Kemstone's Journal

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.

Have you received your “Social Security Statement” from your friendly neighborhood federal Social Security Administration yet? Did it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see that your government cares enough about your financial future you send you these figures to help you plan for your retirement?

Or did you look past the genial rhetoric and notice these two paragraphs?

Since 1935, America has kept the promise of security for its workers and their families. Now, however, the Social Security system is facing serious financial problems, and action is needed soon to make sure the system will be sound when today’s younger workers are ready for retirement.

In 2012 we will begin paying more in benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted and there will be enough money to pay only about 76 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits. We need to resolve these issues soon to make sure Social Security continues to provide a foundation of protection for future generations.

How good of them to issue this warning. If they hadn’t explained to us so nicely that Social Security is danger, we might have been inclined to protest any cuts to the program that they’re getting ready to propose.

Don’t fall for this, America. This country’s biggest power-brokers have had their greedy eyes on the Social Security Trust Fund for a long time, and now they can smell the opportunity to finally start chipping away at it. Sure, 77 percent of Americans still oppose any cuts to the program, but now they’ve got a Democratic president who is willing to play ball, and enough Congressional Democrats to go along with him. You’ve got Democratic Senators going on TV and talking about how we really need to consider things like raising the retirement age, and refusing to pledge to vote against any piece of legislation that cuts Social Security. You had the bipartisan deficit commission issued by the president make cuts to Social Security one of their top recommendations, and now you’ve got the Social Security Administration itself sending you a letter telling you that changes need to be made or else…

They know this is tricky business. Anyone who takes an independent look at the facts about Social Security can discover that the program is perfectly solvent until 2041, and that without any change it could cover at least three-quarters of benefits until 2083 (when I will be 99 years old). There is no crisis. They just want you to think that there is so you won’t raise your voices too loudly when they start meddling with it.

It’s true that the program will start running deficits in 2017, but with a few minor tweaks this problem can be fixed. Simply raise the payroll tax a little bit and everything will be just fine. There’s no need to raise the retirement age or pay out less benefits for anyone who retires after a certain year.

Or if you don’t like the idea of raising the payroll tax, how about looking at other ways to reduce the deficit, like not fighting two (arguably six) wars simultaneously, or not extending tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans that will explode the deficit by $900 billion?

Social Security is one of the strongest social safety-nets the middle class in America still has. We pay into it our whole lives with the expectation that we’ll be able to get something out of it when we retire, so that no matter what happens we won’t be starving on the street when we’re 65. But the people who own the Republican Party and most Democrats and who write the script that both parties play by have decided that now is the time to try out the storyline in which the deficit takes a hit so they can keep more money for themselves, which they then fix by giving us less of our money back. With the government as the middle-man, it’s like they’re literally taking the money directly out of our pockets and putting it into their own.

Don’t buy the hype. If the deficit needs to be fixed, insist that they fix it another way—one that leaves the middle class alone. Call your senators and representatives and ask them if they would be willing to pledge to vote against any legislation that makes cuts to Social Security. You’ll probably find that they won’t make that commitment right now because any proposed cuts will be a part of a much larger piece of legislation that they can’t promise to vote against. Make it clear to them that you won’t tolerate any yes vote on any piece of legislation that touches Social Security no matter what else it does.

They’ve been planning this war on Social Security for a long time, and they believe that conditions are finally ripe to fire the opening shots. Make sure they know that we’re prepared to fire back.

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.

It usually doesn’t pain me to admit when I’m wrong. Intellectual honesty is something I always strive for, and it demands that I concede things from time to time. But when I find that I was on the wrong side of a fence for a long period of time, making multiple arguments to support a position that I later discover was based on false beliefs, it can be especially difficult to own up to it.

But after this past week’s debacle over Obama’s cave-in to Republicans on extending the tax-cuts for the wealthy, I now have no choice but to admit what I’ve refused to acknowledge for the last two years: I backed the wrong horse in the 2008 primary. Hillary Clinton was not perfect, but I think she would have given us slightly more change, as she was ten times the fighter Obama will ever be.

Don’t get me wrong—I still think Obama deserved the nomination. The Obama campaign was a grassroots movement inspired by a message of hope; energized young people and re-energized old people coming together and fighting to achieve things long-considered impossible to achieve. However empty the candidate’s rhetoric ultimately turned out to be, it can’t be denied that those words reached people, inspired them, got them to believe that we could get the country back on the right track.

