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.

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.

— David Hume (Essays)

We’re being tested.  Republican politicians and pundits are busy testing the American public, trying to assess how ignorant and distracted we are.  While they already have a pretty good idea, they’re determined to get a precise reading.  Testing is vitally important to these people because, if the United States is to be turned into a plutocracy, our collective ignorance is an absolute necessity.

Republicans are aware that most of us don’t pay attention to stuff like history, government, and public policy.  They’re aware that basic facts and principles tend to elude us.  Some of that stuff is trivial, some isn’t.  Many don’t know that the population of the U.S. is almost 312 million, or that we have 535 congressmen and senators, or that women weren’t allowed to vote until 1920, or that state legislatures, rather than citizens, chose our U.S. senators until 1913 (with passage of the 17th amendment).  Some of this stuff is trivial, some isn’t.

Republicans already know that many middle and lower middle-class Americans don’t want to raise taxes on the rich because they’ve been conditioned to believe such a move represents the redistribution of wealth, and smacks of socialism or communism.  Despite the fact that Barack Obama would have been considered a “Rockefeller Republican” in 1974, people can still get away with referring to him as a “socialist.”  That’s because we’re being tested.

Although many people (including billionaire Warren Buffet) think it’s eminently fair to raise taxes on the rich, many still oppose it.  You ask people (I’m speaking of regular working people) if they think taxes on the rich should be raised, and a significant percentage will say no.  But when you ask if they think taxes on the rich should be lowered, they will also say no.

Apparently, they believe the tax structure is perfect, and that the rich are paying exactly what they should be paying.  But when you ask what that amount is—when you ask them to cite the highest tax rate—they can’t.  They haven’t a clue what it is.  They don’t realize that, at 35-percent, the marginal rate is the lowest it’s been in many decades, and that to be taxed at the maximum, you have to earn more than $379,150.  And that’s why we’re being tested.

We all remember, some time ago, hearing about that Tea Party delegate holding up a placard with the words, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”  While the irony and ignorance revealed in those words were gist for much nighttime talk-show hilarity,  they were also terrifying.  That bizarre message revealed that we have people out there who approve of, and depend upon, government programs, but have no idea the government provides them.

I have a friend who describes himself as a “libertarian independent,” and who believes that there’s a good chance the 1969 moon landing was, in fact, a hoax.  Although he considers himself a genuine patriot, he hates the government and believes that virtually every elected official in Washington is a liar and a thief.

During a phone conversation, I pulled a prank on him.  Knowing how suspicious he was of political intrigue, I invented the story that the U.S. government had a secret plan to take us off the dollar, and put us on the yuan, China’s unit of currency.  I told him the plan was supposed to be top secret, but word had leaked out.  He became instantly energized by this news.  He was simultaneously outraged, inflamed, excited and utterly focused, as it reinforced every suspicion he’d ever had.

But when I confessed that I’d just made it up in order to demonstrate how gullible he was, the prank backfired.  Instead of taking a moment to step back and re-assess his personal biases, he said it didn’t matter that I’d made it up, because “it’s something that probably is being considered anyway.”  We’re all being tested.

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.

[At Bain Capital] We got money from other people and we would use that to help start businesses or sometimes acquire businesses that were in trouble or not doing so well and then try and make it better or get the businesses to grow.
– Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, former governor of Massachusetts and former venture capitalist and corporate raider (January 8, 2012)

I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.
– Mitt Romney, January 9, 2012)

They [the corporate raiders] apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off with millions of dollars,” Mr. Gingrich said. …“if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.
– Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (January 8, 2012)

I think people who don’t serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments –– they have no right to send our kids off to war … I’m trying to stop the wars, but at least, you know, I went when they called me up.
– Ron Paul, U.S. Congressman and Republican presidential candidate (January 7, 2012)

In current American politics, money and wars of aggression abroad seem to rule the day. When a candidate’s fortune turns sour, the natural reflex is to spend $millions in negative ads to destroy adversaries and/or to issue hawkish policy statements with the promise to start new wars abroad and even to rekindle old ones.

The motto seems to be that “If you destroy me with your negative ads; I will destroy you with mine.” This is truly amazing.

Lobbyists have always played an important role in U.S. politics, but with the floodgates of money presently wide open, their work has been considerably facilitated. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s (5-4) January-20-2010- decision to allow unlimited amounts of money to be spent by corporations or labor unions during elections under the specious pretext that such legal organizations are “people”, money rules unimpeded in American politics. This has the more or less unanticipated consequence of raising negative campaigning to a new level, to the delight of corporate media which rake in hundreds of $millions in political advertising or propaganda. Can democracy survive such an onslaught of money? This remains to be seen.

As for the U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for instance, during the recent primary campaign in the state of Iowa, he was confronted with a sudden surge of popularity of one of his opponents, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Romney’s camp and its allies went to work and pumped more than $2.8 million in a TV air deluge of negative ads against candidate Gingrich, arguing that the former Speaker had “more baggage than the airlines” and spelling out a series of flaws in Gingrich’s long political career. Sure enough, Newt Gingrich soon plummeted in the polls in Iowa and even nationally. He finished a distant fourth (13.3%) in the Iowa Republican Caucus (U.S. Presidential Primary) of January 03, 2012, while Republican candidate Romney squeezed by to finish in 1st position.

In retaliation, the Gingrich’s camp has opted to turn the tables on candidate Romney for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and has tried to picture him as the Wall Street movie villain Gordon Gekko. Indeed, thanks to a “super PAC”, supposedly financed by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is reported to have poured $5 million into Mr. Romney’s campaign, it intends to pump some $3.4-million into new television ads in order to picture multi-millionaire candidate Mitt Romney as a cold-blooded capitalist raider who made his fortune on the back of workers when they were fired en masse, after Mr. Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital of Boston, gorged itself on financially stressed companies. Mr. Gingrich has even suggested personally that Mr. Romney’s company was comparable to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”

And there you have it, negative campaigning at its best!

Negative ads, whether they are based on facts or on fabrications or on outright lies, can be very effective politically because they raise doubts in the mind of undecided or hesitant voters, even though some voters may be repulsed and turned off by them and this could translate into lower voter turnout. Nevertheless, the more distracted people are, the more they tend to remember negative information better than positive one. Therefore, for those who have no scruples in relying on such tactics and who have the means to pay for them, negative campaign ads have a triple advantage: First, they are a good way to change the subject and steer the debate away from one’s own failures; secondly, they place adversaries on the defensive, forcing them to spend time and money to try to refute the attacks; and, thirdly, they dispense the attackers from clearly spelling out their own positive political agenda beyond generalities and pious slogans. Negative ads maybe a curse for democracy but they work for those unethical politicians for whom power is the only thing that they yearn for in politics.

But negative campaigning or smear campaigns cost a lot. Indeed, they have to be researched and produced and, above all, they must to be aired in the mass media, especially on television. Historically, negative campaigning has always existed. However, modern means of communication and the concentration of national wealth in relatively fewer hands have multiplied its influence. Indeed, in the modern free-for-all electronically based U.S. politics, it can be said that those with the most money and with fewer principles have a decisive, if not an insurmountable advantage in winning elections. In the U.S., and especially with the benediction of a majority of judges on the current Supreme Court, so-called “super PACs” can accept unlimited donations for purposes of supporting or attacking candidates, thus placing the political game clearly in the hands of people or corporations or labor unions with the most money. Money has thus become the principal
deciding factor in American politics.

The current campaign is a clear demonstration.

It’s hard to assess how much praise Obama deserves for making these moves.  On the one hand, appointing members to the NLRB ain’t exactly a landmark achievement.  After all, presidents have been appointing board members since 1935, when the NLRB was first established, so the “presidential act” of picking suitable people (it used to be three, until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act expanded it to five) to fill out the roster shouldn’t be gushed over.  It’s his job, isn’t it?

On the other hand—given that the Republicans despise any agency with the power to regulate business, given that they’ve fought for 75 years to defang the NLRB, given that they’ve purposely tried to keep it understaffed (aware that two members don’t constitute a quorum and, therefore, don’t have the authority to issue rulings), and given that, even with a 53-47 senate majority ready to approve Obama’s appointees, they’ve threatened to filibuster any nominee—it was a bold move.  Bold, necessary, and, let’s be honest, way overdue.  Credit goes to organized labor for keeping the president’s feet to the fire.   That reported $400 million they donated to the Democrats in 2008 finally bought them something.

