UPDATE 2: The implosion of firedoglake continues. TBogg, known for calling a critic of his support for drone strikes a fucking retard and telling that person to blow me without consequences, is now complaining that the conduct of others is driving people away from the site:

I’d like FDL to have a much bigger readership, but it is hard to do that when the same people keep showing with the same tired arguments, and the attendant goal post moving, which only makes regular readers run away, And, believe me, they do; I get emails from people all the time who say they won’t come back. That frustrates the crap out of me.

This, from someone who, in addition to hijacking the comment thread of a post written by someone else, frequently seizes upon the legitimate transgressions of the Catholic Church and turns them into offensive posts certain to drive even progressive Catholics away. Indeed, the anti-Catholicism of TBogg and, sometimes, Teddy Partridge, is arguably the most self-destructive feature of the site, if measured by Hamsher's aspiration to create a progressive town square.

UPDATE 1: Predictably, it didn't take long. Hamsher banned someone who made a comment in response to her post that she didn't like. There is no longer any evidence of this person associated with the site at all. Furthermore, if you inquire about it, or, even worse, post about it, you risk virtual disappearance. So much for being a town square where a fair discussion of the merits of all sides can take place. A better, more inclusive approach would have allowed members to vent in response to her post today, while firmly insisting upon future compliance with the new policy, but that would have run contrary to her reflexive need to assert control. In this instance, there was also the side benefit of expelling a strong, third party voice, and, probably, many of those who liked him, from the site as well. Hence, expect a manipulation of this standard for posts and comments to the benefit of those supporting the reelection of President Obama.

INITIAL POST: Jane Hamsher has spoken in response to intensified snark guerrilla warfare among the remaining die hards at firedoglake:

Accusing someone of having ulterior, nefarious and unacknowledged motives isn’t discussion. It’s nothing but an attempt to shut down discussion.

The rule is clearly stated. Don’t pee in the pool or you’ll be kicked out of the pool. If someone thinks their special brand of ambrosia-scented pee pee doesn’t count, and they want to give a good squirt and demand a deal in order to comply with the rules, they’re gone.

The no wee-wee policy could not be any more unambiguous. I suggest maybe zipping up and rethinking how you want to approach this conversation, rather than accusing us of an unacknowledged desire to to shut down criticism of the veal pen.

It is what it is. The rule is the rule, and it is iron-clad. If someone can’t accept that, this is the end of the road for them at FDL.

I guess that one of the privileges that comes with funding your own website is that you can say anything, no matter how ridiculous. In this instance, she has developed such an impenetrable sense of denial that she no longer recognizes that she is the one of the people that most frequently violates this rule to manipulate the content of the site, as she did in order to drive me away. Is she really so oblivious that she doesn't understand that the snark wars that have overwhelmed the site are being caused by people emulating her oftentimes arrogant, dismissive and insulting style of communication? Or, maybe, she cynically believes that the remaining members will uncritically accept anything she says. Only she knows. But, for those of us on the outside, it is becoming more and more evident that firedoglake no longer possesses any capability to motivate people to politically organize themselves. And, that, for reasons that I have previously explained, is a great loss. If she had candidly admitted her own shortcomings in relation to the current situation at the site, she might have been able to turn things around. But Hamsher isn't known for acknowledging that she makes mistakes. The reporters, Dayen, Walker and Gosztola, remain well worth reading, though.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Culture, Democrats, firedoglake

Over the years, I have been preoccupied with how radicalized people can be effectively organized in this atomized society. Hence, my interest in the demise of labor unions and their self-absorbed leadership that considers any sincerely motivated rank and file social activism as a threat. Instead of challenging the neoliberal order, they have aligned themselves with it, policing the boundaries of acceptable, innocuous protest, as they did in Wisconsin, with disasterous results. I find myself experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance in regard to them, recognizing that they lost their historical agency decades ago, but incapable of identifying an alternative.

Similarly, I have looked to the Internet for places operated by people with a sufficiently independent turn of mind outside the progressive establishment. In 2006 or so, I discovered firedoglake, a progressive site operated by Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith, although Hardin Smith has not been involved with the site for several years, possibly for health reasons. firedoglake was interesting to me, as was the late Steve Gilliard's The News Blog, because anti-imperialists and leftists openly posted there without being moderated out of existence. Both were a marked contrast to mainstream progressive sites where the participants self-censored themselves in regard to challenging the Democratic Party and got rid of anyone who didn't do so. I posted comments on Gilliard's site frequently, he relished hard nosed political discussion, the more contentious, the better. I still remember going back and forth with him about whether US soldiers who enlisted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be held morally responsible for that decision. Conversely, I declined to post comments at firedoglake because I had an intuitive sense that I wasn't going to get along well with the kool kids who ran the site, epitomized by Hamsher herself, an intuition that was confirmed earlier this year. Even so, I was a lurker because I noticed that posters and commenters had a relatively ideologically free hand. Moreover, it was evident that the people forming the firedoglake community were going through a radicalized political evolution, the kind of evolution that many of us on the left hope, against all odds, to happen in this country. As with any such evolution, it was messy, erratic, abrasive and inconsistent.

But it was an evolution experienced by people who were trying to put into practice the old adage attributed to Lenin: Be as radical as reality. Accordingly, the initial approaches were reformist, with an emphasis upon more and better Democrats and an insistence upon subjecting the malefactors of the Bush administration to the rule of law. While I was indifferent to both approaches, ridiculing the expectation that US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald would accomplish anything of political significance through his investigation of Lewis Libby, I perceived that the people involved in these efforts were going through an important educational process. By 2008, after the bitter progressive disappointment with the 2007 Democratic Congress, a disappointment intensified by the betrayals of some newly elected representatives who had benefitted from firedoglake fundraising efforts, Hamsher had the good sense to stay out of the fight between Obama and Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, even though most of the people who posted and commented on the campaign were Obama supporters. firedoglake participants were not immune to the euphoria associated with Obama's candidacy. Perhaps, she perceived, in light of her experience with the 2007 Congress, that there was much worse to come.

If so, Hamsher was correct. To her credit, she put her personal resources to work through the site, exposing the mendacity of those involved in the Obama administration with the same rigor that she had done in regard to the Bush one. She hired journalists like Jon Walker and David Dayen to cover almost every aspect of Obama's capitulation to capital: the conscious refusal to provide sufficient stimulus for an economic recovery, the bank bailouts, the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the refusal to stem the tidal wave of foreclosures and, of course, health care reform. While she did not personally emphasize it, journalists and posters exposed the horrific violence of Obama's variation on the war on terror. For this, she was reviled by mainstream progressives aligned with the Democrats as they called people who identified with her site firebaggers. She even embraced the effort to defend Bradley Manning when everyone other than gays and lesbians and radical leftists considered him a pariah. Along with leftists like Louis Proyect, Pham Binh and Richard Seymour, she immediately recognized the importance of Occupy, and hired Kevin Gosztola to cover it, and raised money to provide supplies for occupations.

