Kemstone's Journal

I’ve had no desire to write about politics in recent months, but the National Defense Authorization Act that passed both houses of congress last week with overwhelming bipartisan support is something so egregious and abominable that I feel obligated to express my outrage over it.

This is quite possibly the most despicable and inexcusable act of congress in American history. It spits in the face of the founding fathers and destroys the core principles this country was founded on. The ghost of King George is laughing at how two hundred and fifty years after freeing themselves from his monarchy, the colonies voted to restore the same despotic powers they had rebelled against.

The Americans of the 18^th century fought bravely and spilled their blood to win certain rights they believed to be inalienable. One of the most important among these was the right to defend oneself in a court of law. For thousands of years, in civilizations across the planet, enemies of the Emperor or the King could simply be taken away and thrown into a dungeon without ever being told what they were charged with let alone given a trial, but what happened two and a half centuries ago was revolutionary—the colonies won their independence and for the first time in human history a government was founded on the principle that no individual person should have such Absolute Power.

That is what The United States of America is all about. That’s why for hundreds of years no matter what sins our government may have committed—the extermination of Native Americans, slavery, wars of imperial aggression, the oppression of the lower classes for the benefit of the wealthy—Americans still had reason to be proud of our country. We were the first nation founded on an ideal: that human liberty is sacrosanct.

Now that founding principle is a mere pen-stroke away from annihilation. The president need only sign the document in front of him, accept the powers his office was deliberately designed to lack, and The United States of America as we know it will be officially dead.

You might say that I’m over-stating the case. The new legislation does not grant the executive branch the power to do anything it hasn’t already been doing for at least a decade. We’ve already been using the fight against terrorism as an excuse to spy on our citizens, detain people indefinitely, and assassinate terrorism-suspects without a trial. Why make such a fuss over a bill that only legitimizes the powers that the president has already been using?

I’m saying that it’s precisely the legitimization of the powers that makes this so terrible. It’s one thing if the president exercises extraordinary powers in violation of the law. It’s another thing completely if those extraordinary powers are the law. When Obama took office he could have put a stop to these abuses and restored the executive branch to the same level of power it was originally intended to have, but instead he not only continued the blatantly unconstitutional and anti-American practices of the Bush administration but codified them. Once this is signed into law, we will officially live a country where the chief executive can throw any citizen in prison for life without a trial and the citizen will have no recourse whatsoever because this will be perfectly legal.

Welcome back to the British Empire.

The fact that there was no fight whatsoever over this—that the bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses—is the most infuriating thing of all. Every single one of those lawmakers took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and every single one of them violated that oath as completely and thoroughly as it could be violated. It may sound like hyperbole but it’s true: they are all guilty of treason.

They have destroyed the very thing that made America America, and because they did so quietly and without a fight, while everyone’s attention was on the dismal economy and their own personal financial struggles, they managed to do it without being noticed. There was no conflict, so the media barely covered it. The vast majority of citizens are unaware that their country has suddenly undergone a fundamental alteration of its very nature.

Perhaps you can say that practically speaking, this is not so devastating. Sure, in the abstract world of ideals and principles it is an outrage, but what difference does it make in the real world?

President Obama will probably not use the new powers any more than he did when they were unofficial. He will probably only target citizens for whom there is strong evidence are working with terrorists. Perhaps the next president will also use the powers responsibly, and the president after that. But can we really trust that every administration from now until the end of time is not going to abuse this power?

If we are realists, is it not realistic to assume that a future president will eventually succumb to the temptation to target a citizen and throw him in prison for life without legal recourse not because he is working with terrorists but merely because he’s a nuisance? Perhaps that journalist is too close to exposing a secret the president wants hidden—if it’s perfectly legal and risk-free to simply remove her, why not do it? Just say we have evidence to suggest that she’s working with terrorists. Perhaps that independent politician is becoming too popular and could threaten the president’s chances for re-election—why not accuse him of having ties to terrorists? No one will ever have a chance to prove it one way or another.

Perhaps that grassroots political movement which aims to restore the middle-class to prosperity in spite of the inevitable harm to corporate profits is becoming too powerful—why not accuse them of terrorism and get them off the streets? It may be an egregious abuse of power, but they will never have a chance to plead their case.

By our own hands, we’ve handed the real terrorists a victory as great as any they could have hoped for. In essence, we’ve said to them: “Your tactics have worked. We are so terrified of you that we are sacrificing the rights our country was founded on to keep us a little safer.”

Farewell, America. It was a great country while it lasted.

When I was a kid I used to play a video game called Mortal Kombat which involved two players engaged in a violent fighting match. Every time you hit your opponent it would drain them of hit-points, and the first player to run out of hit-points would lose the match. If you could defeat your opponent without them landing a single hit, it was called a “Flawless victory”. That’s what the plutocrats will have scored if the debt-ceiling deal currently on the table goes through.