What the Republicans characterize as “interfering with” and “restricting” business, the NLRB views as providing employee safeguards—safeguards expressed in our federal labor law. For example, when people get fired illegally for engaging in union activism, or when a workforce formally requests a union election but is denied, or when the management negotiating team refuses to bargain in good faith—that’s when the NLRB (in principle) comes to the rescue.

Although congressional Republicans are already threatening legal action and issuing hysterical statements (Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi referred to the appointments as a sign of the White House’s “contempt for America’s small businesses”), there’s not much they can do about it, which means the NLRB, at least through 2012, is going to have a fair amount of latitude in addressing workers’ rights.

And one major area of concern will be union membership drives.  According to surveys, upwards of 60 percent of American workers have expressed an interest in joining a union, attracted by across-the-board advantages in union wages, benefits and working conditions.  But national membership stands at barely over 12 percent. While part of that differential can be traceable to the unreliability of surveys, the real culprit is management’s ability to keep its employees from joining up by using its two favorite weapons:  stalling and intimidation.

There are hundreds (thousands!) of documented cases of companies illegally attempting to dissuade their workers from joining a union.  They threaten, they lie, they bully, they bribe, they spy, they hire outside agencies to assist them.  I knew a retired woman who, on a whim, decided to take a part-time job at Wal-Mart to augment her pension.  She said she was blown away by the level of anti-union propaganda.  As a new employee, the first order of business was being shown a 45-minute movie on the evils of labor unions.

Without the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, formed way back in 1906), one can imagine the sort of liberties that would be taken by manufacturers looking for shortcuts and angles.  The same applies to the NLRB.  Without the labor board acting as a clearing house for employee complaints, there would be no workplace justice.  Without the NLRB, we would see the rise of “employer tyranny.”   Indeed, many would argue that we already see it….even with the board.  Clearly, it’s an uphill battle.

There are a number of reasons for this conclusion:

1) Obama has never stood upon principle when the issue of personnel and appointments are concerned. He abandoned Van Jones; same for Shirley Sherrod; same for Elizabeth Warren; same for Justice Liu, currently of the California Supreme Court. All the Tea Party has to do is criticize a potential candidate as being too far to the Left, or too “socialistic,” and Obama runs for the hills. It is quite likely that he will end up appointing a milk-toast liberal who will make little difference when push comes to shove.

2) The U.S. Supreme Court, with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy, will not be a progressive force for needed social change for a decade or more. With a middle of the road associate of the sort that Obama might appoint, it will at best, be a force for little or no change in the foreseeable future.

3) The U.S. Supreme Court plays a rather insignificant role in changing the important policy decisions that confront the American people. It is true that a right-wing court can rule for George Bush over Al Gore, or for corporate “personhood” over corporate responsibility, or for the legitimacy of a police state or a military empire, instead of for working people. But, ultimately, it is the Congress, owned, bought and paid for by the corporate oligarchy, which makes the laws, overrides “bad” Supreme Court decisions and defines the context within which laws and lawsuits are defined. An “unpopular” court decision can be overturned in a week by a hostile Congress. A disenfranchised public cannot force a group of millionaire politicians to do what is right for the people, without more power and influence than currently exists among the 99% of this country.

4) Historically, the Supreme Court has played a conservative and pro-corporate role regarding the social issues of the day. While the William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Earl Warren courts made significant inroads into the areas of protection for those accused of crime and in support of civil rights activists, it was the mass movements of those decades that laid the foundation for those decisions. The Court was not defining or creating a new consciousness; rather, it was merely reinforcing the social trends taking place in the society. The reactionary politics of the American ruling class pose an insurmountable obstacle to the current Supreme Court’s ability to support progressive social change and public control over our economy and resources. While the Occupy Movement, for example, has had a significant impact in educating the American public as to the abuses imposed upon us by the corporate oligarchy, in reality, there is no unified, organized opposition to military/corporate domination of life in this country.

5) The Hobson’s choice of electing Obama because of the minimal impact he will have on future Supreme Court decisions is a ridiculous one. This President has appointed Wall Street hooligans to run our economy. He has waged the most vicious, unwarranted wars in our nation’s history against defenseless Muslims. He has pandered to and empowered an oil industry that is destroying the environment and resources of the entire world, while doing nothing to regulate or control them. He has consistently helped the rich at the expense of the poor. The suggestion that a potential appointment to the US Supreme Court would justify four more years of abuse from this President is nonsense. Any potential court appointment would be a meaningless token in the context of the harm this President is causing. It is similar to a Wal-Mart offer to give customers a $10 rebate on items that are massively overpriced to begin with.

6) There are other marginal advantages to having an Obama in the White House, rather than a Repub: a) the veto power will be exercised more humanely with a Democratic President than a Republican one; b) appointments to various congressional committees and offices will be more diverse than anything the Repubs are capable of; and, c) visitors to the White House will be more likely to represent the world’s peoples than are the white-sheeted candidates the Repubs are likely to court. But the major direction of the country; namely, away from democracy toward imperialism; the concentration of wealth; the destruction of quality education and meaningful human services; and, Klu Klux Klan patriotism rather than just immigration laws — those all are squarely in the hands of the Repubs, whether they be fronted by Obama or a GOP mouthpiece. Until those directions change, the vote for either party is long-term suicide with continued oppression and war.

The next time someone says that the Repubs and the Democrats are the same, BUT the Democrats will make better Supreme Court appointments, think twice. You are getting suckered by a false premise.

The issue does not end here, however, because inevitably the next question arises: When is it inappropriate to choose “the lesser of two evils?”

If a rational human being were asked in 1928 Germany, “Which one of these people do you support: Eichmann, Hitler or Himmler?”, very few people would be likely to choose which of these monsters should be spared and which supported. Most intelligent people would say, they are all horrible excuses for human beings, and good citizens should not support any of them.

What if one is more likely to be nice to Gypsies, or sympathetic to the idea of women’s emancipation or equality with men, or interested in saving the forests? Does an intelligent person say “I’ll support a, or b, or c, because of one or several of these factors?” Or is one left with the realization that the evil done by these “leaders” outweighs any positive act that they might do, regardless of how much better their “constructive” ideas might be?

The people of the world are watching their environment destroyed, their economy hijacked, their future despoiled by wars and poverty. The fact that Obama might appoint a lukewarm liberal to the Supreme Court instead of a Bush-style reactionary means nothing.

1. Ideology.  The dynamic that exists between management and labor hasn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution.  Despite those catchy slogans about “synergy” and “team-building,” people who earn a wage and people who pay a wage don’t necessarily want the same thing. They want different things, divergent things.  One wants a larger slice of the pie for themselves and their families, the other wants to keep the whole pie.  Hence, workers collectives.

2. Numbers.  Despite the hand-wringing over declining union rolls, there are still (as of 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) 14.7 million union members in the country.  That’s twice the population of Israel.  On November 15, 1969, when an estimated 500,000 people participated in an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., it was billed as a historical turnout.  Think what 14 million could do if mobilized.

3. Citizens.  Those “heroic” workers in the community—cops, firemen and nurses—are going to step up to the plate and remind the public that unions aren’t the horrible monsters the Koch brothers and Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party make them out to be.  They’re our neighbors, our friends, our benefactors.  Demonizing the firefighters and nurses is a tactic that’s guaranteed to backfire.

4. Exposure.  The drive to privatize public schools will fail. In fact, those grandiose promises about how brilliantly for-profit charter schools are going to perform, and how charter schools will be the educational template for the future, have already been exposed as false.  Make no mistake:  privatizing the public schools wasn’t undertaken to help America’s students; it was undertaken to make money for a few early-entry entrepreneurs.

5. Politics.  Obama will win re-election (Get serious.  Who’s going to beat him….Romney?) and, as a lame duck president with nothing to lose, Obama will surprise and delight his earlier detractors by making the “Reinvigoration of American Labor” the centerpiece of his second term, proving that those inspirational promises he made on the campaign trail in 2008 weren’t just empty rhetoric.

