Kemstone's Journal

Listening to these Republican candidates talk about Obama, I often wish we actually had the kind of president they’re attacking. The paint him as some kind of progressive lion, zealously going after the super-rich on behalf of the working class, steadfastly holding to an ideology of civil liberties even if it compromises America’s safety, and systematically dismantling our empire abroad, all the while apologizing to the world for our previous transgressions. I don’t know who this person is that they keep railing against, but it’s not the Obama I know.

The fact is that the Republicans are banking on the majority of their base having a completely distorted view of the president thanks to conservative news sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. These media outlets have made a calculated decision to create their own narrative about who Obama is and what he wants to do, to emphasize every tiny little thing that supports that narrative and de-emphasize, ignore, or even outright lie about anything that doesn’t.

The Obama you see on Fox News is not a real person but actually a fictional character based on the stereotype of liberals that conservatives have in their minds. He wants to raise taxes, impose strict regulations on business, cut defense, eliminate gun rights, encourage more abortions and gay marriages, read terrorists their rights, and purge all religion from the public sphere. When the Republican presidential candidates talk to their debate audiences and the crowds at their campaign rallies about Obama, they’re talking about this guy, a radically liberal president who—unfortunately for them—doesn’t actually exist.

The real Obama hasn’t raised taxes. He’s far too timid to take the political risk. He’s cut taxes across the board and agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for two years. He says he’ll fight to let them expire next time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As for the idea that he’s imposing crippling regulations on businesses, that is simply absurd. Barack Obama is the Goldman Sachs president. His entire financial team and his last two chiefs of staff have been Wall Street insiders, and according to internal memos it would appear that they dictate his every move in that area. The “historic financial reform” legislation that passed last year is widely acknowledged by bankers to be a complete joke. Not one of the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 has been prosecuted for committing fraud, and Wall Street continues to thrive thanks to taxpayer bailouts (which Obama supported) while the rest of the country struggles.

I hear over and over again that Obama has drastically cut defense spending. Simply not true. Defense spending has increased every year since Obama took office, it’s just that the rate of increase has gone slightly down thanks to the cutting of a few strategically unnecessary projects like stealth-fighters designed to fight the Cold War. Some might say that it’s merely stretching the truth to refer to a slower rate of increase as a “cut”, but I call it lying.

And as for the whole general idea that Obama is weak on defense, consider his doubling-down in Afghanistan and the recent foray into Libya. He withdrew troops from Iraq but only because he was forced to under a treaty signed by the Bush administration which he tried and failed to renegotiate.

On gun rights, Obama has not lifted a finger to do anything about it, other than quietly write an op-ed on the issue after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he did not endorse a single reform that didn’t enjoy at least a 60% approval in polls. And afterwards he did absolutely nothing to attempt to initiate those reforms.

On social issues, one can point to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and pretend that Obama is the “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he claimed to be, but he dragged his feet on that issue for quite some time and he still refuses to publicly come out in support of gay marriage. And on abortion, what has Obama done? Nothing. He won’t even touch that issue with a ten-foot pole, so afraid is he of the potential criticism. But he will make it harder for young women to obtain birth control.

When it comes to the idea that Obama would rather read terrorists their rights than keep America safe, this is where the distance between the real Obama and the fictional Obama is at its widest. Not only has Obama continued the civil liberties abuses that began under the Bush administration, but he’s actually expanded them, to the point where now it’s written into the law that the president has the power to throw American citizens into prison without a trial purely on suspicion of ties to terrorism. He appeared to make a genuine effort to close down Guantanamo as soon as he took office, but when that failed he never brought the issue up again, and the prison remains open and could conceivably remain so for generations. He doesn’t do waterboarding anymore but he hasn’t prosecuted anyone responsible for that war crime, all the while bringing the hammer down on whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who dared to make the abuses of our military public. Finally, if you really want to know whether or not Obama is soft on terror, you can ask Osama bin Laden.

And lastly, there’s the matter of religion. Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters that as soon as he takes office, he’ll repeal every single anti-religious act passed by the Obama administration. That shouldn’t take long, as no such acts have been passed by the real Obama. The fictional Obama is the one carrying out this “war on religion” we keep hearing about. After all, that guy is secretly Muslim and born in Kenya, and obviously on a crusade to undermine America’s Christian moral foundation.

