demosdemos

Moyers with Hacker and Pierson

2012-01-18T06:28:00.004-05:00

Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson on Winner Take All Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Hacker and Pierson argue in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010) that the widening gap of inequality in the US, (“the rich are getting fabulously richer while the rest of Americans are basically holding steady or worse,” p.20) has not primarily been due to changes in technology, education, and economics, or what is casually referred to as “globalization,” but changes in the American political realm. Not only are the growing rates of inequality in the US foreign to other advanced countries which also happen to be indebted to the globalized economy, say Hacker and Pierson, these inequalities are the product of a sustained assault on the American middle-class by business organizations and industry lobbies on myriad labor groups, social programs, and progressive tax policies. The “sustained hyperconcentration” of wealth found in the US these days has been made possible by the coordinated efforts and planning of “trickle-up economics” dating back to the 1970s. And, “alas,” they remind us, “the evidence is overwhelming that upward social mobility has not increased at the same time that inequality has skyrocketed,” (pp. 28-29) and actually lag behind rates of mobility now found in Canada, Germany, Australia, France, Finland, Spain, Norway, and Sweden.

The important point made by Hacker and Pierson is that politics is not a trivial sideshow for cable tv but the battlefront where class warfare gets conducted by other means. Thus what their book attempts to do is repoliticize economic realities.

“Governments do redistribute what people earn.. But government policies also shape what people earn in the first place, as well as many other fundamental economic decisions that consumers, businesses, and workers make. Practically every aspect of labor and financial markets is shaped by government policy...Even the word 'redistribution' is symptomatic of the pervasive distortions in contemporary discussion. It suggests the refashioning of a natural order by meddling politicians, a departure from market rewards. But the treatment of the market as some pre-political state of nature is a fiction. Politicians are there at the creation, shaping that 'natural' order and what the market rewards. Beginning in the 1970s, they helped shape it so more and more of the rewards would go to the top.” (pp.55-56)

So not only did powerful business and employer lobbies work together to achieve shared goals. They did so by generating mass political campaigns and spreading large sums of cash throughout both political parties. And when the cost of political advertising began to skyrocket in the 1970s the increasing hunger for cash gave the political parties good reason to listen to those with deep pockets. “The newly mobilized business groups understood that Democrats and Republicans could play distinct but complementary roles” (p.121). Business PACS could provide mixed donations to both parties - and even hedge their bets by spending on candidates competing in the same race. Eventually, both parties earned their business cred. They ostensibly embraced free markets as well as the cutting of social welfare programs. National economic policies became the consequence of a new kind of politics. And in the long run, those organizations that had once provided leverage to workers and middle-class Americans simply lost their clout.

Hacker and Pierson close by affirming their hope in politics nonetheless. Though the battle may last decades, they suggest, the American political system can perhaps be made responsive once again to democratic engagement and the hopes of the American middle-class. Yet given the neoliberal globalization of markets we may wonder whether the political realm Hacker and Pierson appeal to still has the kind of autonomy they think it does to actually become once again the arena of political change. Let's remember its not just the organized infrastructure of labor and the Democratic party that have been compromised if not lost. The American political infrastructure itself as well as its procedures are also a lot different than they used to be. And so is the American public. Thus, are political and economic reforms still possible within the US given the global regimes it is now embedded within? And if they are, can Americans reasonably hope these changes will somehow grow out of "the quiet heroism of sustained renewal" of traditional political forms, i.e., electoral and procedural politics, political campaigning and political organization? Can we refer back to the successes of the New Deal, and to Walter Lippmann's advice that democracy lift itself up by its own bootstraps, given the realities of the contemporary age? More broadly, I continue to wonder whether Americans are in the midst of a new political founding? Perhaps entering into a new age of techno-feudalism?

ny's finest...just obeying orders

2011-11-17T02:26:00.002-05:00

the occupation movement heckles michelle bachmann

2011-11-12T23:18:00.015-05:00

Occupiers cannot simply continue twinkling at electoral politics and the concentration of political and economic power, and this video suggests they are starting realize it... I think. I also wonder whether they'll be willing to heckle Democrats as well. Because even if the Occupation does not endorse candidates, preferring to “stay out of politics,” it should still plan on clarifying and coordinating its “autonomous” position in regard to the two-party system itself, its candidates, and schemes, especially in light of the onslaught of campaign rhetoric, (“the lesser of two evils,”) eventually on its way. 'Cuz, you know, power kinda works that way.

UPDATE: 11/22/2011

Watch here Obama spin the wheels of co-optation when speaking to an audience in New Hampshire, “including”, he says, “the ones who were chanting at me, you're the reason I ran for office in the first place.” Still no 3rd party people?

though Rahm seemed far more perturbed.

proceduralists are fake anarchists

2011-11-09T12:03:00.025-05:00

If one of the appeals of OWS has been the “99%” mantra, amongst Occupiers there exists a litany of “non-hierarchical” and “leaderless” memes which are also well-known. These buzzwords ostensibly signify radical egalitarianism and hyper-resistance to authority, something more Kropotkinian than either liberal or Marxist. So while an anarchist ethic may be appealing to neo-Nietzschean personalities capable of continually subverting the processes and techniques of power by virtue of their creative agonism, “leaders,” (as many Occupiers never tire of reminding me,) are flawed animals – and thus vulnerable targets for those looking to co-opt or discredit them and their “followers.” According to Malcolm Harris in “Baby, We’re All Anarchists Now,” this leaderless revolution is not just another attempt to not be co-opted but true “autonomous” social action. It is non-representative, post-political, post-systems, post-individualist as well as post-mensch. And it is “premised on the necessity of acting with your body itself, whether through your legs, arms, vocal chords, fingers, whatever.” He adds, “the latter is threatening as hell, especially to the professional left which is thrust into the conservative position of defending its requisitioned authority.”

Sorry to be such a concern troll but if the aversion to hierarchy precludes the coordination of chains of command and their “demands,” many may wonder of this anarchist ethic, cui bono? I’d say that most people these days, the 99%-ers, could give a rat’s ass about anarchist ethics and Foucauldian micro-strategies. Financial security, jobs, better education, a more just and peaceful world… things like that… are probably a lot more in tune with the common folk than some anarcho-situationalist code reversals, let alone The Revolution. The 99% may nod in perfunctory agreement when they hear the slogans, pontifications, and “positivity” of smug college kids but I wonder how deep they actually believe them. Do they even care?

Nevertheless, much of the popular appeal of OWS has been its unruly antagonism to “the system” – not just to concentrations of financial and political power but to the “the culture of capitalism” itself, to its institutional complexes, norms, strategies, and “values.” People are becoming increasingly aware of their exclusion, abandonment, and powerlessness. OWS has called ordinary people of diverse backgrounds and abilities together to talk, debate, perform, and vent anger in ways that show they are trying to think about “paradigms” in new ways, and be creative. So however it turns out, OWS can be said to have successfully reclaimed public space, and even celebrated the anarchical spirit of debate, noise, disorder, and resistance. And despite what some Occupiers may claim, this rowdy spirit – warts and all – is also downright adversarial to the organizational and policy imperatives of “systems” as well as to the managerial stinginess of “consensus” models flaunted at the GA and its working groups. It does not proffer sophisticated models and ideals, nor sets of solutions and procedures, but rather enacts a disruptive and subversive politics which challenges established orders and their mechanisms of control. Interactions are more fluid, and are constantly adapting to people's changing needs. The problem however with this social (or rebellious) vibrancy is that it is difficult to sustain over time. It not only bears the scars of history, and is perhaps more symbiotic to “the system” than we care to admit; it is also impulsive, improvisatory, and vulnerable to rationalization as well as demagoguery.

The most revealing criticism of the “horizontalist” imperative getting pushed onto people around Zuccotti is that existing hierarchies have already congealed within OWS, and denying this fact may perhaps be an effective rhetorical tactic in opening to a wider following but it also signs-on to secretive networks and potential autocracy. Although OWS’s groups are said to be open for anyone to attend the existence of inner circles is evident. I would not want to exaggerate the power of those who occupy these circles, but they often meet privately, often miles from Zuccotti Park, and traverse OWS networks – not just the GA but its myriad “working groups,” “break-out groups,” and other “sub-groups.” Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with ~~leaders~~ individuals who happen to be more committed than the rest of us in pressing “the system” continually to open avenues for democratic participation and the empowerment of ordinary people provided, I would add, they accept their commitments as a service, or even sacrifice, for the interests of those they ostensibly serve, and, are also prevented from occupying exclusive positions which operate in secret and have some semblance of lasting duration and significance.

I also understand standard parliamentary procedures and protocol for assemblies known for factions and competing interests. But I do have a problem with “facilitators” who go about selling the Revolution by setting down the procedural rules and histrionic rhythms for the 99%to follow. The process is political – and nowhere else are proceduralists more exacting in their displacement of substantive debate than the facilitation apparatus in OWS.

I attended one “spokes council” one evening, and observed a deceptively informal semi-circle of a couple hundred people who were thoroughly “facilitated” by several individuals whose role it was, (after telling us how to appropriately hand signal during the assembly: “this means… ‘I feel good,’ this means… ‘I don’t like what I’m hearing’”) to keep procedural order, and sort out various agenda items, proposals, questions, concerns from participants. Yet the obvious problem was that – aduh – exacting procedural order is out of synch with the imaginations, concerns, and questions of the assembly which not only seemed to have a life of its own by virtue of its raucous and improvisatory latency but which found itself at times debating procedure itself. Anygoo, I also noticed on a couple occasions whispering into the ears of facilitators by several individuals otherwise peacefully stationed against the wall. No one blocked. No one voiced objection. They “consensed.”

The criticism that OWS suffers from depoliticization, and is weak on substance, is on the mark. But Its starry-eyed refusal to openly recognize and address hierarchy is also internally debilitating. As Doug Henwood, supporter but resident curmudgeon of OWS, put it, “(w)ith such a freewheeling organization, if that’s the right word, lines of responsibility and accountability are very murky.” Indeed Occupiers will only continually confront the simple politics of how to appropriately allocate the gains of their appeal and accomplishments, like, for instance, how donations should be distributed through the GA.