Unfortunately for firedoglake, however, Occupy has proven to be more polarizing than unifying, partially because it emerged just prior to the 2012 campaign. It emboldened those who had rejected the US electoral process to express themselves more aggressively, while those who remained aligned with Obama responded in kind. There have therefore been a number of nasty arguments on the site that have been poorly moderated by people who support Obama and the Democrats, a conflict that exploded, curiously enough, when someone was banned for posting an anti-Zionist article. If the number of comments are any indication, site traffic dropped significantly after this episode. Meanwhile, contemporaneous with this, Hamsher became paranoid about what she perceived as efforts to disrupt the site, as most embarrassingly revealed when she characterized me as either a Department of Homeland Security or K Street operative. Or, at least, she came across as paranoid, but it could have been an instance of crazy like a fox, hiding behind the absurdity of police and lobbyist infiltration to justify running off people like me from the site, people that she understands all too well. If so, she succeeded, as demonstrated by the melancholy tone of those who remain in the firedoglake community. One even comes across references to those who have been driven away, and elliptical statements to the effect that the damage is real and major.

Indeed it is. And while firedoglake is merely one website among many, it was, until recently, a popular one, and, more importantly, one that facilitated the social and political education of many sincere, highly motivated people. I doubt that it has the capacity to do so any longer, and, for those of us who understand that the radical transformation of this country is dependent upon spaces, however imperfect, it is a great loss. In this, it prefigures Occupy and efforts that will invariably emerge in the future. As with the struggles within Occupy Oakland, it is essential that we learn from them in order to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Culture, Democrats, firedoglake, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

UPDATE: There is a predictable symmetry between those who finance presidential campaigns and those who benefit from government economic policy:

The aftermaths of the Great Recession and the Great Depression produced sharply different changes in U.S. incomes that tell us a lot about tax and economic policy.

The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.

In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.

And, as you might have guessed, the concentration has intensified in recent decades:

The top one percent enjoyed 45 percent of Clinton-era income growth, 65 percent of Bush-era growth and 93 percent of Obama-era growth, though that is only through 2010.

A more damning indictment of the domestic policies of the Obama administration is hard to imagine.

INITIAL POST: Like many of you, I have pretty much tuned out the 2012 presidential campaign. From the fragments of media coverage that I have encountered, the Republican candidates are fighting about which one is this most militaristic and willing to transfer the most wealth to the top 1%. Meanwhile, President Obama is strategically counterpunching, taking advantage of the nascent economic recovery and opportunities to look reasonable in comparison to the religious right lunacy that periodically erupts during the Republican primaries.

But the real story, the one with the most importance, is the extent of the corruption of the US electoral process, as related by the indefatiguable David Dayen. 5 people are responsible for 25% of all SuperPAC contributions, political action committees that may raise and spend money independent of the candidates, with 200 people are responsible for 80% of them. Through the end of January, SuperPACs have spent nearly as much money on the Republican primary campaign as the candidates themeselves. It is fair to say that Newt Gingrinch would be out of the race if not for the open checkbook of Sheldon Abelson and his wife. Of course, President Obama, unopposed on the Democratic side, has no need for such expenditures at this time, but has endorsed SuperPAC efforts on his behalf.

For a good summary of the tentacular strangulation of the electoral process by SuperPACs, and the relationship of the wealthy donors who finance them to specific Republican candidates, go to this post at I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. Based upon the most recent information, OpenSecrets.org has determined that 379 SuperPACs have raised over $130 million dollars and spent over $77 million of it in this election cycle, with some of it directed outside of the presidential campaign. At this rate, SuperPAC spending for the entire campaign could exceed $400 million, and this is a conservative estimate, given the explosion of spending that will take place after the Republican and Democratic nominees are selected.

Why, you ask, am I walking through all this reported campaign finance data generated by well meaning journalists and liberal sunshine organizations? I am doing so because it should induce us to ponder whether we can bring about any meaningful change in this country through any participation in the electoral process. Preliminarily, it is essential to observe that this data conclusively pulls down the curtain on that brief period of progressive optimism during 2008, an unwarranted optimism based upon the utopian notion that presidential candidates, like Obama, could fund their campaigns independent of wealthy donors through small donations over the Internet. As reported just after the 2008 campaign by the Campaign Finance Institute, Obama received 74% of his contributions from people who contributed over $200, with large donors, defined as people who contributed over $1,000, providing 80% more funding than small donors, defined as people who contributed $200 or less.

Michael Malbin, the executive director of the Institute, reached the following conclusions from his evaluation of 2004 and 2008 campaign finance data:

. . . While the large donors thus were responsible for much more of Obama's money than either his small or middle range group, he received somewhat less proportionally from large donors than did his rivals or predecessors. Forty-seven percent of Obama's money came from large donors compared to 56% for Kerry and 60% for both Bush and McCain. However, because Obama's 47% is based on a larger total, that means he also raised significantly more large-donor money in absolute terms than any of his rivals or predecessors.

Much of this money was raised the old fashioned way. Since only about 13,000 of those who started out small for Obama ended up crossing the $1,000 threshold, that means the bulk of Obama's $213 million in large-donor contributions during the primaries came from about 85,000 people who started out giving big and stayed there. Much of this large-donor money – perhaps close to a majority – came to the campaign through bundling methods initially perfected by Bush.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) – which in the absence of legally mandated disclosure had to use information provided by the campaigns – 561 bundlers had raised a minimum of $63 million for Obama by mid-August and 534 people had raised a minimum of $75 million for McCain. The bundlers undoubtedly were responsible for more than these amounts because the campaigns reported the bundlers in ranges and CRP's minimum totals were based conservatively on the low end of each range. A reasonable guess might estimate the real amount at about 50% above the minimum – the mid-point for each range – yielding a total of perhaps about $90 million for Obama as of mid-August and more than $100 million for McCain.

It is important to go through this recent history because it provides some insight as to why the Obama presidency adopted a neoliberal, militaristic course instead of a progressive one. Contrary to the public relations associated with the 2008 campaign, Obama was as dependent upon contributions from wealthy donors as past candidates, he was merely able to supplement them more effectively with a large, aggregate amount of small donations because of the enthusiasm generated by the prospect of electing a charismatic, young, potentially progressive, African American president. Obama revealed the true course of his presidency shortly after his election through his appointments of people like Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates and Timothy Geithner. The naivete of Obama's supporters at the time, still intoxicated with the euphoria of his victory, was almost heartrending. I still remember my KDVS radio program co-host saying, with a straight face, as if were entirely plausible, that Robert Reich would be an excellent choice for Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, the situation, as documented by groups like OpenSecrets.org, is more transparent. Not necessarily worse, but more easily understood. The US electoral process remains dominated by people able to contribute large sums of money, but much of it is received from a shockingly small number of people, as explained by Dayen. Given that the 2008 progressive effort to transform the US socioeconomic system through participation in the Obama campaign has failed, an effort proselytized by an array of people ranging from Bill Fletcher to Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Hayden to Jesse Jackson to Melissa Harris-Perry to the late Howard Zinn, among others, what is the alternative to another such failed effort? Can we really expect to incrementally democratize the US political system through political and legal reformist endeavors in the face of such concentrated financial power? With the participants of Occupy struggling with internal conflict and police repression, such questions retain their difficulty and their urgency. Difficult, because the possibility of a mass confrontation with US and transnational elites still appears unlikely, urgent, because the distress associated with their violent, rapacious practices shows no sign of abatement.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Vote or Die

Kucinich, out of Congress after being redistricted into a tough primary fight with Marcy Kaptur that he lost. Good riddance, although Russell Simmons is no doubt heartbroken. It is tempting to say that he was thrown onto the trash heap of political has-beens despite providing a progressive fig leak for the neoliberal policies of Obama and Pelosi when the Democrats controlled Congress during the 2009-2010 session. But a has-been is defined as: A person, especially one formerly popular or influential, whose popularity or effectiveness has peaked and is now in decline. It is typically said of professionals and celebrities whose prime is behind them.

