Kemstone's Journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Eskow makes a powerful point in a piece for the Huffington Post, leaving me wondering why the hell every other progressive in the country isn’t shouting it from the rooftops until it finally starts to penetrate the Washington bubble:

Only 6% of Americans think Congress should concentrate on reducing the deficit or changing the tax code, according to the latest CBS News poll. Nearly ten times as many people, 56%, want it to focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy. Guess which set of policies is the center of attention in Washington right now?

That’s right—the big battle going on in Washington right now is about extending the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. Specifically, just how much are the Democrats going to cave-in to Republican demands to make the tax-cuts permanent. Will we extend them for everyone making under $250,000 a year or will we push that limit up to $1 million? Will we extend them for two years? Ten years? Just how much money are we going to give to the rich?

Meanwhile, some estimate that the real unemployment rate is about 17.1%. Nearly one out of every five Americans doesn’t have a job, and the debate in Washington right now essentially boils down to how many Rembrandts or Picassos rich people can afford to hang in their foyers.

But once we get that issue cleared up, we’ll start focusing on jobs, right? Nope—we’re going to be talking about the deficit commission’s proposals to slash Social Security, Medicare, Veteran’s benefits, and nearly every other program that benefits ordinary Americans, in order to reduce the deficit, something only 4% of Americans say should be Congress’s top priority.

Now is not the time to fret over the deficit, and the vast majority of Americans understand that. But Washington seems to think that the last election was all about the deficit, which they brilliantly plan to reduce by…giving tax-cuts to the rich? Something’s not right here.

In fact, something is deeply, profoundly f***ed up.

People, why are we not out in the streets already? Washington’s top priorities are slashing entitlement programs for the middle class and giving tax cuts to the super-rich. They literally want to take your money and give it to the rich. They might as well just send people to physically come to your house, take whatever money or valuable items you might have, and deliver them straight to the people living in the mansions across town.

How long are we going to let 6% of the country dictate our priorities? How long is Washington going to ignore the plight of average people in order to please the powerful? How long is the media going to let them get away with it?

Answer: as long as we continue to do nothing about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, America, you’ve managed to inflict massive pain upon yourself yet again. After 2006 and 2008 I thought that we might actually be getting on the right track, but clearly this is still the same country that gave George W. Bush two terms as president. I still think the majority knows what’s best for the country, but apparently not enough of them care enough to actually vote.

So now we’ve handed control of the House of Representatives back to the Republican Party, and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate to almost nothing. We’ve let the corporate shills and collaborators keep their seats and let men of principle like Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson be booted out. We’ve allowed the Big Business interests who’ve spent unprecedented amounts of money to buy these elections succeed in their efforts, thus paving the way for even more giant anonymous donations in every election to come. Rather than prompt a media narrative that voters want systemic fixes to our broken system of government, we’ve allowed the corporate-controlled media to go with the story they’ve wanted to tell all along: that the Democrats did too much, fought for too much change, and that they now need lay low and protect the status quo.

Good going, America. I don’t know who I’m more disappointed in—the misguided fools who voted for Republicans thinking they would actually represent the people and not the special interests who fund their campaigns—or the apathetic liberals who didn’t think this election was important enough to get off their asses and vote. Both are responsible for the disaster that’s coming over the next two years and will almost certainly extend well beyond that. When historians look back at this election, the first since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, they may very well write that this was our last chance to pull ourselves back from the brink.

Make no mistake—the winner of the 2010 Election was not the Republican Party. The winner was money. Mega-rich individuals like the Koch Brothers, giant Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs, and big corporations like private health insurance companies have all discovered that buying elections is now easier than ever. They had their list of targets, the few politicians like Feingold and Grayson who refused to play ball with them, and poured massive amounts of money into ads attacking them. The American public was successfully duped, and they went and voted for the candidates spouting the same familiar “smaller government, lower taxes” rhetoric that they fall for time and time again. Apparently they didn’t get the message that when a Republican says “smaller government” he means “less oversight and accountability for giant corporations” and when he says “lower taxes” he’s only talking about billionaires.