Conversely, the Clinton campaign was the epitome of the Washington establishment machine. It was run by Mark Penn, one of the biggest hacks in the business. Today Penn is the CEO of Burston-Marsteller, a PR firm that represents such fine upstanding clients as Philip-Morris and Blackwater. He just wrote a piece for the Huffington Post telling Democrats to stop engaging in “class-warfare” and get behind the Obama tax-cut deal. In it, he actually urges Obama to spend the next two years focusing on: “issues like the pursuit of deadbeat dads, protecting kids from internet stalking, personal privacy, and zero tolerance of drugs in schools.” Translation: don’t rock the boat. Don’t try to change anything. Just protect your image at all costs. That was the strategy behind the Clinton campaign and we had every reason to believe that this small-minded attitude towards governing would have carried over into her presidency.

So I don’t regret supporting Obama in 2008. I’m glad that the more high-minded, progressive candidate who promised to do big things beat the more small-minded, conservative candidate who promised little more than competence due to experience. Had she won the nomination the message from the voters would have been: “let’s just play it safe and not try to accomplish too much.” Instead we sent the right message: “let’s give real change a try”.

But it turned out that the candidate who inspired that message didn’t actually embrace it himself. Perhaps he did try at the very beginning (though the appointments of Geithner and Summers to top economic positions before he even took office would suggest otherwise) but it wasn’t long before he started behaving exactly as you’d expect him to if Mark Penn were advising him.

How different would a Hillary Clinton presidency have been? In terms of substance, I doubt there would be much difference at all. The health care legislation that Obama finally managed to pass was almost exactly what Hillary Clinton had been proposing on the campaign trail: a system based on an insurance exchange and mandates requiring coverage. The only thing that truly separated Obama’s plan from Clinton’s already corporate-friendly plan was the public option, but Obama tossed that out the window near the very beginning, along with his opposition to mandates.

So we would have got the same basic plan, but I’ll bet we would have got it much sooner. Hillary Clinton does not shy away from conflict—she proved that quite effectively by staying in the race long after the cause appeared hopeless—and she would not have sat idly by and enabled Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to obstruct and delay the way Obama did. Obama barely raised a finger in protest to the underhanded tactics of the opposition, which stretched the fight out far longer than it needed to and had the extremely unfortunate side effect of giving the Tea Party the fuel it needed to fully entrench itself in American politics.

Would there be a Tea Party at all if Hillary were president? I suspect it would exist in some form, but I doubt it would be as strong as it is now. Though to be fair, a lot of the energy on the far right is a direct consequence of the color of the president’s skin and has nothing to do with his governing style. Hillary would have been accused of being a radical socialist terrorist-sympathizer too (Fox News would attach those labels to any Democratic president regardless of reality) but there probably wouldn’t be questions regarding her citizenship or religion.

A Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked about the same from the right as an Obama presidency, but things would look a lot different from the left. Simply by virtue of the magnitude of what Obama promised, he was bound to let his supporters down to some degree. That doesn’t mean I think no candidate should ever make lofty promises (provided they intend to at least try to follow through) but it’s obvious that expectations of Clinton would not have been as high. We knew she was relatively conservative from the very beginning, so the progressive base wouldn’t have felt so betrayed and demoralized from all of the compromises and concessions she would have made to Wall Street, Big Energy, and so on.

But would Hillary Clinton have agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans in exchange for virtually nothing without putting up the slightest hint of a fight? I deeply, seriously doubt that. Even those who make a living spewing out Washington conventional wisdom (with the exception of the hackiest hacks like Mark Penn and Mark Halperin) are aghast at the political ineptitude of Obama’s tax-cut deal. Here was a chance to fight the Republicans on an issue with overwhelming public support on your side—make the Republicans deprive struggling citizens of their unemployment checks during the winter in order to make the rich richer—and Obama just ignored it. He agreed to continue the economically disastrous tax-cuts and add $700 billion to the deficit just so he could continue to play nice with John Boehner.

Yes, his stated reason was that he didn’t want to see any “hostages” get hurt. You have to let the Republicans have their way if they threaten to financially harm the American people, right? Well then what’s to stop them from threatening to financially harm the American people over and over and over again?

I am clearly not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but I definitely think that she would have understood that and she would have fought them on this issue. Even if it was just a purely cynical political calculation to boost her popularity and hurt the other party, she would have made that move and the side-effect would have been a slight improvement of the country’s fiscal policy. Because Barack Obama is so horrendously averse to conflict, because he will do whatever it takes to avoid a fight at all costs and take the path of least resistance at every possible juncture, he bends over backwards to the Republicans whenever they so much as raise their voices, and directs all of his frustrations back at his own progressive supporters…more and more of whom are now becoming former supporters.