Given that Kucinich was never especially popular, at least as defined by the national electoral process, and that he was never effective legislatively, it would, strictly speaking, be inaccurate to even describe him as a has-been. Would it be more precise, using baseball lingo, to call him a never was? Well, not exactly, that's a little too harsh. Merriam-Webster defines never was as one that has attained no rank, success, or eminence. He did, it must be conceded, wins elections to become the mayor of Cleveland and a congressional representative, and he did attain a sort of avant-garde eminence amongst a small group of progressives, for whom he singularly represented their political impotence.

Kucinich was, in effect, a reed by which these progressives clung to the hope that the US could be moved in a more socially responsible direction through the electoral process. In this, his presidential campaigns anticipated the enthusiastic, pragmatic embrace of Obama in 2008 by a much larger progressive constituency. In both instances, progressives underestimated the extent to which the electoral process had degenerated into a duopoly where the two major parties competed for the privilege of which one could better serve the interests of capital. If Kucinich really wanted to perform a public service, he would expose this in relation to his experiences in Congress by writing and publishing his memoirs. Somehow, I doubt that will happen. At heart, he's a team player, as he showed when he voted for health care reform in 2010.

His defenders might contend that Kucinich was in the tradition of Peter Camejo, a revolutionary political figure who, unlike Camejo, actually got elected to office. Camejo, formerly a highly respected leadership figure in the Socialist Workers Party, subsequently participated in the creation of the Green Party and ran for the governorship and the Senate here in California as a third party candidate. It is, of course, a strained comparison. Kucinich was obviously no revolutionary, and, as many have observed, he performed the function of keeping purportedly rebellious progressives inside the Democratic Party, especially during presidential election years. He would run in the primaries, garner a small, enthusiastic vote from progressives that might otherwise be tempted to support a third party effort, and then dutifully support the nominee, no matter how far removed from his own perspective. Not surprisingly, the other, more mainstream, better financed candidates generally ignored him.

Camejo put the people first and the party second, while Kucinich invariably did the opposite. That's why he was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party. Beyond this, he participated in the electoral process as a means of educating people about the urgency of a radical, revolutionary transformation of the US. His efforts can therefore be paradoxically characterized as one of many foreshadowings of Occupy, a marked contrast to Kucinich's facilitation of the cooption of progressives by Obama. Kucinich yet again revealed the importance of his need to remain part of the congressional club when he voted for a bill on February 27th that would criminalize protest at many federal buildings and facilities, the Federal Restricted Grounds and Improvement Act. As with his vote for health care reform, he must have known that it was an act of desperation because of the contempt that those who run the Democratic Party have for him. Sadly, by trying to split the difference, he also earned the contempt of those for whom he sought to represent.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, Vote or Die

One of the most striking aspects of the 2012 electoral process is the fact that much of the public has realized that it has nothing to do with real issues of concern. It is now generally recognized as a form of social entertainment. It is, in short, a spectacle, one designed to give a facade of legitimacy to the governance of a country under the control of transnational elites. One pays attention to candidates like Obama, Romney and Gingrich, if at all, as another form of televised sports. And, just as one tunes out the World Series if you don't care about baseball, a lot of people are tuning out the 2012 election because they don't, for good reason, care about mainstream politics.

Spectacles like this are costly, especially when the producers are facing a headwind of indifference, so it comes as no surprise that President Obama will raise an amount of money close to the $770 million he raised for his 2008 campaign. By the early part of January, Romney has raised more than $56 million, an amount that is likely to increase substantially if it becomes likely that he will be the Republican nominee. Gingrich is receiving generous SuperPAC support from right wing, anti-union, arch Zionist Sheldon Abelson and his wife, Miriam, a reward for appalling, ill-informed political positions that he has expressed for decades. Gingrich can also expect an acceleration of contributions if it appears that he will be the nominee.

But this is background noise for most people, because they have already seen through the charade, the self-referentiality of a process whereby the same people who obsess over the debt and Iran enthusiastically promote candidates who mirror their beliefs. I know a number of people involved in partisan politics who follow it closely, including people involved in unions, and I rarely hear them say anything about the campaign. Sacramento, as the capital of California, is a political place, and yet those who one would expect to talk about it avidly are, by and large, silent. On the Internet, I have noticed that the number of comments in response to 2012 campaign posts over at firedoglake are down in comparison to the number of comments in response to 2008 ones, which is to be expected, I guess, but not this much. I should visit DailyKos to confirm, but I don't have the stomach for it. These are expressions of the post-partisan Obama legacy: the recognition that participation in the electoral process is useless.

Political protest strategies have evolved accordingly. Back in the early to mid-1990s, protest organizers worked on the assumption that elected officials could be influenced through public pressure. Hence, the effort against NAFTA. By the late 1990s, people were beginning to question this assumption. The protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1998 announced the introduction of disruptive direct action methods into the mainstream. Radical environmentalists had already discovered the futility of the conventional practices of protest marches, letter writing campaigns and visits to the offices of elected representatives, and they played a prominent role in the shutdown of downtown Seattle. Trade unionists, on the other hand, played the traditional march and rally game, consciously distancing themeselves, with some exceptions, from the police assaults upon locked down protesters in the central city.

Organizers of the protests against the impending Iraq war in February 2003 took the later approach, and, predictably, failed. Direct action undertaken immediately after the start of the war quickly fizzled out. More recently, there was a tremendous effort to push Congress towards the implementation of a meaningful health care reform. Contrary to Obama apologists who blame the victims by saying that we didn't do enough to make it pass a progressive measure, there was a tremendous, broad based effort to pressure the Congress and the White House. Beyond requiring the President and the Democrats in Congress to adopt public relations strategies to conceal their complicity in the bill as passed and adopted, it failed, too.

In the aftermath of the intransigence of the political system, we are now seeing people gravitate towards more confrontational and amorphous methods of protest. In California, UC students, angry over fee increases, dismiss the importunings of UC administrators to lobby the legislature, and instead seize campus buildings, call general strikes and attempt to storm meetings of the regents. Implicit within these actions is a condemnation of the hierarchies of privilege and access that are interwoven within the modernist university. Likewise, people in the East Bay angry over killings by the BART police sought to disrupt transit service, although they have made some effort to address the BART board in an attempt to get rid of these cops entirely.

Of course, Occupy has been the inevitable extension of these protest tactics in the face of the hostility of elected officials. By refusing to make demands, people involved in Occupy have expressed their contempt for the corrupted political process. Nihilism is the consequence of such an entrenched, corrupted elite, and the refusal to make demands is an obvious manifestation of it. Direct action, such as assisting people against threatened foreclosures (an activity that, admittedly, predates Occupy), is another one, as the participants have decided that they must help people themselves because the government will not do otherwise do so. Similarly, the seizures of abandoned buildings and properties undertaken by OWS, Occupy Oakland, and, possibly, Occupy SF, for the purpose of providing shelter and services (again, an activity that predates Occupy), highlight how the government and the economic system rely upon artificially imposed scarcity to generate poverty.

Occupy therefore represents the extent of the accumulated despair experienced by those who have suffered over the course of the ongoing recession, and the willingness of some of the victims to undertake actions that would have been imcomprehensible to them just a few years before. Consistent with this, there is, within Occupy, primarily among its younger participants, an emotional, philosophical rejection of contemporary capitalist society itself, one with echoes of May '68, social movements in South America, and violent protests in Greece and Algeria. It is but a thread, but a logical one in light of the refusal of those in power to address the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands and the desperation that results from it. But it remains to be seen whether a nihilistic combination of enforced disassocation from the political process and the performance of direct action will provide a way forward to create a new, more humane, more egalitarian society.

