Kemstone's Journal

The Iowa caucuses were last night, and after months and months of exciting horse-race politics in which nearly every single Republican candidate surged to front-runner status and then fell back again, the winner was the guy everybody originally thought would win.

Mitt Romney came in first place ahead of Rick Santorum by just 8 votes. The narrow margin made the night as dramatic as the rest of the race has been so far, but like the entire presidential electoral process in general, it was mostly inconsequential. Santorum only did so well because his popularity happened to peak at just the right time, but like every other alternative-to-Romney candidate in the field, his numbers will plummet once people start paying more attention to him.

And so as early as January 5, with only one primary contest finished and ten months to go before the general election, I can boldly pronounce who the winner of the 2012 election will be: Wall Street, and the rest of Corporate America.

It’s all over, folks. The corporate plutocracy that owns the media and our politicians now has this one in the bag. They already own Barack Obama, and they’ve owned Mitt Romney for quite some time. Both of these guys have demonstrated that they will do whatever the big corporations want them to do, with a few minor exceptions Obama has to make for political reasons (e.g. the consumer financial protection bureau).

The choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a choice between two different brands of the same product. It’s like being offered Pepsi or Coke when what you really want is orange juice. (Or more accurately, it’s like a choice between Coca-Cola and Royal Crown Cola, both of which are owned by the same company.)

The powerful financial interests which make up the establishment would call the shots no matter who gets elected, be it Obama, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, or almost any of the others. There are only three candidates in the entire race who would not be beholden to them: 1- Rocky Anderson, who is a third-party candidate and therefore has no chance, 2- Buddy Roemer (a.k.a. “who is that?”) and 3- Ron Paul.

Yes, the last best chance for real change in 2012 was a Ron Paul victory in Iowa. He was the only real threat to the establishment, but they were able to snuff it out in Iowa. Unfortunately, he was too easy of a target.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s a lot to dislike about Ron Paul. Those racist newsletters are a disastrous reflection on his character and his obvious lies to pretend he knew nothing about them made it clear that he’s not quite as honest as he seems. His die-hard libertarianism, if fully implemented, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But he’s not running for dictator. He’s running for president, and the president does not have nearly the kind of power it would require for him to implement his entire agenda. He would try to eliminate the department of commerce, of education, of energy, the EPA, and so on, but Congress wouldn’t let him. There would be bipartisan opposition to all extremist legislation he proposes, and while a few Republicans would take his side in some fights, the vast majority are owned by the establishment and the establishment would make defeating him their top priority.

On the other hand, there are certain things the president has the power to do all on his own without approval from Congress. He could and would stand against the military industrial complex and get our troops out of Afghanistan immediately, saving billions of dollars of the national budget currently being wasted. He could end the war on drugs, freeing up law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and deal a death-blow to the cartels. Finally, he could aggressively go after and prosecute every single one of those Wall Street bankers who committed the fraud that crashed the economy and then walked away with millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses.

But this is all a fantasy. Ron Paul would never win the Republican nomination, though I think he’d probably stand the best chance of beating Barack Obama because unlike any other Republican he actually appeals to liberals for the reasons stated above. No progressive is going to vote for Romney, but plenty would be tempted to vote for Ron Paul.

At the very least, a Ron Paul nomination would turn the establishment media on its head. The mainstream media, owned by the same corporations that own the government, would throw everything they have at Paul including, possibly, rational arguments over policy! There would be a real debate over things like the proper extent of the role of government in people’s lives, and conservatives would look at his extreme views and be forced to acknowledge that it should at least play some role. There would be a real discussion over the efficacy of the war on drugs, and if enough people look at the statistics it might finally tip the scales against prohibition, an obviously failed and counter-productive policy. Finally, we’d have a real debate over the wars, and with the Democratic candidate in favor of them and the Republican candidate against, people would have to consider their own opinion instead of just accepting the default position of their team.

But the best thing about the imaginary Paul vs. Obama scenario is that Fox News and the rest of the conservative corporate media would take Obama’s side. After all, he’s a part of the establishment and Paul is not. It serves their purposes to be against Obama now because they are still hoping for a more corporate-friendly president, but if Paul were to be the Republican nominee all that nonsense about Obama being a socialist left-wing radical would go straight out the window and the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity would be talking night after night about how Obama has actually been governing pretty much like a moderate Republican.

Sadly, none of that will happen now, so the establishment can rest easy. There will be no real change this year. The middle-class continues to be squeezed and squeezed but the tipping point has not yet been reached and that slowly roasting kettle will not boil over. In 2011 many people finally took to the streets in a genuine rebellion against the establishment, but that political energy will be absorbed by the election as people eventually accept a candidate and line up behind them. Instead of fighting for real change, most of these people will be fighting to re-elect Obama for the sole reason that they believe Romney will be far worse. But in reality, it will make almost no difference.

The American presidential electoral process used to have the potential to bring about change, but ever since the government has been completely absorbed by the corporations and all of the candidates bought by the same interests, it’s become little more than a sideshow—a useful distraction for the politically-active to direct their energy away from actually fighting for real issues. It’s only January, but the election is already over. The 1% win. The rest of us lose.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” –Gandhi

It feels like a lifetime since I’ve posted a political blog entry, but I just can’t resist adding my voice to the chants going out from Wall Street and all across America these days. About two months ago I moved to Japan and since then my focus on politics has taken a back-seat to the major life-changes I’ve been going through. It wasn’t long after I look my leave-of-absence from the political world that thousands of my fellow citizens found themselves diving in head-first and igniting a movement that has the potential to completely change the American political landscape for a generation. This post intends to serve the dual purposes of A) spreading some of my optimism about the potential of the Occupy Wall Street movement to bring about significant political change and B) keeping with the primary purpose of my political writing which has always been to provide like-minded people with arguments to potentially sway conservative-leaning yet open-minded citizens to our point of view.

First and foremost, you should tell your conservative friends that if they like the Tea Party, they should love the Occupiers. After all, this is a grassroots movement of citizens disillusioned with the broken system standing up and demanding change. I seem to recall the pundits on Fox News and other cable channels lauding the Tea Party for that very reason—regardless of their specific views, they were participating in the political process in the full spirit of the American tradition of Free Speech and the right to organize. You’d think that even if they disagree with the message of the Occupiers, they should at least acknowledge that their zeal for peaceful demonstration is as American as it gets, and intrinsically no more or less valuable than that of the Tea Party.

