Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

That's right. You'd better be scared—and you'd better be prepared to give up everything to get Obama re-elected. Ryan is an Ayn Rand fanatic and he has an evil vision for America that threatens to roll back every single progressive gain in our history. The only way to avert complete disaster is to silence every conceivable criticism of Obama and the Democrats, ignore everything they've done for the past four years, forget about everything going on around us, and go all-out to campaign to stop Romney/Ryan from winning in November.

Well, that's what Obama and the Democrats want you to think, anyway. But how much of it should we actually take seriously?

Now, don't get me wrong. I do think that Paul Ryan is awful. I have nothing but scorn for everything he stands for—more on that in a minute. But why does that admission mean that I should give the Democrats a free-pass, drink the Kool-Aid and engage in a long list of delusions—that Obama and the Democrats will fight the Right, that they'll pass progressive reforms, etc.?

If liberals are right to strongly oppose what Ryan stands for, they'd do well to oppose those same stands when—which is often—Obama and the Democrats take them. Let's do a little compare and contrast.

Here's a paraphrase of what Moveon.org has to say about Ryan in a Facebook meme that you may have seen:

• His economic plan would cost Americans 1 million jobs in the first year alone. 
• He'd slash and burn Medicare and Social Security.
• He'd cut taxes for the 1% and raise them for working-class and poor people. And meanwhile he'd give subsidies to big corporations.
• He's an anti-choice extremist. 
• He takes lots of money from the 1%. 
• He opposes LGBT equality. 

Now, of course, all of these measures serve the interests of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us. Broadly speaking they are strong stands in favor of austerity and maintaining existing forms of oppression.

But the bait-and-switch here is to insinuate—as Moveon.org surely intends to do—that Obama and the Democrats stand for the opposite of every one of these measures. If only it were true.

First of all, the Democrats and the Obama Whitehouse are highly tolerant of soaring unemployment for the 99%. The fact is that the Democrats are hypocrites on outsourcing and unemployment. Since 2008, Obama and the Democrats have presided over an economy enduring extremely high unemployment—especially high in communities of color—and they took no bold measures to do anything about it except a weak-sauce stimulus package which, besides being weighted heavily in the direction of corporate tax breaks, had already run out of steam by mid 2010. It was like getting a band-aid for a broken limb.

Or take Social Security and Medicare. According to Obama himself, "Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security". Or consider that Obama's failed "grand bargain" in 2009 included a willingness to simply take Medicare away from 65 and 66 year old Americans. Or consider that Obamacare includes a series of cuts to Medicare totalling nearly $500 billion over the course of several years. Or consider that Obama himself—and other high-ranking Democrats—have on more than one occasion broached the idea of privatizing Social Security. A staunch defender of Medicare and Social Security Obama is not. Both Obama and Ryan are of one mind about austerity—their only disagreement is about how deep to cut the social safety net. 

Or take the issue of tax breaks for the rich. As everyone knows, Obama campaigned in 2008 promising to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the rich. But as President he and the congressional Democrats warmly embraced those tax breaks and extended them--making them the Obama Tax Cuts for the rich. Of course, liberals haven't bothered to rename them. It is well-known that raising the marginal tax rate on the 1% would be both highly popular and an easy way of saving public sector jobs and staving off the push for austerity. But the Democrats and Obama have no intention of doing any such thing.

Why not? One reason is that the Democrats—like Ryan and Romney—take loads of money from the 1%, if they're not outright members of the 1% themselves. Recall that in 2008, the Democrats pulled in the lion's share of corporate campaign donations—they were, as the LA Times put it, "Wall Street's Darlings". As is well-known, the 1% hedges its bets and always gives enormous sums to both parties. There's a lot of alarmist nonsense floating around in liberal circles these days about how Super-PAC's are funnelling lots of money to Republicans—as if the Democrats are some kind of grassroots underdog that operates on online donations or something. The fact is that the ruling class spends enormous sums on the campaigns of both parties, and the politics of both parties reflects that fact. It takes considerable chutzpah to uncritically support the Democratic Party, on the one hand, and complain hysterically about the corporate money accepted by Republicans on the other.

Now, it is true that Obama and some Democrats are not the out-in-the-open anti-choice, homophobic extremists that the Republicans are. But that doesn't mean that they are allies in the fight for women's rights and LGBT equality. At best, they slowly erode gains on those fronts and compromise with the Right. At worst, they propose many of the same policies as the Right—think of the Stupak amendment, for example. But we can't afford to passively support an entity which barely holds the line, at best, and pushes things backwards at worst. The only time that the Democrats move at all on women's rights or LGBT equality is when movements pressure them to act. We should devote all of our time, money, resources and political energies to those movements—not the Democrats—if we want to carry those struggles forward.

And think of all the things that MoveOn.org meme didn't mention. They might have said that Ryan also supports war and imperialism abroad. But, of course, so does Obama. They might have also said that he supports the destruction of the environment, offshore drilling, and the appointment of high-ranking corporate polluters to regulatory positions in government. But, then, so does Obama. To this we could add other abominations such as the "War on Drugs", the New Jim Crow, the mass deportation of Latin@s, corporatized education policy, keeping Gitmo open for business, and all the rest. And, of course, Obama supports all those things as well. It doesn't do any good to pretend that this isn't so.

So, where does this leave us? We need to build the social movements, participate in the struggles of the 99% and be part of constructing a new Left that can actually fight for our interests. This isn't a new idea. It's how every single major progressive gain was won. Again and again we've seen that the Democrats are a political black hole. They suffocate struggles rather than carry them forward. They take and take and give nothing back in return. The time to cut them loose is now.

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Don't let it fool you

This is justly derided as reactionary filth.

But the inference that we're asked to draw is that Obama and the Democrats have a "sharply contrasting vision" that must, insofar as the GOP's plan is so bad, be much better. This is irrational.

I've got an idea: Let's not draw any inferences about the Democrats stand for merely by looking at the Republicans. If you want to understand what the Democrats are about, look closely at their policies and compare them to any plausible conception of social justice. What becomes obvious upon doing this is that the Democrats are only disagreeing with the Republicans about how deep to cut, how far to push the regime of austerity. The parties aren't disagreeing about whether to cut. That question is proscribed at the onset. The "debate" among the two parties is entirely internal to the ruling class policy of austerity.

As I've argued elsewhere, the entire discourse surrounding budgets makes it appear impossible that we could do anything but cut. I call this budget-cut fatalism. This is an ideological blinder that shifts our attention away from what matters and instead focuses us on marginal questions friendly to austerity.

In order to see that this is so, we have only to ask two questions. First, why is there a budget crisis? Second, what is the full range of options available to deal with it?