Labels: Activism, Democrats, Elections, Neoliberalism, Republicans, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions, Vote or Die

I'm feeling a little nostalgic today, so much so that I found myself interested in a post over at firedoglake about Richard Kirsch, Health Care for America Now and the abandonment of the public option during the passage of health care reform. For those of you with any remaining doubt that over the lack of Democratic support for the public option, Talking Points Memo dispels it during the course of a review of Kirsch's recently released book about his experience:

The book is Fighting For Our Health, by Richard Kirsch, who directed the advocacy group Health Care for America Now during the push for reform. HCAN is a well financed umbrella group backed by scores of liberal groups, unions, and other reformers — making Kirsch a close witness to the entire saga. He confirms that the White House treated the public option like a bargaining chip with powerful industry players, and believes that when his group became most critical of the bill mid-way through the fight, that top White House aides sought to have him canned.

The White House had negotiated a number of deals with the health industry, designed to win their support for reform, including agreeing to oppose a robust public option, which would have the greatest clout to control how much providers got paid, writes Kirsch, largely confirming what has become an open secret in Washington.

Kirsch’s book is replete with similar stories. Thematically, it centers on contradictions within the Democratic party, and Obama himself, that gave rise to the infighting that marked the debate. To keep factions from spinning apart, Kirsch suggests, the administration was averse from the outset to the idea that progressives and sympathetic stakeholders should play an outside game, pressuring the President and problem Democrats in Congress to pass robust reforms.

By way of background, it is important to note that the public option was a watered down version of single payer, designed to provide an acceptable alternative for a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress. Perhaps, you recall that the passage of health care reform with a public option and the availability of generic drugs, also voted down in Congress, was mentioned by progressives as one of the reasons that it was essential for to vote for Obama and the Democrats in 2008.The public option, it seems, was more about creating a transfer station for those health care reform supporters traveling from single payer to the individual mandate than it was about an actual policy that could be effectively implemented.

Upon reading the Talking Points Memo review, one is immediately struck by the fact that the White House could not even tolerate the mild advocacy of an Obama friendly organization like HCAN. In the end, Kirsch got back in line, as HCAN urged its supporters to call Congress to get the final version of the bill passed, warts and all, as a visit to the HCAN homepage demonstrates. HCAN is therefore a cautionary story about how a progressive organization created for a particular, socially beneficial purpose ended up as an advocate for what it purportedly loathed, a neoliberal health care reform that places much of the costs on the middle class, although one can plausible argue that this was the true objective of those who created HCAN from the inception.

Not surprisingly, if the Talking Points Memo review of his book gives us an accurate impression of the scope of his book, Kirsch evades these unpleasant truths. Even today, it seems, Kirsch just can't be forthcoming with those who would support his objectives. Kirsch and HCAN refused, during the legislative process, to inform the public about what had already been done to the public option, and, in fact, continued to lead people to believe that, through public pressure, legislators could be induced to pass it. It was all just one big Kabuki show, where Kirsch and HCAN, with the support of labor unions like AFSCME and SEIU, and progressive groups like MoveON.org, mislead progressives and workers because they felt it was more important to dissemble and maintain an illusory influence with the White House than it was to be truthful with those who made phone calls, sent letters and organized rallies in support of the public option. Indeed, Kirsch is still being dishonest with this book, because, according to Talking Points Memo, it attributes the refusal of Obama to fight for a public option to a failure of political nerve and a misguided political strategy, when, instead, it is entirely consistent with the neoliberal, financial sector orientation of his policies.

Put bluntly, Kirsch and HCAN believe that people like you and me need to understand that we have to accept such manipulation as part of the effort to implement the progressive agenda. If this sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly what many of the Strauss influenced neoconservatives say about foreign policy. From this loss of credibility in the legislative process and the institutionalized progressive organizations that considered it pragmatic to manipulate their supporters for the benefit of the White House, we now have Occupy. The failure of the progressive mobilization for health care reform and a Keynesian stimulus plan for the economy induced many to draw the inescapable conclusion that the electoral process merely serves the purpose of legitimizing corporate control of the US political system. They embraced the direct action ethos of Occupy as a form of resistance.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Health Care, Liberals, MoveON.org, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Unions, Vote or Die

ohtarzie has taken the time to visit Zuccoti Park and report about what he observed:

When you originally arrive at Zucotti, it seems a bit like an anarcho-hippie encampment redolent of Thomkins Square in the 90s. There is always a very loud drumming circle and all the various things that go along with it, except you don’t smell pot or booze, both of which are banned by the group.

Around the perimeter of the park are people doing agitprop – mostly making or holding posters – who run the political gamut of all political tendencies that have been marginalized from two-party duopoly, including a fair smattering of conspiracy theorists and cranks. The park grounds themselves are covered with the camping gear of the actual occupants, which is alleged to be 600 people, though it does not look that large to me. The hive of activity seems to be the food line, and, in fact, from a distance anyway, food and agitprop-making seem to be the focal points of occupation life.

Now the strange thing is, once the General Assembly starts, the prevailing demographics seem to shift rather dramatically. Overwhelmingly the people most involved in the General Assembly – the people who facilitate, who offer reports from working groups and who pose questions, are clearly of the professional classes, which is betrayed instantly by their appearance and communication style, their savviness in directing discussion and giving instructions, and by the preening, extroverted style that marks many of today’s professionals from both working stiffs and their stodgier predecessors. In other words, they look exactly like the kind of people who went literally insane for Obama in 2008 and many, if not most, probably did.

Though I find this class of people extremely unappealing as a matter of personal taste, their predominance, at least at this stage, is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of them have genuinely wised up and, more importantly, have skills and resources that less advantaged people frequently don’t have, as well as the patience for the grunt work side of revolt. But they also bring the baggage of their conformism, professional ambition and general trust in state authority, as well as religious faith in the inane strains of identity politics that have run interference for the ruling class since the 70s.

Nowhere have I encountered the social dilemma of Occupy Wall Street so concisely described. The resolution of it will determine whether Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of a new era of radical politics or yet another false dawn. Uncharacteristically the optimist, I'm going with the former instead of the latter, well aware that the odds are against me. If the various strands of the left were able to come together and organize the Bloombergville, then I'm hopeful that leftists and liberals can do the same in relation to Occupy Wall Street. Pressure from the ever expanding population of desperate people demand it.

Labels: Activism, Democrats, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Poor Amy Goodman. She just does not get it. I will quote her summary so that you can save your time and avoid reading the entire commentary: Wall Street firms were among Obama's biggest donors in 2008, and will be again in 2011. He needs us as a counter-weight.

If this is the ultimate objective of OWS, and associated occupations around the country, the participants may as well take down their tents. Fortunately, it isn't. But the fact that people like Amy Goodman are already trying to subordinate the movement to a leader, in this instance, amazingly enough, President Obama, by reducing it to a part of his electoral and governing coalition, should be cause for concern. A grassroots social movement without any express political or partisan affiliation is too threatening to people like Amy, and must be brought to heel by imposing one upon them.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Despite ongoing squabbling, I anticipate that, within the next few days, the President and the Republicans in Congress will agree to a grand bargain that results in significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, so much so with Medicaid that it will reduce it to an illusory program of medical care for the poor. Better to preserve a shell of a program, and the appearance of social support, than eliminate it altogether and make the reality of lower class distress all too obvious.

