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.

“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.

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

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

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

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

Let me offer an idea. The next time you’re arguing with a conservative (if you never argue with conservatives, you should try it sometime) call yourself a “small-government progressive” or “small-government liberal” and see how they react.

If you call yourself a liberal or progressive, they’ll just dismiss you and everything you have to say immediately. You’ve labeled yourself as their Political Enemy, and in their mind you couldn’t possibly have any worthwhile insight to offer. When you speak they won’t be carefully considering your arguments—they’ll just be fishing through their memories of recent Fox News segments in search of an applicable talking point to counter with.

Of course there are plenty of rational conservatives who are fully capable of independent thought—I’m referring now only to a certain type of right-wing ideologue who rely on the Rush Limbaughs, Bill O’Reillys, and Glenn Becks of the world to do their thinking for them. If you call yourself a “progressive” they’ll dismiss you, but if you attach the “small-government” caveat, it’ll make them blink. They may be conditioned to hate the word “progressive” but they’re also conditioned to feel warm and fuzzy whenever the word “small” is placed in front of the word “government”.

Suddenly they’re slightly more receptive. “Small-government progressive?” they’ll ask, their curiosity aroused. Now you’ll have a fair chance to explain your positions, as now their minds will be prepared to agree with at least some of what you have to say.

Start with something that you probably already agree on: bank bailouts. You may be a progressive but you don’t think the government should just hand over hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to Wall Street banks that crashed the economy with no strings attached. That’s about as bad as Big Government gets, and you’re just as outraged as the conservatives are. (For those of you who’ve been told by the media that most of this money has been repaid, I’d urge you to take a closer look and read about how these banks have managed to “pay us back” with our own money and still deprive us of $165 billion in interest). If you’re feeling confident, you may even want to drop a subtle reminder that the bailout happened under the Bush administration.

Next you can explain that you don’t think the government needs to spend nearly $700 billion a year on defense, about seven times as much as the country with the next highest military budget, China. About 36% of all our tax money goes to the military (more if you count veteran’s benefits, but we like those), which it uses to fight unnecessary wars or maintain unnecessary military bases all around the world. As small-government progressives, we don’t think we need an Empire. The military should only be used for genuine peace-keeping and humanitarian missions (done with international support and cooperation) and for defending the homeland from actual threats—like if England ever decides it wants its colonies back.

You might even get some agreement there, but now it’s time to start making your conservative friend’s head spin. When you say you want small-government, it means you also want the government out of people’s private lives. That means you oppose South Dakota’s new law forcing women to wait 72 hours for an abortion, Oklahoma’s law forcing women seeking an abortion to listen to a detailed description of the fetus before undergoing the procedure, Arizona’s law paving the way to imprison abortion providers, and all of these draconian measures implemented by Republicans to place the government squarely between women and their doctors—essentially giving the government dominion over women’s own bodies. Ask them how they can call themselves “small-government” conservatives and still support laws like this.

Also ask how they can claim to be in favor of “small government” and support anti gay-rights measures taken by Republicans like Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia who rescinded the right of state workers to be protected from discrimination based on sexual preference. Suddenly what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom is not only the governnment’s business, but they can actually fire you for it. Is that “small government”? How about the countless bills banning gay marriage? Can your conservative friend really call himself a fan of “small government” if he wants the government to tell people who they can and can’t marry?

Or how about marijuana prohibition—laws that tell us what substances we can or can’t put in our own bodies? You might be able to defend these laws on public safety grounds if there weren’t so much evidence that marijuana is safer than alcohol, which remains perfectly legal. In any case, should a “small-government” conservative support measures like that taken by Rick Scott in Florida to force all state employees to undergo frequent drug tests (which I’m sure has nothing to do with his personal financial stake in a drug-testing company)? Apparently the government should be so big that it routinely examines the chemical composition of your own urine.

Perhaps your conservative friend is beginning to realize that he’s not such an advocate for small government after all. To really put him to the test, ask him if he supports the “financial martial law” legislation in Michigan that allows the governor to declare a state of “fiscal emergency” in a town and appoint an unelected manager with the power to break union contracts, dissolve entire municipalities, and nullify boards and councils of elected officials. Had this been proposed by a Democratic governor, wouldn’t he have been up in arms about it? But because it’s a Republican and because it’s being done in the name of “fiscal responsibility” he’s perfectly willing to let Big Government become so big that it can literally override the will of the voting public.

If you’re still having a conversation at this point, there may actually be some room for common ground. Maybe he’s more consistent in his belief in small government than many so-called conservatives today. Can’t you both agree that what’s important is not so much the size of government but its effectiveness? You may call yourself a progressive and he may call himself a conservative, but you can both be in favor of smaller, smarter government.

We progressives don’t want the government to control every aspect of people’s lives—we just want it to exert more control over those aspects of life where some degree of government involvement is essential. Let’s make sure our drinking water is safe, our food isn’t poisoned, our air is clean, our drugs are well-tested, and so on. Let’s make sure there are enough rules and regulations to prevent Wall Street from crashing the economy again. Let’s not hand over $56 billion of taxpayer money in the form of subsidies to oil companies that are already enormously profitable (how is that not Big Government?), but let’s make sure that if we let those companies drill for oil off our shores, they actually have an adequate plan to contain a spill if it occurs.