Running against a fictional character may work for the Republican candidates in the primary, but it’s going to blow up in their faces if they try that in the general election, which is exactly what Obama is counting on. If Mitt Romney accuses Obama in a debate of raising taxes, Obama will be poised and ready with the facts to prove that he has not. The same goes for the accusation that he’s cut defense, gone after gun rights, and so on. The major political advantage Obama has garnered for himself by going against his liberal base time and again on nearly every single issue is that the Republicans can’t make a fact-based attack on him for doing any of the things that liberal presidents are normally criticized for doing. The best they can do is say that he talked about doing such things in the 2008 campaign.

If they’re forced to run against the real Obama, there are plenty of things to criticize him for, but they are guilty of those same things themselves. Romney could expose every last way in which Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street, but he knows quite well that he’s running to be the next puppet of the very same interests.

But the truly funny thing is that aside from his ties to the financial industry, most conservatives would like the real Obama if they knew who he was. If you just changed the D in front of his name to an R and read off a list of the actions he’s taken since his term began, they’d understand him to be a moderate who is slightly left-of-center on some issues but right-of-center on most.

The real Obama governs like a moderate Republican of former days, before the party drifted off to its right-wing fringe. The real Obama would win a national election against any of these clowns the Republicans have put forward in this primary, and they know it. That’s why they have no choice but to run against a fictional character instead, and it’s why they’re going to lose the general election when the curtain is pulled back and independent voters get a good look at who Obama actually is.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome back to the British Empire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!!!

Right up until this past week, I’d been looking at Michele Bachmann’s candidacy for president as nothing more than an entertaining joke. The woman who famously suggested that the media look into members of Congress to determine if they’re pro- or anti-American, who says that climate science must be wrong because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, who thought that the American Revolution began in New Hampshire, could never actually be president.

But then the Republican debate happened, and all at once the entire mainstream media began taking her seriously. I didn’t watch the debate, but I can easily imagine how a combination of low expectations, innate self-confidence, and contrast with the other boring candidates would have helped her stand out greatly to anyone watching. She is not your typical Republican, and nowadays that’s a huge advantage and one that the media was sure to take notice of.

And once the media takes your candidacy seriously, the rest of the country soon follows. Now Michele Bachmann will no longer be seen as Palin 2.0 but a serious contender for the Republican nomination and therefore the White House. Her history of crazy and/or false comments will be swept to the side, and anyone who brings such things up will be dismissed as a left-wing smear-merchant. “Forget her absurd crusade against the U.S. adopting an international currency—you should be focusing on what she’s saying now.” And as her poll numbers rise and the campaign cash continues to flow, she’ll surround herself with people skilled in the art of making even the most insane candidates sound reasonable.

Michele Bachmann is not insane (though she certainly often sounds that way), and she’s not Sarah Palin (i.e. she’s neither too dumb nor too lazy to run a serious presidential campaign). She is, however, a true believer—as Christian as they come. Read Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece on Bachmann to get a true sense of this. This is a woman who married her husband Marcus because she claims that she, a friend of hers, and Marcus all had a vision from God at the same time. She’s a fierce opponent of gay rights and is as pro-life as they come. These factors will ensure that she’ll have a significant portion of the social-conservative vote locked up from the very beginning, and her uniqueness as a candidate among a field of weak Republicans could easily push her over the top.

It all comes down to whether or not there are still enough sane, pragmatic Republicans left in the party to recognize that Mitt Romney—in spite of his complete lack of solid convictions about anything—is still their best bet to beat Obama in the general election. In 2008, conservatives held their noses and picked McCain because they thought in the end he stood the best chance of winning independents, so it’s not unlikely the same thing will happen again (in which case Bachmann is a shoe-in for VP). But Romney is so weak, so boring, so detested by the Republican base and such a blatant and transparent flip-flopper that his stench might be too much for Republican primary voters even with their noses held. Add to that the widespread (yet obviously false) perception that the reason Republicans lost in 2008 was that their candidate wasn’t right-wing enough, and Michele Bachmann at the top of the ticket doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

Nothing I’ve written so far is the least bit controversial, but where I know most people will disagree with me is that I believe Michele Bachmann actually stands a very good chance of defeating Barack Obama in the general election. Why? Enthusiasm. Bachmann excites her base. Obama deflates his.

