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.

   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

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.

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.

But since you already know that, let’s talk about what we don’t know, or at least what we claim we didn’t. For example, that Obama is pro-war. Because progressives everywhere have their hands over their mouth in shock. We talk of betrayal and defection. Joshua Frank summed up the progressive problem pithily: “These are Obama’s wars now.” The only real problem with this statement is that they have always been Obama’s wars: His opposition to the Iraq war, despite the flowers trailing from it and the flowers we wove onto those, was merely tactical; in his support for the ‘good war’ in Afghanistan he didn’t even bother with flowers — it was so much ‘bring it on.’ As for the broader picture, Obama’s so-called noble rhetoric is of the ‘kinder, gentler imperialism’ strain; nowhere does he fundamentally question the right of the United States to rule the world economy, practice abject self-interestedness, and maintain a global military presence. His “peace” rhetoric is tinkering rhetoric, oiled with calls for diplomacy and schlocky hope-hope-hurrah expressly employed to make us feel good about doing what we have always done.

And the Democratic Party fares even worse. As Lance Selfa reminds us in The Democrats: A Critical History, Democratic presidents and majorities provoked or presided over every war of the 21st century, dropped The Bomb, pushed us to the brink of nuclear holocaust, expanded the defense budget, reinvented intervention, and routinely updated hyper-capitalism to suit the times, all while receiving fast cash and faster demands from the architects of oligarchy. Even their great and ‘progressive’ offerings of the ‘30s and ‘60s were careful concessions to an increasingly militant opposition — confection concessions, candy to stop the revolution. (If you give a mouse a cookie, you’ll probably ask him for some milk. Oh, and he will probably vote for you anyway.) In other words, the Democrats are not just the Hypo-crats, as we in our bravest moments dare to call them. Their abdications are not accidents but necessities performed in the hallowed name of something both parties are happy to agree on: American empire. Their peace postures and bully-pulpit bravado are affectations in the elaborate act of decoy democracy, where The Enemy does its dirty deeds and Our Friends make sure it’s done dirt chic, in the way our consciences prefer it.

But you have heard all this before. And that is why I want to talk about something else — why I won’t bore you further with howling at the liberal moon but will, rather, treat the Democrats’ ‘shocking’ abdication as a metaphor for what is wrong with our political system. You see, I had to give you the same old intro in order to ask the right question: Why are we so surprised?

Because we all are, or pretend we are. Progressive denizens and policy wonks, people who get up at 5am to watch C-Span and pore over the latest bills, are going on television and trotting out the same oh-me-oh-my’s that they trotted out for the Wall Street bailouts, telecom immunity, ‘market-reform’ healthcare and the preservation of the state secrets doctrine. And if you have had the grave misfortune of owning a television in the last fifty years, you have also had the grave misfortune of hearing all this a thousand times per decade. It is as if progressives all got together in the 1950s with an unbelievably bad screenwriter and signed their lives over to movie rights, memorized the script: “Now remember, everybody. Anytime something goes terribly wrong and you are part of it, I will pan in on you. That’s where you wring your hands and say, cloyingly, ‘How could this happen? Here, in the United States of America!”

Of course, the script has been updated for modern viewers. You know the drill. If you are going to criticize Obama, remember to use the word disappointed. If you can, pair it with a comprehensive pronoun-phrase. As in: “All of us here in the progressive movement are shocked and terribly disappointed that Obama . . .” Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Be shocked. Almost personally wounded. Demonstrate a willful amnesia about United States political history, and, more importantly, all of last election season.

But wait! You are about to lose your movement (for this is what you call your rag-tag, internet-fundraising, grassroots-is-the-new-Tammany e-mail list)! Get people’s attention back with homage to the ‘party of the people’ and their great ‘contributions to social justice.’ Pick a Republican, any Republican, and ridicule their backwater view of the world. Forget to mention that they are voting against the war in bigger numbers than Democrats. Say the word neo-con and pause for people to shiver. Pause again for people to congratulate themselves on not being neo-cons (those scheming backwater hicks!).

Now lower the boom. We (the progressives) are not going to get what we want this year. We don’t have the ______. (You will need to improvise on this one; it used to be votes, but you can’t use that anymore. Just don’t say backbone.) Reassure people that they are still the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, what-have-you. And they are powerful. After all, they elected the first Black president, the peace president, the community organizer, the …! (Stop before you faint on national television.)

Regain your composure and give your darling listeners the Greatest Compliment of All. Tell them that they are realistic. Oh, but they are savvy! They know what is possible. Say the phrase “from the inside out” and talk about “pushing the Democratic party to the left.” Perform a mini-monologue on the virtue of incremental gains. Now you have most everybody drooling the same scripted drool. And for those pesky skeptics, a dash of manipulation. Remind them of the Dark Ages of Bush: how bad it was, what an utter departure it surely was from the benevolent policies of yester-empire, how fluke-ish and shockingly-sad-making it all was. Ask them if they want that to happen again. Stare into the camera. Well, do you? Do you?!? Good. Then don’t desert. Don’t leave your party now. And for heaven’s sake, don’t push too hard or you will ruin everything we have ever worked for!!

All that remains now is a brief comparison myth and a rallying cliché. The myth is up to you, but some popular ones include comparing the Obama Epoch to the civil rights era (say it worked and succeeded in whatever way suits your current purpose); FDR (who in the rosy glow of retrospect is a radical); Lincoln (who counsels Obama nightly about Total Altruism and Opposing Injustice as a Crime Against Humanity); or JFK (who’s too good-looking not to bring up!); all culminating in a gushing discussion on Michelle Obama’s wardrobe (which is just lovely and somehow represents a Great Stride Forward in some inexpressible way) and a shining statement about us being so glad to have a president who can speak in full sentences (apparently this is something to gush about). Do not mention Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Eugene Debs, the Wobblies, or Emma Goldman, except to express a vague disdain (the most powerful argument) that makes their supporters look naïve or monstrous. We can’t have The People knowing how history actually works.

You have probably gotten too sentimental, so now is the time to restore your credibility while galvanizing the troops. The promised cliché. Say: “Now we all know Obama isn’t perfect (pause for people to feel a warm rush of self-satisfaction at having realized this), but no one is!” Argue that politicians are not like people and shouldn’t have to be. They can be immoral, ruthless, absurd, cold-blooded, insecure. It is naïve to expect otherwise. It is the people’s job to be moral! And that is why — drum-roll please — “We have to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, to make sure he does the right thing.”

Deliver this metaphor like you are the first person to have ever thought of it. If it helps, put a silent ‘Hey!’ in front of it in your mind, as in ‘Hey! Wow! I just thought of this, guys. We should, like, not rest and stuff and like, hold Obama’s feet to the fire. He-ey! Yeah, that’s it!’ Say it like the stoned guy at the college party who wants everyone to know how profound it is to have, like, a hand. Whoa. Under no circumstances should you stray from the accepted metaphor. It is the Party’s darling, concocted in basement PR laboratories on Capitol Hill, tested on college idealists who are too young and dazzled to know better, rolled out officially at the national convention.

You are done! Done feeding history into the maw of media and myth! Smile frigidly as they thank you and pan out: “That was so-and-so so-and-so of MoveOn.org…”

That is the disturbing aspect of a cultural script. It is the poltergeist haunting a democracy that thinks it has mastered free speech. It asks: How did everyone, every free-to-think person, end up saying the exact same falsehoods? Which leads us back, of course, to the question that gets at the meaning of democracy failure: Why does everyone have such vested interests in acting surprised?

The short answer is this: we are invested in acting surprised because politics is not about truth, but prestige. If that seems a naïve criticism, I am only taking the Parties and high school civics class at their words, and their words have been employed in the colossal effort to establish that politics is a truth project, or at very least an ethics project, in which people get together to battle over what is true and what is right — a project in which somebody can prevail (because, we are promised, they were true or right). The Democrats particularly love to disseminate this notion of politics, especially if they can cast themselves in the underdog role of unveiling that truth and fighting for that right. The entire Bush era is supposed to be a testament to the Democrat’s unflagging love of truth and justice. They stopped at nothing, the story goes, to unveil the misdeeds of the dastardly neo-cons and to get America its reputation back.

Of course, those eight years were loaded with hand wringing and histrionic surprise (here, in America!). Nobody pointed out the obvious: that this surprise and indignation could only exist in an America that had slavishly created a myth of original innocence (America does not torture!) that it could return to, a history of ‘good wars’ fought for the ‘right reasons’ and Camelots interrupted by tragedy. And nobody took that reasoning further and found, at the bottom of it, a two-party system that depends for its very survival on manufacturing domestic polarities — good and bad, truth and falsehood, enemy and friend—so that one party could dutifully assume the former and the other the latter while getting the real business of empire done together.

The Bush years were not years of great oppositional truth seeking, least of all on the part of the Democrats. The Bush years represented the public briefly confronting the culmination of an otherwise unquestioned logic that was we were distracted from by gestures of outrage. The Democrats responded the way they were supposed to: with shock at the excesses of empire merely. They were rewarded for this shock with the Democrats’ ready-made self-remuneration: a feeling of singular intelligence, a deep sense of welling conscience that was better — and this was the important part — than the idiocy of Republicans and the ruthlessness of Republican politics. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It assured both politicians and people that they were free from the impurities that tainted the Other Party. And, since that is the psychological reason the vast majority of people get involved in politics, it served a convenient purpose: it gave people a sense of prestige and respectability that made it infinitely easier for the Democrats to do terrible things without being criticized for them. Indeed, it had become almost impossible to criticize at all. By equating people’s sense of truth and right with a ‘better’ party, and then pairing that again with a sense of intelligence and prestige, the Democrats (and the grateful Republicans) made it so that people could not criticize American empire without impugning their intelligence and prestige. Bingo. In a subtle-simple sleight of hand, democracy became reputation and truth became allegiance.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the media, where liberal bloggers and late-night talk show host had made their fortunes and reputations as dogged detractors of the Bush regime. But when it came to the exact same regime under a new head, the bloggers and comedians cowered. The same organizations who used to send you emails about Evil Bush’s Evil Wars are now writing very different alerts: ‘Help Obama!’ they say. ‘Help Obama end the war in Iraq, push through the public healthcare option.’ No matter that Obama is committed to the war in Iraq and enthusiastically supports market healthcare ‘reform.’ It is as if, somehow, we weren’t looking at the same deaths, the same logic, the same poverty or the same injustice. Or, at least, it is increasingly evident that this was not the issue. If it were, we would be chanting the same chants and writing with the same acid pens. But for the vast majority of politicians and people, it is obvious that justice, so called, is neither the point nor the goal. The goal is myth and a sense of prestige. The goal is to curb the excesses that make us confront our deepest hypocrisies: that our sense of justice is demarcated by our desire for comfort, that we invented a ‘truth project’ to keep us safe from truth, that we mythologize the past to safeguard national solipsism, that political truth is a function of political loyalty and that prestige is more important than ethics.

We are invested in surprise because it allows us to continue believing that what we want is political truth, which we want, in turn, for the sake of political justice. The reality, however, is evidenced by the war funding bill: anti-war Democrats beating the war drum in the name of loyalty to ‘anti-war’ Obama.

So we have come full-circle: an ostensibly anti-war President (a lie) appeals to an ostensibly anti-war party (another lie) to pass a war bill that causes ostensibly anti-war activists to feign shock, which somehow increases the sentiment that the Republicans (who largely voted against the bill) are the sponsor of all political evil. This strangulated logic is our latest and prettiest consequence of believing in parties more than principles. But more than that, it is the consequence of rejecting in the name of realism what we trumpet rhetorically: that politics can be about truth.

I am writing to reject this realism, and refuse to call this rejection naive. I reject it knowing that this is not an issue of Democrats or Republicans — that any party will sacrifice truth for its own preservation. I reject it because believing that it is realistic to believe in amoral politicians and sociopathic self-interest on a public scale while rejecting amorality and sociopathy on an individual scale has bred more blood and disaster than any other philosophy I can think of. To protect this mad logic with the myth that we have prevailed — that justice has been won — makes it even more certain that wars will continue and Congresses will continue to fund them.

Conversely, if we believed that people were the same as politicians — that people were the politicians — if we believed that we could expect and demand that these politicians (us, or other versions of us) act like we would, and for the reasons we would, it would be very difficult to accept a party system where truth was reducible to a loyalty that was itself reducible to the belief that there is a difference between the political and the personal. I believe in this idea, not as something idealistic, but as the beginning of an abiding realism that could actually shake things up.

And if not? Okay, then. But let’s stop with the Theatre of the False Surprise.

Whether those meaningful reform proposals become law is no sure thing, and will depend on the administration’s willingness to stare down Wall Street — which still retains immense political power, despite its partial self-immolation — and on whether a mobilized public demands Congress act for consumers, not contributors.

The 85-page draft released today is qualitatively different than the bullet-point plans previously issued by the Treasury Department. It contains detailed proposals, spanning across the financial regulatory spectrum, not easily summarized. Here are only some key elements — first, the good, then the bad.

The Good

1. The administration supports creation of a strong Consumer Financial Regulatory Agency.

It proposes to give this new agency very strong powers, and jurisdiction over consumer protection rules — taking away authority from existing regulators (like the Federal Reserve) that have failed utterly to protect consumers. It favors simplicity and gives the new agency the authority to mandate financial firms offer “plain vanilla” loans along with the more complicated packages they prefer. It gives the agency authority to ban mandatory arbitration provisions that strip consumers’ right to go to court for redress of scams and rip-offs. And it establishes that the new agency’s rules will be a regulatory floor, with states permitted to adopt stronger protections.

2. The administration proposes to reduce speculative betting, through new standards on leverage.

One reason the financial crisis spun out of control was financial firms’ excessive use of “leverage” — borrowed money. Heavily leveraged, the top commercial banks and investment banks overreached with very risky loans and investments. The administration proposes that all systemically important financial firms be subjected to higher capital reserve standards (meaning they can rely less on borrowed money). The administration properly says these rules should apply to any systemically important firm, whether or not it is a bank. It defines systemically important as a firm “whose combination of size, leverage and interconnectedness could pose a threat to financial stability if it failed.” There are still important details to be worked out here, including how much capital such firms must maintain. And there is the very worrisome element that it is the Federal Reserve that is given primary responsibility for overseeing these systemically important firms.

