A manifesto: not the national interest but the special interest

In my Masters and undergraduate programs, I took a number of classes from Robert Terrell, a professor at CSU East Bay I retain enormous respect for. I’m more radical than he is, but he provided me with the information that led me to where I am. I owe him a lot.

Having looked at all Terrell presented, and being thereby duly horrified, I came to be surprised by his attitude. As just an example, he came to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, “is a really nice lady.” He described politics as “the art of the possible” and retained a faith in the ability of the system to reform itself.

I was more skeptical. But Terrell perceived gradual progress in the simple fact he was permitted to teach. Because of his race, he believed, he would not have been permitted that in the 1960s.

But to the extent we see progress as linear, the best we can say is that strands of progress are co-linear. Not all progress is to the same end. And depending upon our values, we might say that while we might conceptualize them as parallel, they do not proceed in the same direction. A more apt analogy might be with a bowl of spaghetti, with strings of pasta curled and tangled and running in every direction.

Because also in the time that Terrell has come to be permitted to teach, and as I have repeatedly commented upon in this space, neoconservatives have gained a hold on government that has outlasted the Bush administration. We no longer have what C. Wright Mills described as three hierarchies, with elites of similar social station directing those hierarchies toward similar ends, but the barest vestigial remnants of revolving doors between politics, corporations, and the military. It might still be possible to distinguish between the hierarchies; not so the elites.

We have nuclear weapons. Why? What possible scenario could ever justify their use? We only hear some vague explanation about the need for deterrence. But if this is so, why can we not at least disavow any first use?

And what about land mines, which we no longer produce or deploy? We are “continuing Bush’s policy of refusing to honor an international antipersonnel landmine ban — the Ottawa treaty — signed by 158 nations.”

The war in Afghanistan makes no sense at all. al Qaeda, we are told on the rare occasions we do not conflate them with the Taliban, has fewer than 100 forces in the country. But we are escalating our war there, taking a largely untold toll upon civilians, doing much more to promote our enemies than we do to defeat them.

On the domestic front, we have bailed out the banks and protected corporate interests while forgetting that they need customers with money to spend and doing nothing of substance about unemployment. But we have gone to great lengths to preserve the prerogative to spy on our population. If we had a political and economic system worth defending, would we need to fear our citizens and invade their privacy?

In an actual emergency, the earthquake in Haiti, we rushed to “secure” the country. Over 180,000 people were killed, but aid for people needing food and water was of secondary importance. (Disclosure: one of my fellow students in my Masters program, Kevin Pina, a filmmaker, has done a great deal of work in Haiti and is quoted in the preceding linked article.) Our record in that country has been of a series of actions, over its entire history, to brutally suppress any improvement in the condition of the people; they are to remain destitute laborers in the sweatshops of multinational corporations. How does this make sense?

When we are doing so many things that make so little sense, it can only be that our government pursues special interest rather than national interest, that we are solving the short term problems of a few while neglecting the long term problems of the many. Indeed with a government limited to two national parties, Democrats seemingly determined to lose power and Republicans seemingly determined not to take it (at least by electoral means), but both united to suppress progressive ideals, it can no longer be said that our government exists for any positive purpose.

In an odd way, the radical right are correct: our government now needs to be strangled and reduced such that it can be drowned in a bathtub. But their vision is too limited: this also needs to happen with our corporations and with our military. For the conflation of these three is now hopelessly corrupt.

Why I can’t do it anymore

This was one of the men’s room toilets at Luxor Cab Company in San Francisco about the time I got fired early in 2005. And this was on a nice day. Typically, the restroom was in desperate need of cleaning, with toilet paper strewn all over the place, not just draped over the seat as in this picture. The toilets were often plugged up. (For a full size version of the photograph, click on it, then click on the image in the gallery.)

There were two toilets in the men’s room to serve hundreds of drivers and all the male employees at Luxor Cab. A few of us took to using the women’s toilet (a single occupancy room) instead, we were so desperate. To get to it, you had to be let in to the office, and to walk by the president’s office.

The company president, John Lazar, was an obnoxious asshole. He would occasionally call someone in to share some really raunchy pornography. He thought he was being friendly when he pronounced at loud volume that abusing a driver gave him a “hard on.” He tried to fix his son up with one of the few female employees. That’s the kind of place Luxor Cab was: obnoxious, abusive, and exploitive. Company management reveled in the antagonistic relationship it had with everyone else.