I won’t go into the standard litany of reasons as to why the progressive base is disenchanted and frustrated with Obama—it’s enough to merely restate that the central promise of his campaign was “not to the play the game better” but to “put an end to the game-playing” and in reality all he’s done for the past two and a half years is play the same old Washington games. Rather than stand up and use the power of the presidential bully-pulpit to forcefully articulate a vision for the country and make the (very easily made) arguments in favor of progressive policies, he’s tried to have it both ways on every issue and make compromise after unnecessary compromise with Republicans whom he must know are not negotiating in good faith.

He could secure re-election right now by simply refusing to play these games with the Republicans and proposing instead a massive jobs bill whereby the government will hire millions of Americans and put them to work re-building the nation’s infrastructure (which is in great need of re-building). The Republicans will scream and cry about more excessive spending, but since they’ve been screaming and crying about nothing else for the last two years their objections won’t have so much force. President Obama could make the case that this kind of spending is the best possible kind of spending for the economy, as it puts money directly into the hands of middle class Americans, giving them more purchasing power and thus getting the wheels of the economy rolling again. The American people, most of whom are not wed to a political ideology and who vote solely based on their own financial situation will see one party pushing a bill to create jobs and another party blocking it. Such a bill would undoubtedly fail in the Republican-controlled House, but the legislative failure would be a political victory, and voters would go to the polls next November determined to keep the guy who fights for them in the White House and kick out everyone standing in his way.

But sadly, Obama is operating according to a completely different political calculus. He believes that he’s got the liberal and progressive vote locked up, so all he has to do is drift far enough to the right to secure enough independents to push him over the top. As such, he believes he can compromise with Republicans to look as centrist and moderate as possible at the expense of the middle class. Instead of job creation, this is what we’ll get from Obama:

1- He’s already announced a draw-down of troops in Afghanistan, but one so small-scale and slow that even after three years we’ll still have twice as many troops over there as we did when he took office. That means more middle class kids remaining in harm’s way while billions of treasury dollars continue to be flushed down the toilet on an unwinnable war, forcing us to look elsewhere to cut the deficit.

2- There will be modest cuts to Medicare. Paul Ryan laid the groundwork for an all-out assault on the program that provides health care to seniors, and since Obama has never met a Republican plan that he didn’t want to meet half-way, we can be sure he’ll reach some “reasonable” compromise and weaken the program without completely destroying it (which he will call “strengthening” it).

3- The Social Security retirement age will be raised. In spite of the fact that over 80% of Americans don’t want their representatives to make any cuts to Social Security benefits whatsoever, it’s a foregone conclusion in Washington that cuts will be made and raising the retirement age is how to do it. The AARP has folded on this, and even members of the progressive caucus are saying they’re open to the idea. No one in Washington is going to fight on behalf of 80% of Americans on this issue, so average workers can look forward to a few extra years of work, courtesy of Obama’s political calculation.

4- There will be massive cuts to Medicaid. While many Democrats are at least willing to voice their opposition to this, because it’s politically dangerous to cut Medicare and Social Security too drastically, Medicaid will be the “sacrificial lamb”, as Jay Rockefeller put it. The money’s got to come from somewhere, so why not the program that provides health-care for people who can’t afford it? If you count children, Medicaid pays for the health-care of about 25% of Americans, so one out of every four of us can expect less help with our medical bills, thanks to Obama’s re-election strategy.

I could be wrong, but I see this as a disastrous strategy, one that is almost guaranteed to lose Obama the White House. But Obama believes that progressives have nowhere else to go, and if someone like Michele Bachmann is his opponent, he should easily cruise to victory.

But when an incumbent is running, most voters don’t even consider the opposition candidate and base their decision solely on whether or not they want to re-hire the guy they currently have. If they see that not only is the economy still struggling, that they’re still wrestling with their private insurance companies, their friends are still unemployed, and on top of that they’re now getting less help from the government with their medical bills and they’ll have to work a few extra years before retirement, they won’t care that they’ll be hiring Michele Bachmann—who would certainly be far worse for them—they’ll only be thinking of firing Obama.

