A concert in New York of the music of Lamonte Young or Milton Babbitt will almost certainly seem, and almost certainly is, marginal by any reasonable definition of the term.  But invariably, scattered around the world there are a few pockets of admirers who will amplify the event into something which is, at least in their minds, of great importance.  The same goes for #occupywallstreet.  Numerous “tweets”, blog postings, comments to blogs, reports of solidarity marches, busses arriving from Madison, St. Louis, etc. gave the impression that this event had the potential to attract large, or at least respectable, numbers.

The fact is that it did not.  The original group, and I made several efforts to check this, was almost certainly less than 1000, which is to say that it filled about a half the length of a New York  city block. Those who were at the February 15, 2003 demonstration will remember that the throng extended the entire length of 5th Avenue from 42 St. to 96th, across to and back down again on Second across to the United Nations and then back up again to 96th.  That makes for something like 120 blocks or more crammed full with people, a crowd estimated at a million. This was almost certainly a factor of 500 smaller, an indication of where this movement needs to go to get the attention of Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and the other felons who are now our de facto rulers. More on that later.

When I describe the march as marginal, those familiar with protests of this general sort will know what I mean. Doug Henwood’s report  of his visit to Zuccatti Park (a.k.a. Liberty Plaza) nicely captured a static version of the basic outlines of the scene pretty well: a throng of college or post college radicals, whatever that means these days (not much, in my experience), with a few moth eaten contingents from the various Marxist sects still carrying the flag based on some more or less idiosyncratic passage in the Grundrisse, a few obvious psychotics best avoided, a few artsy lower east side types, though by now surely displaced to the outer boroughs. Of course, there were lots more: a few vaguely neurotic looking, aging academics like myself, a disarmingly pretty Asian girl with purple hair and her boyfriend, a few hip-hop enthuiasts, likely attracted by rapper Lupe Fiasco who had endorsed the march.  In any case, this is what we had to work with.  And as Donald Rumsfeld famously remarked, you protest with the marchers you have, not those you wish you had.  And so I joined in somewhat skeptically though I was to become less so for several reasons which I’ll describe in the following, along with some interspersed commentary and reflections.

First, as the march got close to its ultimate destination of Union Square, it seemed to pick up steam, its numbers increasing, the chants, while still mostly pedestrian, becoming more coherent and less obvious recyclings of decades old slogans which have become by now almost irrelevant.  Most significantly, as the march progressed it would be infused with a lot more passion and legitimate anger.

On this latter point, it needs to be observed that a double digit unemployment rate means that being a college student or a recent grad is likely to be suffused with something in between misery, dread and stark terror of the future which likely awaits. And while this has become increasingly apparent to me among the students I teach, it was still more visible in the faces of more than a few of the protestors.

This is not just the long term future of carbon induced planetary apocalypse which they will live to see, and which I, thankfully, will not.  It is the immediate and midterm future of un- or at best underemployment at wages and working conditions reflecting the tight, employer-centric labor market. That means eking out an living through dead end internships.  Temporary office work will become the norm for all but a few of the chosen (read Ivy League) grads in the appropriate majors having the right connections. And while for a long time the Nietzschean devil-take-the-hindmost ethos of college students was unforgiving, viewing those unable to compete in the new economy as having only themselves to blame, it is now becoming apparent that the game is being played with a stacked deck.

And so for the first time in a long time those in their teens and twenties have an immediate personal stake in that which they are protesting, and while the still dreadful legacy of sociology departments, “non hierarchical” discourse, diversity training and “anti-racism” remains evident in the rhetoric, slowly the smothering layer of academic abstraction and language games seems to be lifting from protest culture and what is revealed is a deep, festering and altogether righteous anger — what the Arabic speakers refer to by the word “hamas.”

Secondly, it became increasingly clear that more than a few of the participants were willing to push the envelope of the protest in the direction of outright confrontation, and, more importantly, this seemed both justifiable and appropriate under the circumstances. I use these words advisedly, doing so based on the recognition that demonstrations have become choreographed rituals which have long since lost the capacity to demonstrate anything meaningful.  And when I say choreographed it needs to be understood that those doing the choreographing are the police, under orders from higher ups who are well schooled in crowd management techniques designed to marginalize and blunt the effectiveness of protest.

Under the Giuliani and Bloomberg regimes the cold precision of the choreography imposed by the NYPD on protests rivals that of the Ballet Russe under Balanchine: since the February 15th, 2003 and Republican National Convention protest, the authorities have made use of a highly effective combination of carrots and sticks. Quiet and non-violent — by which is meant non-disruptive protests under the terms set by the authorities are tolerated. However, those stepping out of line, those who insist that protests do what they are supposed to do; i.e., disrupt business as usual and impose a cost on those primarily benefiting from its operation, are dealt with considerable harshness.

The response of demonstrators over the past few years has been to capitulate to these imposed conditions and thereby, often under the rubric of “non-violence”, allow protests to become empty rituals.   What is necessary now is that demonstrations reclaim their roots as a demonstrations of power, specifically, their ability to disrupt.  And while the disruptions effected today, in the larger scheme of things were quite minimal, what a critical mass of the participants seem to implicitly understand is that disruption — the ability to inflict real costs on entrenched capital through unpredictable and spontaneous (i.e., unchoreographed) direct action is a necessary condition for our success.  If these protests succeed in growing with this assumption at their core, they have real potential to become truly meaningful.  It remains to be seen whether they will do so.

A couple of examples will give some idea of the potential I’m referring to, one of these extraordinary: after the march reached its eventual destination at Union Square Park, most seemed to expect that we would return more or less the way we came back to Zuccotti Park.  While we were there, it became clear that the police had received orders to disperse the group.  Their initial attempt to do so was when we were still in the park, and was effected by vinyl mesh barriers which prevented the crowd from returning south back to its original destination in Wall Street. To do this required erecting these barriers at edge of the group, turning back those who had just started on their way south.

Among these was a man maybe slightly younger than myself, though not much, who simply demanded to go where he to wanted to, and he would be damned if he would let the cops get in his way. And so he stepped in front of the cops who were trying to hem us in, inviting a violent confrontation and likely arrest. But that’s not extraordinary, as this was to be duplicated with greater or lesser degrees of violence at least forty times over the next hour.  What was extraordinary was how the man impeded the cop: he did so by pushing a stroller which enclosed the man’s three or four year old child in the cops way. The cop pushed the stroller aside and attacked the man with real viciousness, in full view of the child.  I didn’t see what would later materialize — how or whether the man would be arrested.  I did, however, see another small child in the park who was a spectator to the event breaking down in tears, as his father, a dreadlocked man tried to console him.

As a parent of a small child who I was considering bringing along to this, but thankfully did not, I wasn’t sure how to respond to what seemed to be an act of almost insane recklessness.  Initially, I was was appalled, but in retrospect, in revisiting the mental image, I couldn’t help but be moved by the commitment and courage displayed, and by the recognition that finally the stakes of our confrontation are becoming clear. As Marx famously observed “(we) are now compelled to face with sober senses, (our) real conditions of life, and (our) relations with (our) kind.” While few of us will find ourselves capable of this man’s courage, this is the kind of reaction which will be required of us when we face up to the realities we are encountering with sober senses.

A description of the remainder of the march requires the trite but, in this context, altogether accurate phrase, “violently dispersed by the police”, though this is, of course, usually applied to various third world dictatorships. One block south the police began to erect a second set of barriers with the purpose of dividing the march into smaller groups, separated by a block or so, arresting those who refused to get out of the street, and who resisted.

The arrests were undertaken with considerable brutality which I was a direct witness to, and almost a victim of.  The worst which happened to me was to have received the full brunt of a body which had been slammed with remarkable force by a particularly violent and thuggish cop.  Another encounter which I witnessed was worse and somewhat disturbing.  A protester who had, I would imagine, prevented the erection of the crowd control barrier, was tackled and set upon by at least seven or eight cops administering a series of blows to all parts of the man’s head and abdomen.  I had never seen a display of violence of such intensity and it was quite unnerving. The fact that the target of this display of brutality was black will probably not come as a surprise.