Of course, we know that there is in fact a world of difference between what lies at the core of the Tea Party and what drives the Occupiers. While it’s true that most of the average citizens who go to Tea Party rallies are well-intentioned people who honestly believe in the message they’re sending, their movement is “grassroots” in name only—it is in fact a collection of various political organizations funded by right-wing think-tanks like Americans for Prosperity which are themselves funded by the wealthiest Americans and corporations, the very people who are responsible for the economic conditions the Tea Partiers’ anger is a product of. Their anger is justified and their willingness to protest is admirable, but they’ve been misled and misdirected into serving the enemies of the very kinds of change they really need.

Conversely, the Occupiers are a true grassroots movement, not funded by any billionaires but started “from the ground up” in the most literal sense of the term. Just a few hundred citizens decided to direct their anger at the very people responsible for their financial hardship and they took to the streets and kept at it—not just organizing a single protest for a day and then going home having been completely ignored by the media, but sticking to it until people finally started paying attention and more powerful allies began to join their fight.

The right-wing propaganda machine wants us to dismiss them as a bunch of left-wing hippies who don’t understand how the world really works, and this has worked so far and will continue to work on the Fox News audience for a long time to come, but they should be reminded as often as possible that just as the Tea Party was not quite the neo-Klan rally gathering of racists and bigots that the “liberal” media sometimes portrayed them as, neither can the Occupiers be characterized with such a broad brush. Fox News has constantly reminded us that there are Independents and Democrats among the Tea Party crowd, and we should all be reminded that there are indeed some Tea Partiers among the Occupier crowd as well.

The movement to restore fairness to the American economic system should not be considered either right-wing or left-wing and we should resist as much as we can the efforts of the corporate media to drive a wedge between the Occupiers and conservative-leaning citizens who would share their sentiments if only they were given an objective look.

I won’t waste time going into the justifications of the Occupy Wall Street movement itself, as anyone interested in understanding their message could read any of a thousand other blog posts, check out this website, or simply watch the movie Inside Job. The central fact—and it is a fact—behind this movement is that Wall Street traders, aided by their bought-and-paid-for tools in Washington (on both sides of the aisle) who’ve been deregulating their industry since the 1990s in exchange for campaign donations, inflated a financial bubble that dealt a crippling blow to the middle class when it burst. Moreover, those responsible for this fiasco have continued to thrive thanks to a giant taxpayer bailout, even awarding themselves record bonuses as if to spit in the faces of all the people they’d screwed over once they were through screwing us.

I’ll say it again: if you like the Tea Party you should love the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tea Party movement was so popular (among those who failed to follow the money) due to the perception that it was a struggle of the Little Guy against the Big Guy, a reaction to the financial crisis and the ensuing bailout that enraged everybody regardless of political affiliation. Yet somewhere along the way the anger was diverted from Wall Street and directed at the handful of people in Washington who were actually trying to fix the system. The Occupiers have brought the anger back to where it started and where it belongs, and if the success of the Tea Party is any indication it will soon be a force to be reckoned with.

Just look at what the billionaires and the corporate establishment have managed to accomplish by harnessing the momentum that the Tea Party provided them with. They were nearly able to derail health care reform entirely, and while a bill was ultimately passed it was so watered-down and establishment-friendly that its main element is actually a mandate to buy insurance from the same profit-driven companies that were the reason the American health-care system was in such need of reform in the first place. They’ve prevented anything whatsoever from getting done on climate change, deflated any pressure there might have been to restore the civil liberties demolished by the Bush administration, allowed state and local governments to slash funding for education and public services while handing out corporate tax-cuts, secured at least a two-year extension of the Bush tax-rates, and in the biggest irony of all made last years’ Wall Street Reform Act so ineffective as to ensure that if nothing else is done by the time the next bubble bursts, the entire financial-collapse and subsequent taxpayer-bailout is guaranteed to happen all over again.

Much has been made by the mainstream media about the lack of “concrete demands” from the Occupier movement. The lack of specific demands never stopped the Tea Party from having such a major influence in Washington. And if the Tea Party can be said to have made any demands at all, it was always to prevent something from getting done (e.g. “Kill the Bill!”). The spirit of the Occupier movement is to get those in power to actually do something to fix the broken system. The specifics of what that is can be debated by policymakers, but without that pressure from the ground there will never even be a debate.

One of the best suggestions is this one put forward by Alex Pareene at Salon to demand that Wall Street forgive the debts of the 99% who bailed them out. It’s got both moral and practical justifications: they’d be bankrupt if not for our help so why shouldn’t they save us from bankruptcy? Not only that, but imagine the stimulative effect on the economy if all of a sudden the middle class had all that capital freed up to spend on consumer goods rather than debt payments to banks. If the Occupiers take up this idea as a rallying cry, it might just become a real issue in the 2012 election.

The timing of this movement could hardly be more perfect, as right now the Obama White House is suffering from a complete lack of momentum and yet it still has time to change course. When he came to office Obama had a movement of energized citizens behind him but his failure to harness that energy and lead the country in a different direction caused it to fizzle out in a matter of months. If he wanted to ensure his re-election there’s a new movement full of energy just waiting to be harnessed, if he just had the political courage to stand up, take the mantle, and run with it.

Among the Occupiers’ demands, I believe the immediate firing of Tim Geithner, (referred to by insiders as “Wall Street’s man in Washington”) should be near the top of the list, along with the rest of Obama’s disastrous economic team to be replaced by people actually willing to fight the bankers and hand out indictments where appropriate. Obama has done so much to appease the Wall Street crowd and yet they still aren’t satisfied, so his best chance at redeeming his administration is to give up on their support entirely, take a cue from Franklin Roosevelt, and welcome their hatred. As the Occupy movement grows it should become increasingly clear to him that making an enemy of the most hated institution in the country is not, as the establishment-insiders in their beltway-bubble would have him believe, political suicide. He won’t need their campaign cash with such strong wind at his back.

At the very least, the Occupy movement can play the same role as the Tea Party movement in providing strong and vocal support for policies to bring about more economic fairness for the middle class, throwing its support behind any politician willing to fight for their popular and just cause and fighting tooth-and-nail against all those Wall Street puppets who stand against them.

Finally, as the number one argument that will get thrown back in your face by conservatives when you insist that the rich should pay their fair share is that “the top 1% pay 40% of all federal taxes and the bottom 51% pay no taxes at all”, I just want to offer you a couple of links that will allow you to quickly shoot down that talking-point. Here it explains that between 1987 and 2008, the top 1%’s share of the national income increased at five times the rate of their share of taxes. Here you’ll find that while the top 1% do pay 40% of all federal income taxes, when you factor in other kinds of taxes including payroll tax and sales tax their actual share is actually between 22 and 28%, right in line with the 25% of the national income they control. And here you’ll find that when you don’t just cherry pick the federal income tax, the bottom 51% do indeed pay a decent chunk of their income in taxes. You can cite these facts, or you could simply remind them that when a family making less than $30,000 a year pays 13% in taxes, they have to use everything left over to pay for food, heating, car insurance, and all the other bills, while when someone making millions of dollars a year pays 34% in taxes, they’ve still got millions left over.