I know it seems crazy. And I admit that I just can’t conceive of Michele Bachmann as President of the United States—I can’t picture her addressing the nation from the oval office no matter how hard I try—but then I think of all those conservatives in 2008 who found the idea of a black man in the White House equally inconceivable.

As Bachmann rises to become the nation’s top Republican the idea will gradually seem less and less absurd, and by the time she’s standing across from Barack Obama at the first presidential debate people who might consider her a joke now will have had plenty of time to grow used to the idea of her as president.

In his final act of self-destruction, President Obama will probably instruct his campaign not to attack Bachmann at all, not to call her out on her lies, her religious fundamentalism, or her nutty ideas, and to instead treat her respectfully and agree with her as much as possible. That’s the truly centrist thing to do, and Obama thinks it’ll help him win independents. He never really punched at McCain even when he chose Sarah Palin to run as his VP, and the Obama campaign’s failure to call her out on her idiocy lent her a large degree of legitimacy (temporary though it was). In the same respect, his campaign will legitimize Michele Bachmann.

In the end, most Americans vote on personality, and Bachmann’s is just more appealing. Unlike Obama, she is a fighter. She has strong convictions, and while every one of those convictions might be wrong, dangerous, or outright crazy, she is at least willing to fight for them. Obama is weak, he looks weak, he sounds weak, and he’s governed weakly throughout his whole first term. Bachmann looks and sounds strong, and voters like strength.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about all of this, but unless we start taking Bachmann seriously we’ll continue laughing at and dismissing her right up until she’s sworn in as president and we’re left with mouths agape, wondering how the hell that happened.

I know I’m rather late posting this, but I went to Rome a couple of weeks ago and my head remained there long after my body returned. Even now I’m still not in much of a political mood but this story is too big not to comment on.

When I write about President Obama in my blog it’s usually to criticize him, but one thing he clearly deserves credit for is authorizing the operation that finally brought Osama Bin Laden—murderer of thousands of innocent men, women, and children—to justice. It was Obama’s national security policies that allowed us to piece together the information which led to Bin Laden’s location, it was Obama’s foreign policy that made capturing Bin Laden a top priority, and it was Barack Obama himself who ultimately made the decision to perform a surgical strike on the compound where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding rather than blow the whole place to smithereens.

It’s for this last part that I offer President Obama complete and un-tempered praise. The politically safer move would have been to send drones in to blow the whole place up, as doing so would have prevented any risk of harm to American soldiers. Had the ground operation gone wrong, Republicans would have wasted no time in spinning it as Obama’s own personal Bay of Pigs. But the president took the risk, and not only did we get confirmation of Bin Laden’s death as a result—something we could never have gotten with an air-strike—but we also spared the lives of all of the women and children Bin Laden had living at the compound with him. This is how the “war on terror” should have been fought all along—by going after the individuals guilty of terrorism and only those individuals. I am firmly in favor of any approach that enhances our national security without killing children.

The correctness of Obama’s actions in this case was in fact so abundantly clear that at first Republicans didn’t know what to do with it. It’s been their modus operandi for the last two years to simply criticize Obama for every single thing he does no matter what: blame him for not fixing the economy even though your party is obstructing all his efforts to do so, blame him for the health-care mandate even though it was originally your proposal, blame him for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even though your president started them, and on and on. How could they possibly spin this to make Obama look bad?

It wasn’t long before some Republicans discovered a neat way around it. Since they couldn’t blame Obama for doing something they were all in favor of (although some actually did start to argue that perhaps killing Bin Laden was the wrong move), they decided instead to simply put most of the credit elsewhere—namely with the Bush administration, and specifically with regards to torture.