These are some of the events which seem worth reporting here.  There were others which a more journalistically inclined (and trained) observer would no doubt relate.   Rather than itemizing these I’ll close by mentioning a third reason for why I am somewhat optimistic.  This is personal and even a bit sentimental so those who don’t know me might do well to skip the remainder of this paragraph.

At the intersection of West 4th my friend Judd Greenstein who I had called earlier darted in the the crowd next to me. Judd, in addition to being probably the most gifted, passionate and communicative of the younger composers I know, is also one of the finest people –in the most simple and meaningful sense of the term.  Pretty much unique in my circle of acquaintances, he is a reliable presence at these sorts of protests, having met up with me a year ago or so at a Wall Street protest following the bank bail outs.  More significantly for me, this seemingly random encounter brought back for me one of my most treasured memories.  At the Iraq war protest in February 2003, I was within a sea of bodies walking southward on the corner of 79th and Amsterdam, when I spotted within the crowd heading west my father Morris, who was then eighty, and my mother Rosamond who was now walking slowly having begun to be affected by the Parkinson’s disease which would take her life this year.  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

While they are not political activists (certainly less so than my father’s long time friend and colleague Chomsky) their investment in politics is real, though almost exclusively moral-dictated by a simple code which required them to actively protest when their government is enacting atrocities in their name, as it did in Vietnam during my childhood, and as it was about to do in Iraq.  Protest is what every decent person did back then — it was not limited to an activist clique.  There were lots like my parents back then.

Judd attended this demonstration for exactly the same reasons which my parents did nearly half a century ago, and which were defining events of my childhood.  Protest is what decent people do when they are confronted with evil.  Having both witnessed the thuggish crackdown south of Union Square, I was grateful to be able to take stock of the situation with him. His presence today was for me a validation of the possibility that there may be some ultimate hope to be squeezed out of what now appears to be a fairly desperate trajectory into something approximating a police state — at least for those who do what is necessary to make protest meaningful.

Finally, a post-script: I’m writing this as the police prepare for what may be a final — and likely, if today’s events were any guide — intensely brutal assault on the encampment in Zuccati Park.  As I have been posting on Facebook, this appears to me to be a Martin Niemoller moment for us, one where they are coming for a marginal clique, one which is the butt of jokes (including my own above) and regarded as absurd and insignificant by all but a few.

Today’s NYT’s coverage of the protestors, predictably contemptuous and dismissive, sets the stage perfectly for this crackdown and provides grounds for all the right thinking people who are the Times’ primary demographic to avert their eyes.  The few decent people who find out about this may get on the subway and head to Wall Street to bear witness, and maybe even act.  But I can’t say I’m in the least optimistic that anything like this is in the cards, certainly nothing approximating the display of force which we must martial to make a difference.  All this is only further confirmation of Niemoller’s dictum: when they come for us there may very well be very few left to speak up.

I should mention here that the open letter was only the latest in a series of numerous letters to the editor, blog comments, and long and short articles submitted for publication in internet and print outlets going back three years or more, all of which attempt to raise awareness about the essentially reactionary nature of the Democratic Party generally and the Obama campaign and presidency specifically.

In the course of these efforts, certain websites moved to eliminate my participation either as a front page poster or in their comment sections where I had previously been a frequent contributor.

Before I describe some of these instances I will make two introductory qualifications.  First, I am by no means the only one who has been subjected to similar treatment, and I hope this piece will encourage others to document their experiences; our coming forward could, I believe, address some of the underlying causes of what is now a rather dysfunctional climate for discourse on the left.  Second, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there is a need for editorial gatekeeping.  Indeed, I have argued that there should be more, not less, than there is.  Rather, the following should be seen as an argument for this gatekeeping function to be exercised responsibly to promote, rather than undermine, the left’s agenda.

With those qualifications out of the way, here is the thumbnail history.

As of this writing, I have been banned from the comment sections of two websites, OpenLeft.org and Commondreams.org.  In the first of these cases,  there was at least a superficial justification for their having done so.  In a posting I made a description (of Open Left founder and Obama’s transition team member Mike Lux) which could be characterized as ad hominem — understood to be a “capital” offense on blogs.

In retrospect the posting in question seems more likely to have served an excuse for management’s enacting a broader agenda which was to rid their site of a group of skeptics of the Democratic Party centric organizing model taken as a given by management. The trajectory of Open Left manager, Chris Bowers, to Daily Kos where purges of so-called “Naderites” are routine would seem to lend credence to this explanation, though I should say that, in fairness, I could possibly have escaped banning by couching my objections more diplomatically, and probably should have done so in any case.

My other banning was from commondreams, both from the comment section and, it would seem now likely, also from their front page which had run some of my articles in the past. While the cause was unstated, as is typical of the internet at its most Kafkaesque, it seems that it was provoked by my attempting to use the site for lining up signatories for the open letter.  Both I (and, I suspect, they) knew that commondreams was a natural place to do so.  This was because the comment section routinely demonstrates that the readership, as opposed to the management,  is sympathetic with the basic goal of the open letter — to protest left establishment apologetics for the Obama administration and the imposed silence about it on outlets like Commondreams.

All this came to a head in the following postings which appeared on the site in reaction to one of my comments mentioning www.protestobama.org. I’m copying one thread in its entirety as it provides an indication of the kind of virtual paranoia the imposition of arbitrary censorship results in.

Aquifer December 20th, 2010 11:44 am.

GW, have you noticed how my response to your comment and your response to it, in which i commented on the removal of another poster’s, John Halle’s, response, have been removed. Since then, John Halle’s original comment, the first posted on this thread, and my responses to him, including one pointing out how his response had been removed, have, in turn, also been removed. When i tried to respond again to your response, I got a message “you are responding to a comment which doesn’t exist.

i guess my days on CD are numbered – that’s OK, cause this whole area of censorship is really getting to me …..

RV December 20th, 2010 11:46 am

You and I may disagree on some things, but you are absolutely correct about that!

Aquifer December 20th, 2010 11:59 am<

So, RV, I am correct about my days being numbered, or about censorship, or both?

In any case, here’s a simple suggestion for the first step in solidarity – how about all of us here protesting the censorship of posters? Good grief, if we can’t do that, what’s the point of even posting? i stand in support of “teddy” who was banned, for god knows what, and in protest of all these posts that have been removed for CONTENT reasons only – no cuss words, no insults, just pointing out either censorship, or, in the case of john Halle, a “protestobama” petition, apparently …..

One wonders how many other posts have been removed for similar reasons, either our “fellows” here don’t know or don’t care. I think this needs to be a theme mentioned and pursued on every thread here ……

L:et’s (sic) see how long this comment lasts …..

The answer to “Aquifer’s” question was quickly provided.  Commondreams’ reaction to the above (and similar reader uprisings which have periodically taken place) was to disappear these and other postings and ban those participating in the discussion, myself included.  The postings can no longer be found on the site and were copied by me in anticipation that the commondreams staff would do exactly as they did.

****

Counterpoised to these brute force tactics, a more traditional and effective means of information management is to prevent positions judged unacceptable from finding their way into print in the first place.  In its internet variant, this takes the form of editorial decisions with respect to the content of front page postings at the major left websites.  Central among these was the topic of the open letter; namely, the maintenance of “critical support” with respect to the Obama campaign and subsequent administration.  Those who viewed the Obama phenomenon with grave suspicion both for its stated  policies and for its likely effect in undermining opposition movements, almost never found their positions represented on the front pages of any but the most marginal internet outlets, and, for that matter, in left print publications.

