Cliopatria: A Group Blog
Aaron Bady (∞); Chris Bray (∞); Brett Holman (∞); Jonathan Jarrett (∞); Robert KC Johnson (∞); Rachel Leow (∞); Ralph E. Luker (∞); Scott McLemee (∞); Claire B. Potter (∞); Jonathan T. Reynolds (∞)
And so, coming here, I read Dreams for My Father, which I had read before, and going back read The Audacity of Hope. And the striking thing to me was that all of the themes I was trying to identify in those seven lectures were present in those two books. And I hadn't read a word about the depth of those books in anything I had seen about the election. It was all about how Dreams for My Father was a meditation on identity, it was about race, and how The Audacity of Hope was simply a campaign book, in the way that all presidential candidates have to write campaign books.
So what struck me as I reflected on these books is how much better than that they were – how much richer, how much deeper, how much broader they were. And so I began thinking about Obama in relation to traditions in American political history.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, pg. 66:
At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those – whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors – who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunity – all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first popularized in Poor Richard's Almanack and that have continued to inspire our allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.
These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will – a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth.
See also. Or this whole page. Or this. Passim!
Barbara Tuchman called this sort of thing"self-hypnosis." It's like a sort of Rorschach test: I'm going to show you 400 pages of mind-numbing platitudes, and you tell me what you see. (Geez, doc, I dunno -- is it the greatest political mind since Jefferson?)
I just don't understand the intensity of the investment.
Giles Milton,"Rise and Fall," Literary Review, November, reviews Philip Mansel's Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, which concentrates on Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut.
Saul David,"Lyons' Share," Literary Review, November, reviews Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided, which treats Britain's role in the American Civil War.
Nathaniel Philbrick,"Sailing Alone," NYT, 29 October, reviews Geoffrey Wolff's The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum.
Teller,"More than Magic," Vanity Fair, December, makes the case for the importance of Harry Houdini.
Norman Stone,"The Führer in the Making," WSJ, 30 October, reviews Thomas Weber's Hitler's First War.
Deborah Solomon,"Gothic American," NYT, 28 October, reviews R. Trip Evans's Grant Wood: A Life.
Peter Mandler,"Binary Pere," Literary Review, November, reviews Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory.
Sad days at The Nation, where the editors recently explained -- right out in public, Todd Seavey-style -- why they had to break up with an old lover. Despite their longstanding admiration for the Republican Party, they now realize that"there will be no compromise with extremism. It must be challenged and defeated." For once, breaking with history, they believe that it's necessary to actually oppose Republican politicians and policies.
This is all new stuff, of course, caused by"the GOP's lurch toward extremism" since the party"has folded Ronald Reagan's 'big tent'." Remember how the editorial staff at The Nation loved Goldwater and Nixon? Remember their admiration for Reagan's"big tent" politics? Their abiding faith in the conservative mainstream? Because if you don't remember it, they certainly do (emphasis totally added, because I will eat a bug if this doesn't make you laugh out loud):
Whether or not voters like it—and polls suggest most do not—America is saddled with a two-party system. Historically, this has required both parties to keep the middle ground in sight. Some of the earliest critics of McCarthyism in the 1950s were Senator Joe McCarthy's fellow Republicans; and when the John Birch Society made its move within the GOP in the early 1960s, rebukes came not just from mainstream party leaders like Richard Nixon and George Romney but from conservative icons Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley.
No more.
By golly, back in the days of Watergate you could sit down like adults and find the middle ground. Mainstream party leaders like Richard Nixon wouldn't go for any partisan shenanigans, no sir! (G. Gordon Liddy? Absolutely a gentleman, I tell you! Just keep him away from psychiatry offices and candles.)
Favorite part, complete with condescending paternalism so broad as to simulate a pat on the head:
"Broadening the debate is fine. But when one party pulls that debate toward extremes that even its most radical leaders have recently rejected, the prospect of political dysfunction, if not explosion, grows exponentially."