Yes, the plutocrats. Not the Republicans. The media has been framing this as a death-match between Democrats and Republicans from the beginning, but that’s an inaccurate picture of what’s really going on, as it assumes that not only are the parties united internally but that they fundamentally disagree politically. Not so. Nearly all Republicans are bought-and-paid for by their wealthy donors from Wall Street and other Big Business interests (whom I refer to under the umbrella of “plutocrats”) and a majority of Democrats are owned by the same interests as well. The fight in Washington has not been Republicans vs. Democrats but rather Corporate Republicans and Corporate Democrats vs. the Economic Interests of the American people.

Unless he’s the most incompetent negotiator in the history of politics, it should now be completely apparent to everyone paying attention that Barack Obama has been playing for Team Plutocrats all along. You can go all the way back to his appointment of Tim Geithner and other Wall Street insiders to his economic team if you want evidence of that, but you really need look no further than his behavior over the course of this debate to make that determination.

Instead of doing what a liberal, a progressive, or any rational independent-thinking person would do in the midst of an economic recession and insist on holding off on spending cuts until unemployment goes down, then pushing hard for programs aimed to do just that, President Obama went into this process already agreeing with Republicans that spending cuts should be the top priority. So instead of the debate being Job Creation vs. Spending Cuts—a debate that any president could easily win—he turned the debate into Spending Cuts with Minor Revenue Increases vs. Spending Cuts Alone. And guess what? Spending Cuts Alone wins. Flawless Victory.

Why is that a victory for the plutocrats? Because the more money that gets cut out of the public sector, the more goes to the private sector. Cut government programs that help the poor and middle class and those citizens will be forced to go to the private sector to get those services, and they’ll find themselves charged a hell of a lot more by these profit-driven industries. A balanced budget is a good thing, but a deal that balances the budget on the backs of middle class workers and senior citizens while asking absolutely nothing in return from the wealthiest Americans and corporations is an abomination.

This is the deal on the table, according to the Huffington Post:

The deal calls for a first round of cuts that would total $917 billion over 10 years and allows the president to hike the debt cap — now at $14.3 trillion — by $900 billion, according to a presentation that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made to his members. Democrats reported those first cuts at a figure closer to $1 trillion. It was unclear Sunday night why those two estimates varied.

The next round of $1.5 trillion in cuts would be decided by a committee of 12 lawmakers evenly divided between the two parties and two chambers. This so-called super Congress would have to present its cuts by Thanksgiving, and the rest of Congress could not amend or filibuster the recommendations.

But if the super Congress somehow failed to enact savings, the measure requires automatic cuts worth at least $1.2 trillion. Those cuts would be split equally between military and domestic programs. Social Security, Medicaid and programs for the poor would be spared, but Medicare providers — not beneficiaries — would take a hit.

At first glance you might think this sounds somewhat reasonable. At least the cuts would spare Social Security and Medicare recipients…right? Doubtful. Cuts to providers will almost certainly affect recipients anyway, and even if they don’t this whole “super Congress” idea is designed to correct that apparent oversight. Twelve lawmakers evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans? How many of those Democrats will be corporate-owned? It’s practically guaranteed that at least one of them will, thus handing the majority to the plutocrats who can make sure cuts to Medicare and Social Security do affect beneficiaries and not just providers. If it’s a choice between that and the threat of these automatic ticking time-bomb cuts going off, of course they’ll accept whatever so-called “compromise” is put in front of them.

The most telling thing about this whole deal is the president’s reaction. Naturally, he doesn’t like the deal, but here’s the reason why:

President Obama seemed especially dissatisfied with the idea of the super committee, saying the leaders should have been able to accomplish all the cuts now.

"Is this the deal I would have preferred? No," Obama said. "I believe that we could have made the tough choices required — on entitlement reform and tax reform — right now, rather than through a special congressional committee process."

He’s upset because it doesn’t cut enough. He wanted to cut your entitlements now, presumably so he could claim credit and brag about what a reasonable, middle-of-the-road, fiscally-responsible centrist moderate he is. “Look at me! You said I was a socialist but I just made cuts to entitlement programs that not even George W. Bush could accomplish! Does the Washington press give me credit for ‘leadership’ now?”

If I hear any pundits try and spin this as a victory for President Obama—“He was able to bring Republicans to the table in the end and he came off looking like the adult in the room”—I’m going to have to fight very hard to stifle the impulse to throw something at my television.

Obama is now handing the plutocrats and their Republican Party stooges one of the biggest political victories they’ve scored in a generation. The cuts they’ll end up getting will actually be more than they originally asked for, and there will be absolutely no revenue increases whatsoever—not so much as the closing of a corporate-jet loophole. The plutocrats get everything they want—or at least a clear path towards achieving everything they want—and the progressives who are the only ones actually fighting for the economic interests of the American people—get absolutely none of what they want.

And keep in mind that this whole thing was all for the sake of getting Republicans to vote for something that they’ve voted to do every single year prior to this one, purely as a matter of procedure. In order to get the Republicans to agree to pay the bills that Congress has already accumulated, Obama has handed them a deal sweeter than their corporate masters could ever have imagined.