If I could go back in time and change the result of the 2008 primary, I still wouldn’t. I think the message of the Obama campaign transcends Obama the person and it was important to show the world that it was a message the American people supported wholeheartedly. But for all practical purposes, Hillary Clinton would have made a better president.

To Barack Obama I would say this (and I’m sure he reads what every single disenchanted liberal blogger has to say about him): we have remained true to the message of your campaign. You have not. You expect us to be loyal to you personally, but that increasingly requires disloyalty to the ideals you campaigned on. We supported you because you represented the Hope that things could Change, but you no longer represent those things and you should therefore not be surprised that we no longer support you.

If we’d wanted nothing but watered-down corporate-friendly legislation we would have given the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We picked you because you led us to believe you could do more, and instead you wound up doing less.

I’d rather see a real progressive run a primary challenge against you in 2012, but if Hillary Clinton shocked the world by deciding to run against you again, this time I would vote for her.

I keep waiting for someone other than a left-wing blogger or commentator (perhaps some kind of Democratic politician, perhaps some kind of president of some kind of united body of states) to throw the wrench into the argument that the unemployment crisis in this country is a result of the wealthiest Americans and corporations not having enough money.

According to the New York Times, corporations earned a record $1.66 trillion in profits in the third quarter of 2010.

Well that’s good news. I guess now they can finally start using all those obscene profits to create jobs, no?

No?

The corporations of America are not only doing just fine—they’re better than ever. And yet the titans of industry are still making the absurd claim that Obama is anti-business, and if he would just cozy up to the Wall Street fat-cats a little more, just crawl a little deeper into their proverbial assholes, the rest of America will start to see some real job creation.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I’d suggest that when the super-wealthy people who work for Wall Street banks, private health insurance companies, the oil and coal industries, and any business that makes up the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are gathered around the dinner table, they say how thankful they are that we don’t have a real Democratic president who actually wants to reform anything.

I’ll just be thankful that these rich people have so much stinking money that they can afford to keep buying politicians and media hacks to continue to rattle off the absurd talking-point that Obama is a radical anti-business leftist who just hates hates HATES it when corporations make a profit.

Assuming anyone actually reads this before sitting across from their conservative family members this Thanksgiving dinner, when you hear them parrot that propaganda about how the rich need more tax cuts so they can create jobs, point out to them that corporations are making record-breaking profits, the rich are better off than they ever were before, and they’re still laying off workers to save even more money.

But maybe once they’ve saved up so much money that they can buy every politician in the country three times over, they’ll use some of what’s left over to create jobs for Americans. No?

I follow U.S. politics because I think it’s important to know who’s pulling the levers of power in the world’s most powerful country, but it often feels like watching a game of football. The Democrats had possession of the ball for two years, and during that time they pushed legislation while the Republicans mounted a strong defense, limiting them to a field goal at best. The Democrats’ recent loss of the House of Representatives prompted them to punt the ball and gear up to spend the next two years on defense, defending themselves against relentless investigations as well as the inevitable push to undo the good parts of health care and financial reform.

But something about this match doesn’t seem right. All of the moves seem choreographed, the outcome pre-determined. It feels less like a sporting event and more like a scripted reality TV series in which the actors already know what’s coming but they try to act surprised when it does.

I’m not the only one who had the idea that the Democrats were trying to throw the 2010 election. Some were making that claim as early as March, when the Democrats’ refusal to put the public option for health insurance up for a vote revealed to everyone with a shred of intelligence that they never actually wanted it in the first place. The public option would have been a touchdown for the Democrats, exactly the kind of genuine systemic change that the voters were hoping for when they went to the polls in 2008, but they never even made a serious push for the end-zone.

Clearly there were other forces at work—forces more powerful than either of the teams on the field—who had determined from the beginning that there would be no government-run health insurance option to compete with the profit-driven corporations. All the Democrats needed was a good excuse to give it up. Republican filibusters worked perfectly when the Democrats had 60 seats, as all they needed were one or two conservative Democrats to play the villain and join the Republican filibuster until the public option was removed. But when Scott Brown was elected and the Democrats had no choice but to push the legislation through under a process that required a simple majority, the Democrats were caught with their pants down. That wasn’t part of the script.