3. Through “skin-in-the-game” rules, the administration aims to prevent predatory and reckless lending.

One reason lenders were willing to make so many predatory and bad-quality mortgages — including but not limited to the class of “subprime” loans — was that mortgage originators did not hold on to the loans. Mortgage brokers cut deals on behalf of banks and non-bank originators, which in turn sold the resulting mortgages to other banks. These banks, in turn, sliced and diced the mortgages, combined them into packages of pieces of thousands of other mortgages, and sold them to all kinds of investors. Because the initial lender did not maintain an ongoing interest in the mortgage, they did not have any incentive to ensure they were making a quality loan.

The administration proposes that loan originators be required to keep, at minimum, a 5 percent exposure in loans.

4. The administration seeks power to take over failing, systemically important financial firms.

The government already has such “resolution” power for commercial banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation regularly takes control over failing banks and “resolves” them outside of the bankruptcy process. This typically means selling off the failing bank to another bank, often after separating its good assets from bad. FDIC is expert at this process, moves very quickly, and averts the harmful consequences from extended bankruptcy processes.

The government does not have the legal authority to undertake comparable measures for important non-bank firms. This includes investment banks (think Lehman Brothers) and insurance companies (think AIG). Giving the government resolution power for non-banks should help control financial panic.

The Bad

1. The administration does not propose to do anything serious about executive pay and top-level compensation for financial firms.

The administration does support “say-on-pay” proposals, which give shareholders the right to a non-binding vote on executive compensation. But a non-binding vote isn’t worth too much; and, more importantly, shareholders are often willing to support excessive compensation while risky bets are paying off.

In terms of financial stability, the imperative is to do away with the Wall Street bonus culture, where executives and traders are given extraordinary bonuses — often four or more times base salary — based on annual performance. This bonus culture gives traders and executives alike an incentive to take big bets — because they get massive payoff if things go well, and don’t suffer if they go bad, or go bad sometime in the future.

This is a structural problem, not a symbolic one. Anyone who thinks pay isn’t of overriding importance in financial regulation should have been set straight by the desperation of the bailed out Wall Street firms to pay back their loans from the government. That desperation is overwhelmingly tied to a desire to escape the extremely modest pay standards issued by the Obama administration.

Besides financial stability, there are important questions of economic justice and taxpayer rights related to executive compensation. The Wall Street hotshots — including the major hedge fund players — have paid themselves unfathomable amounts of money over the last decade. They have set an aspirational standard for other executives and professionals, and helped drive wealth and income inequality to outrageous and unhealthy levels. Ultra compensation should be taxed at very high rates; and, at a bare minimum, the loopholes that let hedge fund managers pay taxes at about half the rate of regular folks must be closed. The case for aggressive tax reform on ultra rich financiers was overwhelming last year; now, with the financial system completely dependent on taxpayer largesse, there shouldn’t be anything left to debate. No one in finance can say they made their money just by working hard or being clever — their system was saved by the government.

2. The administration does not propose structural reform of the financial sector.

Although it proposes some meaningful regulatory reform, and modest alteration of the structure of regulatory agencies, the administration does not propose to alter the structure of the financial sector itself.

There is no discussion of returning to Glass-Steagall principles, to separate commercial banking from other financial activities including the speculative world of investment banking. Glass-Steagall was adopted during the Great Depression, as a response to financial abuses that closely parallel those of the previous decade. Repeal of Glass Steagall — following a decades-long erosion — came in 1999, and helped pave the way for the present crisis.

Nor is there any discussion of shrinking the size of goliath financial firms. Everyone now recognizes the problem of too-big-to-fail and too-interconnected-to-fail financial firms. The administration proposes to deal with the problem through regulation alone; a more fundamental approach would break up giant firms (or at least commit to prevent further consolidation going forward).

Addressing structure and size is important not only because of the economic power accreted by the goliaths, but because of their political strength — about which, see below.

3. The administration’s approach to regulating financial derivatives is too timid.

To its credit, the administration proposes to repeal recent deregulatory statutes and establish regulation of financial derivatives. But its plan does not go far enough. It creates a regulatory exemption for customized derivatives — a loophole that will create lots of business for corporate lawyers ready to change terms in derivative contracts so that they differ somewhat from standardized terms.

Nor does the administration propose to ban classes of dangerous financial instruments that cannot be justified. A clear example of a product that should be banned is a credit default swap — a kind of insurance against a certain outcome, like the inability of a bondholder to make required payments — in which neither party has a stake in the underlying transaction. Such credit default swaps have no insurance component, and are nothing more than bets — but they are bets that can vastly exceed the value of the transaction being bet on, and can spread financial contagion, as AIG demonstrated. George Soros argues that all credit default swaps basically share this feature, and should be banned altogether.

The administration proposal also fails to require that exotic financial instruments be subjected to pre-approval requirements. Under such an approach, financial firms would be required to show that new instruments offer some social benefit, and do not pose excessive risk.

4. The administration does not propose to empower consumers.

There is enormous merit to the proposal for a Consumer Financial Products Agency. But it is not a substitute for giving consumers the power to organize themselves to advance their own interests. Simply mandating that financial firms include in bills and statements (whether mailed or e-mailed) an invitation to join an independent consumer organization would facilitate tens of thousands of consumers — and likely many more — banding together to make sure the regulators do their job, and to prevent Wall Street from “innovating” the next trick to scam borrowers and investors.

The Ugly

Identifying the merits and gaps in the administration’s proposal is important. But the proposal does not exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t become law just because the administration has proposed it.

The Wall Street types don’t know shame. Having benefited from literally trillions of dollars of taxpayer largesse, one might expect that they would be embarrassed to lobby on Capitol Hill. Or, that Members of Congress would be unsympathetic to their pleas.

But that’s not how Washington works. Having spent $5 billion on political investments over the last decade, Wall Street continues to pour cash into the political process — and those investments continue to pay handsomely.

To understand how things work, consider the fate of the proposal to give bankruptcy judges the power to adjust mortgages, so that they could reduce the principal owed on loans on homes now worth less than value of the loan. Then-candidate Barack Obama campaigned in favor of such “cram-down” provisions. In a rational world, banks would agree to these adjustments to principal on their own, because they do better if people stay in their homes and continue paying on the loan, rather than by forcing foreclosure. Not long ago, it was widely expected that cram-down would quickly become law. But the banks deployed their lobbyists, and this vital though totally inadequate measure was defeated in May. The Obama administration sat quietly by.

Now, Wall Street is already trashing the good parts of the administration’s proposals.

“Congress is not going to impose a ’skin-in-the-game’ requirement on all loans,” Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Washington Research Group, a division of Concept Capital, flatly tells American Banker.

The Chamber of Commerce and other industry groupings are attacking the idea of a Consumer Financial Product Agency, including with the extraordinary claim that it will improperly relieve consumers of their duty to do “due diligence” on financial products.

Hedge funds are hiring ever more lobbyists and floating the claim that the administration’s requirements for some modest disclosure requirements for secretive hedge funds could do more damage than good. One purported reason: the disclosures may be too complicated for regular people to understand.

There’s no question that Wall Street is going to mobilize — is already mobilized — to defeat the administration’s positive proposals.

What remains very much in question is the administration’s willingness to engage in bare-knuckled political fighting to defend these proposals, as well as whether the public will be mobilized to support these and other moves to control Wall Street.

A new public interest coalition — Americans for Financial Reform — aims to do just that, but they are fighting on occupied territory. As Senator Majority Whip Richard Durbin says, “the banks are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

[Disclosure: My organization, Essential Action, is a member of Americans for Financial Reform.]

Thus, the phenomenon has the potential to become the basis for a viable third party, particularly if other portions of the disaffected populace could be brought on board. Whether this eventuality materializes positively pales in significance when compared to our collective lack of understanding of the manner in which our personal ideologies and political choices are being shaped by a phony “war of ideas.”

This understanding must begin with an examination of the central role that tax exempt foundations and the money powers behind them have long played in the creation of both past and present political movements, now labeled “phenomenon.”

To begin this journey, we delve again into the questions of authorship and purpose of those “ancient history,”and highly controversial newsletters, otherwise known as The Ron Paul Political Reports. While Paul and his spokesman have given varying accounts over the years of just who wrote those newsletters, at least “a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.”²

So, who is Lew Rockwell?

For starters, Rockwell was Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982 and a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates – which was the publishing company for the infamous Ron Paul Political Report as well as The Ron Paul Investment Letter and the Ron Paul Survival Report. Rockwell “remains a friend and advisor to Paul – accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com Blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman’s recent writings and audio recordings…”²

A number of writers have identified a 1980’s collaboration between Rockwell and Murray Rothbard as the key to those infamous Political Reports. The purpose of the collaboration was to build a coalition of populist “paleoconservatives” via Machiavellian style methodology. Theirs was a deliberate “politics of hate” strategy that was at its most extreme between 1989-1994, the same time period during which the most incendiary Paul newsletters appeared. The works and writings of both Rockwell and Rothbard during that time period mirrored the most controversial of the Paul newsletters.³ Moreover, and as a result of those efforts, the 2008 Ron Paul Campaign was able to tap into the financial and networking resources of that coalition.

Those newsletters are only one of the ties that bind Rockwell, Rothbard and Paul together. The Ludwig Von Mises Institute is another, with Paul serving as a “distinguished scholar,” lecturer and frequent visitor. Rockwell is its founder and President.

According to its website, “The Ludwig von Mises Institute is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), with a vast array of publications, programs, and fellowships, the Mises Institute … seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth.”⁴

The Mises Institute is a type of tax exempt foundation known as a think tank. Most but not all think tanks in the United States are tax exempt foundations, which as a group came about as a result of charitable foundations being granted tax exempt status by Congress in 1913. As of 2007, there were 5080 think tanks in the world, with 1776 in the United States. This represented a 91% increase since 1951 with more think tanks having been established since 1970 than in the previous 50 years.⁵

Examples of think tanks include The World Business Council on Sustainable Development, The American Eugenics Association, American Petroleum Institute, Accuracy in Media, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, Southern Poverty Law Center, World Economic Forum, Rand Corporation, Progressive Policy Institute, Global Climate Coalition, as well as the Ludwig Von Mises Institute among thousands of others.⁶

For the most part modern day think tanks owe their existence to tax exempt foundations, which had caught the attention of Congress over fifty years ago. In 1952, the Cox Committee was set up by Congress specifically for the purpose of investigating the political and economic impact of the largest of these foundations. When Cox died unexpectedly, the Reece Committee took up where the Cox Committee had left off. Norman Dodd was appointed Director of Research and Rene Wormser served as general council. Wormser subsequently wrote a book, now out of print, called Foundations: Their Power and Influence.

A scanned copy of the Dodd report submitted May 10, 1954 to Congress can be found on the internet, as can copies of both the Cox Committee and Reece Committee hearings. The conclusion of the Dodd report reads as follows: “It seems incredible that the Trustees of typically American fortune-created foundations should have permitted them to be used to finance ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of our Constitution. Yet there seems to be evidence that this is so. I assume it is the purpose of this committee to gather and weigh the facts.”⁷

The Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford Foundations were the focus of both the Cox and the Reece Committees, and the committees together essentially documented the manner in which these foundations had been deliberately developing tools and strategies with which to influence and control education, government, the media and the country at large. Moreover, both committees found that the actions of these foundations were often the opposite of their stated purposes.

The work of the Cox and Reece committees led to a flurry of research into what became known as the left gatekeepers – the term used for the interlocked network of foundations which controlled the ideological “left.” One popular left gatekeeper chart archived on the internet identifies the Council on Foreign Relations, The Schumann and MacArthur Foundations, The Soros Foundation, The Trilateral Commission, and the Carlyle Group – together with the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford Foundations and a number of smaller foundations – as part of the left gatekeeper structural network. The CIA is also identified as one of the most influential of these left gate keepers.⁸

In 1961 Texas Congressman Wright Patman began another Congressional investigation into tax exempt foundations. Described as a “fierce populist,” his effort lasted a full eight years, culminating in 1969 with the first major regulatory controls over foundations (which perhaps not unpredictably have been watered down since then). His first report to Congress in December 1962 decried the fact that ownership of an increasing number of corporations was finding its way into tax exempt foundations. The resultant concentration of power and influence, Patman maintained, called for an “immediate moratorium on the granting of tax exemptions to foundations.”

His reasons included evidence which showed that foundations were not subjected to adequate or appropriate scrutiny by the IRS as well as the fact that many of the foundations under study had been found in violation of the law as well as Treasury regulations. Just as troubling was his discovery that some foundations were being used only to provide tax breaks for their principals and, further, that certain trustees were able to channel foundation money to themselves, their relatives and even their friends. Essentially and perhaps not surprisingly, Patman’s evidence showed that “foundation-controlled enterprises possess[ed] the money and competitive advantages to eliminate small business.”

