Freedom's Just Another Word For...

The Dismantling Of American Democracy by Nancy Ohanian

Brown County is the fourth most populous county in Wisconsin. Green Bay is the county seat and biggest city. After the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court forced in-person voting on the state, Brown County was hot hard with new COVID cases. The Public Health Department reported another 95 cases Wednesday, bringing the total above 1,600. Wisconsin was headed for a mild pandemic before the Supreme Court ruling which has steepened the curve considerably. Yesterday the state has 1,540 cases per million people; not good but increasing by the day.

The Republican ideologues on the state Supreme Court, led by GOP ideologue Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, seem determined to cause more unnecessary suffering in the state. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported asked "How do you take an already heated Supreme Court hearing on Gov. Tony Evers' stay-at-home order and make it even more explosive?" He responded to his own question: First, you have one justice liken the order closing schools and businesses to 'tyranny' while also bringing up the Japanese-American internment camps from World War II. Then you get Chief Justice Patience Roggensack to dial it up even more by appearing to downplay a flare-up of coronavirus cases at a major meatpacking facility in Brown County. '(The surge) was due to the meatpacking-- that's where Brown County got the flare,' Roggensack said. 'It wasn't just the regular folks in Brown County.'"

In 2016 Brown County voters gave Bernie more votes then either Hillary or Trump. Bernie won 22,471 votes to Hillary's 16,626 and Trump's 18,706. In November, the county went Republican, Trump winning 52.7% to 41.9%. In 2018 the voters split their tickets. In the gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Scott Walker, who lost statewide, beat Democrat Tony Evers 53.1% to 44.7%. But the county also went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin in the Senate race, giving her a 51.5% to 48.5% win over Republican Leah Vukmir. And in the congressional race (WI-08), GOP incumbent Mike Gallagher won handily over Beau Liegeois. Brown, the biggest county in the district performed at R+21 level.

State Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa said she was "very offended" by Roggensack's statement.

"It's classist, and it's out of touch," said Zamarripa, a Milwaukee Democrat who is also a Milwaukee alderwoman. "It's embarrassing that we have a Supreme Court justice who would say something like that."

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said he was "shocked" by the remark, and Democratic Sen. Dave Hansen of Green Bay accused Roggensack of "elitism and ignorance." He said the statement showed the justice was "unfit to serve" on the high court.

Labor leaders were equally upset with Roggensack, the head of the conservative majority on the court.

Pam Fendt, president of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, said she found Roggensack's remark "divisive." Her group represents 100 local unions with 25,000 workers.

Fendt said those working at meatpacking plants live in neighborhoods, go to church and coach Little League. They are, she said, as much a part of the community as anyone else.

"It is shocking and deeply offensive that Justice Patience Roggensack would suggest that workers in meatpacking plants aren’t 'regular folks' who deserve protection," said the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1473, which represents 5,000 employees in meatpacking plants in Wisconsin.

Umair Haque also answered a question-- why the world is horrified by the American Idiot. He wrote that "the American idiot is, by now, a figure that’s the stuff of myth and legend across the world. Nobody else is really quite sure: are Americans really like this? This… well… laughable? Yesterday, they were the kind of people who made their kids do “active shooter drills,” meaning masked men burst into classrooms… and pretend… to kill them. What the? Today, they’re the kind of people who happily congregate in parks and on beaches during a global pandemic… when the lunatic fringe amongst them isn’t protesting for “liberation” in the first place. What on earth? I don’t use the term as an insult-- the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, 'idiot' carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots."

Now, I’m going to generalize. But I don’t mean that all Americans are idiots. I mean that, for example, more or less everyone who wants to carry a gun to Starbucks, deny their neighbours healthcare, make people beg for medicine online, and not let anyone in society ever retire… all of those people in the world, by and large, are Americans. Nobody else-- nobody in the whole world at this point in history-- thinks such things are remotely desirable. Hence, the American idiot. It means: the world’s largest and most hardened subset of idiots at this point, in the Classical Greek meaning of the word, is largely American.

‘Freedom?’ ... ‘More like freedumb.’