6. Merger.  Without a clear agenda or recognized leadership, the Occupy Wall Street movement will fizzle out.  The volunteers who fueled that noble experiment will come to the realization that the only institutional opposition to corporate America is organized labor.  The OWS faithful will embrace the AFL-CIO, and together they will go on the warpath. A coalition made in Heaven.

7. Opportunity.  Fast food and retail workers will be the target of the next big membership drive.  Not only are these workers underpaid, underappreciated, and fed up with being marginalized, the jobs they’re doing just happen to be jobs that can’t be shipped to another state or overseas, so those tired old management threats can’t be used against them.  They’re ripe for organizing.

8. Patriotism.  America will inevitably realize that, unlike Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs, union members are our true patriots.  Union workers not only earn every nickel in these United States, they spend every nickel here as well.  Unlike “situational capitalists,” America’s unions don’t root for the success of foreign economies (to the detriment of our own).

9. Culture.  Conservative Republicans will wake up and realize that, across the board, union members tend to be fairly moderate when it comes to social and cultural issues.  Despite being linked to the Democratic Party, organized labor isn’t the radical, godless hotbed the evangelical right pretends it is.  That phony liberal stigma will collapse like a house of cards.

10. Money.  This time around, labor will take the reported $400 million it spent on getting Obama elected in 2008, and spend it all on congressional and senatorial races, winning decisive majorities in both chambers, gaining chairmanships of all the committees, and eliminating the threat of Republican filibusters.

And that’s how labor will get its groove back.

You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.

The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy –- it’s a lesson about our national character. Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure.

— President Barack Obama, Address to Troops at Fort Bragg, December 14, 2011

The lies of war are forgotten as easily and readily as the wrappings of Christmas or the resolutions of a new year.  Like a child still in diapers, the lessons of war must be learned again and again until finally they are taken to heart.

The lies of the war in Iraq are so easily buried that six out of seven Republican candidates for president of the United States have publicly pledged to go to war in Iran based on the identical unsubstantiated claims that led us to war in Iraq.  The lessons of that ill-fated war, the largest strategic blunder since Vietnam, are so readily put behind us that even before that colossal disaster officially ended, six of seven Republican candidates pledged his and her allegiance to the same neoconservative brain trust that guided us into the snake pit.  And the White House is not far behind.

Those of us who remember the war in Vietnam and the years we committed to ending it will find the bipartisan rationalizations of the Iraq War all too familiar and profoundly disturbing.

The lie that drove the Vietnam War was the Domino Theory:  If we lose one nation to the red menace of communism, then we will lose them all.  On that basis, three generations of western powers (Britain, France and America) chose a little country on the doorstep of China as their playground of war.

It required over three million lives to prove that a child’s game was not a legitimate basis for a foreign policy.  It only made sense because it fit on a bumper sticker and because our leaders were dominated by military minds in search of power, glory and the spoils of empire.

The great postwar lie of Vietnam was that we lost the war because we were never fully committed.  The politicians in Washington held our generals back.  Between 1965 and 1968 we dropped over a million tons of missiles, bombs and rockets on North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but we were never fully committed.  We sprayed 12 million gallons of the deadly chemical defoliant Agent Orange over wide swaths of Southeast Asia but we were not fully committed.  At the height of the war in 1968 we deployed over half a million soldiers, including the first conscripts since the Korean War, but we were not fully committed.

Short of nuclear bombs, we were as committed to that unjustifiable war as any nation could have been yet the lies of war survive.  The lies of war take on mythological characteristics and believing them becomes a ritual of patriotism.

Little wonder we commit the same strategic mistakes, the same errors in judgment, the same acts of criminal inhumanity, the same ultimately desperate and self-destroying measures over and over again.

In the wake of Vietnam, America’s leaders were confined to small-scale interventions until George Herbert Walker Bush, former Director of the CIA, conspired to wage war in Iraq.  Though the Gulf War was short-lived, its military success inspired President Bush to announce: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

Forever was not a long time as his eldest son was to initiate two wars that brought the specter of Vietnam back into focus.  One was the ongoing ten-year war in Afghanistan and the other was a return to his father’s war in Iraq.

Few will recall the lies of the father but the lies of the son are too fresh to be so soon forgotten.  They include not only the infamous weapons of mass destruction but also the later claim that virtually all the world believed the lie.  For the record, we lost our appeal before the United Nations Security Council to justify military action on the basis of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  The International Atomic Energy Agency thoroughly debunked our claims and the measure was withdrawn when it became clear that the Council would vote overwhelmingly against our cause for war.

Members of the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was a party to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.  They falsely claimed that Iraq harbored and worked with Al Qaeda operatives.  These claims were so clearly and demonstrably false that even President Bush was forced ultimately to disavow them.

The lies of war had served their purpose.  Once the first bombs lit up the Baghdad skyline, supporting the war became a matter of patriotism.

The next lie was that our actions had nothing to do with Iraqi oil and everything to do with establishing democracy in the Arab world.  That lie was exposed when our first action was to protect the oil fields.  Well before an Iraqi government could be established we contracted Iraqi oil to the highest corporate bidders.  Mission accomplished.

The lies of war are really not that difficult to detect.  It only requires an open mind, an appetite for facts, and a willingness to think.

The lies of the Iraq War will survive unless those of us who witnessed them, from the soldiers who sacrificed to the citizens who supported and opposed them, unless each of us vows to accept the truth and pass that horrid account forward to future generations.

We can be grateful that a president elected largely on the promise of ending the Iraq War has officially done so, though we remain mindful that thousands of American-hired mercenaries remain behind to guard the largest diplomatic embassy on earth.

We understand at our stage of development that a president cannot apologize for the harm done in the name of our nation.

We understand the wisdom of separating the war from the warrior.

We know the president cannot inform our soldiers that they were fighting the wrong war for the wrong reasons.

But when the president announces that we have created an opportunity for the Iraqis to thrive and prosper as a democratic nation, he is not only being disingenuous; he is perpetuating the lies of war.  When the president declares that our fight in Iraq was for Iraqi freedom and international justice, he is paving the way for another unjust war in America’s future.  He is attempting to bury the specter of Vietnam.

Leaving Afghanistan for another day, we should all agree that the Iraq War was wrong from its inception.  It was never about democracy.  It was never about justice.  It was always about oil and strategic advantage.

Wrong is wrong.

I don’t mind receiving Christmas cards or being wished a “Merry Christmas” from friends, clerks, or even in junk mail trying to sell me something no sane person should ever buy. My wife and I even send Christmas cards, with messages of peace and joy, to our friends who are Christians or who we don’t know their religion.

I like Christmas music and Christmas carolers, even if some have voices that crack now and then, perhaps from the cold.

At home, from as early as I could remember, my family bought and decorated a Christmas tree, and gave gifts to each other and our friends. Usually we put a Star of David on the tree, undoubtedly an act of heresy for many Jews and Christians. We learned about Christmas—and about Chanukah, the “feast of lights,” an eight day celebration of joy and remembrance of the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem at a time when it seemed as if a miracle had saved the Jews from darkness during the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE.

This year, my wife and I have a two-foot tall cypress tree, decorated with white felt angels, glittered silver tin snowflakes, and small white LED lights, a gift from a devout Christian. We weren’t offended by the gift; we accepted it and displayed it on a table in our dining room in the spirit of friendship. In Spring, we’ll plant the tree in our backyard and hope it grows strong and tall, giving us shade and oxygen, perhaps serving as a sanctuary for birds, squirrels, and other wildlife.

What I do mind is the pomposity of some of the religious right who deliberately accost me, often with an arrogant sneer on their lips, to order me to accept their “well wishes” of a “Merry Christmas.” Their implication is “Merry Christmas—or else!” It’s their way of saying their religion is the one correct religion, that all others are wrong.

Although I try to understand and tolerate other beliefs, the extreme right doesn’t tolerate difference or dissent.

Right wing commentators at Fox News are in their final week of what has become a holiday tradition of claiming there is a “War on Christmas.” The lies and distortions told by these Shepherds of Deceit, and parroted by their unchallenging flock of followers, proves that at least in this manufactured war, truth is the first victim.

The Far-Right-But-Usually-Wrong claim that godless liberals are out to destroy Christmas, and point to numerous examples, giving some facts but never the truth.