In the forward to his 1962 report, Patman refers to the Ways and Means Committee hearings of 1948-49 which “revealed that educational institutions and private charitable foundations had moved into commercial and industrial fields. Some had inherited substantial business interests, as was the case of the Ford Foundation. Others had purchased control of businesses. A tax exempt cancer research organization, for example, had acquired a variety of industrial firms … In fact, the [1962] record lists about 40 different types of businesses controlled by educational and charitable organizations …” Incredibly,” continues Patman, “as far back as 1916, we were amply warned by the Walsh Committee of the abuses that might flow from the creation of those privileged, tax exempt entities…”⁹

Drawing from Rene Wormser’s book Foundations and other sources, the author of a 1971 book titled The Money Manipulators provides additional, important insight into the way foundations work and the problem they present to the average citizen:

We must not overlook the interlocking directorship which exists within corporations and often extends into an invisible international government. Highly placed members of the Council on Foreign Relations occupy positions of prominence in many of our giant corporations and their influence extends beyond corporate corridors into the national, state and even local legislative bodies. Foundations are one of the most important power centers on our national scene. Their numbers have proliferated rapidly …

A recent [1971] Treasury Department study revealed that there are at least 100 major United States corporations in which foundations owned at least 20 per cent of the stock. It is the belief of this writer that many corporations pay dividends primarily for the benefit of this class of stockholder…

The most serious flaw in the structure of the foundation setup from the standpoint of the average citizen is the element of thought control which is exercised. Since the officials are generally men of wealth and position, they attract followers. This is true not only in business and industry but in the educational fields as well. A bright young student will usually identify favorably with the foundation which offers him a much needed fellowship or research grant. He will tend to develop attitudes sympathetic toward the objectives and thinking of foundation officials. This is the indirect method of thought control. The more direct one is the Fullbright or similar type scholarships which are generally awarded only to students who, when properly investigated, are found to be intellectually reliable…

The Reece Committee found that the foundations tended to develop a bureaucratic structure within and were usually managed by professionals. They also found “interlock” or cooperation among the powerful big-name funds… It is also difficult to live in a vacuum. Since the money power is so extensive, any opposing voice is usually either neutralized or bought off. If occasional cries of agonized individualism persist, the time-honored technique of smear and other propaganda devices are used to discredit them sufficiently so that their protestations are rendered valueless.¹⁰

As might be expected, the use of foundations to advance an Orwellian style agenda hidden behind lofty-sounding goals did not originate with Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. In 1984 author-researcher Eustace Mullins penned a brief history of foundation influence in the United States, as follows:

We have read ad nauseam about men of great wealth who, after careers of astounding ruthlessness while amassing their fortunes, suddenly underwent a profound conversion, like [the Biblical] Paul, and became men of goodwill… From the outset, American foundations have exhibited a twofold image – in front is the tireless do-gooder who balks at nothing if it serves a good cause. Behind him are the evil conspirators who are intent on preserving and increasing their wealth and power.

The foundation in its present form, originated in the concept of a Boston family, the Peabodys. Henry James in his novel “The Bostonians”, ridiculed a family friend, Elizabeth Peabody, for her fifty years of relentless humanitarian zeal, portraying her as the legendary Miss Birdseye.

[Meanwhile] George Peabody, after slave trading operations in Washington and Baltimore, moved to London, where he was set up as a front by the Rothschild family. He amassed a fortune by buying up depressed stock in American panics, and chose a Boston trader, Junius Morgan, to carry on his business. In 1865, Peabody set up the first large-scale American foundation, the Peabody Educational Fund, endowing it with $1 million in government bonds. By 1867, this had grown to $2 million; by 1869, $3.6 million.

Ostensibly set up to educate Southern Negroes after the Civil War, it was a key operation in the carpetbagger strategy to gain control of Southern lands and to control their state governments. These states had to borrow heavily from Wall Street bankers to rebuild their services, and they remained deeply in debt for the next century.¹¹

With respect to the Civil War, evidence clearly suggests that the Civil War itself was a carefully laid plan to usurp the monetary independence of the United States and create a financial empire centered on Wall Street from which the country as a whole would be governed from behind the scenes. Trial attorney and former law professor John Remington Graham summarizes the conclusions for the case he lays out as follows:

The divisive antagonisms between the North and the South, finally erupting in the spring of 1861, were not unfortunate historical accidents, nor the result of some inexorable momentum in events. Those antagonisms, rather, were deliberately agitated during the 1850s by great international banking houses with a preconceived motive of provoking secession. And secession was to be used as a pretext for a bloody war of conquest…

The war was planned to generate a stupendous national debt, mostly represented by bonds … the private interests acquiring these bonds successfully plotted to secure the passage of legislation which enabled them to convert them to the paper by them acquired in financing the war into a new and dominant system of banking and currency under their ownership and control. And those private interests fully succeeded in their sinister program, and set up a huge financial empire centered on Wall Street from which they have ever since governed the United States behind the scenes…

[Moreover], the great banking houses in Philadelphia, New York, London and Paris did not like [the Lincoln greenback, originally issued debt “free” by the Treasury] because they could not “control” it – in other words, they could not convert it into a profitable venture for themselves.¹²

Graham essentially lays out the case, in lawyerly fashion, that over the two or three decades leading up to the Civil War the international money powers were able to manipulate we the people and our government in such a way that radical voices on both sides of the manufactured divide became the only voices heard. Passions thus aroused created fertile ground for war.

Like Graham, general council for the Reece Committee Rene Wormser was not content to focus on the narrow issues prescribed by the media or the propagandists. Speaking of the post World War II period during which we faced the “communist threat” Wormser would bemoan the fact that “the emphasis on a search for organized Communist penetration of foundations absorbed much of the energy of the investigators [for the Reece Committee] and detracted somewhat from the efficacy of their general inquiry into subversion.”¹³

In similar fashion to Graham, Wormser became far more concerned with the broader picture of a newly emerging American financial elite that could wield massive amounts of political clout through the size of its wallet and the strength of its own intricate, interlocked power structure. Neither the media nor the Congress paid attention to Wormser’s broader concern, and national attention remained directed at the so-called Communist threat until it was replaced by the Cold War. Antony Sutton and others tried to expose the “Communist threat” and the Cold War for what they were but no one listened to them either.

It is worth noting that tax exempt foundations were not the only tool employed by “money powers” because concomitant with them came the deliberate infiltration of grassroots groups and development of tools such as the “left/right” political spectrum as a means by which to control the “public debate.”

Thus, as Georgetown professor Carroll Quigley wrote in his 1966 Tragedy and Hope: “More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people.”¹⁴

In 1913, and writing about the same time period as Quigley, Charles Lindberg Sr. wrote in his book, Banking and Currency and the Money Trust that “The [money] interests have done everything that has been possible for them to do in order to divide the people of this country into factions commonly known as political parties, because it was in their interest to do so… Partisanship is factional government and not national government … Partisanship has been the cause of retarding all social progress.”¹⁵

In 1983, Antony Sutton would write in his book America’s Secret Establishments , “More effective than outright censorship is use of the left-right political spectrum to neutralize unwelcome facts and ideas or just condition citizens to think along certain lines.”¹⁶

So it is that in the final analysis and despite the evidence uncovered by the Cox and Reece Committees about “left” gate keepers, it strains credulity to think that only the ideological left was – or is – controlled by “gate keepers.” As it turns out, Wormser was right: there was the broader concern of subversion that needed attending to.

1. “Ron Paul: Republican or Revolutionary?” ABCNews Report, October 18, 2007.
2. “Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Political Report? by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, January 16, 2008, ReasonOnline.
3. “Angry White Men,” by James Kirchick. January 8, 2008. The New Republic.
4. About at Mises.org.
5. “The Think Tanks and Civil Society Program,” James G. McGann, Ph.D. Foreign Policy Research Institute. 2007.
6. “Think Tanks,” SourceWatch Encyclopedia.
7. Norman Dodd Report to the Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations, submitted May 10, 1954.
8. Left Gatekeepers.com.
9. Tax Exempt Foundations and Charitable Trusts: Their Impact on the Economy. Chairman’s Report to the Select Committee on Small Business. Wright Patman, Chairman, House of Representatives, 87th Congress. December 31, 1962.
10. The Money Manipulators by June Grem, Enterprise Publications, Inc. 1971. Chapter VIII.
11. The World Order by Eustace Mullins. 1984.
12. Blood Money by John Remington Graham. Pelican Publishing 2006, p 15-16 & 48.
13. Foundations: Their Power and Influence, by Rene Wormser. 1958, p vii.
14. Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, 1966.
15. Banking and Currency and the Money Trust Charles Lindberg Sr. 1913, Private Reprint, p 95.
16. America’s Secret Establishment by Antony Sutton, 1983.

Barack Obama’s administration and party leaders in Congress have given up without a fight on a single-payer system that could actually solve the health care crisis — and they’re allowing the measures they do claim to support to be gutted of anything that might make a difference.

Support for a radical overhaul of the health care system, with a leading role for government-run programs, has never been greater. But with health care legislation expected to take shape over the coming weeks, it seems like Democrats are giving away the store before it even opens — in the name of bipartisanship and political “realism.”

This is already a pattern with Barack Obama’s White House — promises of “change we can believe in” raise expectations, but the administration concedes to business and conservative political interests on all the important questions, and we’re left with policies that differ little, if at all, with the status quo.

History shows there’s only one way to break that pattern — a struggle from below that forces the politicians to cave to our side.

Obama promised that all sides would be represented in the debate over health care policy, but one proposal was excluded from the start — single-payer, which would eliminate for-profit private insurance companies and cover all Americans under a government system.

While the administration rolled out the red carpet for industry representatives, advocates of single-payer had to kick up a fuss just to be invited to the White House summit on health care in March.

Obama even concedes that single-payer would be the way to go “if I were starting a system from scratch” — but that it would be economically and politically untenable now. Instead, Obama’s proposal revolves around a so-called “public option” — the creation of a government-run plan that would be a competitor with private ones, giving people a choice if they didn’t like their other options and “keeping the private insurers honest,” in Obama’s words.

The problem is a public option would still leave private insurance intact, and enjoying unhindered profits from the market for employer-based health insurance, which covers the majority of Americans. Since 78 percent of people who had to file for bankruptcy in 2007 because of overwhelming health care costs started out with insurance when they got sick, it’s clear that the health care crisis isn’t just about insuring the uninsured.

Nevertheless, Obama’s “public option” will seem appealing to many people as at least a step in the right direction — and maybe even progress toward the goal of a nationalized system, since a government-run option that provides quality care without the inflated costs and lack of accountability of private insurers would certainly appeal to a lot of people.

But this is exactly why big business is working so hard to make sure any public option would be crippled from the start by restrictions and limitations — and therefore unable to succeed as an effective alternative.

Moderate Democrats and a few Republicans are floating elaborate schemes and formulas to constrain the public option — for example, splitting up control of a public plan among third-party regional administrators or, worse, all 50 states. Other proposals would require the public option to operate exactly as private insurers do — or put off its creation for years, and then only if it were “triggered” by the private system failing to meet certain (easily manipulated) criteria.

These proposals would guarantee that a public option is a failure. The only way for a public plan to bring down costs and premiums — and thereby out-compete private insurers — is if it used its leverage as a national program to bargain with drug companies and health care providers for lower costs.

Of course, the insurance industry would rather not have a public option at all. It’s mounting a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign to smear a public plan as “unfair” — as if the standard by which fairness should be judged is insurance company profit rates rather than the quality of health care for actual people.

But if the health care bosses do have to tolerate a “public option” in some form, they want it to be as hamstrung as they can make it.

Remember, the health care industry isn’t just thinking about profits drying up if a “public option” succeeds. If private insurers can keep the government from encroaching on their market, there are huge sums of money to be made off health care reform. Legislation will be designed to get health coverage for the uninsured, in one way or another. If the plan subsidizes the uninsured going into private plans, that’s upwards of 50 million new customers to extract money from over the coming years.

This ought to be the perfect moment for supporters of genuine health care reform to make their case.

For one thing, the right wing is still working off the same old discredited talking points — the myths that a government-run system would be inefficient, too expensive and prone to bureaucracy.

Anyone who’s had to battle an HMO to get approval for an operation or see a specialist or any of a million other pieces of privatized red tape will doubt these claims immediately.

But even on their terms, the lies about government health care programs are easily exposed. For example, between 1997 and 2006, health spending per person (for similar benefits) grew by 4.6 percent per year under the Medicare system, and by 7.3 percent annually under private health insurance. Medicare enrollees rank their health coverage more favorably than those in private insurance plans. And as far as bureaucracy is concerned, average administrative costs in the Medicare system are around 2 or 3 percent–compared to more than 25 percent for private insurers.

“If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program,” Republican strategist Karl Rove warned darkly from his new perch on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, “America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.”

The question that will come immediately to mind for millions of Americans is: What the hell is wrong with that?

This is an important point. The reason a single-payer system is considered “politically unrealistic” isn’t because Americans won’t support it. A January New York Times/CBS opinion poll, for example, found that 59 percent of people are in favor of government-provided national health insurance. Even the less favorable surveys show a 50-50 split.

And half the popular opposition that does exist to single-payer would disappear overnight if a political leader of the stature of Barack Obama spoke openly and honestly about what’s wrong with the for-profit system — and why a government-run system would be better.

No, the reason single-payer is dismissed as a “pipe dream” is that Corporate America wants it that way — and it has the power over Republicans, Democrats and the media establishment to make sure that this has become the conventional wisdom.

But the real pipe dream is the idea that some form of a public option — inevitably compromised and constrained by members of Congress counting votes, and by an administration that doesn’t want to alienate business interests — will solve health care crisis.

It won’t — and under the proposals floating around Congress right now, it will make things worse.

So the question that needs to be asked of those who promote Obama’s public option proposal as a “realistic” alternative to single-payer is: Why should we be for something we don’t want? Shouldn’t we instead speak up for what we do want?

That’s not to say that a single-payer victory is around the corner. Health care is big business — worth $2.4 trillion a year in the U.S. economy and about 18 percent of gross domestic product. The wealthy corporations that profit from the system won’t be giving that up without a fight.

But by the same token, our side won’t win any reforms worth having by accepting the limitations of what’s “realistic” — because that means accepting what the industry is willing to give up.

We also won’t win anything without a struggle. In the absence of pressure from below, the politicians are certain to concede to the pressure of corporate interests from above.

Right now, a small but important core of activists — health care workers chief among them — are continuing the fight for single-payer. This core needs the support of the labor movement and other organizations of working people to grow stronger.

There aren’t any short cuts. The struggle for single-payer has to start where it finds itself, develop new ways to connect with the widespread sentiment for fundamental change — and keep building a voice that will be heard in the current debate, and in the years to come.

