Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Did you think it was a bunch of limousine liberals?

Limousines, yes. Liberals, no.

Except some on paper.

In America, as in most places, the party of Davos is bipartisan. It includes Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, Robert Rubin and Don Rumsfeld, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush is also a member, but he doesn’t like to travel). John Kerry is quoted as having called himself a “Davos” man.

Indeed, without reference to economic class, it is impossible to explain why Democratic elites championed NAFTA, the WTO and the other instruments of corporate protectionism, which traded away the interests of its blue-collar industrial base in favor of the GOP constituencies in Wall Street and red-state agribusiness. Nor is it possible to explain why Washington is indifferent to a relentlessly rising trade deficit, and the resulting foreign debt that has put the country’s future in the hands of the central bank of China, while the Pentagon simulates war games with China as the enemy.

The media language we use to talk to each other about globalization hides its class structure. The press consistently talks about national “interest” without defining who exactly is getting what. Thus, American workers are told that the “Chinese” are taking their jobs. But the China threat is, in fact, another global business partnership—this one between commissars who supply the cheap labor and the United States and other foreign capitalists who supply the technology and two-thirds of the capital used to finance China’s exports. The rest of the world calls this “neoliberalism,” a term unknown among America’s media “internationalists.”

The politics of the global marketplace are a one-party system...


Realize that.

Kerry can post on Kos to declare jihad on Alito, but the willingness to Fight the Power has less to do with the basic human and civil rights Alito will trample and more to do with Alito's desire to establish an Eternal Dominionist Imperial Presidency, without end, Amen.

[Update tinman observes that this may a sham opposition, since Kerry doesn't think there are enough votes to sustain a filibuster. Monday will tell, when they lay their cards on the table...]

A Presidency that locks out everyone outside of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton is a Presidency the other aristocrats will fight. It is far from clear that the inside-the-Beltway crowd really wants to resist a winner take all presidency on principle. Because of this, Alito may get a filibuster, but as far as DINOcrats are concerned, resistance is futile.

They've already been assimilated.

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