Broadening debate is fine, as long as you don't, you know, broaden it. Broaden it all the way to the edges of the narrow centrist consensus-liberal band of pale vanilla District of Columbia respectability. Say your thought out loud: does Sally Quinn blanch over her mimosa? Too far, man, too far! No one in history has ever said anything like that before! (Now be polite, and offer to freshen up her drink.)
See also this paean to Everett Dirksen at the Huffington Post.
This is my favorite recurring lament of the political class: but they always agreed with us before! What happened?!? Ohhhh, whither the nonpartisan consensus of the past?
Someone show this campaign ad to the editors of The Nation, and see if they can place it in a historical context. I bet they just get a terrible headache.
There's been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the Browne Review in the UK -- for example, at Larvatus Prodeo (also here and here), Skepticlawyer, zunguzungu (a response to this animation, 'So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities'), Edge of the American West, and an article by James Vernon at GlobalHigherEd. I don't have much substantive to add, though I very much agree with Vernon's conclusion:
A good deal is at stake. We must defend the vision of a publicly funded university able to support classes in subjects that do not generate economic benefits. Economic utility is not the measure of who we are or who we want to become.
However, my main reason for posting this was that I didn't think I could live with myself if -- being the kind of blogger I am -- I passed up the chance to use that title.
Image source: Wikipedia.
At the center of the park: a tower that depicts"the history of the African American struggle from Africa to America." At the entry to the park, a sculpture depicts a"white man fully armed for assault," a"black man with his hands raised in surrender" -- rather strangely, since the attack on Tulsa's black neighborhoods began when armed black men surrounded the local courthouse to prevent a lynching of a black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman on an elevator -- and"the white director of the Red Cross holding a black baby."
Not to be missed: the comments section following the story at the Wall Street Journal, where a commenter helpfully explains that none of this ever happened:
"Historians agree that it never happened and you won't find any reference to it in history books. Something happened, of course, and it got ugly, but a riot? There has never been a riot in Oklahoma. This notion is driven by a handful of black attorneys who want their share of any reparation settlement."
Visitors may reach the The Tower of Reconciliation by way of the Healing Walkway.
T. J. Stiles reviews Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life, for the Washington Post, 24 October.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft,"The Voice of Unconventional Wisdom," NYRB, 11 November, reviews Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris and William Pfaff's The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy.
David W. Blight reviews Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery for the San Francisco Chronicle, 24 October. Thanks to Mary Dudziak at Legal History.
Studiolum,"Man with a cat," Poemas del río Wang, 18 October, introduces us to Sándor Kégl (1862-1920), Hungary's greatest Iranologist.
... already at high school he read all literature in the original – Latin, Greek, German, English, French, Italian – languages, and in the following four years he perfectly acquired Russian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese. After the main European languages he turned to the Oriental ones, and mastered Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Tatar and Sanskrit. He kept learning languages all along his life: he learned a number of other Iranian and Indian languages, living and dead Scandinavian dialects, and during WWI he even learned Chuvash and Mordvin from the captive soldiers of the Russian army working on his estates.
See also:"Sandor Kegl, Language Hat, 23 October; and"Ways," Poemas del río Wang, 23 October.
Jonathan Mirsky,"How Reds Smashed Reds," NYRB, 11 November, reviews Andrew G. Walder's Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement.
From Michelle Alexander's new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incareration in the Age of Colorblindness:"There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began." Hat tip.
We Africanists just can't help but smile at this sort of thing, you know...
Dalton Conley,"Making Sense of the Sixties," CHE, 24 October, invites comparison with Rick Perlstein,"That Seventies Show," Nation, 20 October.
Christopher Hart,"Rebel in a Tweed Suit," Literary Review, October, reviews William Cook, ed., Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh.
William Dalrymple reviews Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, ed., Under the Sun: The letters of Bruce Chatwin for the TLS, 27 October.