The first question is easily answered: deficits and budget shortfalls are cropping up in states, municipalities, and counties all over the country because of the global economic recession (brought on by the reckless gambling of investors in the financial sector). Accordingly, as in any recession, tax revenues have fallen off a cliff, while unemployment and demand for social services has soared. Moreover, regressive tax policies have (for decades now) have slowly starved public coffers of much needed funds by in large measure exempting the rich and powerful from paying their fair share. . At the Federal level, the deficit is a combination of these factors, such as economic meltdown and big tax breaks for the rich (I note that the Bush tax breaks, which Obama extended, has cost $2.74 Trillion over 8 years) but others as well, namely, the ultra-expensive wars our government has been bankrolling since 2001.

Though this is obvious and basically uncontroversial, it is shirked by the defenders of austerity. They act as though the budget shortfalls were caused by "reckless government spending". Thus they are able to appear credible in claiming that the government must learn to "live within its means". But for that to be true, we'd have to ignore all of the above evidence while also believing that governments (at the municipal, state, Federal level, in various different countries from Greece to the UK to the USA) suddenly decided to dramatically increase spending between 2008 and 2009. Of course, that's not what happened. As everyone knows, budgets weren't in the awful shape that they're in now only 2-3 years ago, so we have to explain the sudden change from then to now. But anyone who's been conscious the last 2-3 years also knows that this thing, the global economic recession, has kinda been a notable economic event. To say that "reckless spending" is the culprit is ad hoc and unjustifiable. Budgets are in the dumps because the floor dropped out when the recession hit, causing tax revenues to drop dramatically.

Having answered the first question, the answer to the second is rather obvious. Our options are as follows. One is to severely cut the living standards of the majority of Americans through austerity, thus forcing them to pay the price of the crisis they didn't cause, the wars which they oppose, and the tax give-aways to the rich which don't benefit them. That's the option pursued enthusiastically by Democrat and Republican alike.

But there are clearly other feasible options. For example, we could end the wars and occupations right now, thus saving trillions of dollars over the next 10 years (we could also drastically reduce the Pentagon budget). Moreover, we could easily raise taxes on the rich to cover the budget shortfalls: chop from the top, as they say. We wouldn't even have to raise them very much (though, I'm for raising them much more). For starters, we could ask G.E. to pay some taxes at all. We could easily institute a windfall tax of 2% on profits, which makes sense given that the ruling class made record profits (amidst a recession!) last quarter. Similarly, we could institute luxury taxes of various kinds, we could reinstate the estate tax, and we could raise the top marginal rate for income taxation. We could increase corporate taxes and sharply increase funding for enforcing the existing tax laws by cracking down on rich tax evaders. There are lots of options here.

All of these options would have no impact whatsoever on 99% of the population's tax rates. Moreover it would hardly "cripple the economy" or anything like that at all; it would simply tap into the vast, unproductive surpluses of the rich (who have become so at the expense of the vast majority of us). The unjustified dogma that high marginal rates of taxation are incompatible with economic growth is just that: unjustified dogma. From 1945-1973, the longest most sustained economic boom in US history, marginal rates of taxation were twice as high as they are now. They were even as high as 90% at times. So it's just false to say that high marginal rates slow economic growth and its groundless to complain that such rates would "hinder the recovery". What recovery? There has been no recovery yet for working people. Taxing the rich would be a way of stopping the lot of the rest of us from getting worse.

This is all a way of saying: if you want to support the Dems merely because they are the lesser evil, then fine. But don't pretend that they're not an evil. Don't talk as though they actually represent a progressive force in the US. Don't pretend that they are looking out for the interests of the vast majority of us. They are a party dominated by ruling class interests and their policies and actions in government make this painfully obvious. If the best you can muster is the lesser-evilist argument, then fine. But you've got to admit that that's thin gruel. So refrain from buttering the Dems up and pretending that lesser evils are something more than what they are. If you, like me, aren't satisfied with the lesser-evil... the answer isn't to project your political ideals onto them. This is wishful thinking, a paradigmatic failure of rationality. The answer is to get up and organize, mobilize, and be part of rebuilding the Left in this country.

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GOP Union-Busting and the Democrats

A disarming headline: "Buried Provision In House GOP Bill Would Cut Off Food Stamps To Entire Families If One Member Strikes." Read about it here.

By comparison, attacks like this make the Democrats look good. But let's not get carried away here. The Democrats, to be sure, are not the rabid union-busters that the Republicans are. But they are hardly a friend of labor either. They receive enough money and electioneering/get-out-the-vote support from labor that the Democrats are in no position to want to completely destroy organized labor. But there are a lot of possible positions between the poles of genuine working-class political organization, on the one hand, and union-busting corporate thuggery on the other. It's not clear that it is either prudent or plausible to identify the democrats with the former simply because they aren't full-fledged proponents of the latter.

We should be clear that the Democrats are not going to revoke collective bargaining rights as such. But they will (and, in fact, already are trying to) push through punishing wage cuts, salary freezes, layoffs, pension "reforms" (read: cuts), etc. for workers. They will (and have for generations) allow the labor movement to wither on the vine and ultimately decline into oblivion. They will (and already have) push through big tax breaks and subsidize huge gains for the ruling class at the same time that they're telling the rest of us that we need to "live within our means" and "tighten our belts". They will (and always have tended to) "play both sides of the fence" and try to make it publicly appear that they are not "biased" toward either labor or capital, but are merely neutral arbiters advocating cooperation between them (their rhetorical ploy for making this argument is to fawn over the mystical "middle class"). But close analysis of what the Democrats actually do (as opposed to what they merely say around election time) shows us that even this tepid "cooperative" maneuver is disingenuous- the party clearly favors the interests of capital over the interests of the working majority.

It should be no surprise that the Democrats are using the GOP union-busting crusade as leverage to re-establish credibility with labor. This is exactly what we should expect them to do. There is virtually no cost to doing so, since the GOP is taking such an extreme position (attacking bargaining rights as such, rather than simply forcing workers to accept austerity in bargaining situations). The Dems can join in the wide public condemnation of the attack on bargaining rights as such, while keeping in line with their national perspective regarding the need for austerity for working people. They don't have to do much in the way of passing any new legislation, they needn't even commit funds to assuaging the corrosive effects of the economic crisis on workers' living standards. All that's required of them is that they stand up and say a few fine words in defense of labor- and in return they are able to generate cheap political capital with labor and pump up a legion of willing foot-soldiers for the next election cycle. It's a great deal for the opportunistic Democrats, but its a short-sighted and ultimately futile one for labor.