Occupiers are correct to insist that “what’s your demand?” is a conventional narrative of rationalism, interest group realpolitick, and legitimacy which misunderstands the fundamental challenges posed by OWS. Yet like it or not, the demand for demands is still inevitable. Talk of “cultural revolution,” “paradigm shifts,” and “we’re all anarchists now,” is theoretically feasible in the loooong-term but OWS still cannot afford to disengage from institutions of power, like the state and the economy. You know, because if you don’t go through politics and the state, politics and the state go through you, no matter how much you say the word “autonomy.” The real difficulty however with “making demands” is that Occupiers simply don’t yet have the numbers willing to go for the mat for them anyway, whatever they are, nor the organization to make them possible.(And things like this make it near hopeless.) Thus OWS has to grow in numbers and appeal to make its presence more efficacious and powerful. Future political and economic crises can only present such opportunities. But if it atrophies into festering blobs of “Occupations” sans “demands” it will become the nomenclature of nose-ringed A-circling suburbia.

zuccotti is not a model

2011-11-02T11:43:00.016-04:00

OWS is a miracle. It’s also exiting. About a month ago, I jokingly referred to Zuccotti Park as a kind of refugee camp from Hampshire College’s better days playing host to a wide variety of political activists and performers. Radicals, liberals, freaks, Marxists, anarchists, Ron Paul trojan horses, occasional saboteurs, and the honest-to-god-just-curious were there all on display. While Zuccotti Park has also become a haven for homeless people and various drifters attracted to the free meals and a place to stay, the site has over time also attracted some unsavory characters and become more dangerous as well as a little less exciting. There already exists in the park an informal band of security personnel which has been undoubtedly busy of late. One person today openly queried whether some form of ID should also be required, perhaps “wristbands” handed out and worn at least by those sleeping and eating in the park. “What constitutes a member and a non-member?” Another activist told me that “women don’t feel safe, and its’ not simply a media representation.” (There’s also this report from Salon.)

Insofar Zuccotti Park gains a sticking reputation for being an unsafe cesspool, deservedly or not, the broader effects of this development could be irreparable. Most onlookers in the general public will probably not confuse the political cause behind OWS, (“the 99%”) with criminals and drug users. But city authorities can only relish some additional ammunition to discredit it nonetheless. So even if the overall perception of OWS in the public seems to be a work still in process, rifts will grow between those in the park as well. (So much for “autonomy” I guess, and all that “non-hierarchical” utopian flapdoodle!) More disturbingly, I sense “the Occupation” at least in NYC is imploding – and starting to get lost. That it has had to seriously ramp up its “policing infrastructure” in light of these Lord of the Flights awakenings is indeed the most depressing irony coming out of Zuccotti Park to date.

Truth is, I started getting queasy with all the petty bureaucratic mechanisms and manners weeks ago. Grassroots political activism is fucking hard enough. Frankly, it can bore me to tears. I can understand people trying to get high on “process” by injecting a little self-expression through histrionic hand gestures, working groups ad infinitum, and the-will-to-mic-check. I also understand the importance of putting together a political movement with lasting potential – and that kind of thing requires some degree of hierarchy and organization even if Occupiers prefer not to admit it. But as formalities these activities can also become distractions which sap precious energy and resources. I sat in on one particular “working group” and encountered droves of petty diversions and disagreements about “facilitating” simple courtesies and common sense. There was also some talk of “paradynamics.” I don’t remember such “experiments” going down @ Tahrir Square when Egyptians were continually staying on message and continually demanding that Mubarak resign. I wonder why OWS @ Zuccotti Park had to turn so inward, and so procedural? Is there too much aversion and indifference to coordinating explicit demands? To direct action? What happened to the antagonism? (More exciting things are happening outside of Zuccotti Park.) Can we get it back?

To give you an idea as to the thorny issue of “making demands,” one observer writes:

The GA actually laughed out loud when the facilitators suggested that the group take thirtyfive minutes to discuss the proposal. After an hour has passed, they had not even made it through the Clarifying Questions surrounding the proposal.

Some of Occupy’s original organizers are furious that the Demands Working Group was able to make this proposal to the GA. They say that Demands can’t even be a working group because on the third day of the occupation of Zuccotti Park, the GA came to consensus that the occupation would not make demands.

All of this reminds me of something someone else wrote centuries ago – and it’s not exactly a note of optimism.

For an emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws. Since, therefore, the legislator is incapable of using either force or reasoning, he must of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing.

wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born

2011-10-14T16:46:00.001-04:00

An excellent discussion on OWS.

Is OWS beholden to “the lesser of two evil” meme?

2011-10-12T23:41:00.009-04:00

Can OWS be harnessed by the Democratic Party for 2012?

Glenn Greenwald asks also: “Would it not be a bit odd for a protest movement to 'Occupy Wall Street' while simultaneously devot(e)itself to keeping Wall Street’s most lavishly funded politician in power?” And after documenting the usual mounds of evidence of Wall St. ties to Obama and the Democratic Party, Greenwald sarcastically concludes:

“So best of luck to CAP and the DCCC in their efforts to exploit these protests into some re-branded Obama 2012 crusade and to convince the protesters to engage in civil disobedience and get arrested all to make themselves the 2012 street version of OFA. I think they’re going to need it.”

OWS should obviously be commended for being able to shift the public discourse back onto Wall St., growing inequalities, and the runaway corporate plutocracy that has taken over the political realm. Greenwald here thus refers to Naomi Klein who on DemocracyNow! claimed that the protestors, in Greenwald's words, “are out on the street rather than working for the DNC or OFA...precisely because they concluded that electoral politics or working for either party will not address the issues motivating them; part of what they’re protesting is the Democratic Party.” Which is all probably true. Charlie Rangel was booed away. And so was Geraldo Rivera. But having attended OWS rallies in NYC, I can tell you unequivocally that there is virtually no noise being made about 2012. Little or no clamoring is being made about getting sold out by any particular political figure or political party. There is also virtually little or no “third-party” presence there either. Thus, barring some future development, the OWS protestors may end up turning out to vote for Obama and the Democrats anyway! Though they certainly feel betrayed by the two-parties and “the system” more generally, (and rightfully so!) it remains unclear whether they will at some point actually begin the process of organizing positively for a political alternative, either as a popular electoral base for a challenger to Obama within the Democratic party during the primaries, or for someone even further to the left.

capitalismo doesn’t work but we do

2011-10-02T06:43:00.001-04:00

From a good piece by Kevin Gosztola, “Why Establishment Media & The Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall St,” comes this passage from Howard Zinn.

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

stockbrokers are more psychopathic than psychopaths

2011-09-27T00:22:00.000-04:00

News you can use from HuffPo.

Various studies have suggested that a certain kind of psychological profile gravitates toward the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of the trading floor -- and that this profile probably has more than a little in common with psychopathic personality, a clinical condition marked by gregariousness, impulsiveness, dishonesty and lack of empathy.

A recent study from the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, goes one step further. The research, led by forensics expert Pascal Scherrer and prison administrator Thomas Noll, finds that professional stock traders actually outperform diagnosed psychopaths when it comes to competitive and risk-taking behavior.

So they’re not just painfully shallow, insecure, soulless assholes after all!

wall st. is our street

2011-09-21T10:56:00.001-04:00

More at The Real News

find out more: https://occupywallst.org/

ironic. how ironic. this is ironic.

2011-09-06T11:24:00.000-04:00

From vastleft.com

and not just a coincidence

2011-08-22T09:23:00.002-04:00

From The Guardian, "England Rioters: Young, Poor, and Unemployed."

blokes and birds

2011-08-10T01:09:00.021-04:00

Of course, for the first three days of the London riots the American media was pretty much Nothing To See Here Folks, Just Move Along. But now that the violence does not show signs of abating, and has actually spread beyond London, even to police stations in Liverpool, Nottingham, and Canning Circus, we may begin hearing discussions on this side of the pond, (like this one seen earlier today on Al-Jazeera,) pertaining to social and political factors, (like police harassment, economic and social inequality, and good ol' injustice,) which deepen disaffection, resentment, and only increase the likelihood of turmoil and violence when something goes very wrong.

Yet Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money makes an awfully safe bet:

Urban riots are usually complex events, in which people participate for many reasons, ranging from simple boredom and criminal opportunism on one end, to conscious political protest on the other.

Although its been a while since my last epistemological tweaking I'll contend that one-to-one causes for individual action is quite beside the point here simply because widespread rioting and looting are not individual events. It would be like citing the endless array of individual reasons given to a questionnaire which asked mobs of people why they end up packing into a stadium for a football match. Such data clearly takes place against a greater field of sociological meaning which attendees also share. This is not to say that all kinds of action rationally make sense or that they even can be justified; but even acts which may seem irrational or contradictory can be understood as a structure of meaning nonetheless insofar they can related to other structures of meaning and institutional patterns. Even if crowds are contestable, disagreeable lots, that doesn't mean they lack a raison d'etre. Actions also often have meaning for actors which is not exhausted by positivist data but which may be crucial to understanding their importance. So, for example, in participating in an event like voting one may also be contributing to the honor or demise of a political party, or vindicating the value of free elections, or defending law and order, justice, whatever. Campos completely misses the significance of the London riots.

Breakdowns of social order (or outbreaks of resistance) obviously reflect disenchantment. So with widening gaps of economic inequality, a slumping economy, high unemployment, and systemic theft and looting by the rich and powerful – all against the setting of increased budget cuts and enforced “austerity,” (and all of which are secrets to no one,) – can anyone lucidly claim that the UK rioting is surprising? Or, that the cynicism and distrust that many feel toward the powerful these days only denude the good ol’ social contract? Even former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, quipped that a whole “generation” is “growing up completely uncertain about their future,” citing economic and political insecurity specifically. Nina Power, writing in AlterNet, also reminds us that the relationship between the British police and people of color has been contentious as well. Clashes in Bristol between civilians and police already took place earlier this year, and, as reported last December in The Guardian, out of the 333 number of deaths that have occurred in police custody since 1998, only zero have led to any convictions.