They are furious that many stores wish their customers a “Happy Holiday” and not a “Merry Christmas,” unable to understand that sensitivity to all persons’ religions isn’t some kind of heresy. The ultra-right American Family Association even posts lists of stores that are open on Christmas, have their clerks wish customers a “Happy Holiday,” and don’t celebrate Christmas the way they believe it should be celebrated. (Of course, the AFA doesn’t attack its close ally, the NRA, which on its website wishes everyone “Happy Holidays.”)

Because of their own ignorance, they have no concept of why public schools may teach about Christmas or even have students sing carols but can’t put manger scenes on the front lawn. Nevertheless, the Extremists of Ignorance and Intolerance parade the Constitution as their own personal shield, without having read the document and its analyses, commentaries, and judicial opinions that define it, and can’t understand there is a strict separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers, especially Franklin and Jefferson, were clear about that. They were also clear that this is a nation where a majority of its people profess to be Christians, but it is not a “Christian nation.” There is a distinct difference.

The ultra-right—some of whom stanchly believe Barack Obama is not only a Muslim but wasn’t even born in the U.S—follow the guiding star of Fox to wrongly claim that the President Obama hates Christianity so much that he won’t even put up a Christmas tree but calls it a “holiday tree.” Perhaps they were too busy imbibing the bigotry in their mugs to know that the President and his family helped light the National Christmas Tree near the White House, wished Americans a “Merry Christmas,” and even told a bit about what Christians believe is a divine birth.

When confronted by facts, these fundamentalists point out that the Puritans, the ones who fled England for religious freedom, demanded adherence to a strict code of Protestant principles—and if it was good enough for the first American “citizens,” it’s good enough for the rest of us. What they never learned, obviously, is that the Puritans banned Christmas celebrations, declaring them to be pagan festivals.

If the Fox pundits, leading their sheep into the abyss of ignorance in a counter-attack in a war that doesn’t exist, would take a few moments to think before blathering inanities, they might realize that the man they worship was called “the Prince of Peace” not “the General of War.”

It should be obvious at this point that neither the U.S. government, nor the corporate oligarchy (forgive the redundancy), is interested in formulating and carrying out solutions to the problems facing the world: poverty, inadequate health care, meaningful education at affordable prices, world peace, environmental protection, sustainability and justice, to name just a few.

It is not that the powers-that-be disagree as to the ways to deal with these problems. On the contrary, there is total unity that meaningful solutions to the problems would affect corporate profits, and accordingly the parties simply agree to disagree. In that way, the status quo remains intact, assuring the destruction of the earth, the economic disenfranchisement of the masses of people, and the ongoing monopolization of wealth into the hands of the billionaires.

Indeed, the charade that is seen every day on national media and within all three branches of government, suggests that there are significant differences between Newt, Romney, Obama and the other charlatans who pass themselves off as credible candidates. There are no differences – only a façade to placate the average Americans’ reaction to the outrageous policies hammering us farther into the ground. By pretending to offer us a choice, they cover up reality: the leadership of both parties like the situation just the way it is.

Who is in a position to argue for the arrest of Wall Street gangsters, of corrupt politicians, of corporate boards that destroy our economy and our natural resources? Where is the political power to demand justice for the many, and the imprisonment of the profligate few?

No candidate in any of the current political parties calls for the prosecution of the criminals who have destroyed our economy. None has identified the enemies of the environment – those who eat up the world’s natural resources for individual profit. None calls for the redistribution of wealth from the 1% to the 99%. None calls for an end to our imperialist, religious crusades throughout the world.

Until there are voices to carry out an agenda that helps the poor, and punishes the super rich, voting for representatives of either ruling class party is a meaningless act. It is a fool’s game.  Do not get caught up in the tweedle-dee, tweedle-dumb conundrum. Let the oligarchs continue to occupy the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon and the board rooms until such time as we, the people, can identify and support legitimate alternatives to illegitimate impostors.

Organize locally, build upon a solid foundation, and abandon any hope of obtaining co-operation from the rich. Supporting the lesser of two evils is simply not possible in this climate. This is a period that demands serious action, and not trite sloganeering. Supporting one millionaire over another offers nothing to the 99%.

The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you’re concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?

President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we’re locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!

For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it’s not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?

Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.

How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have, in fact, been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we’re supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who’s been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?

It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It’s an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.

We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space. We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?

This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don’t want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street’s opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.

Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they’re on the teevee screen.

Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.

These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage. In general, the middle class can be counted on to detest the poor…blaming those born devoid of societal advantage and political influence for the impoverished circumstances that were in place long before the happenstance of their birth. Moreover, in a bit of noxious casuistry, as despicable as it is delusional, all too many members of the middle class have been induced by grift artists, employed by the ruling elite, to blame their own declining social status and attendant beleaguered existence on the poor.

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” — John Donne

This has proven to be an effective, time-tested grift: Because as long as the animus of the middle class remains fixated on the poor, the criminal cartels known as the economic elite can continue to ply their trade. Of course, in reality, by their greed and complicity, what the middle class has gained is this: trustee status in the capitalist workhouse.

Although, there is no need to fret: The run of neoliberal capitalism is about over. Don’t mourn: This late stage, rapacious, mutant economic strain has leveled destruction on community and the planet itself as well as the hearts and souls of too many of those imprisoned within its paradigm.

At this point, the situation comes down to this: paradigm shift or perish.

The hour is amenable to reevaluate, reorganize and re-occupy. Doing so will prove helpful in withstanding false narratives.

Apropos: As of late, in my hours spent at Liberty Park, I’ve been witness to increasing numbers of tourists wandering in and repeating derisive, right-wing distortions regarding the OWS movement and its participants. For example, they are a collection of whiny college students who want taxpayers to be responsible for picking up the tab for their student loans because they are too lazy and spoiled to work off their debt. These tales are variations of the old canards involving welfare queens, mouths gleaming with taxpayer financed gold teeth, arriving at grocery stores lounging behind the steering wheels of late model Cadillacs, and proceeding to purchase steaks and fifths of gin with food stamps.

Ronald Reagan spoke of this mythical figure often, affording her near supernatural powers: She, through indolence, guile and a welfare state-bestowed sense of limitless entitlement, was the near singular cause of the nation’s economic woes; her very existence, not only depleted the U.S. Treasury of dollars, but drained the U.S. free enterprise system of vitality and the very will to compete. She was a succubus who arrived in the socialist haunted night to feed on and zap the very virility of capitalism.

Because of the wealth inequities inherent to capitalism, in order to prevent social unrest, the system is reliant on creating false narratives that foster misplaced and displaced class resentment. These tales are very potent, because they serve as palliatives for the enervating states of shame inflicted on the population at large by their enslavement to the free market. Accordingly, because the vast majority of the populace are deemed “losers”, due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created and maintained to displace the rage, borne of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system’s exploited underlings.

OWS is beginning to change the narrative, align it with reality–and that is an alarming development for the 1%; hence, the retooled, amped up propaganda campaign we’re seeing signs of at present.

This is the reality the 1% endeavor to obscure: Capitalism is a pyramid scheme; by its very structure, only a few will ever receive its bounty that is wrung out of the exhausted hides of the vast majority. Fact is, capitalism, the neoliberal variety or otherwise, has never worked as promised; its innate structure ensures exploitation and inequity. Therefore, time and time again, adding aspects of socialism (e.g., New Deal era programs and reforms) have saved capitalism from itself. But, after a time, the plutocrats regroup and begin anew to launch a big money-financed, slow motion coup d’état of government (e.g., the Reagan Revolution).

A vast disparity of wealth within a nation will all but ensure this societal trajectory. But that isn’t going to happen, this time. The planet cannot endure the assaults wrought by a system that requires exponential growth to be maintained. The run of capitalism is nearly over. A more sustainable economic system, based on horizontal rule, is being developed, globally (e.g., the Icelandic model).

The vertical structure inherent to capitalism brings about the self-perpetuating reign of an insular elite who choose to go the route of empire and, by doing so, overreach and bring themselves down, but only after much unnecessary suffering, exploitation and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of imperium.

Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one’s situation–beginning to question how one arrived at one’s present station in life–will engender anxiety, anger and regret.

Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life’s winners.