Though we are under great pressure to forge the recent past in a business society whose media is dominated by the ephemeral swells of spectacle, we would do well to recall what the post-2008 election terrain looked like. Obama, a young, extremely popular, enthusiastically-supported, and allegedly progressive president had just taken office. The fact that he isn't white made his election all the more significant. The Democrats had won the largest majorities in the Senate (filibuster-proof, super-majorities) and House that we have seen in generations. They had massive public support, huge congressional majorities, and a clear mandate to put forward bold, progressive reforms of the sort exemplified in the more left-wing elements of the New Deal and Great Society. Obama, in particular, had talked tough in the campaign about the need to pass the much-needed Employee Free Choice Act. He had even said to roaring crowds of workers that he would fight, tooth-and-nail to ensure that it passed. Yet what happened?

The Democrats didn't even try to bring the bill to the floor. Obama was silent. They let it die in the early months of their rule, despite having the muscle to push it through relatively easily. Don't forget: they had the trifecta: big majorities in the House, super-majority in the Senate, and a popular young President. If you can't pass a bill designed to undo the most anti-labor laws (see Taft-Hartley) with majorities like that, when can you be expected to do it? Are we supposed to wait until the Democrats get even bigger majorities? What are we fighting for when we, as supporters of the working class, try to get Democrats elected?

This question is rarely asked. The true answer from those in the labor mieleu who soldier for the Democrats is thin gruel: we must fight for Democrats to get elected because the alternative is worse. We must invest millions of dollars (that could be spent elsewhere, say, invigorating the rank and file or on new organizing campaigns) getting tepid Democrats elected because they are not Scott Walker. These folks would have us believe that this is the best we can do- the political agency of labor is exhausted by what can be done to get Democrats elected to office. What do we do, then, when Democrats attack labor? What should labor do when the "progressive" President imposes wage freezes, attacks teachers, cuts budgets, and gives away large pieces of the social product to the rich? The rejoinder is even more cynical than the original argument: we just accept that this is basically the best we can do outside of trying to back more "progressive" candidates in the primaries.

Railroading the political visions of the working class in this way is a sure-fire way to demobilize, de-energize, and ultimately destroy the labor movement. Rather than accept this tactical/organizational straight-jacket, the labor movement needs to take a sober look at its own history: how was it built? how was the 8-hr workday won? how were collective-bargaining rights obtained? how was child-labor defeated? how did the UAW win recognition?

The answer to all of these questions is: militant direct-action by workers themselves, organized independently of the two-party duopoly. None of these gains were won by way of narrow-electioneering drives to get Dems elected. In fact, the Dems only came to sell themselves as the "party of working people" in the 1930s after a massive wave of radical militancy (general strikes in 1934 in San Francisco, Toledo, Minneapolis... factory occupations and sit-down strikes in large-scale industry, etc. ). It was only after labor established itself as a powerful force in its own right that the opportunistic politicians in the Democratic party took note and decided they could forge a formidable alliance out of it. By taming the movement, defanging it, co-opting it, and giving a few concessions to the rank-and-file FDR and the Democrats purchased a legion of enthusiastic political foot-soldiers for a generation. But this was only after the upsurge in militant working-class self-organization in the 30s. It's worth noting that the co-opting maneuver wasn't accepted blindly by the rank-and-file- in fact, the UAW had voted against alliance with the Democrats at first (favoring instead an independent farmer-labor party), but were ultimately pushed by the union leadership to join ranks with the Democrats.

This is all a way of saying that we shouldn't be hoodwinked into embracing the Democrats simply because the Neanderthals in the GOP are so intent on smashing labor to smithereens. We should instead ask: where is it that the labor movement is heading, what are its goals? And then we ask: is merely electing Democrats to office going to get us there? I think the answer is quite obviously no. If you want to vote Democrat, vote Democrat. But when it comes to big, collective questions about what kind of organizations and unions we need... I think there needs to be far more resources devoted to rank-and-file militancy and organization. Rather than funneling billions to the Democrats, labor would be much better off using that money to grow its own ranks and energize, educate and mobilize it's own membership. Moreover, the Left needs to reflect on how struggles in the past were won and what we can do to learn from those moving forward. What it is obvious is that we need powerful, well-organized and politically sharp social movements that can put us in a position to change the entire framework of debate, pressure elected officials into action, and bring new people around to the ideas and arguments germane to the Left. That is not a goal compatible with the narrow electioneering approach advocated by the likes of Moveon.org, PDA, DSA, HRC, etc. etc. It is antithetical to it- it brushes against the grain of the idea that there is something irrational, illicit, or brash about independence from the Democrats.

It's not for nothing that many on the Left call the Democratic Party the "graveyard of social movements". After being co-opted by opportunistic, top-down Democrats its not for nothing that social movements go into decline. The most recent example is Wisconsin. The struggle there continues, sure, but nobody would say that it is as vibrant, energized, or forward-looking as it was only 3 weeks ago. Why is that? The energy was extinguished, the struggles wound-down, the movement dispersed by the Democrats who co-opted it and transformed it into a re-election campaign. From the podium they told crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands to lay down their placards and pick up petitions for recall. They poo-pooed the idea of further mobilization or strike action. They took something organic, progressive, and bottom-up and defused it. Far less attention is being paid to Madison now because far less is going on. Much of the euphoria and enthusiasm and organizational energy has subsided, precisely because of the cooptation (favored by union leadership) by the opportunistic Democrats. People bought into the Democrat mantra because they believe that this is the best they can hope for. But that is false. A quick glance at history (not even- just look at Egpyt and Tunisia!) shows that we have the power to ask for a lot more when we're organized together. The defeatist, cynical soldiering for the Democrats has to stop. It is nothing but a recipe for the long-term decline if not eclipse of the Left.

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Mandates, ObamaCare and Social Justice

A U.S. District Judge in Virginia, Henry E. Hudson, has recently ruled that the individual mandate in Obama's health care bill is unconstitutional. When I first read this, I was ambivalent. On the one hand, I've got no love for the Republican boneheads for whom this is a way of trying to assault the entire idea of health care reform. But on the other, I've long felt that the individual mandate is an oppressive, basically conservative idea.

No wonder, then, that the individual mandate was an idea hatched by the Right. As I've noted elsewhere, it emerged as an idea in the early 1970s from Richard Nixon as a response to Ted Kennedy's push for single-payer. As Ezra Klein notes:

The individual mandate began life as a Republican idea. Its earliest appearances in legislation were in the Republican alternatives to the Clinton health-care bill, where it was co-sponsored by such GOP stalwarts as Bob Dole, Orrin G. Hatch and Charles E. Grassley. Later on, it was the centerpiece of then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s health-reform plan in Massachusetts, and then it was included in the Wyden-Bennett bill, which many Republicans signed on to.