That was an issue for me. As a student in the social sciences, I was not only becoming more sensitive to issues of harassment, bias, and discrimination, but facing a cognitive dissonance between the basic level of respect I sensed when I was at school and the fundamental disrespect I faced at work.

But of course, that’s not why I got fired. I had been hired at Luxor as a call taker, someone who answers the phones and enters orders for cab service. With San Francisco’s parking and traffic problems, demand for cabs can be high, and I was the fastest call taker Luxor had.

But there were also slack periods, as any cab driver can tell you. I remember those as well, from when I’d driven cab for Luxor before getting sucked into the dot-com boom. There are two ways to approach this. You can sit in a hotel line, but the bellhops are corrupt and often steer airport trips to town car services. Or you can cruise for flags. I’ll never forget the sight of other cabs ahead of me, doing the same thing, and other cabs in my rear view mirror, doing the same thing.

Cab dispatch operations are in a paradoxical situation. Obviously, they need orders for the cabs. But the orders also need to be “good” orders. That means that when the cab driver gets to the address–all too often in distant neighborhoods with a low volume of orders–the customer needs to be there and ready to go, preferably on a long trip. Any time an order is not “good,” dispatch credibility suffers. That makes it harder to get drivers to go on orders–they’ll just cruise for flags or stay downtown. But if they don’t take any risk, people can’t get cabs, the San Francisco Taxi Commission gets complaints, company management gets complaints, and people call other companies. The fact is that drivers need orders to make the most money. So this is a system that needs to work, with a balance between caring about drivers and caring about customers.

Luxor fired the best dispatcher I knew at managing this balance. He had severe hip problems and there was some suspicion that the company’s health insurance premiums were rising accordingly. Call takers were all part time workers, precisely to avoid being covered by health insurance.

Being a call taker meant I had a reasonably steady income. The pay was minimum wage, but there were also tips, which the cashiers took in and shared with the rest of us. Cab drivers usually aren’t employees; they lease a cab, which comes with insurance and dispatch service, for ten hour shifts. Everybody wants a cut of their earnings. At Luxor, they had to buy gas at the end of their shifts and were expected to tip the attendants, who were also mechanics. There are the aforementioned bellhops and they’re also expected to tip dispatch, which they do through the cashiers, both when they check out a cab and when they pay for their lease at the end of every shift. The cashiers take the biggest cut of the tips, the dispatchers take the second largest cut, and the call takers get what’s left. I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree in–it would turn out to be–mass communication and so in slack times, I would study, with my laptop open on my workspace.

At some point, the head dispatcher’s manager became an independent contractor and started being paid entirely out of the tips. He took a lion’s share, and of course, this cost the rest of us money. I eventually got annoyed enough that in 2004, I went down to the State’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement to file a complaint.

I was in for a shock. Instead of having people who would investigate the situation, order corrective measures, and levy appropriate fines, I was thrust into a hearing. I tried to collect statements from my fellow employees, but they were all too intimidated to cooperate. So it was just me against Luxor with its lawyers.

I remember being called into Lazar’s office after I filed the paperwork. Lazar offered me inducements to get me to drop the case. I refused them.

And of course, my case was thrown out in short order. Lazar, now victorious, came through the dispatch area afterwards while I was working and declared that he didn’t like my laptop. Other call takers had books, radios, even portable TVs, but I was not to be allowed the use of my laptop.

As a student, I couldn’t comply. I needed every available minute to study. Lazar understood that.

About six months after the hearing, all of a sudden my call taking speed became an issue. Fast was good, Mark Powell, the head dispatcher, informed me, but I was too brusque. So I was cut from three days to two. Then someone finked on me about my laptop and I was fired.

So yes, I do demand a basic level of respect. And stunts like what the Census Bureau pulled on me yesterday just don’t cut it anymore.

Take your “positive attitude” and shove it

A few days ago, I called up the local Census Bureau. They’re supposedly hiring census takers for the 2010 Census. The job requires a high school diploma. I have a Master’s degree. The job would last maybe two months. I need something more or less permanent. But I haven’t found any jobs whatsoever.

