in an otherwise excellent presentation, but was it really Eurocentric?

In Taiwan, where new democratic institutions are evolving quickly and sometimes painfully, the accusation of Eurocentrism rings especially hollow when it defends an Asian authoritarianism that rejects the values of freedom of speech and freedom of the press as incompatible with Asian identity.

Namaste

reality check

Along with many others, Michael Bérubé blogged the Suskind article in the NY Times on Bush's faith. (I can acknowledge a good thing in the Times when it comes along.) A Bush aide aparently tells Suskind that as a member of the reality based community, he can only sit back and watch as the faith-based community, the true actors of history make realities for Enlightenment skeptics to ponder.

In the midst of reading Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy and after having finished Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, I find the following conclusions unavoidable: the costs of Empire on the domestic economy have undermined working conditions for all working Americans, which means most Americans. Unrelenting globalization, the undermining of public education and the recent Republican plutocrat-favoring politics have left most of famed Middle America so beleaguered that faith is the only thing they have left.

How else to account for the fervor with which so many Americans have embraced an evangelical and apocalyptic Christianity? They may rightfully perceive that their fates on Earth are overdetermined by forces beyond their control and that God may be a better guarantor of some sort of rough justice than our present political system.

More than ever, we need to defend the values of the Enlightenment over the values of Empire and its delusions. Can we be warriors for reason?

CNN's Crossfire gets an F from Jon Stewart

Look at this video of Jon Stewart standing up to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. This is finally making the news: journalists have failed to behave with any amount of integrity is so massive and so damaging to American democracy and public discourse. Academics should get the NY Times' obituary in perspective. Stewart got on CNN's Crossfire and told Begala and Carlson that Americans are hurting because of bad journalism and its complicity with the political spinmeisters. Stewart's plea for authenticity was totally authentic and this threw Tucker Carlson's gear shift out of its normal smartass high-spirited frat boy mode and straight into real nastiness. Carlson told Stewart to be funny and Stewart shot back, "I'm not your monkey." Jon Stewart is a satirist, and he is motivated by a similar outrage with the press that many academics are expressing about the New York Times' treatement of Jacques Derrida.

Basically, Jonathan Kandell the author of the obituary got it hideously wrong about Derrida: he was aiming to please his corporate masters and felt no need to actually do any reporting. The millions of Times readers who know nothing of our world will think that Derrida was some kind of elusive, high-paid "French" philosopher who foisted something bizarre upon unsuspecting Americans called "deconstruction."

Those of us who feel bereaved now feel outraged and betrayed by the world of journalism, but if we focus completely on this particular breach of integrity and honesty, then we are missing the big picture. There are other outraged constituencies who feel as betrayed as we do by the mainstream corporate interests driven press. They are here at pandagon for instance, at Eschaton,and at Talkleft. These bloggers, among others, are distinguished by their vigilance with regard to the behavior of the mainstream press.

I just hope that the professoriate is not blind to the fact that in denouncing the journalism of the Times, they are also joining their voices to a demand, voiced by Stewart "to stop" -- that is "to stop" spreading B.S. as reportage.

I'd love to have a clear cut conspiracy theory about the Times' anti-theoretical, anti-intellectual investments, but I'll restrict myself to speculating more or less irresponsibly that none of Jacques Derrida's books has ever been published with a major advertiser in the Book Review.

On the front page of the Times, Judith Miller published a pack of lies about WMD fed to her by her bestfriend the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi, and she still has her job. So let's keep the Tiimes' failure in perspective.

Our hearts may be aching, but our democracy is ailing. What passes for public discourse is seriously distorted and damaged by witless, compromised journalism. Thank you Jon Stewart for your eloquence on this matter -- thank you for overcoming the format of Crossfire, if only for one night.

ny times derrida obit

A great thinker has passed from our midst and the New York Times in its obituary chooses to cite only his most thoughtless and notorious critics. Not one friend, not one colleague, not one peer is quoted here. Younger academics who are interested in Derrida's work are characterized as craven opportunists. Deconstruction is described as a perversely difficult and flippantly critical take on the classics venerated classics, Sophocles, Plato, etc. In fact, deconstruction makes the case for a radical kind of respect with regard to both reading and writing, a point Jonathan Kandell, the author of the obituary cannot grasp since he cannot muster up the minimal amount of respect for the subject of his own writing. Which misguided editor gave him this assignment?

One might expect something on the order of the Guardian's obit, but that would be asking for too much from that paper, which has been so deeply discredited in so many ways in recent years. It seems, however, that the standards of journalistic integrity have little meaning at that institution.

Sign a letter of protest against the Times' obituary. The obituary focuses entirely on the controversies that marked Derrida's long and distinguished career as a philosopher and teacher. He taught so many of us to worry, to think, to read, to reason, to write. Kandell actually attempts to diminish Derrida's achievements by insisting on the impossibility of defining deconstruction. MANY other papers such as the LA Times were able to take a fair measure of the thinker and the man.

Never has the need for journalists and newspapers of honesty and integrity been so urgent; never has the Times' failure been felt so bitterly by those of us who hoped for a different, less acidly partisan attitude. Did Kandell want to suck up to Kakutani?

