Political Theatre category archive

Axel Caballero, writing in the Guardian, reports on Alabama’s moves to reinstitute slavery and forced labor:

So, here is how it goes. First, the state passes a harsh immigration law. Then, it detains large numbers of immigrants. Third, private prisons (LCS, CCA, GEO) receive fresh inmates. And finally, the artificially created labor shortage is supplied by the new inmates. Does this sound like modern-day slavery to anyone?

Dick Polman considers lure of Herman Cain and find his appeal to simple:

. . . The tea partyers yearn for simple answers, and Cain’s “9-9-9” catechism fits the bill. How easy it all sounds, via endless repetition: Scrap the current federal tax code. Replace it with a 9 percent income tax, a 9 percent business tax, and a 9 percent national sales tax. Better yet, Cain didn’t get the idea from some smarty-pants, fat-resume Ivy League economist in evil Washington, D.C.; quite the contrary, he got the idea from an investment adviser who works for Wells Fargo in Pepper Pike, Ohio, out there in real America. The whole tableau oozes populism.

(snip)

The truth, as already ferreted out by most economists, is that Cain’s 9-9-9 would impose new tax burdens on low-income and middle-income Americans. Which is why a number of prominent conservative organs – including FreedomWorks, the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform (home of Grover Norquist’s never-raise-taxes pledge), and the Wall Street Journal editorial board – have already begun taking their whacks at it.

Matthew 6:5.

Via Balloon Juice.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., considers Occupy Wall Street. A nugget:

Some observers dismiss the protests as “street theater,” an easy charge, given the loopy eccentrics who have been attracted to the movement like iron shavings to electromagnets. On the other hand, much of the antiwar movement, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement (rest in peace, Fred Shuttlesworth) also was street theater, and those seem to have turned out fairly well.

Nothing wrong with street theatre. It gets the attention of the audience.

CLick for a larger image.

In a related story, Shaun Mullen considers Occupy Wall Street. A nugget:

Cantor (R, Tool–ed.) has joined the chorus in denouncing the Occupy Wall Street “mobs” that have taken over Zuccotti Park in Manhattan and city halls and malls elsewhere, accusing them of . . . are you ready for this? Class warfare.

The House majority leader symbolizes more than any other Republican the moral rot at the heart of today’s GOP.

President Obama has sent up to Capitol Hill a jobs creation bill that by any measure is modest but at least begins to address the major reason that the aftereffects of the Bush Recession linger, but Cantor says he won’t even allow the bill to come up for a vote.

Main Street is in deep distress, Wall Street is sipping the champagne of record profits and it still is more important to Cantor and his ilk to be obstructionist than actually help the president govern, a tactical decision that they will come to regret next November 6 when the votes are counted.

This is because while there is anger out there toward Obama, the contrast between the party’s stances on helping the middle class, not to mention the poor, elderly and infirm, could not be more striking, and while a lot of us are pissed off even more of us have retained some perspective. And compassion.

It’s rambling, and it’s funny; The bit on the voter fraud fraud is definitely worth a listen–it lasts for the first two minutes or so:

Jennifer Abel asks the question:

So: if the United States claims the right to use robotic attack drones to kill American citizens in foreign countries, does that mean we’ll say nothing when China inevitably uses drones to kill dissidents who have gone into exile?

Follow the link for her answer.

According to the complaint, Abbassi “was readily identifiable as Muslim by what she wore: a long shirt, pants, sweater and hijab, or Islamic headscarf.” She was detained at security for a second screening, but was allowed to board.

When boarding, Abbassi says she was on the phone with a Verizon representative in order to activate her smartphone. When the plane was getting ready to depart, Abbassi alleges she told the representative “I’ve got to go.”

Soon after, there was an announcement that an “administrative delay” would hold up the flight, at which point a TSA agent came on board and asked Abbassi to get off.

TSA took her off the plane, then cleared her to travel, but the pilot refused her admittance, claiming the crew was not “comfortable” with her on board.

And bigotry flew the skies.

Jon Stewart examines the coverage of Occupy Wall Street vs. the coverage of Teabaggery.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awsome Blog.

Ten years in Afghanistan and what have we gained?

Tom Engelhardt worries that unrestricted use of drone warfare, with the accompanying certainty of killing innocent persons, is nearing. A nugget:

In reality, it’s not the drones, but our leaders who are remarkably constrained. Out of permanent war and terrorism, they have built a house with no doors and no exits. It’s easy enough to imagine them as beleaguered masters of the universe atop the globe’s military superpower, but in terms of what they can actually do, it would be more practical to think of them as so many drones, piloted by others. In truth, our present leaders, or rather managers, are small people operating on autopilot in a big-machine world.

As they definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse – like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals – the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes. It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course, via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky. The appeal is obvious: the cost (in US lives) is low; in the case of the drones, non-existent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.

In an increasingly cash-strapped and anxious Washington, it must look like a literal godsend. How could it go wrong?

Of course, that’s a thought you can only hang onto as long as you’re looking down on a planet filled with potential targets scurrying below you. The minute you look up, the minute you leave your joystick and screen behind and begin to imagine yourself on the ground, it’s obvious how things could go so very, very wrong – how, in fact, in Pakistan, to take but one example, they are going so very, very wrong.

Chauncey Devega reads the tea leaves. An excerpt (emphasis in the original):

First, the Tea Party is easily lampooned; However, their songs, folksy misspelled posters, embrace of ignorance as authenticity, and love of costumes are a type of political theater. Consequently–and this is a point that many in the pundit classes and other professional bloviators seem to miss–“the show is the thing.” Reasoned discussions of policy and good governance are made secondary to a sense of belonging. For folks who feel alienated, scared, and “want to take their America back” (from “the blacks, the gays, the atheists, the Socialists, the liberals” etc.) a sense of belonging is a powerful salve for alienation and anomie.

A key point. When the ghouls in the audience at the last three Republican debates howled for murder, death, and hatred of Americans who happen not to be straight, they were marking out the boundaries of their political community. Their cheers were not those of outliers; they were the id of a community that stood silent in complicity and agreement.

Second, as I argued elsewhere, the Tea Party with its hostile faux populism is a cult-like organization whose ethos has infected the Republican Party as a whole. Emotion trumps reason. Faith has been mated with ideology to create a worldview that is immune from critical interrogation and intervention. Heretics are burned at the proverbial stake of Right-wing talk radio and Fox News. And ideological orthodoxy is the prime directive, even if it means destroying the U.S. economy (as was seen during the debt ceiling hostage taking by the Tea Party GOP), or believing in fictions such as cutting the federal budget in a time of the Great Recession will magically create economic growth.

A snippet:

When you look at modern conservatism, these are people who are becoming increasingly immune to facts that dispute their world view. . . . that is really disturbing when you get into areas of public policy because it is leading them to advocate things that are really destructive.

Eric Cantor says no to jobs.

Harsh, but not inaccurate: