That's right. Take your money, your companies, your golden-parachuted executives, your stock options, your subsidiaries, and get the hell out.

The republican talking points deliver the message to their "base" that we (progressives, 'the left', Democrats) are merely communists, socialists, Stalinists, fascists (haha, the irony), and general haters of America, who despise capitalism and the "free market".

But that's incorrect. I think what we really hate is the Amerika these guys have created. We're seeing the fruits of their policies all around us, and I think it's past time to do something about it.

"Never Compete. Every competition damages your reputation.
Our rivals seize occasion to obscure us so as to outshine us. Few wage honorable war. Rivalry discloses faults that courtesy would hide. Many have lived in good repute while they had no rivals. The heat of conflict revives and gives new life to dead scandals, digging up long-buried skeletons. Competition begins with belittling, and seeks aid anywhere it can, not only where it should. And when the weapons of abuse do not effect their purpose, as often or mostly happens, our opponents seek revenge and use them at least for beating away the dust of oblivion from anything that is our discredit. People of goodwill are always at peace, and those of good reputation and dignity are of goodwill. " - Balthasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"

Who here feels edified by having our fine citizens, both Democratic and Republican, dig lower and lower into their beings to beat the other team (being addicted to sport) in this lifelong attempt to finally reach bottom?

Competition is not the only avalable option...

(More below the fold)

Barry Bonds has just been indicted by a grand jury for perjury and obstruction of justice. Here's the complete story from ESPN:

Bonds dared feds to indict him...and they did

This is a sad day for sports fans.

Clear Channel- the San Antonio based media giant, and Bush War cheerleader continues to demonstrate the danger of allowing media octopii to buy more and more stations in a given market and then stifle dissent.

The latest - a directive that its stations, particularly rock stations refuse to play tracks from the # 1 album in the country - Bruce Springsteen's Magic.

Wonder where they were when Ronnie Rayguns was cheering on 'Born in the USA"?

A recent OpEd by Karl Rove in every conservative's favorite talking points megaphone, The Wall Street Journal, shows that Republicans are not just out of touch with average Americans, they have NO NEW IDEAS!!!!!!!!!!"

Please view this compelling video . . . American propaganda - Capitalism (1948)

copyright © 2007 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Decades ago, Americans watched a televised spoof of current events, the Rowan and Martin Laugh-In Show.  A cast of characters sang "What is the news across the nation?"  Then they assessed the antics of politicians and celebrities alike.  Serious situations were satirized; silliness was glorified.  

A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (General Motors) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River.  Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

Interesting exchange on another diary, in a discussion of sharing.I wrote this:

A subtle and powerful point...observe:
On the morning of 9/11, a friend called us immediately after the first plane crashed, and said "Turn on the TV!"

We immediately did, just in time to see the second plane crash into the Towers. I turned to my wife and said:

"I guess now we'll have to share."

A true story. True then, true now.

In a world where the poor can see our riches through advertising, we will share or die.

Reactionaries love talking about "the market." They go from that to insisting that private companies always do a better job than government. This is confusing apples and oranges -- worse, it's confusing apples and road apples.

The market is quite effective in producing low prices when its conditions are met. The conditions for the sort of market described by Economics-101 texts include:

1. Many producers of products which are identical both objectively and subjectively.

2. Easy entry and exit to the market.

3. Prices set by auction.

This is a great way to get low prices, so efective that the nearly first thing that business-school students learn is how to differntiate their business from their competitors -- how to escape condition #1.

But this applies rather poorly to the question of privatization. More discussion after the jump.

I'm amazed at the amount of negative press releases about the Employee Free Choice Act.  Most are coming from the GOP and National Association of Manufacturers, who apparantly want to continue to aid Foreign owned companies that open plants in America that cannot be unionized due to the greatly ignored National Labor Relations Act.

Why does the GOP insist on putting American-owned companies like Ford, GM, and Chrysler, on an unlevel playing field?

Much of our thinking, including a lot of current political analysis, presupposes a certain Darwinian model of individual competition.  The object here is to extend that model to competing groups of individuals.

Last week, the New York Times reported on the move in China to better protect workers' rights, and in so doing stem the tide of rising social inequality.  And it discussed the instant blowback from American companies:

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law...One provision in the proposed law reads, "Labor unions or employee representatives have the right, following bargaining conducted on an equal basis, to execute with employers collective contracts on such matters as labor compensation, working hours, rest, leave, work safety and hygiene, insurance, benefits, etc."

In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to try to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Part Two concluded with a question: If evolution rewards the pursuit of self-interest, does the Strict Father model fit better with evolutionary theory than the Nurturant Parent model does? Part Three showed that natural selection can lead to cooperation as well as competition. Part Four proposed that competition and cooperation might make more sense as underlying conservative and liberal values, respectively, than strength and nurturance.

Join me on the flip for the big finish (Part Five).

Diaries on the state of our nation's economy, its problems and potential solutions are fairly common these days.  This phenomena can be attributed to the growing impact these economic problems have on an increasing number of individuals as well as a growing disconnect between the official reporting on the economy and its felt impacts.

While those diaries which deplore our economic woes go to brilliant lengths to detail the scope and relevance of these problems, and sometimes even go so far as to explain more immediate sources and suggest possible mitigation of those problems, none so far as I have seen have offered a satisfactory explanation of the ultimate source of problems.  And so none so far have been capable of formulating a solution to these problems.

A New York Times article, "Schoolbooks Are Given F's in Originality," caught my attention.  It stated that two of this nation's most prominent history textbooks were virtual duplicates.  The authors were not the same; however, the words within these books were.  I was not totally surprised to see this, for I have often mused, "Who writes our history?"  We read the words within textbooks, repeat these, and recognize the specifics as fact.  Yet, how do we know that what we read is true.  According to the New York Times,  much of what is presented is not as it appears.

Authors and academician whose names appear on the textbook cover do not pen what is within.  Dead authors do.  Ghostwriters compose even more; their contributions are expansive.  These indistinct individuals construct a convention.  Then we, a trusting public, accept what these unknowns inscribe.  What most of us believe is valid is not a universal veracity.  

Recently we in the blogosphere have been inundated requests to support this or that candidate in various contests to win funding -- from Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Democracy for America, and Mark Warner's Forward Together.  We are asked to vote, to urge others to vote, for particular candidates.Some of us receive requests to blog on behalf of  particular candidates.  I have been thinking about this quite a bit since receiving yesterday such a request on behalf of a candidate I do support, and whose support financially I have urged in the past.  And yet something about all this concerns me.  So I thought I would reflect a bit about this, about netroots outreach in general and requests for money in particular.

If you don't really care, or if you think this is just another metadiary (it really isn't) feel free to stop reading now.

This post was prompted by an EDGE article by Daniel Gilbert `The Science of Happiness (5.22.06). My views are backed up in www.humantruth.org

Happiness is an emotion. In nature, it is the fulfilment of every instinctive function. In humans it is a matter of truly fulfilling intelligence. In each case it is a matter of doing good.

Looking out of my window, I see a pair of blue tits popping in and out of a nest box, feeding their young. This is very hard work that is doing good, for themselves, their species, and nature in general, but they may not know it. What they do know is that it makes them happy to fulfil instinct in this way.

You can hear the distant drums of war with China beating in the halls at CNN and the boardrooms of the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.