As I wrote in my last piece, Obama could have put a stop to this at any time, either by invoking the 14^th Amendment or referring to a clause in the Public Debt Deal of 1941 that gives him the power to direct the Treasury Secretary to pay the outstanding bills without any approval from Congress at all. There was never any “debt crisis” in the first place, but by acting like there was and playing along with the Republicans throughout the whole process, he’s not only given away the farm this time around but set the stage for the plutocrats to get even more of what they want by doing the same thing again in the future. For Obama, who has been working against his own team from the beginning, this is truly a Flawless Defeat.

If you’re as angry about this as I am, call your representatives and tell them to vote against this deal. Don’t worry—the United States will not default on its debt. The plutocrats would never have allowed that to happen in the first place, which is the biggest reason this whole thing has been nothing more than a charade. They’ve only allowed their puppets in congress to dangle this bluff in front of the American people (with the help of the Tea Party who’ve played their role throughout this process perfectly…if unwittingly) to make it seem as though some kind of “debt ceiling deal” was necessary. No deal was necessary. No deal is necessary now. They can raise the debt ceiling without any deal, and if push comes to shove they will.

If Democrats block the deal, it will force the president’s hand. He can not let the United States default on its debt—it would be political suicide and the plutocrats wouldn’t allow it anyway—so he will have no choice but to act unilaterally to get the Treasury Secretary to pay America’s bills and put an end to this nonsense once and for all. Not only that, but setting the precedent that the president can bypass Congress on this issue will prevent these shenanigans from ever happening again in the future, taking one more card out of the plutocrats’ hands.

It would probably hurt the president politically in the short term (he’d be instantly slammed as a “dictator” by the right-wing), but I think a bold move like that would actually help him in the long-term, and I think if he takes this deal his hopes for re-election are over anyway. No one is going to care how reasonable he looks—if the economy is still struggling come Election Day 2012 (and if these cuts pass there’s no doubt that it will be), he’s going to lose handily.

But I’m beyond the point of caring. No Republican president would have been able to accomplish such a massive surge of upward-wealth-redistribution because the Democratic Party would have had to stand united against such a thing. These Democrats will go along with the president simply because they’re in his party and they don’t want to stand up to him.

But why should we, the American people, care if we’re hurting the president politically when all he’s doing is hurting us economically? If he really and truly had no choice but to accept this abomination of a bill, you could make an argument that we should have his back. But he didn’t have to accept this at all, and he still doesn’t. We just have to force him not to.

Unfortunately, I don’t think our phone calls will be enough to stop this bullet-train now. The plutocrats are already making their phone calls telling everyone to get in line and let them take their Flawless Victory. And as long as most Americans are still too lazy, stupid, or uninformed to care enough to finally rise up and push back against them, their victories will continue to be flawless.

I’ve been holding off on ranting about these debt negotiations for weeks, mostly because I’ve already blasted President Obama for his political incompetence and/or malfeasance so many times that there’s nothing new to say. But as the clock ticks down to the arbitrary deadline for raising this arbitrary debt ceiling and the news media milks all of the drama out of this absurd charade as they possibly can, I just want to briefly remind everyone that there was never any need for this “crisis” in the first place and that it’s still completely possible for the President to have the debt ceiling raised without striking any kind of deal with Republicans.

To just briefly clarify my position, I think the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling have been leading to one of the worst deals for the American people that a Democratic president has ever been willing to accept. I agree with economists like Robert Reich that now is not the time to make massive spending cuts, and I stand with the majority of the American people in believing that while eliminating waste in our national budget should absolutely be a long-term priority, what’s needed most in the here-and-now of the recession is more spending to create jobs, thus putting more money in the hands of the middle class and spurring demand to help kick-start the economy again. Once unemployment is reduced, then we can talk about debt reduction.

Instead of making this case however, our compromiser-in-chief has been playing the same bipartisan-posturing game he always plays and agreeing with the Republicans that debt-reduction should be Priority One in order to appear like the most reasonable man in the room. He’s certainly succeeded in appearing that way and it’s going to help him politically in the short-term, but he seems oblivious to the fact that there will be consequences to the painful cuts he’s willing to make and that if he does nothing to reduce unemployment between now and Election Day 2012, the American people—most of whom don’t pay close attention to politics—are going to fire him no matter how reasonable he appears today.

The most pull-your-hair-in-frustration part of this entire debacle is the fact that it never needed to come to this in the first place. The debt ceiling can be raised without any debt ceiling deal whatsoever. The Republicans are holding the economy hostage [again] in order to force the president to meet their draconian demands, and he’s playing along because he thinks conceding to these demands (and acting like he agrees with most of them in the first place) helps him politically. But it turns out there’s no need to meet any of these demands at all—the Republicans are writing ransom notes but they’re not actually holding anything hostage.

By now almost everyone has heard of the idea of invoking the 14^th Amendment to get around Republican threats not to raise the debt ceiling. Because it says that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned” the President could theoretically declare that the United States will pay the money that Congress has already appropriated no matter what threats the opposition party is issuing.

What far fewer people are aware of—and I didn’t even know about this until receiving an e-mail about it this morning—is that there’s a way around these debt ceiling negotiations in the debt-ceiling law itself. Quoting now from the Public Debt Law of 1941:

The face amount of obligations issued under this chapter and the face amount of obligations whose principal and interest are guaranteed by the United States Government (except guaranteed obligations held by the Secretary of the Treasury) may not be more than [some arbitrary huge number] . . .

