Walsh argues there is a difference: “Rep. Ron Paul (R, TX) the only contender who is a consistent, principled anti-interventionist, opposed to overseas Empire, and a staunch defender of our civil liberties so imperiled since 9/11.” His argument is that because Ron Paul is anti-war that the Left should embrace his candidature, and he views it as a challenge to the Left.²

Without a doubt, any president that would put an end to the imperialist wars being waged by the US would be light years better than a slew of corporate-backed warmongers that have long sat in the White House, including Obama. This means that a future president Paul, insofar as he would and could implement a policy of no wars, is far preferable to the irredeemable warmonger Barack Obama, who curries negligible favor among progressives.

Paul, however, carries a regressivist side with him that many progressives consider anathema. I consider Paul’s ideology as anti-human, basically every man and woman for his/her self.³ Under Paul, tough luck for those people that fall through the cracks.

Yet Walsh makes the case that Paul is the moral choice. However, based on Paul’s libertarian ideology (which he, arguably, does not always adhere to), the morality of a Paul presidency is open to criticism.

Walsh asks, “Is not the very first obligation of the Left above and beyond all else to stop the killing, done in our name and with our tax dollars? Is any other stance moral? And does not the Paul candidacy need to be seen in this light?”

The Paul candidacy needs to be seen in the light of all his stances and the morality of all those stances. Morality is not a unitary, single issue.

Thus, insofar as participating in rigged elections is a correct strategy, if there were a candidate who is anti-war and progressive on other issues, would not the moral choice be to vote for that candidate? For example, if Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney were to run again?

Nevertheless, should no progressivist candidate stand for the next presidential election, can one argue seriously that lesser evilism is a moral choice?

Obama is not a lesser evil. He is on par with any other Republican candidate — with one exception. Based on Paul’s anti-war stance, it appears that he is a lesser evil to Obama (or any other Republican candidate). Does that make Paul the best candidate to vote for?

Two quotations stand out well for me about the dangers of lesser evilism. Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián warned: “Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other ones invariably slink in after it.”

Lesser evilism has pushed most parties to the Right. The lesson of lesson evilism is that if a party wants to grab a section of the Right, it appeals to with receptiveness to certain rightist issues, believing that it can hold onto whatever leftist base it has because there is no other viable alternative. The result worldwide has been a slide to the right among all prominent political parties. In the US, the Democrats have slid side-by-side with the Republicans; in Canada there is little to distinguish the Conservatives and the Liberals (and the so-called leftist New Democrats are hardly what I would call a part of the Left, at best right of center); in the United Kingdom, the Blairites shoved the Labour Party over toward the Conservatives (and the Liberal Democrats work hand-in-hand with the Conservatives to form a government); in Germany the Social Democratic Party slid to the Right under Gerhard Schröder; etc. What this rightward shift did is vanish, neuter, or marginalize a leftist electoral option. This phenomenon, occurring far and wide, has paved the way for neoliberalism — an extreme form of capitalism — that has caused the middle and lower socioeconomic classes to fall farther behind.

By sliding to the Right, only the corporatocracy wins. Lesser evilism in the form of a Ron Paul government might result in a roll back of the US military — admittedly a stupendous achievement. However, a rightward drift economically might fuel xenophobia, blaming outsiders for the problems caused by right-wing economic policy. This sentiment eases launching of wars against outsiders. Paul does appeal to a base that fears immigration. Moreover, the Tea Partiers, whose support Paul is courting, contradictorily call for reining in government but supporting militarism — a huge drain on the public purse.

Only by holding onto it principles and political goals will the Left, in the long-term, be able to realize its goals in government.

If lesser evilism opens the doors to other evils, then British preacher Charles Spurgeon opted correctly when he stated, “Of two evils, choose neither.”⁴

1. See Kim Petersen, “The Utter Futility of Lesser Evilism,” Dissident Voice, 24 May 2007.
2. Charles Davis earlier made the argument that Ron Paul is a lesser evil compared to Obama. “Ron Paul: A Lesser Evil?” Dissident Voice, 28 April 2011.
3. See Pham Binh, “Don’t Fall for Ron Paul,” Dissident Voice, 16 May 2011.
4. See Kim Petersen, “The Lesser-of-Two Evils,” Dissident Voice, 19 April 2004.

Here are some examples:

1) When General Betray-Us, or ex-Secretary of International Mayhem, Robert Gates, say that we must stay in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bahrain, Yemen, or wherever else our empire happens to be on the move, there is no viable alternative party to oppose their illegal ideology. While some politicos feel protected enough in their electoral districts to call for an end to these senseless wars, there is no mass movement they can call on to picket, boycott, march or even sign meaningless petitions demanding an end to these slaughters. Their voices and their votes are token opposition to the military-industrial juggernaut. In spite of the fact that over 75% of the American people want to bring our troops home, there is no political party or movement to speak out in opposition to the military-dominated Obama administration.

2) When the Supreme Court of the United States orders California to release 45,000 non-violent inmates from our over-crowded torturous state prison system, both the Democrats and the Republicans nod in approval when the California Department of Confinement and Rigor-mortis responds with the absurd statement that such a release will cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. How is such hypocrisy possible? Because the CDC interprets the court decision to mean that the inmates should be sent to county jails instead of released. Who are they to issue such a twisted and distorted interpretation of how to lower the prison population? Where is the party or credible group that should come forward and say: Release means Release! We could immediately, safely and easily, release thousands of non-violent prisoners who could be returned to society into viable programs so that they have some possibility of becoming productive members of the community. Instead, the only voice to be heard is that of the self-serving prison administration and prison guards union. Our police-state government is dependent on repression to finance a faltering economy, and no one speaks in the name of decency and social responsibility. Incarceration and torture are our creative answers to poverty and lack of education.

3) The majority of Americans want single payer, affordable health care. Where is the movement or party to be found that can insist on viable health care as a prerequisite to supporting a candidate for election? Nowhere! Instead, we hear the voices of the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and the professional medical associations. There is no organized institutional response to the theft of our health care.

4) Oil companies, insurance companies, banks, mortgage companies, Wall Street brokers all are completely unregulated in spite of the atrocities they are perpetrating against the American people. Yet both the Democrats and Republicans bail these gangsters out, support their continued abuses, and depend upon them for financial support in the up-coming elections. The suggestion that the greedy, vicious oligarchs who run these industries should be held accountable and prosecuted for their crimes against the American people is not to be found in any serious public forum.

5) This country now has the greatest discrepancy in wealth between the super-rich and the poor than almost any nation on earth. Yet there is no visible movement anywhere that demands a redistribution of the wealth from the rich to the poor. Instead, we hear fantasies about there not being enough money to go around, and “we” should all tighten our belts so that the rich can obtain more.

6) The disproportionate impact that the neo-conservative anti-Cuban and pro-Israeli lobbyists have in Washington, D.C., is contemptible. While Americans suffer from our faltering economy, and experience growing contempt for U.S. policies everywhere in the world, the oligarchy continues to pander to these right-wing fanatics as if there is no opposition to their suicidal policies.

The answer to these questions flow from an obvious truth. We have been McCarthy’ed out of existence. The anti-communist, anti-socialist rhetoric of the 50s has come home to roost. Only the rich have rights. Those who talk about leveling the playing field are, dare I say it, SOCIALISTS. Enough said! In earlier societies, that characterization is like calling someone a witch or some equally sinister force. Socialism is now seen by the majority of the American people as Stalinism; it is equated with Maoist intransigence; Cuban and Vietnamese “aggression,” etc. The concept of a democratic government that redistributes wealth and resources for the good of the majority of the people is inconceivable in a country that applauds the obscene wealth of the Kochs, the DeVos family, the Waltons and the like. Democracy has not only lost its foothold in this country, it is 6 feet under.

We must build a movement or party that is democratic, inter-racial, non-hierarchical, and based upon equal rights and access to the body politic. There must be a process for feedback and criticism, one that ensures gender equality, and one that incorporates the needs of the many over the demands of the few. The elderly and the young must be included in the decision-making process.

The capitalist invention of a greedy, grasping vulture that preys on the weak must be addressed and opposed. Our society can no longer afford a “survival of the fittest” mentality, but rather one that is inclusive, self-sustaining, educational and nurturing. Until and unless the American people take the yoke of McCarthyism off of their shoulders, the U.S. will continue to be a one-party oligarchy, beholden to a handful of corporate billionaires – vampires responsive solely to their own needs.

The media, the religious right and both political parties are owned outright by corporate oligarchs. The repressive apparatus of the police and prison system are at their disposal. While there is a slim possibility that a homegrown resistance can grow in this country, it is more likely that the pressure for change will come from the victims of U.S. imperialism throughout the world. At that time, let us hope that true American patriots will see where their self-interest lies. Let the Kochs, the Waltons, the Rockefellers and their ilk fight for themselves; don’t protect them as if they care a damn about this country.

As a fan of the TV show Lie To Me where the experts can detect minute physical signs of lying or micro-expressions, I felt that the politicians had developed the talent and skill to lie without giving any sign of it.

Here is what Americans should learn: All elected Democrats and Republicans have succeeded because they are excellent liars and, therefore, not one of them can ever be trusted to be telling the truth.

When you vote for any of these two-party politicians all you are saying is: LIE TO ME.

And when they get elected that is exactly what they will do, and not just about their personal behavior.  The larger lesson is that American politicians will also lie effortlessly about public policy and just about everything they have anything to do with.

Make no mistake, President Obama has lied about many things just as presidents before him also have.

Can you have an effective representative democracy when elected officials can never be trusted to tell the truth to citizens?   No.

Elected officials no long feel they have a profound responsibility to tell the truth.  It appears to be behavior that has become automatic, not something they agonize over.  Lying has become normal behavior whether it is done in Internet communications, on TV, in speeches or during campaigning for office.  Lying may have become so commonplace that politicians no longer spend time justifying it to themselves or their closest staff or supporters.  Sure, when they get caught, they easily apologize and accept responsibility in some glib and usually tearful way.  But their moral decrepitude should not be forgiven.  Dishonest politicians are chronically ill, selfish, egoistic betrayers of public trust.  Severe punishment of them is necessary, starting with legally required removal from office and loss of all pension and health insurance benefits.

In the US political system public trust of elected officials is passé, or should be.

This is not a matter of cynicism; it is just prudent and logical to mistrust just about everything said by elected officials.  Of course, if you think that a particular politician lies supports your views, then it may not bother you, but it should.

Forget about the rationalization that politicians merely misspeak or that they are just fallible human beings like the rest of us.  My point is that an essential skill and regular behavior of politicians is lying without any hint of it.  The only thing that politicians now fear is losing control and inadvertently telling the truth!

Has it always been this way?  Have American politicians always been ubiquitous liars?  I don’t think so.  What was once aberrant behavior has become normal behavior.  It is yet another sign of just how much the US has sunk.  It is not just that the country is on the wrong track; it is off the track, falling into an abyss.

When it is rational to always be suspicious of everything politicians say, then why keep listening?  Why keep voting for them?  Why keep believing that the US is still a functioning democracy?  Why believe lies about reforming government?  Why think that the overpowering corruption of government by corporate interests will change?

The biggest insanity of all is that when politicians get caught lying about sexual behavior they pay a high price, but not when they get caught lying about the economy, how they have voted on issues, how they have implemented their campaign promises, what they have taken from corporate supporters, and other substantive issues. They get away with it.  In large measure because the media do not make a big deal of ordinary lying.  Lying is the new normal.  Expectations of honesty are gone.

The US political system is broken.  That is the truth.  You can trust me.

Take a little satisfaction knowing that the biggest lies politicians tell are probably to themselves.

22-year mayor Short Shanks Dick Daley II was off hiding in the British Virgin Islands in exile: a vestige of a political establishment that is now extinct. Am I adding a somber note to an occasion that ought not be so somber? Well, I am a Chicagoan by birth, so he is like my father.

But doesn’t Rahm just continue the machine lineage?

No!

While Daley did gave Rahm Emanuel the nod to run for Congress back in ’02 when Blago was elected Governor, the two are from distinct political establishments, with their intersection being the commonality of Chicago. Daley is a south-sider, part of the dying breed of the Chicago Irish political racket. Meanwhile, Rahm is a Jew from the North: one whom many in the old machine would have considered some “fucking liberal.”

I won’t sidestep into discussion about how he isn’t liberal. In fact, he is quite “liberal” in the more commonly used sense of the word through the world: someone who opposes any interference in the market, even if your aim is merely socioeconomic justice. In the Land of the Free, sadly, almost everyone is hostile to such notions, even the majority that would benefit from social-democratic policies. So if everyone is a liberal, what’s the point in using the word?

A far more prescient term is “googoo”: the yuppie that thinks all will be Good as long as Government is in the hands of one of their own. I will give credit to the googoos for not holding some of the biases of yesteryear, as they did anoint this country’s first black President. In fact, some would argue that the googoo prefers a little color, for it serves to cloak the systemic biases of the liberalism they espouse.

I once saw Rahm on tape complaining about “gooogoos” and their lack of political organization. He rolled his eyes and muttered that which I have muttered many times before: “Fuckin’ googoos!” They aren’t adept campaigners, because they can’t stand in one place for more than a half hour passing out palm cards: they are far too important for that. For these purposes, Rahm prefers the “knuckle dragger,” which Daley has always provided a steady stream of.

Nonetheless, his core voter is still a “googoo,” as with former boss Barack, and most of the Democratic Party establishment. They have just anointed him to be the new Mayor of Chicago, thus ending a century of Machine rule. What little remained of the machine was out campaigning for Gery Chico, the old Chicago Public School boss, whose influence was largely contained to the rolling bungalows of the northwest side.

The only candidate resembling a progressive, City Clerk Miguel Del Valle, limped home with 9% of the vote: a sad reminder that populism is entirely dead in Chicago. He did inspire a fairly impressive ground game, but these don’t amount to votes in the era of the “googoo,” because these foul creatures demand that you have the endorsement of the daily rag for their approval. They will mock your leaflet, spite your populist rhetoric, disparage you for questioning the status quo, and flock to support anyone given the nod by the Trib or Sun Times

Here we see ourselves mourning the death of the machine, for it has been replaced with something even worse. We have gone from blue-collar semi-populist sensibilities to the singular class: the amorphous class of supposedly well-intentioned yuppies. While the machine diverted union interests to the corporate-laded Democratic Party to no one’s benefit, at least their organization required that support. On occasion, the unions could still flex their muscle in this old game. Nowadays, Rahm managed to win despite airing commercials dissing public sector workers, and calling for an era where they work on a purely contractual basis.

I spent the day campaigning for del Valle and myself in a vanity Green Party run for alderman in an abundantly “googoo” ward. Without much time and money, I primarily used my campaign as a chance to stump for Mr. Del Valle. In this ward, the corporate press manufactured an “upset,” by endorsing a nonentity of a googoo over the anointed machine hack (I did not participate in the corporate press endorsement process.) The victor, Ameya Pawar, is a 30-year old with no meaningful political background or coherent political philosophy. This is quite possibly the greatest political upset I have ever witnessed, as he knew little about the dynamics of campaigning, evidenced by the lack of “union bugs” on his material, and the absence of any visible ground game. The “corporate press” now possesses the unencumbered capacity to anoint victors. The unimaginative populace has almost no ability to think on their own, beyond trivial dichotomies. Both corporate newspapers painted this as an “us vs. them” race of a “David vs. Goliath” nature, wherein the longshot got their approval, in large part because he was a harmless googoo running against a machine charlatan.