The CBO scored the Kennedy-Dodd proposal, the most robust of the reform proposals actually being considered, and the bottom line is that it will leave 36 million without coverage a decade from now. That is not what the Democrats and Obama have been promising. It is nowhere near universal coverage.

According to the CBO, “Once the proposal was fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million.”

And, the Obama administration has sent word to Democrats to stop using the phrase “universal coverage.” Lynn Sweet reports in the Chicago Sun-Times:

In discussing a ‘public option,’ Obama’s message team is telling Democrats on Capitol Hill to avoid using the phrase ‘universal coverage’ because that phrase is often associated with a single-payer system, which is often associated with ‘socialism,’ which the Obama administration does not support. The Obama team-approved language is instead to talk about ‘guaranteed health care,’ a phrase that is less polarizing.

Guaranteed health care is just another empty marketing phrase by the eloquent, teleprompter wordsmiths in the Obama administration. Despite the new rhetoric there is no guarantee of health care in any of the proposals being considered.

The “universal coverage” phrase was always used by Democrats who opposed single payer as a phrase to confuse the voters. Universal coverage sure sounds like it achieves the goal of single payer — providing health care for all. But, it was always merely a marketing tool. Now that the Democrats and Obama have kept single payer boxed up and removed from consideration they can abandon this PR phrase for fear of looking too “socialist.”

As to cost, the CBO reports $10 trillion in new expenses over ten years. Yes, some will get lower premiums, but that is just a shifting of costs from premiums to taxes. We will still be paying for wasteful and over-priced health care — still paying more per person than any country in the world — just out of a different pocket.

The failure to confront the waste of the multi-payer, profit-oriented insurance-based system ensures that costs will not be controlled. Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times that, “The entire discussion has to be centered on controlling or reducing costs.” In fact, if the real goal were to reduce costs, single payer would have been the model they used.

But, the goal is not to control costs; it is to preserve the profits of their donors. Health professionals gave Obama $11,532,962 and the insurance industry donors gave the Obama campaign $2,211,348. The Obama administration’s approach puts their interests ahead of the necessities of the American people and of the American economy.

In his speech to the AMA Obama made the point crisply, “If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less and going broke.” But, the Democratic proposals do not really try to fix the broken system; they just pour more tax dollars into it.

Obama’s concern is borne out by the CBO. In discussing the need to confront health care they point out: “The federal budget is on an unsustainable path, primarily because of the rising cost of health care.” Shifting these costs from premiums to taxes does nothing to change this reality. In fact it is likely to make federal budget deficits worse.

More than 80 members of the House of Representatives have co-sponsored a bill, HR 676, which would provide coverage to all Americans — a real guarantee of health care, not teleprompter rhetoric — and that would really control costs.

Will Obama ever have the political courage to actually fight for what he knows is the answer? State senator Obama, circa 2003, said, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” (applause) “And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Well, the public has given the Democrats all three but Obama and the Democratic leadership have refused to even consider single payer. Instead they fight for the interests of the insurance industry and falsely call it health care reform. Mr. President, please show some political leadership — stand up for what you know is right.

This was never more evident than last November, when Barack Obama, running as the candidate of change against a widely unpopular Republican-led administration, scored a sound and groundbreaking win.

The victory wasn’t Obama’s alone. For the first time in 15 years — and for only the second time since the 1970s — the majority of the electorate gave the Democrats full control over Washington, from the White House to the Congress.

But fewer than six months into the new administration, we’re finding out just what kind of “change” that Obama and the Democrats have in mind.

As usually happens in the U.S.’s corporate-controlled political system, the atmospherics of “change” belie a reality in which there is a lot more continuity between administrations than the election rhetoric — and what people thought they were voting for — predicted.

Take the related issues of Obama’s announced intention to close the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and his repudiation of Bush-era policies of torture. On these issues, the media whipped themselves into a frenzy when former vice president and torture defender Dick Cheney and Obama staged dueling May 22 speeches intended to justify their respective views on these issues.

One could ask why someone as thoroughly discredited and unpopular as Cheney receives a hearing at all. And yet after all the hot air dissipated, we were left with the result that Obama had accepted many Bush policies — military tribunals to try detainees and indefinite detention based on presidential fiat, among them — as his own.

Coupled with his double-speak on torture — Obama repudiated the Bush policies as illegal, but wouldn’t actually prosecute anyone who executed them — you have the makings of a presidential betrayal.

In fact, it’s not out of the question to ask if a more full-fledged capitulation to Bush-Cheney is in the offing — as in the Obama administration deciding to keep Guantánamo open. Democrats in both houses of Congress already made that possibility more likely by voting in overwhelming numbers to deny funding for closing the camp.

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, attended a meeting with Obama and major human rights groups held prior to Obama’s Guantánamo speech.

He wasn’t satisfied, telling reporters: “The president was very open to hearing CCR’s concerns on a range of Guantánamo policy issues, but I came out of the meeting deeply disappointed in the direction the administration is taking, and I don’t see meaningful differences between these detention policies and those erected by President Bush.”

On the issue of climate change, congressional Democrats are in the initial stages of passing a “cap and trade” bill that would cap carbon-based emissions and allow corporate polluters who exceed that limit to buy government-backed credits to cover the gap.

In theory, this “free market” solution — forcing business to buy credits to pollute–would give businesses the incentive to lower their emissions. As Budget Director Peter Orzag told Congress in March: “If you didn’t auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States.”

Yet as the Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel pointed out in an analysis of the bills passing through liberal House Rep. Henry Waxman’s committee, 85 percent of the energy credits would be given away to business through 2026. The remaining 15 percent up for auction are those that are meant to fund programs to help low-income people pay their energy bills!

Nevertheless, even though the cap in trade legislation is shaping up to be a massive corporate welfare program, Obama hailed the bill as a “historic leap.”

When we turn to foreign policy, we find an even bigger shift taking place. Here, Obama made no secret of his desire to break with the Bush administration’s obsession with the war in Iraq and its “neglect” of Afghanistan. And the administration appears largely to be following through on its promises.

The problem is that the promises embody a policy of “rebooting” the imperial project that, if it has any chance of succeeding, will plunge the U.S. into a multi-year commitment in Southwest Asia that may end up being an even bigger disaster than the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As one ticks off this list of Obama administration policies, it would be easy to make the case that last November’s election didn’t really change anything. But that would be the wrong conclusion.

There’s little doubt that we are living through a different political era than what we’ve known for much of the last 30 years. Most opinion polls place support for the Republican Party — still identified as the main representative of American conservatism — at somewhere near Watergate-era levels.

And a widely reported April poll by the respected but right-leaning research firm Rasmussen Reports found that only a bare majority of Americans said they supported “capitalism” over “socialism.” One out of three Americans under age 30 said they preferred a socialist system, according to Rasmussen.

A Pew Center for People and Press comparison of political attitudes in 1987 and today shows that Americans are much less conservative on social issues, and far less religious, than they were two decades ago.

This sea change at the level of ideas indicates that most Americans are interested in a break from the past. If the U.S. government enacted a bold new health care reform or a commitment to help homeowners or job seekers, it is likely to find much more public support than conservative, moderate (or even many liberal) politicians are willing to grant. Yet those politicians will not grant reforms on their own. Only a powerful movement from below can force them to.

Unfortunately, those movements have not yet developed. And until they do, popular aspirations will continue to be frustrated by backroom deals between corporate lobbyists, the Obama administration and members of Congress. Moreover, if our side allows its “friends” in the administration and Congress to define the limits of what’s possible, we will always come up short.

The likely defeat of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a measure that would make it easier to organize unions if a majority of workers in a workplace signs cards in favor, is a testament to this. As the Los Angeles Times’ Tom Hamburger reported May 19, despite the key role that labor union mobilization for Obama played in his election:

Once [Obama] was elected, labor leaders made a fateful decision. Originally, they had planned to keep in place their extensive network of field organizers, who had just worked to elect Democratic candidates, and ask them to build pressure on lawmakers to vote for card check.

Instead, they changed course. The labor groups scaled back, partly to give Obama time to get his bearings amid the deepening economic crisis. Business groups, meanwhile, had started work well before the election and did not stop.

The result of this decision is the likely defeat of EFCA without its even coming to a vote in Congress.

The vicious corporate assault on EFCA — and Democrats’ fleeing from support for it — should give us a taste of the type of opposition that we’re up against. And it should tell us that for whatever reform we want–from health care for all, to an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq–a different approach is essential.

What’s needed isn’t a better lobbying strategy or flashier media, but a broad, independent and militant movement that won’t be placated with empty rhetoric or allow its demands to be ignored.

In such cases one must look beyond the intellect and examine the emotional appeal. We all know the world is in big trouble — Three Great Problems: universal, incessant violence; financial crisis provoking economic suffering; environmental degradation. In all three areas the United States bears more culpability than any other single country. Who better to satisfy humankind’s craving for relief than a new American president who, it appears, understands the problems; admits, to one degree or another, his country’s responsibility for them; and “eloquently” expresses his desire and determination to change US policies and embolden the rest of the world to follow his inspiring example. Is it any wonder that it’s 1964, the Beatles have just arrived in New York, and everyone is a teenage girl?

I could go through the talk Obama gave in Cairo and point out line by line the hypocrisies, the mere platitudes, the plain nonsense, and the rest. (”I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.” — No mention of it being outsourced, probably to the very country he was speaking in, amongst others. . . . “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.” — But this is precisely what the United States is trying to do concerning Iran and North Korea.) But since others have been pointing out these lies very well I’d like to try something else in dealing with the problem — the problem of well-educated people, as well as the not so well-educated, being so moved by a career politician saying “all the right things” to give food for hope to billions starving for it, and swallowing it all as if they had been born yesterday. I’d like to take them back to another charismatic figure, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German people two years and four months after becoming Chancellor, addressing a Germany still reeling with humiliation from its being The Defeated Nation in the World War, with huge losses of its young men, still being punished by the world for its militarism, suffering mass unemployment and other effects of the great depression. Here are excerpts from the speech of May 21, 1935. Imagine how it fed the hungry German people.

I conceive it my duty to be perfectly frank and open in addressing the nation. I frequently hear from Anglo-Saxon tribes expressions of regret that Germany has departed from those principles of democracy, which in those countries are held particularly sacred. This opinion is entirely erroneous. Germany, too, has a democratic Constitution.

Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war. None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people.

The World War should be a cry of warning here. Not for a second time can Europe survive such a catastrophe.

Germany has solemnly guaranteed France her present frontiers, resigning herself to the permanent loss of Alsace-Lorraine. She has made a treaty with Poland and we hope it will be renewed and renewed again at every expiry of the set period.

The German Reich, especially the present German Government, has no other wish except to live on terms of peace and friendship with all the neighboring States.

Germany has nothing to gain from a European war. What we want is liberty and independence. Because of these intentions of ours we are ready to negotiate non-aggression pacts with our neighbor States.

Germany has neither the wish nor the intention to mix in internal Austrian affairs, or to annex or to unite with Austria.

The German Government is ready in principle to conclude non-aggression pacts with its individual neighbor States and to supplement those provisions which aim at isolating belligerents and localizing war areas.

In limiting German air armament to parity with individual other great nations of the west, it makes possible that at any time the upper figure may be limited, which limit Germany will then take as a binding obligation to keep within.

Germany is ready to participate actively in any efforts for drastic limitation of unrestricted arming. She sees the only possible way in a return to the principles of the old Geneva Red Cross convention. She believes, to begin with, only in the possibility of the gradual abolition and outlawing of fighting methods which are contrary to this convention, such as dum-dum bullets and other missiles which are a deadly menace to civilian women and children.

To abolish fighting places, but to leave the question of bombardment open, seems to us wrong and ineffective. But we believe it is possible to ban certain arms as contrary to international law and to outlaw those who use them. But this, too, can only be done gradually. Therefore, gas and incendiary and explosive bombs outside of the battle area can be banned and the ban extended later to all bombing. As long as bombing is free, a limitation of bombing planes is a doubtful proposition. But as soon as bombing is branded as barbarism, the building of bombing planes will automatically cease.

Just as the Red Cross stopped the killing of wounded and prisoners, it should be possible to stop the bombing of civilians. In the adoption of such principles, Germany sees a better means of pacification and security for peoples than in all the assistance pacts and military conventions.

The German Government is ready to agree to every limitation leading to abandonment of the heaviest weapons which are especially suitable for aggression. These comprise, first, the heaviest artillery and heaviest tanks.

Germany declares herself ready to agree to the delimitation of caliber of artillery and guns on dreadnoughts, cruisers and torpedo boats. Similarly, the German Government is ready to adopt any limitation on naval tonnage, and finally to agree to the limitation of tonnage of submarines or even to their abolition, provided other countries do likewise.

The German Government is of the opinion that all attempts effectively to lessen tension between individual States through international agreements or agreements between several States are doomed to failure unless suitable measures are taken to prevent poisoning of public opinion on the part of irresponsible individuals in speech, writing, in the film and the theatre. The German Government is ready any time to agree to an international agreement which will effectively prevent and make impossible all attempts to interfere from the outside in affairs of other States. The term ‘interference’ should be internationally defined.

If people wish for peace it must be possible for governments to maintain it. We believe the restoration of the German defense force will contribute to this peace because of the simple fact that its existence removes a dangerous vacuum in Europe. We believe if the peoples of the world could agree to destroy all their gas and inflammable and explosive bombs this would be cheaper than using them to destroy one another. In saying this I am not speaking any longer as the representative of a defenseless State which could reap only advantages and no obligations from such action from others.

I cannot better conclude my speech to you, my fellow-figures and trustees of the nation, than by repeating our confession of faith in peace: Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos. We, however, live in the firm conviction our times will see not the decline but the renaissance of the West. It is our proud hope and our unshakable belief Germany can make an imperishable contribution to this great work.

How many people in the world, including numerous highly educated Germans, reading or hearing that speech in 1935, doubted that Adolf Hitler was a sincere man of peace and an inspiring, visionary leader?