The woman who answered the phone took my name and phone number and signed me up for a test to be held at the Sebastopol Library today. Show up fifteen minutes early, she advised, for a 1:00 pm examination.

I arrived twenty minutes early. There were lots of people in the library, but no signs indicating anything about the test. I asked at an information desk. The woman behind the desk hadn’t heard anything about the test but led me over to the other information desk where I guess the calendar for room reservations is kept, and the woman there, who also hadn’t heard anything about it, commenced calling all over the place.

Long story short: there was no Census Bureau test at the Sebastopol Library today or at the library in Guerneville. There was one at the library at Rohnert Park. Given advance warning, I could have driven to Rohnert Park easily enough. But even though they had my telephone number, no one at the Census Bureau called me. And no one was at the Census Bureau to answer my phone call then or a half hour later. And no one returned my call after I left a message.

I guess I’m supposed to believe this is for real.

Since beginning my job search many months ago, I have looked for college teaching jobs, writing jobs, and jobs at nonprofit organizations. I have sent out hundreds of resumés, filled out countless on-line applications. Very rarely have I even received an acknowledgement.

But I’m supposed to believe this is for real.

The job search advice is to tap your social networks. I have social networks, which I have expanded, mostly on line. But I have not gotten one job lead from my social networks since I was laid off from my last decently paying job in 2001.

And I’m supposed to believe this is for real.

After being laid off from high technology in 2001, I came to realize that this was the third time I had landed hard in that industry. I’d never progressed very far up the career ladder and spent an awful lot of years in desperate poverty in between “real” jobs, working in exploitive, abusive conditions.

Poverty is real. And there is nothing good that can come of it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to protect their own position.

I first graduated with an Associate’s degree in Business Data Processing in 1979. The last time a Republican had been elected president, it was Richard Nixon, and I remember thinking the Republican Party had been forever discredited. I was wrong. I entered the job market for real just about the time that California’s Proposition 13 passed and Ronald Reagan came to power. And all I’ve seen since is how jobs in one industry after another were exported overseas. I realized that anything in any kind of work that I’d been raised to understand as “real work” was being exported just as fast as capitalists could figure out how to export it.

Unemployment is real.

I returned to school, earned a Bachelor’s degree in mass communication, a Master’s in speech communication, and am now pursuing a doctoral degree in transformative studies. A Master’s degree is all you need to teach in a community college. It is all that is needed to be hired for an lecturer position at many (if not most) universities. And I even have experience: I taught public speaking for two years, tutored and supervised tutors at the communication lab while finishing my Master’s.

My qualifications are real.

But now people tell me to keep a “positive attitude,” to keep applying, to keep networking, and not to whine. Oh, and by the way, according to the local job resource center, long-term employment is now two years. So even if I find work, I am essentially expected to continuously beg for access to the essentials of life.

I’m sorry, but this is not for real.

Censorship and Google’s protest: Why westerners should listen to developing world complaints

According to the Associated Press:

Beijing issued a stinging response Friday to U.S. criticism that it is jamming the free flow of words and ideas on the Internet, accusing the United States of damaging relations between the two countries by hoisting its “information imperialism” on China.

In the United States, mainstream news media have simply dismissed this claim of “information imperialism” without explanation. But to treat this correctly, we should first, understand what it is the Chinese governnment is referring to; and second, determine to what extent their explanation is adequate for their actions.

First, western news media dominate the world’s flow of information. That means the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence-France Press, all news agencies situated in western colonial and/or imperial powers; and reflecting western values of “capitalist democracy,” a certain degree of political (but not economic) human rights, and secularism predominate. It means that in this flow of information, western military interventions in developing countries are assumed to be largely justified. Finally, this flow of information values white lives over the lives of people of color, so, for examples, the “excess deaths” of well over a million Iraqis in the Iraq war are far less significant than the thousands of casualties among the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” and Afghan and Pakistani complaints against drone attacks that kill far more civilians than insurgents are far less significant than the duration and expense of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And when western governments have advocated a “free flow” of information, it has been to promote these values.

In contrast, other societies express different beliefs about the role of journalism. In Agents of Power, J. Herbert Altschull describes a Marxist ideal of journalism as propaganda, a Leninist view of journalism as a tool for activism and organization, and an “advancing world” perspective as journalism as facilitating cooperation. Regardless of belief system, Altschull argues that, in fact, all mainstream journalists more or less explicitly act as agents of power, supporting the status quo.

