1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

Affirms that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening. Urges increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to secure an agreement that includes: (1) suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, (2) complete cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran’s nuclear activities, and (3) a permanent agreement that verifiably assures that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Supports: (1) the universal rights and democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, and (2) U.S. policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Rejects any U.S. policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran. Urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat. (emphasis mine)

The resolution passed the House 401-11, with a few representatives absent and a few abstaining. This means it had massive bipartisan support – for those of you who only consider Republicans to be warmongers: 166 of 190 Democrats voted in support, including some of its ostensibly most progressive members, such as Barney Frank and Rush Holt.

The language used bodes terribly for the United States’ already disastrous and destructive foreign policy. The House affirms not merely that Iran will not be allowed to manufacture nuclear weapons, but that it will not be permitted the capability of said manufacturing. Never mind that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta observed that Iran is not actually pursuing these weapons; given the extreme and persistent threats from the nuclear-armed Israel and United States, coupled with the U.S. forces surrounding Iran, we would have no right to prevent them if they were.

Further, examining the House’s reasoning for denouncing Iran as a repressive regime highlights severe hypocrisy:

Whereas, on December 26, 2011, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution denouncing the serious human rights abuses occurring in Iran, including torture, cruel and degrading treatment in detention, the targeting of human rights defenders, violence against women, and ‘the systematic and serious restrictions on freedom of peaceful assembly’, as well as severe restrictions on the rights to ‘freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.’

Switch in that paragraph “the United States” for “Iran” and you might think we should be sanctioning ourselves. Regarding the first several accusations, consider this: the United States tortures foreign adversaries by proxy, abuses accused whistle-blowers in prison before trial, detains more prisoners than any country on Earth, and continues to pass state laws assaulting women’s rights. Perhaps the most hypocritical, though, is the accusation of the repression of peaceful assembly. Just two days after the House passed this resolution, Chicago riot police beat protesters with nightsticks, hit others with CPD vehicles, and used sound canons to disrupt peaceful demonstrators against the NATO summit. So the idea that the U.S. deems Iran a barbaric nation that represses political speech is extremely two-faced at best.

The worst part about the bill, though, is not what policies it specifically introduces or accusations it announces but rather what it signifies more broadly: the U.S. is taking the next step in the war on Iran that has already begun.

For one thing, Israel has already teamed up with a U.S.-backed terror group within Iran to assassinate nuclear scientists, serving both the temporary, practical purpose of inhibiting Iran’s nuclear progress and the long-term, psychological purpose of instilling fear within Iran and its fledgling nuclear program.

More insidiously, the U.S. has imposed severe sanctions on Iran that most describe as “crippling” and that all should describe as acts of war. Just today, the Senate voted unanimously to escalate those very sanctions. While President Obama may say that sanctions are intended to isolate Iran’s leaders in their nuclear position, it is citizens who bear the burden of these economic moves. Look to Iraq for the devastating effects, where a senior U.N. official estimated that U.N.-imposed sanctions in the 1990s killed a staggering 500,000 children under the age of 5. They don’t call ‘em “crippling” for nothing.

We should also look to Iraq to understand how this bipartisan process of escalation works, from sanctions to bombing to occupation. Arguing against sanctions on Iran in April 2010, Rep. Ron Paul recalled how sanctions on Iraq led inevitably to war:

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

The Iraq war did not begin with the 2003 invasion – it began with the 1990s embargo. Sanctions on Iraq not only killed hundreds of thousands, but they structured the narrative on Iraq to winnow out peaceful options on the path to war. And the same is true of Iran. Now debates on Iran focus on whether Ahmadinejad will relent in his pursuit of weapons, whether sanctions are “working” sufficiently, or where the U.S. and Israel should draw “red lines” for attack.

President Obama called last month’s “negotiations” with Iran that country’s “last chance,” effectively threatening to escalate sanctions or initiate an attack if Iran didn’t cease and desist its nuclear enrichment program entirely. How are those “negotiations”? How is that “diplomacy”? Threatening Iran to completely submit to the U.S.’s will to get nothing in return is not a discussion – it’s bullying.

What would Iran have to gain in that situation? Iran is seeking to defend itself from nuclear-armed bullies surrounding it constantly. Passively complying would only speed up the U.S. plan to replace the Iranian regime with one even more compliant.

But the United States will not relent on Iran – just as it did not relent on Iraq. Examine again the House resolution’s first principle:

…it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and warns that time is limited to prevent that from happening.

Compare that with President Bill Clinton’s 1998 remarks on Iraq:

One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.

This is how American bipartisanship – or more accurately, duopoly – works. Both parties want war with Iran, the way both parties wanted war with Iraq. It is in both of their interests – appeasing Israel and its chief lobby, AIPAC, and posturing for their respective bases. Republicans take the hard line on our “enemies,” using blatantly aggressive language, refusing to “apologize for America” and reducing our victims to less than human. Democrats take the more “pragmatic” approach, adopting “national security” rhetoric based in protecting Americans that disguises the exact same policies. The Senate vote to go to war with Iraq, after all, didn’t barely squeak through on Republican support: it passed 96-4. (Now, 9/11 catalyzed the whole process in Iraq and made dissent even less popular, but the biggest antiwar protest in recorded history couldn’t sway more than four measly votes in the Senate.)

This endless posturing is how President Obama can be accused of being “soft on terror” and simultaneously escalate sanctions on Iran and massive drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

This is why, in the interest of war, sanctions by one party is a huge gift to the other. If Mitt Romney is elected this year, he’ll likely announce that Obama’s sanctions were insufficient and encourage an Israeli attack on Iran behind closed doors. If Obama is re-elected, he’ll continue on the path he’s currently on: allowing Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists, officially recognizing the terror group seeking regime change in Iran, and escalating sanctions that cripple the Iranian people and isolate its leaders.

Citing Glenn Greenwald and Greg Sargent on liberal support for Obama’s escalated drone strikes, here’s Stephen Walt on ‘Why Hawks Should Vote for Obama’:

Obama can do hawkish things as a Democrat that a Republican could not (or at least not without facing lots of trouble on the home front). It’s the flipside of the old “Nixon Goes to China” meme: Obama can do hawkish things without facing (much) criticism from the left, because he still retains their sympathy and because liberals and non-interventionists don’t have a credible alternative (sorry, Ron Paul supporters). If someone like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush had spent the past few years escalating drone attacks, sending Special Forces into other countries to kill people without the local government’s permission, prosecuting alleged leakers with great enthusiasm, and ratcheting up sanctions against Iran, without providing much information about exactly why and how we were doing all this, I suspect a lot of Democrats would have raised a stink about some of it. But not when it is the nice Mr. Obama that is doing these things.

So if you vote for Barack Obama because you think that Mitt Romney would put troops on the ground, you’ll only be doing it to make yourself feel better. You’ll be playing right into the partisan posturing that seeks to fabricate a meaningful difference between the two major parties, both with long histories of support for wars of aggression. You’ll be fundamentally misunderstanding how American duopoly works: both parties decry each other for tactically approaching the same policies differently in the interest of electing their own representatives to power. Both parties want war – they just want to play it to their respective bases properly.

If you think Al Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, that Ralph Nader ruined the antiwar movement and George Bush is all to blame, point me to where Gore opposed Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq when he was Vice President. In the meantime, read how Gore argued for regime change in Iraq a few short months before Bush invaded: “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”

If you think Bush’s war was a terrible mistake that warranted John Kerry’s election in 2004, read Kerry on Iraq two months before the invasion:

Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction … So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…

Find more quotes from Democrats leading up to and supportive of Bush’s 2003 invasion here.

Liberals criticize President Obama for escalating drone strikes, failing to close Guantanamo, aggressively persecuting Bradley Manning, illegally invading Libya, offering cuts to Social Security, and immunizing the war crimes and torture of the Bush administration – but many same liberals say that despite all of these transgressions, the ostensible likelihood of Mitt Romney attacking Iran makes them feel they have to re-elect the president.

If this were true, wouldn’t these liberals be criticizing Obama’s sanctions on Iran? Wouldn’t they have abandoned Clinton, Gore, and Kerry after their comments on Iraq? More to the point, if these liberals despise war so much, why aren’t Obama’s surge in Afghanistan or expanded wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen deal-breakers for re-election?

If you actually don’t want war with Iran, you have to help end duopoly. You can’t support either of the two establishment parties who feed the military-industrial complex and fear-monger voters into submission. We must make it known that the people want peace – meaning no sanctions, no assassinations, no threats of war.

We must make war making and fear mongering unacceptable. Come Election Day, we can vote third party, or boycott the election, or protest to shut down military recruitment centers or drone bases. But we can’t fund or vote for the war parties – our victims can’t afford it. No votes for empire, no money for war. No exceptions.

Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

Countering, Democrats will huff that the travails of their dead battery, soft spot, touching turmoil or whatever it is that’s inside their boxer’s shorts or panties is no one’s business, least of all the government, though, of course, the Democrat-appointed Janet Napolitano and her TSA hordes have set up an enduring base next to their exposed, uh, discount toys. Irradiated and propped up by Cialis, they don’t look half bad. Oh yes, they do.

According to Democrats, Obama is a good liberal because he will also send gay men and women worldwide to massacre whoever gets in the way of the oil liberals need to drive their SUVs to anti-war rallies.

According to Republicans, Mitt is a good conservative since he can’t stand Ellen DeGeneres, Johnny Weir, or Barney the Dinosaur, although he will condemn a husband or wife halfway across the globe to commit unspeakable acts for years, while the remaining spouse languishes at home in anxiety and loneliness, to be comforted by some groggy chick at the bar, talk radio, a young cable guy, Jesus, reruns of American Idol or, in the best case scenario, nothing at all.

Republican politicians pretend to cherish the traditional family, while their Democratic counterparts feign that everyone should have a right to a family, but, in fact, neither side cares about anyone’s family, because they are indifferent if not hostile to human connections, period. Propped up by our military-banking complex, both parties support a bankrupting and bankrupted banking system and an endless war policy that destroy families worldwide, including here.

On top of that, they’ve tricked you into being plugged to their various brainwashing machines all day long, so that you’re divorced from your very self, honey. Outside, birds, sunshine and mounds of corpses your tax money murdered, though you wouldn’t know it, because you’re addicted to songs you’ve heard for the billionth time, each, as well as Snookie updates, pixelated pussies, cocks and boxscores.

Outside, a busking violinist says that his life is easier now, since there are so many out-of-business stores he can play in front of, without being shooed away. Outside, a person, male or female, it’s not clear, poses as a horse for tips, as a real horse looks on. Outside, a Vietnam vet drinks mouthwash to get high, while an Iraq vet shows his discharge paper to prove that he is a genuine, disposable piece of fodder, and not just an ordinary panhandler. A pint of Listerine with 21.6% alcohol costs $4.50, compared to a 24 oz., tallboy can of Natural Ice at $1.49, with 5.9 % alcohol, so Listerine is a much, much better value. It’s not exactly Jameson, true, but a few gulps will get you buzzed for maybe five hours. Outside, a man sells Newport cigarettes, “Two for a dollar, two for a dollar. Who’s next? How are you today? Very good to see you. Welcome back, it’s happy Monday. Time to go to work! It’s a beautiful day today, but don’t get used to it. It’s going to rain tomorrow! We all have our own cross to bear, ladies and gentlemen. My, aren’t you lovely today! Yes, you! Welcome back!” If he sells the entire pack in an hour, he will make $3.50. Outside, a man drains a leftover soda fished from a trash can in a well-manicured downtown plaza surrounded by bank skyscrapers.

But inside the screen, and thus inside your mind, all is well, stable and sexy. The recovery is on track, unemployment is steadily going down, and new college graduates are entering an improving job market, with multiple offers even. Inside the screen, what happens in Europe stays in Europe, Detroit is back, California is still the land of milk and honey and, soon enough, we will be amped up by orations of hope, change, forward, believe in America, let America be America and, yes, America can!

In this land of peeling yet persistent illusions, none is more farcical than the Presidential election, for even as it promises renewal, common purpose, focus and hope, and demands a collective soul searching, even, this elaborate and drawn out ritual will deliver nothing more than a new (or renewed) apologist for the same set of crimes against humanity, country and you. If there’s any good to this coming circus, it’s that the empire seems determined to maintain a relative peace until the electoral shenanigans are over. Though it’s itching for new rounds of shock and awesome, y’all, because that’s how it makes its money, it doesn’t want to tip this tottering economy into the mother of all ditches, not when citizens are somewhat focused on how to correct or improve our common lot.

If enough machinists, PhDs and war veterans dumpster dive and share a honey bucket, if whores dally in middle-class suburbs and gas goes to 6 bucks, for example, the country will explode from sea to shining sea, and not just because of well-placed FBI agents. With events quickly spiraling out of control, this election may not go as choreographed, family values be damned.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.

Remember, this sprawling yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of responses to its FOIA filing is one Nov. 5, 2011 from the NOC Fusion Center Desk, which collects at the federal level and then distributes the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders. Although none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information were widely disseminated by the DHS.

Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS, the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers around the US.

Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression. Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would “reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist. Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law enforcement, intelligence and military network.

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists, it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy actions.

These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:

Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants — the Federal Protective Service (FPS) will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.

There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS “background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)

The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out lie:

DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.

Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the Weekly Informant, an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.

The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.

The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the “We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.

To see all the new FOIA documents, go to the PJIF website.

 Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

— Hebert Marcuse¹

[A potential solution to the financial crisis is] a global neo-Keynesianism… to save capitalism from itself and from potential radical challenges from below.

— William I. Robinson²

Ice Cream and Social Change

In the midst of the slow-down of the Occupy movement in the early months of 2012, a strange creation emerged from its dense horizontal network of assemblies, spokes-councils, and working groups. Dubbed the Movement Resource Group (MRG), its nature drew controversy – and for many, condemnation – from the movement that it claimed to represent. It appeared as a vertical blip on the flat radar screen, an image of wealth operating in a space where class and rampant material accumulation were adamantly questioned.

The MRG’s aim was to act as a conduit for funding for the movement, seeking to ease Occupy “as it transitions from being a series of spontaneous actions to a more strategic national movement.”³ It was first launched by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the progressive-minded Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. They were quickly joined by other high profile left-wing millionaires and figureheads: Anna Burger of the SEIU labor union, entertainment moguls Danny Goldberg and Richard Foos, and others. Maybe it was because Ben and Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, is a member of the much maligned American Legislative Exchange Council. Or maybe it is because the image of money cozying up to Occupy reeks of the age-old tradition of progressive co-option – a threat very real to all that seek real change. Regardless, MRG did not seem to make much headway, and attention has shifted in both the Occupy movement and the media at large to a new grassroots movement sporting the same rhetoric and tactics of its predecessor – the 99% Spring.

The brainchild of the professional left, the 99% Spring is a joint project of a myriad of organizations, ranging from the Rainforest Action Network to the Institute for Policy Studies to 350.org, all taking part in helping push their agenda far beyond Occupy, transforming its energy and ethos into a structured complex. MRG members don’t seem to be very far from the action, with Anna Burger’s SEIU and Ben Cohen’s USAction adding their support for the 99% Spring.

Critics, rightfully skeptical of power of the professional left (particularly in light of the never ending cascade of letdowns and broken promises from President Barack Obama) have repeatedly drawn attention to the pro-Democratic Party attitudes of so many in the 99% Spring Coalition. These analyses have been published in many well-known and well-read publications such as Truth-Out, CounterPunch, and others. Yet an immediate backlash against these viewpoints has come in torrents. One article put forth by PRWatch quotes one 99% Spring affiliate as saying that the criticisms are “misplaced,” while another dismisses critiques of the professional left as being akin to a “Glenn Beck rant.” ⁴

Individuals who are pointing out the obvious and glaring correlations between the promoters of this new “grassroots” movement are being labeled as conspiracy theorists or cranks, bent on seeing patterns that aren’t there and avoiding to contribute meaningfully in the push to the fix the nation and the world. Never mind that Coffee Party, a 99% Springer, was founded by an organizer from United for Obama; or that the founder of Code Pink, another coalition member, garnered between $50,000 and $100,000 for the president’s 2008 campaign. Never mind that their partner, the Working Families Party, has been a longtime endorser of Obama, even hosting an image on their website informing visitors that “voting for Obama is good.”

This article will not attempt to summarize all of the data collected by the various detractors of the 99% Spring, though I’ve compiled links to various articles below in the notes.⁵  However, it will attempt to refute the ideas that there is no ideological link between the 99% Spring and the Democratic Party and that this sudden mobilization has nothing to do with the impending round of elections. In order to do that, primarily two organizations backing the 99% Spring will be looked at: MoveOn and the AFL-CIO; their history and their extended ties will be summarized, albeit in an extremely abridged fashion. Following this, the rhetoric and mentality of the 99% Spring and their backers will be examined and placed into a wider theoretical perspective on the nature of the current capitalist epoch.

From MoveOn to Big Labor to the American Dream

At the center of the controversy surrounding the 99% Spring is the question of MoveOn’s allegiance – the “conspiracy theorists” charge that MoveOn is an unofficial astroturfing organization that acts on behalf of the Democratic Party, while other critics maintain that there has been an important “cross pollination” of ideas and rhetoric between the organization and the more radically-inclined left. These critics, however, are framing their debate strictly around the currently unfolding events, ignoring the history of MoveOn and its ongoing ties to the Democratic establishment. However, these simplistic diversionary tactics, when placed into an overarching context, fall short of proper analysis and largely negate one of the central visions of the Occupy movement; namely, that “another world is possible.”

If one doubts MoveOn’s current affiliations with Democratic politics, one needs to look no further than one of the email blasts that was sent out on April 17th by their campaign director Steven Biel. Titled “Republican Political Suicide,” it carefully navigates around outright support for President Obama, though it makes it clear that MoveOn is preparing to once again act as the grassroots wings of the upcoming reelection campaign. “In 2008, young people voted in record numbers and went for President Obama over John McCain by more than 2-to-1,” the email reads, before stating that because of Congressional gridlock and the student debt crisis, “Republicans have handed us a golden opportunity to fire up young people to vote in 2012.” Biel then unveils his organization’s plan: “To make sure young people know what’s happening, we’re launching one of the largest online ad campaigns in MoveOn history.” MoveOn then asks for $5 donations to help with their emergent strategy – one that is rooted directly in electoral politics consumed in the divisive two-party paradigm that so many in the Occupy movement have spoken out against. Yet this is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that MoveOn has worked in tandem with the Democratic Party.

Perhaps the most notable example of MoveOn’s relationship with the liberal political party was its role as a coalition member of the Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), which had begun its life as an anti-war lobby in 2007. It became rapidly apparent, however, that the AAEI was closely connected to the Democratic Party – for example, it was staffed by members of the public relations firm Hildebrand Tewes Consulting, which at the same time was working with the Obama presidential campaign. One of the firm’s founders, Steve Hildebrand, had served as the director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, while his partner, Paul Tewes, would go on to serve as then-Senator Obama’s Iowa campaign manager. Likewise, AAEI staffer Brad Woodhouse went on to act as a director of communications at the Democratic National Committee.

With the slew of connections forming to what would eventually become an extremely successful campaign for the Oval Office, eyebrows were certainly raised — grassroots protestors, working in alignment with figures from a party that had thrown its support behind the opposition’s war efforts. Despite these lingering questions raised by skeptics, the AAEI went on to rally massive support for Obama in the anti-war movement – yet in the aftermath, the president of hope and change rapidly descended into what could only be described as business as usual.

In further considering MoveOn’s ongoing ties to the Democratic Party, the best place to begin is with the long biography of Tom Matzzie, the organization’s former Washington director and perhaps one of its most important members. Matziee had been the leader of the AAEI, and is of immediate interest to the 99% Spring, as he is currently an online strategist for the New Organizing Institute (NOI). The NOI is closely connected to MoveOn, with many of MoveOn’s executives and founders operating on its advisory board. Furthermore, NOI’s Joy Cushman, who worked as the director of the Obama campaign in Georgia, is credited with having “full-time on the 99% Spring plan.”⁶

Matzzie’s skills with online organizing date back to his pre-MoveOn days, when he worked as a director for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign in 2004. Two years later, when he was officially affiliated with MoveOn, he was working in Washington politics again by running the Campaign to Defend America, a spin-off outfit from the AAEI that ran anti-Republican ads in the build-up to the 2008 election cycle. Matzzie was joined at the Campaign by MoveOn founder Wes Boyd and Jeff Blum, the executive director of Ben Cohen’s USAction. The Campaign’s pro-Democrat media blitz was heavily subsidized by the heavyweights of “progressive liberalism,” including SEIU leader and future MRG member Anna Burger; Mother Jones’ director Robert McKay; Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta ; and billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Burger, McKay, and Soros went on to act as leaders in the Democracy Alliance (a coalition of centrist philanthropists), while Podesta headed up the Obama-Biden Transition Team and runs a lobbying organization that represents megacorporations like Wal-Mart on Capital Hill.⁷

Matzzie has also served on the board of directors of Progressive Majority, a network of Democratic operators that seeks to “elect progressive champions” by “identifying and recruiting the best progressive leaders to run for office; coaching and supporting their candidacies by providing strategic message, campaign, and technical support.”⁸ While the mission statement touts their commitment to electing “people of color” and propelling new faces into Washington, the majority of Progressive Majority’s directors are directly linked to either the Democratic Party or the AFL-CIO labor union – the importance of which will be summarized momentarily. For now, however, a cursory mention of some of Matzzie’s cohorts in Progressive Majority is in order:

Karen Ackerman, a political director for the AFL-CIO.

Ellen Golombek, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, now affiliated with the SEIU.

William Lux, one of the AFL-CIO’s in the early 1990s. Following this, he served as President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison before becoming in 1996 the Vice Chair for the Democratic National Business Council. Later, he was the co-founder of the Progressive Donor Network, a fundraising body for Democrat candidates.

Terry Liarman, elected as the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party in 2004. Prior to this he served as the National Finance Chair for Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It should be noted that prior to his loss to John Kerry, Dean was financially backed by many of the major centrist moneymen – including the aforementioned McKay, Podesta, and Soros.⁹

Clearly, Matzzie – as well as MoveOn – has historically operated in a close-knit sphere of Democratic Party organizers and operators; specifically, the people who build up campaigns by selecting the politicians, financing them, raising awareness for them, and, in short, helping them secure the White House. They are the unseen players who keep the political machine oiled and running. It is interesting to note the prominence of the AFL-CIO in this network, as big labor has been quite often viewed as an autonomous unit from Washington politics since the collapse of the New Deal politics of yesteryear. Thus, it is notable that Matzzie himself helps to bridge the gap between labor and Democrats, as he worked for the AFL-CIO in the early part of the 2000s, incorporating online activism as part of their movement building program. It might also be worthwhile to consider that MoveOn and the AFL-CIO share the same PR firm, Fenton Communications, which also represents Soros’ Open Society Institute and Ben & Jerry’s.

The AFL-CIO has been a major supporter of the 99% Spring – the name of the union’s current president, Richard Trumka, can be found on the list of signatories of the letter that initially launched the movement. But even after the AFL-CIO declared its support for this grassroots mobilization that is allegedly outside of the Democratic Party, the website OpenSecrets revealed that the union’s political action committee was working hard to raise money for Democrat candidates.¹⁰ A month earlier Trumka announced that the union was formally endorsing Barack Obama, commending him for his progressive rhetoric and passing the $800 billion stimulus package.¹¹ But rhetoric falls short without real change; as many left-wing commentators have noted countless times, Obama’s so-called reforms – the so-called “ObamaCare” and his attitude towards Wall Street – have been empty promises, nothing more than populist imagery hiding pro-business agendas. Regardless, the AFL-CIO plans on launching a strategy of “door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and registration drives to help President Barack Obama and other Democrats.”

The AFL-CIO has been no stranger to Washington; for the entire duration of its existence it has operated closely with big politics and big business in curbing radical grassroots demands for structural change. When it was simply the American Federation of Labor (it merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO in 1955), it was led by Samuel Gompers. During this time Gompers was also serving as vice-president of the National Civic Federation (NCF), a pro-collective bargaining organization that was led primarily by representatives from leading industrial and financial firms. Gompers’ boss at the NCF, the mining magnate and Republican “king-maker” Mark Hanna, had viewed the promotion of “conservative trade unions” such as the AFL as beneficial to capitalism, noting that they would “play a constructive role in reducing labor strife and in helping American business sell its products overseas.”¹²  While Republican benevolence to collective bargaining certainly seems an oddity in the modern post-Reagan world, sociologist G. William Domhoff writes that the NCF’s stance “involved a narrowing of worker demands to a manageable level.” Continuing on, he charges that collective bargaining “contained the potential for satisfying most workers at the expense of the socialists among them, meaning that it removed the possibility of a challenge to the capitalist system itself…”

In the decade following the AFL-CIO merger, the union, working in conjunction with the Kennedy administration, began to export this moderate unionism overseas through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Funded by USAID and operating closely with the CIA, the AIFLD adopted a militantly anti-Communist perspective and assisted in a series of US-backed interventions across Latin America, including the infamous coup against Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende.¹³  Later the AIFLD underwent a transformation into the Solidarity Center, a subsidiary organization of the US government’s primary vehicle for “democracy promotion” abroad, the National Endowment for Democracy. Importantly, Trumka has served as the head of the Solidarity Center’s board of trustees – making him a de facto member of the US foreign policy establishment.

If all of these connections and ties isn’t convincing enough that the 99% Spring doesn’t bare the hallmarks of Beltway wheeling and dealing, there is the upcoming “Take Back the American Dream” conference, which is being put together by Progressive Majority and Rebuild the Dream – the latter of which is one of the key 99% Spring planners. The conference is being hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future, (CAF) which counts both Richard Trumka and his predecessor, John Sweeney, on its board of directors. Eli Pariser, MoveOn’s chairman of the board, is also an official at CAF. This is not the organization’s only tie to MoveOn; CAF is a coalition member of Healthcare for America Now, a lobbying organization for Obama’s health care plan, alongside MoveOn, Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and Ben Cohen’s USAction.