...When the world looks at America, it sees the American idiot, and what it tries-- and usually fails, because it’s lost for words-- to express is something like this: can people really be this selfish? This oblivious? This… thankless? Why do they keep voting for less healthcare, retirement, education, income, savings, happiness, trust, year after year-- even the so-called good ones? What kind of people…why are the literally the only people left in the whole world who do that? And then… complain bitterly about not having… the very things… they deny each other? Who can even make sense of this, the bizarre circular firing squad of social suicide that America has become? But all those, of course, are key traits of the idiot. The answer-- sadly, I think-- is: yes, people can really be this way.

Perhaps because they don’t know any other way. Maybe because it’s all they’ve ever been taught or told. That’s not an apologia for the American idiot, by the way. Or is it? Even I wonder. Still, let me try to explain as best I can-- America’s strange and complicated with freedom, one so perverse that freedom became twisted into something very much like its opposite. It has to do with the way Americans think-- unsubtly, narrowly, single-mindedly-- about what freedom is, and means.

About half a century ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided freedom into two categories-- maybe you already know them. Negative freedom, or freedom from. And positive freedom, or freedom to. The theory then went-- and this became the basis of generations of American thought-- that only the freedom from was worth developing and cultivating.

Berlin was a Russian-born dickhead-- actually a Latvian living in St. Petersburg when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1905. Listen to this YouTube of him and you'll want to throw a rotten tomato in his face. You can't; he died in 1997.

The freedom “to,” on the other hand, was vilified as something that only communists and socialists would want. Why? Because my “freedom to”-- say to be educated, or to be healthy-- requires your input, help, cooperation. But American thinking-- which became obsessed with individualism-- couldn’t admit or permit that, because then maybe you weren’t “taking responsibility for yourself” and all the rest of the jargon.

All this dates back, of course, to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Uberman. It’s not too hard to see why a society that was born in slavery, and continued into segregation, in which horrors like crippling and maiming people for the color of their skin were perfectly alright-- why a society like that ends up prizing freedom from. America’s obsession with freedom from dates right back to the slave-owner’s desire for freedom from government intervention, law, common decency, any tiny shred of humanity-- to have the power to exploit and abuse human beings on an unthinkable scale. There’s a straight line from Nietzsche’s “master morality” naturally dominating the “slave morality” to Berlin’s “freedom from” any restraint on power-- and that straight line is the one American thinking, still backwards, mired in the logic of domination and exploitation, traced.

...Here’s how extreme America’s belief in freedumb-- freedom as the absence of any kind of obligation or responsibility to anything greater than narrow, immediate, infantile self-satisfaction-- has gotten. Americans aren’t just congregating in parks and beaches during a global pandemic. They’re literally the only people in the world who just voted against better healthcare (from Bernie and Liz) in the middle of a pandemic. Think about the scale of such folly for a moment. What kind of people vote for worse healthcare… during a pandemic? John Cleese would struggle to make a face that expressed the surreal tragicomedy of such a thing. But that’s what Americans did… what they do, over and over and over again.

Why? Because they still believe-- even if they don’t think they believe-- in Berlin’s tired, weary, flawed old distinction. Freedom has only come to mean the removal of any restraint-- negative freedom-- on the exercise of individual desire, the satiation of individual appetite. What freedom still doesn’t mean in America is any of the following, good healthcare, retirement, education, and so forth, because what freedom has never meant is any form of collective action.

Let me put that more sharply. What if the only way that I can have decent healthcare is for you to have decent healthcare-- first? What if the only for me to have a decent retirement is for us all to have one, first? You see, that logic-- which is the math of public goods-- makes a mockery of Berlin’s dichotomy. Then, what we don’t need is simple “freedom from” some kind of restraint-- but the “freedom to”… collectively organize, coordinate, take action.

Freedom from can give us liberty as individuals, it’s true, from kings, and even governments. But only the freedom to can give us liberty as societies, groups, classes, nations. These two kinds of freedoms might exist in tension-- but try to have one without the other, and the result is a spectacular collapse. Freedom to without freedom from gave us the Soviet Union. But freedom from without freedom to gave us America, the failed state, the world’s first poor rich country. Gentle Europe, wise New Zealand, humble and kind Canada-- which balance the two-- have found a kind of miracle in that equilibrium.

...Carrying a gun to Starbucks-- so kids have to do active shooter drills. Being able to “choose” between a million health insurance plans, none of which covers you-- so that you don’t have to pay higher taxes to the hated government. Making everyone stand on their own two feet-- even while every force in society is cutting those very limbs away. Never taking any kind of collective action as a society-- that’s socialism! That’s communism!! Those things are bad!! They’re terrible!

