My Personal, Psychological and Intellectual Epiphany

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During college, a friend admitted he was confounded by my politics. He didn’t know how to reconcile my libertarianism with my other commitments. We were Buddhists and vegetarians, and I knew exactly what he meant. The tension centered around compassion. He wanted to know how someone concerned with the world’s suffering wouldn’t adopt a more compassionate political perspective.

It was a reasonable question, one that I asked myself regularly. My stock answer was that while I supported compassion in the form of assistance to those in need, I opposed the clumsy government mechanisms we relied on for it, not to mention the veiled coercion behind them — where did anyone get the right to enforce their values at the barrel of a gun (meaning taxes), no matter how noble those values might be?

Pretty by-the-books stuff. Libertarianism represented to me a matrix of freedom that could be collapsed onto any particular set of individual values. It was a simple formula to live by: If enough people value X, those people will pay for X, whether or not X = someone else’s interest. Government intervention was at best superfluous to this outcome and at worst distorting of the collective will (measured as the aggregate economy).

When my friend offered the natural response, What if people fail to provide enough for those in need?, I resorted to the tried-and-true strategy of telling him the problem wasn’t a problem. The real problem was taxation or regulation or minimum wage or a failed incentive structure. If people were in need it was because government was preventing the market from providing for them.

What’s interesting to me now is not why this kind of thinking is wrong but why it was once so attractive to me.

I found my way to libertarianism in my teen years when I began reading some of its introductory texts and was attracted to the internal consistency of its policies. If you accepted that the individual was sacrosanct and the government’s only role was to protect the individual, everything else pretty much followed. Unlike mainstream liberalism and conservatism, which were constantly engaged in negotiations between social and economic freedoms, libertarianism was systematically clean and neat. So much so that I quickly stopped concerning myself with how ideas played out in the world. The ideas themselves were enough.

As a kid, you learn to refute anyone’s “theory” by snidely mocking — “In theory, communism works.” When I was in college, I knew that communism did not work, even in theory, and I was happy to tell you why. Only libertarianism worked in theory.

That in switching the terms of the joke I made myself its butt was, regrettably, lost on me. When the lens of ideology grows so thick it’s all a person sees, a sense of humor is often the first thing to be occluded.

So what accounts for my transition from orthodox libertarianism to an unremarkable liberalism? At the risk of putting the cart before the political horse, I’m not an isolated reasoning subject and individual actor but a complex and conflicted human in various social and environmental contexts, and the reasons I abandoned libertarianism are personal and psychological as well as intellectual.

It felt good to be libertarian. I could win political debates (to my satisfaction) by applying the internally consistent reasoning I so admired to any issue. My reluctance to compromise was a virtue that straightened my posture. I took my rigidity as a sign not of narrow-mindedness but of integrity, the consequence of careful advancement from first principles. This particular kind of coherency put me self-satisfactorily and peacefully to sleep on many nights.

But it also sometimes felt bad to be a libertarian. I didn’t like that people I cared about regularly thought I was a smug asshole. I didn’t like that so often in debates I sounded to myself like a smug asshole. Not my intentions — say what you will about the positions, I always held them sincerely — but the words themselves. They didn’t sound compassionate, as it got harder and harder to remind myself they really were supposed to be.

The ideological purity at the heart of libertarianism was so true that I was certain only good effects could follow from it. The plainness of this was apparent enough that I was actually perplexed when others didn’t see it on face value. Whenever an interlocutor pointed to a real-world counterexample I was ready with a distinction between the applied and the perfect libertarian policy.

But the truth an ideologue is at pains to accept is that no life can live up to ideology. We are a messy species living messy lives. And we are lucky for this. The intellectual libertarian wants the world to be the kind of ideal world it never can be. He (and it’s often he) is unable to live with ambiguity and compromise. The beautiful (it is a kind of beauty) logical edifice of libertarianism is built on the faulty premise that this is the kind of world that is built on logical edifices.

The discomfort I felt with libertarianism was the discomfort of my ideas not aligning with my experiences. My thoughts and feelings were at odds. The feeling nagging me was that I couldn’t reconcile my humanity with my ideology any more than my friend could for me. Over time, that feeling became a reason in its own right.

I saw, as many libertarians see, a world tangential to this world we live in, which is the world I always felt like I belonged to.

If you didn’t catch Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, you’re not alone. According to Nielsen ratings, Obama’s hour-long presentation garnered less than 34 million viewers, an all-time low for the president and the “second-lowest rated since Nielsen began recording viewership in 1993.”