Governments and militants all understand information as a weapon of war. U.S. military attacks on al Jazeera, U.S. military “information” campaigns, Iranian regime attacks on the BBC, and other attempts to control information all reflect this understanding.

So, can we understand Chinese censorship of Tienanmen Square protests, Tibet separatist advocacy, and other topics of dissent in this light? Can we similarly understand the Iranians’ restrictions on western news media? The Iranian regime is attempting to blame its internal dissent on external forces. The Green movement in Iran is probably too widespread–and in fact too ideologically diverse–for this to be credible. But when Westerners align themselves with dissenters in any country, there is a case to be made that they are being hypocrites and that they enable regimes to blame their problems on countries that have historically sought hegemony over vast parts of the world.

Advocates of a “free flow of information” should understand that this has all too often been a one-way flow. I spend many hours per day trying to bypass this, getting news reports from western, institutional, non-western, and non-institutional sources (the facts that I’m limited to English and that I have not traveled outside the United States are handicaps). But Google, who has recently threatened to withdraw from the Chinese web search market unless allowed to provide uncensored results; Hillary Clinton, whose recent speech supported Google’s position; and western human rights activists would all do well to understand that communication is not a one way street.

Laissez-Faire and Political Speech: The contradictions of campaign finance reform

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporations today, striking down a prohibition on direct corporate funding of advertisements in favor of or opposing political candidates.

In ruling that “First Amendment protections do not depend on the speaker’s ‘financial ability to engage in public discussion,'” the Court held that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 infringed the speech rights of a particular class of associations of wealthy individuals. To wit, “the Government may also commit a constitutional wrong when by law it identifies certain preferred speakers. There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.”

Numerous commentators have warned that this will open the floodgates to unrestricted corporate influence in political campaigns. (UPDATE: see Glenn Greenwald about constitutionality and undesirable outcomes.) In writing that “political speech is so ingrained in this country’s culture that speakers find ways around campaign finance laws,” the Court pointed out that even without this ruling, the wealthy would continue to find loopholes, and would continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on campaigns. (UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald comments on this as well; see also Juan Cole; Heather Gerken warns about a changed definition of corruption; Chris Hedges points to larger implications.)

The real problem here is a presumption of equality between the speech of the wealthy and that of the poor. As we have so vividly observed over the first year of the Obama administration, larger amounts of money can purchase mass media access–and therefore, influence–which smaller amounts of money cannot. Access to these huge amounts of money is an effective price of admission to political power. So a laissez-faire approach effectively limits the range of ideas in political discourse and the number of candidates for political office. It functions not as free speech is intended, that is to enable the fullest consideration of a wide range of ideas, but rather to protect the already moneyed status quo.

In effect, by removing any restrictions, the Court itself has committed what it has recognized as a “constitutional wrong,” covered only by the fig leaf of not explicitly “identif[ying] certain preferred speakers.” But media scholars cannot be so easily deceived. To us, the Court’s decision, even by omission, identifies and prefers associations of the wealthy which enable them to pool ever larger sums of money.

But the Court’s decision also repudiates a flawed approach, one which could never succeed in fulfilling the fundamental reason for freedom of speech. As I explained to my public speaking students, a political system is best served when it allows itself to consider the widest possible range of options, to hear dissent that urges it to correct its course, and when everyone feels they have a voice. This decision does not relieve the handicap of poverty in political representation. If, however, in the present climate of popular distrust aimed at big corporations and wealthy interests, it provokes a wider discussion of what substantial campaign finance reform actually means, the Supreme Court decision will have been a service, albeit one the right-wing Justices who prevailed today are unlikely to have intended.

Not this time: Democrats lose 60th Senate vote

As I write this, I’m learning from my various feeds that the Associated Press has declared Scott Brown the winner in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race and, according to Alternet, citing unnamed Democratic Party sources, Martha Coakley has called Brown to concede.