It was only when the individual mandate appeared in President Obama’s legislation that it became so polarizing on the right. The political logic was clear enough: The individual mandate was the most unpopular piece of the bill (you might remember that Obama’s 2008 campaign plan omitted it, and he frequently attacked Hillary Clinton for endorsing it in her proposal). But as a policy choice, it might prove disastrous.

The individual mandate was created by conservatives who realized that it was the only way to get universal coverage into the private market. Otherwise, insurers turn away the sick, public anger rises, and, eventually, you get some kind of government-run, single-payer system, much as they did in Europe, and much as we have with Medicare.

So, before sympathizing with apologists for Obama and the Dems who will, no doubt, jump to the defense of ObamaCare against the recent ruling (by a conservative, Bush-appointed judge), it's important to understand what's at stake.

The range of choices before us is not either (a) Republican non-sense, or (b) whatever Obama puts forward. No, on the contrary, justice itself recommends certain health care ideas and impugns others, regardless of what Obama does or says. Contrary to the beliefs of some of his apologists, he's not God and we're not theistic voluntarists.

Everyone who has spent any time considering the issue of health care can see that single-payer is the most rational and just arrangement. Why, then, should we shed a tear at the demise of a mandate that forces everyone to buy the for-profit health insurance industry's product? I agree with Ezra Klein that we shouldn't shed a tear, because this anti-mandate ruling could even turn out to be a blessing for those who actually believe in real health care reform:

If Republicans succeed in taking [the individual mandate] off the table, they may sign the death warrant for private insurers in America: Eventually, rising cost pressures will force more aggressive reforms than even Obama has proposed, and if conservative judges have made the private market unfixable by removing the most effective way to deal with adverse selection problems, the only alternative will be the very constitutional, but decidedly non-conservative, single-payer path.

I'm tempted to say that conditions with or without the mandate will, in the long run, create pressures for more aggressive reforms. But the point is well-taken, the removal of the mandate erodes even the dubious idea that somehow the market could be made to provide "universal coverage".

This may be a setback for Obama, but it is not a setback for progressives who believe in real health care reform.

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"Told ya so" is not a rallying cry

See here. I hope none of those quoted here are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. I agree wholeheartedly with the basic politics of the letter, and I'm all for organizing the Left to confront and oppose the Democrats. But "I told ya so" is no way to win over new recruits.

It doesn't make sense: you don't begin by creating a wedge between yourself and those you're trying to win over to progressive politics. You begin by staking your arguments commitments people already have, but which cannot be fulfilled by the means they presently endorse (i.e. giving resources and public support to the Democrats). It is a strength of the letter itself that it does precisely this: it documents the right-wing tilt of the Democrat's two years of crushing majorities in Washington. But this "what we were saying" page misses the mark, as does the "who we are" page.

You don't start a conversation with on-the-fence Obama supporters by telling them what dupes they are. You don't win them over with "told ya so" bragging.

You win them by showing them how the causes to which they're already committed (e.g. ending the wars, fighting for single-payer, taxing the rich, etc.) cannot be won without a left-wing movement independent of the Democrats. You win them by showing them, concretely, how the Democrats have opposed and thwarted progressive initiatives. You win them by talking about the history of struggle and how past gains were really won.

This "what we were saying" page reeks of "told ya so" bragging. The quoted parties should save it for a cocktail party. Organizing isn't about tooting your own horn- it's about working with commitments people already have and convincing them that such commitments are part of a bigger struggle for freedom and justice.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we, on the Left, need to play nice with the likes of Tom Hayden and Thomas Frank. They should be held accountable for what they said and did. What I'm talking about here is what's at stake in writing this whole letter in the first place: winning progressive minded people to the idea that their political convictions don't register in the two-party system.

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Democrat apologist Tom Hayden responds to letter

(via Louis Proyect): here.

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Proyect on Primary Challenges to Obama

Here.

As usual, I'm tempted to chuckle whenever I read anything put out by the PDA. They sort of remind me of George McFly from Back to the Future: "Now, now, now Obama...". On the one hand, they have it tatooed on their foreheads that "we will dogmatically, till death do us part, always cave in and vote for Democrats". On the other, they expect the big wig Dem leaders to take their "threats" seriously. You've got to be kidding me. It's as if they're saying "Obama, you'd better not be so right-wing, or, or... we'll get really good and mad at you!".

Everyone and their brother knows that the Democratic primary is a race among a small crew of people who have raised the big money from the big donors. How the hapless, powerless PDA thinks they can actually challenge Obama, or any of the mainstream candidates, within the corporate-stymied presidential primary cycle is beyond me. It's delusional. I'm sure that many of the rank-and-file PDA members feel that they're doing the right thing, but at some point they've got to realize that they are wasting precious resources and political energy. They're doing more harm than good at this point. Whether they realize it or not, they are simply part of the effort to close the "enthusiasm gap" and corral frustrated progressives back into prison of the American duopoly.

And worse still, when the PDA doesn't get their way in the primary, everyone and their brother knows that they'll just cave in a vote for whoever the Democrats run for president. I'm sure they wouldn't think twice about spending all their time and energy getting out the vote for Erskine Bowles if he was up against Alan Simpson. They'd probably write letters to, say, The Nation exhorting us to believe that the Bowles/Simpson "face off" was the "most important election of our lives". Delusional.

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More on Obama's Austerity Commission

(via SW.org):

When Obama created the commission in early 2010, he mandated it to consider various options "designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015," including "changes to address the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the federal government."

Translated into everyday language, this meant two things: One, that closing the deficit would depend on some combination of increased revenues and lower government spending on many activities; and two, that Obama himself was putting a big bull's eye on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

To make sure that the commission produced the kind of result that official Washington was looking for, Obama used his six appointments to put two well-known budget "hawks," Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, in charge as commission co-chairs. Obama also tapped two business executives, as well as Alice Rivlin, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration. With the game already rigged, Obama then tossed a bone to organized labor with the appointment of former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern.

Read the rest here.

When Andy Stern is the only "progressive" representative of labor on the commission... that's not a good sign. Jan Schakowsky released an "alternative plan" recently which, on the face of it, says all of the right things (e.g. "deficit reduction isn't an end in itself", we should tax the rich, etc.). The trouble with this alternative plan is that nobody else on the commission gives a shit. 11 of the 14 members of the committee, including the "liberal" Dick Durbin, voted for the doomsday ultra-conservative plan last week. If 11 of them are OK voting to kick the majority of us in the teeth while lavishing the rich with further tax breaks, it's not likely that they would even bother to read Schakowsky's proposal.