With the approval of the President, the Secretary of the Treasury may borrow on the credit of the United States Government amounts necessary for expenditures authorized by law.

By now it’s painfully clear to all of us that the full faith and credit of the United States should not be placed in the hands of children (i.e. politicians) to play political games with. Luckily, the drafters of the public debt law were wise enough to give the president the express and unilateral authority to direct the Treasury Secretary to cover any and all expenditures that have already been authorized by Congress. We can negotiate all day long over future spending, but money that’s already been appropriated must be spent no matter what the clowns on Capitol Hill have to say about it.

Whether he invokes the 14^th Amendment or the Public Debt Law of 1941, the best thing the President can do for the middle class, for the markets, and for the international reputation of the United States is to end these absurd debt talks now, save Medicare and Social Security from the cuts he’s been poised to make to them, and proclaim to the American people and our foreign creditors that no matter what kinds of political games get played in Washington, the United States of America always pays its bills.

Yes, he’d take a short-term hit for waiting so long to do this, and the conservative media would blast him mercilessly for shutting Republicans out of the process (they’d no doubt accuse him of behaving like a dictator) but in the long-term I believe it would not just help America but help Obama as well, as he’s been desperately needing to flex some muscles and show some spine for quite some time, and if he doesn’t do it now—with both the majority of Americans and the law on his side—he never will.

If you feel as I do, please take a moment to visit this link and have a fax submitted to the White House and your representatives in your name saying as much. We can still get the debt ceiling raised without having to swallow this awful budget-slashing legislation they’ve been working on, but only if we make it clear to our elected officials that we’re aware of the fact that we can.

As someone who believes that the democratic process in America is pretty much dead and buried, election results that go against the establishment always surprise me. Even with all the talk leading up to the special election in New York’s 26^th district about how the seat might go to a Democrat even though it’s one of the country’s reddest districts and has been held by Republicans since the Civil War, I still assumed the Republicans would hold on to it.

But I underestimated just how bi-partisan the opposition to Paul Ryan’s budget plan would be. He proposed that Medicare be replaced with a voucher program, basically giving senior-citizens a coupon to go buy insurance on the private market. Naturally, senior-citizens aren’t too optimistic about putting their lives in the hands of private insurance companies (most non-senior-citizens aren’t too happy about it either but that’s another matter) so when the Republican candidate Jane Corwin announced her support for the plan, her poll numbers started dropping and she wound up losing the election, much to my great surprise.

I figured that Republicans wouldn’t have made such a radical proposal if they hadn’t believed they could survive it politically. Medicare is an extremely popular government program that even die-hard conservatives want protected. The same goes for Social Security, and you can ask George W. Bush just how popular the idea of privatizing that is with the American people.

The truth is that as much as they may rail against it, Americans love their socialism. Talking about getting rid of these programs has always been akin to political suicide. This seems completely obvious, pretty much Politics 101. If you want to keep your seat in Congress, keep your hands off Social Security and Medicare.

But the oligarchs have had their eyes on these programs for a long time and they’ve been dying to kill them for decades in order to free up room in the national budget for more tax-cuts for corporations and the wealthy. To finally pull the plug on the last bit of national wealth being distributed to the middle-class and make sure it now all goes to the very top. Once the top 1% have more money than everyone else combined, it’s check-mate and game over.

This moment in American politics seemed to be the right time to finally make their move. All the pieces were in place. Fox News has had plenty of time to sufficiently brainwash a large portion of the population that all social spending is evil and that trickle-down economics is the only fiscal policy that works (even though it’s been obvious for at least 20 years that it doesn’t). The Koch Brothers and other wealthy elites have been financing and pulling the strings of this Tea Party movement which their pals in the media have helpfully inflated out of proportion and created the impression of a sweeping grassroots rebellion among middle-class Americans who are apparently demanding that the rich take more of their money. And most importantly, their pawns on the Supreme Court have ruled that Corporations can spend as much money as they want in elections.

The thinking was that it no longer matters what most Americans think. As long as your proposals are perceived to have public support—and the media makes sure they are—you can safely do the bidding of the oligarchs without concern for what the majority actually thinks. Enough money will be spent on negative ads against your opponent that your seat will be safe and you can go on doing your corporate masters’ bidding in perpetuity.

But apparently we’re not at that point just yet. In spite of the massive amount of money spent to defeat the Democrat Kathy Hochul in the special election in New York’s 26^th, she still emerged victorious. And while Fox News and other media outlets are trying to downplay the importance of the Medicare issue (lest the American people find out that they’re pretty much in agreement on it) it’s clear that the result was due to people’s fear of losing Medicare.

The oligarchs overreached this time, and they’ll presumably put their plans to gut Medicare back on the shelf for awhile. Democracy, in this case, seems to have worked. Despite all the media-spin and big money donations to keep one of their puppets in that seat, the American people spoke and definitively rejected their plan. We believe the government should take care of the elderly, and we let our leaders know it.