I spent nearly the whole of Election Day striking up conversation with machine goons at polling places. We stood out in the cold, passing palm cards to voters as they trickled in. One yuppie googoo, en passant, refused both of our palm cards, declaring: “You’re the machine hack, and you’re a left-wing nut! Don’t bother me!” That was the microcosm of our day.

One of the goons I talked to for a while said “We like you better than that Indian, because at least you’re pro-union.”

I responded : “Well, you know, both my parents were union. I was actually born and raised in the city, not off in the suburbs.”

He continued: “Yeah, this guy is a fuckin’ jackass.”

I replied: “Well, he’s just a googoo”

Another goon chimed in: “Yep!”

So there I spent 15 hours on the sinking ship of Chicago’s machine, bonding with goons in the frigid temperatures, sensing that the sun was setting on a fabled era of Chicago history.

I then cozied into the comfort of O’Shaughnessy’s for a nip and pint, followed by several more, and watched Rahmbo give his victory speech. I had my epiphany: the new boss is not the same as the old boss. The culture has changed, the relevance of organized labor has waned, and the city has become a mob of narrow-minded yuppies that share and embody Rahm’s hostility to populism.

Most importantly, the corporate press enthusiastically trumpeted Rahm’s candidacy. They manufactured this consent, paid no attention to the field’s one progressive (and Miguel was no Hugo Chavez), and turned this narrative into the completion of a dream for a Chicago political hero.

Many in the neighborhood were enthused that the mayor will live amongst us in Ravenswood. The home he famously leased out whilst in Washington is literally blocks from where I sit typing. The current resident, Rob Halpin, refused to break his lease when Rahm returned to run for mayor, thus sparking Rahm’s residency-question debacle. My message to Rob on this somber occasion: “Trash the fuckin’ place!”

The narrative has come full circle. I initially returned to this city to run for Rahm’s old Congressional seat as a Green in the 2009 special election. He is now back and I will be gone. I have regretted the decision to return for most of the last year, as I have grown tired of Chicago’s “Second city complex.” Always beware the people a notch or two below the Jones’s, for they are the most arrogantly hostile people on Earth. Chicago has never been a worldly cosmopolitan city a la New York or Paris, nor did it develop a uniquely vibrant identity a la L.A. with Hollywood.

With the sun setting on the machine, so it has set on us, the children of it. I am off to warmer and more fertile pastures. See you in New Orleans.

But not before making another toast to the memory of the Chicago Machine.

In the past month, the people of Egypt—inspired by the recent democratic revolution in Tunisia and preceding emergent revolutions in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, and Morocco—have undertaken a revolt of truly stunning proportions, one that includes men and women from all class strata, religious and ethnic origins, and ideological commitments. They managed to rid themselves of a longstanding and brutal dictator worth over $40 billion and supported by the collective power of the United States, European Union, Israel, and the Arab Gulf States.

Now that two Arab dictators have been vanquished by the collective will of unaffiliated protesters, many American commentators have been forced to rethink their assumptions about the supposedly tribal and authoritarian Arab mind. Such commentators, sometimes conservative but often liberal, fancy themselves guardians of a civic and political enlightenment that in reality is misinformed in addition to being conceited and imperialistic.

Nevertheless, given the ardor and self-confidence of the notion that American values exemplify democratic modernity, let us imagine a few potential outcomes had the pioneering people of Egypt followed the example of today’s liberal American Democrats.

Mubarak offered the Egyptian people what he deemed sweeping reforms. The people rejected his overtures as inadequate and disingenuous, which only increased their desire to oust Mubarak. A protester named Dalia observed, “Nothing will make this regime go unless we keep on coming and keep on coming.” Had Dalia been a Democrat, she might have instead responded, “The Egyptian government has a real opportunity in the face of this very clear demonstration of opposition to begin a process that will truly respond to the aspirations of the people of Egypt.”

Despite police brutality, the people of Egypt remained steadfast and continued their chants of “down with Mubarak” and “Tunisia is the solution,” both slogans underscoring the importance of a genuinely transformative revolution. Had they been Democrats, they surely would not have been so quixotic and would have instead opted for a pragmatic approach, as most Democrats do in every American election. As Michael Moore warns, democratic transformation has no real place in American politics: “And so, I just—I think that—I mean, what I’ve proposed for the last few years is that if we really want to try and get this power in our hands, in the people’s hands, in the hands of the working people of this country, then we should, on a very grassroots level, from the bottom up, be doing things to—whether it’s running for local office, taking over the local Democratic Party.”

Working within a corrupt system, rather than trying to abolish it, is the way American liberals like Moore prefer to pursue justice: “well, we have these two political parties which are really very much like one party, why don’t we make sure that one of those parties actually is a second party and start locally and do that? And that’s what I encourage people to do. That’s my approach.”

The Egyptian protesters demanded rule by the people rather than subservience to a small caste of politicians and crony capitalists. They continue to agitate for a new constitution, universal health care, a multiple-party democracy, unionization for workers, and an end to the violent suppression of dissent. If they were Democrats, they probably wouldn’t be so ambitious. In the United States, dissent is often suppressed, sometimes violently, unions are busted, two parties representing 300 million people assert plutocratic hegemony, and politicians of the two parties serve the interests not of their citizen constituents but of crony capitalists. The Democrats do not tolerate dissentient action in the form of mass protest; they prefer the tactic of voting for Democrats during election season.

Liberal commentators dismiss as silliness any desire to oust dictatorial leaders outside the pragmatic framework of Democratic values. Todd Gitlin preaches discipline in the face of abusive state power: “Will the rebellious left discipline itself, cool its boiling blood, and decide that the pleasures of sectarianism are worth less than the steady resolve of infrastructural work?” Speaking against—what else?—leftist politician Ralph Nader. Eric Alterman is less diplomatic: “The man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one. Let him damage somebody else’s now.” Alterman despises Nader because of Nader’s lack of faith in politicians: “Politicians blow with political winds. To force them to blow our way, progressives need leaders who can combine hardheaded realism with the ability to inspire Americans’ nascent idealism.”

According to liberal Democrats, alternate politics are impossible and thus undesirable. The Egyptian people do not share the same viewpoint. There was nothing pragmatic about what they did: it is never a reasonable idea to march into bullets, tear gas canisters, and police boots in order to upend a rotten political system brandishing the imprimatur of the world’s most powerful armies and politicians. But if the Egyptian people wanted a just political system, rather than the practical realities of theft and corruption, they needed to replace and not merely reform their government. To challenge bad politicians by electing more bad politicians is not serious political thinking; it is an inducement to apathy and intellectual frivolity.

The Egyptian people erected a remarkably functional democratic space in Tahreer Square, complete with an infirmary, a kindergarten, and a pharmacy. When Democratic Party bosses get together, protesters are entrapped in chain link cages.

In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people.

If the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have accepted Mubarak’s proposed reforms—not because those reforms were good, but because Democrats are accustomed to settling for empty rhetoric. They would have accepted Mubarak’s handpicked successor, the infamous torturer Omar Suleiman—not because they like him, but because he would presumably be less evil than his predecessor. They would have accepted the inevitability of defeat—not because they wanted to lose, but because losing would be both pragmatic and realistic. The actual Egyptian protesters, however, would only accept freedom.

For those who might respond to this hypothetical exercise by pointing out that the United States is not Egypt, I would agree. Egypt under Mubarak was more equitable than the United States under Barack Obama. Egypt has far less income inequality than the United States, and all of Mubarak’s brutality was at least indirectly underwritten by the American government.

The people of the Middle East and North Africa have never listened to American liberals, who through the years have loved to bestow unsolicited advice on Arabs. Had the Arabs accepted this unsolicited advice, they would have become Democrats instead of revolutionaries.

The only acceptable liberal American response to the revolutions in the Arab World is the silence that enlivens a sincere attempt to listen. Clearly it is time for American liberals to stop lecturing Arabs and start following their example, instead.

Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.

— Bertolt Brecht

Several times in columns over the last year or so I have written about the need for a “third force,” a broad, independent and progressive united front.

Those people who know me might think this is nothing new. After all, for over 15 years I have been a leader of the Independent Progressive Politics Network, which has had unity-building for an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans as central to its mission. However, my conception of a 21st-century-second-decade “third force” has one major difference, which is:

What we need is an alliance which consciously incorporates elected Democrats as well as elected Greens and independents, as well as groups, or individual leaders and members of groups, like Progressive Democrats of America and the Green Party. More than that, this alliance eventually needs to support and work to elect candidates running both as Democrats and progressive independents, and maybe even an occasional Republican.

To sharpen the point even more: I am completely convinced after 36 years of being active in organizations trying to build a mass, progressive third party in the USA that such an approach ALONE will never, ever get us to the promised land. The huge, historically-based, structural obstacles in the way of the formation of a truly mass-based (tens of millions), new political party make it essential that a different approach be used.

A Green Party Leader’s Proposal

A progressive third party can be formed, and has been, the Green Party. Of all the various national efforts to form a third party alternative over the last 25 years, this is the one which has been most successful. But after all those years, it does not command the support of tens of millions, its growth has been at best incremental over the past decade, and there is no reason to believe that, alone, this will change substantially.

Some Greens, perhaps many, understand that something new is needed. Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States, wrote a piece just before Christmas calling for a “voters’ revolt.” McLarty’s piece was “not an exhortation for exclusively voting Green in every election. Greens are not on every ballot, nor would I advise voting according to party without regard for candidates’ qualifications. Rather, it’s an appeal for progressive, antiwar, pro-environmental groups and anyone who cares about America’s future to recognize the alternative party imperative, and to support that imperative however they can.”

McLarty goes on to clarify what he sees as the political vehicle for this “voters’ revolt:”

What we need, as a preliminary for the emergence of the Greens or any other alternative, is a popular voters’ revolt against the rule of the Titanic parties (a phrase coined by Laura Wells, Green candidate for governor of California in 2010). It should be led by a coalition of alternative parties that have found themselves virtually shut out of the political system and the media, including Greens, Socialists, Libertarians, independents and others, as well as Tea Partiers frustrated by their movement’s absorption into the GOP and sympathetic Democrats and Republicans.

Tactically, McLarty writes that “the first step for such a coalition would be a list of demands that presuppose no political ideology beyond a desire for clean and open elections.” He lists his thoughts on those ‘clean elections’ demands, including: debates that include all candidates, proportional representation, instant runoff voting, campaign finance reforms, tamper-proof and open-software computer voting machines, abolishment of ‘corporate personhood,’ and repeal of restrictive ballot access laws.

The successful development of this proposal would be a good thing. Without question, part of the overall platform of the progressive movement, of a new “third force,” should be these kinds of electoral reforms to open up our anachronistic political system. But as THE central strategic objective for progressives and revolutionaries, I don’t see it. And a coalition of the kind McLarty proposes is not a progressive coalition; it’s, in essence, a single-issue coalition, and that is not enough on the issue of clean elections, or health care, or the climate, or racial justice, or war and militarism, or anything else

What we need is a broadly-based alliance involving tens of thousands of organizers — once it gets off the ground — that can effectively put forward and organize around a multi-issue, consistently progressive program on how society can be rebuilt and reorganized for the benefit of the people and our severely threatened ecosystem. Neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties are doing this. Obama’s new chief of staff, William Daley, as well his old one, Rahm Emanuel, in no way have, or had, this as their agenda, in any way, shape or form.

Working Within the Democratic Party

Progressive Democrats and the organization Progressive Democrats of America, as well as many unions, reform groups and groups like the NY Working Families Party, have been fighting for years against this right-of-center direction that leading Democrats are taking the Democratic Party. The likelihood is high that this battle within the Democratic Party will become sharper in the next two years. Daley’s appointment is one of a number of signs that Obama will not be adjusting to Republican control of the House by mobilizing the grassroots or taking progressive positions on issues. Instead, on many issues he will be going out of his way to find common ground with Republicans.

Should the independent progressive movement take up this battle within the Democratic Party as its primary strategic task in the coming period? Given the deep-seated structural impediments to the formation of a mass third party, does it make sense that this is where we put our focus?

There is no question that a progressive united front would be involved with efforts to oppose Republican and Tea Party regressivism and Democratic capitulation to it or to the corporate and banking elite which dominates Washington. We should work with those Democrats (and Republicans) who support solidly progressive positions on issues, positions consistent with our own overall policy approaches. A key part of our work must be work on issues, not just by organizing around a longer-term agenda for what’s really needed — like universal single-payer health care or hundreds of billions of dollars in reductions in the Pentagon budget — but in the world of here-and-now where we’re not yet strong enough to enact those needed objectives. Indeed, much of that work over at least the next two years will be defensive, like defending Social Security and Medicare.

But this is not the same thing as a determination that, strategically, OUR MOVEMENT should prioritize day-to-day work within the Democratic Party. Some of those who must be part of a broad progressive third force are doing, and would continue to do, that. For the alliance movement as a whole, however, we must build the strength of independent political organizing — involving progressive Dems, Greens, other independents, unaffiliateds, soft Republicans and skeptics-of-elections — at the grassroots, statewide, regionally and nationally

Independent, Mass Movement Building

THIS must be our continually-affirmed and continually-assessed objective. Just as the decade of the 1930’s was the decade of resurgent labor, just as the decade of the 60’s was the decade of civil and human rights, just as the decade of the 80’s was the decade of a multi-cultural rainbow movement, the second decade of this century must be the decade of people’s power. We must be about inspiring, nurturing and organizing millions of people to assert and organize for their right to live decently and with dignity in a world with clean air, clean water, clean energy and in balance with our natural environment. Any of our tactics, including electoral tactics, must always be determined with this overriding objective in mind.

And we must go about this work crystal clear that what stands in the way of our achieving these objectives are the coal and oil companies, the for-profit health care industry, the too-big-to-fail greedy and criminal bankers, the military-industrial complex — in short, the powerful monied  interests who have hijacked our democracy and are pulling the strings behind the Tea Party, the Republican Party and powerful sections of the Democratic Party.

Just as our movement is multi-issue, so must be our tactics. Some of those who are part of the alliance may have little to do with elections. There are many excellent and dedicated organizers who are skeptical about relating to electoral politics. But the hard fact is that if we are talking about a mass movement of millions, tens of millions ultimately, the movement as a whole must intervene within an arena that, rightly or wrongly, a vast majority of people in this country see as the way to “do politics.” As we do that work, as we connect with more and more people, we can show by example that electoral politics is only one of a number of things that we need to do to be about social, economic and cultural transformation.

Many of us, those skeptical of elections and those who see it as a key arena for struggle, will continue their day-to-day grassroots organizing around the issues most important to the people in their workplace, community or mass organization, or by bringing the action campaigns of the broader movement to those people. Some will want to focus on the organization of “street heat,” mass demonstrations and civil disobedience. The third force must appreciate the lesson of history that mass movements, to be successful, must up the ante, push the envelope, risk arrest in order to underline the urgency and seriousness of the situation we are in.

Non-Sectarianism and a Healthy Style of Work

We need to firmly reject sectarian, narrow and divisive approaches when it comes to building our movement, while constructing a style of work which welcomes constructive criticism. Members of the alliance movement need a way of talking with one another and with those we are reaching out to which consciously looks for points of connection that are then built upon. We need a “we,” not “I” mindset. We need to become known for being good allies. Our organizing work should be about working with others in such a way that they grow from being new members of our movement to the point where they are able to give leadership and, indeed, become “leadership trainers” themselves. This is central, fundamental to our ability to build a people’s power movement that can grow strong enough to eventually win.