Like Kucinich in the presidential elections, Schakowsky is a token who is only there to assuage the frustrations of disgruntled liberals who still support the Democrats. She has no real power on the committee, and that was part of the plan from the start. The fact is that Obama loaded the commission up with business elites (as if they should have any say whatsoever!) and right-wingers from both parties...then he sprinkled one faux-progressive (Stern) and one lone liberal.

Contrary to the apolitical way it is described in the media, deficit hawking is not some technocratic matter of finding creative or "smart" ways to solve a hard math problem. Deficit hawking is one-sided class warfare from above, and both the Republicans and Democrats are on board with it. This entire panel wants to do what governments in Ireland, the UK, Greece and France have tried to do recently: push through punishing cuts that force ordinary people to pay for a crisis that was caused by financiers and capitalists. When push comes to shove, we in effect see the true owners of economy; we see who really has power and what the priorities of governments really are. Perhaps that's what the (bipartisan!) ruling-class technocrats that chair the panel meant by "moment of truth".

We shouldn't sugar-coat what's going on. Austerity is the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. That is what this commission is there to do, and their proposal makes doesn't hide this. They want to slash and burn Social Security and Medicare while, at the same time, giving the rich massive gifts in tax reduction. Now if there are still some apologists for the Dems who would say that we should support the panel, they can at least be clear about what they'd like us to support: one-sided class warfare from above. My sense, however, is that such a blunt portrayal wouldn't win many folks to the cause.

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Does Obama Want to Fight for Us?

Nope.

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What is the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform?

It is the brainchild of Obama and the Democrats. Soon enough we'll be aswim in tall tales from unthinking Obamaheads and other apologists for the Democrats that will try to persuade us that the punishing budget cuts on the table are the sole work of Republcians. Don't believe it.

This commission, let us call it the "Deficit Commission", was created during a period in which the Democrats had supermajorities in the Senate and crushing majorities in the House. This is what we get when America votes Democrat in massive numbers.

The Commission has a large majority of people who believe that we must privatize Social Security and make punishing cuts to Medicare. Who put them there? Are they all Republicans? Nope. They're representatives of both parties and Obama put them there.

To be sure, there has been some push-back from within the Democrat party to the sharp conservative tilt of the Commission. But anyone who knows anything about the House Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Party knows that they are clowns. At times they seem full of sound and fury, but ultimately they do nothing but cave in to the corporate-friendly Democrat leadership. They are a marginal force in the organization of which they are a basically passive appendage.

My point in saying all of this isn't to hammer away at the Democrats because I have something personal against them. The point is that we, i.e. ordinary people who have the "crazy" view that Medicare and Social Security shouldn't be slahsed and burned, have to know who the enemy is. It is not just the Republican Party. It is both the Republicans and the Democrats, although I must admit that right now the Democrats are certainly giving the GOP a run for their money. If pushed I would say that the Democrats are a bigger part of the problem than the Republicans. At least most people know the Republicans suck. The trouble with the Democrats is that they try to sweet talk you. They mislead plenty of good people who care about admirable things (e.g. stopping climate change, beating back the advance of the Right, stopping wars and occupation, etc. etc.) and siphon off legitimate oppositional political energy and defuse it. They manipulate legitimate anger about the system and use it to do essentially the same things that the Republicans do. That's perverse. We deserve better.

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Tea Party: New Whine in Old Bottles

Read Gary Younge's article here. He makes an excellent point: the "Tea Party" is not a coherent, organized group. Its apparent coherence, organizational power and grassroots support is merely the effect of the media. And to the extent that such an entity does exist, it is a loose group of assholes that have existed for quite some time. Dick Armey is, for example, described as a "tea party activist" these days.

It's important to point out here is that the tea baggers represent something like a fifth of the American electorate. The way the media froths at the site of tea baggers would lead you to think that that they are much more widely supported. But though the Democrat Party has found an excellent campaign tool in the Tea Party (don't worry, I'm sure they'll use it again in 2012), the 2/3 of Americans who didn't bother to turn out to vote in the Midterms likely see through this shallow "scare out the vote" tactic.

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(More of) Obama's Legislative Accomplishments

Here. Some context here is helpful. Obama used to tell progressives that he believed in single payer, a position which he subsequently would come to reject. Having rejected the idea of single payer, Obama started off the Democrat primaries in the run-up to the 2008 election with the most conservative health care proposal in the field.

His proposal, essentially a watered-down version of Romney-Care from Massachusetts, has a history that is worth noting. The idea of an individual mandate to purchase private or public insurance emerged in the early 1970s from Richard Nixon as a response to Ted Kennedy's push for single-payer. The idea of a "health care marketplace" was hatched by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute as a response to Clinton's (already weak-sauce) proposal for health care reform. The idea of using a public plan (itself modeled on private plans) to pick up the slack left over after the for-profit plans have cherry-picked all of the least costly individuals to insure, was first put into action by Republican governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. So there you have it- basic components components of Obama's proposal emerged from the likes of Richard Nixon, AEI, and Mitt Romney. Progressive indeed.

Now, this is just a brief history of the ideas included in candidate Obama's proposal. The actual bill itself is actually a great deal less ambitious than the Republican-drafted proposal described above. Obama gave up on the public option when it became clear that industry "stakeholders" weren't having any of it (that's funny... I don't remember voting in elections in 2008 determining who the industry "stakeholders" with veto-power over legislation would be, do you?). Moreover, the Democrat's point-person for drafting the bill, Max Baucus, received the most contributions from the health insurance industry of any congressperson in 2008 (don't forget that the industry has something like 5 lobbyists for each member of Congress). All told, the industry spent millions trying to exact concessions from the Democrats, and so far it has proven to be money well-spent.

At every single stop along the way, Obama and the Democrats have compromised and given concessions to the powerful for-profit insurance industry. The priorities of Obama and the Democrats are on display here for all to see.

And, as if all of this wasn't frustrating enough, now it turns out that the Federal Government isn't even interested in enforcing the already tepid bill it passed, as the SW.org article above makes clear.

But just hold on one second- it actually gets worse. Obama and the Democrats signaled even before the Midterms that they are interested in making punishing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It seems now, in the wake of the Midterms, that the Democrats are going to be even more aggressive in pushing through austerity measures. That means, in short, forcing the majority of the population to pay for the mess caused by reckless financiers and bankers who got bailed out by the Bush and Obama administration. Again, the priorities of the Democrats are on display for all to see. They sold us out to protect the assets of the rich and powerful. This has become something of a guiding theme since the Democrats took back Congress in 2006.

The task of progressives is not to apologize for this kind of right-wing treachery, but to fight it. Voting for the Democrats has little to do with democracy. This is what democracy looks like.