It should have been obvious to everyone then and there that the public option’s failure had been planned all along. But the corporate media did its job by brushing it off and diverting peoples’ attention long enough for the Democrats to pick their pants back up and go on pretending that they were actually trying to get real reform done.

That was a deeply significant moment. The fact that politicians from both parties are working to serve the corporations and not ordinary Americans has seldom been more obvious.

I believe we’re at another one of those moments of clarity right now. There’s no reason the Democrats should have lost the mid-term elections as badly as they did. Even with their constant caving-in on the most significant aspects of legislation, they still managed to get a lot more positive things done than the Republicans have for as long as I can remember. People may have short attention spans but they still remember the eight disastrous years of the Bush administration and the economic crisis brought to us by Republican policies. The Democrats had a winning narrative if they’d only chosen to aggressively push it, but they didn’t. Rather than constantly remind people of what a miserable failure Republican policies have been for the middle class, many Democrats chose to run against their own party, touting all the ways in which they were unlike the president and more like their Republican opponents.

The fact that the Democrats who most blatantly followed that strategy did poorly in the elections should have made it clear that it’s not compromise and capitulation that voters are after, but real significant change. With a few notable exceptions, strong progressive fighters won and corporatists lost. The message of the elections on the Democratic side should be clear: Democratic voters want their leaders to stand up to the Republicans and fight for real change, and if they don’t see that happening they’re going to stay home.

But that wasn’t the message the Democrats were supposed to get, and they seem to be going to great lengths not to get it.

According to the script they all seem to be following, the Democrats were supposed to lose big in 2010 and thus put a stop to the two-year period of reform that the country’s most powerful interests decided to allow. They got everything they wanted under Bush (short of the privatization of Social Security) and enriched themselves greatly at the expense of the middle class. The demand for reforms were so great in 2008 that they must have decided to toss the people a bone, to let the Democrats take the ball for awhile and give progressives the impression that they were getting what they wanted. Naturally, they wouldn’t let anything too drastic go through, but they’d succeed in getting half of progressives to believe that what they did get was the best they could hope for.

At this point, half of the people still reading this will be rolling their eyes and dismissing me as a conspiracy theorist. Half the people really believe that the Democrats did the best they could for the American people and the reason they lost the election is that independent voters decided they didn’t actually want liberal policies.

But consider how well the theory fits the facts: The Democrats had a chance to vote on the Bush tax-cuts before the election. They could have extended those tax-cuts for 98% of Americans and let the cuts for the wealthiest 2% revert back to pre-Bush levels. Not only would this have taken $700 billion out of the deficit, but it would have been extremely popular. The Democrats could have shown themselves to be true fighters for the middle class, willing to do something that would only benefit them and not the super-rich. They might have even been able to ride the issue to electoral victory.

But they decided not to force a vote, and look what happened. As expected, the Republicans won control of the House (and they would have won the Senate too if it weren’t for unscripted elements like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell) and the peddlers of conventional wisdom in the mainstream media immediately started calling for the president to get “back in the center”, to “show some love for Republican leaders”—essentially to bow his head. Some have even gone so far as to say Obama shouldn’t even run for a second term and instead spend the next two years doing everything the Republicans want him to do.

Suddenly there’s an opening to extend those Bush tax-cuts for the top 2% after all! The president can say he’s doing it in response to the election results, as though the voters’ most resounding message was to cut those poor rich people a break.

There was never any chance that the rich would let their taxes go up in the first place. They just had to dangle that out there, make it seem like a real possibility so that progressives would go on believing that the system can still be potentially changed from within. The script may have its twists and turns, but in the end the rich always get what they want.

The truly ominous thing is what lies on the horizon regarding spending cuts. Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission revealed their proposals this past week, extremely unpopular measures including cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising the retirement age, slashing the federal workforce, and increasing the gas tax, all while cutting taxes for corporations!  (And how convenient that this should come at a time when the president is in Asia and can’t be easily reached for comment?)

From here the narrative should move in a very predictable direction. Obama and the Democrats can play the good guys as they criticize these proposals, but in the end they’ll have to implement some of them. It’ll be mirror-image of the health care fight: rather than being forced to give up on the best elements in order to get the half-decent ones through, we’ll be forced to accept some of the least objectionable proposals in order to prevent the most egregious from going through. And just as those of us who complained about the public option’s failure were told that we were too liberal and shouldn’t complain just because we didn’t get “every last thing” we wanted, we’ll now be told that we shouldn’t complain just because we didn’t block “every last thing” we didn’t want. Some compromise was necessary, they’ll say. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could.