Another CAF leader, Robert Borosage, is married to Barbara Shailor, the director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs division. He also serves alongside Tom Matzzie on the board of Progressive Majority, while an organization that he is a former director of, the Institute for Policy Studies, is part of the 99% Spring movement. He still maintains close ties with the Institute: he is currently on the board of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, right alongside Wes Boyd and Joan Blades from MoveOn and the NOI, and Bill Fletcher, a high-ranking official in the AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the current co-chair of United for Peace and Justice – yet another 99% Spring coalition member.

While Borosage, who incidentally is one of the keynote speakers at the Take Back the American Dream conference (along with Howard Dean and Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones)¹⁴ has been critical of Obama’s willingness to bend to corporate America’s demands, Campaign for America’s Future has not minced words about electoral agenda: “Just five months before what could be the most important set of elections in our lifetimes, thousands of progressives will convene in the nation’s capital to energize the movement to Take Back the American Dream.”

Disruption and Redirection (or the End of Neoliberalism)

Borosage’s anti-corporatist tone leads us to one of the major criticisms that defenders of the 99% Spring have of its detractors. MoveOn and its adjunct organizations such as the AFL-CIO and Rebuild the Dream have led activists to protest the corruption surrounding mega corporations, including GE and Bank of America. How can something that does try to bring these abusers of democracy to justice be a negative factor in the activist landscape? The answer to this question is more complicated, yet it is something vital to be discussed in today’s world of the perpetually evolving “flexible capitalism.”

First off, it is important to take note that MoveOn and the extended progressive network does not necessarily practice what it preaches. For example, MoveOn’s “brand-based imagery” for the 99% Spring was crafted with help from Berlinrosen, a “communications consultancy” that operates out of D.C. and New York City.¹⁵ The firm, whose Washington director is a former communications director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, lists on its website MoveOn Political Action (MoveOn’s political fundraising arm), SEIU, Healthcare for Americans Now, and Brookfield Properties as clients. Brookfield, incidentally, is the owner of the now-famous Zucotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street set up camp before its eviction in mid-November, 2011. Brookfield Properties, later revealed to be in contact with Federal agencies just prior to a raid, is in turn owned by Brookfield Asset Management – an Ontario based corporation that counts George Soros as a shareholder and is represented in Washington by a member of the Podesta family.¹⁶  If these people – all tied in one way or another to the 99% Spring – are against corporate malfeasance and are truly in solidarity with the Occupy movement, one would certainly think that they would cut monetary ties with outfits like Brookfield.

Aside from that puzzling detour, the relationship between the “professional left” and capitalism is important to look at. Recent and influential treaties, such as The Shock Doctrine and The Corporation, or the articles published in progressive magazines such as The Nation and Mother Jones, have raised awareness about the destructive tendencies of neoliberalism, showing how they dissolve national boundaries, exploit poor and undeveloped countries, and curtail representative democratic practices by buying off politicians. Yet these publications, for the most part, tend to equate capitalism with its current neoliberal incarnation, and also serve to position corporations – not the underlying structures of the capitalist mode of production – as the problem. While all these works play a critically important role, they simply do not go far enough – overall, their analysis is unfortunately superficial.

This framework – where corporations, not market economies dictated by uneven wealth distribution, finds its physical expression in the works of moderate liberal economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. While their individual approaches may differ, all of these individuals maintain a pro-market rhetoric that avoids undermining the ultimate Washington consensus that reasons that private enterprise and individual greed is the cornerstone of equality. Stiglitz himself appeared at an Occupy Wall Street rally and told protests “The fact is that the system is not working right… Our financial markets have an important role to play.  They’re supposed to allocate capital, manage risks.  We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds.” ¹⁷  But as the Monthly Review’s Michael Yates retorts, Stiglitz is wrong: the system is working correctly. “It is working exactly as capitalist systems work.  They have always been marked by poles of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed by recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve armies of labor, a few winners and many losers, alienating workplaces, the theft of peasant lands, despoiled environments, in a word, the rule of capital.” What Yates is expressing here is a clear and undeniable truth. We cannot attack corporations solely, because they are not the cause of the problem. They are only the symptom of it.

The AFL-CIO and SEIU are also indicative of this mentality, with their perpetual protest slogan of “protect the middle class.” Such a phrase or symbol it represents clashes directly with anti-capitalist sentiments; it’s rooted in the inner-workings of the classist system and is generated solely by workplace hierarchies and capital flows that trickle down ever so slowly. It is true that the world of globalized neoliberalism is dissolving the middle class; this is the result of the breakdown of the social contracts of the Keynesian era, which allowed unionism to flourish and mild redistributive policies to take place. But look at the unofficial label given to the heyday of Keynesianism – “the Golden Age of Capitalism”. ¹⁸  It was the time when the American Dream in all of its illusionary splendor was at its peak; is it any wonder why one of the 99% Spring’s most prominent backers is Rebuild the Dream, or the Campaign for America’s Future’s upcoming conference is called “Take Back the American Dream”? It is as French economist Guy Sorman argued: “I think that the liberal society needs a welfare state… people will accept the capitalist adventure if there is an indispensible amount of social security.”¹⁹

World systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein once said that “we’ve been living in the wake of 1968 ever since, everywhere.” What Wallerstein was alluding to was the dramatic upheaval that happened across the globe in that year, with a surge of left-wing consciousness and revolutionary mobilization from America to Germany to France and beyond. For a brief moment – particularly as France was paralyzed by widespread wildcat strikes – it looked as if a victory was at hand, but it was not.

Within a handful of years the neoliberal project had begun, and capitalism was launched into its current flexible stage. As deregulation became central legislative policy and free trade agreements interconnected the globe in a myriad of ways, the newly unleashed capitalism also took on a rather curious, almost human appearance. For every public asset auctioned off, more and more “socially aware companies” spring up, for every worker protection removed, a corporation unveils an environmentally sustainable plan of action. For every transnational behemoth, there is a corporation that reworks its caste system into networks of interlocking team members. Slavoj Zizek has written about this phenomenon at length, identifying it as a capitalism tailor-made for the post-’68 world:

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful liberation revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism – a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bill Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. (emphasis in original)²⁰

French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have tackled this problem, drawing directly from the malaise that settled in their country after the revolt of ’68 lost its power. Writing in highly verbose theory-talk, they explain it by appropriating terminology from anthropology – capitalism’s power results in deterritorialization, but this is quickly reterritorialized before the process is complete. ²¹ What this means is that capitalism is destructive in an absolute sense, gobbling up and breaking down nation states, cultures, religion, social structures – all things that result in discontents or other internal tensions that threaten to undermine its functionality. But through “reterritorialization” these tensions are acknowledged and measures are taken to smooth them out, to fix them in way that surplus value can still be extracted from the dominated labor force.

Antonio Gramsci called this the “Passive Revolution”: in order to protect themselves in the long run, the capitalist elite (or certain sectors of the elite, depending on which time of business interests are threatened) bend to measures that seem contrary to their short-term benefits of the system. This is precisely what gives rise to things such as corporate philanthropy or socially aware business models and practices – and this in turn, to put it in Zizek’s words, separates the “basic ideological dispositif of capitalism” (individual greed) from “its concrete socio-economic condition.” ²²  No longer is capitalism bad; it is the people running the corporations that are bad. Capitalism, when purged of those who exploit it, can work for the betterment of all. This paradigm is reiterated by Drummond Pike, the founder and head of the Tides Foundation (a progressive philanthropy that funds many of the 99% Spring organizations), who rebuked charges that he and his colleagues were socialists by saying “Tides may be progressive, but we are enthusiastically American. Were it not for the capitalist system, not a dollar would flow through Tides.” ²³

Of course, the debate being covered here – whether or not the 99% Spring is connected with the Democratic Party – is simply a microcosm of this wider, more theoretical and abstract meditations on the shifting nuances of capitalism. These avenues of analysis do, however, provide important insight into the nature of this latest clash between the haves and have-nots.

Is it undeniable that MoveOn and its cohorts are intricately bound to a specific aspect of the political machine – the “underbelly” where PR firms, communication consultants, and brand imagery collide to build campaigns. Conducting this kind of business requires a widespread manipulation of people’s emotions by crafting images that play on people’s hopes and desires, their fear and distrust. In short, it is a sphere of politics that is based entirely in propaganda of action, aiming to mobilize mass groups across the nation into a voter base. If MoveOn and other promoters of the 99% Spring are connected to this world, immediate suspicion must be cast on their true aspirations.

The question still lingers on their anti-corporatist rhetoric, but as noted above, this does not necessarily contradict the “reterritorializations” of capitalism. During Keynesianism, the state more or less acted as a limiting agent for capital flow; it was antagonist towards capitalism for the benefit of capitalism. The state was subsequently “deterrioralized” through neoliberalism, and now we’re seeing a sort of “return of the state”. It first occurred with the outright rejection of neoliberalism with the slew of bail-outs, and now that a grassroots movement has arisen challenging these perspectives from a leftist point of view, another movement has risen to re-inject the state itself (through its emphasis on electoral politics) into a dialogue that up to this point has been driven instead by classist dispute.

With the demands of anti-corporate, localized capitalism, what is being posed is the idea of the state acting as an arbiter to limit the exponential growth of the neoliberal project. This is not a new idea – limits to capitalist growth was posed in the 1970s by the Club of Rome, a little know yet influential technocratic organization that counted some of the leading financiers and industrialists of its day as members.²⁴  More recently the Club has made some rather interesting recommendations for the future of capitalism, going beyond the idea of limiting growth: “…capitalism needs a reliable frame. It means that the trend since the late 1970s of weakening the state must come to an end and should be reversed.” ²⁵ Intriguingly, some of the founding members of the Club were leaders from the United Auto Workers union, which today is one of the backers of the 99% Spring.

So what happens now? Capitalism, in its neoliberalism form, is broken. The ongoing global financial crises reflect the inherent instability and structural defects of the transnational trade system. A return to Keynesianism and the state power may be a temporary solution, but economic legislation ebbs and flows with the changing of administrations. Keynesianism tomorrow could bring a new stability, but it will be most likely repealed at some point again and neoliberalism will return. There is also no guarantee that Democrats will ever hold to their campaign promise of economic justice; those that were roped into voting for Obama under MoveOn’s image of the senator as the anti-war candidate will tell you that words without action are nothing.

What it boils down to is simply that the question is not over whether to side with the 99% Spring or not, whether to allow co-option to take root and proliferate. The question, in actuality, concerns what kind of change we truly want to see. Is it the world of limited growth capitalism, managed by the state through representative candidates, or is it a brand new world where real democracy is realized, where power is returned to the people and the capitalist system is finally overturned?

1. Herbert Marcuse One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society Routledge Classics, 2002
2. Quoted in Michael Barker “Who Wants a One World Government?” Swans Commentary April 6, 2009
3. “Make a donation” Movement Resource Group
4. Mary Bottari,  “99% Spring has Sprung: Shareholder Actions Underway Across the Country” PRWatch, April 29, 2012 ; Bryan Farrell,  “Conspiracy Theorists takes Swings at Tar Sands Action but Misses” April 25, 2012
5. The following links are to articles criticizing the 99% Spring, as well as its earlier incarnations:  Steve Horn, “MoveOn.org and Friends Attempt to Co-Op Occupy Wall Street”, Truth-Out,  October 11, 2011; Edmund Berger,  “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power”,  Dissident Voice, December 21, 2011;  The Insider, “The Guns That Smoked: 99 Percent Spring: the Latest MoveOn Front for the Democratic Party”, CounterPunch, March 16-18, 2012; The Insider, “Fooled Again? MoveOn’s 99% Spring, Obama, and the Dems in Lock-Step”, CounterPunch, April 12, 2012; Charles M. Young,  “’Front Groups, Not Issues!’ Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud”,  CounterPunch, April 13-15, 2012; Edmund Berger, “Harnessing People Power: Co-Option at Work in America Today”,  Swans Commentary,  April 23, 2012
6. “Nonprofit Quarterly: The 99% Spring is Here: An Interview with Organizer Ai-jen Poo”, Change to Win Strategic Organizing Center, Tuesday, April 10, 2012
7. Podesta, as well as his organization the Center for American Progress, are discussed in my article, “Intervention Mentality and the Spectacle of Joseph Kony”,  Dissident Voice, April 14, 2012
8. “Mission Statement”, Progressive Majority
9. Walt Contreras Sheasby, “George Soros and the Rise of the Neo-Centrists”, Citizine, December, 2003
10. “AFL-CIO Worker’s Voice PAC Summary”,  OpenSecrets
11. Sam Hananel,  “AFL-CIO boosts ground support for Obama, Democrats”,  Yahoo News, March 14, 2012
12. G. William Domhoff,  The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America, Aldine de Gruyter, 1990, pgs. 72-73
13. The role of the AIFLD as an arm of US foreign policy will be covered in my forthcoming book on American democracy promotion.
14. “Speakers at Take Back the American Dream”,  Campaign for America’s Future
15. Arun Gupta,  “How to Rebrand Occupy”,  Truth-out,  April 30, 2012
16. This, curiously, has only been reported on in right-wing media outlets. See Aaron Klein, “Look whose relatives just got a $135.8 Million Energy Loan”, World Net Daily,  October 11, 2011
17. Michael Yates,  “Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists”,  MRZine, October 23, 2011
18. Meghnad Desai,  Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism Verso, 2004 pg. 216
19. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Verso, 2009 pg. 26
20. Ibid., pg. 56
21. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Penguin, 2006. 6th edition
22. Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,  pg. 35
23. Drummond Pike,  “Why does the Right Hate Soros?” Politico,  October 29, 2010
24. The Club of Rome published its recommendations for a reworked capitalist economy in the 1972 book Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Today, one Club of Rome member, David Korten, is the co-founder of Yes! Magazine, which counts Rebuild the Dream founder Van Jones on its advisory board and has also published pro-Rebuild the Dream and 99% Spring material. Korten himself has gone from working with the Ford Foundation and USAID to espousing an anti-corporatist rhetoric on Occupy rallies. See Stuart Jeane Bramhall,  “The Club of Rome and the Sustainability Movement”,  Dissident Voice,  April 21^st, 2012
25. Ernst Ulrich Weizsäcker, Oran R. Young, Matthias Finger (ed.) Limits to Privatization: How to Avoid Too Much of a Good Thing, Earthscan, 2005 pg. 186

A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1987¹

On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.

Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying: “We possess many tools … and using these tools over the past three years, I believe — I know — that we have saved countless lives.” Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the President of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that “today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.” (As I described in last month’s report, Libya could now qualify as a failed state.)

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; “It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.” But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet, I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli-American-Iranian-Holocaust-NobelPeacePrize Circus

It’s a textbook case of how the American media is at its worst when it comes to US foreign policy and particularly when an Officially Designated Enemy (ODE) is involved. I’ve discussed this case several times in this report in recent years. The ODE is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The accusation has been that he had threatened violence against Israel, based on his 2005 remark calling for “wiping Israel off the map”. Who can count the number of times this has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A Lexis-Nexis search of “All News (English)” for for the past seven years produced the message: “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.”

As I’ve pointed out, Ahmadinejad’s “threat of violence” was a serious misinterpretation, one piece of evidence being that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”² Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place remarkably peacefully. But the myth of course continued.

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio-TV simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

Teymoor Nabili: “As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this — they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …”

Dan Meridor: “Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.”

Teymoor Nabili: “Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.”

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC, et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to “wipe it off the map”.

And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier. So until a high Israeli official finally admits that that too is a lie, keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has never said simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we historically know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of various political stripes. In a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”³

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

“Nuclear weapons” is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myth.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: “Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”⁴

Postscript: Each time I strongly criticize Barack Obama a few of my readers ask to unsubscribe. I’m really sorry to lose them but it’s important that those on the left rid themselves of their attachment to the Democratic Party. I’m not certain how best to institute revolutionary change in the United States, but I do know that it will not happen through the Democratic Party, and the sooner those on the left cut their umbilical cord to the Democrats, the sooner we can start to get more serious about this thing called revolution.

Written on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two simple suggestions as part of a plan to save the planet.

1. Population control: limit families to two children

All else being equal, a markedly reduced population count would have a markedly beneficial effect upon global warming, air pollution, and food and water availability; as well as finding a parking spot, getting a seat on the subway, getting on the flight you prefer, and much, much more. Some favor limiting families to one child. Still others, who spend a major part of each day digesting the awful news of the world, are calling for a limit of zero. (The Chinese government announced in 2008 that the country would have about 400 million more people if it wasn’t for its limit of one or two children per couple.⁵

But, within the environmental movement, there is still significant opposition to this. Part of the reason is fear of ethnic criticism inasmuch as population programs have traditionally been aimed at — or seen to be aimed at — primarily the poor, the weak, and various “outsiders”. There is also the fear of the religious right and its medieval views on birth control.

2. Eliminate the greatest consumer of energy in the world: The United States military.

Here’s Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Mass. in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.⁶

The United States military, for decades, with its legion of bases and its numerous wars has also produced and left behind a deadly toxic legacy. From the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the 1960s to the open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, countless local people have been sickened and killed; and in between those two periods we could read things such as this from a lengthy article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times in 1990:

U.S. military installations have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, poured tons of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tons of sulfurous coal smoke into the skies of Central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.⁷

The military has caused similar harm to the environment in the United States at a number of its installations. (Do a Google search for <"U.S. military bases" toxic>)

When I suggest eliminating the military I am usually rebuked for leaving “a defenseless America open to foreign military invasion”. And I usually reply:

“Tell me who would invade us? Which country?”

“What do you mean which country? It could be any country.”

“So then it should be easy to name one.”

“Okay, any of the 200 members of the United Nations!”

“No, I’d like you to name a specific country that you think would invade the United States. Name just one.”

“Okay, Paraguay. You happy now?”

“No, you have to tell me why Paraguay would invade the United States.”

“How would I know?”

Etc., etc., and if this charming dialogue continues, I ask the person to tell me how many troops the invading country would have to have to occupy a country of more than 300 million people.

Yankee karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.

1. Washington Post, March 5, 1987.
2. Associated Press, December 12, 2006.
3. President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Transcript, Washington Post, September 24, 2007.
4. Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference, White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 4, 2012.
5. Washington Post, March 3, 2008.
6. The Pentagon v. Peak Oil, TomDispatch.com, June 14, 2007.
7. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1990.

This is largely because the ultra-right and its antics are alienating a sector of voters who otherwise may have tilted toward the Republicans and will bring to the polls those 2008 Obama supporters who may have stayed home because of disenchantment with the White House record.

Recognizing the conservatives and their Tea Party vanguard have gone too far in openly subverting the needs and security of the American people, Obama has decided to veil his center right political record with progressive populist rhetoric for the remainder of the campaign. He even articulates some Occupy themes — a smart if not entirely convincing stance.

Perhaps the main ingredient in any possible Democratic presidential victory is the labor movement. Without it, Obama’s chances plummet. AFL-CIO, Change to Win and a few independent unions are supplying Democratic candidates with over $400 million this year. Of equal importance, organized labor wants to field an estimated 400,000 campaign workers as well.

For the first time, union members can now ring doorbells in non-union households, which will allow volunteers to reach unprecedented numbers of people. This is one of the only positive aspects of the conservative Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing unlimited campaign contributions.

The corporations and Wall Street will provide the Democrats with more money, but they simply cannot field a fraction of labor’s campaign supporters in the streets and on the phones. At the same time, as we shall discuss in Part 2, the unions not only seek Obama’s reelection but several of them have an equal interest in reaching out independently and joining with social movements in the fight against the 1%. Many of the issues brought up by the Occupy forces and others are long time union issues as well, and the labor movement needs allies.

Of course, all the Democratic constituencies will have to turn out in full force at the polls as well. In addition to union members, this includes African Americans and Latinos, women, younger voters, college graduates, and a not insignificant sector of the 1% campaign funders.

It’s ironic that during Obama’s first term, with Democrats controlling the House and Senate for two years and then the Senate during the last two, the White House has done little for its main supporters, except those of the power elite. The black community, Obama’s most loyal supporters, was completely neglected despite its desperate economic circumstances and high unemployment. Considerable numbers of younger voters, and others as well, of course, were disillusioned by the contradiction between the president’s strong election promises of “change” and  his weak performance in office.

Many union leaders and members are extremely disappointed by the candidate they worked so hard to elect in 2008. Labor was not only ignored since then; aside from occasional tokens of Democratic support it was actually set back several times during the Obama years.

But when the AFL-CIO General Board voted unanimously to endorse President Obama for re-election March 13, its only reference to the casting aside of workers’ interests was one paragraph in a declaration of over-the-top support for the Democrats. It read:

Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more — and do it faster — we have never doubted his commitment to a strong future for working families. With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in the president. We pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity.

What followed was a series of statements and documents virtually lauding every decision the president made since taking office in January 2009, singling out three for special mention:

• He took America from the brink of a second Great Depression by pressing Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which saved or created 3.6 million jobs.

• He championed comprehensive health insurance reform, which — while far from perfect —set the nation on a path toward the health security that had eluded our country for nearly 100 years.

• He insisted upon Wall Street reform — passed over the objection of almost every Republican. Now, we can finally begin to reverse decades of financial deregulation that put our entire economy at risk.

Many labor leaders saw through this, of course. but they are uniting behind Obama to keep the Republicans out of the White House and perhaps make inroads in the right wing-dominated House as well. The destruction of the union movement, after all, is a main objective of the Republican Party.

The unions are much weaker than in past decades. Membership today is down to 11.8%, compared to 35% in 1954. But they remain a huge organization and votes Democratic. The NewYork Times pointed out recently that in 2008 “white blue-collar men voted for John McCain over Mr. Obama by an 18-point margin, but, in large part because of unions’ politicking, white blue-collar men in unions backed Mr. Obama by a 23-point margin.”

Despite the enthusiastic statement of support, the labor movement has been complaining for well over a year, often in public. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka repeatedly suggested last year that labor wasn’t getting its due and that the unions should seriously consider taking a more independent stance toward the Democrats.

It was expected the key union leaders would silence dissent during the election year, but they have been unable to mask their irritation as the Obama Administration has taken one anti-union step after another in recent weeks and months.

For example, the JOBS bill, passed in mid-April by Congress and signed with enthusiasm by President Obama, doesn’t create jobs. The acronym stands for “Jumpstart Our Business Start- Ups Act,” and it’s a gift to one constituency — the wealthy contributors of Silicon Valley’s tech industry — at the expense of another, the labor movement. The legislation was the creature of  Obama’s corporate-controlled Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  The bill will greatly benefit big business and Wall St.

Trumka, one of the two labor members of the 24-person blue ribbon 1% panel, thundered:

We are disappointed — and angry — that despite warnings from current and former financial markets regulators, law professors, institutional investors and consumer advocates, 73 senators voted for the cynically named ‘JOBS Act’…. This is a vote against investors in the real economy and for Wall Street speculators. When the next bubble bursts, Americans will know who to blame.

And then there’s the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which was engineered in April by President Obama in Colombia and will go into effect May 15. Obama characterized what has been called a “little NAFTA” as a “win-win” for both countries and an expression of support for the besieged Colombian labor movement.  More union organizers have been murdered in Colombia than anywhere else in the world. Two dozen were killed last year alone.

United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard denounced the agreement, charging that it allows the Colombian government to continue “its shameful distinction as the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist.” He suggested Obama’s guarantee about enhanced safety for Colombian union organizers was mistaken. Trumka called the compact “deeply disappointing and troubling.”

Leaders of the Colombian labor movement joined Trumka in this statement:

The underlying trade agreement perpetuates a destructive economic model that expands the rights and privileges of big business and multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. The agreement uses a model that has historically benefited a small minority of business interests, while leaving workers, families, and communities behind.

This is just the latest. In February Congress and Obama approved a bill funding the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over union objections. The legislation also weakened bargaining rights for workers in the aviation and rail industries by increasing from 35% to 50% the number of worker signatures required to allow an election for union recognition. It wasn’t even necessary to pass the measure at all. FAA re-authorization has been extended for the last four years by temporary funding, and could have been continued until the labor restrictions were excised.  Labor howled again, to no avail as usual.

In fact, Obama has reneged on nearly all his 2008 campaign promises to the unions, such as his pledge to fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would have removed onerous limitations on labor organizing going back many decades. Trade unions have been fighting unsuccessfully for relief the whole time.

The White House also didn’t act on labor’s call for the administration to create 25 million full-time jobs. Obama ignored a promise to hike the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. He didn’t, as he vowed, renegotiate NAFTA. He strengthened the Patriot Act after insisting in 2008 that he would get rid of it. He didn’t fight for safety and health standards for workers. The White House supports cutbacks in postal services that are strongly opposed by labor.

The list of Democratic dismissals of labor’s priorities — to placate the right wing and satisfy Wall St., corporate and wealthy backers — contains many more examples. And as far as the AFL-CIO’s three favorite Obama moves are concerned — jobs, health insurance and Wall St. reform — they stand as their own refutation. Each of these “victories” was worked out and compromised beforehand in negotiations with insurance companies, corporations and the financial industry.

This is only part of the story. Several key unions are beginning to engage independently with various movements for social change, mainly on economic issues. Labor is hardly united on this matter, but it’s a development worth watching.

Clearly, thinking outside the box is not how our system deals with serious issues.  When having lunch with fellow educators and arguing about the crimes, especially against the Constitution and on war,  of both the Bush and Obama administrations, my frustration is palpable.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republicans enjoy being in the box whereas the Democrats don’t even know they’re in one.

On issues of war and economics, the Republicans and many Democrats I talk with clearly support the idea  that the US is a world economic power and needs to maintain it in any way they can.  They might acknowledge the wrongs committed but see it as necessary.  OK, that’s where dialog comes in.  My partisan Democratic friends, especially in the teachers’ lounge of my school, are simply oblivious to the wrongs or come up with every conceivable way of minimizing it or laying blame elsewhere. The most common response to the economic disaster that we’re in due to Obama’s Wall Street cabinet is that the Republicans won’t let him do what needs to be done. Another gem is that in politics you can’t always get what you campaign on and its corollary, the political climate is not ripe for what you’re asking.