Of course, there is nothing surprising about this outcome, as the President expressed his intention to push for entitlement reform just prior to taking office. The Republican electoral victory last fall cleared away the obstruction of a Congress controlled by Democrats. The outcome was, as I posted at the time, Obama's Midterm Victory. For the vast majority of Americans who are struggling to survive in post-bubble world, the bargain, certain to be the centerpiece of Obama's 2012 campaign, will be a disaster. For the entirety of the Obama presidency, they have been subjected to a planned recession, a politically orchestrated recession, and the job losses and foreclosures that have come along with it, so as to bring about this result, the evisceration of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in order to render their lives permanently insecure.

But there is an additional aspect of the situation that has only been glancingly addressed. Naturally, the military-industrial complex will escape the harsh austerity that is about to imposed on the middle and lower classes. Conflicts of varying degrees of intensity will continue across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Going forward, the federal budget will reveal that the US has become a society of perpetual war, funded by the economic sacrifices of its own citizens, even more so than in the past. Economic growth, such as it is, will be significantly generated by sectors associated with the military-industrial complex, especially those involved in the development of surveillance technologies. Politically, this outcome confirms Zizek's criticism of the social democratic left for its failed strategy of contesting neoliberalism solely upon the terrain of the preservation of existing social welfare programs.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Democrats, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

You probably heard about it while I was on vacation. On April 21st, a group of people paid to attend an Obama fundraiser in San Francisco, sang a whimsical political sang and called for the release of Bradley Manning:

According to a White House pool report, Obama was speaking to about 200 supporters when a woman stood up at one of the tables of 10 attendees and declared that the group had written a song.

Obama tried to convince the woman to wait, the report said, but the table then broke into a song that referenced Manning, the cost of the fundraiser, and Florida Rev. Terry Jones, who recently burned a copy of the Koran and sparked an outcry in Afghanistan.

Each of us brought you $5,000. It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign. I paid my dues, where's our change, they sang.

The group passed around signs that read Free Bradley Manning

The pool reporter, Carol E. Lee of the Wall Street Journal, reported that Obama took the song in stride although she also noted that he looked “displeased,” as did House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was also present.

The woman was soon escorted from the ballroom by aides.

That was a nice song, Obama said. Now where was I?

Pentagon officials recently announced that Manning, who is charged with 34 counts, including aiding the enemy, would be transferred from the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., where he was kept in conditions akin to solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and heavily chained when he was moved, to a medium-security facility in Leavenworth, Kan., where he likely will enjoy more freedom in his daily activities.

Was I the only person that considered this a little odd? First of all, it has been reported that the attendees contributed $105,000 to enter the fundraiser in order to serenade the President as to his political deficiences, with $76,000 of it contributed by one of the primary ringleaders, Naomi Pitcairn. So they protested the President by contributing $105,000 to his reelection campaign. No doubt, you will be surprised to discover that Pitcairn is a supporter of the President, responding to a subsequent media inquiry by saying that he's the best shot we have. Pitcairn, a fourth generation heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass fortune, also contributed $28,000 to the Obama campaign in 2008. According to Jeff Patterson, project director of Courage to Resist, an activist group that took part in the protest, Pitcairn describes herself as a trust-fund brat/artist.

So, as usual in liberal circles, the protesters were having their cake and eating it, too. If criticized by their pro-Obama friends, they can say, hey, we contributed $105,000 to the President's reelection camapaign, how much have you given? If criticized by their more issue oriented associates, they can say, hey, what's the problem, we publicized the President's fidelity to corporate interests and his abuse of Bradley Manning, and it got reported by all the major newspapers and cable news channels. In other words, we have a classic instance of political protest drained of all transformative potential, protest intentionally designed to be innocuous and non-threatening by the people who paid for it and participated in it. It was, as senecal would say, another example of the reduction of human expression into spectacle, something to entertain viewers on CNN or Fox News while waiting for the Giants game to start on Comcast.

Beyond this, I know a lot of progressive to radical political organizations that could do quite a bit with $105,000, with more enduring results. For example, I host a public affairs program on a free form, non-commercial radio station, KDVS 90.3 FM, and $105,000 is about half of its yearly operating budget. Barbara Lubin of the Middle East Children's Alliance would be ecstatic to receive a contribution of this size for the benefit of the people of Palestine, as would any number of local grassroots labor, environment and anti-war organizations. But these substantive concerns aren't really the point. When Teddy Partridge reported the protest over at firedoglake, there were numerous comments by people who just loved the fact that the President was being discomforted. Sadly, for many who feel disempowered, this is all that remains, to revel in ongoing efforts to personally embarrass Obama. It symbolizes the passive aggressive relationship that some liberals have with him, they give him money, they defend him against criticisms from the left, but then take out their anger of his betrayals by confronting him during rare instances of personal contact. They want him to stay in the White House so that they can continue to vent their frustrations through him.

And, there is an elitist condescension embedded with this as well. The protesters sang, Each of us brought you $5,000. It takes a lot of Benjamins to run a campaign. I paid my dues, where's our change? Given Pitcairn's history of campaign contributions to Obama, it comes across rather arrogantly. It can be translated as, we gave you money and you didn't do what we said. The racial and class implications of such an attitude are troubling, to say the least. Of course, the song is satire, so perhaps, I shouldn't take it so seriously, except that the costs of the protest were primarily paid by someone who appears to believe that political change requires contributing substantial sums of money to Democratic presidential candidates. I can't help but recalling the old adage that people reveal the most about themselves through their humor. A protest that emphasized that the political system has been corrupted by money exposed something equally disturbing, that activism has been as well.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Liberals

It has been awhile since I have posted on the subject as to whether the US political system provides any meaningful opportunity for participation for the vast majority of the populace. I have periodically elaborated on this theme in posts entitled Vote or Die, an sarcastic reference to someone here who commented that the choice in the 2008 election was either death or voting for Obama. If you are interested in persuing my previous posts about it, you can find some of them here.

Last week, I encountered this Democracy Now! interview with Ari Berman about the selection of Jim Messina as Obama's 2012 campaign manager that prompted me to briefly revisit this topic:

AMY GOODMAN: New York Times saying the nation’s top Democratic contributors were given an ambitious set of marching orders on Thursday, yesterday, with a select group of 450 donors each asked to raise $350,000 before the end of the year. If all members meet their goal, the tally from this one group alone would be $157 million. A new goal will be set next year, expected to be much higher.

ARI BERMAN: Well, the Obama campaign wants to raise a billion dollars for this campaign. And in these events, you know, they’re not public. The names are not released. We don’t know who these donors are. We don’t know what promises are being made. Maybe they’re all just doing it out of the goodness of their own heart, but my feeling is, if you’ve got all these donors in a room, it would be a very different configuration of people than all the small donors who helped power the Obama campaign in 2008.

Leaving aside Berman's apologia for the 2008 campaign, which was as reliant upon the bundling of large corporate donations as any other previous campaign (he is, after all, affiliated with The Nation), his remarks raise a number of challenging questions. What is the point of participating in a political campaign as either a donor or a grassroots campaign volunteer, or, for that matter, even as just a voter on election day, if the campaign is centered around raising a billion dollars from wealthy, well connected donors? How could anyone delude themselves into believing that they could achieve any of their political goals through such an activity? It is about as plausible as a group of ancient Egyptian slaves believing that they have something to say about how the pyramids should be constructed. It is now evident that one of the great, enduring successes of the 2008 Obama campaign was the destruction of the campaign finance system, which provided the illusion of constraints upon the involvement of large capital interests.