The most sensible take on the riots I've seen so far is presented by Camila Batmanghelidjh, “Caring costs – but so do riots,” writing for The Independent. “Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital,” she writes, but (t)he trouble is, the deal has gone sour.” Remarkably, I'd add, these leaders seem only ready and willing to continue taking its chances by continuing to turn their back on inequality, injustice, poverty, and political and economic blight. As Batmanghelidjh writes, “The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment.” But Batmanghelidjh provides one particular insight into the enormous depth of the problem, and a problem many may prefer to deny.

Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best.

But no need to be at street level. Two economists attend to the question of whether budget cuts in particular contribute to social unrest – and they conclude that they do. Via Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage,

Expenditure cuts carry a significant risk of increasing the frequency of riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempts at revolutionary overthrow of the established order. While these are low- probability events in normal years, they become much more common as austerity measures are implemented. … We demonstrate that the general pattern of association between unrest and budget cuts holds in Europe for the period 1919-2009. It can be found in almost all sub-periods, and for all types of unrest. Strikingly, where we can trace the cause of each incident (during the period 1980-95), we can show that only austerity-inspired demonstrations respond to budget cuts in the time- series. Also, when we use recently-developed data that allows clean identification of policy-driven changes in the budget balance, our results hold.

Of course, the predictable response from the right is too render sociological realities completely irrelevant. Criminal behavior, like the kind exhibited in England the last few days, we’re told, can’t be explained – and it definitely shouldn’t be rationalized. Since angry youth and the underclass will clamor at the gates, and burst out periodically into what Cameron called, “criminality pure and simple,” the only thing that can be done is squelch it, clean-up the mess, and get back to business. Inequality, injustice, and economic and political crises, play absolutely no role. So as soon as you do refer to everyday facts on the ground, some ignorant whitey will query: “well, surely you don’t mean to condone rioting, do you?” Case in point, I find this exchange bloody outrageous…

what's up with Brand Obama?

2011-08-02T12:12:00.043-04:00

Great discussion via Corey Robin on what’s really going on. Is Obama just a “bad negotiator”? Or something worse?

I post a few rounds….and provide my own takeaway at the end.

Corey Robin: What do you guys think of this Greenwald piece? I think it’s excellent, but I’m not convinced. Obama didn’t get the tax cuts he wanted. It’s not clear this will help him electorally (the state of the economy in the fall of 2012 will matter much more than his pose of bipartisanship now; there is zero evidence to suggest this deal will help the economy and lots of reasons to think it will hurt.) Though it’s true that Obama has wanted cuts to entitlement programs for some time, he doesn’t get them in the first phase of the deal, and in the second phase, assuming the trigger mechanism kicks in, Social Security remains off-limits.

What’s your sense of why Obama wants these cuts? We know why the GOP wants them. But what are the ideological underpinnings or economic/political interests of Obama’s position? Even within the framework of neoliberalism, I’m not sure I get the motivation. Have the financial markets really been pushing for these cuts? My anecdotal sense was that people like Summers — I know, now out of the administration, but I took him to be a fairly good representative of that sector — thought this wasn’t the way to go. My assumption is that the reason Obama has taken this route is that he thinks it’s a good way to position himself electorally, and that this is coming less from the money people than the politicos. But I am more than happy to be told otherwise.

So what do you guys think: Weak president? Moderate right president? Shrewd negotiator? What?

Doug Henwood: He’s going to position himself as the “reasonable” alternative to extremists, the man who can compromise where they can’t, etc. His partisan selling point will be his bipartisanship, unlike the other guys, who are just rigid ideologues. He’ll have to do this subtly, so he doesn’t sound too partisan.

Corey: Doug, so is your position that the motivation for this is electoral or do you also see pressure for this coming from the bond markets, the money men, etc?

Rick Perlstein‎: “The people hate partisan gridlock”; “I defeated partisan gridlock”; “The people will hail me as a hero, bearing me aloft on their shoulders.” The fellow’s not quite well.

Doug: He loves it that both “extremes” are complaining. Wall Street wants budget balance with no tax increases on itself. That means cuts. Their major jones has been for “entitlement” reform, which means anything from a squeeze (CPI gimmickry, etc.) to outright privatization. The squeezers are more the WS establishment, like Goldman; the outright privatizers are the hedge fund guys, who tend to be more libertarian, often rabidly so. A lot of WS doesn’t follow details closely – they just *know* that gov spends too much and needs to be “reined in.” A lot of the time, their “facts” are wrong. But there’s no doubt they want spending cuts, big ones. And the only way to get that is SS & Medicare. BTW, Summers is now a good guy, as these things go.

Jay Driskell: To me, he reads like a classic late 19th century progressive – that there are smart people who know smart things and it is they who should sit down in a room and hammer out the details above the “partisan fray.” The problem, then as now, is that there is no way above that fray – especially when one or both parties are trying to game the non-partisan/bi-partisan negotiations for their own partisan advantage. However, I really do think that Obama really believes that he is making progress. Otherwise, his negotiating strategies make absolutely no sense. I’d like to think he’s in the thrall of capital, but more and more of me think that he is naive and clueless and out of his depth. That is, if he were in the thrall of capital, that would at least be comprehensible (and reprehensible) to me.

Katha Pollitt: IMO, he’s weak. He made a strategic error in letting the debt ceiling, which has a rigid deadline, be connected to deficit reduction, a longterm and complicated issue. this allowed the Republicans to hold the debt ceiling hostage to their ongoing attack on entitlements and discretionary spending on anything good. he also failed to hold the line on raising revenues through taxation. That kind of disappeared.

And so it goes.

Now for the takeaway. Obama is personally not a fascist, perhaps not a “conservative,” likely not a “right wing Republican.” Actually, it makes little difference at this point what he is, where it is on the political spectrum he identifies, or what it is that he believes in his soul of souls. I know it may be difficult to accept but....“He” has become largely irrelevant. The more important issue is that the political system of the country has moved so far to the right over the decades, including the office of the Presidency, and that Obama, (as Adolph Reed says in the forum linked to above, and as Glenn Greenwald documents, also linked above,) has performed as President like another neo-liberal-opportunist-inside-man for today’s right-wing corporate plutocracy – or, what I would prefer to call, an inverted fascism. The dark truth: the political realm – from the government, the courts, the tax system, the laws, the military, the gamut of public bureaucracies at the federal, state, and local level, our everyday lives – has over the decades been increasingly saturated and taken over by “private” industries, as well as by various shadow institutions and bands of elites. The political culture itself has become one big neoliberal mind-fuck reduced to catering to the whims of spoiled rich kids and their daddies. And the country, only more reckless and belligerent, more destructive, more fearful, more xenophobic, and more heedless. Its tendency for self-destruction is evident; yet some elite few at the top continue to profit enormously from this dysfunction and collapse. It can only get worse. And so it goes.

Yet the office of the Presidency is still a powerful institution. And insofar the Presidency still matters, and I suspect it would still matter if we believe Presidential elections still matter, Obama's performance as President, as Greenwald shows, has been a failure. Instead of a promising leader of a progressive political movement Obama looks like a figure-head doing public relations for various elite powers who tug, push, extort, and coddle him in all sorts of ways. All the “negotiations” and “fights” he and his staff ostensibly enter into with the GOP, as well as with the tugging, pushing, extorting, and coddling elite class, (which he is part of anyway,) amounts to backroom deals and incremental number-crunching – not structural reform nor the Change We Can Believe In that the country needs and voted for.

Obama does not have the powerful political personality to make the Presidency a “progressive” lever of power, much less take on the GOP and his detractors. But the continued focus of Him,and what He is really up to, reflects the inability or unwillingness to see our systematic crisis accurately. And yet it is still in these respects that the real significance of “his” political performance, at least as an individual for objective assessment, will be difficult to ascertain in an epistemologically pure light. We’ll keep coming back to these kinds of questions: WTF Obama? Or less crudely, to what degree can it be said that “he,” or any other individual statesman of late modern post-industrial globalized nation-states, are indeed political actors capable of creating and taking responsibility for the policies enacted in their name? To what extent does Obama and his staff operate from a position of power? What kind of power does the President have? Or is it rather in terms of “weakness,” or some other characterization, we should be thinking? In what ways can it be said that these political actors, including the President, the Congress, and political parties, are autonomous agents – and not, say, merely a concentrated consortium of players very cognizant of their interests and of the discontented masses but which only play the Punch and Judy show for the cameras? Are the actors in the ring really battling it out? Or are they throwing phantom punches, taking dives? And does it even matter given the power structures in place which make their “battle” possible? When is a fight not a fight? A debate, not a debate? A negotiation, not a negotiation?

By continuing to offer various rhetorical palliatives and rationalizations Obama and the Democrats create the illusion that the interests and welfare of Americans are truly "their" priority. These campaign strategies are advertisements and slogans, and they define the compromised style that political opposition within a rigged system takes. Although I certainly disagree with Mattt Taibbi’s statement that the White House is “the most awesome repository of political power on the planet,” he is definitely onto something when he says,

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? Is it possible that by ‘surrendering’ at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

One last thing. The system is not static. Things still happen. Shit happens. And Obama and the rest of them still have to sell and spin whatever comes down the pike, at least for the public relations “battle” between them – even shit they accept, like, and push for. And the tact for re-election will likely remain, as Glenn Greenwald writes, “as a compromise-brokering, trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to ‘take considerable heat from his own party.’” Thus, “the ‘reasonable’ alternative to extremists,” in Doug Henwood’s portrayal, “the man who can compromise where they can’t, etc. His partisan selling point will be his bipartisanship, unlike the other guys, who are just rigid ideologues. He’ll have to do this subtly, so he doesn’t sound too partisan.” It may be the case after all, as Adolph Reed says, that “Obama’s one trick was good for getting him elected to successively higher offices, but now he’s where the buck stops where that trick — the equivalent of a short con — doesn’t work so well. And he doesn’t have a long con to operate. So all he has is a knack for getting himself out of the room he’s in at the moment.”

open secret

2011-08-02T01:17:00.008-04:00

Earlier this month, Nate Silver wrote, “the mix of spending cuts and tax increases that Mr. Obama is offering is quite close to, or perhaps even a little to the right of, what the average Republican voter wants, let alone the average American.” And as Democratic Congressman John Conyers confessed a few days ago: “The Republicans -- Speaker Boehner or Majority Leader Cantor -- did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The President of the United States called for that.”