The Occupy Wall Street movement deserves as much support as we can give it. It’s about time we’re seeing the pent-up rage of the middle class spilling out onto the streets, and if the history of class-struggles in the United States is any guide, there’s reason to believe that they might actually succeed.

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 haven’t written about Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks in awhile, but last night he told a story on his show that blew me away.  Hearing Cenk’s account of how MSNBC dumped him as a host in spite of his excellent ratings, then how he turned down their offer to make almost twice as much money as a contributor so long as he toned it down and kept his mouth shut about the inner workings of the network made me prouder than ever to be a TYT soldier. I think it calls for some over-the-top gushing, which I shall engage in presently in the hopes that it might get a few more people to watch the online show.

It took me far too long to discover the online news-and-commentary show The Young Turks, but once I did I couldn’t remember how I’d ever managed to digest the news without it. There are so many ways to get informed about politics these days, and while many people still believe there’s such a thing as “objective” newsmedia and that this alone is the proper way to obtain information, I’ve long since been of the opinion that there is no such thing as true objectivity, and if you’re going to listen to a news anchor or cable host every night, you might as well know exactly where they’re coming from and through what kind of lens your information is being filtered.

What made The Young Turks so perfect is that the lens through which its host Cenk Uygur views politics is almost identical to mine, and to all freethinking progressives. While most of the media still insists on framing the issues in terms of conservative Republicans vs. liberal Democrats, Cenk understands that the real power-struggle going on is between the Washington establishment (which includes Wall Street banks, oil companies, defense contractors, and every other giant corporation that buys influence in D.C.) and the masses of average American people. He’s not afraid to point out that the Democrats are not nearly as liberal as they’d have us believe, and in many cases (military spending, drug policy, and so on) the Republicans aren’t actually ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word.

But it wasn’t until President Obama started revealing his true colors as more of a Washington-insider than the People’s Champion he ran as that I started tuning into TYT every day and became a paying member. While almost every other figure in the liberal media insisted on not only giving the president the benefit of the doubt on his compromises with Republicans but singing the praises of his hollow victories like health-care reform (massive gift to insurance companies) and so-called ‘historic’ financial reform (massive gift to investment bankers), Cenk Uygur was not the least bit shy about delving into the details of these policies and loudly trumpeting his opinion—one which I and apparently hundreds of thousands of others share—that this is not the kind of ‘change’ we were promised, that Obama’s ‘accomplishments’ are little more than window-dressing, tinkering around with a few cogs in a machine that’s on the verge of a complete breakdown.

Cenk is the only one who consistently and loudly calls attention to the core problem at the heart of the American political system: the politicians do not work for the people they represent—they work for the people who pay them. As long as politicians take money from private health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies, we’ll never get real health care reform. As long as politicians take money from defense contractors, we’ll never stop wasting money on unnecessary wars. As long as politicians take money from Wall Street, our financial system will never be secure enough to prevent future collapses from happening.

This is a truth so obvious that you’d think Americans from all political backgrounds would be able to understand it, but most people are still trapped in the Left vs. Right narrative fed to them by the mainstream media, and that’s why it was such a treat to see Cenk bring this message right into the heart of the beast when he began guest-hosting some of the cable news shows on MSNBC and eventually took over as the regular host at 6 p.m.

Cenk understood that the problem with the mainstream media is essentially the same as the problem with government: the journalists work for the people who pay them, and the people who pay them work for giant corporations which themselves collect their revenue from other giant corporations. Cable-news hosts understand that certain narratives are perfectly acceptable to present, while others shouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole. They may not be explicitly ordered by the higher-ups to stay away from these themes, but it’s somewhat of an unspoken etiquette that you can be as fierce as you want towards a particular politician or political party, but the Establishment itself should always be respected.

And so it was both fascinating and delightful to watch Cenk enter the lion’s den and trample all over this etiquette, take on the talking-heads and make those heads explode. When a Republican would make a disingenuous argument, Cenk would rip them to shreds and smile while doing so, but he’d even go after so-called progressive Democrats who talked about the need for compromises such as raising the Social Security Retirement age, his incredulous reaction to their unnecessary capitulations a sweet cathartic release of my own frustration at being so casually tossed under the bus by my so-called ‘representatives’ in government.

Cenk spoke truth to power within a machine that essentially runs on deference to that power. The most iconic moment was probably the time Cenk asserted in front of an entire panel of conventional-wisdom peddlers like Jonathan Alter that over 90% of the politicians in both parties in Washington were bought-and-paid-for, and the pundits acted as though he’d just accused Mother Teresa of being a child-molester. Cenk asked them to name a few politicians that weren’t bought, and the best Alter could come up with was “Chuck Schumer”, one of Wall Street’s biggest helpers on the hill.

During Cenk’s run at MSNBC, he lent the network a certain degree of credibility that it had never had before, as it seemed that if they were going to let someone go after the establishment as forcefully as Cenk went after them, they must not be completely in the pockets of the corporate plutocracy.

But alas, it turns out that it was only a fluke. Like Howard Beale in the iconic film Network, Cenk Uygur could only “meddle with the primal forces of nature” for a short while before being taken into a back-room and told how the world really works.

According to Cenk, he was told by one of the producers there that there are ‘two audiences’: the average people to whom he appealed, and the management. And while he was having incredible success with the average people—his ratings were even higher than Ed Schultz’s had been in the same time-slot, he was crushing Wolf Blitzer on a consistent basis, and even beating Fox News among the younger demographic—the management, however, wasn’t happy. They didn’t like his ‘tone’ and felt that he wasn’t ‘playing ball’. Some ‘people in Washington’ weren’t happy with him, and as such he was under warning to tone it down a bit and show some more deference to the politicians who came on his show.

A normal person would have probably nodded his head and accepted this direction, grateful just to be given a second chance, but that’s not Cenk’s style. He promised his TYT viewers when he took the job that he would never become a tool of the establishment, and instead of backing off he doubled-down, and from April through June came down even harder on the crooked politicians, on the disingenuous Republicans, and most of all on the increasingly right-leaning Obama administration. Cenk went unscripted and spoke out forcefully, calling on progressives to stand up and fight, to stop waiting for our leaders in Washington to change things for us and to step up and demand change for ourselves.