Bush controlled the Congress. Obama is certainly the antithesis. He punted every major decision to them. Whether it be health care or Don’t Ask, President Obama relinquished the bully pulpit for the collaborative approach of having the other arm of government have a role, but in most cases, the only role.  If only President Obama, when he was elected with an American-style mandate, and with a Democrat-controlled Congress, were to have rallied the pro-Single Payer (Medicare for All) populous, a majority of Americans, for universal health care, it would have passed over both Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress.  He simply could have equated the health insurance industry with the likes of Al Qaeda.  Who would have had kind words for, or dare to come out and defend, the insurance industry? If not Single Payer, then at a minimum, a public option would be the law today, paving the way for universal coverage.  But President Obama preferred the box that we’re in. Yes, I’m implying that he falls within the Republican view of the box theory since he earlier sided with the industry by giving them what they wanted, and no public option, as long as they didn’t pull a Harry and Louise on him.

Missing in the dialog is acknowledgment of reality.  “No we’re not in a Police State because we’re not living like under Nazi Germany.”  True, unless you’re an undocumented alien or whistle blower- military or civilian-, where you’ll be tonight or tomorrow is likely known.  The drone war, supported by a majority of ‘progressives’ in America, is just a way of achieving a military solution without requiring the presence of American boots on the ground.  Rachel Maddow’s all for it so it must be the progressive thing to do when it’s done by a Democrat in the White House.  “Why make a case of habeas corpus?  Abraham Lincoln suspended it and thank God for him. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”

What is the ‘box’?: the capitalist economy. With it comes imperial wars for others’ natural resources (Why is our oil under their sand?); support for military coups against democratically elected governments (Honduras and the Maldives); support for apartheid regimes and theocracies in the Middle East yet mouthing praise for the Arab Spring, as long as it’s in the ‘right’ countries; wages far below needs; reform of health insurance but not health care reform; homelessness and foreclosures when vacant houses, owned by banks and local governments, sit idle; public education under severe attack by both Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize it, bust the unions, and, of course, blame the teachers for not increasing test scores that have no baring of the real learning that is taking place; for-profit prison population booming (especially for the undocumented being prepared for deportation); etc.

Electoral reform is certainly needed to remove the box of capitalism from discussions on solving our problems. As it stands, it is virtually impossible for a variety of Third Parties to have ballot access in every state. There’s too much of a fear that it would cause the demise, in particular, of the Democratic Party. After all, if their platform isn’t marketable and another’s is, then they would go the way of Betamax.  The Republicans can stay as the legitimate 1% Party; the Democrats would do best to merge with them. How can we have electoral reform when states like Virginia require a 10,000-signature petition (not terribly difficult, but onerous) yet require a minimum of 400 in each county? Can you imagine that many supporting a Socialist party in Pat Robertson’s neck of the woods?

Dialog on issues can work as long as there is a recognition of reality and ownership of responsibility for why things are as they are. Without it,  it’s status quo.  Your everyday, typical Republican, on matters of war and economics, needs to see how the system is not working for them, except for those in a minority that it does.  Democratic partisans and Obama die-hard supporters need to truly question their values and principles and objectively see if their party truly stands by it, or equivocates to the point of non-recognition of the principles.  Maybe easier said  than done but the box remains strong, or invisible, as long as thinking remains stagnant.

This last, the encultured view of ourselves, robs us of our class identity. Very few of us consider ourselves working class. The term has been made to seem a musty relic of the nineteenth century, synonymous with lower class, a disreputable band of losers who are to be feared and perhaps pitied, but certainly not to be identified with. Instead we are offered a hierarchy of many classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, and last and certainly least, the lumpen lower. Within these we are fragmented further by conflicting differences: ethnic, religious, gender, life style. We’re supposed to identify with our niche and our job and to strive to move up or at least not slip down in the hierarchy. But more and more of us are slipping down, losing the few securities we had. In our bewildered anger we find allies only within our isolated niche, so our struggles are ineffective.

Almost all of us are, in fact, working class. Everyone in the world who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class. Only when we join together in solidarity will we succeed.

The elite have also fragmented us geographically. The most exploited are far away from the centers of power and thus invisible to us except for media images of illegal aliens storming our borders or insurgents attacking our soldiers. They live under the heel of authoritarian governments held in power by the rich nations and are forced to work under deplorable conditions. The wealth extracted from their labor has enabled the corporations to pay their employees in the home country better wages, thus minimizing discontent here and stimulating consumption of their products.

That economic arrangement is changing, however, as global competition intensifies. Selling in the world market has become more important than selling in the home country. Competing globally requires low prices, so corporations are slashing wages and benefits. The international working class is being leveled. Our task now is to unite and overthrow the elite that rules us all.

This elite is composed of many nationalities and has many internal conflicts. They even make war on each other when economics demands it. But they always recognize their overriding interests as a class, and they will do everything in their considerable power to defend those interests. We, the workers of the world, need to recognize and defend our own class interests with as much determination as our rulers.

They have designed a political system in the USA that ensures their power monopoly. The candidates of both major parties represent their interests. Through corporate financing, winner-take-all elections, ballot-access laws, and slanted media coverage, they effectively exclude alternatives.

To break free of their political control and build genuine democracy, we must delegitimize in particular the Democratic Party, which exists to channel potentially radical discontent into dead-end streets. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements, capturing people’s hopes for fundamental changes, then burying them. It produces only superficial reforms that strengthen capitalism.

Each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. Just being angry at the system isn’t enough. Unless we are organized and militant, a viable alternative to the capitalist parties won’t emerge. The best program I’ve found is the Socialist Equality Party’s .

Labor unions, like the Democratic Party, have become merely reformist. They have been purged of any anti-capitalist leadership and now serve the same function on the economic front that the Democrats serve on the political front: to convince the working class to accept the dictates of capital. Union leadership collaborates with employers to worsen the conditions of their members. They have become functionaries of capitalism and are richly rewarded for it. Workers are going to have to build an independent base of power that will throw out this bureaucracy and militantly confront bosses worldwide.

The reformism pushed by the Democratic Party and the labor unions is reinforced by the liberal media. They foster the idea that the system is basically good but just has some problems that need to be fixed. This is appealing because it’s easy. Instead of revolution to replace the system, we just need to repair it.

Reforms have in the past improved a few conditions. Social Security helped stave off abject poverty in old age, and Medicare helped protect a family’s savings from catastrophic health costs. From the 1950s to the ’70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. But these hard-fought reforms are being reversed now because of capitalism’s need to reduce prices to compete with emerging industrial powers such as China and India. The pressure of international competition is being shifted on to us, the workers, and the Democrats and unions are implementing that. In this new economic reality, reformism has become a coward’s dream, a way of avoiding the unpleasantness of protracted struggle. We need to abandon its delusion and prepare to fight for fundamental changes that will replace oligarchic capitalism with democratic socialism.

Another thread that binds us is the image of socialism that has been burned into our brains. We are continually persuaded that it means brutal dictatorship, concentration camps, no freedom, a slave state. To counter this, we need to criticize the regimes of the Soviet Union and China and point out that they weren’t socialist. The totalitarian tradition in their cultures and constant attack by the capitalist nations kept them from achieving anything close to real socialism. In many cases the government took over as the exploitative boss, and the workers had little power. Real socialism means economic democracy, where we decide together how our economic life will be organized. It puts the resources and productive capacity of the world in the hands of its people, who use them to meet human needs rather than to generate private profits for a few owners.

We are educated to serve the system: to be obedient, to respect authority, to fit into a hierarchy. We are channeled into learning skills the corporations need, and our labor has become just another commodity. Our deepest interests and talents often remain undeveloped, unrecognized even by ourselves. This won’t change until students, parents, teachers, and other workers come together and educate one another to take power.

The mass media exist to control the masses by shaping our perceptions of reality. The pap they feed us switches off our brains, so we can’t analyze society as a system. Instead of thought, we are offered a dazzling array of personal emotions and sensory stimulation to distract us from the bleak reality of our lives.

Through entertainment and news the media fixates us on physical violence, so we don’t perceive the structural violence that causes it. We get lurid, fear-arousing accounts of violence committed by ghetto youths and Muslim guerrillas accompanied with commentaries calling for tough measures to combat these vicious berserkers. We get no accounts of the structural violence of poverty and oppression that capitalism and imperialism have created there. It’s this built-in structural violence that generates the physical violence.

The corporate media exists also to stimulate greed and consumption. Capitalism divides us from one another, and the isolation imposed by this false separation generates insecurity and a sense of incompleteness. It creates hollow personalities craving to fill an inner emptiness, then it comes to the rescue by promising satisfaction through consumption. First it causes the void, then convinces us to fill it with things — beautiful, fascinating, stimulating, extraordinary, sexy things. Lots of them. And so much the better that they never really fill our needs, because then we need more of them.

Dissident Voice and other alternative publications are awaking people from the stupor induced by this mainstream propaganda. They deserve our support.

To escape from the mental manipulation, we must strive for inner self sufficiency so we won’t need all that garbage the media is selling us. This self sufficiency has its basis in our shared humanity, and if we tune in to that, the superficial substitutes of commercial products and entertainment will lose their appeal. A good way to combat such conditioning is a consumer strike. Buy as little as possible. Turn off the television. By overcoming our need for entertainment, we can develop our own authentic creativity. When we’re not consuming as much, the planet will breathe a sigh of relief. Instead of hiding behind fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics, let’s face the world as we are and let the beauty of our defiance show.

The media creates images and myths that reinforce the existing ideologies. Rugged individualism, for example, validates the “every man for himself” ethos of capitalism. The belief that we are isolated beings striving for our own gratification is an axiom of our society. Men are particularly enamored of it, taught to identify with the mountain man, the lone wolf, the entrepreneur.

The separations between people are easy to see: each of us inhabit a different body. Our connections are much more fundamental, but they are invisible, so a shallow culture like ours doesn’t perceive them. We can overcome this by centering ourselves in our connectedness and acting from it. In our lives and in our art we can demonstrate the deeper commonality that underlies our surface separations. Our genuine individuality can be best developed within this context.

Reinforcing traditional masculinity is one of the chief ways in which the elite seek to keep the working class on its side. They exploit the fact that many men cling to maleness as the last power left to them. Working-class men have almost no say over their work lives; machismo has become their only realm of agency. This is exploited by elements of the media, who portray leftists as intent on rendering traditional males extinct. Admittedly, there’s a grain of truth in this. Traditions of dominance and aggression, whether practiced by men or women, need to be resisted. The real attack on working class men, though, is coming not from leftists but from economic forces that are increasingly constricting their lives and limiting their possibilities down to low paying, exhausting jobs. The rage this generates in them is deflected by the media towards leftists, feminists, and minorities, who are actually the core opposition to those economic forces.

We need to show traditional men that socialism will give them economic security and power in the work place. When they have that, they won’t need to dominate their wives and children. If they persist in doing so, society has to prevent them from that. The dominator mentality is a pathology we must overcome.

Gender politics by itself won’t build socialism. In fact, in many cases it ends up serving capitalism. But gender studies can help break the patriarchal mold that keeps producing the same authoritarian personality type. It opens up new possibilities and fosters psychological diversity. By showing that our categories of feminine and masculine aren’t natural but cultural, it calls into question the naturalness of other institutions. It helps us see that capitalism also is not an inherent necessity but rather a product of social forces open to change. Gender subversion can lead to political subversion.

The enforcement mechanisms of society — military, police, and courts — are the bottom line of oppression. All three are licensed to kill and do so regularly. The military are the spear carriers of capitalism. Their job is to defend and expand the empire, and they slaughter millions for that goal. The police live up to their motto, To Protect and To Serve, but they are primarily protecting and serving an oppressive social structure, defending property and its owners against attacks by the deprived. The courts are run by judges who are for the most part members of the elite. They are the final arbiters of punishment, locking up anyone who threatens the system, primarily poor minorities. They have created an American gulag, an egregious, ever-growing prison-industrial complex that crushes those who dare defy its rules.

We need to show the soldiers and police they are workers too. We all have the same basic interests and the same common enemy: their employer. If we win enough of them to our side, they will stand with us rather than against us when a revolutionary situation develops. Winning the judges to our side is unlikely. Most of them are ruling class. We’ll probably just have to find some socially useful work for them, like sweeping the sidewalks.

Our rulers (yes, we really do have rulers) try to convince us that there’s no solution to humanity’s problems, no alternative to the way things are now. This is human nature. Get used to it.

Fortunately the international working class is refusing to get used to it. It is resisting this new wave of impoverishment the corporations and their governments are trying to force onto it. Our bound Gulliver is starting to awaken. It knows now it is fettered and is testing its strength against these bonds. In some places it has already broken a few. The rule of the Lilliputians is coming to an end. This won’t happen quickly, though. A long struggle lies ahead of us. But the tide has changed and is now running in our favor.