But the fight is by no means over—not by any stretch of the imagination. This only demonstrates that we are in fact still capable of winning if we actually choose to fight. The oligarchs have put us in check but they haven’t check-mated us just yet. That doesn’t mean that in just a few more moves we’ll find ourselves trapped in the scenario I described above in which corporations can force through whatever legislation they want regardless of how unpopular it is.

If the Democrats were smart and/or not bought by the same corporate interests as the entire Republican Party, they’d take this cue to go on the offensive. Instead of merely running their 2012 campaigns on the promise of defending Medicare from the Republicans who want to kill it, they could (and should) vow to expand Medicare: to re-ignite the push for a public healthcare option by proposing that anyone can buy-in to Medicare regardless of age. The contrast between the parties this year would be sharper than ever: one party wants to kill Medicare, the other wants to make it available to everybody. If New York’s 26^th is any indication, we’d probably see a massive Democratic sweep the likes of which we haven’t seen in modern history.

Unfortunately, Democrats don’t seem to have any desire to be so bold. They’re not going to take the lesson that New York’s 26^th could teach them—that popular support still counts for more than Big Money donations. They apparently still believe that democracy is as dead as I thought it was and the only way to hold on to political power is to cater to the wealthy and corporate elite.

I would not be shocked if President Obama announces that in the spirit of bi-partisan compromise he will make a few modest cuts to Medicare and Social Security, thus securing a great deal of campaign money for himself at the expense of a few more progressive voters. He’s banking on the fact that the Republican primary will weed out any serious candidate who might stand a chance against him, so his only opponent will be so far to the right-wing fringe that he can win as a center-right candidate.

True democracy is dying, gasping for air under the weight of corporate power and income inequality, but the fact that a Democrat can win in one of the country’s most Republican districts because a majority of voters agreed on an important issue is proof that it’s not dead yet. It can be resuscitated, but only if we remain active and not expect our politicians to do it for us.

I will try to make this as brief as possible because I want to increase the likelihood that people will read it. If you agree with my assessment, I hope you’ll spread this around the internet far and wide, because this is a conversation that needs to happen NOW if it happens at all. Running a progressive candidate against Barack Obama will require a year of fund-raising, and the Iowa caucus is a year away.

I never thought I’d advocate challenging Obama in the 2012 election, but I also never thought that after two years of a Democratic president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, things would still be this bad.

Foreign policy-wise, the troops are still in Iraq and our presence in Afghanistan has escalated. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base are still open. The torturers have not been punished nor even investigated, and the president has now claimed the power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process of law.

Domestically, our government is still illegally spying on its citizens. Private health insurance companies still have no competition to prevent them from profiting by letting people die. Wall Street is continuing the practices that crashed the economy and unless more measures are taken it’s only a matter of time before the second crash comes. The climate change issue has gone completely unaddressed and Big Oil and Coal can continue to rake in record profits. And now, the national debt and deficit will continue to sky-rocket for a minimum of two years as the completely un-necessary and un-stimulative tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans are extended. Presumably, this decrease in revenue will be balanced by decreases in spending, and it looks like Social Security is first on the chopping block.

“But wait,” you might say, “didn’t he sign a measure strengthening registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists?” Yes, you can easily rattle off a long list of small-ball accomplishments that we could never have expected from a Republican president, but most of these things can be done or un-done with the stroke of a pen. When it comes to the fights that really count, the things that go to the heart of the broken system, this president has consistently maintained the status quo.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Obama’s advisors started talking about how the tax-cut deal he struck with Republicans would actually be good for the country. Fox News commentators are actually praising Obama for finally “admitting” that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs, and because Obama has now made Bush’s economic policy his own, he has no choice but to defend it. It’s absurd to think he’ll fight to let them expire in two years if he wasn’t willing to do that when he still had wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democratic president will now be pushing for Republican policies and defending them with Republican talking points. Presumably, we’re going to start hearing him agree with his deficit commission that cuts need to be made to Social Security.

At this point, it has to be acknowledged that unless we issue a primary challenge to Obama, we will essentially have two Republican candidates in 2012.

The objection to this strategy is clear: A primary challenge is likely to fail and it will only weaken Obama and hurt his chances to win the general election. And wouldn’t a Republican president be worse?

Until last week I would have agreed with you. But then I asked myself this question, and I hope you’ll ask yourselves the same:

Which is worse for America? A Republican president who tries to implement Republican policies which progressives and the majority of Americans can rally against to stop those policies from going through? Or a Democratic president who acts as though he has no choice but to implement Republican policies, in which case the progressive movement is fractured and there is not enough unified opposition to prevent them from going through?

Ideally, a primary challenge would result in a true progressive in the White House who will finally draw lines in the sand and be willing to take sides with the American people and against the upper class. But if not, it’s beginning to look like a second Obama term would actually be worse for America than a Republican.

I’m not sure why, but even though everyone expected it, even though I called it a month ago, I’m still extremely angry about Obama’s decision to cave in to the Republicans on the Bush tax-cut issue. Perhaps I’d been holding out some hope until the very end. Perhaps it’s because no matter how angry you anticipate you’ll be when somebody does something you find despicable, you don’t fully feel the anger until they’ve actually done it.