Lo and behold, after a few months of this Cenk was called into the office again and told that he would no longer be the host at 6 p.m. They wanted him in a ‘different role’—that of a paid contributor, making the occasional appearance on some of MSNBC’s other shows, just another drop in the ocean of talking-heads at the network’s disposal. Of course, they’d be willing to pay him even more than he was making as a host. Less work, more money? Okay…what’s the catch?

The only catch, it seems, was that Cenk couldn’t talk about what had gone on behind the scenes at MSNBC. He’d basically just discovered from personal experience why the picture of Washington we get from the media is so skewed, but he couldn’t share that insight with his TYT audience if he took the deal. They told him, “Outsiders are cool, everybody would love to be an outsider…but we’re not outsiders. We’re insiders. We’re the establishment.”

Such an incredibly revealing piece of insight would be invaluable to share with The Young Turks audience, to give us a better understanding of the way the media world operates. All he had to do to remain at MSNBC as a contributor was to keep this story to himself.

And so came the Moment of Truth. Cenk had to decide which was his higher priority—his television career or his online audience. He chose us.

On behalf of all TYT members and fans, I want to express our sincerest “Thank You” to Cenk for doing the right thing. We won’t get to see him on TV anymore letting loose on the pundits and bringing the frustration of progressives out into the spotlight for the entire Washington establishment to see, but now we’ll have him all to ourselves again as he can turn all his focus and attention back to the show he created and within which he’s not bound by any strings.

I hope this is the dawn of a new era for TYT. Cenk has now been inside the beast—it swallowed him up, he didn’t sit right in its stomach, and it spit him back out—and now he knows a bit more about its inner workings. And now that he’s got nothing left to lose in terms of the establishment media, he can feel even freer to speak his mind even more forcefully than before.

Thanks to Cenk, we now have a better understanding of how the media machine works and why it’s so pathetically ill-suited to make democracy function properly: it’s not that there’s a secret cabal of powerful men in a back-room somewhere calling all the shots—it’s simply that the people in charge of the media world are closely connected to the people in charge in the political world, and as such they won’t allow their friends in the political world to be challenged too strongly. If you only watch Old Media, you will never get an untainted view of politics.

The New Media is the future of journalism, and with the unprecedented success of The Young Turks, Cenk is leading the way. His stint at MSNBC will probably be spun as a failure in the rest of the media, but to us it should be seen as a triumph. Those of us who’ve chosen to get most of our political commentary from Cenk Uygur can now be sure we picked the right guy. The story of how Cenk refused to be gobbled up by the establishment should be told far and wide, and it should help to get more people watching the show. Let’s keep spreading the word, keep recruiting new soldiers, and keep building the movement. One day it might be big enough to accomplish something, even without the help of the mainstream media.

Long live TYT!!!

On the surface, the problems affecting America appear so varied and complex that it seems absurd to suggest there’s one quick fix. But when you get down to the core it’s actually very simple, and can be explained in very few words and in such a way that almost all people can agree on regardless of ideological background. We’re not going to get anywhere until we can brush our disagreements aside and engage with each other honestly about the heart of the matter. In the following 3 paragraphs I will identify the problem and state how we can fix it. The bold-faced sections can actually stand alone as the entire argument, but I’ve buttressed these points with brief examples and explanations. None of this will be new to anyone, but its obviousness is the whole point—if I can explain it so succinctly, anybody can. My hope is that more people will reach out to those who normally disagree with them and see if we can at least agree on this.

1. The root of the problem is that some people can make incredible sums of money by doing things that harm everybody else. Investment bankers can earn huge amounts of money by inflating financial bubbles which collapse economies when they inevitably burst, energy companies earn higher profits by not spending money to protect the environment, insurance companies profit by denying people treatment, prisons profit by taking in more prisoners, and so on. This is not necessarily due to greed—it’s simply the nature of a business to try and earn as much money as possible, and to use that money to ensure that it can continue doing the things which allow it to keep earning.

2. The secondary problem is that our political system depends on campaign contributions from private donors to fund political campaigns. Politicians have a much easier time seeking large contributions from a handful of big businesses than by attempting to amass large amounts of small donations from average citizens. In order to be competitive, politicians must take money from businesses which profit by harming society. In exchange for these contributions, the politicians agree to either fight to protect the ability of these businesses to continue profiting at society’s expense, or to at least not fight very hard to stop them. As a result, the problems caused by these businesses are never fixed, and the negative effects on average people continue to accumulate.

3. Before any of America’s problems can be fixed, this central problem must be tackled first. Money must be taken out of politics if there can be any hope of politicians acting in society’s best interests as opposed to the interests of those who fund their campaigns. As long as the banking sector supplies most of the campaign money to politicians on both sides of the aisle, we can’t expect politicians to honestly reform the banking sector. As long as our politicians take money from private insurance companies, we can’t expect them to honestly reform the health care system. As long as politicians take money from energy companies, we can’t expect them to honestly work to protect the environment. These companies should have a seat at the table, but they can’t own the table. If we want politics to be about finding real solutions to problems, campaigns must be publicly financed so that politicians are elected on the merits of their ideas as opposed to how much money they can raise. Government should be the tool with which society fixes its problems, but problems can’t be fixed with a broken tool. The only way to fix the tool is to get money out of politics. Explaining how we do that, unfortunately, would require a lot more paragraphs…

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.

We’ve all heard the anecdote about cooking frogs. If you toss a live frog into a pot of boiling water, the shock of the heat will be so great that the frog will immediately leap out to save itself. But if you place the frog in a pot of lukewarm water and then slowly start to boil it, the change in temperature will happen so gradually that the frog will be boiled alive before it can realize what’s happening.

The American middle class was placed in a pot of lukewarm water three decades ago with the advent of “trickle-down” economics, and the temperature has been rising steadily ever since. More money goes to the very top by way of tax-cuts and subsidies for large corporations, and recently through massive taxpayer bailouts of giant financial institutions, and in order to make up for the deficit more money is cut from programs that benefit the middle class. The temperature in the pot has been getting increasingly uncomfortable for quite some time.

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker began his attempt to strip public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights, thus effectively removing any last shred of real political power from these middle class workers in his state, we reached the verge of the boiling point. As the national Republican Party celebrated this move and Republican governors across the country got poised to follow suit, it seemed that the pot was beginning to boil nationwide.

Here I have to tweak the analogy just a little, and imagine that the frog in the pot is split-brained. While the left side of the frog realized what was happening and tried to leap out of the pot by launching massive demonstrations against the union-stripping bill, the right side of the frog—being more easily duped by corporate propaganda—was convinced that the other half was over-reacting and that the water was actually too cold. While the left-brain wanted out of the pot altogether, the right-brain wanted even more heat.