We need an alliance culture that is about respectful listening, cooperation and the common good (“an injury to one is an injury to all”), as distinct from the currently-dominant culture’s individualism, power-seeking and greed. Indeed, today’s right-wing culture has evolved into a mean-spirited, dishonest and violence-producing approach to politics that is a dangerous and very real threat to our common survival and progress. To the extent that we model a very different way of standing up for our beliefs in an organized way, to that extent will we win over large numbers of people and, over time, expose and isolate the ultra-rightists.

Critically, the movement’s leadership and many of its members must appreciate the need for an anti-oppression consciousness, one which opposes racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, etc., if we are to build the unity required to take on our common enemies.

When it comes to making decisions we should use what I like to call a “striving for consensus” model. Such a model proceeds from an understanding that we should try to make decisions through the kind of dialogical process that involves a willingness to see more than one side of an issue before coming to a decision. At the same time, it understands that it is not always possible, or there is not enough time, to arrive at a full consensus and that sometimes a vote passed by a majority, or 2/3 or 3/4 of those voting on the issue at hand, is appropriate.

Platform/Program

What would be the range of positions on issues, an essential “glue” to this effort? Here are some general sketchy thoughts, admittedly incomplete:

Single-payer health care. Significant reductions in the bloated military budget. De-escalation of the war, ending the occupation of Afghanistan, and all troops and military contractors out of Iraq. Ending all fossil fuel subsidies and shifting them to renewables. Policies to reduce carbon emissions by half by 2020. Marriage equality and full civil and human rights for lbgt people. Government programs to create jobs and stop mortgage foreclosures. Labor law reform that protects workers in the workplace. Racial and gender justice. Major changes in our unjust and racially discriminatory “criminal justice” system. An end to Israel’s illegal occupation and support for Palestinian rights. Fair, non-racist immigration policies including an amnesty program. A wealth tax on the rich and progressive tax reform. Breaking up or taking over the “too big to fail” banks and investment houses like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Breaking up huge corporate industrial farms, land reform and support to sustainable and organic family farms and coops. Defense of women’s right to choose on abortion. Support for instant runoff voting, proportional representation, public financing of elections, an end to “corporate personhood” and other electoral reforms. And more.

Structure

Would the alliance be a coalition of organizations or an individual membership organization? Those specifics will be determined when the organizing process begins for this needed people’s power vehicle. Almost certainly, at first, it would likely be more of a network linking together those, whether organizational representatives or individuals, who come together to make it happen. Over time, especially as it involves itself in electoral activity, it would need to develop local and state organizational structures to decide democratically who, if anyone, should be supported.

The key at the beginning of the process is to allow for full discussion and back-and-forth over the basic idea of what a third force should look like, to allow the maximum input into the decision-making process. A national leadership to advance the alliance-building process and its program of activities would need to be created that is broadly representative of our country’s major constituencies, different parts of the country and the political tendencies within the alliance.

Possible First Action Campaign

One possibility for how to get this off the ground, once a critical mass of progressive leaders has come together, would be to organize throughout the country a series of meetings, hearings, conferences, street rallies and other ways to develop a “people’s program.” This campaign would have several purposes. One would be to identify those people prepared to work together in an alliance. Another would be to get lots of popular input into what should be the overall platform/program of the alliance. And a third might be to use the developed set of positions on issues in some way during the 2012 national elections.

Perhaps we could call it a 21s century bill of rights. It may be that, more than just a set of positions written down on paper or posted electronically, the process of constructing this bill of rights/program could be done in such a way that the involvement of people in different types of actions in support of the platform planks could be built into the process.

Conclusion

It could well be that there is a better way to proceed. Maybe it will take some time before a critical mass of progressive leaders with organized bases and constituencies comes together to move this proposal or something similar to it forward. I hope not too long.

There is an urgency to this project. Our country and our world are in deep, deep trouble. What we do here in the USA this decade will be decisive for those who come after us. Time is running out to reverse the many very real crises that are driving humanity and all life forms toward the abyss. History is calling upon us to step it up now.

This letter is a call for active support of protest to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jesse Jackson Jr., and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign.

With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.

It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.

Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war.

Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.

The election of Obama has not galvanized protest movements. To the contrary, it has depressed and undermined them, with the White House playing an active role in the discouragement and suppression of dissent – with disastrous consequences. The almost complete absence of protest from the left has emboldened the most right-wing elements inside and outside of the Obama administration to pursue and act on an ever more extreme agenda.

We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize.

In this connection we would like to mention a specific protest: the civil disobedience action being planned by Veterans for Peace involving Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Joel Kovel, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, several armed service veterans and others to take place in front of the White House on Dec. 16th.

Should you commit yourselves to backing this action and others sure to materialize in weeks and months ahead, what would otherwise be regarded as an emotional outburst of the “fringe left” will have a better chance of being seen as expressing the will of a substantial majority not only of the left, but of the American public at large. We believe that your support will help create the climate for larger and increasingly disruptive expressions of dissent – a development that is sorely needed and long overdue.

We hope that we can count on you to exercise the leadership that is required of all of us in these desperate times.

Best Regards,

Sen. James Abourezk

Tariq Ali

Rocky Anderson

Jared Ball

Russel Banks

Thomas Bias

Jean Bricmont

Noam Chomsky

Bruce Dixon

Frank Dorrel

Gidon Eshel

Jamilla El-Shafei

Okla Elliott

Norman Finkelstein

Glen Ford

Joshua Frank

Margaret Flowers M.D.

John Gerassi

Henry Giroux

Matt Gonzalez

Kevin Alexander Gray

Judd Greenstein

DeeDee Halleck

John Halle

Chris Hedges

Doug Henwood

Edward S. Herman

Jack Hirschman

Dahr Jamail

Derrick Jensen

Louis Kampf

Allison Kilkenny

Jamie Kilstein

Joel Kovel

Mark Kurlansky

Peter Linebaugh

Scott McLarty

Cynthia McKinney

Dede Miller

Russell Mokhiber

Roger Morris

Bobby Muller

Christian Parenti

Michael Perelman

Kim Petersen

Peter Phillips

Louis Proyect

Ted Rall

Cindy Sheehan

Chris Spannos

Paul Street

Sunil Sharma

Stephen Pearcy

Jeffrey St. Clair

Len Weinglass

Cornel West

Sherry Wolf

Michael Yates

Mickey Z

Kevin Zeese

Please sign the Open Letter to the Left Establishment.

Ultimately, many of the sentiments expressed by the tea partyers are deeply dishonest, deeply un-American. We need to keep them in their rightful place as a distinct, if sometimes loud, sometimes dangerous, political minority. We will do that to the extent that we out-organize them at the grassroots, engage in creative and significant mass action, and pressure the federal government to pass genuinely progressive legislation. That’s the way we’ll keep down the supporters of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

This is how I concluded a Future Hope column on September 12th of last year reporting on the first major demonstration of what has become the Tea Party. I spent several hours at this 2009 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., listening to the speakers, checking out the signs and feeling the crowd vibes. My overall assessment was that although the politics were very different, their action had a lot of similarities to the massive peace and justice demonstrations our side organized during the early years of the George W. Bush administration. These demonstrations, many of them much bigger than the one organized by the Tea Party, took place from 2002-2006, when the rightist-led Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Being out of power, we back then and the tea partyers in 2009 both felt the need to demonstrate in the streets.

But with the emergence of the electoral-oriented Tea Party this year, the neo-rightists showed a strategic and tactical sophistication that the progressive left did not. They have successfully transformed a 2009 protest movement into a movement serious about winning political power via the ballot box, combined with continuing mass action, as we saw at the Glenn Beck late August Lincoln Memorial rally.

And all indications are that they will win not just a number of internal Republican Party primaries but a number of actual Senate and House seats. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be successful in taking the country backwards in the ways they would like. That very much remains to be seen, to be fought out over the next two years and beyond, but there is no question that they have had a major impact upon the politics of the USA.

Why hasn’t the progressive left, those millions of people rooted in and, in some cases, leading a wide cross-section of local, state, regional and national progressive or liberal organizations and issue-oriented movements, done something similar? Why have the overwhelming majority of us seemingly gone along with two-party politics-as-usual? Why haven’t we organized ourselves into something like a left-wing Tea Party?

A good argument can be made that too many progressive leaders don’t have the guts to do what’s right. As Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine, recently wrote:

Where they saw Republicans who were too wishy-washy or too compromised, they [the Tea Party] went after them and took them down, and ran the most avowedly ideological candidates they could find. They didn’t bother offending the party establishment. They went around the establishment.

And now they’re flexing their muscle and all but daring that establishment to stand in their way. As Sarah Palin said this week, ‘Some in the GOP — it’s their last shot. It’s their last chance.’ And she warned the establishment that if they don’t surrender, she can take the grassroots with her and start a third party. No major figure within the Democratic Party has had the guts to do this. And progressives have, by and large, found themselves paralyzed within the party. For far too many years, most progressives have played nice and played along.

There are exceptions: Ralph Nader, David Cobb, Cynthia McKinney, Progressive Democrats of America, progressives running as Greens, independents or in primary challenges to conservative or wishy-washy Dems. But these are exceptions to the dominant political and tactical dynamic within the progressive left.

Another reason for the Tea Party success is the huge sums of money provided to them by rightist millionaires and billionaires. Though there are left-wing millionaires and billionaires too, there aren’t as many, and there are proportionately fewer willing to buck the established ways that things have been done in the political arena for decades.

The rightist media: without question Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and all the other right-wing media have provided significant motivation and support for the Tea Party movement.

But in my opinion probably the most significant reason for our situation, the ruts of our own making that have allowed the corporate-supporting Republicans, Democrats and Tea Partyites to dominate U.S. politics, is our inability to bridge the divides between those who are working mainly in support of progressives within the Democratic Party, those who are organizing independent and outside of it in the Green Party or other independent parties, and those who are abstaining from any involvement in the electoral system at all.

As long as we are divided into our progressive Democrat, third party or abstentionist camps;

as long as we are unable to unite around a truly progressive agenda and build unity of action in support of it;

as long as we allow left sectarians or centrist sectarians to influence us and prevent us from building the working unity we need; and,

as long as we refuse to consider ways that we can forge a unified, activist alliance that will support both progressive Democratic and independent candidacies, with decisions as to who determined democratically—

that is how long we will remain in the political wilderness.

Perhaps there is some hope for change. It was a positive thing that the labor movement and the NAACP took the initiative to organize the One Nation Working Together demonstration in D.C. on October 2nd. Will that coalition, or significant sectors of it, see and act upon the need for something on-going after November 2nd?

There is talk within the climate movement about running/supporting candidates who prioritize the building of a clean energy economy. Given the energy and organization within that movement, as indicated by the 2,000 or so local actions on the same day that were organized for two consecutive years, perhaps it will play a leadership role in advancing what we need.

It is clear that just supporting whoever the Democrats come up with isn’t working. It’s time for a change we can believe in as far as how we do politics from the left in the USA.

All this tells me that any nation that can elect such inept people president can also elect other people that appear to have no right or chance to be president of the United States just as Bush and Obama once appeared before they were sold to the public. That is what is so frightening about the future of this nation. The two-party plutocracy with its stranglehold on the American political system has the power to elect presidents that are an insult to the great ones that once served the nation with pride and competence.

I keep searching for explanations why millions of American voters make such bad electoral decisions. Are they just so stupid, uninformed and distracted that they fall for endless political lies? Have Americans become so easily manipulated and fooled by advertising and brilliant political campaigns that they can be sold terrible presidents as easily as unneeded, low quality and unhealthy products?

Yes, all this seems too true. Delusional voters have produced our delusional democracy which strongly favors corporate, wealthy and elitist interests over ordinary Americans. This explains frightening economic inequality and the demise of the middle class. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income (less than 5 million people). Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to this sliver of households, which saw a rise of 62 percent, compared to 4 percent for the bottom 90 percent of households. Today, the median male worker earns less, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago. A corrupt bipartisan system gave us this. Is this the change you were waiting for?

Considering Bush and Obama from a right-left perspective misses their several critical commonalities. Both have wasted the nation’s wealth and lives on two ludicrous, unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both turned out to be pretty good communicators during their presidential campaigns but quite lousy after they became president. The more intelligent and articulate Obama is particularly striking in being totally lackluster when it comes to addressing major issues and crises and building public support for his policies, which now explains his very low approval ratings.

Both pursued public policies and government programs that preferentially benefit corporate and other special interests, especially the financial sector. This is no surprise because both depended on huge amounts of corporate money to get elected. They both have responsibility for the economic meltdown that still exists for a large fraction of the nation. A large majority of Americans correctly see the nation on the wrong track, but more importantly it is hurtling down the wrong track, which President Obama ignores, because he lacks solutions.

What may turn out to be the most disturbing similarity is that Obama may get elected for a second term just like Bush accomplished despite uninspiring performance. If there is anything more disturbing than electing awful politicians with no real record of accomplishments it is reelecting them for a second term! More than anything else this demonstrates the absence of true, effective political competition and the ability to brainwash and manipulate voters.

For years I hoped that some third party presidential candidate would emerge, capture public confidence and offer a true reform program to repair our nation. But sadly the political system has been so corrupted that no third party presidential candidate stands a chance against the two-party plutocracy. The biggest nonsense is that the US is the greatest democracy on Earth. There are many other democracies where multiple political parties give citizens far more choices than Americans have. It pays to remember that no nation ever copied the government structure of the US. Instead, other democracies where citizens also have freedom use parliamentary structures with far more political choices and even the ability to more easily get rid of rotten leaders. Here we suffer with disappointing presidents for far too many years.

The most fascinating aspect of our constitutional republic is that one constitutional path to get true, deep reforms of our government and political system has never been used. This proves how powerful, entrenched interests on the right and left have maintained a corrupt, dysfunctional and costly system. Very, very few Americans know anything about the option in Article V of the Constitution for a convention of state delegates that could propose constitutional amendments. You can learn the facts at the Friends of the Article V Convention website. The one and only requirement for a convention has long been met but Congress refuses to obey the Constitution. They fear it. We need it more than ever.

A constitutional scholar such as President Obama could make history by openly demanding that Congress convene the first Article V convention. But that would require dropping the constitutional hypocrisy that he and so many others have. The rule of law is a farce when an important part of the beloved Constitution is ignored.

Here’s a sneak peek at a Canadian adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s 1604 masterpiece The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. The story has been played and re-interpreted by other masters over the centuries—Mann, Goethe, Gounod—but its central theme has remained unchanged: a bored, frustrated but otherwise bright man sells his soul to gratify his ambitions. Here are a few scenes from “Layton Tendencies”.

The following sketch concerns Jack Layton, the leader of Canada’s “third” political party, the New Democrats, which represents the sole theoretically plausible alternative to the neo-con/Zionist dogma of Stephen Harper’s government or Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Party. Unlike the other two party leaders, Layton has managed to nurture the image of integrity.

(SCENE I: Jack Layton, leader of the federal New Democratic Party, is alone in his Ottawa office working late on a Parliamentary speech, when he suddenly stops, pen in hand, and stares blankly at the clutter of books and paper on his desk. The pen falls carelessly from his hand and he petulantly pushes his chair back from the desk.)