Apparently, Americans would rather spend their time watching Simpsons reruns or fiddling with their iPhones than listening to the pompous pronouncements of the Dissembler in Chief.  And good for them. It goes to show that no one really believes that a junior senator with a pedigree in community organizing is setting policy for the world’s only superpower. The idea is ridiculous. Obama is merely the mask that conceals the ruthless machinery of Empire. The real power lies beyond the veil, in the Deep State apparatus which decides everything from drone strikes to Gitmo, from NSA dragnets to habeas corpus,  from deficit-slashing austerity to the “pivot to Asia”. Obama has no say-so in any of these decisions. He’s merely a public relations invention whose job is to look sincerely into the teleprompter while announcing the latest round of budget cuts or more of the deeply-regressive social policies his puppetmasters crave.  That’s his job and everyone knows it.

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The author may be more optimistic about Obama’s drop off in popularity than we are—stupidity dies hard in America—but there’s no doubt that the constant cynical betrayals are finally beginning to take a toll even among the true believers. 
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Only now– judging by the SOTU ratings— he’s even failing at that task.

Why?

Because no one’s listening anymore. They’ve tuned him out, which means he’s lost his ability to shape public opinion.  President Snake-oil has become completely irrelevant, a non-factor in advancing elite policy. His presidency is effectively over. Good riddance.

That said, there have been some fine summaries of the SOTU speech that are worth reviewing. The best of these were posted on the World Socialist Web Site whose analysis (as usual) was laser sharp. Here’s a blurb from a piece by Bill van Auken:

“President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was a cynical propaganda piece, filled with fraudulent claims and promises that no one, least of all his audience at the US Capitol, believes in the slightest.

The annual address has long since become an ossified ritual, a kind of national pep rally into which social and political reality seldom intrudes…..

With Obama’s speech Tuesday night one had more than ever the sense of the president as chief representative of the financial aristocracy that rules America, speaking to a house filled with millionaire congress members and bought-and-paid-for representatives of big business.

It has more and more come to resemble a political echo chamber, in which the ruling establishment celebrates and talks to itself in utter indifference to the needs and concerns of the country’s working people.”  (“State of the Union: A bankrupt ruling class talking to itself”, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site)

Bravo, Van Auken! “An ossified ritual…. filled with fraudulent claims and promises that no one… believes in the slightest.”

That sums it up perfectly, doesn’t it?

Joseph Kishore, who also writes for the World Socialist Web Site, posted an equally impressive piece titled “Obama’s State of the Union address: An empty and reactionary charade”. Here’s a clip:

“Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday …. was a mixture of pro-business nostrums, militarist jingoism and a jumble of penny-ante proposals. The media’s attempt to promote the speech as a major address on inequality was a deliberate falsification aimed at drumming up interest among a generally indifferent and hostile population…..

(The speech) was a threadbare attempt to cover over the reality of the past year, a year in which the mask fell off a society riven by historically unprecedented levels of social inequality and mass poverty, overseen by a vast police-state spying apparatus, on the verge of another global war of incalculable consequences and presided over by the most right-wing administration in US history…

As has become traditional in such events, Obama singled out individuals in the audience, generally victims of the policies of the ruling class, who are exploited to make various political points. Nowhere was this more sickening than at the end of the speech, when the president heaped praise on a veteran severely maimed by an explosion in Afghanistan.

The assembled congressmen—responsible for wars of aggression that inflicted a similar fate on thousands of Americans, while killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis—gave a lengthy standing ovation to one of the victims of their criminal policies. This spectacle was a fitting conclusion to a nauseating political ritual.”  (“Obama’s State of the Union address: An empty and reactionary charade”, Joseph Kishore, World Socialist Web Site)

Both articles are worth reading in full.

Obama’s abysmal State of the Union ratings suggest that the country has turned against him. People don’t trust the president anymore and they certainly don’t want to listen to his lying bullshit for an hour or so. It’s easier just to change the channel … which millions of them did.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

If it looks as though the case against Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is superficial at best, there’s a reason for that — it is. To say that because a speck of Knox’s DNA may have been present — on a knife, or a bra clasp, in the apartment in which she resided — is absurd on its face and constitutes no evidence of anything.

In addition, neither prosecutor got anywhere near presenting a viable connection between the man convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher, Rudy Guede, and Knox or Sollecito. The purported collaboration was the stuff of a poorly written work of fiction. In fact, there was no evidence of collaboration between Guede and Knox or Sollecito presented to the court at all.

In their totality, the combined theories presented to the three courts by two prosecutors were so illogical and utterly lacking in substantiation that it’s the prosecutors, not the defendants, who should have been on trial — for misconduct.

Further, that a second prosecutor could present a second case that all but abandoned the entire premise of the first case, after the first case was thrown out on appeal, is patently malicious, and absolutely does constitute a separate/unique judicial instance and double jeopardy in a very material sense. The whole thing makes a profound mockery of the entire concept of criminal justice.

But while there is little chance that Amanda Knox is guilty of murdering anyone, she is in fact guilty of two very important things: being an inconveniently pretty young woman and being an American abroad in the Bush era.