But even now the analogy doesn’t accurately reflect reality. You’d have to imagine that the left side of the frog is almost twice as large as the right, as poll number after poll number has consistently indicated that about two-thirds of the American people are opposed to the union-stripping measure. The impulse of the frog to leap out of the pot was stronger than the impulse to stay and boil, and yet…somehow…the frog has remained right where it is.

After waking up Wednesday to the news that Governor Walker actually seemed ready to compromise by weakening the union-busting part of the bill, I thought this might finally be it. The American political left, having been far too silent for far too long as the pot kept getting hotter and hotter, had finally stood up and spoken out and sent a message to the cooks in the kitchen that they were not going to sit around and be boiled. Might the chefs have finally gone too far? Might this finally be the end of the relentless rightward-drift America has been on for my entire lifetime?

Then I woke up this morning, Thursday, to the news that the Wisconsin state legislature had done an end-run around the Democrats and rammed through the union-busting portion of the bill through a sudden stroke of political trickery. Because they needed at least one Democrat to hold a vote on the state budget, they had to remove the union-busting measure from the bill and vote on it as a separate piece of legislation, for which no Democrats were needed. It’s as though the moment the frog was finally leaping out of the pot, they grabbed it, tore off its left leg, and tossed it back in the pot from which it is now incapable of escaping.

Had this draconian anti-union bill been proposed twenty or even ten years ago, it never would have passed. That would have been going too far, too fast. The entire frog—both the left side and the right—would have noticed the sudden change in temperature and leapt out immediately. But the Republicans seem to have paved the way for this just slowly and gradually enough that they felt the time was ripe to deliver this final blow to the middle class and let boiling begin.

Slowly but surely, they’ve managed to get a sizable enough chunk of the middle class to direct their anger away from the corporations and wealthy people to whom all of their money is actually being funneled and direct it instead at organized labor. It’s not the Wall Street fat-cats who are the problem, it’s those fat-cats who work in…public education? It’s the nurses who are to blame for everyone’s economic woes?

Enough people have been fed these lies for a long enough time that they no longer even question them. And while there are definitely valid criticisms to be made about teachers’ unions and the like, it’s a huge leap from saying they may go a little too far at times to blaming them for the budget crises in local and national governments, especially when tax-rates among the super-rich are at historic lows and defense spending is at a historic high.

A recent poll asking Americans how they would balance the budget came back with results proving my conjecture that America is far more progressive than most Americans believe. When asked how they would save money, 81% said they would raise taxes on millionaires, about 76% said they would cut defense spending, and about 74% said they’d end subsidies for oil companies.

Washington just recently voted to keep giving subsidies to oil companies, there’s no talk of seriously cutting defense spending, and as for raising taxes on millionaires…well…hopefully your short-term memory isn’t so terrible that you’ve forgotten Obama’s deal to extend the Bush tax-cuts back in December.

Americans were also asked what would be unacceptable to cut. The three items at the top of that list, each with over 75% of the American people saying it would be unacceptable to cut them, are Social Security, K-12 education, and Medicare. And yet Washington remains poised to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare while local governments—including Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin—are busy slashing education.

Democracy, it seems, is in its death pangs. When you have a huge consensus among the American people that they don’t want labor unions stripped of their collective bargaining power but the people supposedly “representing” them in government do it anyway, when the vast majority of Americans agree on which programs they want to see cut and which they don’t want touched but their “representatives” in government do precisely the opposite, when weeks of grassroots protests across the nation send a message loud-and-clear that what one party wants to do is unacceptable but those “representatives” do it anyway, something is seriously, deeply, profoundly wrong.

When a journalist prank-called Governor Walker pretending to be the billionaire political financier David Koch to encourage him on his union-busting efforts and the governor’s response revealed just how squarely in the pockets of powerful business interests he’s in, that should have been the end of his career. Ten or fifteen years ago, there would have been such an outcry over this transparent disregard of the interests of average citizens that the governor would have been forced to resign. Nowadays, he was not only able to remain in office but to win the political fight he knew the vast majority of Americans opposed him on.

The pot is boiling. Poll numbers don’t matter anymore because it no longer matters what the average American thinks. The average American is broke. The only opinions that matter are those of the Koch brothers and their billionaire-brethren who can afford to finance political campaigns (now without limit thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling). The fact that even in the face of overwhelming public opposition, even in the face of massive, nation-wide protests, the Republicans still feel safe doing the bidding of their corporate masters at the expense of the middle class, is all the evidence you need that they think the frog is pretty much cooked.

There is only one avenue of escape left to the frog, and that’s to not let the momentum of these protests die down. Just because the battle is lost does not mean the war is over. If efforts to recall Governor Walker and the State Senators who voted to pass his democracy-destroying legislation manage to succeed, other governors will have to seriously consider putting the brakes on their plans to do the same things in their own states. The protesters have already succeeded in scaring some of these governors like Chris Christie in my own state of New Jersey (who is, incidentally, much admired by my conservative parents) into backing off for now, but if the people of Wisconsin and their supporters all just pack up and go home now that they’ve lost this fight, we may have lost our last change. If the massive amount of campaign contributions these Republicans will now be receiving allows them to prevail in upcoming elections against Democrats who will no longer be able to look forward to quite as much funding from labor unions, you can rest assured that the same kind of legislation that Wisconsin lawmakers just rammed through their state will be back on the table everywhere else.

It’s up to us, America. We can either let our right half keep our much-larger left half stuck to the bottom of the pot while we all boil together, or we can keep reaching for the rim and trying to pry both halves out in spite of the other side’s misguided resistance.

It’s time that the middle class on both the left and the right realize that we’re both part of the same frog, and that we need to stop fighting ourselves when the real enemies are those who are trying to cook us.

After watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address, I didn’t think there was anything about it particularly worth writing about, and that any opinions I had would be expressed by other bloggers and commentators a million times over. But after a few days of reading and hearing others’ commentary it seems I do have something to say that nobody else is really saying.

Obviously there was much praise directed at Obama for how centrist and bipartisan the speech was, a perception greatly augmented by the fact that Republicans and Democrats had a mixed seating arrangement so it wasn’t as easy to tell as in previous years which policies were supported only by one party or the other (which in my opinion also made it much less interesting). And the speech-writer himself did a great job of lumping liberal ideas together with conservative ideas, often in the same sentence (as the mention of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was followed immediately by a call to college campuses to open their doors again to ROTC recruiters). One thing almost everyone can agree on is that Obama laid out a vision for America that transcends the partisan divide.