Yesterday Grover Norquist tweeted: “Sounds like a budget deal with real savings and no tax hikes is a go. We'll see.” And from the NY Times this morning, a front-page article declares: “However the debt limit showdown ends, one thing is clear: under pressure from Congressional Republicans, President Obama has moved rightward on budget policy, deepening a rift within his party heading into the next election.” The article added that Obama “put on the table far more in reductions for future years’ spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, than he did in new revenue from the wealthy and corporations. He proposed fewer cuts in military spending and more in health care than a bipartisan Senate group that includes one of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans.”

Even wonk-face Matthew Yglesias comes around occasionally to admit the obvious: “Obama has successfully transformed massive debt ceiling hostage taking from an act of breathtakingly irresponsible brinksmanship into a proven effective negotiating tactic. Suppose he gets re-elected in 2012. What’s he going to do when this issue recurs in 2013? Every time the president’s party has fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, we may face a recurrence of this crisis.”

In addition to the extension of the Bush tax-cuts, one could easily add to these revealing assessments of Obama by considering:

· The continuation and extension of executive power so prized by the Bush administration yet once decried by liberals,

· the secret deal Obama made with Pharma to ditch the Public Option,

· the relaxing of EPA standards as well as the enforcing of environmental law,

· high unemployment,

· having presided over the greatest transfer of wealth in history as well as increasing gaps between levels wealth and income,

· the failure to close Guantano Bay and secret-prison sites around the world,

· the failure to enact or even promise meaningful cuts to greenhouse emissions,

· and, who can forget, the casual jabs made by Obama and members of his staff at the “professional Left,” otherwise considered by many to be his electoral base.

And yet some “progressives” somehow conveniently forget all that stuff. Amanda Marcotte, for example, makes an absolutely asinine argument by whitewashing decades of pro-war, neo-liberal policies openly pushed for by the Democrats. She writes, “If it wasn't for the batshit crazy Republicans willing to destroy our economy to get their way, none of this would be happening.” So, “no matter what lurks in Obama's heart, none of this would be happening if Republicans didn't win the House. So I think that my priorities are just fine, thank you very much.” I’ll let Marcotte speak for herself, and only recommend a link to her evisceration.

Still, some supporters of Obama amongst the electorate do believe in the righteous benevolent soul of Barack Obama, whatevah he does. Here actions and reality don’t seem to matter much; what matters is The Man Himself, his essence and inner-being, which they seem to know so well as if it actually mattered anyway. What they see in the True Obama is a True Progressive who unfortunately “has to compromise” with a dysfunctional Congress, and, à la Marcotte, maniacal saboteurs in the Republican party. By making excuses for him they get to see in Obama what they have always wanted to see in him: the personification of a New Age America that is post-racial, post-political, open, transparent, gluten-free. Though they probably find Obama’s ties to the financial industry disgusting they end up accepting them as inevitable, even if unfortunate, like the class system itself. As David Atkins writes, these class free liberals “recoil at strident aggressive approaches” to fighting Wall Street like the kind FDR displayed in 1936. “Go to any convention of progressives,” Atkins states, “and you're far likelier to see images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi than either Teddy or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To most Democrats and progressives, Barack Obama is simply following along in their tradition of passive resistance and refusal to play by their terms.”

What is sadder and probably more common amongst the electorate is the person who does see through the machinations of Brand Obama and the Democrats, as well as those of the GOP, and who has consequently given up on politics, and resigned themselves to silence and apathy but who, come election day, will hear the campaign slogans, and find some reason to get their sorry ass into gear to the voting booths to vote Democratic anyway. Oh the absolute horror of it all: people who give up on staying informed and participating in political action in whatever capacity but because they want to do the right thing – bless their hearts – end up voting for feckless liars. Could the scheme work any better?

why whole-scale sabotage gets a free ride

2011-07-30T21:42:00.015-04:00

This piece by Paul Krugman points to “the cult of centrism” which has infected the American political media during the debt-ceiling fiasco of late, “a wholly self-inflicted crisis,” he writes, “which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences.” Sure, he knows that the right will always out-crazy liberals, and for many Americans that’s largely its appeal. But:

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion….

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent…

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

He’s right…well, at least kind of. I’d just like to know where the hell has Krugman been the last decade? Where was he during the lead up to the Iraq War? And how could he forget this absolutely hilarious “To Be Continued” exchange hosted by Tim Russert in 2004?

I generally like Krugman. But the problem is not, as he sees it, “the cult of centrism” but rather the professionalism and respectability of a Centrism which continues to find its seat at the table which just happens be on the right side of the political spectrum. And the problem is endemic to the mainstream political culture at large – and its not new. What Krugman sees as intellectual and institutionalized corruption is hardly the work of a “cult” but is business as usual for the media establishment which depends on caricatures, sound bites, and short-handed laziness in reporting. More bluntly, the spectacle of debate is what counts in realpolischtick, not its content. So as long as the Democrats are seen to be left of the Republicans they will be The Left. And as long as Republicans pull to the right regardless of the consequences, the Left will be The Responsible and Sane Ones, at least minus the likes of Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, and Leon Trotsky. Thus, The Center, that hallowed ground of good ol’ American pragmatism where conflicting parties come to make deals and settle their differences, becomes a legitimate debate between rabid political animals who act as ideological crusaders and respectable pea-eating gentleman like Harry Reid and Barack Obama who cut deals with them, sometimes behind closed-doors, sometimes not..…you know, not perfect but clearly “the lesser evil.”

Not convinced? See this for a good argument for why “We just have a right wing media. Period."

don't be dead

2011-07-27T01:43:00.002-04:00

From The Onion

Social Security Scam Robs Elderly By Convincing Them They Are Dead

a lesson from oslo

2011-07-24T23:17:00.001-04:00

Oslo Mayor on the recent shootings: "I don't think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect."

10 Happiest Countries in the World

2011-06-05T21:35:00.002-04:00

and the US is not even on the list! Read all about it.

Or perhaps Americans' expectations are just too darn high?

.

the latest from the IMF

2011-05-31T11:35:00.003-04:00

Dominique Strauss-Kahn isn't the only news coming out of the IMF. This article appeared in NY Times, May 29, 2011. And it begins,

At the International Monetary Fund, there is one set of ethics guidelines for the rank-and-file staff and another for the 24 elite executive directors who oversee the powerful organization.

Over the last four years, the fund has tightened internal systems for catching ethical misconduct among its 2,400 staff members, establishing a telephone hot line for complaints like harassment; publishing details of complaints in an annual report; and empowering an ethics adviser to pursue allegations, which last year led to at least one dismissal.

But the fund’s board members remain largely above these controls. The ethics adviser, for example, is not able to investigate any of them.

more from The Real News

2011-05-22T02:30:00.002-04:00

Herman Daly once wrote, "To paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Let them eat growth. Better yet, let the poor hope to eat growth in the future."

A discussion on the possibilities of economic and environmental sustainability.

More at The Real News

single-payer in vermont

2011-05-01T07:53:00.003-04:00

From Vermont Digger,

Whether the federal government will give Vermont a waiver to adopt a universal health care system in 2014 is an open question. (One physician and long-time single payer advocate) said the state has a 50-50 chance of getting the exemption from the Affordable Care Act. Even so, she believes Vermont’s attempt to create a single-payer system is worthwhile.

Zactly. Read more…

remember. pass it on.

2011-04-26T11:30:00.000-04:00

Remember when teachers, public employees, planned parenthood, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither.

Taken from a friend. Pass it on.

henry miller ...nothing but monsters

2011-04-19T16:44:00.002-04:00

Give us hell Henry! From Tom Schiller's 1975 Henry Miller Asleep and Awake

do you have an incentive to not see things accurately?

2011-04-07T21:29:00.000-04:00

Joseph Stiglitz discusses today's plutocracy and some of the asymmetries between priorities and economic policy.

tax burden

2011-03-29T21:30:00.001-04:00

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

some music

2011-03-13T03:28:00.001-04:00

So if one were pushed to come up with a slogan to encapsulate the raison d'etre of this blog it would have to be, "'cuz democracy is dead but the demos keeps on going!" Yet every once and awhile we here at demosdemos like taking a a slight diversion of sorts, call it the "dilettantes delight." Tonight I bring you two pieces worlds apart. "Lasse! comment oublieray" was written by Guillaume de Machaut,(1300-1377) the poet-musician most musicologists these days generally consider to be the culmination of the ars nova, (I recommend Richard Taruskin's 5 Volume set in these matters,) and "Nowheresville," a dandy of a song written by Nico Muhly, voice by Teitur. Love the recorder!

“markets like totalitarian governments”

2011-03-05T00:36:00.005-05:00

And its’ not hyperbole! Don't believe it? Listen to Larry Fink explain why.

Originally from Washingon’s Blog but link to this video.

Fink is one of the most powerful ~~persons~~ financial insiders in the world, and happens to head BlackRock, the largest global investment firm with assets about 3.5 trillion dollars, and which the interviewer twice refers to as “a systematically important institution.” For more on the dirty-rotten-lisping-Fink read this.

And just as a side note, there was also some local news.

labor fights spur surge in union support

2011-03-04T01:11:00.001-05:00

From Firedoglake comes these statistics. And from one of the commenters: "Wow, a group trying to move public opinion–and succeeding–rather than simply throwing their hands up and complaining about how they can’t get anything done because the current environment doesn’t support it. What a concept!" Frankly, I think the bigger problem is being left out in the cold by Democratic leaders who may voice "support" in front of the cameras but who do next to nothing to help move the needle because they already buy into the Austerity Now! mania spreading cross the land. Oh the humanity....

latest from Wisconsin

2011-03-01T11:01:00.000-05:00

More at The Real News

go wisconsin!