It is true that the far left spectrum of the internet represented by Counterpunch allowed challenges to this conventional wisdom.   But even here, leftists such as Norman Solomon, David Michael Green and others could be found making the case for “critical support” and in some cases expressing unbridled enthusiasm at the prospect of the nation’s first African American president.  In the months after the election, as predictions of even Obama’s most unenthusiastic supporters collided with the hard right reality of the Obama administration, pieces stating the obvious fact of the matter — that virtually the entirety of the mainstream left and much of the so called “radical left” — got it wrong remained hard to place.   Again, speaking from my own experience, what I regard as one of my better pieces “Who Got it Right” was consigned to the far fringes of the web, having been rejected for publication from the all of the major left sites I sent it to.

It is obvious that no single rejection by itself, or, for that matter, a boxful of them, constitutes censorship.  As stated earlier, articles can, and should, be rejected based the quality of the expression, factual accuracy, logical consistency and relevance among other factors. Proving censorship requires demonstrating that a piece meeting normal standards for publication was rejected purely on the grounds of its content having been considered as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, which meant in this specific case challenging what had become a widespread left conventional wisdom with respect to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign.

Circulating the open letter was a useful exercise in that it demonstrated conclusively through some of the responses it received that the leading left wing sites engaged in censorship in the service of this agenda.  That there is a paper trail attesting to this was due to a unique circumstance.   Had the letter been merely an over the transom submission by a relative unknown such as myself it would have been summarily rejected without any acknowledgment of its existence.  As it was, however, the letter was signed by a rather large cross section of leading left intellectuals and activists forcing some of those sites which ignored it to to reveal their grounds for doing so.  Or, insofar as they lacked such grounds, they were required to invent them.

The latter was the case for Znet which found its proprietor Michael Albert accusing the authors of “deliberately misleading” himself and other potential signatories, “fooling” them into believing that those receiving the letter (and criticized by it) were, in fact, endorsing it.  Albert would evidently use this canard as a justification for removing the open letter from the site after having ran it on the site for a less than a day, replacing it with a rebuttal by Bill Fletcher which was front paged for a full three days.  The original piece was subsequently purged from the Znet website — a google search bringing up a link to a blank document.

While Counterpunch ran the open letter, that it did so grudgingly was revealed in a note rejecting a follow up piece from editor Alexander Cockburn who described the “bleats out to progressive leaders” as “uninteresting.”

The good news is that it may be well on the way to becoming legendary, joining iconic Vietnam and Civil rights era Washington protests in our collective memories.  If so, this will be at least in part due to a remarkable and deeply moving video documenting the event for posterity.

Framed by a searingly prophetic oration of Chris Hedges, alongside a Lincolneque cameo by Daniel Ellsberg, a procession of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans function as a kind of Greek chorus, bearing witness to the human wreckage of war, which they both inflicted and suffer from themselves, living breathing testimonies to Hedges “War is a Force which Gives us Meaning” and his subsequent, even more radical books.

But while recognizing that halcyon possibility we must also splash ourselves with some cold water. For in an important sense, the demonstration might as well not have happened in that very few, relatively speaking, have any inkling that any such thing — the largest demonstration of Veterans at the White House since Vietnam — even occurred.

The reason, as has been noted by Dave Lindorff among others, is by now predictable: it was barely mentioned within those channels through which most get their information, which is to say, through major media: network television, high profile dailies and internet news outlets.

The underlying explanation for this blackout should also be well known by now which is that the establishment media does not challenge but rather serves power.

We need to stop complaining and simply recognize corporate media complicity and censorship as the fact of life it is.  And given this fact, we need to redirect our attention to monitoring those media outlets and individuals who claim to offer alternative to the corporate mainstream and give voice to the left, such as it is.

And this means, specifically, that we need to ask certain questions about their relationship to this event.

Among these are why did left media outlets such as Common Dreams, Alternet, Counterpunch, Znet and others devote relatively little attention to the protest in the days leading up to it, even when it was already clear that it would be a major act of civil disobedience that needed, and deserved, to be reinforced by thousands of others?   As for well known left writers such as Thomas Frank, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Katrina van den Heuvel why did they fail to write pieces in support of it, or even mention it, within the high profile platforms they have access to, thus getting the word out to many thousands some of whom were sure to have participated?

We can only infer the answers to these questions.  But for at least two members of what might be called the “left establishment”  we now have some grounds for making inferences.  These are based on a recent initiative which attempted to move some of these figures from their prior positions of support, albeit highly critical support, of the administration into active opposition.  Thus, in his reaction to the initiative (which he characterized as “weirdness”)  Tom Hayden described the demonstration as “somewhat jusfified” while expressing doubts as to whether “it was a smart idea to begin with.”  In short, an event of relatively little consequence, though Hayden did mention that civil disobedience could be “healing” for those participating in it.

In his reaction, Bill Fletcher made no comment on the demonstration confining his remarks to the observation that he was a strong critic of the administration.

It should be noted in this connection that while failing to mention the December 16th event, even when specifically requested to do so, Fletcher has been actively involved in Washington demonstrations since the Obama administration took office, most notably the union-sponsored One Nation rally on October 5.

The differences between the two protests could not be more stark and are highly revealing.

First, one was a rally held at the Lincoln Memorial some distance from the White House while the other centered around civil disobedience at the White House fence.

Secondly, more significantly, the Veterans directly and passionately criticized the Obama administration and its policies.  In contrast, at the One Nation rally, according to Patrick Martin of the World Socialist website:

Nearly every speaker combined warnings of the consequences of a Republican victory in the November 2 election with appeals to those attending the rally to spend the next month in all-out campaigning for a Democratic Party victory. There was no examination of the actual policies of the Democrats, still less of the relatively insignificant differences between the two big business parties.

There was no criticism of the Obama administration by name, even by speakers who criticized some of the policies for which the Democratic president is responsible.

These two protests clearly display an unmistakable and unbridgeable difference in perspective-between support (including highly critical support), on the one side and active dissent and militant opposition on the other.

This distinction, which has immediate practical consequences for how, or whether, a protest movement will develop and flourish, admits of an explanation: in the opinion of many, much of the left leadership played a role in fomenting unrealistic expectations with respect to the Obama presidency.  Their investment in the Obama brand prevents them from endorsing and playing a role in organizing protests of sufficient vehemence and intensity as these would necessarily shine a light on their failure of judgment and lack of credibility.

Whatever the cause, the course of action is clear: the institutional left establishment must get off the fence and show which side they are on — critical support or active opposition.

If not, they will be, regrettably, but justly and inevitably swept aside by the currents of protest which must now come into being.

A more or less paradigmatic example of the former can be found in Mark Danner’s recent NY Times Op-Ed “To Heal Haiti, Look to History,” which was quickly picked up at commondreams.org, Democracy Now! and grit.tv among other sites.

That the piece would be promoted by web organs of the authentic — as opposed to liberal — left was at least superficially reasonable in that Danner’s (or for that matter anyone’s) minimally accurate thumbnail sketch of Haitian history could not fail to deliver a stridently anti-imperialist message. Haiti has functioned as “a state built for predation and plunder”, starting with the complete eradication of its Indigenous population, to its establishment as the most brutal of slave states, to its functioning in the 20th century as a paradigmatic kleptocracy presided over by a string of vicious dictators serving themselves and the interests of foreign capital.

Danner’s bill of particulars, many of these laid on our doorstep, is of course regrettable, disturbing, and even damning and as such provides an opportunity for the displays of teeth gnashing and garment rending which liberals can be relied on to engage in. This requires, however, that one condition is met: that these instances are all safely in the past.

Thus, what is predictably missing in Danner’s discussion is anything other than the vaguest allusion to the recent history of Haiti. And it is this history which is largely responsible for the almost inconceivable scale of the devastation caused by what would otherwise be a major, but by no means unprecedented disaster.

The relevant cause, as is described in the works of Robert Fatton, is demographic: for the past three decades the city of Port au Prince has grown from approximately 300,000 to over 2.5 million inhabitants. Lacking the infrastructure required to support this population and the financial wherewithal to develop it, most residents of the capital lived in slums lacking the most basic sanitation facilities, with only sporadic access to safe drinking water and frequently subjected to protracted encounters with what NGO’s somewhat euphemistically refer to as “food insecurity”. Moreover, it hardly needs to be mentioned, building codes were non existent.