It should be abundantly clear by now that Obama and the Democrats are not doing the best they can. It’s as though they’ve got wide receivers in the end-zone during every play but the quarterback just runs a few yards before allowing himself to be tackled. Whether he ultimately falls short of the first-down and loses re-election remains to be seen, but judging from the direction the script has been going so far I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying there is some organized group of wealthy and powerful individuals who really have planned out the entire political football match ahead of time (though that idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds). It’s enough that the system is rigged in such a way as to ensure the best possible outcome for the already-rich-and-powerful every time. They’ve got enough money to buy enough politicians who will do their bidding. Not every Democrat agrees to follow the script, but enough of them do. And sadly, the president is one of them.

That is what the progressive movement is confronted with right now. They thought they’d finally found someone to change the game when they got Obama elected in 2008, but since then they’ve just been playing the exact same game in which the outcome is predetermined. They think the president should do more passing and less running, but they’re not suggesting he quit the game altogether.

It’s up to us to leave the stadium and go directly to the script-writers themselves. We have to demand that they burn what they’ve written so far and start composing a new story, one in which our team actually tries to win, or perhaps even one in which there are more than just two teams to root for.

We need a script in which the income disparity between the rich and the middle class actually goes down, where the federal deficit is reduced by cutting military spending and not entitlements, where Americans are put back to work through massive investment in infrastructure and research, where we actually do something about climate change and environmental destruction, where Wall Street bankers actually face consequences for crashing the economy, where war criminals are put to justice even if they used to be the president or vice president, where homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else, where billions of dollars a year aren’t flushed down the toilet on a failed war on drugs, and where every child has the same opportunities as every other child regardless of where they come from.

But that script is very difficult to write. The one we’ve got now is much easier: put all our hopes in politicians and lament our helplessness as those hopes are dashed repeatedly. Watch our team get crushed and go home in defeat. Until we acknowledge what’s actually going on—that American politics is just a scripted game of football designed to keep us all in line—that’s all we’re going to be doing.

It’s another busy day so I’ll keep this quick. I just wanted to echo a sentiment I’ve been hearing a lot lately from other bloggers and commentators, a point that I think is worth repeating often.

If Barack Obama had gone into the presidential primaries in 2008 and campaigned on what he would actually end up doing, he would never have won.

Had candidate Obama announced that he was going to pass a health care reform bill that forced everyone to buy insurance from private companies and did nothing to control costs, he would have lost easily.

Had candidate Obama promised Wall Street reform that allowed banks to continue gambling with taxpayer money, he would have been crushed.

Had candidate Obama admitted that we was going to expand offshore oil-drilling and do nothing to address climate change, he wouldn’t have even survived past New Hampshire.

Had candidate Obama told the American people that he was going to continue the most egregious abuses of executive power done by the Bush administration including warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention in military prisons like Bagram and even Guantanamo (we’re still waiting for that to get closed), he would have been out of the race so fast that his name would have already been forgotten by now.

Had candidate Obama declared his intention to actually expand executive power to the point where the president can order the execution of an American citizen abroad without a trial, he would have been practically run out of the country.

I could go on, but you get the point. The people who are defending Obama today don’t seem to have realized that this is almost a completely different person than the man they voted for. If they were yelling and screaming in protest about this kind of stuff when Bush was doing it, why are they defending Obama for the same exact shit?

The main point is that we can’t expect change to come from our political leaders at all. Even if a candidate says exactly the right things and runs on the exact agenda we’d like to see implemented, there’s no guarantee that he won’t do a complete reversal on nearly all of it once he gets into office—in fact it’s likely he will. Bowing to the establishment is much much easier than standing up to it.

Oh, but I suppose I’m just “whining” and I should “buck up”. After all, the important thing is to have a Democrat in the White House, even if he governs just like a Republican.

I’m having a social life today, so I’ll have to hold off on the more serious pieces I’ve been planning that will require a bit more time and care. Today I’ll just bang out a short musing that’s been on my mind for awhile.

The color-coding of the political parties in America has remained completely stable for the last couple of decades, to the point where most people my age don’t even realize that the Democrats weren’t always blue and the Republicans weren’t always red. The concept of “red states” and “blue states” is now so firmly ingrained in our national consciousness that I doubt it will ever change again.

What’s interesting is that in Germany and most other countries in the world, the color red is the color of the political left. That makes sense when you think of communism, which has always used red as its representative color. It’s the color of blood. The color of anger. It symbolizes the struggle of the common people against tyranny.