2011-02-20T15:58:00.002-05:00

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

democracy in Egypt not in the New World

2011-02-12T00:44:00.003-05:00

Democracy in the New World disparaged and demoralized by New World ~~aristocracy~~ plutonomy. Dictatorial regime in the Old World chased out by Old World democracy still on the march! Undoubtedly an enormous victory for the Egyptian people after more than two weeks of protests, and Mubarak has left for the hills!

But as to the whereabouts of his regime? Any status updates tweeters??? Another way of asking: can the democratic uprising in Egypt endure, or will it result in a Hobbesian renewal of the political? Consider what HuffPo reported on Friday:

An astonishing day in which hundreds of thousands marched on Mubarak's palaces in Cairo and Alexandria and besieged state TV was capped by the military effectively carrying out a coup at the pleas of protesters. After Mubarak's fall, the military, which pledged to shepherd reforms for greater democracy, told the nation it would announce the next steps soon. Those could include the dissolving of parliament and creation of a transitional government.

Ouch. The Egyptian military, its bureaucratic brass and accoutrements of surveillence and destruction, as well as its global allies, are indeed left largely intact. But same as the old boss? At least not yet. According to John Simpson from BBC,

What has happened today is that the old Nasserite system, a vaguely socialist, military dictatorship, heavily dependent on an unpleasant secret police, has collapsed. The military will continue to run Egypt for the moment, but only until the presidential elections in August or September, if not before.

“For the moment”? Remember when the military just laid back and watched protestors in Tahrir Square, ready to roll its eyes and start pulverizing, even when subjects went about duke-ing it out amongst themselves? It seemed to be that these nameless tanks were just waiting with brute force for new faceless subjects, whomever they would be, to win that battle only to step up and swear their allegiance to a heavy militarized state. The state of nature, (if one were to call the violence and attacks endured by the pro-democracy Egyptians at the hands of the Mubarak “thugs” during last week’s protests,) had bizarrely lurking in the shadows the mechanisms and machinery of a brutal state regime. These mechanisms and machinery seemed to just wait for the dust to settle so new subjects, probably those with new rights and new freedoms, would sign a new social contract, one surely more democratic and legitimate than any previous one but one that would not contest the raw power of state domination. Much has been gained by the Egyptian demos but democracy cannot flinch in front of... “transition” is the word, isn’t it?

There were deaths and there was violence. But the optimal tactic by the protesters, by and large, proved to be non-violent resistance. Indeed non-violence did not lead to the slaughter of the lambs nor even to their disregard. Thus I wonder what finally convinced Mubarak to flee. “Cracks in the military” beginning to show perhaps, as Simpson suggests? Some international pressure was there, at least in rhetoric from Obama, America’s Rhetorician In Chief, least at times, in dribs and drabs, sidesteps and reluctant hesitance to be sure. A majority of Americans were even “sympathetic” to the anti-Mubarak protesters. So, in this new global world of instant tweeting and blogging, can non-violence protest be an effective strategy for new political foundations? Or just a changing of the guard?

Democracy is born in transgressive acts. It disrupts boundaries and forms of power which look to limit and contain the demos. Thus it is amorphous, unpredictable, leaderless as well. It renews the political in a radical way; it smashes the class, values, and status systems by which it is excluded. And rather than conveniently morph into a renewed, albeit, amended, constitutional framework and its ultimate form, i.e., the modern political state, democracy thrives on heterogeneity, diversity, and contestation. In Egypt, labor unions were there with students, the young with the old, middle-class and the poor, the secularists with the Brotherhood. But democracy is also vulnerable and extremely difficult. It certainly cannot look to state power for sustenance. Yet it also must not come to depend on assertions of mass protests, though the dearth of large-scale resistance movements has only starved democratic politics. In addition to mass protest it needs an ability to exert continued localized pressure to disrupt concentrations of power; it needs fragmented maneuvers, heterogeneity, cultivation over time, and most of all, persistent care in order to endure.

As Americans gaze at themselves through smoke and mirrors I wonder what - if anything - of the Egyptian uprising actually managed to pierce through the self-reflecting menagerie we inhabit. Probably not much. In this post-Tocquevillian world, the inverted mega-state of US power is fragile and in decline, and has only thrived on the popular withdrawal from political life. Unfortunately it seems that Change today in the US can only come about exogenously, i.e., not of its own doing as an autonomous political form but spurred from some abroad. And the changes may not be pretty. They may not be democratic.

Sheldon S. Wolin once wrote in a 1995 essay entitled "Fugitive Democracy,"

The modern state as a guardian of boundaries has been rendered paradoxical, if not anachronistic, because of the problematical status of boundaries. The many phenomena that seem to escape or transcend boundaries, for example, electronic communications, are often cited as confirmation of the real existence of the postmodern. If such is the case, then the development may shed some light not only on the future of the state, and its conception of the political, but also on the democratic or nondemocratic tendency of the postmodern.

After Egypt

2011-02-09T05:22:00.005-05:00

Justin Elliot from Salon writes:

So 82 percent of Americans are sympathetic to the protesters. Among those who are “following the situation in Egypt very or somewhat closely,” that number actually goes up slightly, to 87 percent. The irony here, of course, is that Americans are on the side of protesters fighting a regime that the U.S. government has been propping up for decades.

And it's an open question whether public opinion in the U.S. will have an impact on the Obama administration's Egypt policy, which has notably shifted in the past few days away from calls for immediate change.

The rest of the poll is here (.pdf).

Ah, but I hear the corporate masters and media wizards tell me they know better! And that democracy in Egypt would only undermine US ~~principles~~ interests, particularly its relationship with Israel. The problem however with these “expert opinions” is that trying to maintain an alliance with an autocratic regime like Egypt is not in the least Realistic but utterly blind in the pursuit of exceedingly short-term ~~geopolitical~~ geocorporate gain. Thus, Marwan Bishara puts it: “The longer the Obama administration takes to regain the initiative and declare unconditional support for democratic change, the greater would be the negative impact on its relationship with the Arab world.”

So stumble along American power! Follow fickle “stability”! Continue to gamble on the complacency of Arabs to just continue putting up with whatever shit goes their way, mutatis mutandis, no matter how fortune turns the tide, no matter how this democratic uprising in Egypt may happen to get resolved, no matter how the moribund Middle-East peace process happens to turn out, no matter how “history” is settled, and regardless of decades of US support for dictatorial regimes.

Ah, but I also read in the NY TImes that “Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth.” Watch also The Moustache chime in on “AE – After Egypt,” and give its take on the overall political corruption, societal “backwardness,” and waywardness in Egypt....“in the region even!” Glenn Greenwald commented on the obvious penchant for Otherness in the American mainstream media:

Can you believe that ‘in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt,’ private wealth translates into great political power and vice-versa? What is it like, wonders the curious and concerned Times reader, to live in a country like that? No wonder there's an uprising…. Thankfully, Times readers don't live in a country where such endemic problems reign….

crumbling

2011-01-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

More at The Real News

the Second Amendment and the right to bear nukes?

2011-01-16T02:23:00.025-05:00

What is so distressing about the coverage of the Tucson shootings so far is the general reticence to reopen a debate about gun-control and the Second Amendment, and talk openly about the need for PROPER LIMITS in accessing and using weapons. Remember, Jared Loughner bought his nine-millimeter Glock 19 lawfully and easily. So whatever may have led Loughner to commit the act, whether it was “Don’t Retreat, Reload!” Sarah Palin and the Tea Party antics, or the grammar of Mexican immigrants, or those aliens from hell, “whatever Loughner’s demons turn out to be,” writes Katha Pollitt,

what let him kill six people and wound fourteen was that he had access to a gun—and a magazine that let him shoot thirty-three bullets without reloading. (Indeed, the Glock 19 was the same model gun Seung-Hui Cho used to kill thirty-two people at Virginia Tech.) It's a little pathetic—has it really come to this, that it will be a huge uphill battle to ban something that has no purpose except to kill up to thirty-three people before anyone can stop you? Apparently, yes.

And, remarkably, the sale of the Glock 19 has only skyrocketed nationwide since the shooting!

Sure, the militia cult among my fellow Americans is hardly new. And, of course, it is impossible to prove that Palin, Glenn Beck, fat-man Rush, Sharron Angle, Joyce Kaufman, or anyone else on the extreme right led Loughner to go on his rampage; but it is also impossible to prove that they did not. In fact, it really doesn’t matter whether Loughner saw Palin’s website, or even the campaign ad for Jesse Kelly who ran against Gabrielle Giffords last November. These public figures are still morally culpable, at least, in pandering to and feeding the rabid gun-toting right which has only become more mainstream and normalized because of it. The far right sees cultural authenticity in guns and, more generally, in a military aesthetic which is boorish and brute - exactly the kind of thing people cling to when they are incapable of arguments and debate, and exactly the kind of thing righties these days like to fire up.

Perhaps even more disturbing are the militia-men troglodytes who readily speak in in terms of the legitimacy of armed resistance against the US government. And, remarkably, they do so as Constitutional Fundamentalists appealing to the Second Amendment, as well as to the overall libertarian lexicon of “limited government” and individual freedoms more broadly. (Listen to Ron Paul talk about the Constitution’s state-of-nature clause.) Here Fundamentalists like to claim that their purchase and possession of guns and weapons are simple testaments to – even a celebration of – their Constitutional right. A few have even brandished their weapons at public gatherings, (like town meetings where “the socialist takeover of health-care” has been debated,) in order to remind the rest of us of so-called “Second Amendment remedies,” (a term coined a few months back by candidate for Nevada Senator, Sharron Angle.)

But would this guy and others like him ever go so far as to actually advocate the armed overthrow of the US government? And should the FBI and others in law enforcement be watching them given their Constitutional obligations? (Listen again to Ron Paul give his views.) Whether or not gun-nuts actually openly look forward to the day when they can wage insurrection against the US government, or much less pull a trigger, their organized presence can certainly intimidate and chill political debate.

Rachel Maddow began to provide some much needed perspective a few nights ago.