It was eminently predictable from these initial conditions that a 7.0 Richter Scale seismic event would materialize as it did with countless thousands buried under rubble, those able to extract themselves doing so in a weakened condition sometimes literally dying of thirst or through opportunistic infections.

If we want to understand, as opposed to merely wring our hands, about this epic tragedy, we need to inquire into why these conditions existed. What accounted for the massive influx into Port au Prince from the rural agricultural areas? Danner indirectly alludes to the crucial in his proposal to “America (to) throw open its markets to Haitian agricultural produce and manufactured goods, broadening and making permanent the provisions of a promising trade bill negotiated in 2008.”

Danner has this exactly backward. As Fatton and others have noted, it is not the failure of the U.S. to open its markets, but rather the converse which is directly implicated in the catastrophe — which is to say two decades of extortionate neo-liberal trade pacts which required Haiti to open its markets to U.S. goods. Chief among these are heavily subsidized U.S. agricultural products, most notably rice. These were dumped on Haiti with similar results to that in much of the third world. Farmers unable to compete with cheap imports were driven off their land, selling out to multinational agribusiness and developers, initiating an exodus to the cities offering the prospect of employment in manufacturing sector albeit at near starvation wages.

This is now an old story applying to much of the third world and told in numerous places, most comprehensively in Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. So it is reasonable to ask why does Danner fail to mention it?

The answer is necessarily a matter of speculation though it is probably not too cynical to assume that Danner is well aware that his reputation as a “serious” thinker on these and related matters in establishment circles requires that these obvious truths be passed over unacknowledged.

A parade examples of a fall from grace occasioned by failing to respect the boundaries of acceptable discourse is provided by former Times Middle East bureau chief Hedges whose rigorous, informed and brilliant recent works, or “rants” — as they are described when insiders even bother to recognize them, are now relegated to wilds of the internet.

Danner’s perches at the Council on Foreign Relation, the Century Foundation and the Pacific Council for World Affairs and his access to mainstream “print” media (not to mention his substantial fees) will remain secure so long as he respects the limits which Hedges transgressed — as will his ultimate legacy as one more apologist for imperial plunder, albeit of the kinder and gentler neo-liberal variety.

If it is to be otherwise, he will need to join Hedges on “the dark side” as it were, by developing the capacity to name those individuals as well as the system (namely capitalism) which is responsible for the conditions which made widespread death and destruction, in Haiti and much of the rest of the third world, inevitable.

True to Bush administration form, the Paulson plan outrageously insists on a virtual blank check made out, essentially, to Paulson himself. The Congressional Democrats, also true to form, are timidly proposing sweetening the bitter pill by making some of the funds available to the millions currently losing their homes while at the same time placing limits on compensation packages available to CEOs who, if past performance is any guide, have no qualms about taking truckloads of government money and driving away to Aspen or Palm Springs.

What is missing from all of the discussion is any mention of how the plan will be payed for, as it is taken for granted that the average taxpayer is sure to be stuck with the ultimate cost of the $700 billion dollar price tag.

But we don’t need to pay. And in this case we should not. For very few Americans have benefited from the giant casino which Wall Street has become over the past generation.

Yes it has spun off enormous wealth but this has gone overwhelmingly to a small number at the top.

And it has been paved for by those at the bottom who have experienced now almost four decades of stagnant real wages, the evisceration of pension plans, degradation of public services and a constant threat of job loss due to corporate outsourcing.

All of these conditions are the result of policies that have been effectively lobbied for by Wall Street and, just as they have destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans, they have worked to produce a new class of what Franklin Roosevelt called economic royalists unprecedented in U.S. history.

It is time to make those who have danced their jigs on our backs pay the fiddler.

And that means that not one dime of the bailout should come from the 99.9% of Americans who are the victims of Wall Street. All of it should come from the enormous store of assets controlled by the upper 1%.

The way to do this is by instituting a Wealth Tax-a tax on accumulated assets above $10 million.

It will, of course, take an economist, or probably a team of economists, to calculate with precision the funds available, as most of these are in “intangible” form (investment vehicles such as bond, stock securities, etc). That said, it is obvious the total is by now almost unimaginably huge after a generation of disgracefully low marginal income tax rates, tax loopholes, high corporate profits and, most notably, stratospheric executive compensation.

Eight-figure salaries have been routine in investment banking firms for two decades with Henry Paulson himself having earned $35 million in 2005 on the road to socking away accumulated assets of more than $700 million (not including stock options). His Democratic Party counterpart and predecessor at Goldman Sachs, key Obama advisor Robert

Rubin, received similar compensation before moving to Citibank, where his wealth ballooned still further. Hedge fund operators, who have benefited from the absurd exemption on capital gains tax, have accumulated wealth beyond their dreams of avarice, one of them, John Paulson, of Paulson & Co. raking in a cool $3.7 billion for one years work.

These are just three of the inhabitants of what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank calls Richistan and are unusual only in that their names have appeared in the press. Most are anonymously sitting on huge piles of investment capital, dutifully passing on the totality of their fortunes to their offspring virtually untouched by inheritances taxes.

Simple arithmetic demonstrates that more than enough is available from these and other charter members of the plutocracy to fully finance the bailout, as well any additional items those with sufficiently resourceful minds would like to make part of the package.

Reasonable add-ons would include financing single payer health insurance, a renewable energy research and development, aid to states and localities suffering from withering infrastructure, particularly in depressed urban areas, publicly financed elections, etc.

Pushing for all of this, and more, should be the bottom line of progressives right now and we should be in the streets and in our representative offices demanding it.

Anything short of this is missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to return the country to fiscal and mental health after a three decades long episode of free market insanity.

When the comparisons between the two are taken further they begin to tilt in Maddow’s favor. Obama’s shabby and unprincipled embrace of post-partisanism whether in the form of the FISA compromise, siding with the most reactionary wing of the Supreme Court, his sabre rattling in the Middle East, has already begun to alienate more than a few of his erstwhile supporters. Maddow, in contrast, will have none of this: she recognizes thatgiving any quarter to the right inevitably confers fatal respectability on what Tom Frank calls the wrecking crew which has owned and operated the political system for the past generation.

Unlike Obama, Maddow is ready, willing and able to call a right wing turd a turd and she can be counted on to thoroughly masticate and dispatch into oblivion the Republican talking point du jour the talent for which she routinely displays on her radio show. Often this is done Jon Stewart style, with the aid of looped soundbites of a particularly absurd or vulgar ejaculation emanating from Larry Craig (“Let me be clear: I am not gay.”), John McCain (“Bomb, bomb, Iran”), Bush (“the math doesn’t work”) or Reagan (“government is the problem.”) All these serve as pinatas which Maddow hangs up and bashes with a gleeful and infectious enthusiasm which recalls, at least to those in my age group, the “revolution for the hell of it” attitude of new left icons like Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale.

It would be comforting to imagine that Maddow’s oratorical brilliance, infectious albeit somewhat manic enthusiasm combined with an impressive command of policy minutiae renders her problematic to the bosses considering her hiring at MSNBC in the same way as was the new left: compelling, cute, photogenic and, consequently, too salable acommodity to pass over while presenting a dangerous potential to use her media perch to inflict damage on the bottom line on MSNBC’s parent company GE and to some degreeon the ideological foundations of the corporate system. The excitement at the prospect ofMaddow on primetime is predicated on this conspiratorial assessment of Maddow as an MSM mole for our side. But of course, that only tells one side of the story. A hint to what is omitted is provided in a recent Nation magazine piece where Maddow is described as a “deft, bright careeris(t).” What this means is that Maddow has provided more that a few hints that she is well aware of the limits of the system in which she is operating and is careful not to transgress them even while throwing red meat to her leftist base.