Jack Layton: “What’s the bloody point! Here I am, perfecting a speech against Stephen Harper’s new Harmonized Sales Tax, but what good will it do me? This government of despotic corporate kiss-asses still stands at 31 percent in the polls. Sure, that’s a 6 percent drop since the 2008 election, but it’s absurdly high for a government that systematically abuses Parliament, buggers the civil service, colludes in the torture of Afghan detainees, muzzles scientists who know the truth about climate change, and is now proceeding to sabotage the national census.“Of course, the palace press is largely to blame. It does its best to ensure that this most treasonous of all prime ministers suffers as little fallout as possible. But the Canadian people… they aren’t stupid, or are they? (stands up and begins pacing in an animated fashion.)

“Where are the disaffected voters going? To the Liberal Party? It’s mired at 26 percent, just where it was in 2008, thanks largely to Michael Ignatieff’s ineffectual, vacillating ‘leadership.’ I should be thrilled, right? I have a higher approval rating than any other national party leader. I lead the only significant national party that speaks for working Canadians and doesn’t have a broken moral compass. If any party should be on its way to forming a government it should be my New Democratic Party, right?

“Let’s see: in 2008 the NDP stood at 18.2 percent; on July 14, Ekos Research put us at…18 percent! With all that my party and I have to offer, voters still think they have to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedleinsane. Either that, or they waste their vote on the Green Party! What is it—my breath?!

“After 7 1/2 years of leading a third-place party to perpetual mediocrity I want more. I deserve more. What will it take for me to become prime minister!? Obviously, I can’t rely on the electorate to vote intelligently. (shouts to the darkness) I…will…do…anything!”

Voice: (from behind Layton) “You don’t say!” (Layton whirls around in a nanosecond and betrays a look of utter shock and panic. He is standing not three feet from the intruder and starts backing away.)

Layton: “Who the hell are you, and how did you get in here?”

Voice: (calm and inviting) “Hell, indeed! I am Mephistopheles. My master heard your lament and sent me to help you.”

Layton: “Sent from where?”

Mephistopheles: “Why, hell, of course.”

Layton: “There’s no such place as hell. Where…did…you…come from?”

Mephistopheles: “All right, I happened to be in Ottawa just now, but that’s only because I have to make regular visits. You‘d be surprised how many politicians share your frustrations and call upon me to help them realize their ambitions.”

Layton: “How did you get into this office?”

Mephistopheles: “You invited me, when you said you would do anything to be prime minister.”

Layton: (flustered and perplexed)“Just who, or what, are you?”

Mephistopheles: “I am just a messenger sent by a very powerful master who is willing to help you fulfill your deepest political desires for as long as you hold your party’s leadership.”

Layton: “What do you take me for?”

Mephistopheles: “A man who distrusts his own senses, and is afraid to do what is necessary. Do you want to be prime minister or not?”

Layton: “Of course I do, but I fail to see what you or your master can do about it.”

Mephistopheles: “You’re right about your failing eyesight, if nothing else. My master is all powerful and is the only one who can ease your path to the prime minister’s residence, provided that you give him something in return.”

Layton: “What would that be?”

Mephistopheles: “Your political soul.”

Layton: “I don’t believe in such nonsense. If your master is as politically powerful as you say he is, then this is a no-lose proposition.”

Mephistopheles: “You’re sure?”

Layton: “Of course, I’m sure!”

Mephistopheles: “You understand that once you agree to terms, there is no going back? Many who have made this bargain have tried to back out, claiming they didn’t understand the true moral cost. That’s also why I have to make frequent trips to Ottawa—to remind politicians that their careers now depend on the pleasure of my master.

You wondered a little while ago about the ‘inexplicable’ standing of the government and the Liberals? Harper and Ignatieff and their respective parties still have a pulse because they have enlisted the services of my master. You may remember a few years back when Ignatieff nearly ended up a political corpse after failing to show sufficient respect to my master.”

Layton: “Yes, I remember, but I fail to see what that has to do with me.” (Mephistopheles produces a ledger in which are written the names of numerous politicians. He hands it to Layton, who takes it to his desk to sign. Mephistopheles stands next to him and hands him a very ornate pen.)

Mephistopheles: “Just sign here. (points to the page on which Layton’s contract is written.) The particulars of your agreement are spelled out below. Any questions?” (Layton says nothing and signs his name. Mephistopheles takes the ledger.) My master thanks you. (Layton lifts his head up to say something to Mephistopheles, but discovers that he is again alone.)

*****

(SCENE II: The NDP caucus room. The air is agitated as party MPs seek Layton’s leadership on a sensitive matter concerning Vancouver-East MP. Libby Davies, the party’s House leader.)

First MP: “Jack, we’ve got to stand behind Libby! She has been smeared and libeled in the Ottawa Citizen and other right-wing rags, to say nothing of the Internet, just for saying something uncomfortably true about Israel.”

Layton: “Cool your jets! I’ve already spoken to Libby, and I’ve accepted her apology.”

Second MP: “Apology?! For what—telling the truth? Here is a priceless opportunity for you to show leadership and distance yourself from the other two parties, but instead you leave her twisting in the wind!”

Layton: “The NDP has always supported Israel’s right to exist.”

Second MP: “What does that cliché have to do with anything?”

Layton: “When Libby said Israel’s occupation dated to 1948, she implicitly denied Israel’s right to exist. That is not NDP party policy.”

Second MP: “But she’s right! More than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced between November 1947 and December 1948, and the Partition Plan was never ratified. So how Israel came into existence is very much a legitimate subject of debate.”

Layton: “I will not take sides. I have already stated what has been long-standing party policy.”

Third MP: “Is it also ‘party policy’ to support gross human rights violations?!”

Layton: “Hold on…”

Third MP: “No, you hold on: You have said nothing, absolutely nothing, about Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza, which many Western commentators liken to an outdoor prison. When was the last time you defended the flotilla of aid ships bringing food, medicine and building materials to Gaza? When did you last condemn Israel for its deliberate murder of 9 unarmed civilians on those ships? I’ll tell you—never! But let one of your MPs utter a controversial truth about Israel, and all of a sudden you find something to say.”

Layton: “I have consistently steered a middle ground between Israel and Palestine. I don’t know where you get off making these accusations, but I would be careful if I were you.” (points a finger at the MP in question.)

First MP: (to Third MP) “Never mind what Jack has or hasn’t said. We can save that for another time. Right now, one of our own is under a vicious media disinformation campaign and we need to help her. (to Layton) What are you afraid of, Jack? The Israel Lobby? They don’t support us much anyway. We speak for Canadians, not foreign interests, like two other parties I could name. If we do nothing, if we do not vigorously denounce this attack, if we do not stand by Libby’s statements then we have no right being here. We might as well call ourselves the ‘Liberal-lite party’ and stop pretending we have any principles.”

Layton: “That’s enough! As I said, I accepted Libby’s apology for mispeaking herself and I apologized to the Israeli ambassador on behalf of the party. That’s the end of it!” (Gasps and murmuring)

Third MP: “Why the hell would you do that? Since when does the NDP apologize to the agent of an aggressor state for the honest comments of one of its own MPs! Tell us, Jack, do you serve Israel or Canada?”

Layton: “This meeting is over, and you (pointing to the Third MP) have just lost your shadow cabinet position!” (Layton walks very deliberately out of the meeting room, leaving behind a confused and dispirited caucus.)

*****

(SCENE III: Layton’s office later that same day. He is again at his desk. Mephistopheles materializes behind his left shoulder.)

Mephistopheles: “Tough day?”

Layton: (whips around, startled with his heart racing ) “Don’t do that!” (catches his breath) “Yes, a tough day. Although I didn’t fire Libby as many demanded, I feel I let her and my party down. Most of my caucus is furious with me and think I’ve betrayed Libby Davies and the party.”

Mephistopheles: “They’re right, but so what? Can they control the media? Can they control campaign money? No, you did the right thing, though you should have gone further. (pause) You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?”

Layton: “No, no,… It’s just that… although I remember speaking, I felt as though some other power was putting words in my mouth.

Mephistopheles: “That was your master. You work for him now. Gradually, he will become more assertive, so your service to him will seem natural. You won’t even notice. Just look at Harper and Ignatieff. They’re ‘Stepford politicians’: do you think either of them cares what their party or the Canadian public thinks when he supports Israel or remains conspicuously silent when Israel conducts strategic murder? They serve the real political power in this country, even if you don’t, yet.

You will come to realize that Parliamentary democracy is just a game that powerful interests use to delude people into thinking they have a say in how they are governed, when, in fact. they have no say at all. Pandering to the public’s vanity and inflated sense of importance is the essence of government.

Now as you know, Israel has stripped Arab MKs of their immunity, is continuing to prevent aid ships from reaching Gaza, and has recommenced ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem. You know what your party’s official position on this is, don’t you?”

Layton: “Yes… I know.” …

*****

Lance Boyle: “Well, that’s a taste of what you can expect on Modern Classics.” Did you recognize Benjamin Netanyahu as Mephistopheles? Stay tuned now for our regular feature, Zombieland.” (fade out)

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/08/layton-tendencies/feed/ 31 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/2010-the-year-of-the-progressive-populist/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/2010-the-year-of-the-progressive-populist/#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:00:54 +0000 Jerry D. Rose http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=16355 The death of Doris (Granny D) Haddock brings to mind the title of her memoir: You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell. Ten years ago, at the age of 90, she undertook an arduous cross-country trip to promote campaign finance reform, an effort that helped create a Clean Elections Law in Maine featuring limits on campaign fund-raising and expenses and the public financing of modestly funded campaigns. Similar efforts at various degrees of development have occurred in other states.

The year 2010 began inauspiciously with the January decision of the Supreme Court that seemed the very antithesis of clean elections: the Citizens United v. F.E.C. which invalidated existing limitations on corporate and other special interests in campaign contributions, endowing on these collective entities a status of “personhood” with the free speech rights of citizens to make such contributions as they might please. Ironically this was the very month of Haddock’s death at age 100, an event that seemed to deepen the sense of dirge for campaign finance reform that the Citizens case had inaugurated.

I am not a big fan of dirges in unfortunate developments in political life, and I shortly published a pair of articles titled “Apres Citizens Le Deluge,” arguing that the death of democracy being mourned is a decidedly pre-mature announcement, that there is even the possibility that the Citizens decision was a surprising blessing in deep disguise, and that rather than “cursing the darkness” indicated by the decision, we well might see it as a wake-call for the need to “light candles” of illumination out of that darkness of corporate domination of our politics.

The simplest argument against Citizens as opening the flood gates of money control of our politics is the observation that these politics were already awash in plutocratic domination before the decision, as demonstrated in the fact that Barack Obama spent nearly a billion dollars in his successful pursuit of the presidency. The best (legislature, city council, White House — fill in the blank — money can buy) had become an almost trite description of our electoral campaigns long before Citizens. That granted, is there any path of illumination available to us in escaping the cesspool of bought-and-paid-for politicians? As the difficulty of implementing campaign finance reform by legislated limits on contributions and/or expenditures has proven, any reliance on corruptly-elected officials legislating against the very system that brought them into power would seem to be a very poorly lighted pathway indeed.

Faced with such dilemmas in the effort to “take money out of politics,” I am advocating for a position that it is possible instead to “take politicians out of the money” or, to put it another way, produce a devaluation of money in its capacity to buy votes in the political market place. Being totally realistic, politicians and political parties will raise and spend as much money as they can raise and need to spend in order to gain election. Only by converting their fund-raising and expenditures into “negative incentives” in this marketplace can this “miracle” ever come about.

My argument is this: the transfiguration of political money from a politician’s necessity to his or her liability can be accomplished if candidates campaign smartly, emphasizing their own fund-raising and spending frugality in comparison with their opponents’ enormous chest-funds and lavish expenditures as the very basis of their appeal for votes.

What I have just described and am trying to promote through my internet activity is precisely such “populist” campaigns with severe limits on overall amount of funds raised and those raised from any individual or group. In this year of 2010 there is reason for optimism that the public is ready for this kind of campaigning and prepared to reward with votes those who carry it out. I hardly need point out the kind of popular anger against the Wall Street bankers whose greed generated economic misery for so many that has made poverty almost respectable (at least very common) and the life styles of the rich and famous increasingly repugnant.

More than once, I’ve heard someone express frustration in the thought that their campaign donations, whether rendered to a Democrat or Republican, would be unlikely to promote policies of benefit to the people at large, and it has taken some nudges to suggest that they expend their modest donations for the benefit of those candidates who are campaigning under a populist political banner. On such considerations as this, I believe that we will be surprised indeed at the performance of “third party” candidates in this year’s elections. The populists may not win these elections, but they will indeed send a message to major party candidates that taking themselves to a greater degree “out of the money” is something they must do for their own benefit. It may even encourage them to support some of those long-delayed campaign finance reform laws.

You can’t really talk much these days about populist anger at incumbent politicians without considering the prototypical “populists” of today, those Tea Party types who are so angry at the perceived extravagance of elected officials who spend their much-beloved tax money on policies that they believe are unworthy of such “waste.”

To finish my argument about 2010 as the year of the progressive populist, I must address the possibility, as many will maintain, that populist discontent will be expressed in a mostly regressive manner by people determined to carry out the conservative Republican agenda of “shrinking” government to a size that it can be washed down a bath tub. As a person of totally progressive philosophy, I would regard this as a very unfortunate consequence of a “new populism” in our politics. I am, therefore, going to offer a bit of political analysis to suggest that populist campaigning is not simply another way of taking us back into the darkness of a Newt Gingrich world.

Here’s my point. An article by David Helling of McClatchy Newspapers has suggested that the Tea Party (regressive populist) movement has actually driven a wedge into the electoral prospects of the Republican Party. For example, on the issue of immigration reform, likely to come to the fore of public attention as this year goes on, many conservative Republicans, recognizing the economic value to employers of immigrant labor, are eager to find paths to citizenship of undocumented immigrants that will tend to stabilize that work force, whereas Tea Partyers are more likely to express a working class nativism and xenophobia that blames immigrants not only for “taking jobs” from native workers, but for creating an undue tax burden for provision of services to them that they, the nativists, have to add to their already-stressed tax bills.

Now what is the effect for the progressive side of the political spectrum to a “wedge” driven into the regressive side? A split vote obviously, as there is so much Tea Party disillusionment with business-catering Republicans that they they vote for their own candidates or simply “stay home” on election day, endangering the electoral chances of the GOP candidates. But what might develop as a three-way race between GOP, Tea Party and Democratic candidates could become a four-way race if those men and women willing to take a straight progressive stance on policy issues were to offer an alternative to the Democrats. This third party of the left — whatever it might be or might become — would be composed of people who do not need to “triangulate” their views to attract the support of, say, Blue Dog Democrats, with their proclivity to regressive views on such issues as abortion, immigration reform, gay rights and gun control.

I can easily see the possibility that our much-vaunted 2-party system could thus become a 4-party one as a result of the unique conditions of this extraordinary year in our history. In such a system, you don’t need 51% of the votes to win an election, you need 26% — a number well within the reach of progressives if we will campaign truly progressively as well as in populist fashion.

It is reasoning like this that has led me to undertake a project called Campaign Corner which is designed to promote precisely such progressive populist campaigns for this campaign season and beyond. It can be seen here. At this point, only a little over 2 weeks into its development, the people who have “signed on” to involvement in the Corner are predominantly candidates of the Green Party, but independents and those representing other parties will likely join as well and, as I have said, the outline of what may emerge as a dominant party among progressive populists has yet to become clear and, in a sense, it doesn’t matter whether in 2010 a coherent and effective such national progressive populist party is established. If even a handful of Green, other third party or independent candidates were elected to Congress or to statehouses or local governing bodies, the “complexion” of our politics could begin to change in quite dramatic ways.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/2010-the-year-of-the-progressive-populist/feed/ 7 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/nadering-kucinich/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/nadering-kucinich/#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:00:26 +0000 John Murphy http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=15264

So then, because you are neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth.