Now giving Bush credit for capturing Bin Laden seems, on the surface, rather laughable. This is the guy who famously said in a press briefing that he was “truly not that concerned” about Bin Laden and that he honestly didn’t “spend much time on him”. Bush argued that Bin Laden was just “one person”, and the war on terror was much bigger than that. It’s exactly this vision that’s brought America to the disastrous point we’re at now. Rather than go after the individuals responsible for 9/11, Bush played right into the terrorists’ hands by spreading our retaliation across the Middle East in the form of two massive ground wars that have not only drained our economy to the point of bankruptcy (as Bin Laden himself explained was his exact objective), but destroyed our international reputation for at least a generation.

And part of what destroyed our international reputation is the use of torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the Bush apologists like to call it. Regardless of what euphemisms they used, things like water-boarding are banned by the Geneva conventions and have been prosecuted as war crimes in the past. People outside the American bubble, not subject to Fox News and talk-radio propaganda, clearly see it for what it is and those already predisposed to hate the United States were provided with more than enough justification for their hatred. It’s not only been testified to by many actual intelligence officials such as Matthew Alexander, but it’s just plain common sense that the use of torture has created far more terrorists than it’s eliminated.

And yet many right-wingers are still so hell-bent on justifying their support for torture that they now trumpet the claim that Bin Laden would not have been captured had it not been for the use of torture. They make this claim not after examining the evidence but before they know anything about it—then grasping at whatever straws they can to justify their claims such as the testimony of former CIA head Jose Rodriguez in TIME magazine that some of the information gained by water-boarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed ultimately led to Bin Laden’s whereabouts. The White House rejects this claim and points out that it took years and many various pieces of information to find Bin Laden. You don’t have to trust the White House to recognize that logic—if torturing KSM in 2003 really led us directly to Bin Laden, why wasn’t he caught until 2011?

Not only that, but we know that KSM was water-boarded 183 times, and multiples sources report that he continuously gave out false or misleading information time after time. He apparently knew of the courier who ultimately led us to Bin Laden but even after being subjected to the water-board one hundred and eighty-three times, he didn’t give him up.

Conservatives act as though the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to the use of torture is if we’re pacifists, hippies, or terrorist-sympathizers. As though our only objection to torture is that it’s painful for the terrorists and inflicting pain is wrong. Personally, I don’t have any qualms whatsoever about men who murder children getting tortured, and in fact I wouldn’t mind if we used actual forms of torture and cut off their fingers one by one.

The reason I’m opposed to torture is that it doesn’t work and that it’s counter-productive. It sends our intelligence officials off on wild-goose-chases, and when the fact that we torture people leaks out it damages our international reputation and provokes more violence against us. This is so obvious that it hurts, yet the media still treats this like it’s an actual debate and the war-criminals in the Bush administration have a legitimate point of view.

I understand why people like the idea of terrorists getting tortured, but because they don’t want to believe their support is rooted in pure vindictiveness they desperately cling to the claim that torture works—which simply isn’t true and won’t be true no matter how often they insist that it is.

It’s a shame that so many are so blinded by ideology and identity politics that they are incapable of giving credit to political enemies or accepting blame for those on their side. I am not a fan of Barack Obama by any stretch of the imagination but for succeeding where his predecessor failed in the effort to catch Bin Laden—and by preventing the deaths of innocent civilians in the process—he deserves as much praise as I can give him.

Those who refuse to acknowledge that Barack Obama could possibly ever do anything right under any circumstances and instead cling to the belief that torture was the reason we got Bin Laden are living lives of cognitive dissonance where facts don’t matter and beliefs are simply a matter of what feels good to them.

It’s our responsibility to not let these people control the debate, or the next conservative president won’t hesitate to use torture as well. It would have been best if we’d prosecuted the Bush administration war criminals as soon as we’d had the chance, but since that will never happen the best we can do is try to ensure that it never happens again, and that means making judgments based on what the facts tell us is true, rather than merely what we’d like to be true.

Like most progressives, I liked what President Obama had to say in his budget speech last Wednesday. For the last two years I’ve been criticizing him for never standing up and making his case to the American people, so when he finally does that I have to give him some credit. He argued that the government does have a role to play in society, that we as Americans ought to not just look out for ourselves but our fellow citizens as well, and that dealing with our economic problems should require sacrifices from the wealthy and not just the middle class. He finally went after the Republicans for claiming that we can afford massive tax-cuts for the rich while simultaneously demanding drastic deficit reductions, and he pointed out that the rich are doing quite well these days and they ought to be expected to pay their fair share. He vowed not to extend the Bush tax-cuts again, and he said he would protect social safety nets like Medicare, which the Republicans are now planning to ‘reform’ (i.e. kill it in order to “save” it).