Indeed, when one examines much of the actual substance of TRMS (as the Maddow show is known to insiders) Maddow’s new found status as a repository for left-wing hopes and right-wing fears seems a bit baffling. For stripping away Maddow’s well honed partisan attacks, the show’s essential format and function is little different from most other conventional gabfests featuring the passel of establishment think tank wonks and area studies “experts” hawking their latest “product” whether this is a book, a feature article in the dead tree media, or an on-line blog.

Furthermore, rather than critically examining the monolithic mainstream assumptionswhich most of Maddow’s guests are in the business of perpetuating, Maddow’s guests are treated with with astonishing deference: Ben Smith of Politico, an utterly conventional hack journalist, is “super smart”, Dahlia Lithwick, a purveyor of ur-centrist conventional wisdom is “a big pal of the Rachel Maddow show”, Ryan Lizza formerly of the New Republic and now at the New Yorker, is not asked about his disgraceful reporting on Bush’s WMD fantasies which helped to set the stage for the Iraq invasions, but of his “analysis” of this or that aspect of the Democratic horserace.

In Maddow’s defense, it should be noted that other frequent guests do appear who arefully capable of challenging the bland narrative of what Jim Hightower has called dead armadillo centrism. Among these are the Nation‘s John Nichols, the syndicated columnists David Sirota, Glenn Greenwald and Lew Dubose. But all too frequently underthe imposed framework of Maddow’s questions the fundamental differences between thegenuine left and the corporate centrists are blunted and papered over. Thus, a recentedition of TRMS found Nichols holding forth on the phalanx of VP prospects underconsideration by the Obama camp: the superficial viability of one in garnering “lunch box” voters, the geographical balance provided by another, the Irish Catholic roots of another, the “olive branch to the Clinton wing” of the party provided by another. The obvious, unacknowledged fact that all were to a greater or lesser degree supporters of the Iraq war, corporate written free trade agreements, the drug war, expanded military budgets, the financial services bailout, etc. is conveniently (from the Democratic Party’s standpoint) removed from view as is the fact that the entire field of candidates as whole amounts to one more in the endless series of snubs by Obama directed at the progressive wing of the party in which Maddow implicitly places her hopes for a political
transformation.

Insofar as the terms of her employment dictate her contributing to the manufacturing of a fake consensus masquerading as party unity, Maddow’s accommodation to her role is not so easily justified but it needs to be understood and sympathized with. Maddow, like everyone else, has car payments, or the equivalent. “Ex talk show host”, the job description of those who do not respect the limits imposed by their employers is not a job which pays the bills. And so one should not equate Maddow carrying out her responsibilities as an employee of Air America (presided over by the well known New York DP functionary Mark Green), with her underlying politics any more than we do ourown. The awareness of what is expected of Maddow makes one more grateful for the extent to which one finds her straying far from the reservation where the establishment would, no doubt, prefer her to confine herself.

Many of these episodes occur during the indispensable “life during wartime” segments on Iraq and Afghanistan. These continue to open every show even while the occupation has been pushed off the front pages. The reports function to spotlight the daily carnage and ever mounting military and civilian body count, and while virtually any accurate information seeping out of Iraq is unflattering to the administration, much of it also casts a highly unfavorable light on the congressional Democrats who authorized and continue to finance the operation. Life during wartime thereby opens the door for attacks on the congressional leadership for its spinelessness and complicity most notably of Speaker Pelosi who has come in for her share of harsh criticism. But once this rhetorical flood gate is opened another one seems to slam shut protecting the essential core of the Democratic partisan infrastructure. And so Maddow’s attacks on Pelosi are never coupled with the recognition that voters in San Francisco district are in aposition to hold Pelosi accountable by supporting her opponent Cindy Sheehan. This is not possible since Sheehan has become a non-person on Maddow’s show and on the Air America network where she had been a frequent guest. Her mortal sin was to have repudiated the Democratic party as complicit in the managing and financing of the warand she has not been heard since.

In so doing, Sheehan joined the other great liberal unmentionable, Ralph Nader, perhaps the only political figure able to cause Maddow to lose her sense of humor. The mere mention of Nader causes Maddow to become shrill, tense and unfunny. Liberally deploying the epithet “turd in the punchbowl” which she affixed to him during the 2004 campaign, the phrase is spat out with a venom never in evidence even when Maddow isdirecting her invective at the most odious of right wing thugs.

Into this mix one more complication should be added: Maddow has not displayed much enthusiasm for the Democratic standard bearer, basing her criticisms on more or less thesame pages as those on which Nader is basing his insurgent campaign. Most strikingly, Maddow has on at least one occasion mentioned that she has not committed to voting for Obama in the firmly safe state of Massachusetts, leaving open the small possibility that she will sit this one out, as more than a few progressives have suggested they will.

Maddow’s intense animus towards Nader seems to be a reflection of the war whichMaddow, and so many others are fighting not so much with Nader but with themselves.The recognition that as the Democratic Party continues its rightward drift, their investment in the grassroots, activist base as a vehicle for progressive change become increasingly obviously a lemon. But just like the neighbor who bought the Edsel and continues to gush that it’s a fine automobile despite misfiring cylinders, the muffler dragging on the pavement, and the duct tape keeping the trunk closed, so too are Progressive Democrats in denial of the Obama campaign being nothing more or less thatthe most recent entry in the long history of the Democratic Party functioning as the graveyard for progressive movements. Those who are most aware of the history, like Maddow herself, are usually the least able to perform the necessary feat of doublethink required to rally around the party flag and the most defensive when they are forced to recognize the obvious and uncomfortable contradictions underlying their support.

That Maddow is at least conflicted on this point may be an indication that the well worn path from left muckraker into cynicism and hackery, like so many before her might not be inevitable in her case. The hopes of the left are based on this and lead to the not altogether unrealistic expectation that as a network anchor she will remain a loose canon, picking and choosing her opportunities to inject occasional doses of reality into theconsistent stream of reportorial fantasy perpetuated by the MSM. It is perhaps a bit comical to recognize that just as we are asking these sorts of questionsabout Maddow’s commitment to the left, MSNBC management has asked similar questions and already received an answer to their satisfaction — or at least so we can infer. In particular, MSNBC’s parent company, GE, a major defense contractor is, apparently, willing to bet that Maddow will not use her media access to spotlight the useless and destabilizing weapons systems it produces. The NBC media empire has been convinced that Maddow is ultimately unlikely to turn her attention to the grossly disproportionate share of the media spectrum which NBC and other media giants have been provided by the 1996 communications bill. The financial wing of the company is reassured that Maddow will not be advocating too stridently for putting it on the hook forits deceitful practices in marketing subprime loans. And the manufacturing division isconfident that Maddow will not be poking her nose into the environmental apocalypse which GE has visited on the Hudson and Housatonic rivers through its decades long practice of dumping PCBs. Maddow may turn out to be excessively partisan for some GE board members in effectively trashing the Republicans, but insofar as the DemocraticParty remains safely in corporate hands — as is assured during an Obama administration — GE has no real basis for concern that it will have helped to create a monster in Maddow.

This evaluation of Maddow will, no doubt, be seen as more than a little cynical particularly in a political season dominated by “hope” and may be, in fact, since what is being inquired into are Maddow’s underlying motivation and values. These are, of course, ultimately unknowable; but while granting this fact in the main, when it comes to media personalities, bitter experience should have taught us by now that we have plenty of grounds for assuming the worst. A few examples should suffice to demonstrate the point: disgraced NY Times reporter Judith Miller began her career as a correspondent for the Pacifica radio network and the Progressive. The far right propagandist David Horowitz was an editor of the legendary new left monthly Ramparts. Fox News anchor Brit Hume began his journalistic career working under muckraker and Nixon antagonist Jack Anderson in which capacity he was placed under CIA surveillance.