– Jesus (Rev 3:16)

I thought I could get away with it. I thought I might be able to have a week’s vacation and not be assaulted with more atrocities from the Democrat Party. I would leave my computer behind and go to a place where I would not even have to worry about seeing a newspaper and where the only thing on television would be rented DVDs of the movies I had not seen over the last year. I would spend lots of time in the fitness center and the swimming pool.

Yes, I had forgotten. The fitness center has a television. I added another corollary to Murphy’s Law. Someone had tuned into the Keith Olbermann show. Lawrence O’Donnell was substituting. Dennis Kucinich was the guest. He hammered the Democrat Party’s health care plan and put the lie to each one of the talking points spouted by the Democrat’s talking heads from big Ed “Sissy” Schultz to Thom “Toady” Hartman. Painful as it may be to listen to Rush Limbaugh, it is mind splitting to listen to the wimps on “America Left” (the XM satellite radio station that should be renamed “America-wimpy-Democrat-talking-heads”). Listening to “America Right” is perfect when you need a laugh. But listening to “America Left” is not recommended while driving over 5 mph. Road rage, risking life and limb, even if that of only a passing tree, could be the result of listening to “America Left”.

Kucinich told O’Donnell, “The bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry, $70 billion a year, no guarantees for any controls over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance with five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases”. Pantywaist O’Donnell then asked Kucinich if he would be comfortable if his vote was the vote that defeated the bill. Kucinich reminded him that every vote counts indicating that his would clearly be a “no” vote. This is the kind of thing that makes us love the MSNBC people as much we love the Fox News people.

I went back to my room very pleased at having temporarily left the Green Party in 2004 to support Kucinich in the primary election before switching back to the Greens and working for the Nader campaign. A lot of my Green Party friends told me that the only reason Kucinich bothered to enter the race was to sucker members from the Green Party into registering as Democrats in order to vote in the Democrat primary elections. I came to believe that. To be sure, tens of thousands of Greens left the Green Party in 2004 and never bothered to rejoin after the primary election. But now, I had been vindicated. Kucinich was not that kind of a guy after all. You could trust Kucinich.

Practical Politics

The very next night milksop Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed one of the Internet’s supreme bottom feeders, Markos Moulitsas, founder of the blog Daily Kos. This is a guy who would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle. Even the people who do ads for male enhancement products look down on Moulitsas. When O’Donnell, clearly suffering from a case of terminal diaper rash, asked Moulitsas to comment on what Kucinich had said the previous evening Moulitsas said Kucinich was practicing a “very Ralph Naderesque approach” to politics. “The fact is this is a good first step and he is elected not to run for president, which he seems to do every four years. [Kucinich] is not elected to grandstand and to give us this ideal utopian society. He is elected to represent the people of his district and he is not representing the uninsured constituents in his district by pretending to take the high ground here.”

Continuing in his spasmodic seizure, O’Donnell asked Moulitsas, who was still smacking his lips after finishing off his nightly dinner of creamed dandruff, as to whether Kucinich would get a Democrat challenger for his seat if he didn’t support health care legislation — and in the process kill it — Moulitsas replied, “Yeah, absolutely. What he is doing is undermining this reform. He is making common cause with Republicans. And I think that is a perfect excuse and a rational one for a primary challenge.” Of course it is Moulitsas and O’Donnell along with their corporate colleagues masquerading as “liberals” who are making common cause with Republicans. Just being a member of the Democrat Party is making common cause with the Republicans.

Listening to someone like Moulitsas compare what appeared to be Kucinich’s principled stand on health care with Nader’s presidential run in 2000 ought to have been enough to have forced the guy who had tuned in MSNBC on the fitness club’s TV to pitch the remote through the screen. He did not. He was either a masochist or a Democrat. Come to think of it, that’s a tautology.

Checking the exit polls of the Democrat Party and then checking the exit polls of CNN shows that the reason that Al Gore lost in 2000 was because 250,000 registered Democrats voted for George Bush! Who could blame them? Who would have possibly wanted a repeat of the disgraceful Clinton years? Clinton had already killed a million innocent Iraqi men, women and children with bombs and sanctions. With his so called “welfare reform” he threw tens of thousands of single mothers into the streets and forced tens of thousands of others into the slavery of Wal-Mart like jobs thereby destroying the women’s movement.

Other Democrats put forth the same nonsense about Ralph Nader and his 2000 campaign. Somehow or other Democrats have the impression that they “own” votes and that Nader “took” 500 votes the Democrat party “owned”. A strange game these Democrats play! A game for chumps! They keep asking, even ten years later, “What if Nader had not run”. The Democrats refuse to ask the other “what if” questions, namely; “What if the Libertarian candidate had not run”; “What if the Natural Law candidate had not run”; “What if the Reform Party candidate had not run”. Each of those candidates drew 500 votes which might have gone to Gore. But the biggest “what if” question the Democrats refuse to ask is: “what if 250,000 registered Democrats in Florida had not voted for Bush”? The Democrats do not want any other candidates other than the corporate owned candidates to win.

Moreover, a Democrat Party exit poll showed that 25% of Nader’s votes came from Republicans, 38% from Democrats, and the rest were nonvoters who would have only voted for him. In other words, more than sixty percent of Ralph’s voters would NOT have voted for Gore.

Oh yeah, then there were a couple of little other items — Katherine Harris removing 80,000 eligible voters from the voting rolls and the Supreme Court ending the recount. And the Democrat Party said nothing about any of this! Furthermore, every one of those judges was approved at a time when the Democrat Party held the majority in Congress! If the Democrat Party actually thought Ralph Nader spoiled the 2000 election it would have taken steps to prevent it from happening again. It would’ve introduced IRV voting — that prevents the spoiler effect.

Any 12-year-old with a modem knows that Nader had absolutely nothing to do with Gore’s loss but then some people still think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That’s what happens when you have nothing upon which to rely but the talking points of the corporate party. The Democrat Party has no one to blame for Gore’s loss but itself. Gore destroyed the Kyoto protocols and couldn’t even win his home state of Tennessee or the home state of Slick Willie.

The Democrat Party is just another voice of the corporate elite that is trying to control America. It does not want us to have any choices other than the corporate candidates and it will do its best to slander and malign even men like Ralph Nader who has done more for this nation in the past 40 years than any 30 presidents in the last 200 years!

For the last ten years Democrats and corporate media pundits have been smearing Ralph Nader — seemingly oblivious to the facts — looking for a scapegoat for the failures of their own party and its candidates.

It is not the job of third-party or Independent candidates to make sure either of the two major parties wins. That would be like asking a new start-up to make sure Microsoft or Apple has more market share. Moreover, there are 100 million people in this country who do not vote. There are plenty of nonvoters for all candidates to attract.

At what point do we stop relying on a party to be an opposition party and start asking what else needs to be done to put some spine into Washington politics?

No, believing the corporate owned Democrat Party or its henchmen like Moulitsas and O’Donnell about Nader causing Gore’s loss is as insane as believing Iran is building nuclear weapons. Most Democrats are suffering from “Battered Left Syndrome”. It’s time for them to leave the abusive relationship with the Democrat Party. But just like the battered wife who says “he really loves me” or “I can change him if I just stay with him a little longer”, the battered Democrat voter will inevitably learn the same fatal lesson learned by the battered wife.

The Democrat Party is part of the problem. It voted for or failed to stop the Iraq war resolution turning Bush into a wartime president. It voted for or failed to stop the Patriot Act. It voted for or failed to stop John Ashcroft. It voted for or failed to stop Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. It voted for or failed to stop the Medicare fiasco. It lost the 2002 midterm elections, contrary to historical tradition. For the last three years it has controlled Congress and continues to fund illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and Palestine.

More dangerous than the Republican Party, it has destroyed the labor movement by its failure to repeal the Taft-Hartley act over the last 60 years and even now the Democrat Congress has removed the teeth from the Employee Free Choice Act. Although it may have been the Republicans under Ronald Reagan which gave us neoliberal economics, it took the Democrats under Clinton to destroy American jobs with NAFTA and repeal the Glass–Steagall Act which resulted in the collapse of the American economy. And as we have witnessed over the last year, there is merely a cosmetic difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration although Obama’s death toll is beginning to make Bush look like a schoolyard bully. To paraphrase HL Mencken, if there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Obama would have courted their vote by promising them free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayer’s expense. Of course there would have been no missionaries served up, just a few desiccated prayer books.

No, believing Markos Moulitsas when he says Nader caused Gore’s loss is as insane as believing Glenn Beck when he says that “social justice” is code for Communism and Nazism.

The perverse Lawrence O’Donnell would not stop hammering Dennis Kucinich by merely trotting out the despicable Markos Moulitsas. No, that would not be nearly enough for a gym sock-sniffing skid mark like O’Donnell. On the next night O’Donnell spoke with the dying Natoma Canfield, the 50-year-old cleaning woman and cancer survivor from Ohio, who had to drop her insurance due to skyrocketing premiums. Ms. Canfield is back in the hospital after living more than a decade cancer-free. She has been diagnosed with leukemia. O’Donnell, with all the concern of a barracuda, asked if she too would condemn Kucinich. To her credit, she merely suggested that the Democrat’s bill might be a good first step. Of course it will not and she will die if the Democrat’s bill is passed because it will not cover her for four years. Her condition will not permit her to live that long and God only knows the disastrous amount she will be charged for her treatment.

Along with the hundreds of thousands Obama will have killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and Palestine over the next three years he will also have murdered 150,000 Americans who will die because of the back room deal he cut with big Pharma and the healthcare insurance companies.

On the next night O’Donnell tried again with Michael Moore. Michael Moore of course is the guy that Democrats love but progressives love to hate ever since he stabbed Ralph Nader in the back in 2004 (no, there is no such thing as a “progressive Democrat”; that would be oxymoronic). He completely supported Nader back in 2000 but then suddenly turned 180° and threw his massive weight behind the Butcher of Belgrade, General Wesley Clark, the first military commander to bomb Yugoslavia since Hermann Göring. Nice job Michael. But at least, to his credit Moore would not condemn what was, up until the next day, the principled stand of the congressman from Ohio.

It has been a busy year for the Democrats. They have destroyed the hopes of the antiwar movement, preempted universal single-payer health care, continued the Bush neoliberal economic policy of bank bailouts, botched the stimulus program and dealt a death blow to the environmental movement in its attempts to deal squarely with global warming. But from big Ed “Sissy” Schultz, Thom “Toady” Hartmann and the rest of the “settle-for-the-crumbs-from-the-corporate-table-Democrat” talk show hosts, no one would ever know that the Obama administration was destroying people by the hundreds of thousands and turning health-care reform into a boondoggle of corporate welfare transferring wealth to the richest corporate interests in the country.

They urge on us the politics of the practical. This is what we must expect from a political party that tells us we must be content to settle for the crumbs from the corporate table whether the issue is fortifying the position of American workers by strengthening the labor movement or defining healthcare and education as human rights to be protected and guaranteed by government. After all, we must practice “practical politics” not some “ideal utopian society”. If single-payer healthcare, tuition free education for every American and worker’s rights are what the Democrats consider to be part of an “ideal utopian society” we must shudder at their idea of the “practical”.

The Darling of the Democrats

Even Alan Grayson, the darling of the Democrats, does not understand the Democrat party’s existing legislation. He believes that it will cover 30 million people. That’s simply not true. He believes it will save lives. That’s not true. The bill will not take effect for four years. If he wants to save lives, he should introduce a bill that will go into existence in 3 to 6 months. It can be funded by taxing the rich and by the huge sums of money we would save by the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq, and Afghanistan and the money we would save by cutting off funds to Israel. But neither Alan Grayson nor any Democrat would want to propose such legislation. Alan Grayson is considered to be the Democrat with guts. Perhaps if he had a bit more knowledge as a bit more guts then progressives would feel more comfortable with him.

Perhaps Grayson was well intended with his recent “public option” bill. But as soon as it was analyzed PNHP’s (Physicians for a National Healthcare Program) Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne, M.D. violently opposed the bill. Here’s what he said on March 13th when the bill was proposed:

At any rate, the Grayson proposal seems to be the true public option, run by the government that progressives have been fighting for. So what could be wrong with it?”

The greatest concern of all is that it still does not fix our outrageously expensive, administratively wasteful, highly inequitable, fragmented method of financing health care. It merely provides another expensive option in our very sick system of paying for health care. Providing yet one more option that people can’t afford really hasn’t moved the process.

Although Medicare is a very popular program, it is highly flawed. It has an oppressive central bureaucracy. It fails to use more efficient financing systems such as global budgeting for hospitals and negotiation to obtain greater value in health care purchasing. There are serious questions about whether Medicare funds are being distributed equitably and in a manner to promote greater efficiency. Its benefit package is relatively poor, covering only about half of health care costs for our seniors. Most Medicare beneficiaries feel that they essentially are forced either to purchase Medigap plans, which provide the worst value of all private health plans, or to enroll in Medicare Advantage plans, which waste too many tax and premium dollars. It would be both much less expensive for all of us and better for Medicare beneficiaries if the extra benefits of these private plans were rolled into the traditional Medicare program. Part D should be stripped of its private market administrative and profit excesses and also be rolled into the traditional program. Medicare also has failed to introduce beneficial innovative programs such as the British NICE system, which would improve both quality and value in our health care.

When we advocate for an improved Medicare for all, we really aren’t advocating for Medicare with a few tweaks. We are advocating for replacing Medicare with a single payer national health program that covers everyone, which we can still call Medicare, just as the Canadians do. Adding another buy-in program to the two buy-in programs that already exist in our highly dysfunctional system will do virtually nothing to fix these flaws we now have. It does nothing to slow the growth in our national health expenditures, and the high premiums for a package of mediocre benefits will do little to reduce the numbers of uninsured.

For those who say that a Medicare buy-in is an incremental step towards health care utopia, explain precisely how that is going to work. Explain each problem that it solves. Explain how it is going to morph into a universal or near universal system in which each individual is paying the full actuarial value of the coverage. It won’t happen.

Playing with a Medicare buy-in is an unnecessary diversion at a time that we need to get serious about reform. We need to fix Medicare and expand it to cover everyone. Nothing less will do.

It is clear that Grayson simply realizes that given the impenetrable depths of Democrat cowardice, even someone who simply gives the appearance of courage becomes a hero to the courage-starved people who mindlessly vote each year for the ghost of FDR. If Grayson had any real courage, he would leave the Democrat Party along with Kucinich but we have just learned a powerful lesson about the courage of Dennis Kucinich. On March 15th he pledged that he would not vote for the Democrat health care bill. On March 17th he had changed his mind. A little whisper in his ear from Rahm Emanuel’s alter ego, Barack Obama, was all it took. “You will lose your job if you don’t do what you’re told.”

The Last Laugh

But it turns out that the Democrats and Dennis Kucinich have had the last laugh. Just when we thought we could actually trust Dennis Kucinich to take a principled stand against the Democrat’s horrendous healthcare bill, only two days after he told us that there is no way he will vote for this egregious piece of legislation, he changed his mind and announced that, after all, his principles mean nothing compared to helping the Obama agenda succeed. Dennis Kucinich is a Democrat. Alan Grayson is a Democrat. Their only function in the Democrat Party is to keep those suffering from “Battered Left Syndrome” from leaving. Kucinich and Grayson perpetuate the myth that the Democratic Party can be changed from within if only we give it a little more time.