I won’t spend too much time going into all of the reasons why extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans is a bad idea in terms of policy—I think most people already understand that trickle-down economics is bunk and that the more money we borrow from China the worse-off our country is—but it’s a far worse decision in terms of politics. In this case, the politics are more important than the policy because this sets the tone for the next two years and will thus have a significant impact on every policy to be addressed during that time.

First of all, it’s important to know what public opinion is on this issue. In a recent CBS news poll only 26% of responders said they believed the tax-cuts should continue for everyone. 53% said they should only continue for income under $250,000 a year, and 14% said they should all expire. If you add up the last two numbers, that’s 67% of Americans who want the tax-cuts for the wealthy to expire to just 26% who want them to continue. Public opinion is overwhelmingly against extending the tax-cuts for the rich (even just among Republicans, the numbers are 52% opposed to 46% in favor).

There are those who say that making a deal with Republicans was a political necessity. Obama did what he had to do. It was the responsible thing. The Republicans would have blocked unemployment benefits for people badly needing them unless Obama agreed to a two-year extension of the Bush tax-cuts. Obama used an appropriate metaphor, painting the Republicans as terrorists holding the middle class and the unemployed hostage. He said that while you shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, sometimes it’s necessary to prevent the hostages from being harmed.

But that’s only half the analogy. If you cave in to the terrorists’ demands they may release the hostages this time, but it only encourages more hostage taking in the future. The Republicans know exactly how to manipulate Obama. They’ve been doing it for the last two years and will continue to do it for the next two years unless Obama finally stands up to them. Sometimes you have to let the hostages get hurt to prevent harm to future hostages. Show the terrorists that taking hostages is not a winning strategy, and they’ll have to find a different one.

So what could Obama have done? It’s very simple, and it would have been a far better strategy than caving in:

Call the Republicans’ bluff. Make them filibuster. Make them hold up every single piece of legislation until the 111th Congress expires, and at the beginning of next year all taxes would go up across the board, for the rich and the middle class alike. Make it clear that it is the Republican Party that is responsible for taxes going up, that their obstruction is the reason the unemployed have stopped receiving benefits, that the START treaty hasn’t been ratified, and so on. Make it as clear as possible to the American people (most of whom are already on your side) that the Number One priority of the Republican Party is getting tax cuts for their rich friends, and that they’re willing to let the middle class, the unemployed, and national security suffer just to help out the people who are least in need of help.

At the very beginning of the next legislative session, introduce new tax-cut legislation completely separate from the Bush plan. Cut taxes for the bottom 98% of Americans if you must, but refuse to include any cuts for the top 2%. Include an extension of unemployment benefits along with compensation for whatever the unemployed had been deprived of thanks to Republican obstruction.

Dare the Republicans to filibuster this. They probably will at first. But how long do you think they’d be able to hold out? Every single night, even the least informed Americans will turn on the TV and hear about how their taxes have gone up and the unemployed aren’t getting the money they need to heat their homes because Republicans insist that the rich aren’t rich enough. Do you think the majority of Americans will blame the president for not caving in? Or will they blame the Republican leaders whose shrill cries of “but…but…but the job-creators!” will grow increasingly hollow as this drags on.

The media may even decide to look deeper into the issue—to research the impact of personal income-tax reduction for the wealthiest Americans and actually inform their viewers that it doesn’t create jobs! (Honestly, they’ll still probably be too afraid of accusations of bias that they won’t do it. If the facts come down solely on one side of a political argument, the media’s tendency is not to report those facts.)

But if the Republicans are pressed, they will fold. They’ll see which way the political winds are blowing, they’ll notice their approval ratings plummeting, they’ll hear from their staffers just how many angry calls they’re getting every day from people demanding to know why they can’t feed their children because the rich need more money, and they will end the filibuster and let the bill come to a vote.

Republicans are cowardly politicians just like the Democrats, and if someone stands up to them they will cave in. But Obama has yet to stand up to them.

If he actually did fight back and won this political victory, it would set a great the tone for the next two years. Republicans would know that they can no longer get away with blocking everything, and Democrats would know that if they’re willing to fight they can win.

Furthermore, Obama’s disaffected base would be completely re-energized. Hope would be resurrected. Change would be back on the table. Perhaps now would be the time to bring the public option back up for debate or to impose stricter regulations on Wall Street.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives may uniformly oppose these things, but if the people can clearly see which party is trying to get things done and which party wants to spend all of its time investigating the White House while the economy suffers, they’ll reward the party that’s fighting and punish the one that’s obstructing. Obama will get a second term and fresh congressional majorities in 2012 and he can become the Change president we all hoped he would be.

Oh, but it’s too late. The deal is done. Obama has decided to let the Bush tax-cuts continue, thus empowering the Republicans to get whatever they want for the next two years just by threatening to filibuster.