It is doesn’t seem likely that Maddow’s ultimate position on the media spectrum will beon the far right with these and so many others. More likely, she will slowly mature away from her youthful dalliances with extremism becoming a reliable and respected purveyorof the Washington Consensus, perhaps moderately inflected by the residue of her prior, long dormant left commitments. A premonition of this ultimate trajectory is provided byan appearance by Maddow on MSNBC’s Dan Abrams show last March. Paired with thevile liberal hawk Peter Beinart to discuss the Democratic front-runners’ national security views, Beinart, manipulatively, but quite correctly, characterized the left (and by extension the Democrats) as regarding “global warming as more of a threat than an al Qaeda attack.” Maddow responded by vehemently condemning what she characterized as a slur by Beinart against Democrats and progressives. To rank global warming aboveal quaida as threat to national security was “a weird idea”, “perverse”, the product of of a “twisted mind.” What was striking was not so much the absurdity of the party lineposition: of course the near certainty of complete planetary destruction due to globalwarming is an infinitely more serious threat than that presented by “Islamic terrorism”, according to any rational analysis, at least.

Rather what was on display was Maddow’s willingness to marshal her formidable intellectual arsenal in defense of this flat earth proposition, albeit one which is firmly cemented within the media manufactured consensus. Insodoing, Maddow provided a clueas to why GE/MSNBC regards her as a worthy recipient of their trust. The GE publicrelations and lobbying departments have, after all, invested billions over the years in attempting to establish similar flat earth propositions among them the claim that PCBs have no deleterious effects on acquatic ecosystems, that the “star wars” missile defense is technically viable, that hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime loans packaged into a baroque investment securities provides a stable foundation for home ownership. These are packaged and placed before the public in the shiniest of media wrappers — phrases carefully crafted by wordsmiths as verbally gifted, well educated and hip as Maddow, supported by junk science (when necessary) produced by the most disciplined and highly trained professionals, and when all else fails, defended in the courts by the cleverest, savviest and sharpest legal minds on GE’s corporate consul staff. While the claims remain no less absurd, eventually the public, through endless repetition grows to accept themrather than dismissing them with ridicule and contempt.

While this segment, one hopes, is not representative of where Maddow is headed, it luridly demonstrates that even the most principled, critical and flexible minds of every generation ultimately purchase their ticket for entry onto the road to “success” in the deeply pathological society we have become.

Let’s hope that Maddow and many more will become the exceptions.

That means, most notably, the U.S. Army will remain in Iraq doing what armies do: blowing up buildings, killing scores of people and getting killed themselves-financed by ever more extravagant deficit spending from the treasury.

They will continue to do so whether Senator “120,000 new troops”, Senator “obliterate Iran” or Senator “hundred years war” is installed in January 2009.

What this means for the sixty five percent of the population committed to ending the three trillion dollar genocidal fiasco is that whoever takes office will scale back and end U.S. occupation only under duress. He or she will need to be dragged kicking and screaming-by us.

Given this reality, the question for the movement remains what it has been since the failure of the huge antiwar demonstrations of 2003 and after. How do we communicate that we mean business? That when we say “no war” we mean no war.

The Language of Force

The best answer was delivered appropriately enough, on Mayday by the ILWU which effectively shut down all shipping on the West Coast, not for a fattened paycheck, but in their words, “to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U. S. troops from the Middle East.”

The ILWU understands from its illustrious radical history what the peace movement has yet to learn. Namely what forces power to concede is red ink on the balance sheets of the corporations who effectively own and operate the political system. Accessing this lever of power is talking to the bosses in the only language they understand, and for this reason is the ne plus ultra of protest.

The language which the peace movement needs to learn to speak is the language of economic force.

It needs to begin preparing to do so next Mayday. Friday May 1, 2009 should be a day without work, without shopping, neither producing for the system or consuming what it offers up. Corporate balance sheets, the EKGs of economic health, should go flat.

Those monitoring it for signs of life will be obliged to declare it comatose, reviving only on the next business day.

Can we do it?

We shouldn’t kid ourselves as to what it would require to make this work-which is the participation of a significant fraction of the total workforce, amounting to numbers in the eight figure range. Probably somewhere around 20 million workers need to stay off the job for the message to be conveyed.

And given that it is unlikely that a single day work stoppage no matter how disruptive will be sufficient to send the message, we will need to commit ourselves to systematically upping the ante with additional work stoppages. These could occur on election day 2009, followed by one week strikes beginning on May 1 and Election Day 2010.

Should troops remains in Iraq in 2011, and hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to continuing the occupation be approved, the entire months of May and November 2011 should be targeted for zeroing out.

While it is surely ambitious, it is not unrealistic that the movement can assemble the kinds of numbers necessary to induce a near death experience among the high priced bean counters who manage policy in the interests of the investor class.

It should not be forgotten that while the past five years of antiwar demonstrations are by now largely viewed as futile exercises in feel good boomer nostalgia, this was not due to low participation. Millions marched in demonstrations around the country beginning with the enormous mass action of Feb 15, 2003.

It is not wishful thinking that a Mayday work stoppage could easily involve numbers an order of magnitude higher.

For every person actively involved in a previous demonstration, one or two more will have to commit in doing nothing. No one will have to get on a bus, arrange childcare for your kids, prepare a bag lunch, call your cousin in D.C. to move the books off the living room couch for you to crash on that night. The effectiveness of a strike is a consequence not of action but of inaction, not from showing up, but from sitting it out.

What Will It Take?

Assembling these numbers will require, first and foremost, for the word to get out-repeatedly and from multiple sources- and with the internet, we now have the means to do this.

Top rated left websites such as the Huffington Post receive millions of hits. Uncompromisingly left sites like Counterpunch and Dissident Voice attract substantial and articulate activist bases. Among the traditional media, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! airs on hundreds of stations likely reaching millions. The Nation‘s circulation is in the hundreds of thousands, and reaches many more second hand. Even right-wing media have granted access to reliable leftists like Barbara Ehrenreich, published in Time, and Thomas Frank now featured on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

It is not lack of access which has accounted for the failure the peace movement so far but rather what the left has communicated to itself. In particular, the high profile figures who define left discourse need to go beyond their obsession with what have become increasingly garden variety “powerful indictments” or “devastating critiques” of the bipartisan corporate consensus. The history of the past five years should have shown us that the widespread assumption that these will magically bring an effective mass movement into existence is a delusion.

Once the left jettisons its juvenile obsession with critiquing the system and begins discussing seriously the strategy required to combat it, and its most malignant expression in the form of the three trillion dollar war, what the ILWU did last week will begin to be seen for the major step forward which it should represent.

It is the ball which the rest of us need to pick up and run with.

Vehemently opposed to the Iraq invasion, continually pressing for protection of labor rights and for serious action on climate change, against corporate trade agreements, staunchly supporting single payer health care, Dennis has championed the entire progressive agenda as it has, again and again, piece by piece, gone down to defeat.

There is a name for someone who fights good fights, is always on the right side of a losing issue, is always ready hold the little guy’s hand when he gets garroted by multinational conglomerates.

The word for such an excellent fellow is “loser.”

Dennis, like us, is a loser.

But unlike some of us, Dennis is also a good loser.

Even when he is beaten with a stacked deck, when he is forced from the ring by a well placed sucker punch, Dennis can be counted on to decorously withdraw leaving no question that we in the loyal opposition “believe deeply in this noble experiment which we call American Democracy” and in “our vigorous two party system of representative government.”

This is why, as we should remember from 2004, not a word of protest was heard from Dennis when he was prevented by party insiders from addressing the Democratic convention despite his being entitled, due to his strong showing in several primaries, to do just that. Nor was there a peep from Dennis when anti-war signs were pried from the hands of Kucinich delegates by party hacks or when those protesting the pro-war nominee were confined to free speech zones on the periphery of the convention site, in blatant violation of the first amendment.

Nor was Dennis anywhere to be found in the months prior to the 2004 election as the body count mounted in Iraq. What was, in the year before, an active and aggressive peace movement was kept under lockdown least its visibility endanger the Democrat ticket. It has never recovered and remains comatose.