The answer lies in a deeper corruption, which tales of tax evasion and phantom mortgages touch upon but also conceal. Since Margaret Thatcher, British parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business state, each with almost identical social, economic and foreign policies. This “project” was completed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, inspired by the political monoculture of the United States. That so many Labour and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally crooked is no more than a metaphor for the anti-democratic system they have forged together.

Their accomplices have been those journalists who report Parliament as “lobby correspondents” and their editors, who have “played the game” willfully, and have deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment on personalities and their specious crises, have reduced the “national conversation” to a series of media events, in which the withdrawal of popular consent — as the historically low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated — has been abused as apathy.

Having fixed the boundaries of political debate and possibility, self-important paladins, notably liberals, promoted the naked emperor Blair and championed his “values” that would allow “the mind [to] range in search of a better Britain”. And when the bloodstains showed, they ran for cover. All of it had been, as Larry David once described an erstwhile crony, “a babbling brook of bullshit.”

How contrite their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on “media training”, called on MPs to “rebuild cross-party trust”. The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago — cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a “revolt” among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new female MPs, who had been elected “to end male-dominated, Conservative policies”, spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.

The same was true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party Establishment and the political media rallied. Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told BBC viewers that Blair had “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.” When Blair’s army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.

As for the “celebrating” Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall’s own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation — they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.

Such venality goes far beyond the greed of the uppity Hazel Blears.

“Normalizing the unthinkable,” Edward Herman’s phrase from his essay “The Banality of Evil,” about the division of labor in state crime, is applicable here. On 18 May, the Guardian devoted the top of one page to a report headlined, “Blair awarded $1m prize for international relations work”. This prize, announced in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, was for his “cultural and social impact on the world”. You looked in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the truth. Instead, there was his “optimism about the chance of bringing peace” and his work “designed to forge peace”.

This was the same Blair who committed the same crime — deliberately planning the invasion of a country, “the supreme international crime” — for which the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg after proof of his guilt was located in German cabinet documents. Last February, Britain’s “Justice” Secretary, Jack Straw, blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes from March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered their release. For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalized and celebrated.

“How our corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists,” said the cover of last week’s New Statesman. But is not their support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the government’s collusion with torture?

It is as if our public language has finally become Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to combat democratic dissent they call “extremism”. Their de facto partners are “security” journalists, a recent breed of state or “lobby” propagandist. On 9 April, the BBC’s Newsnight program promoted the guilt of 12 “terrorists” arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the Prime Minister himself. All were later released without charge.

Something is changing in Britain that gives cause for optimism. The British people have probably never been more politically aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullshit.

On a collective basis, we as a nation are living through such a time. At present, we are witnessing the descending spiral of Icarusian Capitalism; our sacred delusion of the perpetual ascendancy of a god-like market place lies broken in the dust. Malls and McMansions stand abandoned, desolate as the edifices of forgotten gods, as the come-ons of the salesmen of deregulated capitalism are churned to spittle amid a cacophony of collapsing market platitudes.

And not an uptick in public optimism, nor a surge of euphoria on Wall Street, nor the “invisible hand of the marketplace” sprinkling pixie dust will bring back the Olympian days of 2005, when the wise men of Washington and Wall Street knew the force of gravity was just a myth believed in by those embittered prophets of doom whose only joy in life is fantasizing the fall of their wealthy betters. It does not matter a damn how many dollars our present day believers of neoliberal tall tales, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, pour into the hole in the ground where the crash occurred, a bean stalk, twining skyward towards a golden, debt-negating goose, will not flower forth.

Fortunately, when false convictions fall, it is possible for a leveling of sanity to prevail. But there can be no more hubristic flights borne on waxen wings. No more multibillion dollar confidence scams from Wall Street. No more smash and grab imperial wars. No more tea parties for the dim and deranged. There is the banality of evil, and then there is the evil of banality. Both, the present era has produced in abundance. From about the late nineteen-seventies to the present, The United States all but ceased manufacturing products and went into the business of manufacturing marketplace hype, baseless fears, and illusionary enemies. Due to this economic and cultural derangement, a dark tower of self-imprisoning delusions has circumscribed our nation’s fate. Is it any wonder the quintessential dark lord of the darkest tower, Dick Cheney, will not exit the scene?

And what will foster real change? Not pleasing sound bites and rousing oratory from President Obama, then a continuance of many of the pernicious policies of his criminal predecessors. Conversely, the iron gates of Hell must crash closed behind us. The absence of light must grow so unbearable to us that we’re willing to ask how is it we arrived in this place and become willing to challenge our most cherished concepts about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. That is the sort of “indefinite detention” the nation could use. What is needed is the audacity of hopelessness.

President Obama and the Democratic Congress could have ridden a wave of public discontent towards meaningful reform, but instead they have hugged the shore. And they seem to be surveying the property, scouting locations to build beach house retreats for their elitist benefactors and the militarist fantasists whose tsunami-sized arrogance wrought the present destruction in the first place.

Meanwhile, right-wing radio haters, like penned dogs, bark into the empty air of their meaningless day. Daily, we negotiate our way through the encompassing banalities and casual brutalities of soft oligarchy, as beneath it all churns the nebulous rage of the powerless that creates an audience for the likes of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

It is high season for those virtuosos of displaced anger, because not only the nation’s treasure, but its élan vital, has been squandered inflating the bubble-borne vanities of the ultra-wealthy up to the point of economic immolation. The elite have perpetrated an act of catastrophic clownishness so massive that it has left the rest of us stunned, and left to pick amid the debris of our exploded hopes. Bur hopes do not die pretty. Once dead, they do not rise like the redeemer gods of myth; instead, they stagger about, rotting and snarling like B-movie mummies. They leave us with our mouths tasting of ash. Our hearts choked by dry thistle.

Yet the buffoons of Wall Street and the killer clowns of our militarized Disneyland strut and swagger past the smoking ruins they left behind after their high-end looting spree. In their plundering, the only thing they didn’t steal for themselves was any sense of self-awareness. Or is self-awareness necessary when you’re obscenely rewarded for your narcissistic follies? What motivation would a high-chair tyrant have to modify his self-centeredness when he is shielded from the consequences of his bratty machinations? Why become an honest actor in the realm of human events when one can strut through life with a con artist’s inexplicable sense of entitlement?

And what about the rest of us? The financial elite, by means of their bagman in the Executive Branch and Congress, continue to plunder our hopes for a meaningful future byway of that legal larceny popularly known as the bailout, i.e., the latest transfer of wealth from the bottom upward. This is why the buffoonish tea-bagger types hoard their resentments. All they’ve been left with is a heap of fragmented hatreds. Those toxic baubles they shore against reality.

Tragically, when not addressed, fear and resentment will increase in intensity and can become an exponentially growing feedback loop of paranoid rage. At present, such a process has created that haunted forest of the airwaves known as right-wing talk radio. It is the voice of anger feeding off of itself, and it seems dangerously close to reaching the point of hypertrophic breakdown. It is the audio analog of a belief system in exponential decay . . . The more the rot increases in the system the more Glen Beck babbles and weeps. It is physically manifested in the cataclysmic ecosystem of Rush Limbaugh’s repulsive bulk . . . his corpulent carcass is the morbid bloat of unregulated capitalism.

Right-wing hatred is a many headed hydra that feeds on fear and desperation. It cannot be fought by attacking its spindling heads, each of its hissing mouths dripping with black poison. Instead, one must make thrusts at the noxious heart of the raging beast. But one cannot know where the heart of an external monster beats without suffering the agonies of one’s own. Accordingly, one must allow one’s heart to be broken. And don’t look to Barack Obama’s bland charm to mend it. Because the honest grief of the heart provides a point of reference, a foundation of knowledge, as to why the monster is inconsolable in its wounded fury; hence, this provides a strategic starting point as to how to fight it.

And that is why we must release the photographs of torture. Moreover, we must bring public ignominy upon the respectable psychopaths in high places who mandated these policies, plus bring a leveling of shame upon the high-flying, highchair tyrants of high finance who exploded the global economy. Our ugliness must be public like a frog. The nasty secrets must be revealed; the mortifying pictures gazed upon. Our stomachs should seize up in revulsion. The ordeal must exact such a degree of revulsion within us that we will never again allow these despicable practices to transpire on our watch.

There is a stench of putrefaction rising from beneath our feet. We must uncover the corpses laid under by empire. Being placated by Barrack Obama’s bland charm — in the same manner we were cowed by George W. Bush’s infantile petulance, amused by Bill Clinton’s brilliant, bad boy seductions, and drugged by Ronald Reagan’s stupefying 1940’s Hollywood bromides — will only defer the reckoning and render us ignorant stooges in the impersonal sweep of history. As a people, we have a choice: We can be strengthened by embracing uncomfortable truths, or we can grow enervated and enfeebled by pushing them away.

But sadly, Obama is attempting the tried and tested political trick — used effectively by Washington hacks from Watergate (”Our long national nightmare is over”) to Iran-Contra (”We cannot have another failed presidency”) — of inducing the uniquely American trait of Instant Amnesia that has, in the past, allowed the empire to stagger on, repeatedly committing variations of the same crimes, then coddling and protecting the same variety of corrupt elitists responsible, and thereby, reducing the Constitution to tatters and rendering the rule of law rubble.

But this time, the rot is too deep, the pathology too systemic. Obama’s placebo presidency will not stem the hypertrophic decay. Granted, it was good to evict the previous, psychotic tenants from the property (Although Dick Cheney seems to be stalking the place with his obsessive, media drive-bys.) but that does nothing to repair the collapsing foundation of the structure, its core eaten away by an infestation of anti-democratic termites. Rather than addressing the core issue, the deterioration of the rights and liberties granted by the U.S. Constitution, President Obama is wallpapering over the rot wrought by the national security state’s termite hive mind of authoritarian appetites, that has been, silently, and hidden by darkness, gnawing the house of state to sawdust.

Again our choice: Either open up the decay within the system to the light of day and start the process of rebuilding and renewal, or allow the republic-ravening pestilence to continue unchallenged, hence unabated, and let the nation go bughouse crazy as the house comes down around us to the strains of the insect-brain stridulations of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill… we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

– Plato

During the campaign, amid their state of elation, many disregarded Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama’s past record and took any criticism of these past actions as partisan attacks deserving equally partisan counterattacks. Some continued their reluctant support after candidate Obama became grand finalist and prayed for the best. And a few still continue their rationalizing and defense, with illogical excuses such as ‘He’s been in office for only 20 days, give the man a break!’ and ‘He’s had only 50 days in office, give him a chance!’ and currently, ‘be reasonable — how much can a man do in 120 days?!’ I am going to give this logic, or lack of, a slight spicing of reason, then, turn it around, and present it as: If ‘the man’ can do this much astounding damage, whether to our civil liberties, or to our notion of democracy, or to government integrity, in ‘only’ 120 days, may God help us with the next [(4 X 365) - 120] days.

I know there are those who have been tackling President Obama’s changes on change; they have been challenging his flipping, or rather flopping, on issues central to getting him elected. While some have been covering the changes comprehensively, others have been running right and left like headless chickens in the field — pick one hypocrisy, scream a bit, then move on to the next outrageous flop, the same, and then to the next, basically, looking and treating this entire mosaic one piece at a time.

Despite all the promises Mr. Obama made during his campaign, especially on those issues that were absolutely central to those whose support he garnered, so far the President of Change has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. Not only that, his administration has made it clear that they intend to continue this trend. Some call it a major betrayal. Can we go so far as to call it a ‘swindling of the voters’?

On the State Secrets Privilege

Yes, I am going to begin with the issue of State Secrets Privilege; because I was the first recipient of this ‘privilege’ during the now gone Administration; because long before it became ‘a popular’ topic among the ‘progressive experts,’ during the time when these same experts avoided writing or speaking about it; when many constitutional attorneys had no idea we even had this “law” — similar to and based on the British ‘Official Secret Act; when many journalists did not dare to question this draconian abuse of Executive Power; I was out there, writing, speaking, making the rounds in Congress, and fighting this ‘privilege’ in the courts. And because in 2004 I stood up in front of the Federal Court building in DC, turned to less than a handful of reporters, and said, ‘This, my case, is setting a precedent, and you are letting this happen by your fear-induced censorship. Now that they have gotten away with this, now that you have let them get away, we’ll be seeing this ‘privilege’ invoked in case after case involving government criminal deeds in need of cover up.’ Unfortunately I was proven right.

So far The Obama administration has invoked the state secrets privilege in three cases in the first 100 days: Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v. NSA.

In defending the NSA illegal wiretapping, the Obama administration maintained that the State Secrets Privilege, the same draconian executive privilege used and abused voraciously by the previous administration, required the dismissal of the case in courts.

Not only has the new administration continued the practice of invoking SSP to shield government wrongdoing, it has expanded its abuses much further. In the Al Haramain case, Obama’s Justice Department has threatened to have the FBI or federal marshals break into a judge’s office and remove evidence already turned over in the case, according to the plaintiffs attorney. Even Bush didn’t go this far so brazenly. In a well-written disgust provoking piece Jon Eisenberg, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, poses the question: “The president’s lawyers continue to block access to information that could expose warrantless wiretapping. Is this change we can believe in?”

This is the same President, the same well-spoken showman, who went on record in 2007, during the campaign shenanigans, and said the following: “When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution.”

Yes, this is the same President who had frowned upon and criticized the abuses and misuse of the State Secrets Privilege.

On NSA Warrantless Wiretapping

The new Administration has pledged to defend the Telecommunications Industry by giving them immunity against any lawsuit that may involve their participation in the illegal NSA wiretapping program. In 2007, Obama’s office released the following position of then Senator Obama: “Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies … Senator Obama will not be among those voting to end the filibuster.” But then Senator Obama made his 180 degree flip, and voted to end the filibuster. After that, along with other colleagues in Congress, he tried to placate the critics of his move by falsely assuring them that the immunity did not extend to the Bush Administration — the Executive Branch who did break the law. Another flip was yet to come, awaiting his presidency, when Obama’s Justice Department defended its predecessor not only by using the State Secrets Privilege, but taking it even further, by astoundingly granting the Executive Branch an unlimited immunity for any kind of ‘illegal’ government surveillance.