So what are the PROPER RESTRICTIONS AND LIMITS …and why? And do we want law enforcement actually having to contend with a heavily armed population which also incidentally happens to be ill-informed, xenophobic, and probably ill-equipped to use the fucking things anyway? Adding, Digby wrote,

Let's face it, even if the founders anticipated a future revolution when they wrote the second Amendment (which I doubt --- I assume the anticipated a future invasion.) But whatever it was, they didn't anticipate the kind of weaponry the government would someday be able to muster against the people if such a thing happened. It's a silly notion at this point that a revolutionary force armed with Glocks could defeat the government if it decided to turn its sites on the people.

So, for the sake of argument, why not tanks? Why not nukes? Does there come a point where the Fundamentalist reading of the Second Amendment undermines a functioning Constitutional order, or at least any remaining Constitutional order which requires peaceful assembly, due process, etc. Is the US Constitution potentially at war with itself?

On another level we must begin to realize that the heated rhetoric and overall “climate” in the US right now should be seen as symptoms of a failed two-party system which cannot adequately address a pervading violent, fearful, and increasingly deranged culture as well as a widespread persistence of political and economic malaise, individual powerlessness, and resentment that is felt by many, many Americans. So rather than try to begin addressing these issues, (much less even tighter restrictions of semi-automatic weapons like the Glock 19,) the response of public officials from both parties has been to call for calm while consider how best to ramp-up the security state even more, and spend more money on private security forces. “There are a lot of desperate people in our society, said Jesse Jackson Jr., “who may be unemployed, uneducated and despondent. They are susceptible to rumors, innuendo and anti-government rhetoric that only serves to inflame an already combustible environment.” And considering this timeline of political violence and threats since the US Supreme Court cited the Second Amendment in June, 2008 to proclaim that it was indeed unconstitutional to ban fire-arms, their pleas hardly seem irrational.

As institutions increasingly fail, and the country teeters on becoming downright ungovernable, unfortunately for liberals and progressives it has been the Tea-Party and the far right that has successfully mobilized popular discontent. But a broken system such as this one only reflects and entrenches adversarial hysteria, some kinds more disturbing than others. Considering the violent acts and rhetorical antics on the right, especially during the elections of 2010, should the rest of us, especially on “the left,” start taking the Second Amendment into our own hands as well for protection? Criminals, gun-nuts, businessmen, politicians: everyone and their neighbor will have ‘em, why not us too? I really hope it doesn’t end like that.

bankers steal your money

2011-01-13T12:08:00.006-05:00

they also concoct and sell poisonous financial instruments to the gullible and unknowing, and THEN blame them when the shit hits the fan. Watch Charles Ferguson talk about his documentary, Inside Job. Though Ferguson does not discuss it in this particular take, one of the most telling features made clear by the whole “securitization” collapse of 2008 is just how rotten the academic discipline of economics itself has become…a topic worth pursuing a lot further.

politics for losers, part II

2011-01-05T14:47:00.006-05:00

Mike Konczal at Rortybomb writes that what has been most disappointing about Obama in his first two years as President is just how “bad at losing” he has been.

I expected Obama to be a better loser, specifically to be better at losing. There were a lot of items on the table, a lot of them weren’t going to happen, but it was important for the new future of liberalism that the Obama team lost them well. And that hasn’t happened.

By losing well, I mean losing in a way that builds a coalition, demonstrates to your allies that you are serious, takes a pound of flesh from your opponents and leaves them with the blame, and convinces those on the fence that it is an important issue for which you have the answers. Lose for the long run; lose in a way that leaves liberal institutions and infrastructure stronger, able to be deployed again at a later date.

And it’s not just making concessions without getting much in return, “conceding both pieces of flesh and the larger narrative to the other side,” that has disheartened Konczal but that Obama has in both policy and tone alienated – even infuriated – supporters who now seem too “demoralized and confused” to be politically active, and pick up the proverbial gauntlet once again come election time. Konczal asks, “where are the newer and/or stronger liberal groups that have emerged in the past two years?”

Konczal mentions Net Neutrality, immigration, climate change, and the failure to investigate the Bush and Cheney administration for the breach of law as evidence of a misguided two years, but if a list is something you really want, then hey...what the hell, why not add fifteen more?

1. The continuation of Bush-Cheney era interrogation and renditions

2. The overall unprecedented growth of executive powers to spy on and police the citizenry

3. The expanded war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen

4. The failure to close Guantanomo Bay

5. No Public Option and the gift giving Reform to the private insurance industry

6. Subservience to the wishes and delights of the financial industry

7. High unemployment and a stinking economy

8. An economic stimulus package not being big enough

9. Nopenhagen

10. BP cover-ups

11. Still no word on the coming Green economy

12. Having become the all-time corporate kingpin through bailouts and giveaways

13. Extending Bush tax-cuts for the wealthy

14. For having allowed Tea Party loons to buy the populist agenda

15. And for slapping his electoral base for complaining about all of the above.

Sure, one could add to the list – which will only grow likely in dribs in drabs during the remaining two years of Obama’s Presidency. But the dogged persistence and naivete of believing in the well-intentioned soul of poor-hands-tied-behind-his-back Barack Obama amongst liberals and “the left” will only continue to neutralize the significance of such stubborn facts, as well as the possibility for a vital progressive politics. Indeed the power of rationalization is immense these days. But do you know what is most pathetic about these insipid goobers, these losers? Sometime around the summer of 2012, some of them, (like Jonathan Alter, Ezra Klein, and Katrina van der Nation,) will dust themselves off and rise once again to cheerlead, wear buttons, and wave the flag of political “pragmatism.” More ordinary supporters will remember their shame but still go sheepishly to the voting booths nonetheless to cast their vote for Obama. Oh the horror.

Ultimately Obama is not a fighter for progressive ideals and ends he claims to support. He not only makes backroom deals with corporate lobbyists but hardly ever takes the time to travel the country to move the needle of public opinion, like Clinton often did so successfully. (Insiders have already begun talking about more backroom deals involving a “compromise” with Republicans over Social Security.) Obama and the Democrats have thus squandered the opportunity to take charge of the political narrative handed to them in late 2008, and have failed to (re)build political coalitions they will need for years to come. And so, in just two years the GOP is back with a fucking vengeance.

It wasn’t long ago that candidate Obama proved to be a great inspirational speaker for many Americans, and was even sold as a “community organizer!” The 2008 election brought the country not just its first African-American President but filibuster proof majorities in both Houses of Congress until, that is, the upset by Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Clearly, staying within the beltway has had pretty awful consequences for Obama and the Democrats. As Digby put it,

You can't win them all, but you can make damned sure that when you lose your principles are out front and everybody knows where you stand. That is very helpful down the road when you try to make a case for your policies. Trying to "make the best of it" or paper over the differences or (worst of all) adopting the other side's position as your own and saying the policy is actually a good one, will come back to bite you hard.

Indeed the long term effects of the Obama Presidency may easily translate into disaster for the “progressive” cause itself. Not only will state corporatism likely be more entrenched than ever, as it continually “Reforms” its mechanisms, and eats away at the savings and lives of the demos in the process, but the progressive legacy that has been fought for over decades as a whole, (social safe nets, simple health and safety protections, due process, public education, transparency and disclosure laws, etc.,) will likely be lost as well.

Who is Cathleen P. Black?

2011-01-03T17:35:00.010-05:00

Cathleen Black in 1997.

Last November, Mayor Mike hand-picked this same Cathleen Black, a corporate publishing mogul and business leader, to become the new Chancellor of the NYC public school system, the largest public school system in the country. Despite protests and several lawsuits waged by civic and education groups which decried Black’s lack of experience as well as her refusal to issue any revealing statements about the state of public education these days, she was waived in by some stacked-deck committee of Bloomberg toadies. So today she was sworn in.

Much like her predecessor Joel Klein, (who had been a media magnate himself at Bertelsmann, and who will now go on to work for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.,) Black has been at the helm of Hearst Magazines since 1979, and, to her credit *cough* has successfully found plenty of shelf-space for glossy show-and-tells like Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Redbook, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, etc. She has also served as eight-year President of USA Today, perhaps the daily template for dumb-downed and fluffed-up misinformation, (see rampant euphemisms, one-dimensional reporting, and all the accompanying multi-colored charts and pie diagrams your ADD desires.) As for her professional accomplishments, the NY Times mentioned that Black, “helped convince Oprah Winfrey it was time to extend her brand to publishing, personally visiting the talk-show host with a mockup of what was to become O, the Oprah Magazine — one of the biggest success stories in the industry.” For more on Black’s accomplishments and skills as a businesswoman, see this article.

Black also sits on the board of IBM and Coca-Cola Co., positions she promised to resign from come the New Year. (For more of Black’s involvements with Coca-Cola and IBM, see this NY Times article.) And to complete the portrait, according to one NY Times article, Black also has homes on the Upper East Side as well as in Connecticut where her children attend…you guessed it! private boarding schools. Unsurprisingly, Black never attended public schools as a youngster herself. But perhaps most damning, she has absolutely no experience in education at all, not even any gigs in public service.

Alex Pareene in an article in Slate thus wrote,

The New York public schools system serves more than a million students. Picking the woman responsible for keeping Cosmo profitable and publishing anti-literacy newspaper USA Today to run the whole thing is corporatism masquerading as benevolent rule by our wisest technocrats.

The fantasy of the superstar CEO who can parachute into any company -- in any industry -- and right the ship through time-tested management techniques is common in corporate circles, but so are books of New Yorker cartoons about golf. Only the sort of lucky billionaire convinced of the moral superiority of the financially successful would assume that a random executive with no education experience could manage the New York city public schools better than someone who... you know, has experience managing public schools.

Although I disagree with Pareene’s emphasis on “experience” as the sole criteria for determining the merits of appointees to important positions in general, we should nevertheless wonder how Mme. Black will go about making her decisions: Does she know what programs to cut if she must? Which ones will she fight for? How will she prioritize competing agendas and reforms? What is her vision? What are her plans, and why has she been so silent about them?

If you ask these questions because you happen to care about public education and the welfare and health of the city's students, the interview of Black with Charlie Rose embedded above could make you seriously ill. Its only fifteen minutes but one gets the impression that any issue pertaining to public education was as important an issue to Black at the time as eighteenth century stamp collecting may have been. As she and her host whiz by topics on advertising and demographics in the fascinating world of the magazine industry circa 1997, the interview quickly becomes the typical mind-numbing interview Charlie Rose has become famous for, and which made you change the channel to catch those last few minutes of that Cheers rerun.