In 2008, the tragedy was replayed as farce, with Dennis barely breaking into the low single digits. Rather than make trouble by endorsing the long shot candidacy of Edwards, Dennis threw his support behind a candidate endorsing pre-emptive strikes on Pakistan, who is calling for 92,000 new troops, explicitly rejects single payer health care, and is a prime mover behind environmentally suicidal subsidies for biofuel and clean coal.

And now we have the spectacle of Dennis pleading for our support against a primary challenge sponsored by the party leadership.

It appears that he can be cut loose since his services will not be needed due to the powerful sedative the Obama campaign and presidency is likely to administer to the left for the foreseeable future.

This is the thanks Dennis gets for his services in confining his potentially troublesome supporters within the DP prison, for never issuing a discouraging word about whatever corporate shill ends up striding up to the podium to accept his party’s nomination while the party sinks the further into the unreachable swamp of neoliberalism.

But ironically, for those of us who support Dennis, and for Dennis himself, his being discarded like a used kleenex, like Cynthia McKinney before him, might be the best news we receive this electoral season.

It will be if Dennis, and others like him, finally get the message that the only hope for the agenda which he has staked his career on is outside the gated community which the Democratic Party has become.

So for those considering contributing to Dennis, the place to contribute should be in an account to support a third party run following his defeat in the primary.

Another possibility, if Dennis has recovered from the shock of his defeat sufficiently, perhaps we can look forward to supporting a Kucinich/McKinney Green Party ticket in 2008 and with it the prospect of a 5% showing which will qualify them for federal campaign financing.

In any case, let’s hope this serves as a wake up call to Dennis and his supporters.

By now, at least, he should know who and where his friends are.

I write as a strong supporter of your candidacy and someone who has
profound admiration for the work you have done. That said, I want to
attempt something uncomfortable which is to make a constructive
criticism of your campaign for Congress. I’m doing so based on the
firm conviction that you can move beyond being a strong protest
candidate-you are already that-to become a legitimate contender for
Pelosi’s seat. I am optimistic on this score because I know the facts-
among them, that Matt Gonzalez almost won a majority of votes in your
district against Pelosi’s handpicked candidate in his mayoral
campaign. As you know, there is also widespread disaffection with
Pelosi, not just limited to the left fringe, but among what should be
her core constituency.

For you to take advantage of these openings you must be perceived not
as a fringe candidate but as a serious candidate. This does not mean
that you need to dilute your message or alter your positions or
beliefs in any way. Rather, it means that you need to find ways of
expressing them so that the mainstream voters in San Francisco will
not be able to write them off on superficial grounds which the media
has, that is, as the rantings of a grieving mother and the band of
malcontents supporting her.

Make no mistake, your office should be producing a constant stream of
press releases, op eds, and open letters, as you are doing. When
these are picked up, even by small local media outlets and websites,
they provide your campaign with the exposure required for your
campaign to become competitive. However, when these give any
indication of amateurishness, they significantly undermine your
campaign and this is particularly the case in San Francisco where
voters tend to be extremely literate and well, indeed overly, educated.

To give an idea of what I’m talking about I’ll focus on today’s
Dissident Voice article “Accountability Now”. The first sentence
reads as follows: “The U.S. House of Representatives under the so-
called leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) is failing We the
People at an alarming rate.” In addition to it sounding a bit
contrived in this context, “We” functions as the subject, not the
object pronoun, so the sentence is technically ungrammatical. Also,
“at an alarming rate” is an awkward adverbial complement to “fail”;
(as an indication, one can’t “fail quickly”). Finally, while it is
clear what you have in mind by “so-called leadership” the expression
comes across as flippant coming from the new congresswoman from the
eighth district. Correcting these problems you could try something
like “The U.S. House of Representatives under the weak leadership of
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-SF) is undermining the trust of the nation,
the State of California and Pelosi’s constituents in the City of San
Francisco.”

I hope you understand that I do not bring up these faults because
they are at all important to me, but rather because many people,
among them your potential constituents, consider them important.
They have, moreover, a rational basis in that they expect their
representatives to have the ability to represent them with real
authority. Part of this authority is derived from the ability to
deploy written language which commands respect. When one is
preaching to the converted on fringe websites like Dissident Voice,
this doesn’t matter. When one is attempting to operate in the public
sphere it very much does matter.

I should make clear that in no way is it required for you to develop
the skills necessary to produce the kind of copy which should be
consistently coming out of your office. I have no doubt that few
members of congress are, in fact, able to do so. Rather they leave
this to their staff people, who, having benefitted from long and
expensive educations have the ability to polish the turds produced by
their bosses to a blindingly metallic sheen.

What this means is that you need to hire staffers who are capable of
doing precisely that-except that your positions don’t require
exercises in rhetorical slight-of-hand to make them compelling. All
that is required are clear statements of common sense. While these
sorts of folks do not grow on trees, and there are fewer on the left
than one might hope, they are around. In fact, you could do worse
than make an offer to the editors of this site, Josh and Sunil, both
of whom are superbly clear and eloquent writers. Of course, their
positions will need to be financed but I can assure you they will
quickly pay for themselves.

That’s because there are more than a few progressives who are waiting
to see whether your campaign is serious in the same way as Matt
Gonzalez’s campaign was-serious as the proverbial heart attack.
When you show that it has the potential to become legitimate, that
will be Pelosi’s worst nightmare, and the support, which I’m sure is
already there will come rolling in, not just from me, but from the
huge numbers of us who are desperate for a real viable alternative to
the perpetual war, lies and indecency which define the Democratic
Party as personified by Pelosi.

Love,

John Halle

I’ve tried to argue elsewhere that even in their mortally compromised state, we ignore elections and organizing around elections at our peril. This is one symptom of a generation-long flirtation with a pseudo-anarchist (in some cases authentically anarchist) contempt for leadership and organization which has a lot to do with why we are where we are — at the extreme margins of political impotence.

Given that those of us who have tried to argue these points have been unsuccessful, the following conversation will be directed to a minority. Namely, the minority among the left who seriously think about the kinds of a strategy required to make participation in electoral politics worth the investment in time, energy and (sometimes) money.

Rancid DLC Goods

The discussion needs to begin with the uncontroversial assumption that neither of the two Dem front-runners has any credibility among serious progressives. Both are hopelessly compromised, one supported by Rupert Murdoch, the other by George Will. The one a recipient of lavish contributions from hedge fund billionaires, the other stuffed to the brim by investment banking firms. One in the pocket of energy consortia the other bought and paid for telecommunications conglomerates.

For a brief period, the Edwards candidacy provided a flicker of encouragement for the much vaunted Democratic wing of the Democratic party but by this point it seems certain that (yet again) the strategy of working within the Democratic Party promoted by, among others, Norman Solomon, David Sirota and the Progressive Democrats of America has been a failure. Rather than throwing more good money after bad, the left needs to (yet again) recognize the traditional role of the Democrats as the graveyard of progressive movements, the Edwards campaign joining on the scrap heap the failed candidacies of Kucinich, Dean, Jackson, McCarthy among others. While this is all water under the bridge for the moment, it will be something to keep in mind in 2012 and before when a similar cast of characters will try to sell the same rancid meat in different packages.

For the immediate future, the question remains who should we be supporting. For what it’s worth-here’s how I’m going to direct my energies and dollars for the next few months.

Go Cindy!

Supporting Cindy Sheehan’s challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a no-brainer. It should have by now already become the focus of an major national mobilization and while the campaign organization has so far been flakier than I would have hoped, it appears that Cindy’s supporters are slowly getting their act together; a few bucks thrown their way will likely be put to good use. (An immediate order of business for the campaign needs to be Sheehan’s website which is unimpressive, to put it charitably. The campaign should also consider employing an editor to correct grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes in the regular series of “pensées” which Cindy has been circulating to the left blogosphere.)

The logic for supporting Sheehan does not require that she win-though that is not out of the question. A strong showing would send an unmistakable message to corporate Dems that even though they succeeded in locking down the presidential race forcing us into the usual lesser of evils choice, we have the will and the means to address the rightward drift of the party by cutting it off if not at the very head at least at the top level.