This blog, and many others, have chronicled a seeming determination on the part of the Democratic Party to be irrelevant. The Party refused to stand up to Bush on myriad issues even after winning a majority of Congress in 2006. When it won the presidency, it concentrated on serving its corporate supporters and bankers who refuse to accept responsibility for their role in creating the recession, while leaving the unemployed and homeowners to twist in the wind; not only refused to pursue but sustained Bush administration criminality (UPDATE: See also Glenn Greenwald); and even seemed to convert an emergency response to the earthquake in Haiti into a military occupation, while people became increasingly desperate for food and water and mass graves were dug for the dead–undermining even the friendliest possible comparison with the notorious Depression-era President Herbert Hoover. Micah Williams wrote that

you can hardly fault us for being swept up in the “hope” and “change” whirlwind that blew through our country with Barack Obama’s presidency. Young folks from coast to coast turned out in droves to knock on doors, work phone banks, and register new voters. Even people steeped in radical politics, deeply critical of the American two-party system, got on board. Some volunteered for his campaign, a task in which they had never imagined themselves participating; others decided they would vote for him, despite taking previous positions that they would never participate in electoral politics; many put forth a sharply critical stance in public or print, but one-on-one, maybe after a few beers, admitted that his campaign’s energy was infectious, and they were doggedly attempting to evade the grasp of that excitement–to no avail.

Much was made of how the Democrats needed to win this race in order to pass their health care proposal, the one that will cost ordinary people more than they can afford for mediocre health insurance. But the real news is that progressives refused to buy into the dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans that sells them out every time. As Eugene Robinson wrote for the Washington Post,

The first [lesson the Obama administration needs to learn] is that the “enthusiasm gap” matters, and it matters a lot. There is no way that a Democratic candidate for the Senate from Massachusetts, running to fill the seat that the late Ted Kennedy held for decades, should have anything but a cakewalk to victory. It’s true that Martha Coakley ran a mediocre campaign and that Republican Scott Brown ran a very good one, but still, this is Massachusetts we’re talking about. That Obama would have to fly in two days before the vote and stump for Coakley and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority was absurd.

Robinson is putting his finger on that Ted Kennedy was widely considered a leftist; he inherited a seat that his brother, John F. Kennedy, won in 1953, and he held it for decades. And now the Democrats have pissed it off. According to a Public Policy poll, “Brown’s voters continue to be much more enthusiastic than Coakley’s. 80% of his say they’re ‘very excited’ about voting Tuesday while only 60% of hers express that sentiment.” Also according to the poll, “Those planning to turn out continue to be skeptical of the Democratic health care plan, saying they oppose it by a 48/40 margin.”

These are not voters who have suddenly turned into Tea Partiers. According to the New York Times,

It was a sharp swing of the pendulum, but even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction.

“I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country,” said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. “I think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”

Going by party affiliation, Massachusetts favors Democrats by 34 percent. When it comes to giveaways, there are only two groups who have gotten anything out of the Obama and Bush presidencies: neoconservatives and the very wealthy.

Democrats need to decide which they want more: the money that corporations shower upon them for being in power or to even be in power to receive that money. The game is up.

A friend in need? Progressives and the Massachusetts special election

So it seems the Democrats might lose a Massachussetts U.S. Senate seat they’ve held since 1953 tomorrow. And it is amazing to see so many Democratic Party supporters all of a sudden appealing to progressives.

Nick Baumann argues that Republicans will spin Coakley’s defeat as a some sort of a mandate. I’m not sure for what–since the Republican strategy appears to seek an insurrection rather than an electoral victory–but it wouldn’t be good for Barack Obama’s program. In a display of dichotomous reasoning, Baumann writes, “It’s hard to see how crushing defeats for the more liberal party will somehow help liberals. The Democrats are the more-liberal party. If they’re losing, the Republicans (the more conservative party) will be winning.”

Repeating the dichotomy, Obama tried to tap into popular anger at the bankers he bailed out, campaigning for the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, asserting, “She’s got your back. Her opponent’s got Wall Street’s back.” Never mind that his plan for financial reform includes a tax that cuts the government in on some of the action for being “too big to fail,” but only until all financial bailout money has been recovered. As marijuana advocates in California know, you don’t tax something you’re seeking to abolish. You tax things you acquiesce to. And as for having ordinary people’s backs, Paul Krugman writes

The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough. . . . A number of economists (myself included) called for a stimulus substantially bigger than the one the administration ended up proposing. According to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, however, in December 2008 Mr. Obama’s top economic and political advisers concluded that a bigger stimulus was neither economically necessary nor politically feasible.