No, my friends. Americans will never understand the miracle of European social democracy, of Canadian investment in each other, of New Zealand making a difficult, joyous peace with a broken past. They won’t. Because they can’t? Because they don’t want to? Because nobody teaches them about the gentle and beautiful power in cooperation, in dignity, in respect for the self and others as more than a thing of appetite? Because they’re trapped by a sordid history-- which they secretly care little about overcoming?

Maybe, in the end, it’s just all the above.

Freedom! Here I am, the American idiot, carrying my gun to Starbucks, before I go to Walmart, where I’ll choose between a million different flavors of the Everyday Low Price, and then I’ll dream about being Great Again, while I drive my big car down the big, empty highway, listening to some bellowing mullah of capital and individualism and cruelty telling me to hate and rage a little more. Along the way, so what if I create my very own exploitation, abuse, misery, decline into poverty, despair, degradation, dehumanization? Hey! Don’t tell me any different!

Isn’t that what freedom really is?

Mrs. Thatcher as a champion of "freedom and liberty"? Jon Lee Anderson doesn't think so

In March 1999, while General Pinochet -- finally, after all those years, being called to account for some of his crimes -- was under house arrest in London, his bosom buddy the former British PM paid him a much-publicized visit.

"Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister."

-- from Jon Lee Anderson's newyorker.com "Daily
Comment" post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady"

by Ken

Where would the Right be if it didn't exercise so freely its right to abuse and sabotage language. At the moment I'm thinking of the hostage-taking of the word freedom, by which right-wing liars and nitwits understand something close to the exact opposite: the compulsion to behave in strictly prescribed orthodox, but socially sanctioned, ways. At the moment large swaths of right-wing insanity and coercion are being advanced under the banner of what they call "freedom."

The point comes up rather starkly in the case of Britain's Iron Bitch, the late former prime minsiter Margaret Thatcher. As Jon Lee Anderson points out in a newyorker.com post, "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady," President Obama tramped right into this linguistic minefield:

In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty." Actually, she hadn't.

As with most right-wingers, the Iron Bitch's idea of freedom and liberty was the freedom to think exactly the way I do and the liberty to do exactly as I do.

Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted "Chilean economic miracle."

And kill he did. Pinochet's soldiers rounded up thousands at the country's national stadium and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in the stadium alone. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital -- along with many others. The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet's intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende's exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet's killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons -- that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.

In 1980, the year after Thatcher took office, she lifted the arms embargo against Pinochet; he was soon buying armaments from the United Kingdom. In 1982, during Britain's Falklands War against Argentina, Pinochet helped Thatcher's government with intelligence on Argentina. Thereafter, the relationship became downright cozy, so much so that the Pinochets and his family began making an annual private pilgrimage to London. During those visits, they and the Thatchers got together for meals and drams of whiskey. In 1998, when I was writing a Profile of Pinochet for The New Yorker, Pinochet's daughter Lucia described Mrs. Thatcher in reverential terms, but confided that the Prime Minister's husband, Dennis Thatcher, was something of an embarrassment, and habitually got drunk at their get-togethers. The last time I met with Pinochet himself in London, in October, 1998, he told me he was about to call "La Señora" Thatcher in the hopes she could find time to meet him for tea. A couple of weeks later, Pinochet, still in London, found himself under arrest, on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. During Pinochet's prolonged quasi-detention thereafter, in a comfortable home in the London suburb of Virginia Water, Thatcher showed her solidarity by visiting him. There, and in front of the television cameras, she expressed her sense of Britain's debt to his regime: "I know how much we owe to you" -- for "your help during the Falklands campaign." She also said, "It was you who brought democracy to Chile."

This, of course, was a misstatement of such gargantuan proportions that it cannot be dismissed as the overzealousness of a loyal friend.

You'll have noticed that Anderson's post is titled "Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady." It's the Neruda connection he starts out with.

It's curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country's elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba's President Fidel Castro as Pinochet's goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende's; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of Santiago -- a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of the coup, the mourners sang the "Internationale" and saluted Neruda and also Allende. As they did, the regime's men were going around the city, burning the books of authors it didn't like, while hunting down those it could find to torture or kill.