In the final analysis Markos Moulitsas could not have been more wrong in comparing Dennis Kucinich with Ralph Nader. Nader does not back away from a principled position. Nader is not a Democrat; Kucinich is; that makes all the difference.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/nadering-kucinich/feed/ 5 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/just-walk-away-from-the-democrats/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/just-walk-away-from-the-democrats/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:00:59 +0000 Ron Jacobs http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=13911 The left needs to organize the unorganized. The working people, the unemployed, the young, and the restless. The right wing has their core group of supporters who organize around fear of the other. The liberals have those who believe in the myth of American equality because they have no class analysis. The Left needs to organize the rest and they need to do so without the Democratic Party. It should be quite clear to almost every left-leaning American by now that the Democrats are nothing more than another wing of the party that works for Wall Street and the Pentagon. To continue to work for and elect their candidates is self-defeating. As the first year of the Obama presidency has clearly shown, not only do the Democrats support the right wing agenda, that support makes it easier for the right wing to put their candidates into power. Why? Because after promising progressive reforms and then failing to deliver, voters tend to either not vote or vote for the right wing candidates out of anger and frustration.

This occurs because the current system provides no alternative. There is no progressive third party or grassroots movement to support such a party. There is not even a grassroots movement that vocalizes the desires of millions for a fair and just society where people’s needs come before Wall Street’s profits and the Pentagon’s wars that help protect and expand those profits. So, the Democrats step in as they have always done and pretend that they are the party that will address these desires. There was a time when such an argument was plausible. From FDR to LBJ, the Democrats were the party that passed many reforms making life better for America’s working people. They even passed bills outlawing racial segregation. Of course, this occurred because of immense pressure from the Left–pressure a hundred times greater than the pressure from America’s right that the Democrats claim has caused them to compromise on virtually every progressive piece of legislation during the current period. Yes, there was a time when that claim could have been made.

Today’s Democratic Party however, is not that party. It is the party of Wall Street as much as its opponents are. It is the party of war as much as the GOP is the party of war. Sure, there are a few congresspeople under the Democratic mantle that oppose the greed and bloodlust of Wall Street and the Pentagon, but they are such a small minority they are irrelevant. Indeed, if they truly wanted to be effective, they would leave the Democrats as soon as possible. Nowadays, when leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democratic Party and its positions, they also align themselves with the reactionaries that run the Republican Party. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they align themselves with those who have sent billions of US dollars into the coffers of the war industry and hundreds of thousands of US men and women into combat for the princes of oil and finance. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they tell the people of the world that they support the transfer of America’s wealth to the bankers and insurance industry through bailouts and so-called health care reform. When leftists and progressives align themselves with the Democrats, they tell the American people that they are willing to give lip service to the concerns of America’s workers and poor, but when it comes right down to it, those workers and poor will have to figure out on their own how they will get jobs that no longer exist. Jobs that are not being created because the Democrats and the GOP bailed out the banks instead.

The Democratic Party has never been the party of the people. It served the slaveowners of the US South until the Civil War ended that foul practice. Then it served the slaveowners’ successors: the cotton and sorghum producers that kept their workers in serflike conditions and never saw a lynching they didn’t like. In terms of America’s growing industrialization, the Democrats were right there with the GOP pushing through legislation favorable to capital and (at best) ignoring the conditions of American labor. As mentioned before, the Democrats’ best years in terms of serving the working and poor people of the United States came during the years between 1936 and 1968, when they passed legislation like Social Security and Medicare and pushed through laws outlawing racial apartheid in the United States. Also, as noted before, this occurred only because of extreme pressure from mass movements of progressive and leftist opponents of the anti-worker and racist policies of the government in Washington. Even then, however, the role the party played was designed more to diminish the strength of those movements. Nonetheless, the reforms occurred because of the movements, not in spite of them. In terms of economics, today’s Democrats resemble the Democrats of old more than they do the Democrats of the New Deal and the Great Society. They are in the pay of today’s equivalent of the slaveowners–the global capitalists that roam the world searching for labor pools easy to exploit because of their desperation and national governments willing to brutalize workers into submission just like the slavedrivers and field bosses of old. Not only are they in their pay, but they push through legislation like NAFTA designed to make that search for exploitable labor and new markets easier and more profitable than it already is. On the domestic front, it was the Democrats under Bill Clinton that dismantled the system of public assistance for women with children and it is under Barack Obama that a new commission designed to bypass the Congress on the question of possibly dismantling Social Security was recently set up.

As if one needed more convincing, after the recent defeat of the Democratic candidate in the Massachusetts special election, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The piece was written by a mainstream Democratic party member who blamed the left wing of the party for the defeat. It was time, said the writer, to move back to the right in order to win the next round of elections. In other words, try and steal the traditional GOP voters away from the GOP instead of going after the traditionally unorganized mentioned at the beginning of this piece. In case I haven’t made it clear already, the writer in the Journal is what the Democrats really are. The party is not interested in genuinely addressing the concerns of the poor, the newly unemployed and the rest of America’s disenfranchised. That is why most of these voters (many who voted in 2008 for Obama) stayed home in Massachusetts this last time. They understand that the Democrats are for someone other than them and they won’t be lied to again. Unless the Left gets it act together, they are willing to let the chips fall where they may–even if that means a resurgence of the GOP.

I can’t be emphatic enough, there is no reasonable reason to waste a dollar or a moment of your time campaigning for the Democratic Party. Barack Obama’s campaign based on false hope and promises and the subsequent reneging on almost every promise of change should be enough to convince any left-leaning or progressive person in the United States who voted for Obama in 2008 that the time has come to end this relationship for good and forever. Like the cheating and lying spouse that keeps asking for one more chance after you find them in bed with your enemy once again, there comes a time to end the relationship. Not only have the occasional moments of bliss and the crumbs that say I care become fewer and fewer, they are no longer enough. The denial so many left-leaning Americans have lived with in their relationship with the Democrats is causing more harm then it is worth. Walk away, close the door behind you and begin the work required to build a real force for progressive change in the United States.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/just-walk-away-from-the-democrats/feed/ 132 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/massachusetts-calling/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/massachusetts-calling/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:01:32 +0000 Gary Corseri http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=13855 I just called the Jack Rice radio show on Air America. Rice’s show is new to the D.C. area, so I got through the phone vetting process fairly easily. I waited a minute or two and then Rice took my call on air.

I was pretty clear about what I wanted to say. Rice had actually set things up the day before when he said that their likely defeat in the Massachusetts race for the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death would—hopefully!—cause Congressional Democrats to “grow a pair,” withdraw the health care reform bill as is, and then re-submit the much stronger bill that the majority of Americans were hoping for when they voted for Obama a year ago.

“Grow a pair”? Dems in the millionaires’ club of the US Senate are going to “grow a pair”? (And, in deference to the ladies, doesn’t he really mean, “get some spine”? I don’t think there’s any doubt about which part of the human anatomy he’s talking.) Rice was speculating aloud that the reason Martha Coakley was ebbing in the polls and Scott Brown was surging was her failure to connect! He trotted out the old saw: Democrats run lousy campaigns, but they govern well; Republicans run great campaigns, but they govern poorly.

Apparently, Obama’s campaign of ’07-’08 got flushed down Rice’s memory hole. According to Rice, who characterizes himself as “a Liberal, not a Democrat” at least once a day, voters connect to candidates who can draw the “big picture.” Candidates lose voters when they try to talk about policies and details. I interpret: Our eyes glaze over unless the ad, the pitch, is coming at us in digestible five-minute spurts. Obama spelling out the details on how he was going to get us out of Iraq (and NOT get us deeper into Afghanistan), or exactly how his health care reform bill was going to pass unscathed by a hostile, obstructionist minority in the Senate—rich with the promise of campaign funding underwritten by insurance and pharmaceutical companies—that Obama could have easily lost the 09 election. But, Obama spouting “change” and “hope”–the Obama of soaring rhetoric and comfortable cliches, well-groomed and corporate looking: that Obama was sure to win.

Martha Coakley was surely not in the mode. She couldn’t “connect” to the people.

My father used to call that kind of talk “bullsh*t for the birds” (minus the asterisk!) I tried to call-in during the day that Rice was spouting these inanities, the day before the Mass election (pardon the pun, but let’s hold Mass now, you good Kennedy Libs!) I wanted to say that the likelihood of Dems growing “backbone” (my word), suddenly transforming into a party for the people, withdrawing the slipshod health care reform bill and standing firm behind a health care bill with teeth and nails and claws was about as likely as a Wall Street tycoon donating a couple of hundred million of his ill-gotten rip-off money to help desperate strangers in Haiti—or anywhere else!

But I called too late yesterday and the vetter told me to call earlier next time.

So, today I called early into the show. I just managed to get my main point out. I said something like this: the Massachusetts vote was not about the Dems being defeated because they needed to change their game plan and simplify the message (“simplify” as Scott Brown had done!) No, the Mass vote was/is another expression of anger against our system as is—against the status quo. In ’07 and ’08, Obama was able to tap into that anger with his hyper-cliches. Now the Repubs are doing the same. Same boiling and over-boiling anger—different target.

Then I hit Rice with my clincher: We the People (you know, like in the Constitution) need to harness that energy and anger and create a second party—you know, as in non-Republicratic, non-corporate. Rice cut me off. (I imagine he did a slice-across-the-neck gesture in the studio.) I turned up my radio and heard him announce, “I completely disagree with you, Gary” (thanks, Jack!). He spouted the usual malarkey about how a third party—remember, I didn’t say “third” party; I said “second, non-corporate, non-Republicratic—couldn’t make it in America because we didn’t have a parliamentary system, we have a winner-take-all system (might that not be a good reason, I wondered, to think about changing that system into something more … er… democratic?). Rice went on to explain, somewhat befuddlingly, that even if a “third party” managed to get “14%” (why, I wondered, “14”%? Why not a plurality at least?)—even if it garnered 14% of the popular vote, it would not get 14% of the Senate, and blah, blah, blah.

So, forget all the hype about democracy and representational government. It seems we’re stuck with the Tweedle Party—Dum and Dee, that is (or Dumb and Dumber).

Rice is probably a decent enough sort. I’d probably drink a beer with him. (I’d probably drink a beer with George W. Bush, too—as the saying goes—but I’d like to throw the beer in his face—as in one of those good old movies!—The Caine Mutiny—for example. (I’d do it for all the sh*t he has made the world eat–pay homage here to poet e.e. cummings: “There is some sh*t I will not eat!” Omit the asterisks).

Can these radio jockeys really believe half of what they say? They serve the system that butters their croissants. They are the corporate media, they are the Republicratic party—two sides of the same coin—the tarnished coin, the cheapened, sinking coin of this realm.

Independents are now the majority in America—not Republicans, not Democrats. When we wake to our real power, we can change this world.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/massachusetts-calling/feed/ 12 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/the-results-are-in-massachusetts-chooses-tweedledum-over-tweedledee/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/the-results-are-in-massachusetts-chooses-tweedledum-over-tweedledee/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:00:32 +0000 Ron Jacobs http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=13839 I live almost a thousand miles from Massachusetts, but watched the special election for Senate there with interest. It’s not that I am convinced that the Democrats are better than the GOP. In fact, I actually believe that there is very little difference in the ultimate product either major party puts out there. No matter who wins, the result is more war, less money for most of us, and lots more money for the already wealthy. So, no, I don’t think there is a lot of difference between the two parties. However, there does seem to be some difference between their backers. Besides their traditional base among the monied classes, the GOP tends to attract socially reactionary religious fundamentalists and angry middle class people who are responding to a perceived loss of entitlement. I say perceived not because many of these folks haven’t lost their previously comfortable life, but because they honestly believed that they were entitled to it, when the fact is that version of the American Dream was never meant to last. Not to mention that for many of those folks it was built on debt encouraged by Madison Avenue and greedy banks.

At any rate, this voting populace tends to consider themselves the majority in the United States. I don’t have figures to prove whether or not this is true, but it is probably safe to say that they constitute a majority of those who consistently vote. Why? Probably because their vote actually means something to them, having been fundamental in electing a number of right wing politicians over the fast forty years. So, even if they do not constitute an actual majority, their voting practices have been crucial to the nation’s recent history.

Mainstream pundits write about the anger of the voter. They point to the over-hyped phenomenon of the Tea-Partiers as proof. Some left-oriented writers speculate about the possibility of organizing these Tea-Partiers, looking at them as somehow be crucial to the future. Here in North Carolina, these folks constitute a vocal element of the populace. They make lots of noise, hold signs with veiled (and not so veiled) references to Barack Obama’s skin tone and carry their guns. If they represent a potentially leftist upsurge, I’m not seeing it. What I see, instead, is an angry group of people whose understanding of the political system in the capitalist US fails to see the fundamental fact of that system: the government works for the corporations. Plain and simple. This is a fundamental economic base for fascism. This fact is underscored by the ever-expanding war budget in the United States and, most recently, by the mutation of the desire for universal health care into a government-enforced insurance system that funnels consumer money into the bank accounts of some of the largest financial institutions in the world–the insurance companies. Although Tea-Partiers do have it right when they oppose the current health care legislation, the fact is, they opposed any type of government involvement in health care. Their solution of completely private insurance is no solution at all. The fact that these are the two choices presented does makes my point. The government works for the corporations. No matter what happens–Obama’s health care bill or the Tea-Partiers status quo–the insurance companies win. Do the voters of Massachusetts honestly believe electing Scott Brown will change the way the system is run?

I am friends with a dozen or so folks who consider themselves part of this movement. Most of them are retired. Almost all of them are reasonably well off. They travel when they want and a couple of them own two homes. They all worked for what they have and were able to get where they are with that work and a little bit of luck. However, there are many more US residents who have worked just as hard that have not nearly as much to show for it. Their interests are not represented by the Tea-Partiers, the GOP, or the Democrats. Despite this, it’s hard to convince most people that this is the case. Almost everyone seems to think that one of these groups represents them. Even if it’s only the one that places itself opposite the one that doesn’t.

Is the tea-party movement as big as FoxNews would like us to believe? Is it capable of changing the face of Congress to reflect its anger and scapegoating? Is it a rising fascist movement? The answer to the first question seems to be a pretty firm no. The Tea Party rally held on November 12, 2009 in Washington, DC was originally reported to number between 500,000 and a million. Re-estimates by a number of partisan and non-partisan sources have reduced that number to 250,000 at most. While this is a substantial number, it is probably not enough to create any popular groundswell towards right wing populists taking over the Congress. The question as to whether it represents a rising fascist movement requires a more complex answer. Certain elements of this movement do share various racial and nativist prejudices with various neo-Nazi and other fascist movements. In fact, these latter groups make no bones about their attempts to attract attendees at these rallies to their organizations. However, like the fringe groups of the left that appear at antiwar and other protests organized by leftists, their appeal is quite limited. It seems safe to say that the largest beneficiary of the tea-party movement will be the GOP. Indeed, according to the Tea Party Patriot website, most Tea-Partiers have decided not to go the third party route, but will work to “revive” the GOP.