The same goes for Prop. 19 in California, the ballot measure that would have finally put in motion an end to this absurd marijuana prohibition that’s enabled so many criminal gangs to flourish, taken up so much time and resources of law-enforcement, put so many non-violent people into overcrowded prisons, and caused numerous deaths due to the fact that alcohol—a far more dangerous drug—is legal and therefore more accessible. The Chamber of Commerce poured their money into an ad campaign full of lies and distortions (just because weed is legal doesn’t mean you’d be allowed to drive or go to work while high) in order to protect the profits of the private prison industry, the alcohol business, and everyone else who benefits from prohibition. The failed war on drugs continues, thanks to Big Money and America’s indifference to actual facts.

So what can we expect from here on out? In the short-term, prepare for an excruciating two years as the 112^th Congress makes the 111^th look like the most successful, progressive Congress in history. There are two lessons Obama could take from the election results, but we already know he’ll take the wrong one. He’s been sealed inside the Washington bubble for so long that he’ll actually believe the false narrative that Democrats lost because they were too liberal and he needs to follow Bill Clinton’s lead and move “towards the center” (as though he hasn’t firmly lodged himself there already). The argument that Democrats lost because they weren’t liberal enough—that they accomplished too little—will be dismissed off-hand. They’ll accept the Fox News narrative, just as they have since the very beginning. Only now, they won’t even try to push back. They’ll propose all kinds of compromises with the Republicans in a desperate attempt to finally convince people how bipartisan they are, but they will continue to fail as the Republicans have no interest whatsoever in letting Obama accomplish anything.

The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has already stated quite plainly that limiting Obama to one-term is their top priority. There are some deluded folks in the media and in the White House who think that because Republicans now control the House they’ll have to take some responsibility and actually work with Democrats to take steps to improve the economy. This is utter nonsense. The Republicans know they won big in this election mainly because the economy is still terrible. Why on earth would they want to lift a finger to improve it before 2012? Their best chance of taking the White House in 2012 is to make sure the economy remains just as terrible as it is now, and that means obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.

You should expect to see many-a-subpoena handed down to Democrats and members of the administration. Bogus charges will be trumped up and investigated relentlessly, taking up all of the time in the House and dragging the media narrative with it. Don’t be surprised if they invent some preposterous reason to impeach Obama. Even if they fail, it will be a very politically useful distraction for them, and it will undoubtedly please their base. Because honestly, how many of these Tea Party people really care about the federal deficit? I’d bet that most of them are only out there marching because they personally loathe Obama, and as long as the Republicans are attacking him they won’t give a damn about fiscal policy.

And let’s not even mention the likelihood of a government shut-down. The Republicans have been itching to try that stunt again, and they have reason to believe that the results will be different this time.

But that’s just the next two years. Long-term, things look even more dismal thanks to Citizens United. As I said, the powerful interests who can buy the government have now discovered that buying the government is even easier, and because of their monumental success this time around it’s going to be even easier next time. Not only will they be far less hesitant to throw money at their preferred candidates (nobody who did this time around suffered any negative consequences), but the politicians themselves will be far more likely to approach fund-raising by soliciting the donations of just a few major corporations they can do favors for, and ignore the millions of people who might give them small donations that are now no longer needed.

It won’t be long before instead of a Senator from Wisconsin or a Representative from Florida’s First district we’ll have a Senator from Exxon or a Representative from Goldman Sachs. The politicians already care more about pleasing their big donors than delivering on reforms that would help average citizens. Now they’ll have almost no reason whatsoever to do anything for average citizens. As long as they do the bidding of their corporate masters, those corporate masters will ensure that they remain in power.

Democracy may have breathed its last gasps in the United States of America. From here on out, it’s plutocracy. The rich will make all the decisions, and they’ll do so based purely on their own selfish interests. The gap between the super-wealthy and everybody else will continue to expand until there’s no more “middle-class” to speak of, and the power and influence the United States once held on the international stage will slowly wane away as foreign interests find that they too can buy a piece of the American government.