Ultimately, Boss Bloomberg’s selection of Black should hardly be surprising because it is symptomatic of the ever-increasing homogeneity of political, corporate, and educational culture. Though Black is not an educator it would be mistaken however to think she is a stranger to the world of public education, or, shall we say, the education industry. In between her various stints at Hearst and Coca-Cola, Black also finds time to sit on the Advisory Council of the Harlem Village Academy, a charter school in NYC, while her husband and confidante, Thomas E. Harvey, is a “longtime lawyer” for the Institute of International Education – and, let it also be known, “a regular donor to Republican candidates and causes.”

Bloomberg admitted months ago when going public with his selection of Black that he did not want an educator as his new Chancellor but rather a “world-class manager,” or, more glowingly, “a superstar manager who has succeeded in the private sector.” But what our intractably smug mayor may not prefer to mention however was the selection process by which he chose her, a process which the NY Times has describe as “secretive.” “To a degree unusual even for an administration that relishes keeping deliberations as private as possible,” the article said, “hardly anyone knew of Mr. Klein’s departure or Ms. Black’s arrival until minutes before the official announcement. While such posts are typically filled after highly publicized national searches that can last months or even a year, there is little evidence that anyone else was seriously vetted or considered – and few of the usual suspects, including members of the mayor’s inner circle, were even consulted.” The autocracy, as well as the bad judgment of selecting her, was echoed by Black herself when blurting to the NY Post that ‘the offer came out of left field.’” Fearing a public debate which might spoil a thing or two, the mayor went ahead like a good dictator, and chose, in the words of the NY TImes, “someone he knew through business and social networks, someone squarely in his comfort zone of wealthy and socially prominent Upper East Side residents, someone with whom he shared many friends and colleagues, dinners and drinks.” According to the same NY Times article, Bloomberg and Black, along with Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein, indeed happen to be “regular attendees” to New York investment bank Allen and Company’s annual get-togethers in Sun Valley, Idaho, “the exclusive gathering each July of the country’s publishing elite.”

I suppose it would be remiss not to mention that Mike Bloomberg has been a longtime proponent of charter schools. (And for a report-card on NYC schools under his reign, see this recent article. For some broader perspective on charter-schools nationwide, see this review of “Waiting for Superman” by Diane Ravitch.) Bloomberg has also announced plans to cut back on teacher tenure, and make it easier for the city to fire teachers. He also looks forward to opening a high-school which will be a partnership between IBM and the City University of New York, thereby allowing students of the school to earn a two–year degree and get a head-start in "being the first in line for a job at IBM,” as any aspiring NYC teenager should surely want. I mean in today's techno-world, and what not, who could protest when Mikey assured the public last September at NBC's “education Summit” that NY state law would be changed to require public schools to buy more digital goodies from the very media conglomerates that he, Black, and Klein broker with. Read about what else he said that day here.

According to Carmen Fiarina, who served under outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein from 2004-2006, “I’m not sure if the purpose of this appointment is to strengthen — or eliminate — public schools.” A far more prescient critique however was recently given by Henry A. Giroux, also an educator, who wrote that Black’s appointment illustrates that

educational and political problems can be solved through the template of a business culture increasingly characterized by top-to-down modes of governance, unchecked financial recklessness, a contempt for democratic modes of deliberation, a hatred of unions’ and teachers’ rights, a disdain for all things public and a flight for social and moral responsibility. But the real issue here is not about the appointment of Black to a position for which she is embarrassingly unqualified, but about corporate power and a business culture, along with its pocketed elites, who both detest public education and who pose a serious threat to the educational conditions necessary for critical thought, engaged citizenship and democratic life itself.

Gets me thinking. Can you imagine some elected official in the coming future making the case that private sector managerial experience enables one to run the NYPD?

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T17:21:00.001-05:00

watch this interview with Philippe Petit.

More GRITtv

remember the bailouts this holiday season!

2010-12-21T16:04:00.002-05:00

Bailouts and Bonuses, a short by TRIIBE VIDEO (2008)

big apple and bananas

2010-12-17T02:48:00.003-05:00

From Naked Capitalism comes this link to a report by the Fiscal Policy Institute, “Grow Together or Pull Farther Apart: Income Concentration Trends in New York.”

For a primer on the issue of inequality itself, and why it matters, listen to this interview with Alex Voorhoeve conducted back in 2007 with Nigel Warburton.

Barack Obama: the good Republican

2010-12-09T09:17:00.001-05:00

And though some are upset with his latest hustle, i.e., extending Bush tax-cuts, the Democrats are poised to tell us explicitly that they have become the “progressive” party of the investor class. (BTW, so much for the deficit!) The critical takes on Obama’s extension of Bush tax policy are legion. But read this one from Corrente.

La Smith telling it like it is

2010-11-22T09:39:00.002-05:00

Yves Smith interviewed back in August of this year. Follow her via Naked Capitalism, incredibly informative and highly recommended.

Koppelesque on NPR

2010-11-19T02:34:00.012-05:00

Generally not a fan of Keith Olbermann (I don’t even own cable, SIR!) but his calling out of Ted Koppel’s false equivalencies of FOX NEWS and MSNBC was finely welcomed. Of course, it is hardly controversial to say that “objectivity,” though altogether not an appalling idea, by nearly any measure inevitably falls short of pure, perfect impartiality. More importantly, and as Olbermann emphasizes in his response to Koppel, the discourse and norms of objectivity in journalism have all too often served propagandists and talking-heads of all stripes to spin, mislead, or downright lie to the public without critical scrutiny. Indeed the Nothing-But-The-Facts brand of journalism that Koppel and others venerate itself tries to delude the public into thinking that “facts” are simply out there waiting to be conveyed as “unbiased accounts” in all-too-brief news segments and spaces. The truth is that Nothing-But-The-Facts is myopic and slightly misleading at best, it is irresponsible and downright disingenuous at worse, the work of, in Olbermann’s words, “glorified stenographers” who edit, aid, and abet – often unknowingly – ideological and partisan thugs.

Koppel admitted in the WaPo, 11/14/10, that “the commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me.” Both networks, he continued, were to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to financial investment. “He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.” Surely, Koppel could also be referring to Charlie Rose, Jim Cramer, Anderson Cooper, and, one of Teddy’s favorites, sleepy Jim Lehrer and his gang at the NewsHour – but he isn’t. Koppel points his finger at the two most politicized cable networks on American TV, and is even careful enough to balance his naming of names to three each side, (Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews for the partisan liberals, Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly for the childish and emotionally challenged partisan blowhards on the right.) More remarkably, Koppel reserves special ennobled status for the three major news networks, at least as he knew them years back, writing that “fear and innocence” made network news a more “virtuous operation” in comparison. The three networks, according to Koppel, “offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed…It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues.”

In his long career, Koppel seems never to have fully reflected on the benefits to journalism if some of that “untidy little Eden” were to be abandoned for more investigative sensibilities – prejudices even – which don’t easily fit the sheltered template of impartial and neutral reporting but are still informed, incisive, and intelligent nevertheless to yield real insights. Isn’t a poor person’s reality different than a rich person’s? So why not clarify those differences by calling attention to them openly? Asked more generally, does not "objectivity" in the best sense of the word only require the kinds of impassioned interest and dedication Koppel only decries?

Today the news networks and cable outlets are not just part of the partisan banter; they not only air all kinds of extreme and simplistic viewpoints but are at the forefront in pushing what one ex-media executive aptly described as “a fun, non-linear creative environment” for political analysts as well as political hucksters and demagogues to attract their audiences. They provide caricatures of all sorts, and exhibit some of the most garish yet yawningly predictable forms of political neuroses and fears, some surely more informed than others.

That Olbermann made a couple donations to Democratic candidates, thus breaking MSNBC policy, we are now well aware. Big fucking deal. I only wonder what Koppel thought of Rachel Maddow’s honest and direct commentary on the issue which pointed out how FOX, unlike MSNBC, has no prohibitions on hosts making political donations, and has even openly solicited for Republican candidates and causes. Ahh, Teddy’s silence here speaks volumes. Perhaps he hasn’t gotten around to doing the research? Or maybe he’s just too indifferent or impartial to even care about such details? And, as Olbermann suggested in historical context, it has been exactly this kind of “that’s all we have for tonight, folks” treatment that so often enabled Koppel and the networks to fluff up the experts and partisan hacks as they monumentally failed the public during the leadup the war in Iraq.

Most recently, Koppel sounded a little more thoughtful in an interview on NPR where he fielded good questions from callers, and debated Jeff Jarvis who pushed Koppel on several points. Yet when Koppel admitted to his dread of the “man on the street interview,” he concluded that “you'd get one for, one against, and one who really hadn't made up his mind - and the end result is, you had nothing.” Come again, Teddy? “I am not presenting objectivity as though it were some form of castrated truth. I'm presenting objectivity as something that is presented to the public at large so that you out there have enough information that you can make intelligent decisions of your own.” But isn’t it the job of journalists to let subjects speak while using their informed judgment qua journalists to provide relevant context to what “the man on the street” says...you know, so that we don’t end up with “nothing?” Even more revealingly, when asked directly by a caller about his false equivalencies of FOX and MSNBC, Koppel refused to answer by fleeing into Parrot mode: “But if you ask anyone who considers himself right of center whether he regards MSNBC News, and the people who appear on MSNBC, and the information that is conveyed on MSNBC as being objective, you're clearly going to get a different kind of answer.” My god, can you, Mr. Kopple, just answer the question put to you in the first person? Can you for the love of sweet Jesus just say it already!!! “The test, I suppose,” he then added, “is whether someone watching who is a regular MSNBC viewer can watch Fox without feeling that it is totally biased - and whether the opposite is also true. And if the equivalency is not perfect, I think there is enough equivalency there to justify the central point that I was making.” Huh? “Enough equivalency”? This is all getting very Koppelesque! I’ll just let the man with the whitey-fro speak for himself, and give him the last word…you decide.