But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem–not the dishonest economic setup–and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can’t get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.

And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned…have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs–all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I’ve adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.

Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.

What an unnerving task that would prove to be…an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone.

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” — Albert Camus

Accordingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-rewarded, professional dissemblers of the political right, imploring them to dissolve my doubts and dread. To escort and ensconce my troubled form back into my comfort zone by telling me the problem is not the iron boot of the corporate state upon my neck; rather, my oppression stems from the barefoot hippie lefties of OWS “who need a bath and a job”; it is their odious presence in our lives that has subdued my happy capitalist destiny by the pernicious act of laying down an effluvia (more demobilizing than pepper spray) of patchouli musk and has caused capitalism itself to weaken into an enervated swoon.

Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my oppression. Those America-hating Occupy Wall Street hippies are actually the hidden hand that controls the global order and who possess a craven desire to smelt down the gleaming steel of the humming engines of U.S. capitalism into creepy, Burning Man statuary, who want to hold 24/7 Nuremberg-style rallies in the form of annoying drum circles.

In reality, it is those dirty hippies who are actually “The Man.” Withal, hippies crashed the global economy and pinned the blame on the selfless souls who ply their benign trade on Wall Street.

Now, you know why conservatives harbor such animus towards hippies. Don’t claim that Fox News et al–those selfless souls–who only desire to protect the glories of the present order, and who only have your best interest in mind, didn’t try to warn you.

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” — Mark Twain

To which I very bluntly and emphatically say: bullshit. It is precisely when our so-called “leaders” of both parties get together and agree on a particular piece of legislation that we the people get screwed the hardest. Since this ridiculously naïve (or duplicitous) theme just doesn’t seem to want to die despite its sheer absurdity, let me recount some of the most notorious examples of “bipartisanship” from the past couple of decades:

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 1994 –  “Free” trade is only free for the elites who reap the profits from the lowering of trade barriers. Working and middle class Americans are the ones who have paid dearly for NAFTA as well as other such measures like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades through the loss of tens of millions of good paying jobs that have been sent to places like Mexico, India and China. The potential loss of such jobs was easily predictable beforehand, and yet NAFTA was passed back in 1994 in a bipartisan vote that included a total of 166 Republican Senators and Representatives and 129 Democrats before being signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton).

Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, 1999 – Probably the most damaging piece of financial legislation in recent times was the repeal of the Great Depression era banking law and the removal of the barriers between investment and commercial banking. The demise of Glass-Steagall was a huge contributing factor in the financial crash of 2008. And yet, the final version of this horrendous piece of legislation was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of 362-57 in the House and 90-8 in the Senate. It was then signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton), effectively thumbing his nose at a key regulatory provision enacted under the revered lion of his own party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Patriot Act, 2001 – The greatest single legislative curtailment of individual liberties in United States history was, of course, passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when politicians across the political spectrum declared that the terrorists “hate us for our freedom” even while they worked to curtail much of that same freedom. The act created the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security and set the tone for all of the Constitutional abuses (electronic surveillance, militarization of police departments, “free speech” protest zones, intrusive airport scanners, etc) that have followed. And yet the final bipartisan vote on the act was 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate (the 1 “Nay” being my personal hero, former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin).

Iraq War Resolution, 2002 – Anyone who was paying attention and actually had a conscience (not always the same thing, unfortunately) knew that the Bush administration was blatantly lying about its case for going to war against Iraq after 9/11. One wag even commented that it was as if in the wake of Pearl Harbor, America had declared war on Mexico. Our so-called “leaders” who presumably had access to most, if not all, of the real intelligence on Iraq were better positioned than even the average citizen to know that the case for war was complete bullshit. And yet, the final tally in favor of launching an unjustifiable attack on Iraq and butchering several hundred thousand of its citizens was 297 to 133 in the House (including 82 Democrats) and 77 to 23 in the Senate (including 29 Democrats). Even such alleged far left “liberals” as Hillary Clinton voted for the resolution.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) law, 2008 – After Congress’s previous bipartisan screw-up in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act helped lead to the financial crash in 2008, they decided to compound their error by giving $700 billion in taxpayer money to bail out the big banks and Wall Street. After the initial effort to pass the TARP failed in the House (with the far left and the far right of each party most opposed), the “leadership” of both parties engaged in political arm-twisting and gamesmanship until they secured enough votes to pass the bill in the face of overwhelmingly negative public sentiment. The final tally was 263-171 in the House and 74-25 in the Senate. A total of 211 Democratic Senators and Representatives as well as 126 Republicans voted “Yea” on a measure that was then signed into law by a Republican president (Bush). Moreover, had you opposed the TARP law as a voter you had no one to vote for in that November’s presidential election as both Republican candidate John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama voted in favor of it.

And now we have the most recent example of this hideous dynamic in action with the bipartisan Senate vote to allow the U.S. military to indefinitely detain citizens suspected of “terrorism” anywhere in the world. If this awful measure becomes law, you might as well take the 235-year-old “damn piece of paper” that is the U.S. Constitution and run it through the shredder because it will have been rendered invalid. As reported by the Huffington Post, here is one of the more outrageous quotes in support of the proposal:

Backers of military detention of Americans — a measure crafted by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) — came out swinging against Udall’s amendment on the Senate floor earlier Tuesday.

“The enemy is all over the world. Here at home. And when people take up arms against the United States and [are] captured within the United States, why should we not be able to use our military and intelligence community to question that person as to what they know about enemy activity?” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.

“They should not be read their Miranda Rights. They should not be given a lawyer,” Graham said. “They should be held humanely in military custody and interrogated about why they joined al Qaeda and what they were going to do to all of us.”

Yep, here you see the very worst of bipartisanship in action—a conservative Republican Senator from the Deep South rhetorically creaming his jeans in support of a piece of legislation drafted by a supposed northern “liberal” Democrat. Senator Graham is the worst kind of bloviating, conscienceless windbag. There has not been a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil in more than a decade, and yet in response to the miniscule possibility of another one he wants to subject all American citizens to being taken off the street at anytime, anywhere, based upon any spurious allegation made by a jealous ex-lover, spurned former business partner or aggrieved neighbor. Bill of Rights? We don’t need no stinking Bill of Rights, even though it has served America quite well for more than two centuries.

The final vote tally was 61 Senators voting in favor, including 16 Democrats, and only 37 opposed. Only two of the “Nay” votes were Republicans, to include Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. The only hope we have now to defeat this provision is that President Hopey-Chagey claims he opposes the measure and has threatened to veto it. But we have seen time-and-time again how easily Obama backs down in situations requiring him to take a strong moral stand, so I wouldn’t bet on it.

There you have it folks, bipartisanship in all of its appalling glory. At this point, it won’t take too many more bipartisan measures to destroy this country completely. So the next time some pundit or office holder gets up on Fox News or MSNBC and decries the partisan rancor in Washington and imploringly asserts the need for bipartisanship, you’ll know that not only are they completely full of it, but they probably have in mind some nefarious plan designed to grab you, the citizen, by the neck, forcibly hold you down and sodomize you like Marcellus Wallace in the basement torture scene from the movie, Pulp Fiction.

When these bills move through the Congress, they are so enormous and yet so routine that almost all attention is drawn to one or more peculiarly putrid or pretentiously benevolent little attachments. Either the bill simply must be passed because it contains hurricane relief or veterans aid or unemployment insurance or because it finally allows GLBT Americans to join in our crusades of mass murder. Or, alternatively, the bill desperately needs amending because it sanctions torture or lawless imprisonment or expands an especially hated war or an especially transparent investment in unwanted weaponry manufactured by some campaign donor. But the underlying insanity of the bill itself never makes it into the corporate conversation.

In the case of this latest National Defense Authorization Act, there has been a toothless rhetorical amendment passed asking the president to end his warmaking in Afghanistan in something less than three years if it’s not too much trouble. But that positive measure has been absolutely overwhelmed in what little discussion of the bill exists by a section of the bill giving presidents and the military the power to lock you away without any of the process guaranteed you by the U.S. Constitution. Now, President Obama may veto the bill because he would prefer that section to be even worse than it is. He has expressed concern that it limits, rather than expands, his options. He should veto it because it rips out the heart of our Bill of Rights and grinds it into the dirt.