Somehow, the Republican Party in the U.S. became the red party and the Democrats settled on blue. But the Republican Party is the party of the power-elites, of the establishment, of the corporate tyranny that we all currently live under. Of course most of the average citizens who call themselves Republicans have it completely backwards, thinking that the Democrats are the party of the elite and the Republicans are the insurgents fighting on behalf of the people’s rights and liberties. Perhaps the color red has something to do with this misperception.

One thing I’m sure of is that red is the stronger color, and this makes sense because Republicans are typically the stronger politicians. Currently, supporters of the Republican Party are the far more loud and energetic segment of the population, while those who vote Democrat are demoralized and disgusted by the weakness of their party.

The color blue just doesn’t provoke the same feelings as red. It doesn’t stir the spirit and make people want to get out and raise hell. Blue is a melancholy color. A contemplative color. Perhaps it does fit our disposition better, but I often wonder if liberals would more easily be able to shed the perception of weakness if we took our color back.

We should be the red ones, the insurgents, the fighers on behalf of the people. Like all of the great uprisings in history since the French Revolution, we should be able to wave the red banner and have everyone know what it means: that we are for the people, that we are for liberty, and we’re willing to fight for what we believe.

Have you ever been told to “buck up” and “stop whining”? If so, did you react positively?

This past week, Joe Biden sent a loud message to liberals and progressives on behalf of the Obama administration, and that message was “what’s your fucking problem? Shut up about things like the public option and vote for Democrats, okay?”

Biden said that “some” people from the Democratic base are upset because they “didn’t get everything they wanted”. Who are you talking about, Joe? I’ve been all over the liberal blogosphere since before the inauguration, and I’ve never encountered anyone who threatened to stop supporting Democrats unless Obama delivered on every single promise he made.

This mythical all-or-nothing liberal voter has become the prime target of the Obama administration, from Rahm Emmanuel to Robert Gibbs and even the president himself. They’ve adopted this “hippie-punching” strategy as though it’s smart politics. As far as I can tell, the only benefit of this is to lower expectations so that when Democrats lose in the upcoming elections, they can say “at least it wasn’t as bad as everyone thought.”

In the mean-time, they’re turning half of their former supporters against them and all of their supporters against each other. Instead of going after Republicans and giant corporations and the people truly responsible for the plight of average Americans, liberals are attacking each other for either being too hard on the president or blindly supporting him no matter what.

If one were prone to wild conspiracy theories, one could theorize that the entire Obama presidency is a plot on the part of the power-elites to destroy the progressive movement. First you make it seem that weak and watered-down change is the only kind of change we can possibly expect from Washington, and then get half of the liberals to lambaste the other half for saying that we could have gotten more.

Of course the two most realistic possibilities are that Barack Obama either truly resents progressives for being more loyal to their policy goals than to him personally, or that this is just a calculated strategy to lower expectations before the election.

I think it’s probably a little of both. The fact that both Obama and Biden used the infuriatingly patronizing expression “buck up” (the only other time I’ve ever been told to “buck up” was from a girl as she rejected me) suggests that there is some calculation behind this, but you’d think that if Obama really felt the same frustrations as his base he would spend less time on the defensive and more time pointing the finger at those who stood in the way of real reform.

When Obama’s defenders ask me “what more could he have done?” I can’t believe that I actually have to explain it. Barack Obama was swept into office by millions of supporters not just eager to see him elected but to continue to fight for the Change we were told we could believe in. We were told that “we were the ones we’ve been waiting for” but when we fought hard for a public health care option and the White House negotiated it away before the fighting even began, most of us recognized from that moment on that we’d been played for suckers.

There are countless disappointments from the administration, but the battle over the public option remains the prime example both because it was the first major fight we lost and because it was so obvious that we could have gotten it if Obama had fought for it.

What more could he have done? Instead of merely paying lip-service to the public option, he could have been out there every week explaining to the people why it was such a good idea. It was an incredibly easy case to make—end the stranglehold of purely profit-driven private insurance companies on the health of the American people—but he wasn’t making it. He had to keep saying he was in favor of it, but he almost never mentioned it without some kind of qualifier: It’s just a ‘tiny sliver’ of the whole reform package. The reform legislation was the belt and the public option was suspenders—helpful but not necessary.