Obama’s essential idea was this: the most important battle of our time is not that of Republicans vs. Democrats or conservatives vs. liberals, but rather America vs. the rest of the world.

America, the president basically said, is losing its edge. Foreign countries—China in particular—are catching up with us rapidly and unless we come together and find solutions that can push us ahead again, we are in danger of falling behind. We should think of this as a “Sputnik moment” in which Americans of all political stripes join forces against the real enemy: foreign countries.

“What’s wrong with that?” many might say. It seems a perfectly acceptable tactic—the best way to unite two foes is by invoking a bigger foe that both have in common. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, we would all like for America to remain top-dog on the world stage, wouldn’t we? Heaven forbid we become some kind of second-rate world power like those countries in…ugh…Europe. We all know how miserable those Europeans are.

I live in Europe and every day I hear people lamenting their non-superpower status. “I can barely make myself get up in the morning,” they say. “What’s the point of living if your country isn’t the most powerful nation in the world?” Sure, they work shorter hours, take longer vacations, enjoy guaranteed affordable health care and the comfort of knowing that losing their job won’t mean financial ruin, but none of that matters when their country can’t kick every other country’s ass economically and militarily. Yes, their existence is pretty dismal.

But in all seriousness, there are far more important things than being Numero Uno. There are far more important divisions than those of nation-states. Yes, conservatives and liberals share more common ground than we think, but so too do average Americans have more in common with average citizens of other nations than most of us think.

It seemed to me that the president was drawing a line across a battlefield with both Democrats and Republicans on one side and other nations on the other. In my mind, this is not where the line should be drawn at all. America is perfectly capable of out-competing the rest of the world without the middle class reaping any of the benefits from our nation’s success, which is the way things are going now. As the president said, we still have the world’s largest and strongest economy. We also have incredibly high rates of unemployment and poverty. American-based corporations are kicking ass on the world-stage (usually by hiring workers from other countries) but that doesn’t translate to more prosperity for the people.

In my mind, the most important line on the battlefield is between the haves and the have-nots in every country in the world. As a member of the middle-class, my interests are far more closely aligned with a German factory worker or Chinese schoolteacher than with the CEO of General Motors or the president of Wal-Mart. Everywhere it’s the top 2% vs. the bottom 98%, and everywhere that top 2% are cooperating to keep the other 98% down. Most corporations we think of as “American” are actually multi-national corporations, and they’ll cooperate with any foreign business leaders they can to increase the bottom line regardless of the effect on the overall prosperity of average Americans.

It’s the same old scene from the oft-referenced film Network in which the chairman of the network explains to his top news anchor how the world really works:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels…We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.

In a way, the mixed seating arrangement at this year’s State of the Union was the most honest representation of our government we’ve ever actually seen. The Democrats and Republicans in our government are not enemies—they are two different parts of the same system. While one party may be more overtly pro-corporate than the other, both parties essentially work to advance the interests of multi-national corporations ahead of the interests of average citizens, be they Chinese, Russian, German or American.

I have to give the president credit for bringing people together. In the wake of the tragedy in Arizona I think it’s just what the country needed. I think the speech he gave in Tucson was highly appropriate and I was glad to see the partisan rancor toned down a bit in recent weeks.

But what good is coming together if we’re just going to be marched out to fight the wrong kind of battle? Are we just going to wave our miniature American flags and cheer on the success of our most successful institutions while ignoring the plight of the unsuccessful? Are we going to be the inverse-Europeans, working longer hours, taking shorter vacations, unable to pay our medical bills and being forced out on the street if we lose our jobs, yet unfazed by any of this because we can still cheer “we’re number one!”?

I’d like to see this question asked in a poll: “Which would you prefer: 1- America’s standing in the world goes down but the quality of life for the bottom 98% of Americans goes up, or 2- America remains the world’s most powerful nation but the quality of life for the bottom 98% of Americans goes down?”

Of course this is a false dichotomy—both our corporations and our average citizens can prosper, but not if we set ourselves apart from the rest of the world. Corporations would have to sacrifice some of their profits in order to share their wealth with the general population (most of whom do the nitty-gritty work which allows them to become successful in the first place), and if they did that the corporations in other countries unrestrained by social conscience would pull ahead.

Global cooperation is the only way forward if we’re to start bridging the gap between the enormously wealthy and everyone else. The common good, rather than the unrestrained pursuit of profit, must be the guiding principle for all businesses all over the world. That is the vision I wish a president would lay out, but I’m not holding my breath. “America vs. the world” is a much easier vision to get people behind, and it’s much better for the corporate bottom line.

[If you share my vision of global cooperation among the underprivileged citizens of the world, I hope you’ll consider joining Revolution Earth.]

It’s rare when it comes to news these days, but every once in awhile a story comes around that is genuinely encouraging with regards to the future of the human race. Yes, giant corporations and corrupt governments are funneling wealth into fewer and fewer hands while ignoring any impact their actions have on the environment or ordinary persons, but in some places all it takes to push back against this trend is a little sunlight.

WikiLeaks provided that sunlight in Tunisia’s case, turning what had been a more-or-less impotent protest movement into an all-out revolution that has succeeded (at least temporarily) in toppling the grotesquely corrupt government and sending the ruling Ben Ali family into exile in Saudi Arabia.

It began with a leaked June 2008 cable from a U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia which confirmed everything the anti-government protesters had been charging. Here are some excerpts:

Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. Beyond the stories of the First Family’s shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries. The economic impact is clear, with Tunisian investors — fearing the long-arm of "the Family" — forgoing new investments, keeping domestic investment rates low and unemployment high (Refs G, H).

Although corruption is hard to verify and even more difficult to quantify, our contacts all agree that the situation is headed in the wrong direction. When asked whether he thought corruption was better, worse, or the same, XXXXXXXXXXXX exclaimed in exasperation, "Of course it’s getting worse!"He stated that corruption could not but increase as the culprits looked for more and more opportunities. Joking about Tunisia’srising inflation, he said that even the cost of bribes was up. "A traffic stop used to cost you 20 dinars and now it’s up to 40 or 50!"

President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of "the Family" is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.

The cables go on to describe how First Lady Leila Ben Ali built an International School with government funds and then sold it to Belgian investors, keeping all of the profits for her family. They also describe how Ben Ali’s nephews stole the yacht of a French businessman, how the financial sector is riddled with corruption and mismanagement, how nepotism plays the most important role in the awarding of jobs and academic scholarships, and so on.

Tunisians were already viscerally aware of the corruption problem, but the solid document-based confirmation of their suspicions apparently pushed them over the edge. When 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire, the kettle boiled over and the protests ignited into a full-fledged revolution, culminating with the toppling of the government and the exile of the Ben Ali family to Saudi Arabia.