The uprising began in the Muslim world because they are under the most direct imperialist attack. It has spread to the NATO countries, the chief instigators of the attacks, because their populations are having to pay the bills for this war through social cutbacks and lower wages. As the uprising spreads globally, the elite will do everything they can to crush it. They will try to divide us and make us fight one another. They will offer tempting reforms and compromises that will allow them to maintain ownership. They will bribe some of our opportunistic leaders with promises of token power if they cooperate. They will jail us. They will even kill some of us. But if we persist, holding to a militant rather than a reformist course, we will eventually free ourselves of them and build a system that emphasizes the humane in humanity. This is our time, a historic battle for liberation.

They also try to scare us into voting for him by claiming a Republican president would be much worse. In fact the differences between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a matter of image and style. Their military policies are equally aggressive, and their economic policies differ only in nuances. But the Democrats put a friendly face on their administration of capital. Their rhetoric is sprinkled with populist slogans as they’re bailing out banksters and dropping bombs.

The more blatant style of a Republican president might actually be better now because it would generate more opposition at home and abroad. This opposition needs to build into militant resistance before it will produce real change. To prevent this sort of uprising was one of the reasons the corporate elite backed Obama. And until recently he’s succeeded in quieting dissent. With masterful PR legerdemain, he put the antiwar movement to sleep while continuing to fight the wars. Under a Republican president we could revive the spirit of revolt and mobilize the people of the world against the empire. It’s going to take that kind of international struggle to overthrow this colossus.

Another strategy of deception is to claim that the good old days of middle-class prosperity can be brought back. Both major parties say their policies will restore high employment at good wages. But those times are gone. Those were the conditions in the prior, Keynesian phase of capitalism, when the main market for products was the home country. Wage increases were tolerated then because they stimulated consumption. Now the market is global, and corporations face severe competition from emerging industrial powers such as China and India, which have far lower labor costs. To compete with their prices, US and European corporations must slash wages and benefits. If they are to maintain long-term dominance, they must also extend their hold on essential resources. Control over Mideast oil and a pipeline through Afghanistan aren’t just things they’d like to have. They need them to hold on to their power in the present consolidation phase of capitalism, when the less effective predators are eliminated and wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer giant corporations. The system demands they impoverish their workers and kill millions of people. Capitalism is inherently aggressive and predatory, and this intensifies in its later stages. Reforms can’t change its basic nature.

In addition to pushing reformism, the liberal media portray the economic crisis as being a problem of distribution. The 99% have too little, the 1% have too much, so the 1% should be taxed and regulated so the rest of us get a fair share. This sounds good, and it has elected a string of Democrats who talk about it while loyally serving the interests of the 1%.

The core problem is not distribution but ownership. If forced to, the 1% will accept higher taxation and regulation, as long as they maintain ownership. With the economic power in their hands, they can reverse the taxes and regulations later, as we have seen.

The only fair share is an equal share for everyone. To achieve that we must take the means of production — the natural resources, factories, banks, and major corporations — away from the 1% and use them for the benefit of us all.

The 99% doesn’t need a bigger piece of the pie. We need to own the pie. We planted the seeds for the pie, tilled and harvested them, ground the flour, cut the sugar cane, churned the butter, bake the pie, delivered it to the store, rang up the sale, and made the owners rich. It’s our pie! But we’re going to have to take it back.

We’re not going to do that through liberal regulations and reforms that leave ownership in the hands of the 1%. And we’re also not going to do it through a dictatorship such as the Soviet Union or China. Those societies had no tradition of democracy, so they kept their totalitarian character. We however can build a democratic, decentralized form of socialism.

The first step towards that is to free ourselves from the strategies of deception with which the oligarchs try to shape our minds. The second is to join with others in active struggle. Just being angry isn’t enough; to succeed we must be organized and militant. Dissident Voice is a resource for both these steps.

Such a reality, though, seemingly matters little to the federation, as it readies to embark on its largest political effort to date.  As the Los Angeles Times reports, the AFL-CIO plans to mobilize a total of 400,000 volunteers in the coming year to assist in the president’s reelection.  (The federation mobilized 250,000 volunteers back in 2008.)  And in all, the federation expects to spend upwards of $400 million on its electoral efforts.

When asked in a recent interview with In These Times just how the federation plans to mobilize such a formidable army of volunteers with widespread disillusionment hanging over working class voters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka quickly moved to defend Mr. Obama.  As Mr. Trumka stated:

First, let me start off by saying this: Sometimes we have disagreed with the president on strategy, but I know one thing, he’s a friend of the 99 percent. That is what I know for sure.

But some “friend” Mr. Obama has proven to be.  After all, the president extended the Bush tax cuts; he signed the Colombian, Panamanian and South Korean free trade agreements; and he left the Employee Free Choice Act (labor’s biggest ask) to wither and die in the Congress.  In other words, he repeatedly sided with the proverbial one percent and against his labor “friends.”

Moreover, despite promising to “walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America” while campaigning in 2007, Mr. Obama has remained conspicuously muted as workers have engaged in fights against anti-union legislation in statehouses the nation over.

But perhaps most damning of all, as longshoremen in Longview, Washington struggled to prevent an international conglomerate from breaking their long-held jurisdiction earlier this year, the president sided with management by readying to send in the Coast Guard against the workers. (The Longview dispute settled before it came to any such confrontation, with the longshoremen ultimately preserving their jurisdiction.  Although, it should be noted, with no help from Mr. Trumka, who chose not to insert himself into the struggle.)

For Mr. Trumka and the national labor bureaucracy, though, the glass is apparently always half full when it comes to the Democrats.  In describing the president’s record to In These Times, Mr. Trumka fawned:

Look at the things he has done. Look at where he has been, fighting for the American Jobs Act, extending unemployment insurance, recess appointments to the NLRB to keep it going. He has been fighting hard for working people, and we applaud that.

In addition to Mr. Trumka’s personal tribute, the AFL-CIO even went to the trouble of preparing an entire document touting all the president’s so-called accomplishments, which was published on their website Tuesday.  The list of accomplishments—at times reading more like a case against the president than for him—includes some rather meager feats.  For example, the list includes amongst the president’s accomplishments: his pledge to continue fighting for the American Jobs Act, along with his willingness to highlight the nation’s growing wealth inequality, witnessed in his speech made in Osawatomie, Kansas last year.  The latter, of course, came well after Occupy Wall Street had already swept the country.

Nothing is perhaps more indicative of the bankrupt nature of the AFL-CIO leadership than the fact that such nonsense can be presented to its membership as motivation for the coming election.

Moreover, the dead American Jobs Act—which the AFL-CIO for some reason believes the president is still actively fighting for—was a rather flawed proposal to begin with.  After all, sandwiched within the act was yet another payroll tax “holiday,” to be paid for by raiding the Social Security Trust Fund.  (Unsurprisingly, President Obama mustered the political will to push this part of his jobs plan through the Congress.)

All such Social Security “reforms,” however, only serve to gradually decouple the program’s funding from the Trust Fund and further tie it to the general revenue stream.  Needless to say, this only opens the door for a future “crisis” and thus future cuts.  Or, to put it differently, it paves the way for President Obama to “save” Social Security in his second term by slashing benefits and raising the retirement age.  And lest one doubt, the AFL-CIO shall be there to tout all of this as a great accomplishment from their man in the White House.

And then there is Mr. Obama’s disastrous imperial foreign policy, which can hardly be considered much in the way of “fighting hard for working people.”  All wars, one ought to inform the leadership at the AFL-CIO, are class wars.  But we should not be surprised here, for the AFL-CIO has a long and wretched history of supporting American imperialism.

In the end, then, the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of President Obama and its overall political strategy for 2012 is merely a continuation of an age-old racket.  For the national labor leadership is once again readying to deliver the union vote to the Democratic Party—its trumpeted great “friend.”

Therefore, it ought to be increasingly clear that the only path toward building an independent national labor movement lies not only in freedom from the Democratic Party, but also in freedom from the opportunist leadership residing atop the AFL-CIO.  A good start in this regard would be to refuse conscription into the federation’s army of Democratic campaign volunteers soon set to deploy.

The laws were simply left in place. The rulers of Egypt and Syria, content with their power, decided to concede nothing to their citizens. Tens of thousands of people found themselves imprisoned for extended periods of time, simply for demanding the principles of democracy already encoded in their constitutions or being critical of the government. The emergency laws provided these autocratic regimes with the authority to force their will onto to their people without opposition.

Under a president deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, the will of the authoritarian tyrant caste is being written permanently into American law.

H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the Senate and receiving only three negative votes in the House, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.

These laws would have made Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights luminaries felons subject to indefinite detention.
When, and if, demonstrators get released from incarceration, they will continue to suffer the long-term legal consequences termed by prisoner-rights advocates as “civil death.” Felons are barred from multitude vocations, associating with certain people or even living in particular areas, ineligible to serve on a jury or receive government assistance, and even denied the right to elect their own public servants. As of 2008, over 5.3 million people in the United States are currently left without the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement. A sure-fire way of controlling political opposition is to deny it the ability to participate in political life.

Restricted areas spoken of in HR347, interpreted under existing law and court precedents, include any “building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.” This definition, kept intentionally broad and vague, allows anti-protest measures to be applied at the whim of the political elite. Already in Chicago, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel presides over crippling restrictions on public activity brought as a result of the upcoming NATO conference—and the simultaneous anti-globalization protests—on May 20-21st, 2012.

While the laws were called a temporary response to the G8 summit taking place in Chicago alongside the NATO conference, the Obama White House made a last minute decision to move G8 to the presidential compound at Camp David, a restricted military installation. The laws in Chicago will remain. Draconian laws enacted in the name of national defense in the Other Civil War are nothing new.

On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency due to the terrorist attacks of three days earlier. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the President to renew this state of emergency on an annual basis if he wishes it to remain in effect; Bush renewed it every year he was in office and Obama has continued the trend.

The United States has been in a declared state of national emergency for the last 11 years.

According to Harold Relyea, a specialist working for the American government in the Congressional Research Service, the president “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

Combined with Patriot Act measures enacted by Congress under George W. Bush and extended by Obama, these laws provide a framework of surveillance and control only dreamed of in some Orwellian nightmare.

The nature of neoliberal globalization virtually ensures that fascist cartels will force their monopolies onto unwilling nations or unknowing populations; plurilateral agreements like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, are created in secret by leaders of a select handful of the wealthiest countries and designed with the intention of forcing them upon developing nations. ACTA includes provisions that profoundly restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy. It also severely restricts generic drug creation and use in underdeveloped countries. They are nonnegotiable.

Kader Arif, the European parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA, resigned from his position in January 2012 denouncing the treaty “in the strongest possible manner” for having “no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, [and] exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in [the] assembly,” concluding with his intent to “send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation” and refusal to “take part in this masquerade.”

As with other undemocratic measures being passed around the world, HR 347/S1794 is a ruthless and reactionary law designed to eliminate political and economic dissent.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It is little wonder that HR 347/S1794 has been called by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), one of only three members of Congress to vote against the bill, the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act.” While the NDAA seeks to remove your 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights, this newest attack on self-determination is aimed at the heart of 1st Amendment rights including Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom to Petition.

The Supreme Court ruled in Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 318 (1988), that protesting outside an embassy was worthy of Constitutional protection, recognizing that freedom of speech, even if it may interfere with normal governmental activity “reflects a ‘profound national commitment’ to the principle” and “‘debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”

While the right to free speech, assembly, and the petition of grievances is enshrined in the US Constitution, the right of government to conduct its business without dissent is not.

In 1783, twenty-four year old William Pitt, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was petitioned to change the law based on the “necessity” to save the East India Company from bankruptcy. His reply was brief.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

The arguments of a tyrannical Congress would have you believe that HR 347/S1794 is a necessity, that demonstrations against the actions of government and business cause it undue hardship. While the government’s ability to permissibly restrict expressive conduct is limited by reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, the restrictions must, by law, be narrowly tailored to prevent unconstitutional adversity.

HR 347/S1794 flagrantly violates the First Amendment, since it is a broad and sweeping restriction based particularly on political speech in a public forum and not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.

Of course, the crypto-fascists in Congress will argue that protecting themselves from the sight of the “unwashed masses” is a compelling state interest. They wouldn’t be incorrect. The nature of power is self-preserving; by surrounding themselves with a no-free-speech zone, the State can continue its self-congratulatory paternalism, content in the false knowledge that they’re “looking out for the little guy.”

The unconstitutional socio-political deprivation embedded in these authoritarian anti-Occupy laws would arguably be unfeasible without an almost complete blackout by mass media.

Media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role in the ability of police-state measures to pass. Where is the outrage over the state of emergency laws that have gripped this country for almost a dozen years? How can unelected bankers wrest power from leaders in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, while the rest of the world fumbles with “austerity measures” to save their own necks? Consolidation of the global commercial media system can be easily linked to deregulation in the name of neoliberal “progress.” That deregulation—and the resulting monopoly that keeps alternate news sources like Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English off the air—has allowed only capitalist rhetoric to flourish.

The business interests that control the mainstream media are the same that control the United States government. They will allow no dissent as they continue their war on liberty.