To make matters worse, the “Bush tax-cuts” will henceforth be known as the “Obama/Bush tax-cuts” and Obama will have no defense against the Republicans howling about the deficit in the next election. The tax-cuts will add an extra $700 billion to the deficit and the Republicans will put the responsibility squarely on Obama’s shoulders in spite of their hand in it.

Obama won’t be able to defend himself, because the responsibility was squarely on his shoulders, and he shirked it. He negotiated with the terrorists, compromised himself and the country, and when the terrorists come back and blame him for the harm to the country that they made him do, he’ll have no excuse. It’s over. The terrorists win.

As a follow-up to my extremely pessimistic post-election day rant on Wednesday, I was going to write a lengthy entry today about all of the silver linings in the dark cloud that was Tuesday’s mid-term election. From the Tea Party’s losses to the corporate-friendly ballot initiatives that failed, there were a few reasons to feel relieved or even slightly hopeful, but because there are a couple of other things I feel compelled to comment on today I’ll make this a short post and focus on what I see as the most significantly positive thing about the elections: the heavy losses suffered by the Blue Dog coalition.

If anyone reading this doesn’t know, the “Blue Dogs” are a caucus of Democrats from more Republican-leaning districts who tout themselves as fiscal conservatives. The caucus arose in 1994 out of the idea that the Democratic Party had suffered so badly in those mid-terms because it had drifted too far to the left. The Blue Dogs have been a thorn in the side of liberal Democrats ever since, attempting to win over the voters in their home districts by standing in opposition to their own party from time to time. Most memorably, it was the Blue Dogs who forced the most painful concessions in last year’s debate over health care reform. Had it not been for them, we might have ended up with some kind of public option or Medicare buy-in.

But rather than push to make the bill more progressive, they stood against it until they felt it was sufficiently conservative, i.e. acceptable to the private health insurance industry. They bowed before all of the conservative propaganda about how a public option was akin to some kind of socialist takeover of government and voted against the bill until the very end. They believed they could have it both ways—get points for opposing the bill and points for passing it. They believed their voters would interpret their actions as moderate and centrist, which they believed is what Americans want to see from their elected representatives.

Well, it turns out they were wrong. 22 of the 46 Blue Dogs running for re-election on Tuesday lost their seats. This may not seem like a total blow-out, but considering how difficult it is to unseat an incumbent, a loss of nearly half their caucus is a pretty big deal.

If anyone in Washington would actually get the right message for once, they’d interpret this to mean that you can’t have it both ways. Liberals hated the Blue Dogs for standing in the way of progressive policies, and conservatives hated the Blue Dogs for being Democrats. This is a polarized nation. Nobody votes for a candidate based on how indistinguishable they are from the other party’s candidates. Blue Dogs behaved like Republicans but it turned out Republican voters would rather have the genuine article.

Maybe now Democratic politicians won’t be so eager to work against their own party in an effort to win independents. The Blue Dog caucus is now powerless in the House, as congressional Republicans no longer need to reach out to them in order to swing votes their way. They might as well just vote with their party, as nobody is going to give them any credit for switching sides.

Now if we could just get the message through to Obama…

A must-read article recently appeared in the New York Times magazine which provides a great deal of insight into the mindset of the Obama administration as it anticipates significant losses in the upcoming mid-term elections.

The article is eight pages long and covers a wide range of topics, but what struck me most was this passage at the end:

Obama expressed optimism to me that he could make common cause with Republicans after the midterm elections. “It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,” he said, “either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”

*heavy sigh*

Really?

Really, Barack? You think the republicans are going to start acting responsibly after the elections? That they’re going to start working with you to pass bi-partisan legislation to improve the lives of the American people?

I would ask you if you’ve been paying any attention at all to the Republican Party over the last two years if I hadn’t just read eight pages indicating quite clearly that you have. So how is it that you think this same Republican Party that has opposed you at every turn to the point where they stop supporting legislation they’ve always favored just because you support it too is going to suddenly start working with you after the mid-terms?

Even if they wanted to, the Tea Party wouldn’t stand for it. Any compromise, any cooperation whatsoever will be met with cries of treason.

You might think that the obstructionist strategy might be abandoned if it results in a failure to take control of the House, but the conservative base these days is not results-oriented. They’d rather have a minority of ideologically pure conservatives than a majority of moderates willing to work with an evil Kenyan-socialist-Muslim-terrorist-sympathizer.

You might think that if the republicans do take control they’ll feel some sense of responsibility to make the economy better, but that’s an idiotic notion as well. Not only would they see their obstruct-everything strategy as having paid off and thus decide to double-down in preparation for 2012, but they’ll still have a vested interest in making sure the American people (except the very rich) are suffering financially because all of the blame can be laid at the feet of the Democratic president. Even now they blame the economic crisis not on Bush but on the democrats in congress. They never take responsibility for anything, and they sure as hell aren’t going to start if they win back the House.

No, if republicans take control of the House as everyone expects they will, we can expect an endless slew of investigations into bullshit accusations against democrats and quite possibly an effort to impeach Obama for whatever ridiculous charge they can come up with. They’ve found that political success on the right is as easy as making Obama into Public Enemy #1 and fighting him as forcefully as possible.