But a bill like this should not be passed simply because the latest erosion of our civil liberties is removed and the even worse un-codified understanding and practice is left to continue. A bill like this one should be rejected in its entirety. This bill kills human beings in large numbers, endangers us all through encouragement of foreign hostility, contributes to the development and proliferation of genocidal weaponry, creates massive environmental destruction, advances a foreign policy built around an unsurvivable energy policy, funds both sides of an unending Afghan occupation, funds prisons where we already hold many hundreds of men behind bars without charge or trial, and gives presidents de facto power to ignore our rights for the duration of a global war that has no end. And this bill destroys our economy through unfathomable wasteful spending in the midst of a manufactured deficit crisis and an actual humanitarian crisis at home and abroad.

Military spending is worse for job creation and retention than any other kind of spending or even tax cuts. Jobs is not the silver lining in militarism. There is a choice that confronts us between militarism or jobs, militarism or human services, militarism or a safety net for the ill and the elderly and the impoverished. We’re dumping over a trillion dollars a year into “security” spending in “defense” and other bills combined, well over half of discretionary spending. The deficit “crisis” is not the creation of sick people getting old and multiplying without having had the decency to bribe their way into major government contracts or bailouts from the Federal Reserve. Single-payer health coverage, not cuts to Medicare, is the solution there. The deficit is not purely the result of the Obama tax cuts (sorry, Bush is gone now) or of the bad economy. There is a way to improve the actual economy by spending existing public dollars in different ways.

In 1963, Senator George McGovern and House members F. Bradford Morse and William Fitts Ryan introduced a bill that gained significant support and hearings and would have begun a process of economic conversion from a war economy to a peace economy, retraining and re-employing anyone thrown out of work in the process. Meanwhile, the military was secretly beginning a war in Vietnam, and certain elements were plotting to blow President Kennedy’s brains out of the back of his head. We took a turn for the worse, and economic conversion has never seriously begun. Yet, for decades members of Congress had the decency to at least propose it.

Here’s a bill introduced 20 years ago, in 1991. Do some of the names on the bill look familiar? Waters, Pelosi, Schumer, Slaughter, McDermott, Markey, Panetta (yes, Panetta), Lewis, Pallone, Towns, Berman, Payne, Waxman, Boxer, Wyden, etc. Here’s a solution backed by these people 20 years ago, more desperately needed now, and not under consideration. That’s not their fault. They are cogs in a money-marinated machine. It’s our fault.

In the absence of an overall conversion-to-sanity-and-sustainability bill, there is a related bill that has been introduced in the current Congress: “The Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act of 2011″ introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton. This bill is a concise thing of beauty which says:

(a) In General- The United States Government shall–

(1) by the date that is three years after the date of the enactment of this Act, provide leadership to negotiate a multilateral treaty or other international agreement that provides for –

(A) the dismantlement and elimination of all nuclear weapons in every country by not later than 2020; and

(B) strict and effective international control of such dismantlement and elimination;

(2) redirect resources that are being used for nuclear weapons programs to use–

(A) in converting all nuclear weapons industry employees, processes, plants, and programs smoothly to constructive, ecologically beneficial peacetime activities, including strict control of all fissile material and radioactive waste, during the period in which nuclear weapons must be dismantled and eliminated pursuant to the treaty or other international agreement described in paragraph (1); and

(B) in addressing human and infrastructure needs, including development and deployment of sustainable carbon-free and nuclear-free energy sources, health care, housing, education, agriculture, and environmental restoration, including long-term radioactive waste monitoring;

(3) undertake vigorous, good-faith efforts to eliminate war, armed conflict, and all military operations; and

(4) actively promote policies to induce all other countries to join in the commitments described in this subsection to create a more peaceful and secure world.

(b) Effective Date- Subsection (a)(2) shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have–

(1) eliminated such weapons; or

(2) begun such elimination under established legal requirements comparable to those described in subsection (a).”

If you’re going to begin conversion with one sector, why not start with the worst? The answer does not ultimately lie in backing a particular bill so much as in educating, mobilizing, changing the public discourse, and applying nonviolent pressure. But there are bills that exist or could easily be made to exist that merit our unqualified support.

Either we will move the money from where it destroys to where is sustains life, or our civilization will meet the fate Kennedy met in Dallas.

In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or, in fact, advance a never ending war, and its present under each rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.

The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem foreign enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.

An enormous issue with the militarization and deviation from open aired civilian courts is the very secretive nature of it all. If an individual has truly done a harm that merits intervention, then the light of day should shine on the accusations and stand on their own merits. That tired excuse that the information in these trials needs to be hidden is simply a ploy to avoid oversight and scrutiny. The stories have circulated about local warlords turning in neighbors (who get sent to Gitmo) often for decidedly illegitimate reasons. And then just enough scary terror bogymen really are in residence there to allow the average citizen to go back to sleep, avoiding the uncomfortable realization that some there did nothing wrong, except perhaps be in the wrong place at the wrong time or have enemies with the ear of Uncle Sam. It would be mindless to think it would go down in any other manner here. We aren’t that exceptional, I’m sorry to say.

Not to mention that this further advancement of the Military Industrial Complex must be making those entities who profit off of all of this salivate. As resources dwindle, the decision seems to have been made by the few to loot all that is available, consequences be damned.

At a time when Walmarts around the country have to add extra staff to handle the huge influx at midnight when food stamp cards get recharged….is this really the largest threat to the average American right now?. Of course not. Who is really destroying our nation?

The lumbering corporate facilitators in Congress who let our people languish as they advance Military Industrial Complex hardcore porn legislation such as this.

I have trouble believing that all of the legislators are truly evil. Rancid little snowflakes, all of them, to be sure, some evil, but some merely venal and ignorant — all hideous in their own unique manner. We will find no assistance from this pool of infamy.

This bill is flying under the radar; few seem to know about it. But, of course, that’s understandable; a new woman has popped up to talk about an inappropriate affair with Herman Cain. And if she hadn’t materialized, some damn baby would have to go missing or a hooker’s ipad with Congressional fetish requests would have to be unearthed at a booth in Chili’s – as they debate legislation that would allow the foundations for a new class of “disappeared” to occur in this nation.

If you still have any lingering thoughts that a Democrat (Crip) or a Republican (Blood) might save you, then this should serve as your final wake up call. If the teams truly believed their rhetoric, an abomination like this would have never been advanced — the fear of the other party occupying the Commander in Chief throne would be too frightening to ponder for the opposite party. Sure, they say this is for Al-Queda, but that’s what they always say. It only morphs into the others, such as political dissidents down the road.

McCain joked about his daughter going “to the dark side”, presumably for taking a job at MSNBC (as aside, it’s astounding the talent pool in these children of politicians, isn’t it….they seem to be getting jobs in the media all over the place.) But if McCain believed the bread and circus nonsense he is peddling, would he ever want to advance this kind of bill during a “dark side of the force” presidency? Of course not — because all of that is simply an illusion. They work together for corporate interests, never us. When a clown like Newt Gingrich says “child labor laws are dumb”, it inflames and occupies the national discourse. It’s meant to be that way, and hey…. if he can score one for kids going back to 1827 and get soot to cover their little faces, so much the better. Callista looks good amongst that squalor. Her Tiffany diamonds shine all the brighter in comparison.

It can be a soul crushing moment when it is realized that there are no politicians advancing a core decency for the average American life (and heaven forbid for foreign lives). I’m sure it’s not a new realization for most of the readers of the legitimate free press still operating in the internet hinterland, but for the bulk of Americans, it’s a painful leap they have yet to make. A bill like this is inflammatory to most – when they truly realize what it means – ironically, a bridge between those who still think of themselves with political labels.

It’s all evolving, what this information means. Occupy movements are nebulous, but they seem to have this basic understanding mastered — that the current system is flawed beyond repair. The consent of the governed is being eroded slowly. We still have many decent people who don’t understand, though. Where they use fear and manipulation, we need to use reason, love, and inclusiveness to advance the notion of an equitable society based on mutual respect. We may lose, but what choice do we have?