Progressives don’t want Big Government. We just want a government that does what it’s supposed to do, and if we can resist falling into the black-and-white narrative of Big-Government Liberal vs. Small-Government Conservative that the media traps us in, we might find that we have more in common with our Fox-viewing friends than either we or they would expect.

All you have to do is challenge the framing a little bit to get them to open their minds to a healthy dose of nuance. Progressives aren’t who they think we are, and many of them are not as closed-minded as we might think they are. In any case, middle-class conservatives and middle-class progressives definitely share far more economic interests with one another than we do with the giant corporations and billionaires who own the media and both political parties.

They’ve taken over our government, shrinking it only in the areas that present obstacles to them while expanding it to absurd proportions in all of the areas that benefit them. Conservatives may think they have a monopoly on the concept of “small government”, but my hope is that we start forcing them to think about what they mean by that. Perhaps some of them will realize that when it comes to certain core issues about the role of government, both conservatives and progressives can be on the same side.

America, meet Barack Obama’s new chief of staff Bill Daley:

Who is Bill Daley? Well, let’s just say if you liked Rahm Emanuel, you’ll love Bill Daley. Not only does he have a background in Chicago politics (he’s the current mayor’s brother), but he’s also got ties to Wall Street as well, having served as the Midwest chairman of JPMorgan Chase. And just like Rahm, he’s bought into the widespread misperception that the country is actually significantly further to the right than it actually is.

We all know how Rahm Emanuel pushed the president to pass any kind of Wall Street reform he could get, regardless of how strong it was. And we know he had the same attitude regarding health care reform: make deals with pharmaceutical companies and private health insurers that will increase the bill’s chance of passing, no matter how much these concessions weaken it. If you were thinking that a new chief of staff would bring a different kind of advice to the president’s ear, think again.

Regarding health care reform, Bill Daley told the New York Times:

They miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.

Apparently he thinks the watered-down health care reform legislation went too far. He believes that when the American people voted for Change, what they really wanted was for things to stay more or less the same.

There are plenty of people who still believe that this is a “center-right” country and that liberals and progressives are just a small minority. After all, the media repeatedly and relentlessly trumpets this Gallup poll showing that when asked to describe their political ideology, 40% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 35% as moderate, and only 20% as liberal. Never mind that this poll only asks people how they self-identify and doesn’t ask for their actual opinions on a single actual issue—because more people are comfortable calling themselves “conservative” than calling themselves “liberal” (I wonder if decades of right-wing talk-radio might have anything to do with that?) they consider it an irrefutable fact that most Americans are not liberal, and therefore that most Americans are opposed to things like government-run health insurance, strict Wall Street reform, and raising taxes on the rich. Most Americans, because they call themselves “conservative” must therefore believe that fixing the deficit is the most pressing issue of our time, and that this must be done through spending cuts and under no circumstances with increased taxes for the rich.

As a public service, let me help to bust this myth for you once and for all. When you’re arguing with conservatives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with you (or when you’re arguing with progressives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with us), you can tell them that they are simply mistaken.

When you go issue-by-issue, the majority of Americans support the more liberal position on almost every single question ranging from foreign policy to gay rights, as this superb study by Media Matters proves.

When it comes to Wall Street reform, an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in April 2010 indicated that 65% of Americans wanted reform to be tougher, not weaker.

When it comes to health care, poll after poll consistently showed widespread support for the public option (i.e. “government-run” health insurance), including this New York Times/CBS poll taken in June of 2009 in which a whopping 72 percent of respondents said they were in favor. If Bill Daley thinks most Americans believe the health care bill went too far, he is just plain wrong.

And another great poll just came out this week, and it’s one I hope did not go un-noticed by Bill Daley and the rest of the folks at the White House: A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll asked people what the first step they would take to balance the budget would be. 4% said cut Medicare. 20% said cut defense spending. But an overwhelming 61% said they would raise taxes on the wealthy!

Center-right country indeed.

Incidentally, only 3% of respondents said they would balance the budget by cutting Social Security, but that appears to be the course of action our “representatives” in Washington are going to take. But even though nearly two-thirds of Americans would rather raise taxes on the rich, that won’t even be considered.

Since he took office, the president has been surrounded by political advisors telling him to move to the right, to compromise on the liberal agenda because liberals don’t really matter. They’ve been telling him that most of the country is to the right of the political center.

But this is simply not true. Washington is significantly to the right of the rest of America, which is significantly to the left of the political center. President Obama doesn’t seem to understand that. And sadly, his new chief of staff Bill Daley is not going to be the one to tell him.

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.

We demand smaller government (except for the defense department).

The government needs to balance the budget (as long as it doesn’t involve raising taxes).

The government better not mess with the free market (so it should let giant corporations merge and monopolize every industry).

The government needs to look out for the interests of the middle class (by letting the richest people take as large a share of the nation’s wealth as possible).