A couple of years ago, Neruda's former driver came forth to express his suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he'd heard from the poet that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda's condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may provide the answer to a nagging historic question.

The president probably thought he was saying something safely noncontroversial when he saluted Mrs. Thatcher's freedom-and-liberty credentials. Which is the problem with these famous-person memorializings. It's considered unseemly, even rude, to tell the truth about the deceased. But that's no excuse for outright lies.

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Do Republicans Really Want To Kill Us All?

They do have their partisan agenda, and they certainly put it ahead of the nation's safety-- at least most of the ones in DC do. Jim DeMint has been tweeting hysterically about stopping the very bipartisan-- even nonpartisan-- START agreement with Russia, and he and some other hard-core lunatics on the fringes of the right have been trying to bully weak-willed Republican colleagues to help filibuster it.

Why? Just to hand Obama a stinging international defeat that would make him a less effective leader among nations and damage his political cred here. DeMint is more a nihilist than a conservative, and even mainstream conservatives are starting to worry about his motives. Many in the Senate, the latest being Georgia's far-right Johnny Isakson, are abandoning his dangerous leadership, even if this particular lunacy was embraced by a panic-striken Miss McConnell, desperate to appear to be leading the clown parade, a clown parade that wants to spend its time reenforcing bigotry, allowing free-floating nukes to threaten the safety of the planet, deny health care compensation to 9/11 first responders and poison the whole country's drinking water in the pursuit of "free market" ideological insanity.

Poison everyone's drinking water? Republicans? Sure... well, maybe not everyone's. Rich people, after all, drink expensive bottled water, and on the bright side there are four cities in the U.S., of the 35 tested, whose drinking water isn't carcinogenic. In L.A. and Atlanta there's enough chromium-6 in the tap water to worry experts that stomach cancer rates will rise. Chicago and NYC have rates nearly as high and just as dangerous-- enough to increase the risk of liver and kidney damage as well as leukemia. Levels are even worse in Norman, OK; Honolulu; Riverside, CA; Madison; and San Jose.

A potentially cancer-causing metal made famous by the movie Erin Brockovich has turned up in the tap water of 31 out of 35 American cities tested, according to a study that urges the government to adopt tougher standards for the nation's drinking water.

The Environmental Working Group, an independent, Washington-based research organization, conducted the first nationwide analysis of hexavalent chromium, otherwise known as chromium-6, in drinking water. The substance was regularly used as an industrial chemical until the early 1990s and still appears in some plastics factories. It can also seep into groundwater from natural ores.

The metal has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals, and the National Institutes of Health defined it as a "probable carcinogen" in 2008. Last year, California proposed limiting the amount of chromium-6 in its drinking water to 0.06 parts per billion. It's still being debated, but if the measure passes, California would be the first state to set such a limit.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hasn't set a limit and doesn't regularly test for chromium-6.

In the EWG study released today, 25 U.S. cities' water tested positive for levels of chromium-6 that are above California's proposed limit. The highest levels were found in Honolulu, Riverside, Calif., and Norman, Okla., where the water tested at 200 times the California target.

"I was expecting to find hexavalent chromium in some of the cities we checked, but I didn't expect it to be so widespread," Rebecca Sutton, a senior scientist with the EWG and the lead author of the study, told CNN.

The movie Erin Brockovich chronicles the true story of how the water supply of Hinkley, Calif., was poisoned with chromium-6, which was used in a nearby factory belonging to a utility company. Pacific Gas & Electric ended up paying more than $330 million in damages as part of a 1996 lawsuit.

...The American Chemistry Council, a lobby group representing chemical companies, opposes California's efforts to limit chromium-6, accusing the state of setting unrealistic goals. Some water has a naturally occurring level of chromium-6 that's above 0.06 parts per billion, it said. In a statement to the Post, the group said that "even the most sophisticated analytical methods used by EPA are not able to detect the extremely low levels that California wants to establish."

The president of the EWG, Ken Cook, responded by saying it's understandable that water utilities and chemical industrial groups are opposed to the idea of limits.

"If a limit is set, it's going to be extraordinarily expensive for them to clean this up," Cook told the Post. "The problem in all of this is that we lose sight of the water drinkers, of the people at the end of the tap. There is tremendous push-back from polluters and from water utilities. The real focus has to be on public health."