American anarchist Noam Chomsky, long known for his critiques of U.S. policy, has often written about the “manufacture of consent,” something propaganda maven (and Freud nephew) Edward Bernays happily called the art of manipulating people. In his criticism of the global commercial media system, Chomsky posits that mass media, as a profit-driven institution, tends to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups over the social well-being of entire societies. His writing firmly rejects the kinds of censorship that HR 347/S1794 proposes.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

What does this mean for us? Simply put, this is not a battle of the Left versus the moderate Right. This is a direct attack on the United States Constitution, a charter written expressly to limit the government’s power over its citizens.

This is a war of the authoritarian oligarchy upon the principles of democracy.

Around the world, the working and middle classes have risen up against the duplicity of their governments, the engineering of political realities by corporate interests, and the social stratification enforced by capitalist exploitation. In the United States, both Occupy Wall Street and the libertarian wing of the Tea Party have demonstrated against the excesses of the US federal government. These protests, however, have been relatively small compared to the injustice being perpetrated upon the American people.

Organized labor has tried to make up for their decline in membership and economic power in recent years by abandoning any pretense of non-partisan organizing and pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues money into the campaigns of Democrats. The opponents of organized labor are allowed to paint it as a partisan special interest group in the pocket of the Democratic Party. This has proven to be the case for far too long. The Democrats, in turn, have taken labor’s vote as a matter of course and done little to advance the political agenda of the working class. The vast majority of workers who remain outside of traditional unions see no use in joining one; management sees suppression of organization as just another cost of doing business. A return of radical unionization, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World call to organize the entire working class into One Big Union to abolish the wage system, would do much to stop the pitting of worker against worker, allowing for people over profit, cooperation over competition. The Preamble to the IWW Constitution still reflects this.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

Organized labor can, and should be, a force to reckon with. It cannot do so, however, as long as it continues to blindly support a party that has forgotten the farmers, laborers, labor unions, and minorities that have made up its traditional base. Regardless of whether organized labor feels it must undergo a transitional program from capitalism to participatory economics, it must divorce itself from unwavering allegiance to the Democrats. Labor would be more effective supporting individual politicians who promote a working class agenda, whether they are Green Party, Libertarians, Social Democrats, or independents.

Civil libertarian organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Center for Constitutional Rights have a long history of defending the inalienable rights retained by—as opposed to privileges granted to—citizens of the United States under the Constitution. As nonpartisan organizations, they have the ability to denounce legislators of any camp for transgressions of civil liberties. It is expected that they will use test cases to undermine the illegal laws being propagated by the political elite; as part of a diversity of tactic, these kinds of cases should be applauded, even as the larger movement forges ahead with broader goals. Embracing different tactics allows radical proponents of liberty and democracy to work with mainstream advocacy groups to advance our larger strategy in accordance with our common goals. The Saint Paul Principles provide a framework for that cooperation without sectarian breakdown.

The fiscal conservatives, moderates, and libertarians who make up the Republican base have seen the party of Lincoln hijacked by social conservatives like Leo Strauss, who said the “crisis of our time” was a “permissive egalitarianism” embedded in liberal democracy and neoconservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who prompted Reagan to give financial and material support to pro-Western authoritarian regimes.

Libertarians and fiscal conservatives have little in common with the state-enforced conservative social policies pushed by the religious right wing that seems to dominate the Republican Party. The interventionist war machine driven by neoconservative thought—to say nothing of the government intrusion into privacy via the Patriot Act, REAL ID, and NSA domestic spying program—runs contrary to principles of state sovereignty and self-determination held in high esteem by traditional conservatism, principles that Thomas Paine instilled into American body politic under the phrase “Common Sense.”

As encroachments on personal privacy and individual liberties continue, both the Democratic and Republican parties have forgotten their base: the working and middle class.

Communist Karl Marx borrowed the term “proletariat” as a description for the working class from the Ancient Roman Empire, whose rulers believed the only contribution the masses could make to Roman society was the ability to raise children to colonize new territories. The crypto-fascist authority today, encompassing both the Democratic and Republican Parties, continues this view; to capitalists, workers are not individuals but only the rungs of a ladder designed to lift them higher on the pyramid scheme of capitalist economics.

The time has come for the American middle and working classes to join their comrades in the campaign for liberty currently sweeping the globe.

H.R. 347/S1794, rightly nicknamed the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act,” has been passed by both chambers of Congress. It now sits on President Obama’s desk, awaiting his signature. If his capitulation to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012—and its promise of indefinite detention—is any indication of his future action, he’ll sign it.

This issue transcends traditional party politics. Political opposition will be outlawed immediately. Pro-life rallies will effectively end with ban on public demonstrations, as well as pro-choice demonstrations. The government will not hesitate to prohibit any and all organizations it defines as dissenting or subversive, including alternative parties, labor unions, veterans’ associations, and others. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party can both kiss the promise of reforming government goodbye.

Congress has already declared America a battleground. They now want to silence us. It is time to bring the battle home.

The U.S. Congress has an approval rating of less than 10%. Greedy, unprincipled billionaires own virtually all of the wealth of the nation, and pay a lower percentage for taxes than the poorest worker. We imprison a greater percent of our population than any nation on earth. We spend more on vicious, unwarranted wars than the 15 top military spending countries combined. We are the greatest purveyor of murder and destruction internationally than anyone else.

Our public school system is under attack, and becoming obsolete. A college degree has become so expensive as to be unavailable to middle class families. The safety net for the old and infirm is being torn asunder. Our immigration policies are so degrading and inhumane that there is a mass exodus from the U.S. by peoples who used to flock here. Health care is a national disgrace, and is fast becoming unaffordable to any person in need of hospitalization. Homeland Security looks more like the German Gestapo every day.

The list of failures and problems facing the country is unparalleled, and the public knows it. Everything from cartoons to serious news shows bemoan the catastrophic decline in this country’s standard of living, and recognize the incompetence and inhumanity of those in power. This is so, even though the public media is little more than a propaganda tool for the oligarchy.

What is the most astonishing fact, though, is that there are no candidates or possibilities for new leadership on the horizon anywhere! Obama is the best of the pack of wolves and thieves who are actively destroying this nation. 95% of those in Congress who are running for re-election are are  certain to retain their status. How in the world is that possible? Any rational person would expect the electorate to throw these pandering,  posturing politicians  out on their keesters, and elect a set of representatives who would radically change the picture. But instead, we are about to re-affirm the failed, dying programs that have transformed this country into a  violent, disrespected second-rate nation. What a contradiction in logic and reality!

What kind of national pathology is causing the electorate to allow the oligarchy to engage in this unadulterated rush to destroy everything of value in this country? Like lemmings, rushing into the sea to commit suicide, the voters will once again endorse the same fools who have immobilized Congress for decades, will do nothing to control a run-away Pentagon, and its maniacal weapons manufacturers, and will accept Wall Street’s unregulated destruction of our wealth and resources. There is simply no rational explanation for the inability of the American people to find alternatives to the elected gangsters who bow to every billionaire that comes before them.

It is apparent that the voting public in the U.S. feels so disenfranchised from the process that it has for all intents left the spoils to the thieves. By abandoning any process by which there can be meaningful change in the policies of this government, the people have accepted the fact that there are no meaningful differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. The wars will continue, the repression will expand, the rich will get richer, and the rest of us are on our own.

There are some of us who  plan to protest when Mr. Obama hits town. We aren’t birthers and we aren’t Tea Partiers. Some of us even voted for Mr. Obama. All of us are pissed off. Having a Democrat in the White House has not made much of a difference, even for those that thought it would. Obama has not fulfilled hardly any of the promises he made to his progressive supporters. There are multiple reasons to protest.

Because the reason for his visit is to raise cash for a politics that leaves most people out.

Because Guantanamo Bay prison is not closed.

Because 91,000 US troops and even more US mercenaries are still killing and dying in Afghanistan.

Because the US is still spending $3 billion a year in Iraq.

Because Bradley Manniing is in jail for exposing the truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while the liars who started the wars walk free.

Because thousands of Iraq and Afghan War vets are without work.

Because thousands of those vets suffer from PTSD and other combat-related illnesses.

Because millions of people are homeless, including thousands of veterans, women and children.

Because millions of houses sit empty after banks foreclosed on them and kicked out the residents.

Because the banks that engaged in illegal foreclosure actions are not being prosecuted.

Because Washington continues to support Israel’s expansionist policies in the Middle East and against the Palestinian people.

Because Washington seems more willing to go to war against Iran instead of agreeing to unconditional negotiations.

Because sanctions are an act of war that harms civilians.

Because the Defense budget (not including VA) is over a trillion dollars

Because Washington has 450 overseas military bases.

Because the Pentagon wants to send Special Forces death squads anywhere at any time to kill whomever they want.

Because Empire is unsustainable, unwanted and wrong.

Because Barack Obama refuses to stand up to the right wing women haters in the Congress.

Because the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act is still on the books.

Because Barack Obama bailed out the banks instead of the workers.

Because Barack Obama pays lip service to workers’ right to unionize while his policies do nothing to help workers to unionize.

Because student debt should be forgiven.

Because the post office is being destroyed and sold off.

Because schools and libraries are being closed.

Because 44 million Americans don’t have health care and many of those won’t be able to afford that offered via Obama’s “health care” plan.

Because immigrant families are being shattered by ICE.

Because the underemployment rate stands at around 16%, with more than half of that number being people with no job at all. The unemployment rate for black Americans is even higher. This is also the case for youth.

Because the DEA continues to arrest medicinal marijuana providers.

Because CEOs average paycheck increased 24% since 2008 despite a failing economy.

Because business as usual is the business of exploitation and greed.

Because Obama represents business as usual.

Because Obama talks some of the talk of the 99%, but his actions benefit the one percent 99% of the time.

There are many more reasons, some that go beyond Mr. Obama and get closer to the heart of the problem in the United States—the fact that it is ruled by the corporate and financial elite. However, Mr. Obama’s staunch defense of that elite and his continued acceptance of their millions only underlines his complicity. To those who agree that Barack Obama has audaciously failed to not only deliver on most of his promises, but has failed to generate much hope at all, yet want to give him another chance, let me say this:

Democracy is not merely at the ballot box. When the choice is between two people whose means are well beyond most of those voting, then how representative of your needs and desires can the winner be? Democracy does not end the day after elections. That’s when it begins. The corporations and the banks don’t stop pressuring and sending money to politicians once they get elected. Indeed, they step up the pressure. It’s time the people do the same.

Who decides what the American public focuses its attention upon on a day-to-day basis?

With this nation at war with innumerable countries, with habeas corpus being tossed into the waste bin, with self-confessed torturers having their crimes swept under the carpet, with environmental extremes becoming self-evident; why is anyone in this nation concerned about what moron the Republican Party is dating at the present moment?

When was the last story about the nation’s loss of habeas corpus presented on any of the national media outlets?

Let’s put it into the immediate perspective. Another Republican boob has threatened the choices of women in this country. This happens every time the GOP is allowed the microphone. Suddenly 95% of discussion is taken over by controversy over who pays the premium to a private insurance company. Virtually everyone focuses on this. Thousands of articles are written.

This is a distraction.

It’s the same song played over and over. Screaming about the distribution of pennies while habeas corpus disappears, drones assassinate indiscriminately, torturers conduct coast-to-coast book tours, and more and more this country becomes a 21st Century fascist state.

Barack Obama has shown that the President of the United States can order the torture of defenseless prisoners and never be punished. Democrats have ordered the execution of at least one American citizen with no due process. Drones launched by American forces attack Pakistan citizens on a daily basis.

And yet thousands of articles are written about Rick Santorum? Where the hell are your minds, people?

Pathetic.

With an incumbent President who appears to be a pretty good bet of being reelected, why is the focus of the nation on everything except what the President is actually doing? Where are legitimate critics of this administration broadcast in the national media?

What is presented in the media as being legitimate criticism is mostly the babbling of the right wing fringe. Obama’s team inoculates the President by having any and all critics portrayed as nut jobs and/or racists. This is wonderful if all that matters to anyone is having the present Democrat reelected. Habeas corpus can go to hell. Torture can become the rule of the land. American forces can assassinate anyone at will as long as the current President is reelected.

Disgraceful.

This country has gotten the cart so far in front of the horse it’s ridiculous. Money is a tool. Money is a way to facilitate the transfer of goods. Do any of you seriously believe that if the fools of the Republican or Democratic Parties had all the money in the world that they would actually know what to do about anything?

One of the major failures of the current Democratic Party is their refusal to shape the conversation of America. For the past thirty years Democrats have only responded to Republican attacks. Health care? Let’s use Bob Dole’s plan. War? What does the GOP want to do? Jobs? How can we help Republican donors?

There has been no discussion regarding where this country wants to be two, three, five, ten, one hundred years from now. There has been no discussion on how many drone attacks should there be tomorrow in Pakistan. There has been no discussion on why twenty percent of every dollar spent on health care should go into private pockets which only encourages increasing the price of all medical services.

Is the Democratic Party a strong political voice or does it have the personality of a battered child, only wishing to please its batterer?

Habeas corpus gone. Torture back.