At the end of the leaked cable, the ambassador comments:

Although the petty corruption rankles, it is the excesses of President Ben Ali’s family that inspire outrage among Tunisians. With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumors of corruption have added fuel to the fire. The recent protests in the mining region of Gafsa provide a potent reminder of the discontent that remains largely beneath the surface. This government has based its legitimacy on its ability to deliver economic growth, but a growing number of Tunisians believe those as the top are keeping the benefits for themselves.

Sound familiar? The government promises economic growth, but all of the benefits go to those at the very top while the quality of life of average citizens gets worse.

This is the story nearly everywhere in the world, including the United States, and this is why  the ruling class is so terrified of WikiLeaks. Everyone already suspects that their government is corrupt but the documents that constitute proof of this corruption—as well as the details regarding who specifically is involved and to what extent—remain classified. The ruling class knows that the internet is a dangerous thing and information is becoming increasingly harder to keep secret. They look at sites like WikiLeaks and fear the day that their positions are put in jeopardy by the revelation of their secrets.

We tend to imagine—whether consciously or unconsciously—that things have always been about the same as they are during the short time periods in which we’ve been alive, and we also imagine that they will remain more or less the same in the future. But occasionally new technology arises which shatters the very foundations of existing institutions and leaves a vastly different world in place of the old one.

The printing press broke the centuries-old stranglehold that priests held over spirituality by giving people a chance to read the Sacred Texts themselves and draw their own conclusions, and allowing concepts such as the “rights of man” to be widely disseminated eventually led to the toppling of the old monarchies and replacement by democracies. This took place over a period of many centuries and it can be argued that the transformation is not yet complete.

The internet has the power to disseminate information across the entire world at the speed of light, and there can be no doubt that it has already vastly transformed our way of life in the developed world. But we often forget that it’s actually just a baby on the world stage. It’s only been around for a couple of decades, and most people alive today—myself included—remember a time before internet access was a taken-for-granted aspect of life.

Is the revolution in Tunisia just the tip of the iceberg? I had the same thoughts about the Green Revolution in Iran back in 2009, although that revolution did not succeed. In both cases, online communication technology like Twitter greatly aided the ability of the people to organize and carry out their protests, though the Iranian government was better able to put a lid on it than the Tunisians.

In the next century, the ruling elites around the world are going to be doing everything they can to bring the internet under their control, but the hope is that things like WikiLeaks and Twitter can’t be controlled and that just as the printing press eventually brought about the end of rule by kings and queens, the internet will bring about the end of the shadow rule of corporations and super-wealthy families. Just as the printing press spread the ideals of human rights and self-determination throughout the human consciousness, the hope is that the internet will do the same for ideals such as economic fairness and environmental sustainability.

I would like to do everything I can to help bring about this transformation, so from now on I will conclude all of my posts with an invitation to visit my website, Revolution Earth, where people can come to discuss issues of significance to humanity’s long-term future. One of the things we must do is figure out how to make sure the internet remains free and out of the hands of the corrupt ruling powers, so that revolutions like the one in Tunisia can keep happening.

The site isn’t much right now, but the hope is that it will eventually grow to become a place where people from all over the world can meet to share ideas and gradually cultivate a common vision for a peaceful, just, and sustainable global model of civilization. Starting in February, I will begin to introduce a “topic of the month” for people to discuss, and the first will be the ideal structure of government. Whenever a system is toppled through revolution, something new must be put in its place. If the internet is to bring about a worldwide revolution in the next century, we should start thinking about what that new world should look like.

Every year at my high school, there was a “career day” for seniors. We had the opportunity to choose to hear from a variety of speakers who had been invited to discuss their various careers as a way of helping us determine the course of our own lives. Of the many possibilities I’d been considering at the time, a career in law was one of them, so I signed up to hear the lawyer speak about what his life was like.

Despite my relatively conservative up-bringing, my parents and grandparents had instilled in me the values of human compassion and sharing what we have with the less fortunate, and most of my teachers reinforced these ideals throughout my life. Hearing this lawyer speak was like diving into a freezing cold ocean when you’ve only ever swum in heated pools—you may have had a basic understanding that water could be different than the way you’ve always known it but you’ve never actually confronted that reality until now.

The lawyer spoke to us perhaps more frankly than we’d ever been spoken to before, not only sharing the fact that a career in law meant excruciatingly tedious work and horrendously long hours, but sharing his philosophy that it was all worth it because, when all is said and done, money is the most important thing. “Life is a game,” he imparted to us, and “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

Even at the time I knew that I’d learned a valuable lesson by actually hearing someone express this view in complete sincerity, but I only gradually came to recognize the full significance of that experience as I looked back on it over the years. It was the first time I realized that the world is actually full of people like that—people who see life as a game in which the “winners” owe nothing to the “losers”—and that I just hadn’t known any of them. That all of the various groups and sorts of people I’d been thinking of as enemies weren’t actually on the opposite side of the most important “us vs. them” divide in the human race, but that it was this way of thinking that represented the true enemy.

In the world of online discourse (particularly among Americans), I’ve noticed that almost everyone seems to have drawn their own lines around who they see as part of their “team” and who they consider “the enemy.” I’d like to take a moment to look at some of these various ideas regarding who our real enemies are, and point out why I believe that people are misdirecting their anger when most of it ought to be reserved for that special kind of scoundrel I’ve alluded to above.

1- The foreign terrorists are the enemy. This is quite a common view in the “post-9/11” world, and at first glance it seems quite reasonable:

“I may have my differences with my fellow countrymen but I recognize that they are my fellow citizens after all. The real threat to our security comes from the outside, and we should all be willing to join together to fight the radical militants who would kill us indiscriminately to further their religious and political goals.”

While radical extremists certainly are an enemy, I don’t believe they can be considered the enemy. The people who commit acts of terrorism such as suicide bombings are usually the victims of some kind of oppression, whether real or perceived, and they honestly believe they are fighting for a good cause. The only effective way to defeat radical extremism is to gradually and painstakingly root out oppression worldwide and win people over with ideas. Simply declaring them Enemy #1 and attempting to kill them all is the most counter-productive approach possible, as the past decade has demonstrated. In doing so you only create more terrorists, thus providing our real enemies with more manufactured enemies with which to enrich themselves by fighting.

2- The political left is the enemy. Thanks largely to real enemies such as Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, many conservative Americans do not see liberals and progressives as people with whom they have mere political disagreements, but as the greatest threat to their way of life.