Unfortunately, while President Obama did make a lot of good points, he made them at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, he didn’t make them very forcefully, and it seemed that nobody noticed except the usual TV pundits and bloggers whose job is to follow this stuff closely. They all agree that this was basically the first speech of Obama’s 2012 campaign, but it doesn’t seem like anyone heard it.

But it was a good speech and a good sign that the president isn’t going to drift as far to the political right as some of us have feared. If he remains president, we should be able to expect the expiration of the Bush tax-cuts, and we should be able to rest relatively safe knowing that programs like Social Security and Medicare will remain intact. Those reasons alone are good enough to vote for Obama over a Republican in 2012.

But I can’t help but seriously temper my optimism by looking at Obama’s campaigning/governing pattern so far and noticing the glaring differences between his rhetoric and his actions. If I ask myself, “Is this the kind of message I want from the president?” the answer is yes. But if I ask, “Does this represent a fundamental shift in the president’s governing strategy?” I’d have to say no. It was refreshing to hear him stand up and make some progressive arguments, but it’s not like he’s never made progressive arguments before—he did that all the way through the 2008 campaign, and back then he did it far more forcefully.

It was to be expected that once the re-election campaign kicked into gear, we’d start to see a little of the old Obama again. As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, most Americans take the liberal/progressive position on virtually every political issue, so it’s politically smart to run a campaign as a progressive—as long as you can privately assure your Big Money donors that you’re not actually that progressive. Once you win the election and get into office, you’re free to move as far to the right as you like (and when your political opponents are as close to the fringe as the Republicans are, you can move very far to the right indeed).

I don’t need to make another laundry list of the things Obama promised he would do as a candidate and then backed down from as president. The only thing I need to mention is his promise to let the Bush tax-cuts expire. He tells us now that when the fight over those tax-cuts comes up again next year, this time he’ll refuse to cave in to the Republicans. Forgive me for quoting Bush, but “Fool me once, shame on…shame on…”

I’m not too excited about what I heard from Obama in his speech because it’s nothing new. I’ve always liked his speeches, I’ve always come away from them thinking that he’s on my side and he’s sincere in what he says. Then he goes and cuts back-room deals with Republicans and corporate power-players and I wonder what the hell happened to that guy who gave those awesome speeches.

The real litmus test for whether or not Obama is actually changing course in his approach to governing is coming soon, in the battle over raising the debt ceiling. Everyone who knows anything about economics says that for America to default on its debt would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The Republicans are getting ready to threaten to plunge the country (and the rest of the world with it) into another major economic crisis if the president doesn’t give them exactly what they want.

My guess is, the president won’t shift tactics at all. He’ll act like the Republicans are actually serious about doing it (when in reality they wouldn’t dare because their Wall Street masters wouldn’t let them) and cough up a bunch of spending cuts on programs for the poor and middle-class before finally reaching a deal at the eleventh hour.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and this time he’ll actually call the Republicans’ bluff and refuse to give up any more cuts that would hurt the middle-class. I certainly hope so, but I just don’t see that happening. His whole strategy is to appear as moderate and willing-to-compromise as possible, so he’ll compromise even when he doesn’t have to. He knows he can win re-election simply by telling progressives what they want to hear, and by moving just as far to the right of the center as he can in order to attract independents. He knows how far to the right the Tea Party has pushed the Republicans, and it’s his best electoral advantage. He might tell progressives nice things, but he doesn’t actually have to do anything for them because they’ll have no viable alternative.

Meanwhile, he still needs those Big Money campaign donations, so he’ll make sure to continue protecting the establishment and maintaining the broken system as is.

The only way for us to truly change things is by reforming the way campaigns are financed, but that’s only going to happen from a grassroots level, and unfortunately I don’t see such a movement really picking up steam before the next election.

No matter who wins in 2012, the American people will lose. The only decision we’ll have is over how painful that loss is going to be.