But time is running out. I’m impressed that Occupy hasn’t turned to violence that places them in the meat grinder. You just know that they are salivating for that. The powerful probably fully expected it to go that manner after beating those kids. How funny to disappoint them so. I see a quite asymmetrical situation — I think it will call for something more nuanced — that of turning the opinion of the masses. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it certainly has been done to great effect by the manipulators of our time. One would hope that truth would have an advantage, but base emotions often rule.

I don’t pretend to know the answers, but I do know that it’s necessary for the broader populace to understand the coup that is underway. That’s the foundation we need. Attempts at localization will likely be necessary as well. A government that seems to care little for any of us, and simply expects us to behave as cogs in machinery of big commerce will continue to run amok when met with resounding silence. But finally, the silence is waning.

But we are on a path that will lead to our own version of “disappeareds” and that is no exaggeration. We have no choice but to resist.

The former Obama administration official, who received a golden parachute at Princeton and the Democratic think tank Center for American Progress when he left the administration, is doing what Democrats always do—see the energy of an independent movement, race to the front, then lead it down a dead end and essentially destroy it. Jones is doing the dirty work of a Democratic operative and while he and other Dem front groups pretend to support Occupiers, their real mission is to co-opt it.

Glenn Greenwald says in a recent blog, “White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicity clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign.”

Before he ran to the front of the Occupy Movement, Jones’ Rebuild the Dream had been saying that its first task was to elect Democrats. Now he is claiming there will be 2000 “99% candidates” in 2012. These Democrats will be re-branded as part of the 99% movement. Democrats will now be re-labeled and marketed as part of the 99% movement. Republican operatives did the same thing to the Tea Party.  Tea Party candidates, who often used to be corporate “Club for Growth” candidates, ran in the Republican Party.  See, e.g. Senator Pat Toomey – before and after.

Jones is urging the Occupy Movement to “mature” and move on to an electoral phase. This would only make us a sterile part of the very problem we oppose. The electoral system is a corrupt mirage where only corporate-approved candidates are allowed to be considered seriously. At Occupy Washington, DC, we recognize that putting our time, energy and resources into elections will not produce the change we want to see. What we need to do right now is build a dynamic movement supported by independent media that stands in stark contrast to both corporate-bought-and-paid-for parties.

Democratic operatives want to steal the energy of the Occupy Movement because they do not have any of their own.  These Dem front groups operate within the confines of the two corrupt parties and their agenda is limited by what big business interests say is politically realistic. Rebuild the Dream is more of the same that has been seen over and over from groups like MoveOn and Campaign for America’s Future – elect Democrats is their mantra.  It is their only program.  And, it is bankrupt.

Democrats need to derail and co-opt the Occupy Movement because it calls attention to what’s really happening. The American people need a real jobs bill, not one that is merely a political tactic for an election year. We also need a truly progressive tax system—one that taxes wealth more and workers less. The poorest Americans pay taxes on necessities like food and clothing, so why is it that neither party urges a tax on the purchase of stocks, bonds and derivatives—a tax that could raise $800 billion over a decade? And finally, we need an end to the wars and militarism maintained and expanded by both parties, bringing huge profits to the arms industry and immense suffering to millions.

The Occupy Movement is not part of either corporate-dominated party and Van Jones is not our leader. It is corporate rule we oppose. The Obama administration and the Democrats as well as the Republicans maintain the rule of Wall Street. Occupiers have organized an independent movement that challenges the rule of the 1% and their Republican and Democratic lackeys. Bought and paid for with millions of dollars from Wall Street, the health insurance industry and big energy interests, Obama and the Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution.

“Gas is much more harmful for the environment,” he added. “And, truth be told, lethal injection is a gateway drug.”

Many folks found it humorous, especially the “gateway” drug line.

I was less impressed. But it got me to thinking. Maybe conservatives (and Republicans by association) are more environmentally conscious than we realize.

The old electric chair didn’t actually conserve much energy, and electric shock torture of the order depicted in the Rambo movies was hardly environmentally responsible. But the Bush Administration’s utilization of water-boarding was clearly green. All it required was an old rag (reusable), a metal or wooden plank (also reusable) and several gallons of water and, even if you water-boarded a human being 183 times, it still comprised a diminutive carbon footprint. It was much more eco-friendly than electroshock interrogation.

And consider the yellow cake uranium prevarications that the Cheney branch of the Bush White House pushed to justify invading Iraq. Outright lies require much less manpower and paperwork than pursuing the truth. Think of how many trees Cheney spared.

Imagine the transportation costs the American taxpayers would have incurred if the Bush White House had allowed the CIA to do its job.

Looking back on it, the Bush Administration was much more conservationist than folks realized and the upcoming 2012 election cycle has Republicans taking note. They’re not wasting any energy coming up with new ideas. They’re simply recycling the old ones.

Republicans want a return to the lack of regulations that led to the Wall Street meltdown. They figure if less of us have jobs, less of us will need to drive to work. We’ll save billions in fuel costs and, if our cars remain parked in our driveways, there will be a substantial reduction in carbon emissions.

Republicans want to reinstate the U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. They realize it will significantly reduce the number of trained, qualified servicemen and women serving overseas and, with less qualified personnel in the ranks, there will be additional casualties. This will help mitigate the growing shortage of jobs that face the soldiers coming home from our wars.

Republicans want to restore the Bible in school curriculums. They know deferring to The Word instead of promoting contemporary theories cuts down on the number of textbooks required to educate our children. And with less textbooks and a de-emphasis on intellectual development, competent instructors will be easier to find and cheaper to hire. Sticking closer to the Holy Writ will spare untold swathes of forest and hiring less educated instructors will cut down on all the government funding that’s wasted on “higher” education.

Republicans want to limit the political conversation to their own tried and true talking points. Fox News affords them a captive audience that is practically intellectually catatonic and introducing new ideas or meaningful discussions simply disturb the sediment that insulates their base. Pigeon-holing the debate keeps their conservative environs intact and less vulnerable to de-stabilizing nature of newly introduced theses and the contaminating aspects of broader viewpoints.

And, finally, in perhaps the greatest conservationist and preservationist efforts Republicans have followed through with in decades, they’re working tirelessly to maintain and protect the plunder and privilege of the human subspecies known as the American wealthy.

Fearful that this potentially endangered strata of our citizenry is threatened by the menacing forces of cultural equilibrium and economic fair play, Republicans are organizing filibusters in the U.S. Senate and staging a do-nothing occupation of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Considered en masse, the Republican Party is obviously much greener than we realized.

Of course Republican greenness has more to do with bigotry, ignorance and corporate backers than Mother Nature. But you have to start somewhere.

They are clearly the oak that becomes an acorn.

Those who followed the 2008 presidential campaign will remember Joe the Plumber as the man John McCain dramatically invited up on stage and portrayed as a symbol of America’s “noble working class.”  McCain hoped the gesture would attract the blue-collar vote.  Alas, with his abject ignorance of Obama’s proposed tax plan and his puffed-up resume (despite using the plumbers union logo on his web page, he was neither a licensed plumber nor a union member, but rather a “plumber’s helper,” having failed the journeyman’s test), Joe turned out to be more of a liability than an asset.

Still, proving F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong in claiming that there are no second acts in American life, instead of licking his wounds and slinking away in embarrassment and disgrace (and perhaps giving that journeyman’s test one more go), Joe abandoned the plumbing trade altogether and went on to bigger and better things.  Swooped up by Republican activists, he became a motivational speaker.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he was both impressed and appalled by much of what he observed here.  One of the things that appalled him was Davy Crockett.  Crockett had recently served in Congress, representing (coincidentally) Tennessee’s 9thdistrict.  Tocqueville described Crockett as a man “…who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent his time hunting, selling his game for a living, and spending his whole life in the woods.”

If the Frenchman was suggesting that only “educated” citizens are worthy of holding public office, he couldn’t have been more wrong.  Just consider unctuous ex-senator Phil Gramm (he and wife Wendy smoothed the way for Enron) and pesky Republican show-off Newt Gingrich.  Both of these men have Ph.Ds and were former university professors.  But Gore Vidal and Eugene Debs never spent a day in college.  Tom Paine never went to college.  Harry Bridges never went to college.  Yet, Sarah Palin holds a bachelor’s degree in—God help us—Journalism

However, if Tocqueville’s larger point was that we Americans are too easily enamored, too easily suckered into thinking that any common man—any working man, any “man of the people”—is preferable to any nominal “elitist,” then he was definitely on to something.  Indeed, we do seem to have a fetish, a bizarre and stubborn love affair, with the concept of mock-equality.