What more could he have done? How about pointing the finger at the private insurance companies and actually telling the horror stories of how the profit-motive in health care has been the cause of so much suffering and death in this country for decades? How about calling out the Republicans for their complete disingenuousness in negotiating on the health care bill, watering it down further and further in spite of the fact that none of them were ever going to vote for it? How about—and this may sound crazy—calling out corporate-friendly Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Max Baucus and asking them to explain to the American people why they believed that the profit-motive should still be at the heart of the health care system?

Sorry Barack, but the idea of a universally available not-for-profit health insurance option is more popular than your administration. If you want to blame us for being more true to our ideals than a politician or political party, go right ahead. Just don’t act surprised when your approval rating continues to plummet.

Obama would like us to forget about the public option and move on, but why should we stop ‘whining’ when there’s still no real competition in the system, people with pre-existing conditions are still being excluded thanks to all the loop-holes, and premiums continue to rise by absurd proportions because there’s still no real cost-control mechanism?

Quit whining? Sorry. Not this hippie. I’ll stop whining when you deliver some real change. As of now you’ve only made a few minor improvements here and there, and I’ll give you credit for that but I’m not going to be waving your banner around when you clearly have so much contempt for people like me and the things I believe in (which contrary to media spin are the things that most Americans also believe in).

Keep on punching those hippies, Obama. Keep rubbing salt in our wounds. Keep turning us against each other (even now there will be people who read this and think that I’m somehow handing the election to the other side). Maybe when the Republicans take control and they start their ridiculous impeachment hearings, your popularity will go up like it did for Bill Clinton. Maybe you really want to lose your majorities so that you no longer have the responsibility to deliver on the things you promised because at that point no one will be able to reasonably expect significant change.

I’ll end with a disclaimer. My frustration with Barack Obama has grown to outright loathing thanks to this hippie-punching strategy, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to support Democrats this election. I don’t want Obama to get the relief from responsibility that will come with a Republican takeover of Congress. I want to make sure that we can still insist that Obama can get real change if he just fights for it.

And who knows? Maybe one day he’ll wake up and realize that we’re not his enemies and that he can actually accomplish great things if he just listened to us every now and then. Until then, I’m going to keep whining. I’ll whine loud and I’ll whine proud. If they don’t like it, they should buck up.

It seems that we’re stuck in a lose-lose situation. For most of us, voting for our Democratic Party representative in the upcoming mid-term elections will send the wrong message to Washington—that we approve of the pathetic, wishy-washy, cowardly way in which the Democrats of the 111th Congress have been governing. Constantly incorporating Republican proposals into their legislation in spite of their clear electoral mandate to change course, watering-down and weakening bill after bill to make them more acceptable to powerful special interests, refusing to stand up and make the case for things like a public health insurance option and a cap on carbon emissions, and most recently being too intimidated by the prospect of negative campaign ads that they won’t even vote on repealing the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% until after the election. The strategy has been to move as far to the right as possible to ward off attacks from a right-wing media machine that is attacking them for being too liberal anyway. This is not the kind of government we voted for in 2006 and 2008, and the last thing we want to do is put our stamp of approval on it once again in 2010.

But what choice do we have? We certainly can’t vote for Republicans, as what they’re proposing will have us crashing back to disastrous economic conditions even faster than Democratic passivity. While Democrats don’t want to move forward quickly enough, Republicans want to actively move in the opposite direction, making the deficit-exploding Bush tax cuts permanent and repealing the health care reform legislation that in spite of its major shortcomings could still do a lot of good for a lot of people. As far as I can tell, these are their only two major policy ideas: tax-cuts for the rich and repealing health care reform. Anyone who votes for that thinking it will solve everything has been watching too much Fox News.

Of course most voters don’t know anything about economic policy, so they’re just going to go and vote against the Democrats because the Democrats are in charge and the economy still sucks. Never mind that the Republicans would make it worse—they show up at the polls every two years and launch their protest vote and that’s as far as their thinking goes. They don’t read or watch the news enough to understand just how badly they’re shooting themselves in their own financial foot.

That leaves liberals with the distasteful obligation of voting for Democrats to cancel out these understandable but misguided protest votes, and this is what the Democratic Party is counting on. No matter how poor a job they’ve done at governing these last 2-4 years, they know that their base knows the alternative is far worse. They’ve got us by the balls and we can either hold our collective noses and vote for them, or stay home and let fate plunge this country even deeper into the hole that uninformed voters have been allowing it to sink into for decades.

But there is an alternative, and I hope you’ll consider taking it. The key is to throw your support not behind the Democratic Party in general, but behind specific Democrats who deserve our support.