Let me emphasize, the Obama Administration’s action in this regard was not about ‘being trapped’ in situations created and put in place by the previous administration. These were willful acts fully reviewed, decided upon, and then implemented by the new president and his Justice Department.

Accountability on Torture

President Obama’s action and inaction on Torture can be summarized very clearly as follows: First give an absolute pass, under the guise of ‘looking forward not backward,’ to the ultimate culprits who had ordered it. Next, absolve all the implementers, practitioners and related agencies, under the excuse of ‘complying with orders without questioning,’ and then start giving the ‘drafters’ of the memos an out by transferring the decision for action to the states.

After granting the ‘untouchable’ status to all involved in this shameful chapter in our nation’s dangerous downward slide, he now refuses to release the photos, the incriminating evidence, and is doing so by using the exact same justification used repeatedly by his predecessors: ‘Their release would endanger the troops,’ as in ‘the revelation on NSA would endanger our national security’ and ‘stronger whistleblower laws would endanger our intelligence agencies’ and so on and so forth.

Not only that, he goes even further to shove his secrecy promotion down other nations’ courts throat. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and a legal resident in Britain who was held and tortured in Guantanamo from 2004 to 2009, and filed lawsuits in the British courts to have the evidence of his torture released, Mr. Obama’s position has been to threaten the British Government in order to conceal all facts and related evidence. This case involves the brutal torture and so very ‘extraordinary’ rendition practices of the previous administration, the same practices that ‘in words’ were strongly condemned by the President during his candidacy.

Today he and his administration unapologetically maintain the same Bush Administration position on extraordinary rendition, torture, and related secrecy to cover up. Here is Ben Wizner’s, the attorney who argued the case for the ACLU, response “We are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has chosen to continue the Bush administration’s practice of dodging judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture. This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course.” Yes indeed, President Obama has chosen to protect and support the course involving torture, rendition and the abuse of secrecy to cover them all up.

The Revival of Bush Era Military Commission

After all the talk and pretty speeches given during his presidential campaign on the ‘failure’ of Bush era military tribunals of Guantanamo inmates, Mr. Obama has decided to revive the same style military commission, albeit with a little cosmetic tweak here and there to re-brand it as his own. Many former supporters of Mr. Obama who’ve been vocal and active on Human Rights fronts have expressed their ‘total shock’ by this move and its pretense of being different and improved, “As a constitutional lawyer, Obama must know that he can put lipstick on this pig — but it will always be a pig,” said Zachary Katznelson, legal director of Reprieve.

Thankfully the ‘on the record’ statements of Candidate Obama in 2008 on this issue, contradicting his action today, are accessible to all:

“It’s time to better protect the American people and our values by bringing swift and sure justice to terrorists through our courts and our Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

Suspect terrorists (emphasis on ‘suspect’) cannot have just trials consistent/in line with our ‘courts and Uniform Code of Military Justice’ via military commissions. It’s almost an oxymoron! And if you add to that the other Obama-approved ingredients such as secrecy, rendition, and evidence obtained under torture, what have we got? Anything resembling our courts and Uniform Code of Military Justice system?

On War and Bodies Piling Up

Here is the first paragraph in a New York Times report on May 15, 2009:

“The number of civilians killed by the American air strikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan.”

The report also includes the disagreement over the exact number of ‘Civilian Casualties’ in Afghanistan by our military airstrike:

“Government officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the villagers of 147 dead civilians. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue their own count.”

Does it really matter — the difference between 147 and 117 or just 100 when it comes to children, grandmothers…innocent lives lost in a war with no well-defined objectives or plans? If for some it indeed does matter, then here is a more specific and detailed report:

“A copy of the government’s list of the names, ages and father’s names of each of the 140 dead was obtained by Reuters earlier this week. It shows that 93 of those killed were children — the youngest eight days old — and only 22 were adult males.”

Maybe releasing the photographs of the nameless unrepresented victims of these airstrikes should be as important as those of torture. Because, from what I see, they and their loss of lives have been reduced to some petty number to fight about.

When I was around twelve years old, in Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war, my father, a surgeon in charge of a hospital specializing in burns and reconstructive surgery, decided to take me to the hospital to teach me an unforgettable lesson on war. I think one of the factors that prompted him was my new obsession with classic war movies; you know, ones like The Great Escape. Anyhow, he took my hand and we entered a ‘transition ICU Unit.’ In that room, on a standard size hospital bunk bed, laid an infant of eight or nine months of age, or what was remaining of her. Over eighty percent of her body was burned; to a degree that the skin had melted and absorbed the melting clothing on top — impossible to remove without removing the skin with it. Instead of a nose two holes were drilled in the middle of her face with tubes inserted allowing breathing, the upper eyelids were melted and glued to the lower ones, and … I am not going to go further — I believe you get the picture.

This baby was the victim of an air strike, a bombing that killed her entire family and leveled her modest home to the ground. My father pointed at this heartbreaking baby and said, “Sibel, this is war. This is the real face of war. This is the result of war. Do you think anything can justify this? I want to replace the glamorous exciting phony images of those war movies in your head. I want you to remember this for the rest of your life and stand against this kind of destruction…”

And I do. This is why I am offended by those petty numbers when it comes to civilian deaths. This is the reason I believe some may need pictures of these atrocities as much as those of torture to replace those ‘Shock & Awe’ footages fed to them by our MSM.

All this death and destruction is carried out while the administration’s Afghan policy is still murky and confused, and its strategy ambiguous. Sure, our so-called ‘New’ Afghan Strategy includes more troops and asks for a much larger budget allocation; nothing new there. It is another war with no time table. It is the continuation of the same abstract ‘War on Terror’ without any definition of what would constitute an ‘accomplished mission.’ One minute there is pondering on possible ‘reconciliation’ with the Taliban, and the next minute seeking to topple it. In fact, to confuse the matter even further, we now hear this distinction between ‘Good Taliban, Bad Taliban, and the Plain Ugly Taliban.’ As stated by Karzai on Meet the Press on May 10, 2009, not all Taliban are equal!!

I can go on listing cases of Mr. Obama’s change on change. Whether it is his reversal on protection for whistleblowers, despite his campaign promise to the contrary, or his expansion of the Un-American title of ‘Czardom,’ where we now have more czars than ever: Border Czar, Energy Czar, Cyber Security Czar … Car Czar … maybe even a Bicycle Czar!. Or … But for now I’ll stick with the major promises that were ‘Central’ to him getting elected, all of which he has flipped on in less than 150 days in office, a track record indeed.

What I want the readers to do is to read the extremely important cases above, step back in time to those un-ending campaign trail days, and answer the following questions:

How would Senator McCain have acted on these same issues if he had been elected? How would Senator Hilary Clinton? Do you believe there would have been any major differences? Weren’t their records almost identical to Senator Obama’s on these issues? If you are like me, and answer ‘same,’ ‘same,’ ‘no,’ and ‘yes,’ then, why do you think we ended up with these exact same candidates, those deemed ‘viable’ and sold to us as such?

With too much at stake, too many unfinished agendas for the course of our nation, and too many skeletons in the closet in need of hiding for self-preservation, the ‘permanent establishment’ made certain that they took no risk by giving the public, via their MSM tentacles, a coin that no matter how many times flipped would come up the same — Heads, Heads.

I don’t want to say “I told you so”. But the fact is that many people, including Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez, his former VP running mate, exposed Obama’s voting record and political stances long before the 2008 election.

Gonzalez sent out a long memo which I myself distributed to all my lists but apparently few paid attention to Obama’s actual voting record: in favor of the death penalty; support for most Iraq authorization bills; favors for Exelon, Illinois’ nuclear industry, support for “clean coal”, opposition to class action lawsuits and to limits on credit card interest rates, and (hold your breath), active support for neo-con U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama praised as his mentor.

So none of what Obama is now doing (or not doing) comes as a surprise. My reaction and that of many independents and greens was a big DUH. Or, what is it about a centrist capitalist that you don’t understand?

Some progressives moan that Obama has reneged on his promises. But in fact he never made these promises. All his statements, with possibly a few exceptions, made it quite clear that he was in lock step with traditional centrist Democratic Party capitalist beliefs and ideologies. Now, when these facts have become clear, too many people are too ready to believe that he changed his mind rather than admit that they were fooled.

Why were they fooled? The answer is obvious. Because he is African-American. Millions of people voted for him because of this alone, thinking that the color of one’s skin and one’s experience as a minority come hand in glove with progressive or radical thought. This is in its own way a converse variant of racism: thinking that one’s skin color is somehow linked on its chromosome with progressive principles.

These people forget that he comes out of the Ivy League, Harvard Law School, and the eerily prescient Democratic Party machine in Chicago, which has carefully groomed him as The Great Black Hope. They really put their money on the right number.

More people voted for Obama because he was African-American than voted against him because of that. Ponder that fact. Ponder the fact that even now, many blacks and liberals are bending over backwards to cut him slack, even after he brought with him the worst most regressive white collar criminals into his private abode and put them in charge of our economic future: slime buckets like Larry Summers, and, overlooking possible “minor” crimes, Eric Holder. The list goes on and on.

And then there were the Wall St./bank bailouts, done without setting the most minimal conditions on this huge payout, and without demanding anything in return. The Democrats railroaded this through for their friends in finance and banking. The Republicans, whose regressive agenda we fully recognize and which in fact called their sincerity into question on this issue, opposed it.

They were right to do so, though for the wrong reasons (although the far right and conservatives had the right reason: keep government from getting its hands into the pants of private business even if it means bankruptcy for businesses and banks). At the very least Obama could have laid down one condition: support universal single payer health care and you will get your bailout. He didn’t. That isn’t what I call a shrewd businessman.

My point is that Obama didn’t change direction or positions. He stayed firm in his commitment to capitalism, corporatism, and Wall St., so firm that he wasn’t going to demand anything in return for rescuing the financial community. I call that not stupid but an intentional betrayal of all those progressives who voted for him blindly, thinking that his election meant a new era.

But lots of people didn’t fall slavishly at the feet of this idol; they saw very clearly what he stood for and where he would go. And he clearly wasn’t going to diverge from traditional centrist capitalist politics. The believers exhibited “the audacity of hope”… blind hope. That’s par for the course for knee jerk Democratic Party members, for paleo-liberals, for African-Americans. There is always an audience for well-trained dog-and-pony shows. They have four years to brush up on their tricks before every presidential election.

The 2008 election was yet another example of Democratic Party blackmail: “do you want another four years of Bush in the person of McCain”? and all that crap, knowing that there was no alternative to either of them, realistically. The usual lesser of two evils argument that we saw offered when Ralph Nader had the cojones to get up and say what we all know (liberals excepted): that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is, generously, the difference between the two slices of buttered bread squashed together.

Unless and until voters acknowledge this last fact, they are destined to continual groping in the dark for something that will forever elude them. So let’s be blunt.

1. There is no chance in hell that Obama is going to adopt the progressive agenda on ANY of the relevant issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, health care, climate change, civil liberties and protection of privacy, bringing Bush war criminals to justice, energy policy, etc.). No chance.

2. The complacency of the electorate in the face of massive bail-outs, including that of the auto industry which should fold up shop and go home unless they are forced to build electric vehicles, trains and buses and wind turbines, must be brought up short.

3. The prayers and reliance of the public on the federal government to save their jobs and homes need to be aligned with reality, by a push for massive relocalization of the economy, which must for survival’s sake become leaner, smaller and non-reliant on continued economic growth and consumption. Republicans fear socialism but so should we, though for somewhat different reasons. Socialism and corporatism are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of a deluded and disinterested citizenry.

4. The recession needs to be welcomed and augmented by a wholesale drawback by all citizens from compulsive shopping and consumption, shredding of credit cards, demand for public transportation, willingness to pay the full cost of energy and goods by ending all subsidies and tax breaks for energy and corporations, among other things. We should be helping push capitalism over the cliff; it is Wall St. and the banks that will go first. Afterwards, we can reassemble the pieces we want reassembled, in the way we want them to be. Americans still haven’t learned that democracy comes before the economy. The Russians didn’t learn this lesson soon enough.

5. Here is the sine qua non: a grassroots political and electoral movement that will unite behind some basic principles and demands and then put this into practice in a citizens’ PAC that will focus on unseating those phony liberals (mostly Democrats) who are mainly responsible for the betrayal that is being led by Obama. Max Baucus might be considered as a first target for his outrageous behavior on health care, with Waxman and Markey a close second for their huge energy bill, one of the biggest scams to ever get support from the liberal media and pundits.

Yes, the Republicans are repulsive and mendacious. But they always were and don’t pretend to be otherwise. We don’t need their phony cry for “bipartisanship” and “ending the stalemate” in Washington; the Democrats are doing a fine job of sitting in for the Republicans.

We have two years to put these people up in front of a political firing squad.
Yes, some of you will say that the alternative might be right wingers lurking and ready to replace them. But consider this: the Dems might get re-elected but in the meantime they will have to face the wrath of the public and the possibility, even if slim, that their political careers might be over. This is the only way to hold them accountable for their brazen arrogance. They need to be told two things: we don’t like them, and we don’t like the things they stand for.

This message will trickle into the White House soon enough. A grassroots revolt against the deceptions and blackmail of the Democratic Party. A statement that we will no longer accept their contemptuous attitude that continues to lecture us that the alternative is worse. The Democrats in congress, NOT the Republicans, are the ones who need to be put on trial. They need to be told that they do not own our vote and that they must earn it. They have failed. They need to be booted out. Are progressives willing to admit their mistakes and take appropriate action to regain their power as citizens and voters? How long will Democratic Party members fete and re-arm their executioners?