Since 1990 the chemical industry has contributed $44,209,443 to federal candidates, $30,691,489 of it to Republicans, most of the rest to corrupt conservative Democrats who vote with the Republicans to protect the "freedom" of Big Business to exploit the rest of society. The biggest all-time bribe-taker from the chemical industry is John McCain (R-AZ)-- $595,313-- who may be viewed as an erratic nutbag on most things but has been very consistent in his support of the chemical companies' right to poison our drinking water. Other big-time champions of freedom-to-poison action are:

Dave Camp (R-MI)- $430,633
Joe Barton (R-TX)- $329,340
Joe Lieberman (I-CT)- $324,200
Rob Portman (R-OH)- $290,412
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)- $261,450
Miss McConnell (R-KY)- $227,455

Ken Calvert, an extraordinarily corrupt Republican representing one of the most toxic and endangered counties in America, California's Riverside, was bought off for far cheaper-- just $28,375. And Oklahoma's chemical-industry senatorial champion, Jim Inhofe, is far less interested in the danger the families of his constituents are in than in the $137,110 in thinly veiled bribes the industry has filtered into his disgraceful political career.

When Republicans talk about "freedom" and "liberty," it is always the freedom of the rich and powerful to do whatever they want, no matter how dangerous it is for the rest of society, and the liberty of pursuing the bottom line without regard for the consequences of the rest of us.

Uhuru-- And The Heritage Foundation

Every year, the corporately-funded far right-wing Heritage Foundation releases, in conjunction with the reactionary Wall Street Journal, a ranking of nations to promote conservative visions of what "freedom" is. They claim the methodology for their index is based on the concepts in Adam Smith's 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. The concept of "freedom" has changed a great deal from the time when it included government protecting the rights of ordinary people from more powerful predators.

Let's turn to Thom Hartmann's new book, Treshold to see how the meaning of freedom has changed since the time when England's nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta granting them-- the great nobles, but not the lesser nobles, let alone the common people-- the right to habeas corpus, something that conservatives have been still working on weakening.

[T]he definition of "freedom" evolved somewhat between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries, but was always largely grounded in the notion that much of freedom had to do with individual's being free from harassment or imprisonment by government, or by exploitation by other, more powerful individuals (or groups of individuals).

As America and much of the modern world industrialized in the late nineteenth century, though, a new definition of "freedom" began to take hold. Historically, wealth was held by a small number of people, and one of the dimensions of "freedom" was the protection, or at least the ideal of protection, of the average person from exploitation by those of great wealth (read Dickens for examples).

Hartmann then explains how sociopaths, from Lenin and Stalin on the left to Mussolini, John Nash and Ayn Rand on the right, started redefining freedom "as the individual's ability and right to totally selfish self-fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations) or the individual's failure to participate in and uplift society as a whole."

Freedom was a negative force in this new world view of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the "Chicago School" philosophy of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand's objectivism. It was as much the freedom "from" as it was the freedom "to": freedom from social obligation; freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection ("interference"); freedom to purely consider one's own wants and desires, because if every individual followed only his own selfish desires, the mass of individuals doing so in a "free market" would create a utopia.

This was a radical departure from eight centuries of the conceptualization of freedom. Instead of providing the soil in which freedom would grow, these new visionaries (some would say reactionaries, some revolutionaries) saw government as the primary force that stopped freedom.

They claimed that there vision of a truly free world, where government constrained virtually nothing except physical violence and all markets were "free"-- markets being the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations)-- had never been tried before on the planet. Their opponents, the classical liberals, said that indeed their system had been tried, over and over again throughout history and in fact was itself was the history of every civilization in the world during its most chaotic and feudal time. Lacking social contracts and interdependence, "Wild West" societies were characterized by both physical and economic violence, with those who were most willing to exploit and plunder rising to the economic (and, eventually, political) top. They were called robber barons.

Today's Heritage Foundation release flows right out of this vision of right-wing, Randian dystopia, currently the second most important value-- after racism-- in the teabagger (or Know Nothing) movement. And, needless to say, with the end of Bush's residency in the White House, the U.S. has fallen out of the ranks of the "free" countries (and Canada, with it's progressive healthcare system, is a hair's breath from following). Two fascist dictatorships, Hong Kong, which is 100% ruled by Communist China, and Singapore, are the #1 and #2 free-est countries in the 1984 Ministry of Truth world that is the Heritage Foundation.