Political Kitsch and Economic Crime

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving creep: out of the blue, a month before the elections the airwaves are filled with the stunning revelation that Meg Whitman employed an illegal Latina nanny. ... for nine years. Oh but it gets better. When the Social Security Administration requested she clarify the small matter of a mis-match between name and number. ... Whitman ignored the request ..... for six years. Oh buts it gets even better still.  After requiring the illegal Latina to work unpaid overtime, Whitman fired her without cause the day after she declared her candidacy for California's governship.

But that's just the script. As for the drama, the allegations got read to a phalanx of press cameras by a perfectly coiffed and facial'ed Gloria Aldred in tones of aggrieved and outraged victimhood while The Victim herself, all but dressed in sackloth looked on plaintively and providesdsobbing punctuations to Aldred's delivery. When the complaint was read, Aldred turned to the helpless, illegal, victimized victim and hugged her with emotive solidarity as the victim emoted some more. What next? Aldred standing shoulder to shoulder with Oppressed Nanny on the rush hour subway to Brooklyn? It was enough to out-emote the most contrived and collusive trials ever performed in the Roman Forum.

We did some quick calculations. At 15 hours a week, at $23.00 an hour, 15 months lost wages from unlawful termination comes out to $20,700.00. That's less than peanuts for a $400.00 an hour lawyer like Aldred. So Aldred's accountants must have rustled up a hell of a lot of unpaid overtime to beef up the "compensables".

The whole thing has the unmistakeable air of a political contrivance -- a bloody shirt, a "Grover, Grover, Where's my Pa?" We wonder if Aldred realizes that her act has become political kitsch?

But what is not political kitsch or, more importantly, economic kitsch, is that a woman of Whitman's colossal net worth paid another human being spit in the bucket wages of $23.00 an hour.

Of course, the capitalist answer, is that $23.00 an hour was at least, if not more than, the going market rate. But that is precisely the kind of pseudo justification that makes capitalism so disgusting -- it justifies its conduct by the disparity of income it itself creates. It is truly nauseating.

One would think that a person in Whitman's position would want to display her magnanimity, her ability to be over-flowingly generous. A truly generous spirit would say: I have more money than I know what to do with, so I will at least make sure that anyone who is fortunate enough to work for me gets paid more money than they need. This is what it means to "shower blessings" and just as God has showered blessings on Whitman, it was Whitman's Christian duty to shower blessings on people who made her bed, cut her lawn and washed her floors.

Instead, Whitman sees nothing wrong with a system that generates such incredible disparities of wealth and feels no compunction in behaving as miserly and contemptuously as she can get away with. Marie Antoinette paid more for less.

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Holocaust Newspeak at BBC

In the Shrieking News department, today's BBC headlined that "British Holocaust Denier David Irving has arrived in Poland to lead a tour of sites from the Nazi occupation." The article explains that Irving has written a book containing "the suggestion that Hitler knew nothing the Holocaust until late 1943, and that he never gave the order for the annihilation of Europe's Jews."

Does BBC know the meaning of its own English? Does it know what an indirect object is? To say that someone knew nothing of something is not to say that the something did not exist or that it did not take place.

For some reason David Irving is intent on exculpating Hitler for the project to annihilate european Jews; but that does not equate with denying that the genocide took place.

By now, it is unlikely that the fervid scriveners in the BBC Ministry of Truth are even aware of the origins of their own taboo. In the 1960's and 70's Germany, France and other european countries passed laws outlawing racism, denigrating an ethnic group and denying or minimizing the holocaust. Irving has not "denied" Nazi genocide, he has "minimized" some aspect of it.

The problem with any law that seeks to curtail free speech is that it inevitably paints with too broad a brush. What does it mean to "minimize" Nazi genocide? At bottom, it means to disagree in some manner with someone else's imposed, mandatory account. Turning disgreement or divergence from orthodoxy into a crime is simply demanding, under penalty of law, mute, subservient and unthinking assent to an official truth.

The resultant absurdities are never ending. Of late, Bishop Williamson was also accused of "denying" {beat your breast and gasp here} the holocaust. Shrieked the New York Times: he denied "that six million Jews were gassed...."