But Berman also provides some insight into another related question as well. How was it that one of the most idealistic political campaigns in recent memory, evocative of JFK and RFK, subsequently degenerated into a presidency of expediency without any meaningful protest? Berman provides the answer:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And with these progressive groups, there was a weekly meeting, every Tuesday, Common Purpose. Could you talk about how Messina dealt with that group and what it is?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Because most people across the country don’t even—have never heard of it.

ARI BERMAN: Yeah. There was this group set up called the Common Purpose Project, which really was supposed to be the gathering where administration officials would brief progressive groups. Big progressive groups like MoveOn.org, labor unions, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Planned Parenthood, all the gamut of progressive groups in Washington, inside and outside of Washington, would be at these meetings. And there was supposed to be a back-and-forth.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And they’d meet every Tuesday?

ARI BERMAN: They’d meet every Tuesday evening at the Capitol Hilton in Washington. But what Messina did is he really tightly controlled the discussions, and it was very much a one-way mode of doing business, where he said, This is the strategy. Go support it. And what it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be a back-and-forth. And there was supposed to be outside mobilization by progressive groups on things like healthcare, on things like gay rights. That was the whole purpose of the Common Purpose Project.

But really what happened is Messina and the White House, Rahm and other people, demobilized these progressive groups, took them out of the equation on things like healthcare, didn’t want them talking about a public option, didn’t want them criticizing Max Baucus. And that had a very detrimental effect when the Tea Party exploded, and there was all this mobilization on the right and none on the progressive side.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he would threaten to not—to disinvite you if you didn’t go along with the program?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be at these meetings, you had to be in line, you had to be with the administration. If you weren’t, you would not be invited, or you’d be excommunicated. It was very much a take no prisoners style. Messina has a take no prisoners style; the problem is, the people he’s often taking prisoner are Democratic activists and grassroots organizers. And that’s why Obama supporters are worried about his role in 2012.

Of course, the problem is much greater, much more profound than whether Jim Messina serves as Obama's 2012 campaign manager, more profound, in fact, than whether Obama wins reelection. Without acknowledging it, Berman exposes an institutional breakdown in American progressive politics, one in which organizations that sought to facilitate a generational transformation of the country in a more humanitarian, egalitarian fashion, embraced a new mission, however reluctantly, to rationalize the militaristic, neoliberal policies of the Obama administration as consistent with their espoused ideals. Not surprisingly for someone associated with The Nation, which is, of course, the house organ for this bankrupt political perspective, he excuses them on the ground that it was Messina's fault. I mean, for chrissakes, he threatened to disinvite them! What else could they do except bow down before such a bully? Instead of holding these groups accountable for their craven abandonment of their supporters, he peddles the pathetic explanation that Messina and the White House, and Rahm demobilized them. If so, it was a demobilization that they were all too willing to accept. As for the rest of us, we are, as the old protest song says, on our own.

Labels: Activism, Democrats, Elections, Liberals, The Nation, Vote or Die

As explained here. Not surprisingly, one of my senators, Dianne Feinstein, is primarily concerned about budget cuts that would affect water deliveries to agribusiness.

Labels: Democrats, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution

As described in an enlightening article by Joel Olson:

Arizona's economy was founded on the Five C's: copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism). These C's were controlled by big mining and agricultural interests and real estate developers. Corruption was commonplace as they manipulated the political system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establishment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want. If the names Don Bowles, Evan Mecham, AZ scam, Fife Symington, or the Keating 5 (which included Senator John McCain) mean anything to you, then you know that corruption is as plentiful as the parking here. And I haven't even mentioned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio or State Senator Russell Pearce, the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum of racist nativism.

SB 1070 and Giffords's shooting, in other words, are but the latest of a storied history of corrupt cowboy capitalism.

Such tomfoolery is part of the class struggle in the Grand Canyon State. Three classes matter in Arizona: elites, the white middle class, and the working class. The elites come mainly from the agriculture/mining, tourism, and construction/real estate sectors (with an emerging tech sector). They are the masters of the corruption I described. But in a system of majority rule, elites need a junior partner to dominate. This is where the white middle class steps in.

The white middle class is the engine of suburban development here. The new housing developments, strip malls, and big box stores that pop up almost daily (until the recession, at least) are built for and fueled by this class. Many in this class run small businesses related to the main sectors of the economy, such as ranching, construction, landscaping, and pool maintenance. Many are retirees who used to manage businesses in other states. This small business atmosphere contributes to the libertarian, Barry Goldwater-style political culture of the state.

For years, this relationship has been mutually beneficial. While legal segregation never took deep root in this state (most of Arizona's explosive growth took place after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954), unofficial practices have kept many neighborhoods and schools comfortably white for decades, and the best jobs have been traditionally denied to Chicanos and Natives. (With a Black population of just three percent, the racially "out" groups in this state have historically been Chicanos, Mexicans, and indigenous peoples.) Politicians have successfully tied these practices to the laissez-faire economic policies of the elites, giving whites the sense that their success is due strictly to their own work ethic rather than being facilitated by white privilege. As a result, many white middle and working class Arizonans identify with the success—and conservative politics—of the elites.

This collusion has created an anything-goes capitalism mixed with a suburban consciousness. Call my state the Wild West or suburban hell—they're both accurate to a large degree.

But the partnership has been fraying in the last two decades. Pressures to diversify corporations, universities, and governments have led elites to support various multicultural initiatives, which middle class whites resent. (Arizona voters in November voted to outlaw affirmative action by a wide margin.) The state's Latino population has outpaced white growth, and the state is now nearly one-third Latino. Areas that were once comfortably white now have Spanish-language business signs. More and more schoolchildren have brown faces—even in the good schools.

Please consider reading the article in its entirety, as Nelson places the current struggles over the anti-immigration bill, SB 1070, the collective bargaining rights of labor unions, the dismantling of essential public services, and the Tucson killings within the context of the unraveling of the conservative coalition between white elites and their brethren on the lower rungs of the class ladder. He provides what is the best argument to date, one grounded in class analysis, and therefore, class resistance (as opposed to the liberal alternative of speech regulation and suppression), for connecting the political activities of Palin and the Tea Party to Loughner:

Of course Loughner is probably crazy, but his mental health—and even his ideology—are not the point. What matters is that the conflict over this frayed class alliance—and all the political vitriol it has generated by Tea Partiers and others—pointed his illness toward Gabrielle Giffords.

It bears repeating: the conflict over this frayed class alliance. Giffords was part of the elite that implemented the conservative social and economic policies described by Nelson, even if she was not in complete agreement with them. She therefore became a target for the resentment of someone like Loughner, who was all too willing to misogynistically select her as opposed to numerous other male alternatives. Nelson highlights the prospect that, in addition to Tea Party and Minutemen threats and violence directed towards people of color, we may now be entering a period of fratricidal conflict among whites, one in which the combatants are identifiable by their class status. No one has been so provocative in this regard as Sarah Palin, and it may partially explain why so many elite conservatives, like Charles Krauthammer, for example, were alarmed by her selection as John McCain's vice presidential candidate in 2008. A sociological project that focused upon quantifying the subjects of her hostility in her public statements might generate some interesting results in this regard.