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Surrender at Home, War Abroad

Here's Tariq Ali on Obama, the Democrats and the Midterms. I found it to be spot-on.

Albert Einstein once said that the definition of madness is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". Is there a better definition of the always-vote-for-the-democrats-no-matter-what strategy?

Or, think of it this way. Even the most obstinate, pro-democrat liberal will concede that the last two years of democrat hegemony didn't turn out the way they'd hoped. So what, then, is the strategy for getting what the liberals hoped for? What's their strategy for getting the progressive results they want?

They think, as far as I can tell, that the best thing to do now is to hold our noses and bail out the democrats. But, of course, this lesser-evil argument is given just about every single election cycle. And it has yet to produce the progressive results liberals seem to think it will. This is a myopic perspective.

Imagine a democrat politician who, despite the odds, manages to hold onto their seat this election cycle. Suppose that this politician was a large part of all the disappointing, conservative things the democrats did during the two years during which they had the largest majorities in a generation. What lesson will this person have learned if we just vote them back into office? Will they suddenly worry more than they did before the election that they might lose support should they drift further right? Of course not. The lesson they'll have learned is simple: it doesn't matter if I'm a conservative jerkoff or not- the dumb progressives will still vote for me.

There was a time when I thought lesser-evilism was plausible in this country. In retrospect it was understandable naiveté. But after seeing the Democrats make serious gains in that election (2006 midterms), ostensibly capitalizing on widespread anti-war sentiment among the public, only to continue fully funding and supporting the war (their excuse then was that they only needed bigger majorities and a Democratic president)... I began to feel that the Democrat's game was a trap for progressives. This was only further confirmed by the 2008 election cycle and its aftermath.

If you're raised as a Democrat-supporter, you're taught that the be-all-end-all of politics is to have a popular democrat president, super-majorities in the Senate, and massive advantages in the House. That's the silver tuna. When under the spell of electoral politics, that's what you always wish for. That's what it's all supposed to be about.

Well, we've seen what the democrats do when that happens. And it isn't very different from what the Republicans did with similar amounts of power in the recent past. We can do much better than this.

So you decide whether or not it makes sense to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. I'm inclined to say enough is enough.

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Obama is the DLC Democrat Par Excellence

This was penned right after Obama won the election. It's incredible how closely his administration has followed the DLC line put forward by Galston.

It's almost as though they took Galston's advice and implemented it 100%.

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Lance Selfa on Scott Brown

Lance Selfa has an excellent analysis of the recent senate election in Mass. I haven't looked at NYTimes this morning yet, but I can already imagine all of the "wisdom" coming from pundits to the effect that "the democrats must move to the Center". The Democrats can shove it. Who gives a shit whether or not they have a super-majority, when they never threaten to do anything progressive enough to warrant a GOP filibuster?

If you haven't already heard, just rest assured that Scott Brown is a "left-leaning Republican" who is "more liberal than some of his counterparts in other states". Yes, evidently "left-leaning" means vowing to defeat even the most tepid, counter-productive forms of health reform. Once we dilute the political content of "left-leaning" so heavily, it's difficult to see why Democrats of this persuasion don't vote Republican more often. Ugh. If it were up to people like this, we wouldn't even have the pretense of multiparty democracy... we'd just have the TPA (the Tepid Party of America) which stood for rabble-rousing values like "moderation", "good sense", "centrism", "bipartisanship" and "experience".

Of course, making it appear as though people have a choice is a far more stable means of reproducing this sad state of affairs.

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Black America in Free Fall

Reading things like this, this or this are, to say the least, jaw-dropping and enraging. It's no accident that Obama's approval ratings are the lowest of any first-term president at this point since Eisenhower.

As the percentage of Black children living in poverty soars in the direction of the heart-stopping figure of 50%, one wonders what to make of Jesse Jackson's recent decision to give a major speech at the Left Forum in March in New York City. While it has always been the case that Jackson has been, in some broad sense, a man of the Left, a venue like the Left Forum is a touch more radical than is usual for him.

My general experience with Jackson, things like this notwithstanding, is that on the one hand he often makes critiques of the status quo that are powerful and insightful. Unfortunately, these critiques often end with a coda like "but, nonetheless, we have to support the Democratic Party and help persons X, Y and Z get elected". His decision to oppose the Democrats in the 80s was, on my view, politically important and courageous. But since then he hasn't really been a figure with the independence from the Democrats to have any hope of challenging their conservatism.

Thus I'm interested in why he's speaking at the Left Forum, and particularly why he's speaking there now. I don't think he would've done this sort of thing in 2008, nor do I think that the figures discussed in the news articles above about Black suffering are irrelevant here.

The sticking point, for me, is whether (1) Jackson will push for independence from the Democrats, or (2) if he will try to quell dissatisfaction on the Left (particularly the Black Left) with the Democrats and try to bring them back aboard. My hope is that it is the former. Whatever else is true, there's no sense in supporting the Democrats if you believe in healthcare, racial justice, full employment, stopping unjustified wars, workplace democracy, or women's rights. You might add public transportation and public universities to the list of things the Democrats don't care about. If these important initiatives wither on the vine when we have a Democratic President, Democrat super-majority in the Senate, Heavily Democratic House and so on... what's the use of electing Democrats? It shouldn't even be a dilemma for those on the Left anymore: the Democratic Party is not worth one ounce of support from progressive and left-minded people. In order to get the things we care about (e.g. healthcare, jobs, education, and so on), we're going to have to organize independently of the Democratic Party and demand them. This isn't a utopian idea: the Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Act both have extra-electoral struggle to thank for their passage.

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Against Electoral Politics

What is politics? What is the terrain of the political? What's at stake?

Ask many people these questions and their answers will understandably point to Washington, elections, Democrats, Republicans and so on. Having an interest in politics, on this view, means watching CNN, following the inane daily hubbub on Capitol Hill, etc.

But as Alain Badiou astutely points out, "If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure." This is a fecund observation that is worth unpacking further.

The definition of politics offered above seems, on the face of it, uncontroversial. What should the raison d'etre of our electoral institutions be, if not to facilitate collective decision-making, organized by certain principles, aiming to unfold the new possibilities currently repressed by the dominant state of affairs?

Yet this is patently not what electoral politics are about in the US. Here, elections are about an endless, narrow see-saw maneuver between Democrat and Republican parties. Consider for a moment what this narrow back-and-forth is not: it is not a struggle between different substantive political visions. Nor is it a disagreement over how a just social order would be organized. It is, for all intents and purposes, a process of narrow bickering between two pro-business entities. Politics, if it has any place in this process at all, is merely a small, incidental side-effect.