Derrida Dead

Jacques Derrida died at a Paris hospital of pancreatic cancer; he was 74.

administered life

Against the backdrop of the administered life, or the life of administration, everyone imagines herself inimitable. The more bureaucracies, corporations and schools treat us as if we were entirely interchangeable, the harder the American Culture Industry sells us its brand of individualism. In the publishing industry, writing about oneself has become entirely reified as “journaling” (a noun become gerundive verb like “parenting” that describes the complete colonization and objectification of these of activities by the advice industry). Everyone’s story is a unique narrative of rugged individualism, of sins redeemed, of innocence molested, of genius unrecognized and courage unspoken. (Parenting.com and Parenting magazine seem to be financially viable: you can find some advice next to lots of advertising. But Personal Journaling, a magazine -- yes it's true -- is on "hiatus": they must be still looking for their market niche.)

Multinational publishing houses market the spectacle of exhibitionism and confession as “life writing” in order to destroy experience as such. Witness only the latest in such literary projects cum marketing gambits as Toni Bentley’s The Surrender, (a sort of Anal Sex in the City). I happened upon it on Roger Ailes's blog. Bentley's book is an autobiographical account of this former New York City Ballet dancer's romance with taking it up there where the sun don’t shine. Maybe Toni Bentley could take over at Personal Journaling and refocus the magazine on lubricants. Advice! Advertising! Anality!

Thinking of voting your wallet? Think again...

A lot of eminently reasonable people have been reminding you, haven't they, that in this raging election, with its military themes spilling over into the campaign and media metaphors ( - "the ground war to register voters" - and other unthinking babble), it really comes down to one thing: it's still the economy, stupid! Economists say if Bush keeps unemployment and inflation in check, he will be re-elected. And while this insight, such as it is, is neither new nor compelling, it does keep providing an angle on current events as we hurtle towards due deliverance.

Certainly politicians are too easily blamed for a stalling economy, and too eagerly take credit for well-performing markets. While politicians have historically proven all too able to exert their influence through regulation, taxation, jawboning... the facts remain: interest rates are set by non-elected administrators, financial institutions are hardly ever (only in extremis) regulated by representatives of the people (some people might remember President Clinton cursing the "bunch of fucking bond traders" he had to keep giving in to in matters of international trade etc), and it is we the people who are the economy.

However, an important perspective is the inverse: how does Wall Street like this or that candidate? The assumption generally remains that despite some centimillionaire Democrats here and there, the mainstream of the investor class likes Republicans. Polls of fund managers and traders tend to indicate an overwhelming majority supporting President Bush; banks and funds show their allegiance with the checkbooks. No doubt the main reason for this is the tax policy of the current administration, favoring the rich (although increasing the federal deficit - in flagrant contradiction of long-standing Republican principle...)

Nevertheless, historically the average gain for equity markets under Republican presidents is 3.7%, while it has been 10.6% on average with a Democrat in the White House. Republican Presidents ruled over the three great bear markets of the century, and half of them left the stock markets lower than when they took office. And while Republicans love to extol the virtues of small government as a boon to investment, the current administration allowed federal spending to rise almost by a third! "Hands off regulation" - a staid Republican motto - was ignored in favor of new steel tariffs and higher farm subsidies. NEW STEEL TARIFFS! HIGHER FARM SUBSIDIES!

On the other hand, not all commonplace notions have been thrown out (yet). If you're looking over the predictions issued by Wall Streeters, it seems most would expect Kerry-Edwards to be tougher on pharmaceuticals than Bush-Cheney; defense stocks have been buoyed by the Iraq and Afghanistan engagements, which may or may not be scaled back if the White House changes hands. This kind of knee-jerk, "Farmer's Almanac" style horizon of expectations is undeterred by anything like experience, plain facts, or widely available stump speech quotes... Common sense, as wrong as ever, continues to dominate. And as long as enough people believe Republicans are for small government, reducing federal debt, and eliminating subsidies and trade restrictions - and as long as enough people go on to believe Democrats were really all raised in France by homosexual couples - this upcoming election will succeed in distracting you all from what is going on.

self-interest is baaahd --mkay?

On Michael Bérubé's blog recently, there was a heated debate on Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?. Although there was a great deal
of disagreement about Frank, everyone seemed to think that it is indeed deplorable that Republicans have hypnotized millions and millions of Americans into believing that to vote with the elephant is to vote for their own self-interest. Frank demonstrates that sad untruth of this for his home state of Kansas where Great Plains farmers and down-sized workers pull the lever for the party that is bent on promoting the economic interests of a cynical plutocracy by eliminating the estate tax and foiling any serious discussion of national health care.

But here's the rub, it may work as a temporary salve to convince the red states that voting blue is in fact in their selfinterest, but self-interest IS the whole damned problem. "Self-interest" is a manufactured value: its apotheosis as rugged individualism is a spectacle that Hollywood narrative and tabloid newspapers have been peddling to those of us least in charge of our lives, least capable of laying claim to anything resembling autonomy -- the workers, the wage slaves, the paper pushers, the majority of Americans who live form paycheck to paycheck.

It was "self-interest" that supposedly crushed the collective dreams of Communism like locusts under the heel of a lizard skin cowboy boot. (Reality check -- Soviet style Communism killed itself.)

Self-interest is about a complete denial of the social link that weaves us into communities, dependencies and collectives whether we like it or not. The opposite of self-interest is not self-sacrifice, which is just another face of heroic, Christianized individualism exalting itself in a narrative of mortifications of the flesh (the appeal of self-sacrifice has worn a bit thin in the Western World even as it has gained cachet elsewhere).

The bourgeoisie has created a new International cartel of self-interest designed to promote and export its corrupted ethics, its contempt for critical thinking, its masochistic submission to the brand name, its wholesale acceptance of what is given and its anxiety-ridden and phobic parenting techniques to all the corners of the globe.