Very important is the role of the tea-party’s political, corporate and intellectual sponsors. FoxNews is foremost among these sponsors. If the antiwar movement had a media outlet with the reach of FoxNews hyping its cause, all of the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would be home by now. This media source provides what is essentially free advertising for those politicians and groups going after the angry voter that leans right. The Tea-Party’s corporate sponsors in the financial and insurance industry also help the Tea-Party organization function. Sure, there is a grassroots aspect to the movement, but it is the corporate money and FoxNews publicity that has made the movement most of what it is.

Is there a possibility that some of the angry voters who voted for Republican Scott Brown would consider a progressive third party? Perhaps. More likely, however, is that these angry voters will merely vote for the party not in power, expressing their anger while ensuring more of the same. This is not so much the fault of the angry voters as it is the failure of the Left to organize a left opposition that does not include the Democrats. The only choice most voters see is Tweedledee and Tweedledum. So, the revolving door of rule by the wealthy continues.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/the-results-are-in-massachusetts-chooses-tweedledum-over-tweedledee/feed/ 4 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/the-race-to-fill-ted-kennedy%e2%80%99s-senate-seat-2/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/the-race-to-fill-ted-kennedy%e2%80%99s-senate-seat-2/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:59:23 +0000 John V. Walsh http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=12682 In a scene replicated all over the country, a small, dispirited crowd protested on Boston Common following Obama’s West Point declaration of more war on the unfortunate people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama intends to out-Bush Bush on AfPak, which has finally thrown some cold water on his supporters.

The large printed placards ordered up for the demo called for an end to the war on AfPak, but only three scraggily handmade signs mentioned Obama. The speeches ordained by the organizers also made scant mention of Obama, with two exceptions, one from Vets Against the War and another with Military Families Speak Out. When one guy took advantage of an open mike, not readily yielded to him, to criticize both Obama and the antiwar leadership of UFPJ, “Progressive” Democrats of America and their bedfellows, there was a quiet over the crowd, the only speech without at least token applause. One could only wonder where this “movement” was headed next.

A clue came if one listened to the buzz on the sidelines. It was all about another election — the Democrat Party primary this coming Tuesday to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy. Each of the candidates has taken up an antiwar mantra as the polls have shown that the people of Massachusetts want no more of this game of Empire in Central Asia. Michael Capuano, Congressional Rep. from the Cambridge/Somerville/Boston area had the early lead in establishing his antiwar bona fides since he did vote against the Iraq war in his early days in Congress. But is he really a dove? Are Dems with antiwar constituencies like Capuano’s in Cambridge genuinely against war and Empire? The answer is “no,” and every now and then a vote comes along which shows how it all works.

One such crucial vote came in the winter of 2007, shortly after the Dems took control of the House in the elections of 2006 on a tidal wave of antiwar sentiment. Bush was at that time requesting another supplement for the wars on Central Asia, and the Democrats had inserted a dreaded “timeline” into the appropriation bill. This led the Republicans to vote against the bill, and if they were joined by enough Dems, then funding of the wars would end at that moment. A golden opportunity if ever there was one. Faced with this potential debacle Nancy Pelosi scrambled to get all the Dems to vote for the bill to fund the war. Every vote was needed. What did Capuano do? What did other “antiwar” Dems of the Mass Congressional delegation do? The entire delegation voted for the bill, as Pelosi instructed, including Michael Capuano, James McGovern, Barney Frank –- every one of the Mass delegation, the most “liberal” delegation in Congress. There were only nine Dems who stood up to Pelosi that day — Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, Lynne Woolsey, Barbara Lee were among the nine who voted against war that day. If the bill had only ONE more opponent, the funding would have been cut off, so close was the vote. But that lone vote did not materialize from the Mass delegation (including Michael Capuano). So the funding bill passed, and war was alive and well.

That is the way the game is played. So long as the war machine does not need the vote of Congressmen with strong antiwar constituencies, then they are free to cast a vote to mollify their voters. But when the chips are down and every vote is needed, the charade is called to a halt and these counterfeit progressives cast their votes as instructed by Pelosi or whatever gauleiter happens to be in charge at the moment. Thus the Empire rules by demanding loyalty to one of the two War Parties over the will of antiwar constituents. Of course this emerges even more clearly in Presidential elections when each and every Dem, even the nine mavericks of Winter 2007, Kucinich, Woolsey, Waters etc. line up to dutifully support prowar candidates like Kerry or Obama.

As the late Eugene McCarthy pointed out long ago in 1968 in the snows of New Hampshire, drawing on words of Daniel Webster, wars of Empire continue because the people’s “representatives” put loyalty to Party over loyalty to the people and to principle. Thus the Vietnam War ground on, and thus does the U.S. Empire’s deadly game in Central Asia continue.

So what should the voters of Massachusetts do? The antiwar misleaders like “P”DA are urging a vote for Capuano, without any trace of shame after leading people into the Obama camp and into more war. They should be crimson faced to even offer an endorsement so soon after their man Obama’s Tuesday speech. All the Dems are in effect prowar, as Capuano and McGovern proved in the vote of 2007. So it would seem that the only principled thing to do is not to vote for any of them. No Dem deserves a vote after Obama’s West Point speech. Say no to Empire, and stay home by a warm fire.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/the-race-to-fill-ted-kennedy%e2%80%99s-senate-seat-2/feed/ 4 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/power-illusion-and-america%e2%80%99s-last-taboo/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/power-illusion-and-america%e2%80%99s-last-taboo/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:03:26 +0000 John Pilger http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=10247 The following article is the text from John Pilger’s address to Socialism 2009 in San Francisco, California on 4 July.

Two years ago, at Socialism 2007 in Chicago, I spoke about an “invisible government,” a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes “torches of freedom.”

The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media — PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth — and I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left.

First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.

I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.

“My orders”, said the Marine sergeant, “are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, “means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite.

The sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up in a jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody, we got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you!…”

There was silence.

“Now listen, either you gooks come on out, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”

The people of Tuylon finally came out, and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.

And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned, and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and produced a handwritten speech.

“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” he said, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s the land where miracles happen. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background.

Of course, the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about. When the Marines clapped, they clapped. When the colonel waved, the children waved. As he departed, the colonel shook the sergeant’s hand and said: “You’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here. Carry on, Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

In Vietnam, I witnessed many spectacles like that. I had grown up in faraway Australia on a steady cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, the Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan. The American Way of Liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook.

I learned that the United States had won World War Two on its own and now led the “free world” as the “chosen” society. It was only much later when I read Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion that I understood something of the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad history.

Historians call this “exceptionalism” — the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls liberty to the rest of humanity. Of course, this is a very old refrain; the French and British created and celebrated their own “civilizing mission” while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties.

However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an “age of innocence.” American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy.

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a “nation of moral ideals” — the words of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that, “spiritually advanced people regard the new president as ‘a Lightworker’ . . . who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama’s drones. Or Tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were resupplied to Israel for use in the slaughter “only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.

Obama’s is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change; it was power. The United States, he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that a we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.” At the National Archives on May 21, he said: “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.”

Since 1945, “by deed and by example,” the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet, here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.

Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama’s Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the “nation of moral ideals.”

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest, where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were lit up. These included tributes to the quote “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam where they were quote “determined to stop communist expansion.” In Iraq, other brave Americans quote “employed air strikes of unprecedented precision.”

What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times but the sheer routine scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have much in common. The wars of both presidents, and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy, are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America — a myth the late Harold Pinter described as “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is so extraordinary to see an African-American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race — together with gender and even class — can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what matters, above race and gender, is the class one serves.

George Bush’s inner circle — from the State Department to the Supreme Court — was perhaps the most multi racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.

To many, Obama’s very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he is a brand that promises something special — something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s postmodern man with no political baggage.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” For some reason, he does not say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia.

Obama does not say what he did at Business International; and there may be nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of enquiry, and debate, surely, as a clue to whom the man is.

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, reinstated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg was right when he said that, under Bush, a military coup had taken place in the United States, giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates, a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, and by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In Colombia, Obama is planning to spend $46 million on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in Latin America.

In a pseudo event staged in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China.

In a pseudo event at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that the troops were coming home. The head of the army, General George Casey, says America will be in Iraq for up to a decade; other generals say fifteen years. Units will be relabeled as trainers; mercenaries will take their place. That is how the Vietnam War endured past the American “withdrawal”.

Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion puts it well. “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.” And so you are kept in “a perpetual state of childishness.” He calls this “junk politics.”

The tragedy is that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the antiwar movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 billion for more war.

In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its members can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, says her people aren’t turning up because, “it’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in February, MoveOn’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him — apart from the amorphous “change”? That isn’t activism.

Activism doesn’t give up. Activism is not about identity politics. Activism doesn’t wait to be told. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics, a distraction that confuses and suckers good people everywhere.

I write for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February, I sent the foreign editor an article that raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why? I asked. “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more ‘positive’ approach to the novelty presented by Obama . . . we will take on specific issues . . . but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.”

In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history is ordained and depoliticized by the left. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that the so-called radical left has never been more aware, more conscious, of the iniquities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions of people, so that almost every child knows something about global warming; and yet there is a resistance within the green movement to the notion of power as a military project. Similar observations can be made of the gay and feminist movements; as for the labor movement, is it still breathing?

One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy. Long ago, Bernays’s invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The American Way of Life began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today, we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity, thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity is to recognize a stirring in America that is unfamiliar to many on the left, but is related to a great popular movement growing all over the world.

In Latin America, less than 20 years ago, there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. There is now a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and a history of popular and revolutionary struggle less affected by ideological distortions than anywhere else.

The recent, amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. These successes are expressed perversely in the overthrow of the government of Honduras, for the smaller the country the greater the threat that the contagion of emancipation will follow.

Across the world, social movements and grassroots organizations have emerged to fight free market dogma. They have educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem rather than a solution to global poverty. They have politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. An authentic globalization is growing as never before, and this is exciting.

Consider the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign — BDS for short — aimed at Israel, that is sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to built a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities have begun to sever ties with Israel, and students are active for the first time in a generation. Thanks to them, Israel’s South Africa moment is approaching, for this is, partly, how apartheid was defeated.

In the 1950s, we never expected the great wind of the 1960s to blow. Feel the breeze today. In the last eight months millions of angry emails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. This has not happened before. People are outraged as their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the massive mass presented by the media.

Look at the polls that are seldom reported. More than two thirds of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves; 64 percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone; 59 percent are favorable towards unions; 70 percent want nuclear disarmament; 72 percent want the US completely out of Iraq; and so on.

For too long, ordinary Americans have been cast in stereotypes that are contemptuous. That is why the progressive attitudes of ordinary people are seldom reported in the media. They are not ignorant. They are subversive. They are informed. And they are “anti-American”.

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interested call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

A certain populism is once again growing in America and which has a proud, if forgotten past. In the nineteenth century, an authentic grassroots Americanism was expressed in populism’s achievements: women’s suffrage, the campaign for an eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership of railways and communications, and breaking the power of corporate lobbyists.

The American populists were far from perfect; at times they would keep bad company, but they spoke from the ground up, not from the top down. They were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. Does that sound familiar?

What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth. “At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth a revolutionary act.”

* Watch a video of Pilger’s address.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/power-illusion-and-america%e2%80%99s-last-taboo/feed/ 45 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-democrats%e2%80%99-single-payer-razzle-dazzle/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-democrats%e2%80%99-single-payer-razzle-dazzle/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:00:39 +0000 John Murphy http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=9593    Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle
   Razzle Dazzle ‘em

   Give ‘em the old hocus pocus
   Bead and feather ‘em
   How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

   What if your hinges all are rusting?
   What if, in fact, you’re just disgusting?

   Razzle dazzle ‘em
   And they’ll never catch wise!

   Give ‘em the old flim flam flummox
   Fool and fracture ‘em

   How can they hear the truth above the roar?

   Back since the days of old Methuselah
   Everyone loves the big bambooz-a-ler

   When you’re in trouble, go into your dance
   Though you are stiffer than a girder
   They’ll let you get away with murder

   Long as you keep ‘em way off balance
   How can they spot you’ve got no talent
   Razzle Dazzle ‘em
   And they’ll make you a star!

(From the film Chicago)

On Friday, July 31 Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, honorary members of the “Blue Dog” Democrat Party caucus, agreed to allow the single-payer healthcare bill (HB 676) to go to a floor vote before the end of the year. Pelosi said earlier this year that “single-payer is off the table.” For some reason when Pelosi and Waxman make this kind of commitment I hear the voice of Jon Lovitz in the background saying “Yeah! That’s the ticket! Why of course, we’ll let them have a vote on the single-payer bill, yeah, that’s the ticket!”

A young woman friend explained me that when some creep says to her “hey babe how about giving me your number” while she is out having a drink with her friends she gives him the telephone number of “The Rejection Hotline.” The creep goes away and does not understand until the next day when he “gets the message” on the Rejection Hotline. Then it’s too late.

While it is clear that President Obama is bucking for the coveted title of “Most Incompetent President”, desperately trying to edge out James Buchanan, the Congressional Democrats have long since held the title of “Most Incompetent Legislators”. With only brief rises to competence during the 1930s and 1960s the Democrats have abandoned any pretense of actually representing the people who voted for them.

Why then suddenly are Pelosi and Waxman giving the “liberal” Democrats a vote on single-payer health care? Waxman is the dandruff-eating pimple-nibbler who cut the outrageous deal with Obama and the Blue Dog Democrats which ensured that health care reform legislation would be unsustainable, and would consequently put off meaningful reform for another 20 years. When over 70% of Americans and over 59% of American physicians want single-payer health care, why would the corporate owned Democrats risk the passage of the single-payer healthcare bill?

The move came about somewhat as a fluke. New York Congressman Anthony Weiner threw a curveball. He introduced an amendment that would have created Medicare for the entire nation into the Energy and Commerce Committee healthcare markup session. That blew Waxman away! Nevertheless, Weiner was so surprised when Waxman said he would allow a vote on single-payer healthcare, he made Waxman repeat the statement making sure that it was clear and on the record. I guess we can see how much Representative Weiner trusts Pelosi and Waxman! They are the moral equivalent of a pair of leeches.

BY THEIR VOTE SHALL YE KNOW THEM

Largely the vote is seen as symbolic but at least for the first time, the concept of universal single-payer healthcare: government-funded, privately delivered health care will be given public exposure to the nation. Furthermore, when the bill comes to a vote, members of Congress will be forced to declare a position. When the bill fails, as is expected, Democrat rank-and-file should understand that the “Blue Dog” Democrats are, in essence, Republicans. Just as the Republicans had their think tank “Project for a New American Century” the Democrats have their “Progressive Policy Institute” which is anything but progressive. It is in fact the think tank of the so-called moderate or Blue Dog Democrats and is right in sync with PNAC.

It’s important to understand this reality because the Democrat Party’s talking point disseminators, the Democrats’ version of Rush Limbaugh, as well as the average Democrat voter, appear bewildered that health care reform has taken so long given that the Democrats have an overwhelming majority in both houses. But of course there is simply not an overwhelming majority of “Democrats” in the House or the Senate.

The Blue Dog Democrats are in effect Republicans. There are about 52 of them in the House and a handful of “unofficial members” in the Senate. While the House Blue Dogs actually have a caucus and a website,the best guess as to whom the Senate members are includes: Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Mark Udall of Colorado, and Mark Warner of Virginia.

