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One addendum to the previous post; if this subject has any interest for you I suggest you go read These Republican primaries are a sideshow – and so is the presidential election by Tom Mendelsohn.

Technically this is a blog post, although whether anyone on the inside has noticed or not I think any effective demarcation between “real news stories” and blog posts is being lost at online news sites anyway; either way it reads like the product of some sort of space-time flux through which a typical story from some parallel universe slipped into ours. A parallel universe where journalism actually just cuts right through all the conventions and false equivalency and horse-race bullshit and instead just frankly describes what’s actually going on in American politics.

I’ll just post two excerpts:

The presidential election is a sideshow. The office of the president is not this all-powerful bully pulpit it’s cracked up to be. The US government is designed to stymie itself, packed as it is with checks and balances. Obama can’t get much of substance done on his own; he has no control over the budget or passage of bills, and precious little over the states. He couldn’t reshape the US into a leftist paradise if he even wanted to.

And then, the really depressing bit:

The real battlegrounds in US politics are lower than the presidency – in Congress and in the states. And while the country may not like the GOP narrative at the top level, in the state houses and in Washington, the rightist agenda still goes great guns.

I don’t present this as the absolute be-all, end-all final Truth of 2012; I’m not nearly so convinced that Obama’s re-election is inevitable, for example. And I think Mendelsohn fudges the complicated reality that Republicans really aren’t very popular in congress, either, but are insulated by various structural details of our kinda-representative democracy. But most of this seems shockingly honest and realistic, especially amidst the continuing context of most “news” being flooded with breathless primary play-by-play, without even attempts to report on actual, real significance in terms of boring old reality.

Anyway, interruption over. Back to your steady diet of tracking polls and strategy analyses.

Because, as Andrew Kerr observed pointedly in “As Good as We Get,” hand-outs are strictly for rich corporations.

Especially here in the Buckeye State, with said corporations essentially running the show through the Republican legislature and their (certainly not “our”) very pro-business governor, John Kasich. Earlier this year, there was already the ninety-three million dollar gift to American Greetings which had me steamed up.

And that’s almost chump change, now, with Johnny “dangling a $400 million package” in front of Sears in hopes of luring them here from Illinois (in the somewhat uncomfortable phrasing of the Plain Dealer‘s Henry Gomez). For the most part, there’s nothing new to say about this, really. Moreover, even for the purposes of a propaganda drill, I don’t need to say a whole lot because there were so many good quotes in the cleveland.com article.

First of all, let’s recognize that this isn’t unique to Ohio, of course. “Kimberly Freely, a Sears spokeswoman, confirmed last week that about one-third of the 50 U.S. states have submitted proposals to the company. Freely said the company does not comment on incentive deals.” Well, why should they; what is there they can really say about their parasitic extortion of money from a society in which the general public and the government have been nearly bled dry already. (more…)

Okay, personal note: it’s an exaggeration to say my life has “turned inside-out” the past few weeks, but it’s been weird and let’s face it, I’m no Hunter Thompson. It  definitely can get too weird for me. So I’ve had little time or energy for the wider world of weirdness.

But I’ll jot down a few more thoughts on the expanding Occupy Wall Street protests.

First, on my non-participation. As noted the other day, any excuse feels like an excuse; Uncle Paul gives his own explanation today and it sounds flimsy though obviously I’m sympathetic, since my own absence from (more and more geographically distributed) protests is at least as flimsy.

That said, where to begin… The main action is still in New York, and I’m in Cleveland. I’ve been very busy. I’m a pussy; I’m pathetically non-confrontational. I’m an isolated, introverted single individual; I suspect that very few people join in demonstrations like this on their own.

The big reason, though, is probably that my brain just doesn’t work this way. I’m probably what one pop-psychology system has termed a “concrete sequential;” in any event my nature is overwhelmingly one of cautious, logical, ordered progression. Whereas protests generally, including in this case, just don’t match up with that approach. One of The Economist bloggers bucked the punditry trend, today, and suggested that “what [protesters] want is pretty clear: jobs, cheaper health care, cheaper education, and relief from suffocating debt.” And I’m for these things, really.

Yet, if I were at an Occupy Wall Street protest, I just don’t think I could satisfactorily get past the questions “what exactly do you hope to achieve, and how exactly do you hope to achieve it by standing here yelling and waving a sign?” (more…)