Nelson also implicitly repudiates the liberal strategy of treating the Tucson killings as merely the consequence of toxic political speech. In the remainder of his article, he identifies the interrelated struggles associated with workers' rights and immigrants' rights as the best hope for overcoming cowboy capitalism in Arizona, and the violence and repression associated with it. Both constitute political movements in which the Democrats, and many liberals, are noticeably absent. While protesting people like Palin, Limbaugh, Beck and others for what they say may feel good in the short term, it is insufficient, by itself, to generate the momentum necessary to escape the escalating violence related to the sub-proletarianization of America.

Labels: Arizona, Democrats, Racism, Sarah Palin, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Tucson Tragedy

As does Bill Fletcher (please see the comments to the excellent post by Louis Proyect linked in the title of this one). I'd pretty much given up on Hayden awhile ago, but it is disappointing to discover that Fletcher has likewise decided that it is more important to defend Obama than hold him accountable for his serious failings. But, then, when you chain yourself to the electoral process as the be all and end all of political activity, there's not much else you can do, previous advocacy for a radicalized labor movement notwithstanding. Of course, by condemning a letter issued by protestobama.org, a letter urging the progressives who publicly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign to protest his betrayal, Hayden and Fletcher have revealed that their insistence that it was necessary to get Obama elected so that he could be presssured to enact more liberal policies was nonsense from the inception. But, as you might have guessed, Fletcher has already provided us with an explanation: we just didn't work hard enough to make that happen.

Labels: Activism, Barack Obama, Democrats, Liberals, Unions

Please help me with this question: why is it that liberals of the Daily Kos kind are now suddenly outraged, after having acquiesced to previous embraces of neoliberal policy by this President? Is it sincere, or merely an act of political self-preservation, a calculated decision to enter the fight after it has already been decided? With that said, my few remaining contacts in the Davis (California) liberal scene tell me that there has been a freak out by some heretofore Obama apologists. As usual, many days late and many dollars short.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

The domestic blueprint for the next two years of the Obama presidency:

A draft proposal released Wednesday by the chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan commission on reducing the federal debt calls for deep cuts in domestic and military spending starting in 2012, and an overhaul of the tax code to raise revenue. Those changes and others would erase nearly $4 trillion from projected deficits through 2020, the proposal says.

The plan would reduce projected Social Security benefits to most retirees in later decades — low-income people would get higher benefits — and slowly raise the retirement age for full benefits to 69 from 67, with a hardship exemption for people who physically cannot work past 62. And it would subject higher levels of income to payroll taxes, to ensure Social Security’s solvency for the next 75 years.

The plan would reduce Social Security benefits to most future retirees — low-income people would get a higher benefit — and it would subject higher levels of income to payroll taxes to ensure Social Security’s solvency for at least the next 75 years.

But the plan would not count any savings from Social Security toward meeting the overall deficit-reduction goal set by Mr. Obama, reflecting the chairmen’s sensitivity to liberal critics who have complained that Social Security should be fixed only for its own sake, not to balance the nation’s books.

The federal tax on gasoline, now 14.8 cents a gallon, would more than double between 2013 and 2015, so that revenue from the tax and similar user fees could cover all transportation and highway spending programs, and the funds set up for that purpose would no longer require money from the general treasury.

This is a document released by the co-chairs of the Deficit Reduction Commission, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, so it does not necessarily reflect the final report that will be released in less than a month. But it does reveal the broad contours of the discussion that will take place between the President and the new Congress that will arrive in January. It is, of course, possible that the commission will come together around a compromise version of these proposals, and submit them to the lame duck Congress for more rapid action, such as, for example, the specific recommendations related to Social Security and Medicare (addressed elsewhere towards the end of this article by David Dayen), but this now looks unlikely.

Lost in the emphasis upon Social Security and Medicare is the overall supply side orientation of the proposed policies: reductions in the top rates of taxation, reductions in government expenditures and employment, enforced through spending caps, with 75% of the proposed deficit reduction accomplished through spending cuts and only 25% attained through tax increases, with many of those regressively imposed through a fee for service, cost sharing approach, as outlined by Dayen. One needn't rely upon Marxist economists to discover that the implementation of these measures is likely to increase the deficit instead of reducing it, disciples of Keynesians like Paul Samuelson will do. Reductions in expenditures by both the government and middle and lower middle income consumers will transform the deficit into a moving target than can never be reached, with each reallocation of revenue from them to supply side investors accelerating the growth of the deficit beyond the savings attained by cuts in expenditures.

But this is probably the intention. For circumstantial proof of this proposition, we need only wait to see if the Bush tax cuts are extended for everyone, including the exhorbitantly costly ones provided to the top 2% of the population, the ones that everyone acknowledges will significantly increase the deficit. If they are, we can conclusively say what we have always suspected, that concern about the deficit is a public relations effort on behalf of elites to further concentrate wealth and power within themselves. Apparently, they are confident that they can manipulate the social unrest that is likely to result from the economic stagnation that will ensue if these proposals are adopted in any meaningful respect.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

UPDATE 2: Patrick Martin of the World Socialist News Website nails it:

Establishment liberalism is concerned about lifestyle issues and identity politics, but is utterly distant from the needs of the working people who are the vast majority of the population. It has moved so far to the right that the economic program of Obama and that of the incoming House Speaker John Boehner and the Republicans differs only on minor details.

Coming out of the election, Obama will renew the drive towards bipartisanship with which he began his administration, going out of his way from the moment of his election to rehabilitate a completely discredited Republican Party. All the compromises that he proposes will amount to acceptance of Republican demands for deeper reductions in social spending as well as further tax cuts and other concessions to corporate interests.

UPDATE 1: Embedded within a provocative, informed analysis of the midterm election results by lenin:

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued, in Why Americans Still Don't Vote, that the exclusion of the working class from elections is actively desired by politicians. They suggest that if politicians were interested in crafting a policy mix that would appeal to the poor, the poor would respond, and they would be able to command electoral majorities. Pippa Norris of Harvard University concurs: the evidence suggests that turnout among the working class will increase at elections if there are left and trade union based parties that are capable of mobilising them. But it is again worth stressing that the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system is not wholly voluntary. Thomas E Patterson, in The Vanishing Voter (2009), points out that the electoral system in the US has had a long tradition of seeking to exclude the uneducated and the poor, and Patterson argues that voter registration rules still work to limit the size and composition of the electorate. He notes that the US has a disproportionately high number of non-citizens among its total population (7%), and ineligible adults (10%). Thus, 17% of the total adult population at any given time is legally excluded from voting. The exclusion of so many voters is the result of deliberate projects: in one case to manage labour migration flows to benefit capital (non-citizens cause less trouble than those permitted to naturalise); and in the other case to construct a carceral state that imprisoned more poor and black Americans than ever before. On any given day, 1 in every 32 American adults is directly in the control of the criminal justice system, either through jail, parole, probation or community supervision. This only hints at the wider effects that this behemoth has on American society, but suffice to say that it deprives millions of the right to vote where it would easily make a significant difference to the outcome.

In 2008, liberals and progressives apparently believed that Obama was a Moses or Spartacus that would empower these people within the existing political system. There was never any factual justification for it.