This is the question progressives need to answer. They will be met by clever Democrats telling them to just keep quiet and things will work out. But right now things are working out only for Wall St. The rest of us will be lucky if we get an extension in unemployment benefits or a tiny reduction in mortgage rates. If we listen to the Democrats, we will never get universal health care or get our troops back from Iraq. Come on now, you already knew this, didn’t you?

Time for a reality check about the Democrats. Without it we are doomed to hand wringing and regrets, and a permanent apathy and pessimism that the Democrats will welcome as an accompaniment to the voters’ permanent recusal from civic life.

In Bush’s case that base had been the millions of deluded mainstream, other-wise moderate, Christians who were shamed by their rabid evangelical brethren into voting for Bush because, no matter what else, the man kept saying he believed in the sanctity of life. W, of course, went on to prove this sentiment by blocking stem cell research and killing one point three million Iraqis.

In Obama’s case, it means, as it has since the Rev. Wright days, jettisoning any and all whose press begins to compete with his own. Lately gays have been making too much noise, somehow believing that as Americans they had a right to draw attention to injustices, but Obama has been steadily distancing himself from gays ever since he decided the demographic that follows Rick Warren looked sexier in a voting booth.

While the GOP supposed “big tent” turns out to barely big enough to be a bathing suit for Rush Limbaugh, the coalition that put Barack Obama in the Whitehouse was even a greater mix of elements than the man himself. Basically last fall Obama was supported by everyone who felt the GOP and Bushco had betrayed them, in other words the clear electoral majority of the American public. But bit by bit, Obama has tossed away the various special interests groups who gave their hopes to him. At the time it seemed like the man had won himself a mountain of hard-earned political capital. Nowadays it seems like he’s at a roulette wheel staking it all on the banks will come up in the black, but so far the only numbers we’re seeing are “00”.

Bush had once started out claiming to be a “uniter,” then quickly opted for the far easier “you’re either with us or against us” routine, narrowing his message till eventually even most Americans began to realize why the rest of the world detested him. Once upon a time we endured Obama’s tortured prose about how great everything would be if we would only put him in office. Now we’re expected to put up with it as that office stealthily prepares to exonerate all of the Bush era torture pros.

It seems to be a trend that won’t stop continuing until one day we’ll turn on our TVs to Obama awarding W himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here’s hoping Obama doesn’t feel the need to take it quite that far, but after his 1st hundred days of evolution who can tell where Obama will wind up. I heard Cheney is looking for a running mate.

Reversing himself on taxing the rich, on the environment, on ending the war quickly, on tightening the screws on executive compensations, on releasing info on Bush era prisoner abuses, now he’s even bringing back Bush-era military tribunals and again turning his back on gays. The man has changed sides more often than the serve at a tennis match. As each passing day of these second hundred days further defines him, it is beginning to look like the only kind of liberal Obama is really aiming to work for are the neo- kind.

Not that Congress, the Democratically controlled Congress that is, have helped him much. After making sure they forced the public to sacrifice to keep billionaire bankers in their cushy penthouse offices, they then turned their back on American homeowners, all the while taking care to make sure bank execs didn’t get their feathers ruffled by too much scrutiny of the bailout spending. Now this week Congress has watered down the credit card protections bill AND refused to close Guantanamo Bay, or technically, is refusing to fund the 80 million dollar plan to allow the inmates housed there to be imprisoned on US soil; so yet another Obama promise turns into a mouth full of dust.

Cowing to one of the most obscenely outrageous, “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” campaigns in recent memory, your government has decided our US prison system is not secure enough to jail criminals. While this begs the question, “well then what about the other 2.3 million some odd others already housed in US prisons.”

Of course Cooper is probably unaware of the conditions in US prisons. Cooper is just now finally learning that Nancy Pelosi knew and tacitly abided by Bush era torture policies. As could be predicted the revelation is causing Cooper to flex his patented scowl muscles. Of course judging by the content of a fistful of recent CNN primetime segments it appears Cooper just now discovered pot. Poor Anderson Cooper, who knows what sudden shockers tomorrow’s headlines will bring, or how long it will take Anderson Cooper to find out.

A case in point was Obama’s May 10 announcement, which much fanfare and press hoopla, of a pledge from 10 major health industry interest groups to cut the growth of health care spending over the course of the next decade. The $2 trillion in health spending saved could help the administration enact a comprehensive health care reform bill, administration officials noted.

But some liberals weren’t so sure that this announcement was good news. It had the aspect of a behind-the-scenes deal in which the administration won an industry promise in exchange for making some unknown “compromise.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, writing in his blog at the Talking Points Memo Web site, noted:

The only troubling thing about the President’s statements today concerning health care reform was what he did not say: that he wanted any health plan that emerges from Congress to include a public insurance option for Americans who do not want to buy private insurance. But without this option, there will be no pressure on private insurers to adopt all the other reforms to control costs or give all Americans access to affordable care.

Did Obama trade away the “public option” to win support from the health industry? We’ll soon find out.

But this modus operandi is becoming a bit of pattern. Already, the administration’s policies to address the financial crisis — from the bank bailouts to the rigged “stress tests” — appear to have been designed to disrupt Wall Street’s business as usual as little as possible. For this reason, liberal economists like Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have denounced the administration’s policies as, at best, keeping “zombie banks” on life support — or, at worst, robbing taxpayers.

All of this dismays liberals who believe that they have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact overdue reforms. Instead, they see the administration compromising with big business that has interests in making whatever reforms are passed as toothless as possible.

For example, if the administration was truly interested in a health care system that would contain costs and cover every American, the simplest and most cost-effective solution would be to do what virtually every other industrialized country does: cover the population through a government-run “single payer” system.

Instead, the health care reform that is likely to emerge from this Congress will be a jerry-built compromise designed to provide enough incentives for health industry “stakeholders” (to use the parlance in vogue in Washington today) not to sabotage the plan. But this deal with the devil will make whatever reform is passed weaker and more inefficient as a result.

The standard arguments for explaining these capitulations to big business include everything from parliamentary excuses (”we’ve got to get 60 votes in the Senate”) to the fact that Obama and congressional Democrats have pocketed millions in corporate cash. While these explanations tell part of the story, they avoid a bigger picture that places today’s pressure toward reform in the context of American liberalism’s history as one of the two main philosophies (along with conservatism) for governing American capitalism.

Despite what conservatives are shouting these days, liberalism is not a version of “socialism,” or even social democracy. It’s one way to run a capitalist economy in the interests of capital. We can see this even when we look at liberalism’s “high tide” — the New Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Democratic Party’s brand of liberalism in that period was pretty mild stuff.

First, it refused to countenance large-scale government intervention into labor markets or the operation of the economy. Unlike European social democracy, American liberalism didn’t support nationalization of industries or “cradle-to-grave” social welfare policies. Liberals accepted that the paramount aim of American economic policy was to maintain conditions for corporate-led economic growth.

Even in the New Deal’s halcyon days, Democratic programs fell far short of working-class demands or welfare policies in other advanced capitalist countries. As historian Kevin Boyle noted, “In 1949, after four full terms of Democratic Party rule, the United States ranked last among industrial capitalist states in social welfare expenditures.”

Second, liberals did not — and still do not — question the necessity of a massive military machine or the imperialist aims for which it is deployed. In fact, “Cold War liberalism” rested on expanding the Pentagon. By the 1960s and the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the liberal commitment to the war in Vietnam was helping to starve domestic “war on poverty” programs. Obama’s growing commitment to a wider war in Afghanistan and Pakistan may have the same impact today.

Liberalism remained the postwar era’s guiding economic and political ideology because it served the needs of an expanding capitalism. U.S. economic expansion depended on increased investment in technology (and in a technologically sophisticated workforce). Moreover, economic growth pulled larger numbers of workers on the margins of the U.S. labor market into paid labor.

Liberal government policies helped to facilitate these changes required by the postwar economy. Federal programs like the G.I. Bill of Rights and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 subsidized an expansion of higher education and the creation of a technologically equipped workforce. These programs were justified as part of the Cold War need to “keep up with the Russians” — which only added to their appeal.

Government programs such as Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid and child nutrition programs added to the working class’ “social wage,” underwriting the expansion of the postwar workforce. State expenditures on some roles formerly left to women in families–caring for the elderly, assuring adequate nutrition for kids–helped increase the numbers of women available to enter the paid labor force.

Liberals championed and won these reforms — all of which aided U.S. capitalism.

Today, Obama makes many of the same pitches for his policies: arguing, for instance, that health care reform will help U.S. business compete against firms from countries whose governments cover health care costs.

This may be true. But when the policies are crafted from the point of view of the interests of big business, they are just as likely to be curtailed or jettisoned if Corporate America feels it doesn’t need them. That was big business’ attitude through most of the previous political era, when free-market ideology ruled the day. Democrats, as much as Republicans, abetted the process of counter-reform.

As political scientist Thomas Ferguson once remarked, this factor explains why the Democratic Party “left ordinary Americans alternately confused, perplexed, alarmed or disgusted, as they tried to puzzle out why the party did so little to help unionize the South, protect the victims of McCarthyism, promote civil rights for Blacks, women or Hispanics, or in the late 1970s, combat America’s great ‘right turn’ against the New Deal itself.”

“To such people, it always remained a mystery why the Democrats so often betrayed the ideals of the New Deal. Little did they realize that, in fact, the party was only living up to them.”

The people do indeed look at Washington and know that this city is ‘badly’ broken, Senator Kerry. The public confidence in our Congress has been declining drastically. Recent poll results highlight how the American people’s trust in their congress has hit rock bottom. A survey of progressive blogs easily confirms the rage rightfully directed at our congress for abdicating its role of oversight and accountability. Activists scream about promised hearings that never took place — without explanation. They express outrage when investigations are dropped without any justification. And they genuinely wonder out loud why, especially after they helped secure a major victory for the Democrats. The same Democrats who had for years pointed fingers at their big bad Republican majority colleagues as the main impediment preventing them from fulfilling what was expected of them.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in congress’s integrity. But the story is almost dead — ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media’s insistence on burying ‘real’ issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation’s continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the ‘thank you’ should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan isle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party’s tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the ‘victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping’ card, the same very ‘evil doing’ they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets. They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without much arm twisting.

Hastert Redux

I am going to rewind and take you back to September 2005, when Vanity Fair published an article, which in addition to my case and the plight of National Security Whistleblowers, exposed the dark side of the then Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and the corroborated allegations of his illegal activities involving foreign agents and interests.

Vanity Fair printed the story only after they made certain they were on sure footing in the face of any possible libel by lining up more than five credible sources, and after triple pit bull style fact-checking. They were vindicated; Hastert did not dare go after them, nor did he ever issue any true denial. Moreover, further vindication occurred only a month ago. On April 10, 2009, The Hill reported that the Former Speaker of the House was contracted to lobby for Turkey. The Justice Department record on this deal indicates that Hastert will now be “principally involved” on a $35,000-a-month contract providing representation for Turkish interests. That seems to be the current arrangement for those serving foreign interests while on the job in congress — to be paid at a later date, collecting on their IOU’s when they secure their positions with ‘the foreign lobby.’

In a recent article for the American Conservative Magazine, Philip Giraldi, Former CIA Officer stationed in Turkey, made the following point:” Edmonds’s claims have never been pursued, presumably because there are so many skeletons in both parties’ closets. She has been served with a state-secrets gag order to make sure that what she knows is never revealed, a restriction that the new regime in Washington has not lifted.” He hits the nail on the head:” In Hastert’s case, it certainly should be a matter of public concern that a senior elected representative who may have received money from a foreign country is now officially lobbying on its behalf. How many other congressmen might have similar relationships with foreign countries and lobbying groups, providing them with golden parachutes for their retirement?”

The congress went mum on my case after the Vanity Fair story, with, of course, the mainstream media making it very easy for them. They turned bipartisan in not pursuing the case, just as with the Harman case, and similarly, the mainstream media happily let it disappear. At the time I was not aware that during the publication of the Hastert story, Jane Harman’s AIPAC case was already brewing in the background. Moreover, one of the very few people in congress who was notified about Harman was none other than Hastert, the man himself. The same Hastert, who in addition to being one of several officials targeted by the FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations, was also known to be directly involved in several other high profile scandals: from his intimate involvement in the Abramoff scandal, to the Representative William Jefferson scandal ; from his ‘Land Deal’ scandal — where he cashed in millions off his position while “serving”, to the 2006 House Page scandal.

All for One, One for All

How does it work? How do these people escape accountability, the consequences? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against congressional representatives, as if Hoover’s days were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of congress keep tabs on each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this ‘one for all, all for one’ kind of solidarity in congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

Although at an initial glance, based on the wiretapping angle, the Harman case may appear to involve blackmailing, or a milder version, exploitation, of congress by the Executive Branch, deeper analysis would suggest even further implications, where congressional members themselves use the incriminating information against each other to prevent pursuit or investigation of cases that they may be directly or indirectly involved in. Let me give you an example based on the Hastert case mentioned earlier:

In 2004 and 2005 I had several meetings with Representative Henry Waxman’s investigative and legal staff. Two of these meetings took place inside a SCIF, where details and classified information pertaining to my case and those involved could be discussed. I was told, and at the time I believed it to be the case, that the Republican majority was preventing further action — such as holding a public hearing. Once the Democrats took over in 2006, that barrier was removed, or so I thought. In March 2007, I was contacted by one of Representative Waxman’s staff people who felt responsible and conscientious enough to at least let me know that there would never be a hearing into my case by their office, or for that matter, any Democratic office in the House. Based on his/her account, in February 2007 Waxman’s office was preparing the necessary ingredients for their promised hearing, but in mid March the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called Waxman into a meeting on the case, and after Waxman came out of that twenty minute meeting, he told his staff ‘we are no longer involved in Edmonds’ case.’ And so they became ‘uninvolved.’