Today we're trained to think that the highest form of political activity possible is voting for either a Democrat or a Republican. We're encouraged, then, to think that politics itself is an individualistic practice in which we go, alone, behind a curtain to decide to cave in to one or other pro-business organizations. I think it's fair to say that things haven't always been like this. At other periods in world history, there have been serious debates about big questions, about what kind of society we want to live in. It is helpful here to revisit some of the debates from the early 20th century on the Left about tactics, strategy, and elections.

At the very beginning of the 20th century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest Marxist, left-wing party in the world. The labor movement in Germany had been growing steadily in membership and in power, and it looked for a time as though the SPD was leading the charge for another, more just kind of society. The SPD's leading theoretician was Karl Kautsky, a fiercely dogmatic defender of Germany's existing parliament as a strategic means for constructing a socialist society.

An interesting debate was instigated by a polemical brochure entitled "Terrorism and Communism", penned by Kautsky, directed at discrediting the tactical and strategic trajectory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Trotsky wrote a reply in 1920 with the same title, that was later published as a book (republished recently by Verso, and introduced by Zizek).

For Kautsky, the debate between reformists in the SPD and Bolshevik revolutionaries is one of "democracy" versus "dictatorship". He casts his own reformist view as the "democratic" alternative to the allegedly violent, impetuous and "authoritarian" strategy endorsed by the Bolsheviks. The crucial question here, however, is what does Kautsky mean by "democracy"?

He means a representative parliamentary system coupled with capitalist control of industry and social life. In other words, he conflates democracy as such with a certain kind of electoral procedure situated in the context of a particular configuration of capitalism. In short, he reduces democracy itself to the parliamentary mechanism such as it was in early 20th century capitalist Germany.

Trotsky's reply (and we might add here that Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin and others shared this view) is that we cannot speak of democracy at all unless we talk about the conditions it would require to realize it. The view is simple: you can't speak of "democracy" (or freedom and equality) in the legal sphere if workers are in chains in the social and economic spheres. You can't institute true democracy by legal procedures alone if such procedures are instituted against the backdrop of massive inequalities of power. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in the foreword to the recent Verso edition of Trotsky's text:

"For Trotsky the true stakes of the debate are not simply democracy versus dictatorship, but the class 'dictatorship' which is inscribed into the very form of parliamentary dictatorship.... the true question is... how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured."

In other words, our question here must be: what extra-electoral conditions would have to obtain in order for democracy to be realized?

Now, surely some will object here that if this is Trotsky's view, he'd do well to eschew the language of 'dictatorship'. This objection, however, misses the mark. What Kautsky blithely dubs "democracy", Trotsky calls a form of dictatorship. In other words, parliamentary democracy under capitalism is, for Trotsky, a form of class "dictatorship". This is analogous to Rosa Luxembourg's distinction between "bourgeois democracy" and "socialist democracy", the main difficulty with "bourgeois democracy" being that there's not enough of it. It not extended to the social and economic sphere; those spheres are under the control of the capitalists who own the commanding heights of the economy.

Let me try to spell this out a little more clearly. If Trotsky and other Marxists are correct to define capitalism as a mode of social organization in which the major productive resources and institutions are privately owned by a specific class (rather than democratically, by all), then we must conclude that parliamentary procedures are compatible with a high concentration of undemocratic economic power. Another way to put the point is to lean on Marx's distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. For Marx, the transition from feudalism to liberal capitalism represented a great step forward in that it granted a larger degree of "political" (read "legal", "electoral") equality and freedom than feudal societies allowed. But, Marx held, merely political emancipation is not enough; the bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism didn't go far enough. Democracy, he argued, had to be extended not only to political/legal institutions, but to social and economic institutions as well.

Thus, if you're committed to human (rather than merely legal) emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.

Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of large concentrations of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They can lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Often, after hundreds of years of capitalist development, they've managed wield military institutions to serve their interests.

The point here is that economic power is not relinquished without a fight, and we have no reason to expect that fight to be waged "fairly", within parliamentary bounds, by the ruling class. Even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists by governments, capitalists will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get such limits and regulations repealed. In extreme cases, when it appears that a government will make real, systemic changes... the ruling class has been known to support right-wing coups and reject parliamentary democracy entirely. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.

Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.

Multinational corporations in Chile such as the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) set to work quickly to fight against Allende, and they weren't interested in trying to win the battle over electoral terms (a battle, the company's owners realized, they'd have little way of winning in the face of a broad popular mandate for Allende's policies). We now know from memos circulated amongst elites in ITT and the American-owned Kennecott Copper Company that their goals were to "“to strangle the Chilean economy, sow panic, and foment social disorder in order to encourage and create the opportunity for the armed forces to step in and replace Allende". Also- their influence convinced the US and related institutions like the World Bank to impose an economic blockade on Chile to help the destabilization effort.

The point of this is that all of these efforts were effective against a democratically-elected government precisely because of the concentrations of economic power under capitalism. Admittedly, "dictatorship" somewhat overstates the case, but the case of Chile in 1973 makes the point that capitalist's stranglehold on economic power must be challenged directly in order for real democracy to be possible.

So, either you are open to the reconfiguration of social/economic organization or you are not. If you are, as socialists purport to be, then you cannot be dogmatically committed to the narrow strategy of merely trying to elect certain people within predetermined parameters (e.g. Democrat or Republican). You must be committed to a broader conception of political activism, one that embraces extra-electoral struggles (strikes (conventional, sit-down, wildcat, etc.), community organization, grass-roots protest and demonstration, sit-ins, etc.) as a means to alter the entire political center of gravity. In other words, the goal of a progressive social movement is not to merely operate within narrowly circumscribed procedures prescribed by the existing order, but to dynamically create the conditions for its own success.

We've recently lived through a massive change in electoral holdings of power. In 2004, people were talking about a "permanent Republican majority". Four years later, the GOP has lost control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, while the Democratic majority in the Senate sky-rocketed to 60. But for all this massive changing in electoral terms, the political content of the change (as we see today) is extremely thin. The continuity between the last days of the Bush government and the Obama administration is extremely discouraging. Foreign policy has essentially stayed the same. Regulation of financial markets is about as forthcoming under Obama as under Bush in 2008. The response to the crisis of giving spectacularly large amounts of welfare to Wall Street was virtually the same under Paulson as under Geithner, in fact the "Paulson Plan" was implemented lock stock and barrel under the latter's tenure. After all of these massive interventions to save the assets of powerful economic elites, Obama even had the audacity to talk of the importance of "market solutions" and the "private sector" when discussing health care. The message was clear: massive government spending for economic elites will be forthcoming and plentiful, but all we've got fo the majority of the population is the thin gruel of laissez-faire.