Sadly, most of the people who made the mistake of voting Republican in this election will never understand the harm they’ve done. Fox News will make sure of that. They’ll continue to insist that it’s the liberals—the people who’ve been desperately trying to make America work for average people again—who destroyed America. The poor fools will never know that it was them all along, that they are to blame for their struggles, and that when they could have prevented the death of their beloved democracy by simply taking an objective look at the facts and voting accordingly, they were too busy marching on behalf of the very people responsible for their suffering.

I sincerely hope I’m being overly pessimistic, but hope is in short supply right now.

One of the main reasons the system in Washington is so broken is that candidates from both parties are bought by major financial interests, so even when democrats push for reform they don’t push too hard because they don’t want to lose that campaign funding. Giant corporations usually favor republicans, but they pour money into both sides in order to cover their bases. The last thing they’d want is to have an entire political party not beholden to them.

And yet with the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case allowing corporations to anonymously spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads, the game might actually be changing. Republican candidates are out-raising their Democratic opponents by incredibly wide margins this year, thanks almost exclusively to large donations filtered through groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. It seems that the powerful interests are banking not only on a republican takeover but possibly a permanent republican majority. If they only have to buy one party, and the Citizens United decision allows them to pour as much money into that party as they like, why bother covering their bases? Just make sure democrats stop winning elections.

I hope this is their strategy, because I believe it smacks of blind hubris and overconfidence. If they stop buying Democratic candidates, then perhaps Democratic candidates will stop working for them. Why water-down reform if you’re not going to be rewarded financially for doing so? If private industry wants to make an enemy of you, why not make an enemy of them and actually stand up and fight them?

Imagine if Barack Obama had been told before the health care debate that neither he nor a single democrat would receive one penny in campaign donations from private health insurance companies. There would have been no reason for them not to push as hard as possible for a public option, because the only people opposed to it (other than the hordes of grossly misinformed right-wingers) were private insurance companies. Imagine if they’d been told that no money from Wall Street would go to fund Democratic campaigns. There would have been no reason to water-down financial reform to the point of impotence the way they did.

This has the potential to bring about a major sea-change in American politics whereby we have two distinct parties—one of Big Industry and the other of the Little Guy—rather than what we have now which is one party of Big Industry and the other of Big Industry and maybe some unions.

Of course with the economy the way it is, we may already be past the point where a party of the Little Guy can have any power anyway. With such a gross disparity of wealth, we may already be at the point where even millions of small donors wouldn’t be able to match the funds of just a handful of big ones. And as long as they can keep half of the regular people convinced that what’s good for Big Business is good for them (as Fox News does for the Tea Party), they might have free reign to really run the country like the plutocracy they’ve been morphing it into for decades.

That’s probably what they’re counting on. Here’s hoping they’re wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll write more about the Glenn Beck rally once I’ve heard more about what actually took place there, but for now I just want to make a quick comment about a piece I read this morning on the Huffington Post, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoration of Honor’ Rally by Clarence B. Jones and Stuart Connelly—people who apparently helped organize the original March on Washington.

Written before the rally happened, this piece is essentially saying, “The legacy of Martin Luther King does not belong to any specific group. If Mr. Beck wants to champion the values of the Civil Rights Movement, he has our blessing.”

The obvious reaction is to laugh, as it’s obvious Beck isn’t doing anything close to championing the true values of the Civil Rights Movement, and that he’s actually crapping on the memory of MLK by choosing the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech as the date of his rally.

He chose this date because he knew it would create a controversy, get the lefties yelling at him and thus cast himself in the role of the courageous hero standing against overwhelming liberal opposition. Those who’ve lambasted Beck for this are playing right into his hands.

But this strategy—the “God bless” strategy—is much better.

Just imagine if instead of mocking the Tea Party people, deriding them all as racists and dismissing everything they have to say, the entire progressive movement collectively said to them, “We think it’s wonderful that you are so concerned with the future of America that you’re willing to get out and march. We solute your patriotism. Now let’s talk about what the REAL problems are and how we fix them.”