What was discussed during that meeting? The facts regarding the FBI’s pursuit of Hastert and certain other representatives were bound to come out in any congressional hearing into my case. Now we know that Hastert and Pelosi were both informed of Harman’s role in a related case involving counterespionage investigation of AIPAC. Is it possible that Pelosi asked Waxman to lay off my case in order to protect a few of their own in an equally scandalous case? Was there a deal made between the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House to keep this and other related scandals hushed? Will we ever know the answer to these questions? Most likely not, considering the current state of our mainstream media. And the victims remain the same: The American people who have entrusted the role of ensuring oversight and accountability with their congress. This kind of infestation touches everyone in congress; one need not have a skeleton of his own to get sucked into the swamp of those infested. Does Waxman have to be a sinner to take part in the sin committed by the Hasterts and Harmans of congress? Certainly not. On the other hand, he and others like him will abide by the un-pledged oath of ‘solidarity with your party members’ and ‘loyalty to your dear colleagues.’

Back to the enablers: How can we explain the continued blackout by the mainstream media, and/or, logic-less defenses of the Harmans and Hasterts alike by the apologist spinners — some of whom pass as the ‘alternative’ media? Some are committing what they rightfully accused the previous administration and their pawns of doing: cherry picking the facts, then, spin, spin, and spin until the real issue becomes blurry and unrecognizable. The conspiracy angle aimed at the timing; Porter Goss’ possible beef with Jane Harman; accusing the truth divulgers, CQ sources, of being ‘conspirators’ with ulterior motives; portraying Harman as an outspoken vigilante on torture. And if those sound too lame to swallow, they throw in a few evil names from the foggy past of Dusty the Foggo man! If the issue and its implications weren’t so serious, these spins of reality would certainly make a Pulitzer worthy satire.

Let’s take the issue of timing. First of all, the story was reported, albeit not comprehensively, by Time Magazine years ago. It took a tenacious journalist, more importantly a journalist that could have been trusted by the Intel sources to give it real coverage. It is also possible that the sources for the Harman case got fed up and disillusioned by the absence of a real investigation and decided to ‘really’ talk. After all, the AIPAC court case was dropped by the Justice Department’s prosecutors within two weeks of the Harman revelations. Same could be said about the Hastert story. At the time, many asked why the story was not told during the earlier stages of my case. It took three years for me and other FBI and DOJ sources to exhaust all channels; congressional inquiry, IG investigation, and the courts. Those who initially were not willing to come forward and corroborate the details opened up to the Vanity Fair journalist, David Rose, in 2005.

Now let’s look at the ‘blackmail’ and ‘Goss’ Plot’ angles. Of course the ‘blackmail’ scenario is possible; in fact, highly possible. We all can picture one of the President’s men in the White House pulling an opposing congressional member aside and whispering ‘if I were you, congressman, I’d stop pushing. I understand, as we speak, my Justice Department is looking into certain activities you’ve been engaged in . . . .’ We all can imagine, easily, a head of the Justice Department, having a ‘discreet’ meeting with a representative who’s been pushing for a certain investigation of certain department officials for criminal deeds, and saying, ‘dear congresswoman, we are aware of your role in a certain scandal, and are still pondering whether we should turn this into a direct investigation of you and appoint a special prosecutor…’ But, let’s not forget, the misuse of incriminating information to blackmail does not make the practitioner of the wrong deed a victim, nor does it make the wrong or criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our congress for way too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmails from the very same people they are overseeing . . . Period. Those who have been elected to represent the people and their interests cannot pursue their own greed and ambitions by engaging in criminal or unethical activities against the interests of the same people they’ve sworn to represent, and be given a pass.

As for far-reaching ties such as Harman’s stand on torture, or specific beef with Porter Goss, or wild shooting from the hip by bringing up mafia-like characters such as Dusty Foggo; please don’t make us laugh! Are we talking about the same Hawkish Pro Secrecy Jane Harman here?! Harman’s staunch support of NSA Wiretapping of Americans, the FISA Amendment of 2008, the Patriot ACT, the war with Iraq, and many other activities on the Civil Liberties’ No No-list, is known by everyone. But, apparently not by the authors of these recent spins! And, let’s not forget to add her long-term cozy relationship with AIPAC, and the large donations she’s received from various AIPAC-related pro Israeli PACs. To these certain ‘wannabe’ journalists driven by far from pure agenda(s), shame on you; as for honor-worthy vigilant activists out there: watch out for these impostors with their newly gained popularity among those tainted in Washington, and take a hard look at whose agendas they are a mouthpiece for.

Despite a certain degree of exposure cases such as Harman and Hastert, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end, literally dead. Powerful foreign entities’ criminal conduct against our national interest is given a pass as was recently proven by the AIPAC case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media are known universally and seem to have been accepted as a fact of life. Pursuit of cases such as mine via cosmetically available channels has been and continues to be proven futile for whistleblowers. Then, you may want to ask, why in the world am I writing this piece? Because more and more people, although not nearly enough, are coming to the realization that our system is rotten at it’s core; that in many cases we have been trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the cause. I, like many others, believed that changing the congressional majority in 2006 was going to bring about some of the needed changes; the pursuit of accountability being one. We were proven wrong. In 2008, many genuinely bought in to the promise of change, and thus far, they’ve been let down. These experiences are disheartening, surely, but they are also eye-opening. I do see many vigilant activists who continue the fight, and as long as that’s the case, there is hope. More people realize that real change will require not replacing one or two or three, but many more. More people are coming to understand that the road to achieving government of the people passes through a congress, but not the one currently occupied by the many crusty charlatans who represent only self-interest — achieved by representing the interests of those other than the majority of the people of this nation. And so I write.

Here I go again, rather than ending this in a long paragraph or two, I will let another long-gone man do it shortly and effectively “If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can’t protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don’t need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.” — Will Rogers

Candidate Obama claimed to “reject the Military Commissions Act.” Now as president, his administration makes the case for maintaining it. It is important to remember that prior to the Bush administration, terror suspects were tried in open court where they had the right to counsel and to jury verdicts.
It seems that the Obama administration is afraid that some of the defendants might actually be acquitted. Judges might ban evidence discovered under torture or the hearsay evidence of intelligence reports. Defendants would have the right to question their accusers, in this case the intelligence operatives who may have participated in their torture.

“Judges might ban evidence discovered under torture or the hearsay evidence of intelligence reports.”

Reports of the resumption of military tribunals are not the only bad news on Guantanamo and Bush era justice. In congressional testimony, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that Guantanamo detainees may be held on American soil. The Obama administration is going where even the Bush administration dared not. The Guantanamo apparatus was set up precisely to avoid any Constitutional inconveniences and to keep prisoners out of sight and out of mind. They didn’t want to risk waking Americans from their slumber and possibly encourage them to oppose this clear abuse of law and morality. Apparently Barrack Obama has less concern for American public opinion than did George W. Bush.

The reasons for Obama’s nonchalance are obvious. He was never called to account by self-described progressives during his presidential campaign. The same individuals who chose to silence themselves throughout 2008 have continued to act like doormats for president Obama, who as a result has the best, cushiest catbird seat of any president in recent memory.

The acquiescence to the old regime is outrageous in part because it is politically unnecessary. Only 21% of Americans are willing to claim an affiliation with the Republican party. The only good news for Republicans is that their brand can’t fare any worse than it is now. Conversely, Obama has a 68% approval rating that bests all of his predecessors at the 100-day mark. The fear of public opposition to doing the right thing is completely unwarranted.

“Obama was never called to account by self-described progressives during his presidential campaign.”
There is no rational political reason for the embrace of Bush policy. Most Americans do not trust the official explanations given for the September 11th attacks. Obama could not only close Guantanamo as he promised but he could free even those accused of planning 9/11 without fear of public disapproval outside of the Republican dead-ender crowd.

Barrack Obama is in a position to do almost anything he wants. If he keeps the military tribunal system or moves Guantanamo prisoners to the United States it is because he wants to. He believes in the rule of the ruling classes more than he believes in true democracy. Challenging that belief would have made him unacceptable as a presidential candidate.

Dismantling the Bush regime would mean dismantling the prerogatives and assumptions of entitlement carried by the people who run the country. The ruling classes like to know that no one, especially not the president, will get any big ideas about disrupting their rule. Obama is the perfect president for them.
The names change but the system doesn’t. Perhaps the president’s name should be changed to Bushama. There would no longer be any excuse for confusion. We would all know where we truly stand.

This is testament to the desire of the majority of the U.S. public to stick with the decision it made last November — to break with a generation of conservative rule.

Support for Obama among the population surely stands out as his first few months in office has raised criticism from different quarters of the media and political establishment, as well as from liberals who would normally count themselves in his corner.

The opposition from the right so far has been unfocused and largely ineffectual. The motley crew of “tea-baggers” who turned out April 15, radio yakker Rush Limbaugh, and second-rate politicians like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Texas secessionist Gov. Rick Perry are a pretty sorry excuse for an opposition.

On the other side of the spectrum, most liberals remain strong supporters of Obama’s plans, despite their reservations about the administration’s kowtowing to Wall Street bankers and its half-heartedness in advancing priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act and health care reform.

Obama’s first three months in office should also remind anyone who harbored illusions otherwise that, as the president of the United States, Obama — by definition — is there to preserve the status quo. Even if the status quo has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

Obama has taken some steps to renovate U.S. policy, from ordering the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp to scrapping the global “gag rule” on abortion counseling. In contrast to the Bush administration’s denial of global climate change, the Obama administration is acknowledging that this is an issue the U.S. government should tackle.

But on a number of his most important actions, his administration showed much more continuity with the Bush regime than many of his supporters would have predicted.

First, the array of programs that his chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have hatched to rescue the banking system are extensions of the pro-Wall Street bailout policies of their predecessors under Henry Paulson, Bush’s treasury secretary and the former head of Goldman Sachs. These plans amount to a huge transfer of wealth from working people to the banking establishment that is largely responsible for the economic crisis.

Obama and his advisers have swatted away liberal critics of their coddling of Wall Street, like Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. They have even tried to deflect outrage aimed at Wall Street titans who used taxpayers’ money to pay themselves outlandish bonuses.

Obama told a group of bankers at the White House that he was “the only thing [standing] between you and the pitchforks” of angry people demanding an end to Washington’s favoritism to Wall Street, according to the Washington-based newsletter Politico. If that quote is accurate, then Obama is quite conscious of his role in fronting for Wall Street, while saying that he “feels the pain” of Main Street.

Second, it was largely predictable that Obama would reaffirm a number of the most heinous Bush policies from the “war on terror.”

Presidential power is cumulative. Once one president seizes it, his successors don’t give it up willingly. From refusing to prosecute authors of the recently released “torture memos” to intervening on behalf of secrecy and against civil liberties in a number of “war on terror” court cases left over from the Bush years, the administration is signaling to the U.S. national security establishment that it has no intention of rolling back policy to a pre-September 11, 2001 state.

Coupled with plans to step up intervention in Afghanistan and increase the military budget (carping from conservatives about the “cuts” in the military aside), the military certainly has nothing to fear from the Obama era.

Obama’s election was a part of a general move among the U.S. population to the left, or at least away from the dominant right-wing ideology that shaped American politics for a generation. This evolution is likely to continue, independently of what Obama does or doesn’t do.

Witness, for instance, the gathering support for equal marriage rights across the country. Only a few years after conservatives used gay marriage as a “wedge issue” to wind up their base, two rural states — Iowa and Vermont — recently legalized gay marriage after activist campaigns put the issue on those two states’ agendas. Now, even some Republicans, like McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, are calling for the Republicans to dump gay-bashing.

And Obama’s recent suggestions that the U.S. may be open to changing its bone-headed policies toward Cuba has brought forth far less wailing and gnashing of teeth among all but a handful of anti-Castro diehards.

Where do we go from here? Given the mound of crises that Obama inherited, it’s pretty remarkable that he appears to be in as strong a position as he is. But the future may not be as kind to him, and the public’s patience may wear thin.

Right now, Obama has the advantage of having put into place a number of programs to address the economic crisis, without the results of any being visible. So people are giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, it’s a sure bet that unemployment and economic desperation will increase over the next year or more. Obama’s policies are most likely not strong enough to really arrest the economy’s decline. And the risk of the U.S. being drawn deeper into a long and unpopular war in Afghanistan is inherent in Obama’s drum-beating against al-Qaeda.

So there is much that could undermine Obama’s current standing. And his political opposition will not be as clownish is at appears today.

This puts a premium on what SocialistWorker.org has argued consistently since Obama emerged as the Democratic favorite to win the presidential nomination more than a year ago — that is, the shift in mass consciousness has to translate into mass organization that pressures the government on behalf of working people.

The yardstick of judging a new administration by its actions in its first 100 days dates, of course, from the early days of the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Between March 9 and June 16 of that year, Roosevelt proposed, and Congress enacted, 15 major pieces of legislation, including the repeal of Prohibition, creation of the National Recovery Administration, establishment of federal unemployment insurance, jobs programs, foreclosure relief and banking regulation (the Glass-Steagall Act, whose repeal in 1999 contributed to the current crisis).

Compared to this output of legislation, Obama’s stimulus package and budget resolutions don’t even seem to compare.

But it’s important to remember that none of these pieces of legislation in the 1930s — the beginnings of the New Deal — would have had the impact they did if ordinary people hadn’t organized themselves to demand more.

Historian Thomas Sugrue’s recent commentary in The Nation is well taken:

Whether Obama can tame the Great Recession, whether his mostly seasoned, Clinton-era circle of advisers will boldly experiment, and whether his presidency will ultimately be compared favorably with Roosevelt’s, remains to be seen. It pays to recall that the New Deal was the result of presidential leadership and policy innovation, but also that the drama of the Great Depression and the New Deal played out in places far from the nation’s capital — on New York City’s streets, in Nebraska’s cornfields, in Flint’s auto factories and in California’s shipyards.

Perhaps the biggest difference between 2009 and 1933 is that Obama has not, at least yet, been seriously tested by organized pressure from below. That might ultimately be what distinguishes FDR’s administration from Obama’s.

It’s up to those who want to see more fundamental change than Obama is willing to contemplate to get on with creating that “organized pressure from below.”