By the fall of 2007, Italy was in a significant state of conflict with the US over the Bush administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition. Of specific note were Italian kidnapping charges against nearly two dozen CIA agents for the kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar, resulting in 23 convictions. The New York Times reported, “Judge Oscar Magi handed an eight-year sentence to Robert Seldon Lady, a former C.I.A. base chief in Milan, and five-year sentences to the 22 other Americans, including an Air Force colonel and 21 C.I.A. operatives.”

Italy’s decision to confront America’s cavalier disregard for their borders, laws, and judicial system was in line with objections and threats of prosecution by several nations, including German arrest warrants for CIA agents in the kidnapping and extraordinary rendition case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen.

What was at issue for those nations from which citizens and residents were taken was their national sovereignty and the integrity of their judicial process. None of which appeared to matter to the Bush operatives, but mattered greatly to those nations where the crimes occurred — including, significantly, Italy.

In the midst of this international conflict simmering just below the surface of broad public view, a young American woman traveled to Perugia, Italy, to study. Her subsequent arrest and high-profile trial for the murder of roommate and fellow student Meredith Kercher would rivet world attention on the very same Italian judicial system that the US had casually disregarded throughout the Bush years.

Italy never got their CIA agents, but they got a pretty young girl from Seattle, and with her the undivided attention of America and the world to the authority of Italian justice.

It’s not clear if Amanda Knox will foot the bill for the 23 convicted CIA agents, but what is clear is that Italy and many other countries view America’s policy of rendition as indeed extraordinary, and they have a point to make.

When the board of JP Morgan Chase gave its blowdried, tirelessly self-regarding CEO a whopping 74 percent raise — after a year in which the Justice Department blasted the bank with $20 billion in sanctions — it was one of those rare instances where Main Street and Wall Street were mostly in agreement.

Everyone from the Financial Times to Forbes.com to the Huffington Post decried the move. The Wall Street pundits mostly thought it was a dumb play by the Chase board from a self-interest perspective, one guaranteed to inspire further investigations by the government. Meanwhile, the non-financial press generally denounced the raise as a moral obscenity, yet another example of the serial coddling of Wall Street’s habitually overcompensated executive class.

Both groups were right. But to me the biggest news was how brutal an indictment Jamie’s raise was of the Obama/Holder Justice Department, which continues to profoundly misunderstand the mindset of the finance villains they claim to be regulating.

Chase’s responses to Holder’s record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees and freezing salaries for the non-CEO class of line employees.

Next, Chase’s board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.

In the end, the fines left the decision-making class of the company not just uninjured but triumphant. Dimon’s raise was symbolic of a company-wide boost in compensation following the mass layoffs, as average per-employee expenses rose four percent overall, to $122,653, despite the $20 billion burden imposed upon the firm by the state.

There were a variety of reasons for the board’s decisions, but one of the big ones, according to various reports, was that bank honchos wanted to send a message to the government that it believed the company had been unfairly treated. This was a notion Dimon himself snootily trumpeted just before his raise was announced.

So Eric Holder and his lieutenants thought they were getting tough on Chase by dropping a monster settlement on the firm, but actually all they did was a) inspire the company to punish thousands of low-level innocent employees, while b) doubly- or triply-reinforcing the mass-narcissistic delusion gripping the company’s management that the bank’s serial ethical violations — which ranged from providing see-no-evil banking services, to Bernie Madoff, to rigging retail electricity prices, to covering up billions in losses in the “London Whale” episode — were the fault of someone else.

Apparently the bank’s board believed the Justice Department was simply caving in to anti-bank sentiment when it targeted Chase, not punishing real offenses. They seem to have decided their only “problem” was that the Justice Department lacked the political will to ignore the public’s irrational cries for action.

Again, if you punish a firm, and its executives come out of the episode convinced their only problem was an irrational PR issue, your enforcement strategy probably needs tweaking. It doesn’t exactly send much of a message when, mere months after you’ve imposed record enforcement penalties, the CEO of your target company is being led down Wall Street on a donkey, board members showering him with cash.

In contrast, when the LIBOR scandal blew up in England, British authorities essentially removed Barclays CEO Bob Diamond from office right away, in addition to levying fines and other penalties. We never heard about Bob Diamond getting a raise after LIBOR because as far as the world is concerned, there is no more Bob Diamond. He could be on the moon for all we know. It’s not jail, but it’s still more of a punishment than Eric Holder dropped on Chase and Jamie Dimon.

Moreover, when the Royal Bank of Scotland got caught up in the same LIBOR scandal, British and European regulators basically set up a base camp in the bank’s backside, forcing the company to disclose all of its dirty laundry via a merciless long-term cooperation agreement that has already led to the exposure of another major scandal, the foreign exchange manipulation case.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Eric Holder drops a bunch of fines on the Chase corporate entity from 20,000 feet and then watches as bank leaders give themselves raises, force low-level underlings to pay the tab, and publicly denounce the settlements as undeserved. And get away with doing it.

Well done, Justice Department! Way to flex those biceps!

About the author

Matt Taibbi is an investigative reporter for Rolling Stone magazine