politics

Caddell has a good piece about South Carolina as future, which should be enough to get anyone's attention. The people turned whole scale against the South Carolina "good ole boy" political class in the primary elections:

To those of us who live in South Carolina nothing has better captured the spirit of the state than the state’s former Attorney General James Petigru’s reaction upon hearing of South Carolina’s secession from the Union: "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” So these recent political happenings beg the question – is this just South Carolina having another crazy moment or is it giving us a window into an emerging grassroots political revolt in America? Could it be that South Carolina is again leading a secession – this time a secession of the main stream of the American people from their establishment political class?

This offers the foundation of the politics of the future, a dropping of labels and inanity, a recognition the system is broken, and the status quo cannot endure. This allows the beginning of a political conversation of the American people, disinter-mediating the Media and the political class, on how we begin reforming our political economy. "Spare no incumbent" is a fine slogan for November's election, yet at very best only a very small first step.

Next, one must ask, what's with Russ Feingold? I guess he's the quintessential exception that proves the rule. He even allows some romanticizing of the Senate as an institution, "Russ Feingold is what a Senator is supposed to be." Feingold announced he won't vote for the garbage Democrats are shilling as finance reform stating:

“As I have indicated for some time now, my test for the financial regulatory reform bill is whether it will prevent another crisis. The conference committee’s proposal fails that test and for that reason I will not vote to advance it. During debate on the bill, I supported several efforts to break up ‘too big to fail’ Wall Street banks and restore the proven safeguards established after the Great Depression separating Main Street banks from big Wall Street firms, among other issues. Unfortunately, these crucial reforms were rejected. While there are some positive provisions in the final measure, the lack of strong reforms is clear confirmation that Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Washington continue to wield significant influence on the process.”

My my, that certainly puts a crimp in the Democrats' November strategy of bottling swill as reform elixir. A man like that deserves to be saved, give to Senator Feingold.

Finally, on creating a real reform politics, here's some good thinking(tx oildrum):

"The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and messages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity." If we are living in Ridley's world of "rational optimism", why are we hearing a rising chorus of concern from learned scientists, philosophers, academics and authors who are warning us of impending disaster? The palpable sense of foreboding doesn't match the affluence and success of our time.

...affluence is an enemy -- the more we have, the more we can lose. This attachment is the bane of being rich. Much seems to beget the quest for more, until we spend all our time and effort getting, protecting and worrying. Leisure is consumed by busyness and contentment by anxiety. "Those who know when enough is enough," advised the old Taoist sages, "will always have enough." Maybe in our cultural evolution we have been striving for the wrong kinds of riches.

Success, it seems, is more complicated than affluence. So, at a subconscious level, perhaps we are aware that we are living beyond sustainability and beyond happiness, that we are being stuffed to death and starved to death at the same time. Those who take the time for honest reflection may be discovering that our prosperity is more outer and material than inner and satisfying, that we are living in an illusion of constructed optimism designed and perpetuated by an economic system whose sole function is to create need and promote consumerism.

So we should not be surprised if some thoughtful people are awakening to a cultural malaise that is a combination of "habituation and amnesia", a poignant phrase recently used in Newsweek (May 17/10) to describe our propensity for collectively forgetting the consequences of our behaviour -- in this particular case, our dependence on oil. The unfolding environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is now poisoning more than an ocean and its shorelines. It is rapidly becoming a sobering symbol of a structural flaw in the way we are living on our planet.