Patricia Cohen,"In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed," NYT, 27 October, features James Kloppenberg's research on the intellectual development of Barack Obama. He presented his findings at the third annual conference on American intellectual history organized by the bloggers at U. S. Intellectual History.
Laura Cumming for the Guardian, 1 August, and Richard Hamblyn,"The life of the volcano," TLS, 29 September, reviews"Volcano: Turner to Warhol," an exhibit at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, and Alwyn Scarth's Vesuvius: A Biography.
Jennifer Howard,"Jane Austen's Well-Known Style Owed Much to Her Editor, Scholar Argues," CHE, 22 October, features the work of Kathryn Sutherland, editor of the digital Austen. After 9:00 et, you can hear Sutherland interviewed on NPR's"Morning Edition".
Roger Boylan,"Suppose You're an Idiot," Boston Review, Nov/ Dec, reviews Harriet E. Smith, et al., eds., The Autobiography of Mark Twain: I.
Jed Perl,"Classic Catastrophe," TNR, 27 October, reviews"Chaos and Classicism," an exhibit of 20th century European art between the wars at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.
Adam Kirsch,"Homecomings," Tablet, 26 October, reviews"16 mm Postcards: Home Movies of American Jewish Visitors to 1930s Poland," an exhibit at Manhattan's Yeshiva University Museum, and Ruth Wisse, ed., The Glatstein Chronicles, two novellas by Jacob Glatstein.
Peter Duffy,"The Monster," The Book, 27 October, reviews Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.
Jeremy Noel-Tod,"Dictionary of slang: 'Everything went off A1, he said'," Telegraph, 25 October, reviews Jonathan Green's Green's Dictionary of Slang, B. E. Gent's The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699, and Das Krapital: Roger's Profanisaurus.
Thaddeus Russell gives us a foretaste of his new book, A Renegade History of the United States, in"11 Freedoms That Drunks, Slackers, Prostitutes and Pirates Pioneered And The Founding Fathers Opposed," Huffington Post, 13 October.
Rachel Shteir,"The Call to Service," The Book, 13 October, reviews Yoko Kawaguchi's Butterfly's Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture.
Jennifer Homans,"Is Ballet Over?" TNR, 13 October, is an excerpt from the epilogue of her new book Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet.
Finally, farewell to La Trobe's and William and Mary's Rhys Isaac, a distinguished historian of colonial America.
Greg Beato,"The Original Mad Man," Reason, November, reviews Jeffrey L. Cruikshank's and Arthur W. Schultz's The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century.
Alexander J. Motyl,"Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine Unmakes Itself," World Affairs, Sept/Oct:
The first thing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich did after his February 25 inauguration was delete the link to the Holodomor on the president's official Web site. Yanukovich's predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, had made the Holodomor—the famine of 1932–33 produced by Joseph Stalin and responsible for the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants—into a national issue, promoting what Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously called"the struggle of memory over forgetting" as part of his attempt to move the country toward democracy.
Matthew Price reviews Jeremy Lewis's Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family for The National, 22 October.
Patricia Sullivan reviews Condoleezza Rice's Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family for the Washington Post, 24 October.
Johann Hari,"The Valley of Taboos," Slate, 25 October, reviews V. S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief.
Edward Rothstein,"Abraham's Progeny, and Their Texts," NYT, 22 October, reviews"Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam," an exhibit at the New York Public Library.
E. J. Wagner,"A Murder in Salem," Smithsonian, November, features a crime that may have inspired both Hawthorne and Poe.
Elyssa East,"Criminal Mind," NYT, 22 October, reviews Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science.
David Greenberg,"Hating Woodrow Wilson," Slate, 22 October, takes another look at Glenn Beck's favorite President to hate. Earlier, see: Radley Balko at Reason, John Milton Cooper of Wisconsin, Mark Atwood Lawrence of Texas, Jill Lepore of Harvard, Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, George H. Nash, Edward Tenner of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center, and Thomas G. West of Dallas.