Another likely outcome of Sheehan’s run would be similar to that of the challenge to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his local constituency by Reg Keys, like Sheehan, the parent of a soldier killed in Iraq. While Keys did not win a majority, the campaign played a significant role in the subsequent unraveling of Blair’s moral authority. Nothing would be more appropriate than for Pelosi, the quintessential corporate Dem, who recently added “torture enabler” to an already long and bloody resume, to be humiliated by her constituents in a similar fashion.

Go Huck!

The second idea is perhaps somewhat more controversial. Where it is easily done and where there are no significant contested Democratic primaries, leftists should registering as Republicans and voting for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in their states’ primaries. This a purely strategic vote based on two likely outcomes. 1) that Huckabee’s nomination (as William Kristol noted) “would drive the GOP base into therapy” and possibly fracture the party- a good thing, particularly if it were followed by the fracturing of the Dems. But more importantly 2) Huckabee’s economic populism (as phony as it is) would force the Democratic nominee to make rhetorical concessions on (for example) trade agreements, progressive taxation, bankruptcy protection, and various other bread and butter issues.

Of course, we know perfectly well that that whatever promises are made will be quickly jettisoned once the usual suspects set up shop in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget in January 2009. That said, what national candidates say on the stump along these lines will provide at least temporary legitimacy to ideas that had been (since Clinton I) relegated to the lunatic fringe. Of course, it would be ideal if the shift to the left were more than rhetorical but for that we will have to wait for a serious progressive candidate-likely from a progressive third party.

Now that the Edwards candidacy has been dispensed with by the media, the party leadership and their business class paymasters, there will be increasingly less pressure on the DLC frontrunners to even bother mouthing populist rhetoric. They will likely compensate for this vacuum by playing the race/gender card against the other-a vile prospect already materializing. A Huckabee nomination will be the only opportunity to re-inject a serious discussion of corporate dominance and criminality on a national level.

Also, for what it’s worth, those leftists invested in insuring a Democratic administration at all costs would do well to support Huckabee, as doing so will help the weakest, least viable challenger receive the Republican nomination.

Finally, as for Huckabee himself, yes, he’s a kook and a charlatan-albeit an amiable one. As he noted himself, he’s the kind of guy whom you would be more likely to work next to in the auto parts store. The other candidates, Democratic and Republican, fit the profile of the exec who will be signing your pink slip.

The bottom line: when the left is given a choice between a candidate which George Will supports and one George Will opposes, it should know which side it’s on.

In scoring an unprecedented victory over a sitting speaker, the Sheehan candidacy was bolstered by its early alliance with the Greens. The insurgent party has become a formidable presence in San Francisco politics, holding two seats on the Board of Supervisors and on the School Board. Also notable was the support offered by former Board of Supervisor’s President Matt Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s 2003 mayoral campaign, which fell short by just over 14,000 votes, is widely viewed as having set the stage for Sheehan victory. Gonzalez’s decision to share his database of volunteers and financial supporters in exchange for a commitment on Sheehan’s part to run as a Green is credited with providing the electoral muscle which was key to the electoral landslide.

Also key to Sheehan’s victory was the early support of nationally known progressive journalists who made the campaign a central focus of several columns introducing the campaign to a national audience and attracting their support. One of these, syndicated columnist Norman Solomon waxed effusive on the Sheehan victory: “Many of us were chastened by our failure to support the Mayoral campaign of Matt Gonzalez. We came to recognize the Gonzalez near victory as a major missed opportunity for progressives as this would have provided us a legitimate, electable candidate for the presidency in 2008. We were sure not to duplicate our mistake with Cindy and recognized the importance of her campaign immediately after its announcement in July 2007.”

The success of Sheehan’s challenge was vexing to mainstream liberal publications which were generally lukewarm towards the Sheehan candidacy. Their failure to respond positively angered many progressive readers and as a result some have suffered significant losses in their subscription base. Most notable among these was the Nation magazine, though a contributing factor in the publication’s demise was a grassroots boycott in the wake of its endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign. The periodical is now operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The broad coalition behind Sheehan surprised veteran political observers and Democratic Party strategists in extending well beyond her core supporters in the anti-war movement. Civil rights advocates displeased with Pelosi’s failure to move on impeachment proceedings against an administration it saw as routinely demonstrating contempt for the constitution were forthcoming with substantial donations. Others contributed pro bono legal services necessary to defend the Green Party against harassment from a legal team turned loose by the national Democratic Party. Food and farm advocates, disgusted with Pelosi’s support for the 2007 Farm Bill derided as a sham and an environmental atrocity lavished volunteers with locally produced gourmet meals. San Francisco residents with longer memories who have never forgiven Pelosi for her engineering the delivery of the decommissioned Presidio military base into the hands of cronies of Pelosi’s husband’s real estate empire opened their apartments to out-of-town supporters who put in long hours on the campaign.

While national unions, as expected, endorsed Pelosi’s candidacy and contributed to the Democratic get out the vote effort, this was markedly less successful than in previous years. Unconfirmed reports indicate that union members aware of Pelosi’s key role in ramming through job destroying free trade agreements called in sick, refused to participate or, in some cases, actively sabotaged the campaign operation. Some phone bankers would, according to anonymous sources, substitute endorsements of Sheehan for the script provided by the Pelosi functionaries.

But perhaps most decisive was the intangible factor of personality. Ordinary voters appeared to develop a strong attachment to Sheehan, a divorced working class mother of three, whose entry into politics was precipitated by the death of her son Casey in what is now universally understood to be a the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history. Sheehan’s awkward, unschooled and plain spoken manner stood in stark contrast to the smooth manners, impeccable dress and polished rhetoric of Pelosi. Pelosi’s privileged background, the daughter of a big city mayor and her marriage into a billion dollar real estate empire while not figuring Sheehan campaign materials, appeared to become a serious liability among voters.

Pelosi is only the most visible casualty of a political tidal wave whose repercussions are only beginning to be understood by political analysts.

Pledging an immediate withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, the Gonzalez-McKinney ticket is expected to galvanize anti war activists displeased with the current field of candidates all of whom are on record as having supported President Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Congressional support of subsequent incursions into Syria and airstrikes on major Iranian cities have led to numerous, increasingly disruptive demonstrations across the nation.

Unlike previous Green Party candidates, Gonzalez brings to the table substantial experience in governance. A big city mayor and public interest lawyer, Gonzalez’s resume is equivalent to that of his likely Republican opponent, though largely untainted by the plague of scandal that has been a conspicuous feature of the Giuliani campaign since its outset.

The multi-ethnic ticket is also expected to attract the support of Latino voters angered by the Democratic frontrunner’s overtures to anti-immigrant groups. A former member of the Congressional Black Caucus, McKinney will be the first member of this body nominated for executive office. She is expected to make the war on drugs, widely viewed as catastrophic for African American communities, a centerpiece of the campaign and has pledged to make voter registration among traditionally disenfranchised groups a major focus.

The Green Party ticket’s endorsement of single payer, universal health care has attracted the support of large activist organizations developed in the wake of Michael Moore’s Sicko, which last week became the largest grossing film in history. The only other candidate supporting single payer, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has remained mired in the low single digits and has, since September, been excluded from debates sponsored by major news organizations.

Experts noted that while a Gonzalez-McKinney ticket would be a long shot under normal electoral circumstances, the presence of two moderate candidates in a four-way race leaves the field open for a left wing challenge.

While lacking the financial resources of the major party candidates, Green Party officials believe they can compensate for this shortfall through on line donations and an effectively organized volunteer staff. They note that these were sufficient to overcome a candidate lavishly financed by corporations, wealthy donors and the full weight of the Democratic Party machine in 2003.

While some progressives remain skeptical about the prospects for third parties, others have reconsidered their position. “A year ago I was on record as saying ‘It’s not going to happen.’ Now I’m not so sure,” said one who insisted on anonymity.