Obviously, no voter is going to say, “What I want in a candidate is someone who’s totally unlike me, someone who has no idea what I go through day to day, someone who has never struggled and has no idea how hard it is to make a living.”  But while no one’s going to say that, it shouldn’t follow that any self-avowed “common man” who comes down the pike is automatically qualified to represent us.

The argument can be made that Franklin Roosevelt did more for working people than any president in history, and FDR was an aristocrat (scorned him as a “traitor to his class”).  Ted Sorenson, JFK’s aide and speechwriter, said that because Kennedy grew up around rich people he was not only singularly unimpressed by them, he often expressed his contempt for the rich.  Conversely, Richard Nixon, who grew up in a modest household, remained awestruck by men of wealth because they were everything he wasn’t.

Ultimately, it will be up to the good people of Ohio’s 9th district to choose.  They will be asked to decide whether they want as their representative a man who couldn’t follow a basic tax argument, who couldn’t pass a journeyman’s test, and who knowingly lied about his qualifications.  If they wish to go down that road and elect such a man, so be it.  That will be their legacy.

But maybe we’re overreacting.  After all, what real harm can one (one out of 435) unqualified congressman do?  And Lord knows, both the Democrats and Republicans have sent weirder, more offensive people to congress than this fellow.  Also, Davy Crockett may have been adept at hunting and fishing, but Joe the Plumber—even without his journeyman’s license—knows how to rebuild a lawn sprinkler and fix a leaky faucet.  Can Eric Cantor say the same?

If Barack and Mitt are the best the political elite can come up with, we can only conclude that the entire American ruling class is suffering from acute paranoid schizophrenia — fearing commies-turned-Muslims under their beds, shedding tears over the odd child hit by a stray bullet in, say, Syria, while joyously bombing hapless Afghans, Iraqs and Libyans into the Stone Age, wiping out hundreds of thousands in the process.

Obama said Saturday that the US now must tackle its “greatest challenge as a nation” — rebuilding a weak economy and creating jobs — with the “same urgency and unity that our troops brought to their fight”. More like: with the “same cold-blooded disrespect for human life …” Is it possible Obama will promote a Swift-like “modest proposal” to unemployment, and exhort Americans to eat their children?

Despite overwhelming evidence that the chaos and destruction the US brings the world has induced only hate and disgust for America and its values, he preened himself for helping murder Gaddafi and for pretending to withdraw US troops from Iraq: “This week, we had two powerful reminders of how we’ve renewed American leadership in the world.”

Of course, there is an explanation for this raving. The chaos is caused by the logic of profit in the economy, and the rhetoric — by the need to control the political process to ensure profit’s uninterrupted flow. But Obama’s fine rhetoric is not even convincing Americans anymore, as Occupy Wall Street and demonstrations across the country show. As for Congress; just 6 per cent of registered voters think sitting members deserve re-election — the lowest percentage since CBS News Polls began 20 years ago.

What is the poor — literally, at this point — voter to do? There are stirrings, even in the ruling class. Warren Buffett is spreading a chain letter calling on citizens to demand “a constitutional amendment which would make all sitting members of Congress ineligible for re-election anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 per cent of GDP.” If only it were that simple.

As analyst William Cook puts it, “Representatives no longer serve the citizen seeking their consent to govern, they are servants of the corporations and lobbies that control the economic system. Presidents no longer lead, they are the obedient lackeys of their corporate overseers.” If Buffett’s amendment passed, it would merely bring in another crop of time-servers, with no noticeable effect except higher unemployment and more poverty.

Oblivious to the obvious, Libertarian Ron Paul is battling it out with the Mitts in Republican cuckoo-land to slash both the budget deficit and taxes. At least Paul wants less war. He is determined to end what he calls the “welfare-warfare state”, undeterred by the plight of the record 46 million Americans on food stamps (whose welfare expenditures are a crucial stimulus to local economies), and the fact that his very own campaign manager in 2008 died of pneumonia in 2011 from lack of medical insurance.

Then there is the perennial Ralph Nader, who is bowing out from a full-scale campaign so far, and working with left Democrats to field primary challengers to Obama in the desperate hope to move him to the left.

What about a third-party/ independent presidential campaign? The Green Party always fields someone, and Nader ran many times in the past as both the Green candidate and as an independent. There is a new such campaign this year — an Internet campaign called Americans Elect, intending to nominate “a competitive, nonpartisan ticket” that “answers directly to voters”. A Republican must team up with a Democrat. Give me a break.

It is impossible for such a dark horse to actually win, given the Republicrat control of the media and corporate financing of elections. However, American third-partiers, or rather non-partiers, have a venerable history in the US. Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive Bull Moose) captured 27 per cent of the vote in 1912, and Progressive Robert La Follette — 27 per cent in 1924. Billionaire Ross Perot created his own Reform Party, running on a confusing mix of balanced budget, war on drugs, gun control, trade protectionism and environmentalism, to gain almost 20 per cent of the vote in 1992.

If, say, the Green candidate miraculously takes off, s/he will at best be a spoiler, like Republican Party-pooper Roosevelt in 1912 (allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win), Ross Perot in 1992 (allowing Democrat Bill Clinton to win) and possibly Nader in 2000, whose 2.74 per cent of the vote might have been the cause of Al Gore’s loss to George W Bush.

Whichever Republicrat takes over in January 2013 will continue the failed policies of yesteryear as the US people continue to sink into poverty. But the end is already in sight, as the American long spring continues to gain momentum, both on the ground and in the ether. Ipads can distract from reality, but they are also a powerful tool to fight it, as Egyptians found out this January.

The bottom line is, of course, to dismantle the “reality of corporate control”, as Cook puts it. He rightly argues that “the rights of citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness require the government to ensure these rights”, which means universal health care, freedom from want; in short, a government that serves the people, not the corporations. While this may sound trite, it is the stark truth. “Rights before privilege.”

There is strong US precedent for this. In 1944, shortly before he died, president Franklin Roosevelt presented Congress with a new Bill of Rights, which included “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment”, as well as farmers’ and businessmen’s rights “to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition by monopolies”. Of course, Congress being Congress, it dismissed out of hand this parting gift of FDR.

Another stark truth is that real change in America requires the defeat of America in its imperial wars. This uniquely happened in 1975, when the last helicopters carried panicked remnants of the US puppet regime in Saigon to safety. It resulted in a shift towards détente, exposure of CIA black-ops, limits on US promotion of regime-change and assassination, and on the presidential right to launch undeclared war. Alas, this reversal was short-lived. Memories are short. Rhetoric (then, it was the folksy Reagan) and the ease of spinning circles around do-nothing Congress (a truly worthy whipping boy) have brought us to the current impasse.

Obama’s attempts to paint Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as triumphs of “American leadership” ring hollow as the economy continues to sink under the weight of its military might. In 1944, America was on top of the world, and FDR’s wistful reminder of the dark 1930s was easily brushed aside. His vice president from 1941-44, Henry Wallace, ran as a Progressive Party candidate in 1948 largely on FDR’s wish list, but his third-party campaign of racial equality and socialism was greeted by boycotts and rotten eggs, and netted him only 2.4 per cent of the vote. America’s long journey into the imperial wilderness had begun in earnest.

To resuscitate FDR’s dashed dreams today means acknowledging, even welcoming, defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, as their peoples throw off their American shackles. Any thought that Libya will save the Yanks’ bacon is a pipedream. The smoke of civil war there will remain in the air for a long time to come, as a constant reminder of the follies of such imperial games.

The American pacifist Gene Sharp, author of Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential (2005), is credited with ushering in the so-called Coloured Revolutions in countries as disparate as Yugoslavia and Egypt during the past two decades. Ahmed Maher, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement that sparked the Egyptian revolution, was inspired by Sharp, and is returning the favour by advising “our brothers”, the Occupy Wall Streeters, on Twitter. It is a nice touch that Sharp’s techniques for facing down police states (Congress be damned) are now being turned on the American police state itself, as the “99 per cent” of Americans try to pick up where FDR’s Bill of Rights left off.