Clifford Green,"Hijacking Bonhoeffer," Christian Century, 5 October, reviews Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Thanks to John Fea.
Lincoln Caplan,"The Political Philosopher Beneath the Robes," Slate, 21 October, reviews Seth Stern's and Stephen Wermiel's Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.
James Mustich,"Talkin' Bob Dylan," Barnes & Noble Review, 19 October, interviews Griel Marcus and Sean Wilentz.
Jonathan Alter,"The State of Liberalism," NYT, 21 October, evaluates books and ideas on the contemporary American left. Christopher Caldwell,"The State of Conservatism," NYT, 21 October, evaluates books and ideas on the contemporary American right.
Kerry Brown reviews Michael Dillon's China: A Modern History for the THE, 21 October.
Daniel Mendelsohn,"Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar," NYRB, 11 November, reviews Wilde's The Women of Homer edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead; and Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
Anne Applebaum,"The Worst of the Madness," NYRB, 11 November, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Norman M. Naimark's Stalin's Genocides.
Lorin Stein, the new editor of the Paris Review, has made the full run of its highly regarded interview series with important writers available online for the first time. The series began with E. M. Forster in 1953.
Frank Dikötter,"Chinese History: The Great Leap Backward," History Today, 20 October, reports on what is being learned as Chinese archives begin to shed light on Mao's era. Thanks to Chris Bray and Jesse Walker at Reason's Hit and Run.
"The War Logs," NYT, 22 October,"Greatest Data Leak in US Military History," Der Spiegel, 22 October, and"Iraq war logs: UN calls on Obama to investigate human rights abuses," Guardian, 23 October, are first attempts to evaluate the historical significance of information from the 400,000 documents newly released by WikiLeaks.
Daniel Mason,"Tormented by Proportion," Slate, 21 October, is a slide show that inquires into the sanity of the 18th century sculptor, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.
Sheila Melvin,"China Remembers a Vast Crime," NYT, 21 October, features China's recollection of the destruction of Yuanmingyuan — the Garden of Perfect Brightness— on the western outskirts of Beijing by British and French troops in 1860.
Norma Clarke,"English houses and their inheritance," TLS, 20 October, reviews Bill Bryson's At Home: A short history of private life, Charlotte Moore's Hancox: A house and a family, and Robert Sackville-West's Inheritance: The story of Knole and the Sackvilles.
Michael Holroyd,"The Violet Trefusis affair," TLS, 20 October, is the Afterward of his A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate daughters – absent fathers.
Rick Perlstein,"That Seventies Show," Nation, 20 October, reviews a clutch of books on the 1970s in America.
Geraldine Fabrikant,"Hunting for the Dawn of Writing, When Prehistory Became History," NYT, 19 October, reviews"Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond," an exhibit at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.
"Pretty as a picture," The Economist's Prospero, 13 October, and Jonathan Jones for the Guardian, 15 October, review"Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals," an exhibit at London's National Gallery.
Garry Wills,"Chicago's Magnificent Macbeth," NYRBlog, 18 October, reviews the Chicago Lyric Opera's production of Verdi's"Macbeth."
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews a new edition of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62) for the Guardian, 16 October.
Kevin Sieff,"Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers," Washington Post, 20 October, exposes unlikely claims. See: Cynic,"Understanding Virginia's History Textbook Lie," T-N C at The Atlantic, 20 October; and Kevin Levin,"Black Confederates on the Retreat?" Civil War Memory, 20 October.
Finally, Caleb McDaniel,"Teaching with Blogs," Offprints, 13 October, is an outline of his"brown-bag" presentation at Rice. Caleb's work is always worth reading.
Adam Kirsch,"Counter-Revelations," Tablet, 19 October, reviews Robert Alter's new rendition of The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, A Translation with Commentary.