As for the banks, Krugman continues:

The light-touch approach to the financial industry further entrenched the power of the very institutions that caused the crisis, even as it failed to revive lending: bailed-out banks have been reducing, not increasing, their loan balances. And it has had disastrous political consequences: the administration has placed itself on the wrong side of popular rage over bailouts and bonuses.

Obama has even helped to protect the banks from embarrassment, not even considering that maybe, just maybe, a little humility might do them some good. But the Obama administration didn’t even want to expose that it paid a health insurance expert to advocate the abomination that might make it out of Congress if Coakley wins. In fact, for someone who’s supposedly got our backs, Obama is keeping an awful lot secret.

Robert Freeman explains why Obama’s economic plan doesn’t make any sense at all. The fact is that Obama hasn’t even tried to do right by ordinary people and there are no jobs in sight for the unemployed. If you’re trying to understand Obama as trying to be bipartisan, he’s in fact had the opposite effect. The country is at least as polarized as it was under George W. Bush.

Jason Rosenbaum appeals “to the pissed off progressives over here: Don’t be Naderites. It’s a losing political strategy.” It’s a two-party system, he explains. Voting for a third party or not voting at all supports the candidate you like least.

But what amazes me most (and really shouldn’t) is how blatantly all these appeals to support the lesser of two evils appear just before this crucial special election in Massachusetts. It seems the only time that Democrats worry about progressives is at election time. Then, all of a sudden, Democrats are our friends (in need), pleading for patience and understanding.

Trouble is, that isn’t what I was hearing all last year. Any more than I heard it under the Bush administration.

Words vs. Deeds; moving back the Doomsday Clock

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has turned back the Doomsday Clock. The Bulletin‘s Board of Directors said

It is 6 minutes to midnight. We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons. For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable. These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization–the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

This burst of admittedly limited optimism reminds me of the Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama. This committee, too, “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” Having committed the United States to an escalation in Afghanistan, Obama responded in his acceptance speech with a defense of war.

And the discrepancy between Obama’s words and deeds has repeatedly been so vast that we should surely be skeptical about the prospects for nuclear arms reduction against a military-industrial complex that resists even a “no-first-use” pledge. Accordingly, the Bulletin‘s Board warned that “the small increment of the change reflects both the threats that remain around the globe and the danger that governments may fail to deliver on pledged actions on reducing nuclear weapons and mitigating climate change.”

I cannot say I see the case for moving the clock back. The news on climate change seems to get worse every year. If anything, the clock should be advanced, particularly in light of the failure in Copenhagen which the Bulletin‘s Board seems to have studiously ignored.

It is possible to argue that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded hastily and out of optimism. The Bulletin‘s Board has no such excuse. I suddenly feel naïve; can it be that Obama is more representative of the elite than I imagined, that a significant fraction of the elite shares his preference for rhetoric over action?

for Google

This posting exists to help Google (and maybe other search engines) index my entire blog.
This is nothing more than an index of the months of every year that this blog has existed.

2005
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

2006
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

2007
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

2008
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

2009
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12

2010
01

I know, it seems pretty silly.

But you see, I actually use this blog for my own reference.
And even if some of these postings might make me cringe now,
they can help me to reconstruct events.

for Google

This posting exists to help Google (and maybe other search engines) index my entire blog.
This is nothing more than an index of the months of every year that this blog has existed.

03/2005
04/2005
05/2005
06/2005
07/2005
08/2005
09/2005
10/2005
11/2005
12/2005

01/2006
02/2006
03/2006
04/2006
05/2006
06/2006
07/2006
08/2006
09/2006
10/2006
11/2006
12/2006

01/2007
02/2007
03/2007
04/2007
05/2007
06/2007
07/2007
08/2007
09/2007
10/2007
11/2007
12/2007

01/2008
02/2008
03/2008
04/2008
05/2008
06/2008
07/2008
08/2008
09/2008
10/2008
11/2008
12/2008

01/2009
02/2009
03/2009
04/2009
05/2009
06/2009
07/2009
08/2009
09/2009
10/2009
11/2009
12/2009

01/2010

I know, it seems pretty silly.

But you see, I actually use this blog for my own reference.
And even if some of these postings might make me cringe now,
they can help me to reconstruct events.