Aside from snagging a bit of low-hanging fruit (raising the minimum wage, redirecting some much-needed, overdue funds into education and infrastructure), the Obama administration has not deviated from the course taken by Bush. For all the talk of change, this has been a rather smooth transition from 8 years of Bush compared to what, in electoral terms, was a major alteration of course.

What further proof do we need that the end-in-view must not be "getting Democrats elected"? Whatever else is true, the Civil Rights Act was not passed by a drive merely to "get the right people elected". Neither do not have Social Security or unemployment benefits because of electoral fetishism.

Rather than being a means of change, current Federal elections in the US are a way of staving off real change. We must not forget that the large swells of community energy, activism and volunteerism that was poured into getting Obama elected reflected real needs and real discontent with the existing order. The heartbreaking reality, however, is that the election of Obama siphoned off all of this important energy and defused it.

The question we are confronted with is: now that this swell of energy and excitement has been betrayed, what can be accomplished within the parameters of electoralism? Do we have an electoral means of holding those in power accountable? However we answer, no honest response could have anything to do with getting more Democrats elected or with staving off a Republican backlash.

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A Steaming Pile of BS

The headline reads "For Democrats, 60 Senators Is Magic Number for Health Bill".

I say bullshit.

Before Teddy Kennedy died, and they had the 60 votes, Senate Democrats never threatened to do anything that would actually warrant a Republican filibuster. They didn't push the limits, they didn't assert their authority as the party elected in a landslide election, they didn't make use of their palpable political capital.

What they said ad nauseum, if you'll recall, was that we must reach across the aisle, make compromises with Republicans, and seek bipartisan solutions. We heard this when the 'magic number' wasn't an aspiration, but a concrete reality resulting from recent elections.

Yet whenever the Democrats fail to do what they were, quite obviously, elected to do, the excuse that they most frequently offer is that they just lack the 'magic' number of seats. "Give us more votes and then we'll really get things rolling".

Reading only the NYTimes, you would come to think by default that if Democrats fail to enact real reforms, it's always due to the meddling of Republicans, teabaggers, talk-radio hosts, or George Bush. Or, perhaps, in slightly more honest moments, it's only due to the Kent Conrads and Max Baucuses. But the idea that the Democratic Party itself, even at its most 'progressive', is an unremittingly preservative (rather than transformative) force in politics never enters the discussion. The idea that our political institutions themselves are deeply flawed, does not get a second thought. And how can it, if the only meaning 'politics' has is defined by the dialectic of lesser evils and a choice between two capitalist parties?

Does anyone really believe that the problem facing health care reform is just that Democrats in the Senate need to get that 'magic number'? When they had the 60 votes a couple weeks ago, the fact that they did not need Republican support whatsoever in the Senate seemed not to be valid topic of discussion. But now that they need at least one GOP blowhard to join their 'cause', it's all about getting that magic 60.

The opportunity to reemploy the facile "democrat vs. republican" frame of understanding is too irresistible, it seems, for mainstream media... because things start to get complicated when you have to explain how a party, elected in a landslide, that campaigned on sweeping change and health reform (in particular), can fail so miserably to enact even the most modest reforms when there's no electoral opposition standing in its way.

Talking about our political institutions as such is too great a task for newspapers. It's far easier to lump political writing in with the style and depth of sports analysis, focusing instead on the eternal struggle between two well-defined 'teams' in a game whose rules themselves are not open to contestation.

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Bipartisan, Moderate, Independent, Fair-minded good solutions for Middle-class American Patriots

In other words, "maverick" centrist patriotic Democrat Max Baucus has submitted a "compromise" health 'reform' bill.

The virtue of the bill is that it is "a compromise aimed at helping draw support from some Republicans and moderate Democrats." The proposal will "get a response from the bipartisan group that includes five other senators when they meet Tuesday." It has no public option, but that's the reason that it's "Congress's best hope for reaching a bipartisan agreement on sweeping legislation to overhaul the health system."

I, for one, am very convinced by all of this. Given the results of the last two election cycles, it's very clear to me that the electorate fervently believes in hearing what Republicans have to say about health care. Its clear from the results of the 2006 and 2008 elections that Americans don't prefer one party over the other, they just want as much 'bipartisanship' as they can get their hands on.

With control of the White House, crushing majorities in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators in the Senate, what the Democrats need first and foremost is to actively seek out the views of Republicans and see that their concerns are met. Voters didn't give the Democrats the largest majorities in a generation because they wanted them to change things. And they certainly didn't vote to give Democrats majorities because the Democrats talked about health care reform during their campaigns.

Think about it: Democrats can't just use the majorities they were given by voters to pass legislation. Instead, what Americans need are solutions that pander to the pathologies of a party that was hammered into the ground by voters two election cycles in a row. It's obvious that we need maximal 'reaching across the aisle'.

Moreover, we need solutions that are 'realistic', 'feasible', and very cautious. Our 'free market' health care system basically works great for everyone, so why fix what isn't broken?

What this really makes clear for me is that 'bipartisanship', 'moderation', 'independence', 'fair-mindedness' and 'centrism' are all timeless values in and of themselves. Specific political content has no relevance to politics.

It's not like elections shouldn't have consequences. So I was thinking, perhaps we should stop having them. Just appoint 50% republicans and 50% democrats to sit in Congress permanently and we can ensure that 'divisive' 'partisan' politics are gone for good. In this way we could invest forever in the timeless values of moderation, bipartisanship, centrism, reaching across the aisle, and so forth.

etc...

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Two Frank Looks at Teddy Kennedy's Legacy

Here's Doug Henwood's take and here's Lance Selfa's. The motif here is that Kennedy's political history is a microcausm for the liberalism of the Democratic Party writ large, which is a frustrating mixture of good and bad. Sustar focuses on Kennedy's willingness to cut deals with the Right (both in the Democratic party and outside of it) and Henwood takes a close look at Kennedy's role in leading the first waves of deregulation during Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Liberals love to hate on the Republicans and the town-hall crazies, but rarely want to take a frank look at just how conservative and tepid even the most liberal ranks of the Democratic party are. People forget that Reagan passed all of his major legislation with a Democratic House and some of the time with a Democratic Senate. Moreover, people forget that deregulation began first during the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency, at the goading of one Edward Kennedy. As Henwood points out, the results for working people did not keep pace with Kennedy's rhetoric about standing up for the poor and powerless.

Ted Kennedy did a lot of good, and his (sometimes) strong advocacy of Single-Payer was particularly admirable.

But its tough to watch so much of the punditocracy move to appropriate his legacy by selectively emphasizing certain aspects of his political career in order to mold the "meaning of Ted Kennedy" such that it is maximally cosy within existing frames of political reference.

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