Alastair Blanshard,"What lies beneath," The Australian, 6 October, reviews a new edition of Antonio Beccadelli's The Hermaphrodite, Holt Parker, ed. and trans.
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann,"What Caliban really had for dinner," TLS, 13 October, reviews Joan Fitzpatrick, ed., Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary readings and culinary histories, Sarah Moss's Spilling the Beans: Eating, cooking, reading and writing in British women's fiction, 1770–1830, and Henry Notaker's Printed Cookbooks in Europe, 1470-1700: A bibliography of early modern culinary literature. Louis Bayard reviews Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life for the Washington Post, 17 October.
Don Patterson, the author of Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary, sketches its argument in the Guardian, 16 October.
J. R. McNeill,"Malarial mosquitoes helped defeat British in battle that ended Revolutionary War," Washington Post, 18 October, argues that American rebels had allied pests.
Barry Schwabsky,"Old Vagabond," Nation, 13 October, reviews Gauguin," an exhibit at London's Tate Modern.
Sean O'Brien,"Seventies Britain - nasty, brutish and long?" TLS, 13 October, reviews Gerard DeGroot's The Seventies Unplugged: A kaleidoscopic look at a violent decade and Dominic Sandbrook's State of Emergency: The way we were: Britain, 1970–74.
Charles Horner,"A Born Controversialist," WSJ, 9 October, David Brooks,"The Professor Goes to Washington," NYT, 16 October, John Avlon,"We Need More Moynihans," Daily Beast, 18 October, and Hendrik Hertzberg,"Politics and Prose," New Yorker, 26 October, review Steven Weisman, ed., Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary.
For the Washington Post, 14 October, Michael Dirda reviews The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis.
In Benjamin L. Carp,"Noble Patriots or Glorified Vandals?" WSJ, 16 October, the author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America considers comparisons.
Simon Schama,"The beastliness of modern art," Financial Times, 15 October, is an edited version of Schama's lecture at the Frieze Art Fair.
Beverly Gage,"Under God . . . or Not," NYT, 15 October, reviews Jeffrey Owen Jones's and Peter Meyer's The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Ken Kalfus,"Path to Dissent," NYT, 15 October, reviews Vasily Grossman's The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays. Trans. by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova.
Alexandra Mullen,"The Hard Work of an Effortless Pose," WSJ, 15 October, reviews Barry Day, ed., The Noël Coward Reader.
Eric A. Posner,"The Four Tops," The Book, 14 October, reviews Noah Feldman's Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. David J. Garrow,"Justice William Brennan, a liberal lion who wouldn't hire women," Washington Post, 17 October, reviews Seth Stern's and Stephen Wermiel's Justice Brennan, Liberal Lion.
Steven Heller,"Silent Pictures," NYT, 8 October, and Sarah Boxer,"America's First Wordless Novelist," Slate, 17 October, review Art Spiegelman, ed., Six Novels in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward.
Janet Maslin,"A French Thinker Who Crossed Continents and Cultures," NYT, 17 October, reviews Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in His Laboratory.
Charles Horner,"A Born Controversialist," WSJ, 9 October, and Hendrik Hertzberg,"Politics and Prose," New Yorker, 26 October, review Steven Weisman, ed., Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary.
David Remnick and Caroline Elkins cast doubt on rumors that Barack Obama, Sr., was murdered. Andrew Ferguson,"The Roots of Lunacy," WS, 16 October, reviews Dinesh D'Souza's The Roots of Obama's Rage.
Yet the American people seldom return to power the party of a president who just two years earlier had collapsed the economy. In 1934, they didn't pull the lever for the party of Herbert Hoover. And they should have the good sense not to do so in 2010. Then again, FDR fought unapologetically for progressive change. (You heard no complaints about"the professional Left" coming from his administration.)
But of course you heard complaints of that very sort from FDR's White House, where Huey Long's"Share the Wealth" plan was regarded as terrifying madness and Francis Townsend's call for generous and immediate old age pensions was answered with the far more modest implementation of Social Security.