“The terrorists may be out to get us, but the liberals are helping them. By insisting on giving these people their Civil Rights, they’re inviting them to attack us and get away with it, and by apologizing for our nation’s mistakes they’re weakening us in the global community. Not only that, but these progressives want to take all my hard-earned money and give it to lazy poor people who do nothing but mooch off the system. If they had their way, the Church would be abolished and we’d all be worshipping a communist dictator.”

Aside from the blatant misperception of what liberals really want, conservatives should recognize that they share more common ground with present-day liberals than they probably realize, and that political differences can often be reconciled with rational argument and compromise, provided everyone is interested in the common good.

3- The political right is the enemy. Too many people on my side of the political spectrum seem to think that conservatives like the people we see gathered at Tea Party protests are the real enemy, and most of our energy should be spent fighting them.

“These Tea Party people are as bad as the Taliban. If they had their way, women would have no rights at all and minorities would be perpetual second-class citizens. They’d impose their fundamentalist Christianity on all of us and institute laws and punishments based on Biblical Scripture. Given the chance, they’d remove every shred of the social safety net and leave everyone to fend for themselves.”

Naturally I agree that a lot of the sentiments I see expressed by conservatives do lead in these dangerous directions, but I believe that most are far more moderate and reasonable than that. Most conservatives that I know believe in equality of the sexes (even if they’d deprive women of certain reproductive rights) and aren’t overtly racist (even if they believe that minorities are given too much special treatment). They almost all agree that some social safety net is necessary, and with the right combination of rational discussion and compromise there is no reason to consider them any more of an enemy than those who practice different versions of the same religion.

4- The ideologues are the enemy. You have tension all along the spectrum from moderate to extreme on both sides of the political divide, but this is always more of a problem for the party in power. Today there are moderate conservatives who see Tea Party extremists as an enemy, but even more prevalent (at least in the online circles I frequent) are the progressives who view those who criticize President Obama as the biggest obstacle to progress.

“We have the most progressive president in generations, but there’s only so much we can expect him to accomplish. The criticism he gets from the right is clearly ridiculous, but those on the far left who constantly complain about his compromises are doing even more harm. Their impatience will result in losing what little power we have left, as if the president is to have any political leverage at all he needs our unwavering support.”

I will readily admit to being impatient with the president, but I object to being treated as Enemy #1 by my fellow progressives. As I’ve written many times before, the president needs a strong left flank not just to push him to move towards what I believe are the right policies, but to allow him to move there by shifting the political spectrum (see: Overton window) to the left. Without a strong voice of opposition to policies such as tax-cuts for the wealthy and indefinite detention, the president will take the path of least resistance by implementing or extending them. Conversely, without strong and constant advocacy (some call it “whining”) about things like repealing anti-gay policies or fighting climate change, the president will take the path of least resistance by ignoring these issues. The president may be a progressive deep in his heart of hearts, but the realities of governing have turned him into negotiator-in-chief, not fighting for one particular side but merely trying to balance the nation’s competing interests: those of the average people on the right and the left against those of their real enemies, who have most of the leverage.

5- The moderates are the enemy. The inverse of the above sentiment is one I’m more sympathetic to, but which I still think is a mistake. On the right, you have Tea Party conservatives in a rage over those who don’t conform to their rigid ideological purity tests, but on the left these days it has everything to do with the president:

“The people who follow the president like blind sheep are the real enemy. They enable him to move further and further to the right and to protect the interests of the giant financial institutions and the military industrial complex by telling the rest of us to shut up and keep quiet whenever he does something we find unacceptable. Instead of fighting for the principles we all believe in, they are willing to sacrifice those principles for the sake of political expediency, and we often find that half a loaf is as good as no loaf at all.”

Very few people follow the president like “blind sheep”. Most have good, substantive reasons to support him, and he needs those people to keep the impatient among us in check. While I have suggested that perhaps a weak Democratic president might allow more harmful policies to be implemented than a Republican (because the left would be unified against the latter), I am still receptive to the case that the current president has accomplished more than we give him credit for and shouldn’t be tossed under the proverbial bus just yet. That said, I find that Obama’s defenders all too often respond to legitimate, substantive criticism of the president with personal attacks against his critics, likening us to whining children. While we keep our cross-hairs on those in power, they point their guns at us.

6- The government is the enemy. We’re getting to some overlap now, as many who see liberals as the enemy often conflate them with the government. But their sentiment is basically this:

“The government is made up of a bunch of corrupt, greedy, power-hungry individuals who want nothing more than to control every aspect of our lives. With enough size, the government will take over everything and determine who gets what. Success as we know it will become impossible because everything will be owned by the State and distributed as it sees fit, regardless of who has actually earned it.”

To be [extremely] fair, this would be a legitimate worry if circumstances really were as these people are led to believe by Limbaugh & Co. In the past, governments have taken too much power and imposed a brutally unfair system on the people in the name of equality. But that is not the direction things are heading in now, and it’s a mistake to try and push back against a tide that’s already receding rapidly. Ideally, the government is “of the people, by the people, for the people” and if the right kinds of changes are made to the current system, there’s no reason it can’t work for us as it was intended to.

7- Corporations are the enemy. Now we arrive at what I consider the appropriate frame. While I would hesitate to say that corporations themselves (or even most of the people who run them) are Enemy #1, I would place that designation squarely on the corporate structure and make my case thusly:

“The corporation is a soulless, amoral institution designed and required by law to earn as much money for its shareholders as possible without regard to any other considerations. As such it not only destroys the environment but finds ways to funnel wealth from every other sphere of society into its clutches. Left unchecked, corporations will continue to grow and accumulate more of the world’s wealth through mergers and acquisitions until only a small handful of companies hold every last shred of political power in the world, which they will use for no other purpose than to maintain that power even if it means global poverty and irreversible harm to the planet.”

Those who see government as the enemy are only scratching the surface: government is the enemy only insofar as it is currently a tool of the corporation, which is really the dominant ruling institution of our time and the one that constitutes the greatest threat to our collective future.

The corporation is not a person but if it were, it would be like the lawyer I met at career day all those years ago. The corporation doesn’t care how many hours it works or if it ever sees its family—it is unconcerned with human relationships of any kind. The corporation does what it does because by its very design, money is the most important thing. The corporation makes only the decisions that will maximize its own gains and minimize its own losses, determining each move according to a strict formula derived through Game theory. To the corporation, it is all a game, and “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

Until the rest of us acknowledge this reality and stop devoting so much of our energy to secondary fights like the battles between or within political parties and the overblown threat of foreign terrorists, the real enemy will continue to wage war on us without our noticing, until one day the damage is irreversible and all of us—from conservatives to liberals to politicians to religious extremists—will realize that we’ve all lost.