Vote Democratic or Republican?  Only if they start waterboarding voters. Which would probably be O.K. with both parties.

It’s one more indication that America’s unions are over a barrel. The leadership of the Democratic Party — which is dependent on union support and money, especially this presidential election year — knows of labor’s plight, says it sympathizes, and goes off whistling an idle tune.

President Obama and the Democratic House and Senate leadership nod with compassion but do virtually nothing when the unions seek support or removal of decades of anti-union legislation.

This has been going on for a long time. It is the main reason why the rich United States has the weakest protections for working people of all the wealthy democracies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and of many developing countries as well.

It is bad enough when the party known as “labor’s friend” ignores past injustices, or even refuses to act on a labor priority (such as the Employee Free Choice Act). It’s another matter when Democratic votes make it possible to perpetrate new anti-labor injuries, as took place February 6 when the Senate passed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill over union objections.

The worst part of the new legislation weakened bargaining rights for workers in the aviation and rail industries by increasing from 35% to 50% the number of worker signatures required to allow an election for union recognition. It was strongly backed by the airline industry.

Senate Democrats  called the final version of the bill the best “compromise” possible with the reactionary House measure. “That’s a step back, not a compromise,” commented International Association of Machinists president Tom Buffenbarger, a sentiment shared by many unions.

The Senate vote was 70-20. Only 15 Democrats voted against the measure, as did five republicans. Three of the Democrats voting “no” were from the Northeast: Blumenthal (CT), Gillibrand (NY), and Leahy (VT).

The bill allocates $63.3 billion to the agency through September 2015, but it wasn’t even necessary to pass the present measure at all. FAA reauthorization has been extended for the last four years by temporary funding, and this could have been continued until the labor restrictions were excised.

The “do-nothing” Tea Party-infused House passed the bill February 3, 248-169. A respectable 157 Democrats voted against the anti-labor law, joined by 12 Republicans. Some two dozen Blue Dog (conservative) Democrats voted in favor.

[NOTE: Attached to the FAA bill is a rider that will permit flying surveillance drones to spy on Americans throughout the country. An article is directly below.]

After the Senate vote, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA declared: “We will not forget, and we will continue to build a movement of the 99% to stand up and fight back.” The union praised the Democrats who stood up for collective bargaining, saying they “should be lauded as heroes.” But they said nothing about the majority of Senate Democrats who made the legislation possible.

The labor movement was either quiet or moderately critical of the bill after the vote, even though the expectation was that President Obama would sign the measure into law.

The reason? This is an election year, and a union movement that has tethered itself to the Democratic Party since the mid-1930s won’t be directly critical because it doesn’t know where else to go. So it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a party that does all the taking and hardly any giving.

Labor sees it the way most liberals, progressives, Latinos, African Americans and average Democratic voters see it: The Republicans are much worse in terms of the interests of all working families. There are only two plausible parties, both entirely devoted to the ruling elite, but one is the relatively lesser “evil” to the other. That’s how the American political system is rigged by the 1%.

What this means is that the Democrats need be only half-heartedly supportive of the union movement at best, in between periods of indifference, to enjoy labor’s abundant campaign contributions and other forms of electoral support. Here’s an example:

The draconian anti-labor Taft-Hartley law, passed by Congress 65 years ago, gravely weakened union rights by eviscerating aspects of the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act. There were several occasions over the decades when the Democrats enjoyed control of the White House, Senate and House (such as in the first two years of the Obama government, 2009-10), but the law remains on the books. The unions no longer bring up the issue, knowing that a substantial number of Democratic politicians would rather handle snakes than take on Taft-Hartley.

Given the history of the U.S. labor movement, it’s remarkable that it finds itself in this situation, and doesn’t at least demand adequate compensation for its generous, unstinting support.

American unions heroically led intensive struggles against oppressive corporate and government policies for many decades starting in the 1880s. They managed to obtain important rights for the workers, from the eight-hour day and paid vacations, to health care, pensions, and much more.

Often socialists and communists were in the front ranks of the union struggles and were the most reliable fighters, even as the top leadership of the labor movement gravitated to the right. Left participation was virtually crushed in the late 1940s when the internal purges began, and in the 1950s when the government-backed red hunts erupted throughout the country.

All the left militants were kicked out, except in a few progressive independent unions, and the commanding leadership of the union movement consisted of Cold Warriors and supporters of the Vietnam War who performed services abroad on behalf of Washington’s anti-communist crusade. The leaders discouraged any talk of class struggle and even seemed to ban the use of the term “working class.” Even today it’s usually “working families” at best, and that all-inclusive egalitarian community known as the “middle class,” which seems to include everyone earning between $25 thousand and $250 thousand a year. (Brother, can you spare a hundred grand?)

For many decades the labor movement was controlled at the very top by leaders who seemed to work more closely with big business and the government than with the rank and file. The labor movement finally began to break with the flagrant “business unionism” symbolized by the successive leaderships of Samuel Gompers, George Meany and Lane Kirkland when the AFL-CIO elected decent John Sweeney as president of the largest labor federation in 1995. He brought about a few reforms. Sweeney was succeeded by current president John Trumka — a Democratic loyalist, of course, but who from time to time seems interested in a certain degree of “union independence.”

The AFL-CIO, Change to Win and independent unions worked hard for Obama in 2008, and were ecstatic when he was elected. But by 2011 — following repeated failures to stick up for working people and the unions — Trumka began mentioning “independence” more frequently, even hinting that future support might be based on the Democratic Party’s actual performance, not its mere lesser “evil” existence. This year it probably only means withholding funds from a few of the worst Blue Dogs seeking reelection, and perhaps opposing a couple of conservative Democrats in primaries.

But at least it’s a limited start, although unions are expected to be entirely silent about Obama’s abundant shortcomings toward the workers and oppressed during the campaign. One example among many are the large teacher unions, who oppose the White House education plan but will work hard to get him reelected, as will the entire labor movement.

So far, for all their hundreds of millions of dollars and at least a memory of labor’s brave militancy, dramatic strikes and sit-downs, and the righteousness of class struggle, there’s not a peep out of the unions about ever launching a serious labor party to represent the interests of the working class, middle class, oppressed minorities and the poorest sector.

Until something much better comes along — and if it’s not a labor party, what is it? — the union movement seems ready to stick with the middling Democrats for fear of the greater “evil,” thus indefinitely prolonging the uncompromised domination of American society by the top 1% and its minions.

This also means that in addition to the long-time wrongs done to the workers’ movement that will not be righted, and the pro-worker legislation that will not be fought for by the Democrats, the union movement will be the occasional object of anti-labor shenanigans by its “friends” in Washington as happened this month in the FAA fiasco.

The labor movement is weak these days compared to some earlier periods. But who’s to say this will always be the case?

The great labor leader Eugene V. Debs thoroughly understood the extreme problems and serious shortcomings of the union movement, perhaps better than anyone else, and elaborated them all in a 1894 declaration that ends with these words:

Not withstanding all of this, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thralldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as the setting of the sun.

Come election night I would be overjoyed to see Obama lose and equally overjoyed to see the Republican candidate, whoever it is, also lose.  I cannot see how either Romney or Gingrich or even Ron Paul could possibly offer what is truly needed to fix the root causes of all the dysfunction, corruption and despair with the US political and government system.  And Obama?  Nothing but slickness instead of results.

Here is a central, common deficiency: No major presidential candidate has come out with strong support for any of the constitutional amendments critically needed to truly reform our system.  More than ever, after so much failed government, a whole lot of Americans are ready to support amendments that would, for example, mandate term limits for members of Congress, remove all private money from federal elections, require a balanced federal budget, and revitalize the constitutional requirement for Congress explicitly declaring war.

With one or two billion dollars spent on campaigning for this presidential election cycle the real winners will be all the media companies and army of campaign advisors and consultants getting all that money.  With the media and pundits focusing on the election the public has been robbed of real in depth news coverage of countless issues and situations worldwide that we should be far better informed about, especially to better understand exactly what public policies we should want from the president and Congress.  The mainstream media that treats the presidential campaigns like sporting events has become as superficial as the presidential candidates.

There is only one scenario that could make me enormously interested in the presidential election outcome.  With relatively little media attention to it, few Americans know about the Americans Elect national effort that will place a presidential candidate on every state ballot.  The candidates for president and vice president will result from a lengthy process conducted on the Internet involving millions of Americans that have signed up to be part of that process.  True, those two candidates that cannot have backgrounds from the same political party, but they may turn out to be somewhat familiar to us because of their past political efforts, though neither will be the same as those on the Democratic and Republican tickets.  For a fair analysis of this innovative process read what John Heilemann has said in New York Magazine.

Considering the widespread and deserved disgust among Americans with both major parties, there is a decent chance that people like me will be strongly motivated to vote for the Americans Elect alternative ticket.  It definitely will be a vote against both major parties.  If millions of Americans make this choice, then I will be overjoyed and so should you.  Why?  Because it may be the most important historic event that could motivate actions to get us genuine reforms of our political and government system.  The Americans Elect ticket does not have to win, just show the Democrats and Republicans how much they are both being rejected.

For this scenario to occur, however, people must stop thinking about the “spoiler” fear that both major parties promote.  Democrats want people to fear that a vote for the Americans Elect ticket will cause the Republican ticket to win, and vice versa.  In truth, by voting for the Americans Elect ticket we the people have the most important electoral choice to fix our broken system.  Think of it as an electoral revolution.  The imperative is to stick with your fundamental belief that in the end it really does not matter whether the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate wins, principally because elite rich and corporate interests will still prevail.  This means that the vast majority of Americans will continue to get screwed: The top one percent will still own and control our nation under either a Republican or Democratic president.  Keep remembering that both major party candidates have lied repeatedly, will keep lying, and will never implement whatever they have promised they will do to reform the system.

My best advice to you now: Stop wasting your time on following all the nonsense about the Republican primaries and later about the main campaign from both major party candidates.  Don’t let yourself be manipulated.  Instead, sign up at Americans Elect and join the 2.4 million Americans who have already joined the process to give Americans a true alternative to both major parties.  Note that 80 percent of people have said they are ready to support an alternative presidential ticket this year.  Will they put their votes where their words are?

At some point it will become necessary to mount a national demand that the Americans Elect candidates be allowed to participate in the pre-election national televised debates and also to demand that the mainstream media give equal time and attention to them.  If we are to convert our current delusional democracy into a genuine one, then the most patriotic and courageous thing to do is to support the Americans Elect effort.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

Watching the Republican debates is like going to a Klan rally without the sheets.

— Barry Willdorf (attorney and author)

Watching the Republican candidates describe the various methods by which they would destroy the U.S. government is certainly an illuminating exercise, regardless of which clown leads the pack. It is one thing for the Koch Brothers, Sam Walton, or others of their ilk to suggest that the government and public would be better off if corporations were not taxed at all; such a comment is obviously self-serving nonsense. Indeed, if they had their way, they would do away with any limits whatsoever on their power, wealth or authority.

Yet, for electoral candidates, who are confronted with the economic crises facing this nation and the world, who are witnessing the worst depression in 65 years, and who are faced with unparalleled unemployment and financial stagnation — for those candidates to parrot the wish-list of corporate billionaires as if their recommendations are anything but ludicrous is simply mind-boggling.

If you were to put the entire Republican Party in one room together, it would not be possible to assemble a single intelligent brain from the entire lot. Do they really believe the garbage and pap they utter in the media?

Take some examples of their proposals:

1) Stop funding education. Why teach children subjects such as literature, humanities, art or other disciplines that they will not be able to use when they graduate and go to work for slave wages at businesses and mega corporations?

2) Cut Welfare, Social Security and Medicare. These “socialistic” programs cater to laziness and constitute unwarranted charity.

3) Continue to fight imperial wars throughout the Middle East — only escalate those battles with the use of nuclear weapons. Expand U.S. hegemony throughout the world to bring democracy to the “savages” and “fools” of other nations.

4) Get rid of those pesky unions that require corporate billionaires to pay ugly, unfair expenses like the minimum wage, and prevent bosses from firing any employees they want to get rid of for any reason.

5) Deregulate the entire economy so that corporations can pillage without fear of fines or limitations concerning the destruction of the environment or the unlimited expansion of their economic empires.

6) Outlaw abortion. An unborn fetus has more rights than the woman carrying the child.

7) Oppose any form of single-payer or universal health care. Simply let the sick, old and disabled die, as an indication of God’s will.

8) Religious fanaticism is a virtue; it is patriotic and appropriate. Being Christian is a mandatory prerequisite to being “religious.”

The list of atrocities and absurdities is endless and unfathomable. An intelligent enemy of the U.S. would sit back and take whatever steps it could to ensure that Republicans win the next election. Nothing could do more to destroy this nation than to support the various proposals spewing forth from the mouths of these candidates.

What is perhaps even more tragic than that prospect, however, is the fact the Obama, and the Democrats appear to be uniting around the very programs set forth above. There is no sane party for rational Americans to support. If it were possible to find some place to flee to that would be safe from attack by the U.S. within a few short years, Americans would leave in droves.

Compared to the Republican agenda, Alice in Wonderland doesn’t seem like a child’s fable at all.