Roosevelt was challenged and pushed hard from his left, over questions that would be entirely familiar to the crowd at a Tea Party rally in 2010. Like Barack Obama, he responded with a complex mixture of contempt and conciliation. (The third chapter of Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest offers a sharp, concise description of Huey Long's furious attack on the opening years of the Roosevelt administration.)
Having tossed off a false history of the early Roosevelt administration, Palermo turns to a false narrative of our own political moment (emphasis added):
Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, Crossroads GPS, the Koch brothers, Bruce Rastetter and his American Future Fund, the Chamber of Commerce et cetera owe a debt of gratitude to Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas for skewing the political calculus so far in their favor.
And what about the Tea Baggers? How insanely stupid is it when a group of anti-tax antiquarians liken themselves to those who threw the East India Company's tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, and claim they want to protect the Constitution from the evil grip of liberals, yet are being backstopped by some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world?
...No one can really predict what's going to happen on November 2. All we know is that the historical trends are lining up for the Democrats to lose seats in both houses of Congress, and that Citizens United has definitively tipped the scales in favor of the oligarchy.
So, yes: the right-wingers on the Supreme Court opened the doors for big business to pour money into the support of the party of the corporations, the Republicans, to the disadvantage of the party of the people, the Democrats. Obama tells the same story, apparently without feeling a rush of deep personal shame.
Take thirty seconds out of your life to look at the Top 100 contributors to the 2010 campaign of my Representative, the crusading liberal Henry Waxman. His biggest source of funding? Employees and PACs of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Sadly, hilariously, I am not making that up. Number two is a Louisiana corporation that provides home health care services, a natural supporter of a West Los Angeles congressman.
The rest of the list includes a fair number of unions, but they're outnumbered by corporations. Among them are Wal-Mart, AT+T, Qwest, Comcast, Time Warner, Medco, General Electric, Honeywell, Blue Cross, AFLAC, Humana, Sony, UPS, Disney, and Sprint Nextel.
Note also the prominent presence of organizations representing health care providers on a list of top contributors to a ranking member of Congress in the middle of an urgent debate over the future of health care: American College of Cardiology, American Dental Association, American Health Care Association, Federation of American Hospitals, Homecare & Hospice PAC, American Podiatric Medical Association, American Academy of Ophthalmology, American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, American College of Radiology, and the list goes on past my patience for cutting and pasting. Of course, these medical associations and service provider PACs are contributing money to a politician because of their disinterested concern for the wellbeing of the common folk, so never mind.
Waxman doesn't campaign, by the way. He's been comfortably ensconced in the House since the Ford administration, in a district gerrymandered to within an inch of its life, and doesn't really face anything you could honestly describe as an"election," anymore. Call it his re-anointing, if you'd like. In any case, Waxman makes few to no campaign appearances in the district, has no campaign website, sends no mailers that have reached my house (where we have both a registered Democrat and a"decline to state"), and generally acts like he knows his re-election isn't in doubt.
So what does he do with his campaign millions? Take another thirty seconds to look: he funnels them around the party. In the last reporting cycle, Waxman gave $350,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and doled out money to candidates across the country: Betsy Markey For Congress, Fort Collins, CO; Betty Sutton For Congress, Akron, OH; Bill Owens For Congress, Plattsburgh, NY; and on and on and on. Waxman's role is perfectly clear: he's a conduit through which corporate cash flows, nationwide, to Democrats. But you have to vote for them, or else corporate interests will be represented in Congress.
Citizens United, psssh. The oligarchy wins either way. Why on earth would anyone fail to notice at this late date that the Democratic Party just offers another flavor of corporatism?
But note the narrative consistency in Palermo's story, a kind of steady fable in which FDR fought straight on for the principles of the unified left and the Democrats of today charge forward against the corporations. This isn't an argument. This is a faith.