If President Obama had any concept of what it means to be a Chief Executive he would have brought pressure to bear on the Blue Dogs through the power of the bully pulpit as soon as he took office. He should have made it clear that any Democrat who opposes single-payer will face a challenger in the next primary. He should have kicked Pelosi and Reid in their collective butt to discipline House and Senate members to fall behind the House and Senate versions of the single-payer legislation. He should have done that for the Employee Free Choice Act as well. Just as the Employee Free Choice Act has been gutted, if Obamacare passes — that means any form of a public option which still allows the existence of private insurance companies — meaningful healthcare reform will be put off for another 20 years.

A MOMENT OF COURAGE

Up until this point the “Liberal” Democrats — the single-payer advocates — the antiwar Democrats — have essentially behaved like sniveling cowards having nothing to say as the various versions of a “public option” wash away the hope for meaningful health care reform. Usually when people like the liberal Democrats call the Suicide Hotline they are advised, “Go ahead; do it.”

To their credit however the liberal Democrats reacted swiftly when the conservative Democrats — 52 Blue Dog members of the House — said that they might block the healthcare bill from moving forward through the Energy and Commerce Committee. The liberals issued a letter bitterly attacking Waxman’s deal saying:

We regard the agreement reached by Chairman Waxman and several Blue Dog members of the Committee as fundamentally unacceptable. This agreement is not a step forward toward a good healthcare bill, but is a large step backwards.

Representative Lynn Woolsey of California said at a news conference “we have compromised, and we can compromise no more.”

NO HEALTH CARE PLAN IS BETTER THAN OBAMACARE

Just one day before Pelosi and Waxman agreed to permit the vote on single-payer healthcare, advocates of single-payer health held a press conference at the National Press Club. They unanimously urged Congress to defeat “Obamacare” which is defined as a weak or no public option plan which is bound to break the bank and not cover tens of millions of Americans; pretty much what we have in the United States currently. Dr. David Schneider — Obama’s personal physician for 22 years — said at this conference that he opposed Obama’s plan because it’s “a bad program that will set health reform back….It will give people a sense that something has been done — and it hasn’t been done…It’s a bad bill….No bill [at all would be] better than this bill….It will make things more complicated than ever.”

Sidney Wolfe, from Public Citizen said of the various “public option” plans that they are “false promises. It’s incumbent upon us to oppose something that cannot work.”

Jim Ferlo, a state Senator from Pittsburgh said he would “rather wait to get a single payer plan than any half baked Obama plan… [Obamacare is] just not going to work. It’s not sustainable. Any time you see Harry and Louise in paid commercials in the millions financed by big Pharma — now backing the Obama plan, and spending millions of dollars in daily commercials in favor of Obama’s plan — I say hold onto to your wallets. Something’s wrong.”

Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program said the Obama legislation “will not address the fundamental problems we are facing. It will not control costs.” Katie Robbins of Healthcare Now said her group would not support it even with the Kucinich amendment which would allow states to enact single-payer healthcare legislation.

Seeing liberal Democrats stand up on their hind legs is incredibly refreshing. It is as though we went back 500 years and heard Martin Luther say to the Church of Rome, “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders” (Here I stand, I can do no differently). A dangerous position for someone to take back in those days when people who challenged authority were often given the choice of cold chop or a hot steak! Perhaps it is even more startlingly reminiscent of Milton’s account of Lucifer when he looked into the face of God and said “non serviam” (“I will not serve”). Everyone remembers what happened to good old Lucifer however!

THE BLUE DOGS

The reason the Blue Dogs have been able to swing so much weight is because they issue ultimatums — “if you don’t do things our way, we will throw your crummy healthcare plan in the shredder.”

If the Blue Dogs had written Patrick Henry’s speech it might have sounded something like “give me liberty or give me a reasonable facsimile thereof.” Instead of saying “I am Spartacus” we probably would have heard Blue Dog Roman slaves say “I am Spartacus…er…but only figuratively… I mean…er… HE is Spartacus.” A Blue Dog Benjamin Franklin might have been heard saying “those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve a little peace and quiet.”

The Blue Dogs are fiscal conservatives. They support pro-gun legislation, free trade, bankruptcy and tort reform, have anti-abortion voting records, oppose amnesty for economic refugees (called “illegal immigrants” by the mainstream media as well as the Blue Dogs), and they oppose welfare and entitlements. These positions would constitute an excellent platform upon which to build a party. But of course there already is a party with such a platform. It is called the Republican Party.

THE TYRANNY OF THE DUOPOLY

If the 85 House Democrats who pledged their support for HR 676 (John Conyer’s single-payer healthcare bill) remain firm and declare they will not support Obamacare or any other health care Reform Act than HR 676 and drew a “line in the sand”, then at least they would get a hell of a lot of press and the bill might actually stand a chance of passing. Unfortunately none of them have said “no” to Obamacare. Their moment of defiance was short-lived and mostly rhetorical.

Alarmingly, when the “liberal” Democrats acquiesce so easily to the Republicans even within their own party we find ourselves living in what Michael Parenti calls one “the worst forms of tyranny”. This is not one of those tyrannies “we rail against” but one of those insidious types of tyranny “that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.” It is the tyranny of the duopoly.

To live as if our choices make any real difference in the long run may be the act of a fool, but to live as if they do not, that is the act of a coward.

– Albert Camus

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-democrats%e2%80%99-single-payer-razzle-dazzle/feed/ 15 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/what%e2%80%99s-the-matter-with-the-story-of-kansas/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/what%e2%80%99s-the-matter-with-the-story-of-kansas/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:03:24 +0000 Kim Petersen http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=9413 What’s the Matter with Kansas? is a documentary film based on Thomas Frank’s book of the same name. In the film, director Joe Winston and producer Laura Cohen follow, without narration, an interesting selection of middle-class Kansans, and through glimpses into their lives, their stories and beliefs, viewers gain an insight into what Kansans, in general, are like and how they come to believe and vote like they do.

Near the beginning of the film, we meet Angel Dillard, a statuesque wife, mother, songwriter, singer, farmer, and pro-life advocate. Dillard is a Christian woman raised to be a critical thinker, which led her to the Republican Party.

Dillard and her family attend the Baptist church services of senior pastor Terry Fox — an avowedly anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-ACLU, and anti-Islam minister. It would be contradictory to describe this individual as pro-life given that he applauds the pro-death penalty. Fox’s strident pulpit causes a split in the church, and Fox finds himself a new parish in a fledgling amusement park.

A contrasting character is the 73-year-old crusty, straight-talking, liberal and artist provocateur M.T. Liggett. Said Liggett, “Gay marriage!? Who gives a shit? It’s none of my business. Abortion; it’s the same thing …”

Two camps are clearly delineated. Liggett respects individual autonomy — that no group has the right to impose its standards of behavior on another group. On the other hand is the view expressed by Brittany Barden, a volunteer campaigner with the Republic Party, that the United States is “meant to be a Christian nation; that is what the founding fathers intended.”

Bob Lippoldt, a substitute teacher and pro-life advocate, frames the liberals as “anti-Christian.”

Yet, Julie Burkhart, a pro-choice advocate, said, “I believe in what Jesus had to say … but I’m not a Christian.”

The pro-life versus pro-choice battleground occupies a chunk of the film, including the six-week so-called Summer of Mercy when pro-choice advocates targeted abortion clinics. This morphed into a well-organized and successful political movement. The long-time Kansan Democratic representative (1977-1994) Dan Glickman was the electoral target of the pro-lifers, and he was defeated.

When Glickman voted for NAFTA, he alienated many workers. Glickman noted that he had fared worst in blue-collar Democratic districts.

Bespectacled Dale Swenson, a former Boeing worker described a schism in the Democratic Party between “working class Democrats” and “Democrats of the leisure class.”

Swenson reasoned, “There’s nothing left within the Democratic Party for me to vote for if they are going to keep targeting the working class. If I’m in the crosshairs of the Democratic Party, then I’m not any worse off in the Republican Party.”

Donn Teske is a cigar-chomping, struggling farmer, farmer union president, and father. He detests the Bush administration but distances himself from the Democratic Party. He calls himself a Populist without a party.

Teske laments the current dog-eat-dog competition among farmers: “I’ve had friends who said, ‘I can’t wait until he goes broke so I can get my hands on it [the farm].’”

The separation between the two camps is wide. Dawn Barden, Brittany’s mother, deplores secular universities for having an alleged prejudice against Christian students. Dawn Barden claims that 80 percent of Christians leave the faith after studying at a secular college. Unexplored is why. Is not the testing of faith and its affirmation part of being a Christian? Was not Abraham tested? Was not Job tested? Is steadfastness to the faith not at the root of being a Christian?

Frank Thomas explores the radical Kansan political roots. The now defunct Populist Party had its origin in Kansas. Thomas refers to the socialist colonies of the nineteenth century as “My Kansas.” He calls for Liberalism to return to its roots. The question unanswered is: who will represent these roots?

Who are the liberals today? Thomas did not call for the development or strengthening of a “third party” movement. Instead of a future vision of progressivism, the film eulogizes the passage of worker parties in Kansas.

Frank wrote in his book, “For us it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.”¹ Implied was that by voting for Democrats the economic interests of regular Kansans would be served. Confining our analysis to recent decades, however, shows that the Clinton presidency and the Obama presidency have not protected the average Americans’s economic interests.

I wondered how Frank could get it so wrong — especially after how he recognized and depicted the economically self-defeating habit of middle America to vote for Republicans? Frank knows that the Democrats abandoned much of their base.

The film depicts the Democrats as a house divided. Fox’s church was a house divided. Jesus’s – and subsequently Lincoln’s – admonition about division is undiscussed, but it hangs heavy in the film.

Thomas points out that many in the working class voted for Bush in 2004 and at the top of their agenda were moral issues – but Bush’s agenda was economic, as in tax reform (to benefit the wealthy).

The film ends with the electoral defeat of the Republicans in 2008. God had not blessed the Republicans and neither did God bless the theme park venture nor the investments of Fox and many parishioners.

The Democrats are, for the time being, resurgent. Recently, however, Obama and the Democrats compromised on their committment to workers on the Employee Free Choice Act.

For this writer, the Democrats are a part of the corporate political duopoly that serves capitalist interests that exploits the workers, the poor, the weak, and the victimized. Understanding this, I submit, is basic.

The film explored the Kansan historical flirtations with populism and socialism. It did not delve deeply into Democratic politics like the book. What’s the Matter with Kansas? explores what drives middle-class Kansans and why they vote as they do. It is an illuminating film insofar as the political duopoly goes. Notably absent from the film was discussion of prospects for a credible “third” party movement on the political scene.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? will have its world premiere at Film Society of Lincoln Center on 6 August, at which point the DVD will also be released.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004):1.
]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/what%e2%80%99s-the-matter-with-the-story-of-kansas/feed/ 24 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/a-revered-president-a-non-existent-society/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/a-revered-president-a-non-existent-society/#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:00:49 +0000 Matt Reichel http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=9383 Watching President Obama’s press conference on Wednesday evening, one couldn’t help sensing certain hopelessness in his delivery: an understanding that he was advocating a continuation of the same old insurance company racket. Obama is first and foremost a politician and not an academic: an inherently reactionary personality-type without a significant and principled national health care movement to react to.

This nation’s prime dysfunction is the lack of a genuine social movement for anything substantive. The last movement died somewhere in 2003-2004: drowned in a sea of Democratic propaganda about changing the Emperor’s clothes. I was busily organizing the peace movement throughout Illinois at the time. We were turning out thousands of protestors on a regular basis, and backing the street manifestations with a frontal grassroots blitz of letters and calls to congresspeople, followed by the occasional sit-ins at their offices. To all involved, it was clear that the anti-war movement would shut down the war after a few years of persistence.

But alas, the movement completely discombobulated right before us. I watched willing volunteers start spending their time working for an “exciting” new senate candidate in Illinois, and others join the Howard Dean campaign and ultimately the John Kerry campaign. By the time the “exciting” Illinois senator rose to national prominence, based primarily on his capacity to string multiple coherent sentences together in a forceful manner (what low standards we have come to possess), the social movement had become the man himself. When this happens, the social movement stops existing: it is trumped by the ambitions of one man and the party that supports him. Wall Street, the banking industry, the health insurance racket, and the military industrial complex had not-so-cleverly beaten this nation’s last great movement.

According to many sociologists, the Frenchman Alain Touraine prime among them, a society is defined by conflict among social movements. As such, a nation without social movements is also void of society. As in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and other authoritarian systems, society has become thoroughly entrenched by the ruling elite in the Land of the (buy one get one) Free. The uniquely American brand of government is particularly trying and burdensome insofar as a significant portion of the population is convinced that we have a functioning democracy.

I would argue that we are governed by a bureaucratic plutocracy: a system that intentionally drowns the populace in trivial details so as to guard against independent thought. Social interaction is frequently driven by promotion rather than genuine amicability. Since no one in my generation seems to be gainfully employed, everyone is an independent contractor: peddling some sort of pseudo-art or music, or their graphic design or website design “business,” and so on. Even those supposedly working for grassroots political movements operate on a business model of consuming all who stand in their path. To them, you are a name on a list and a potential donor. The message becomes nothing but a tool to procure sustenance for the organization: to the point that the movement gets engulfed in the organization.

For six years, we have been functioning as a nation without society. We have the skeletons of society: people bustling around doing stuff, newspapers printing stuff, televisions broadcasting stuff, and a couple political parties advocating stuff. But the stuff is primarily noise and irrelevant sound bytes.

The closest thing to a genuine social movement today is the inspiring conservative anti-war movement, as evidenced in the appreciable success of the Ron Paul presidential campaign and the succeeding Campaign for Liberty movement. In addition to offering a principled opposition to war, this movement raises prescient criticisms of this nation’s monetary system and an essential reform: abolishing the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately the Left has been more hesitant than the right to critique its mainstream party, though there are notable exceptions. Two of them are right here in Illinois. Firstly, the sit-in at Republic Windows last winter demonstrated that Chicago might still be the labor movement capital of the universe, and that not all workers have been consumed by the ravenous Democratic Party. Secondly, the Illinois Green Party, through persistent and painstaking grassroots work, has become an established party on par with the two corporate parties. Their Gubernatorial candidate, Rich Whitney, won greater than 10% of the vote in 2006 and looks to build on that atop an eclectic slate of seasoned activists in 2010.

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the largely dormant left has been looking to the president for guidance. He is undoubtedly a brilliant man insofar as he navigated the confusing legal, bureaucratic jungle that is our political system and achieved a historic feat last November. However, his accomplishment was not, as is widely regarded, the result of some social movement. In fact, he shunned the remaining minute traces of social movements at every opportunity. He said he would fight to end the war, and then expanded it, said he would fight to restore civil liberties and take a principled stand against warrantless wiretapping, and then reversed his decision. And most recently he said he was for “universal health care,” and yet echoes the same drivel of bygone years.

People must stop looking to the president for solutions to this nation’s numerous problems: unending wars of empire, avarice throughout the banking industry, a political class that is a mere shill for said banking industry, and a national discourse that has become incredibly trivialized by the saturation of corporate-controlled media. Addressing these deficiencies, re-instituting a democracy and reconstructing civil society will require arduous labor over the course of many years. I invite all concerned citizens to join a local anti-war group, or create one if there isn’t one already, and be as visible and intelligently provocative as possible. Do the same with alternative political parties that build off of local involvement, such as the Greens or Libertarians. Join one of the local movements for single-payer health care, or any other movement built upon substance rather than noise. We need people of courage to take on the duty of lifting Americans above this feeble reverence of Wall Street’s latest White House implant.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/a-revered-president-a-non-existent-society/feed/ 12