Russ Feingold is a senator from Wisconsin who has been right about nearly everything in his entire career, particularly when it comes to the economy. During the deregulation fervor of the Clinton years, he stood up and opposed the changes that would allow Wall Street to gamble with our money, which he warned would lead to a terrible financial crisis (and we all know how that story ended). This past year when Obama and the Democrats passed their Financial Reform-in-name-only legislation, Russ Feingold was the guy who had the balls to stand up and say no, that he could not in good conscience vote for a bill that wouldn’t prevent another financial crisis—which it won’t. Wall Street is still up to the same old dirty tricks, and when the next bubble bursts it will be Feingold alone among Senate Democrats who can say “I told you so.”

Feingold is currently in a bloody battle to keep his Wisconsin Senate seat, and the last I heard he was down by nearly 10 points. If he loses, the message the Washington establishment will take—the message they’re hoping to take—is that when Democrats are too far to the left, they lose elections. As a result, the rest of the cowardly Democrats who run to the right at the first sign of trouble will run even further to the right and become even more eager to please the Wall Street masters.

If you live in Wisconsin, for God’s sake get out and vote in November. You actually have the opportunity to send the right kind of message this election season—that liberals want a fighter who will fight for liberal causes, not just a bunch of pathetic cowards who are afraid of being labeled “anti-business”. If you don’t live in Wisconsin, you can still send a message by donating to Russ Feingold’s campaign, which you can do by following this link.

The other Democrat who deserves our support this election is Alan Grayson, whom just about everyone knows. Grayson is a convenient target for those on the right because he actually stands up and says controversial things like “The Republican health care plan is ‘Don’t get sick. And if you do, die quickly.’” They point to him and say he’s a crazy wacko liberal, the Democratic equivalent of a Michele Bachmann. Even some liberals have bought into this, and they’ll condemn him for going too far to the left just to make themselves look more moderate and say “at least I’m condemning extremism on both sides.”

This is a real shame, because the equivalence is a false one. Grayson may push some buttons from time to time but his attacks are always rooted in facts and reality. This is the kind of Democrat that more Democrats should be like—the kind who are not afraid to stand up and forcefully make the case for liberal principles. Most Democrats are so afraid of conflict that they spend 99% of their time bending over backwards to appear “reasonable” and willing to compromise. We need more like Grayson who aren’t afraid of a little controversy, of ruffling a few conservative feathers, of actually standing up and defending the things they supposedly believe in instead of tripping all over themselves to show that they don’t believe these things too strongly.

Grayson also faces a tough re-election campaign, and while most of us don’t live in his district and can’t therefore express our approval, we can still go to his website and toss a few bucks his way. If he wins re-election, the rest of the Democratic Party might wake up and say “Gee willikers! Apparently you can be a strong advocate for liberal principles and still win an election!” If he loses, the conventional wisdom that liberals have to hide their true beliefs and constantly pander to conservatives will be confirmed, and that will be disastrous.

There are several possible outcomes to the 2010 elections, and most of them are dismal. The most likely outcomes involve massive Republican gains in both chambers of Congress, which the Washington media will interpret as a message from the American people that they don’t want Change and would rather go back to the way things were under Bush. The other possible outcomes involve Democrats maintaining their majorities, which the Washington media will interpret as a message from the American people that they like centrist, middle-of-the-road compromise in which the government splits the difference between the interests of the wealthy and the interests of average Americans (and by “splitting the difference” we of course mean giving far more consideration to the wealthy).

But what will really matter is how things go in these tight races in which real liberals are fighting for their political lives. If people like Feingold and Grayson lose, the message will be that moving to the left is political suicide, and the conventional wisdom that has kept the Democratic Party locked in a rightward drift all these years will be confirmed. But if disappointed and disaffected liberals stand up this election and get behind candidates like Feingold and Grayson and these candidates win, then it won’t matter as much what happens in the rest of the country. We’ll have shown that when a politician is willing to fight for us, we will fight for them.

The best possible message we could send to the establishment would come in the form of corporate-friendly Democrats getting booted out of office while genuinely progressive Democrats win decisive victories. That will show everyone in the media, the government, and most importantly the White House, that the key to political victory is not to run from the left but to embrace it—to fight for real change and not be afraid of losing the support of the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations because they’ll have the people on their side.

Support Russ Feingold. Support Alan Grayson. Make the message of the 2010 elections the one we should be sending: “If you’ve got our back, we’ve got yours.”