Well, no serious historian had ever claimed that six million anybodies were "gassed". Neither is there any agreement on the precise number of people who were gassed, starved, murdered, or left to die of exhaustion or disease -- i.e. in some sense "killed" in the overall Nazi "cleansing" programme for Europe.

Raul Hilberg, the jewish historian who is responsible for coining the current usage of the word "holocaust" and who is accepted by Jews and the German government as the "chief historian" of the episode, estimated the total number of deaths from all causes at 5.4 million. Has Hilberg therefore "minimized the holocaust" by deviating from the Weisenthal Institute's "official" figure of "six million"? Certainly 5.4 is less than 6.0.

Hilberg also stated that estimating the total number of deaths was a very complex and uncertain task. A thinking person can see why. The genocide of european Jews was not a simple act of "murdering" X number of Jews. The genocide took place through multi-level and permuting programmes and policies over a four year period. At some point, in such a convergence of processes, an ultimate result or threshold is reached at which point one could easonably say "taken all together this amounts to the equivalent of a systematic plan". (In legal parlance this would be called a "constructive conspiracy" FN-1 .) But to say that calculating the number of deaths is "complex" is to admit that what is called "the holocaust" is also complex.

But if an historical event is complex that necessarily means that there is no simple truth about it. Rather it involves equivocal or uncertain facts giving rise to different inferences and implications. In short, a complex event is something over which reasonable men can in good faith differ. But not, apparently, when it comes to a select group. To question (as Williamson did) the number of Jews who were gassed, becomes the crime of "minimizing" which was then equated with the criminal taboo of "denying" the Holy Holocaust.

It is foolish and in any case beside the point to exculpate Hitler from knowledge of the genocide carried out on his watch. It is true that there is no Fuhrer Order or document which clearly and unequivocally connects him to a planned extermination of Jews. So what? History is as much a question of knowledgable and probable inference as it is of so called "hard facts". In all events, to argue that Hitler did not know of the extermination "until 1943" and then did nothing to stop it afterwards certainly qualifies as an unworthy quibble. But a foolish quibble is not the same as blasphemy.

When the State, at its own initiative or upon the initiative of a faction, turns foolish quibbles into blasphemies, then we have all lost our freedom of speech and with it our freedom of thought.

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All the Significance Fit To Print

Although it was symbolic, it was historic. For the first time ever, the Roman Pontiff addressed the English Parliament and then, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury and all Christian leaders assembled, held services in Westminster Abbey. The two prelates affirmed the need for Christian evangelization in society and gave visibile evidence of their inescapable unity in Christ. For those in the English speaking world, it was no small matter, since the planting and then rupture of Christianity among the British people has defined who and what we are.

Not for the New York Times:

Mezuzahs left on people's door jams was evidently more significant.

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Social Basics

The Obama Administration announced that it is coming forward with a 50 billion dollar work-fare bill.

Whether Hoover/Roosevelt's WPA or Hitler's Arbeitsdeinst, everyone has understood the necessity and utility of public works projects. The defect in the Administration's policy is that it conceives of such programs as temporary, stop-gap measures. They are not; such programs are only the beginning of economic recovery and stability.

A truly social conception flows from the premise that every citizen is directly entitled to a guaranteed standard of living in terms of: education, employment, housing, health-care recreation and retirement.

This is not a question of "welfare" or "minimal scroungables". It is a question of building a society that has as its broad basis (not as its limit) a soci-economic egalitarianism that protects the integrity and develops the potential of the whole person.

National Socialism understood this from the beginning. FDRoosevelt promoted this concept at the very end in his 1945 speech about an Economic Bill of Rights.

And of course, economic rights is the social premise of communism and social democracy. Everyone has understood the concpet except for the US ruling caste from and after LBJ. The neo-liberal premise -- espoused by all administrations from Reagan to and including Obama -- is that if we throw enough goodies at the rich enough of it will miss its mark and actually hit the poor...sometimes, maybe. I seem to recall that Eduardo Porter of the New York Times editorial board once wrote an article entitled "Feeding the Rich feeds the Poor."

The time for this kind of thinking has come to an end. It is not necessary to abolish capitalism, but only to regulate so that it becomes the servant of society not its master.

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Denouement

AP Headline:

Despite Formal Combat End, US joins Baghdad Battle

ROFLMAO

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