The rest of the article suggests that Obama plans to spend the next two years treading softly and not pushing for anything too big. Great. That’s just what we need. Now that we’ve dealt with this country’s massive, blood-spurting wounds by slapping a few band-aids on them, we can focus our attention on the little cuts and bruises and hope everyone just forgets about the missing limbs.

And while we’re at it, let’s invite the people responsible for chopping off those limbs and making sure the wounds stay open to help us out with the little things. Maybe they will. Obama seems to think so.

I spent so much time working on yesterday’s epic blog entry that I need to keep this one short and sweet. It’s not a particularly important issue (unless you’re a crack-smoker) but it says an awful lot about the way in which the spineless democrats are governing.

You may have heard of the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Crack is the same substance as cocaine, only made to be smoked rather than snorted. For whatever reason, it tends to be the drug of choice for poverty-stricken minorities living in the inner-city. Powder cocaine is more often used by white kids out in the suburbs.

During the 1980s people were positively hysterical about drugs (thank you Nancy Reagan), and politicians needed to show how tough they were on this issue. So they rushed to pass legislation imposing a strict mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison for possession of just five grams of crack cocaine (not very much). Apparently they forgot about powder cocaine, which you’d need to possess five hundred grams of (a whole heck of a lot) in order to trigger the five-year sentence.

And so we’ve had a 100:1 sentencing disparity since then, resulting in a disproportionate number of minorities going to prison rather than whites simply because for them crack is easier to come by. Chris Weigant writes:

It’s as if we decided to make coffee illegal, and instituted mandatory minimums for possessing five cups of coffee — while at the same time applying the same penalty only if you were caught with 500 cups of espresso. Or made water illegal, but set a much higher bar for possessing 500 ice cubes. Either way, it is the same substance. The only thing which differs is the penalty for the “lower class” version of the substance.

One of Obama’s many campaign promises was to eliminate this disparity, and in typical Obama-fashion this issue was addressed this past week and the result was—you guessed it—a compromise. They eliminated the mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack cocaine, and upped the amount you need to possess to trigger the five-year sentence from 5 grams to 28 grams. The sentencing disparity is no longer 100 to 1—now it’s 18 to 1.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m amazed they did anything at all. Politicians are so petrified of being labeled “soft on drugs” (because they’re all still trapped in 1987) that it’s a wonder they even addressed this issue at all. But seriously—why not go all the way? The problem wasn’t that the disparity was too great but that there was any disparity at all.

This is the kind of weak governance that exemplifies the nature of the Democratic-controlled congress of these last two years. Make progressive changes but only a little, lest the republicans attack you for being too radically liberal. Never mind the fact that they’re already accusing you of being radically liberal and they’d be doing that no matter what—just pretend that the other side is rational.

Just imagine that their negative campaign ads will go like this: “Congressman Soandso is a soft-on-crime liberal. He voted to reduce the penalty for possession of crack cocaine. Although to be fair, he didn’t reduce it as much as he could have, so he deserves a little credit.”

These people are idiots if they think anyone at all is going to give them any credit whatsoever for not going all the way on this. It would be as though a century ago lawmakers said, “We strongly believe that women have the right to vote, but just to show how reasonable we are we’ll only make their vote count half.”

When are they going to realize how pathetic they look?

Just another quick comment today, this one on the corrupt and spineless senate democrats:

After almost a year of trying to build consensus, top Democrats on Thursday admitted that a sweeping climate and energy bill simply couldn’t be done, faulting Republicans for being unwilling to contribute neither votes nor ideas toward forging a compromise. At a press conference on the Hill, climate crusader Sen. John Kerry called the prospect “admittedly narrow.” Majority Leader Harry Reid followed with a frank conclusion: “We simply don’t have the votes.”

I would be much more angry about this if I thought that the legislation would have had a serious impact on America’s energy policy and the global climate crisis, but had they moved forward we would have no doubt ended up with something weak and ineffective that wouldn’t have really solved anything or brought about real change but would have somehow benefited the oil and coal companies.

Still, just in terms of the gesture itself, this is one big “fuck you” to everyone who voted for Obama and congressional democrats. A radical, “Apollo-style” transformation of American energy policy was one of Obama’s central campaign platforms, and they’re just saying it’s too difficult—they don’t have the votes.

Of course you don’t fucking have the votes! You never have the votes at the very beginning. Too many democrats (as well as every last republican) are owned by the fossil fuel industry. The last thing they want is to have to vote on something that will either piss off their constituents or piss off their energy-industry pals. You have to push the legislation and call on your supporters to put pressure on these people to do the right thing. You never start off with enough votes—you have to fight to get them.

But instead they’ve decided not to fight at all. They piss their constituents off, but there’s no prolonged battle, it’s not in the headlines, nobody is talking about it, and therefore [they think] nobody suffers any electoral consequences for it.

But the worst part is that they’re saying “Now is not the right time. It’s too difficult.” Right, with a Democrat in the White House and overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, passing legislation that the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have been demanding for decades is just too hard. Maybe after the mid-term elections when the Republican Party [presumably] takes over again, it’ll be easier.

I really hate these people.