Jan Pehechaan Ho

2010-11-15T05:31:00.004-05:00

from "Gumnaam"

the takeaway 2010: the coming disaster of the Obama Presidency and the triumph of New Feudalism

2010-11-08T23:57:00.018-05:00

Expectantly the Democrats lost big last Tuesday. And the purging of the Blue Dogs should demonstrate to even the most fashionably clueless among us of the political failure of Democratic “centrism.” Looking on the bright side, we could be tempted to say that the midterms have at least crystallized the liberal and progressive platform, even if Pelosi gets demoted in the process. As Ari Berman anticipated about a month before Nov. 2, “Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus.” True, less blue-dogs in Congress would be a benefit insofar Democrats are able to shape and control their narrative without party bickering. And though I would love for this to be the takeaway of the 2010 midterms, I also detect some stupid here not getting the scrutiny it deserves. First of all, the remaining 24 Blue Dogs in the House, true to form, are already calling for Pelosi to quit. More obviously, if less numbers overall ostracize the Democrats as an ineffectual incumbency it will only require from Brand Obama and members of the party brass more leadership, more heavy-lifting. And given the statements already being made by Obama it is clear the White House intends to remain at odds with the party’s liberal base, and do its best by clinging to the diminishing “center.”

So why would Obama once again reaffirm his willingness to “compromise” rather than try to fire up his own troops in his own party – especially when the signals sent by the GOP tell us that it has no intentions of compromising whatsoever? You know, there was a time not all that long ago when Obama was considered not just a great orator but some new kind of inspirational leader. You know, he had charisma in a ~~good~~ er, "progressive" way. He was even a "community organizer" guys!!! So how can the President continue to foolishly reach across the aisle only to be taken for another ride? Can it be he is just another inside-man for the corporate plutonomy? (Hey everybody! look at Mika!)

One sure lesson to be learned from 2010 it is that even without enough votes to get its policies enacted the gains made by the GOP enables it to simply watch “gridlock” take its toll and dismantle what’s left of the age of Obama.

Energized by the Theo-Cons of the religious right, as well as Tea Party antics and rhetoric, the GOP has been able to rise from the dead in just two years to effectively denounce and repudiate Obama and the Democrats. How did they do it? Sensing weakness in the Dems, they fought and fought continuously. Republicans knew nothing could be gained for their party if they simply went along with the policies of a majority party: Obama and the Dems would get the credit if their policies succeeded and were popular, just as they would surely get blamed if their policies stalled, needed cover, or downright failed. Thus the Republicans became known on MSNBC as The Party of No.

In reinventing themselves the Republicans were also able to distance themselves from the Democrats in a very clear way. What they did was take a feudal turn to the right, and got a huge push from "outsiders" otherwise known as The Tea Party. This New Feudalism is evident not only in the House of Representatives but also in the Senate where old white men parody 1950s middle-class America by evoking the spirit of Balance-the-Budget hardhead Calvin Coolidge and the coming specter of A Socialist Takeover. These New Feudalists speak everyday of America’s ennobled place in history as it soldiers on against infidels, libertines, and the shiftless. They plunder the serfs back home. They make others fight their wars. They spread the gospel of wealth while speaking in tongues. They steal from the poor to give to the rich. Some of their additional accomplishments? Presiding over economic and financial collapse through financial deregulation and disregard; dilapidated and starved social institutions; unprecedented expansions of executive power and surveillance; two losing wars; a bloated military budget which – when paired with rising health care expenses – is bankrupting the country; xenophobia; a plutocratic “austerity” agenda which professes to cut state spending “across the board” by privatizing social security, Medicaid, and Medicare, while making the Bush tax-cuts permanent; and, of course, extolling of ~~private wealth~~ growing disparities in income and wealth inequality. Republicans have also gotten older. But perhaps the most telling sign of the coming of a New Feudalist establishment is the redistricting of congressional seats it is about to redraw.

Surely it isn't new to say that the GOP is radically at odds with the demos. For no matter how much talk there is today of a “populist” Tea Party take over of government don’t expect the Marco Rubios of the world to rock the boat of the Republican establishment. We'll see how much of that Defense budget Rand Paul wants to cut. We'll see how much executive power Dick Armey or that guy in Wisconsin who beat Feingold wants to cut back. Can't wait for Sarah Palin to fight for the unemployed and uninsured. Yeah, both parties are

joined at the hip in profound ways which make meaningful distinctions between them utterly specious: thoroughly corporatist, militaristic, neo-liberal, anti-democratic, and dispassionately fascist just poised at the edge waiting to wage a jingoistic boot stomping of all opposition into oblivion perchance the opportunity ever presented itself. How totally awesome is that? Yet unlike the Democrats who are plagued by caution and "thoughtfulness," (as any good latte drinking feminist sympathizer is,) Republicans can dress themselves up in callous, go it alone, cowboy regalia and rhetoric to give them the semblance and reputation of inherent autonomy, of a Going Rogue toughness and independence, which many, many Americans find appealing. And so by STAYING ON MESSAGE they can position themselves to pull this whole fucking mess of a country continually to the right. You see, Rush and Hannity know stuff. They and their propogandist blowhards know how to create reality so liberals can report it.

no surprises here...

2010-11-03T23:16:00.002-04:00

“Obama To Make Reassuring Eye Contact With Every Last American” What else can the poor President do? Surely not follow all those “bipartisan” impulses (read “dirty fucking hippies!”) we’ve heard about so much the last few years. Aw heck, looks like Obama and the Dems have no choice but bellyflop their way into 2012 as well. Just consider this with this. Do you remember the part when Jaws started chasing the boat! “He’s chasing us, I don’t believe it,” a befuddled Richard Dreyfuss muttered. With swing-states Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania looking bad for Obama in the mid-terms, and without an about face from the Dems, the Republicans are just licking their chops anticipating 2012.

The Rally to Restore Sanity May Not Take Place

2010-10-27T00:40:00.005-04:00

I’m a fan don’t get me wrong. Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s political takedowns through satiric jiu-jitsu have not just been rip-roaring but somewhat mission critical for many liberals and progressives. But I also think their planned Rally to Restore Sanity for this Saturday in DC requires all-too-little expectation adjustment. The fatal blind spot in Stewart’s Rally is not, as Timothy Noah from Slate fears, that it is too political (for Noah, the event potentially incurs a Tea Tantrum reaction from the right,) but rather that it shines blatantly of simulated politics. The event will simply be, in more Baudrillardean lingo, a “non-event” of mass proportions. It will gain media attention, of course. But it will more likely only confirm the political anemia afflicting thousands of activists who can somehow occasionally manage to muster up the energy and wherewithal to mobilize “the grassroots” only to articulate vague, sophomoric, and ultimately cowardly platitudes. (“I MAY DISAGREE WITH YOU BUT I’M PRETTY SURE YOU’RE NOT HITLER!”) As Daniel Denvir wrote last month,

“the Rally to Restore Sanity repeats the liberal establishment’s greatest error: when Republicans go on attack — either at home with lies or abroad with bombs — hunker down somewhere in the middle and plead for civility.”

Needless to say, it also repeats the flawed Hopeful strategy of Obama and the Democrats who have over the last two years conceded too much, too early, while foregoing more combative stances in policy and rhetoric against the GOP. (Prolly just a coincidence, you know the whole thing, something for the DVD extras.)

Leaving aside the obvious question whether the planned turnout this Saturday could have been mobilized in a more politically effective way, say, on Wall St., (just think, “The Rally to Restore Responsibility,”) there is also the more glaring fallacy of false equivalencies which the rally is predicated on. As Rizvi Qureshi asks,

“Are partisan pundits, tea partiers, leftist activists, members of the House, and architects of GOP politics all equally lacking in sanity? These actors are all so disparate in their nature, power, and aspirations that Stewart's attempt to dub them all as a threat to the stability of the nation is puzzling, and appears to be more a product of his fatigue with American politics than a compelling grievance.”

Of course, one could imagine that the absolutely heee-larious “million moderate march” on Washington may help Democrats at the polls despite Stewart’s and Colbert’s silence on this explicitly partisan issue. But, as already reported, the rally may actually come to hurt the Democrats on election day by being a distraction. (Who knew!) More importantly, it must be said that what Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity will certainly not demonstrate to liberals and progressives is that a little mob rule, if coordinated and voiced the right way, can actually go a long way.

private banks buying public debt and taking your house? discuss

2010-10-18T09:55:00.001-04:00

via The Huffington Post.

Citizens United v democracy

2010-10-07T14:08:00.002-04:00

Corporate entities are not human beings: they do not eat, breathe, live, nor die. Neither do they have any overriding ethical or moral commitments. They are artificial constructs with only the legal mandate – their sole purpose of existence – to increase profit. What the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court effectively granted last January was the unlimited potential of corporations, whether they be General Motors, Fox News, Freedom Works, or labor unions, to spend as much money on elections as “they” choose.

Over the several months since the ruling was decided, as reported by NY Times, we have seen numerous small to medium size companies, “mainly on the Republican side…jumping in” to contribute huge sums of cash via various 501 organizations which enable them to do so without having to disclose individual donors. For example, $400,000 was given by American Financial Group directly to Karl Rove’s campaign spending group, American Crossroads GPS, a contribution that would not have been possible prior to Citizens United. And together, with its close affiliate American Crossroads which is not a 501, (and incidentally received 91% of $2.6 million from just three individuals in the month of August alone,) American Crossroads GPS is expected to spend more than $50 million this fall on elections.

Plutocracy works, sure. But if you think these efforts have been bi-partisan, think again. As reported by Politico, as of 9/24/2010,

pro-Republican organizations had paid for a total of $23.6 million worth of ads compared to $4.8 million for Democratic-aligned groups. And it's only going to get worse: Over the next four weeks, GOP groups have $9.4 million worth of TV ads reserved across 40 districts compared to $1.3 million in five districts for Democratic groups.

“And the future?” asks Kevin Drum from Mother Jones. “Probably worse. Big publicly traded companies may still be staying on the sidelines this year to see how things shake out, but that's not likely to last.”