The government has to drastically cut spending (but continue to pay billions for military equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union).

The government’s primary responsibility is to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism (which it can do by invading Muslim countries, killing loads of civilians, and imprisoning and torturing their friends and neighbors).

The government needs to stay the hell away from religion (unless it’s to impose Biblical law on all citizens).

The government better not step between us and our doctors (unless it’s to deny us the choice to have an abortion).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us who we can and can not marry).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when it comes to tapping our phones or groping us at the airport).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us which chemicals we’re forbidden to put in our bodies).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (except hire people directly).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (by cutting tax-rates for giant corporations that don’t pay any taxes anyway).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (as long as it doesn’t force companies to create those jobs in America instead of overseas).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean eliminating oversight of Wall Street so that they can continue to get rich by putting the entire economy in jeopardy).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting corporations maximize profits by deceiving and screwing over consumers at every opportunity).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting the coal and oil industries cut whatever corners in terms of worker and environmental safety that they see fit).

Our biggest concern is for the well-being of our grandchildren (but it’s not even worth considering whether scientists are right about climate change).

We firmly believe in living by Christian values (except for loving thy neighbor and caring for the less fortunate).

We believe in abiding by the constitution (except for the parts about equal rights and the separation of church and state).

Our ideology is superior to all other political ideologies (because it’s based on our gut feeling that it is).

Despite the proclamations from Obama and the democrats that they passed “the most sweeping financial reform since the Great Depression”, very little has actually changed in the way Wall Street does business. The incentive structure that rewards employees for creating financial bubbles that eventually burst and cost taxpayers billions of dollars remains firmly in place. Not only that, but now that the precedent has been set that if Wall Street crashes the economy absolutely no harm will come to any of them personally, things may actually have gotten worse.

Wall Street firms are gearing up to hand out 144 billion dollars in bonuses this year. Wall Street bankers will be taking home tens of millions of dollars not because they earned it or that their talents are actually worth it, but because they’ve simply created this wealth out of thin air and don’t have to worry about losing it. If something goes wrong—and it almost certainly will—it’s the schmucks who can’t afford to buy half of Congress who’ll have to pay.

To the Wall Street types it’s nothing more than a game. There are winners and there are losers, and abstract concepts like morality and social responsibility don’t enter into it. They’ll make their strategic calculations and take the course that leads to the best financial outcome for them, even if it’s the worst possible outcome for everyone else. The only way to change the outcome of the game is to change the rules.

But it doesn’t need to be a huge, complicated piece of legislation. If we just impose one new rule on Wall Street—one that happens to be simple enough for everyone to understand—it could change everything.

William D. Cohan is the author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. I caught him in an interview with Cenk Uygur who was filling in for Chris Jansing on MSNBC this past week, and found his suggestion to be rather brilliant.

The idea is to take the top 100 people at the Wall Street firms, the ones who make the decisions about what businesses to be in, how to deploy capital, who to hire and fire, and make them sign an agreement that they’ll put their entire net worth on the line. They’ll have to create a security out of their own personal money that would be the first thing to disappear if something goes wrong. Yes, the taxpayers would still be on the line for however many billions their reckless behavior costs the economy, but the first few hundred million will have to come directly out of their pockets.

What could be more reasonable than forcing these gamblers to actually gamble with their own money? If we do that, the incentive structure changes entirely. Yes, they can keep creating these bubbles and raking in massive amounts of short-term profit by putting the economy in jeopardy, but if they go too far and it all comes crashing down, their mansions and yachts will be the first things to go.

Right now, Wall Street bankers take all of the gains and suffer none of the losses. They’ll get their bonuses no matter what economic harm they do. But if we change the game slightly so that they’ll have to suffer the losses before anyone else, they might not want to take such huge risks. They might want to play it safe instead, to slowly accumulate wealth as the economy slowly accumulates strength. The rising tide really would life all ships in that case, rather than the way it is now with Wall Street tilting the oceans so that all of the water flows to their end while grounding the ships on the other side.

Cohan suggests that the Wall Street firms take it upon themselves to make such an agreement because it would be good for business. Investors would feel far safer putting their money in a financial firm run by people who have even more at stake than they do. It would be wonderful if a few firms started doing this and the rest were forced to follow suit.

But apparently no Wall Street firms are willing to take that risk. They’re perfectly willing to risk other peoples’ money, but not their own. That can only mean that when they make their strategic calculations they assign a high degree of probability to another financial crisis happening, otherwise there’d be no harm in making such an agreement. But they know they can make more money by inflating the bubbles and dealing with another crisis than by going back to safer tactics. With the rules as they currently exist, we guarantee another crash because another crash is in the bankers’ best financial interest.

All we need to do is change their incentives, and if they won’t do it willingly we have to impose this rule on them. Make them put their own net worth on the line, make them financially responsible for the things they do, and watch as they start doing things more responsibly.

No big pieces of legislation necessary. Just one quick fix, one proposal that everyone can understand and that would therefore be extremely politically difficult to oppose. There’s no reason this proposal can’t be made. We just need one representative willing to make it.

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.