INITIAL POST: Political parties have been obsolete for quite some time, at least to the extent that they actually represent coherent ideological alternatives, and serve as the administrative mechanism for holding elected officials accountable to the people who vote for them. If you turn on the television, you will hear that the Republican Party will seize power in the House of Representatives and sharply narrow the Democratic majority in the Senate. It is, according the commentators, a huge defeat for the Democrats and the President. But they are wrong, because the political parties are merely fig leafs that conceal the actual operation of power within the US political system.

In fact, the President has achieved a result that he and his advisors have wanted for quite some time, the destruction of any remaining vestiges of progressive influence in Washington. One of the worst kept secrets of the campaign has been his deliberate effort to alienate core Democratic constituencies by refusing to move on initiatives important to them, such as the DREAM Act for Latinos and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell for gays and lesbians, and maligning progressive critics, so as to depress turnout and engineer a Democratic debacle. During the first two years of his term, he struggled with the public difficulties of disciplining balky liberals and concealing his true intentions. For example, it took over a year to get a health care reform measure passed on terms dictated by health insurance companies, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies, and, it took extreme measures to do so that generated no end of embarassment, such as strongarming any Democratic Senator who was considering requesting a vote for an amendment in favor of the public option. Meanwhile, he found himself subject to perpetual sniping from those in the Congress who objected to his implementation of economic policies that favored financial institutions at the expense of a more robust recovery.

The President has never been particularly interested in the hardships of those forlornly looking for jobs that don't exist while trying to avoid foreclosure and put off bill collectors. Instead, he has been envious of the bonuses that corporate executives, like the chief executive officers of J. P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Jaime Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, received:

I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.

Of course, one can attribute the success of people like Dimon and Blankfein to many things, political influence, direct and indirect subsidies through the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the tax code, even international trade agreements and the coercion of the US military, but the illusory free market is not one of them.

The President has implemented corporate friendly policies for the benefit of capital across the board, with his top priority, health care reform, transformed from a progressive priority of social support into one requiring the middle and lower middle class to purchase policies from providers without any meaningful cost containment, a massive transfer of income from workers to investors and corporate executives. Commitments made to environmentalists and labor unions were conveniently forgotten at the behest of advisors solicitous of needs of corporate donors and potential future employers. He aligned himself unequivocally with the military-industrial complex before taking office when he retained Robert Gates as Defense Secretary.

In effect, the President positioned himself and his presidency squarely within a bipartisan group of legislators, lobbyists, academics, financial institutions and corporate enterprises that dictate policy in the US. One can perceive their influence most clearly in the US Senate, where figures like Joseph Lieberman, Max Baucus, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid, among others, serve as gatekeepers, allowing House members to release populist pressures by passing measures more in tune with the public mood while relying upon the cloture rule to either kill them or eviscerate them before passage. In the rarified world where important political decisions are actually made, one's party affiliation has, at best, marginal significance. The elitism of the founding fathers, as expressed in their antipathy towards political parties as disruptive factions, has prevailed in an unanticipated way.

With the progressive peril, as puny as it was, exterminated, the path is now clear to remove the legislative barriers that were manipulated to prevent progressive measures from reaching the President's desk, despite substantial Democratic majorities in both houses. Influential senators have already been reaching across the aisle before election day to negotiate possible deals that would push federal fiscal and tax policy further to the right, although one of the participants, Russ Feingold, was not reelected:

Politicians from both parties are debating ideas on taxes and spending that move the discussion to the right, putting pressure on the White House and top Democrats to work with a newly empowered Republican Party after Tuesday's election.

Politicians from both parties are debating ideas on taxes and spending that move the discussion to the right, with the GOP expected to gain power following Tuesday's election.

Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, a liberal Democrat who is trailing in his reelection bid, is working with Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), a tea-party hero, on new legislation to trim billions in federal subsidies and other spending programs, Mr. Coburn said in an interview.

Two other Democratic Senate candidates, Chris Coons of Delaware and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, are bucking the Obama administration's bid to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire, as momentum builds for a broader extension of the cuts. Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky) have suggested they see room for negotiations on taxes and trade.

Most ominously, the President has finally come around to reforming the filibuster with the emergence of Republican and moderate Democrat control of the Congress. First up, cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, as recommended by the Deficit Reduction Commission, in the lame duck session as the first, admittedly huge step, that prefigures a broader agenda to be pursued in the next Congress.

As explained by the President's chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina:

Rouse and Messina see areas for possible bipartisan agreement, like reauthorizing the nation’s education laws to include reform measures favored by centrists and conservatives, passing long-pending trade pacts and possibly even producing scaled-back energy legislation. You’ll hear more about exports and less about public spending, a senior White House official said. You’ll hear more about initiative and private sector and less about the Department of Energy. You’ll hear more about government as a financier and less about government as a hirer.

The President now resides in what he and his advisors consider to be the best of all possible worlds, one in which he can more fully carry out what I have described as the Second Reagan Revolution, while simultaneously seeking to win a second term by contrasting himself with the extremists to his right that facilitate his program. But they may discover that they have been too clever by half.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

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According to a study by the Foundation for Child Development, 2010 will see the highest rate of children living in poverty in two decades. Study results reported in USA Today (June 7, 2010) showed staggering increases since the start of the recession: One in five children live in poverty, approximately 18% of families are unsure where they will obtain food and an estimated 500,000 children are homeless. As always, poverty and health problems go hand in hand. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics states, Family poverty increases many risks for children, including low birth weight, premature delivery, learning problems, asthma and other health problems.

(snip)

The government reported this week that the real wage and salary income of finance industry employees based in Manhattan rose nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. That surge helped make Manhattan the fastest-growing county in the United States in terms of terms of year-over-year gains in income.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Democrats, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

An on the scene report about the One Nation rally yesterday from Louis Proyect:

To start with, I have to confess that I didn’t attend the entire rally. At around 2:30 I decided that I had heard enough blather for one day and took off. As might have been expected, the speakers were handpicked in order to satisfy the main organizer’s One Nation theme, which has largely left them helpless before the unrelenting bared fangs approach of the Republican Party.

Yes, yes, yes, believe it or not, American unions and civil rights organizations spent substantial resources upon a rally for jobs, justice and education for all that did not place responsibility upon the Obama admininstration and the Democratic Congress for the failure to take meaningful action in these areas. In effect, the event was a form of political science fiction that served the purpose of diverting public attention from the failure of the Democratic Party to assist anyone other than capital interests by scapegoating the Republicans. It was one of the most cynical, most dishonest political events in recent memory.

On Democracy Now! this morning, Amy Goodman aired three of the speeches at the event for her audience, speeches by Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, Colin Whited, a student at Gallaudet Universty and Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO. They were worse than worthless, they were deliberate obfuscations of why so many are demoralized in a social system that treats them as disposable. To encourage people to put their time and energy into participating in an event like this is contemptible, and can only result in further alienating them from activism and the political process.

In January 2009, Barack Obama took office with the largest Democratic majorities in the Congress since LBJ. The Democratic Party had the opportunity, through elimination of the filibuster and use of the reconciliation process, to implement the most progressive agenda since the Great Society. Instead, it relied upon Republicans, moderate Democrats and their covert allies, the Tea Party movement, to implement corporate friendly policies reminiscent of Reagan, with plans already in place to cut Social Security and Medicare after the election. Meanwhile, Obama has intensified the war in Afghanistan and expanded the conflict into Pakistan. Outside the rally, the reality based community is well aware, which may partially explain why attendance was spotty.

Labels: American Empire, Barack Obama, Democrats, Liberals, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

How many times does this have to happen before people figure it out?

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Joseph Lieberman, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America