Democrats Now

State of Obama

2010-01-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

Could it just be a year ago that so many were so willfully deluded that The New Yorker, attuned to the mood of the time, ran a caricature of Obama in an FDR pose on its front cover? Back then, a new New Deal seemed just around the corner, and happy days were here again. Nowadays, Obamamania is a spent force; it’s the tea-baggers who own enthusiasm. Republicans are not good at much, not even at coopting tea-baggery, but they can smell blood in the water and go in for the kill. The military can too; it’s their stock and trade. Thus the Gates-Petreus-McCrystal axis has gotten a chance in Afghanistan to redo Vietnam. This time, they think, they’ll get it right. Of course, they are as deluded as any Obamaniac ever was; and pity the victims of the murder and mayhem they unleash.

The Afghanistan escalation is high on the list of Obama’s greatest disappointments, but there are so many others. It was clear enough, even before Inauguration Day, as Obama loaded up his administration with Clintonites and as he turned over management of the economy to the architects of the disaster he inherited. But liberals still dreamed that the Obama of their imagination would prevail over his “team of rivals,” putting their expertise to use while forging his new New Deal over all objections. The hope persisted even when Obama turned his signature issue, health care, over to the “stakeholders” (profiteers) and to their bought and paid for legislators. That mistake was clear for all but the willfully blind by mid-summer, and it has gone downhill ever since.

A year ago, one could believe that the leaders of the world’s greatest polluting state would soon deal with global warming and other impending environmental catastrophes. A year ago, one could still hope that the main perps in the Bush-Cheney torture regime would be brought to justice by an administration dedicated to restoring the rule of law. A year ago, it would have been reasonable to bet the ranch that organized labor, which did so much to get Obama elected, would by now have won a few perks – maybe even the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama officially supports. Who would have imagined that “don’t ask, don’t tell” would still be in force? Or that America’s relations with Latin America and Africa, not to mention the Middle East (remember Obama’s Cairo speech in June!) would be so little changed? The list goes on.

Back in July, Kevin Baker wrote an excellent piece in Harper’s Magazine comparing Obama not to FDR, but to Herbert Hoover. The similarities are striking. Hoover, like Obama, was smarter than the average President (including FDR), better educated and more thoughtful. At an intellectual level, he understood what had to be done to get the country out of the Great Depression. But he was too much a prisoner of conventional wisdom and the powers that be to do more than fall back on old, discredited ways. Do we see a pattern here? In the current issue of The Nation, Eric Foner likens Obama to Jimmy Carter, another smarter than average Commander-in-Chief. Both are too nice and therefore too weak not to be swamped by the forces they set out to oppose; both unnecessarily adopted “ if you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em” strategies.

There is merit in these comparisons. But history doesn’t repeat itself neatly, and each presidency is bad in its own way. If the future is like the past, Obama’s presidency will fail mainly for a reason that is unique to his – and his advisors’ -- patently false view of good governance. Obama’s failures to date and the ones to come, unless he radically changes course, stem from abject servility towards the right, and arrogant neglect of the left. This would be bad enough in the circumstances other Democratic presidents confronted. But now, with a unified and disciplined Republican Party determined to bring the Democrats down, and with a Democratic Party populated by right-wing Clintonites and worse, pandering to the right is as sure a recipe for failure as escalating America’s never ending war in Afghanistan. There is only one way to advance or even just stay afloat in the circumstances that now exist, and it is just the opposite of what Obama has been doing. To survive and flourish, it is necessary to move relentlessly left; to beat the tea-baggers and their political representatives at their own game.

We will find out soon enough if Obama is on track to taking a “populist” turn, as the media calls it; in other words, if he’s going to address the needs and concerns of the constituencies who voted for him. If he does, maybe he can salvage something from the shambles of his first year in office. After the Brown victory in Massachusetts, the signs were hopeful. But now, just a few days later, Obama’s Clintonite advisors seem to have won the day. If he goes through with the idea of a freeze on discretionary spending – a proposal of John McCain’s that Obama rejected explicitly in the debates -- it will be clear that his administration is taking precisely the wrong lesson from Massachusetts. Then Obama will have repudiated the one good thing about his first year – his dedication to an activist economic role for the government.

By ruling so incompetently and stupidly, Bush and Cheney and the morally and intellectually bankrupt Greater Evil Party handed Obama and the Democrats an unprecedented historical opportunity, which he and they have squandered. Unless Obama abruptly changes course, he and his fellow Democrats will pay the price for this “bipartisanship.” Thus Obama will return the favor given him by the Democrats’ electoral rivals – and we will all be even worse off than we would otherwise be.

Coakley v Brown: Should Anybody Care?

2010-01-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

If by “democracy,” we mean what the word says, rule by the demos (the people, as distinct from social or economic elites), it is plain that all liberal democracies are undemocratic. They may (somewhat) respect the form, but not the content, of genuine democratic governance. But each undemocratic “democracy” is undemocratic in its own way. Still, in all cases, the party system is mainly to blame. It has been that way for more than a century and a half – from the time it became clear that with suitable institutions and with political parties mediating public deliberation and collective choice, the propertied classes had nothing to fear from extending the franchise to the propertyless masses. The party system made democracy safe for capitalism.

However, in most countries, the party system allows for the electoral expression of the views voters actually hold – once the elites’ ideological apparatus has had a go at shaping opinion. In recent decades, mass media has been the most important component of this ideological mechanism, but we should not discount the impact of the educational system and, in benighted quarters (which is to say, almost everywhere), of churches, synagogues and mosques. In nearly all cases, the demos gets to vote its will, more or less. That will is then thwarted at a later stage; usually, as parties shape ruling alliances. In the very rare instances where even that does not suffice, capital has other, less directly political, means to assure that its will be done.

But then, in this matter as in so many others, America is “exceptional.” Here, in the Land of the Free, our semi-institutionalized parties have all but duopolized the electoral system, even to the point of making ballot access for “third” parties costly and difficult. The result is that we progressives are effectively disenfranchised – except insofar as we can sometimes exercise our “voice,” impotently in most cases, in primary elections. Thus the compromises and betrayals that normally happen after general elections in most countries happen here before general elections even take place. In many respects, the results are similar; elite rule is maintained. But the American way impoverishes the political culture even more profoundly than happens elsewhere. Elsewhere, it is generally possible to vote for something, and therefore to organize and militate for what one believes. Here all we can do is vote against the greater of two evils.

Of course, when the right candidate appears, progressives, if they are sufficiently muddleheaded, can delude themselves into thinking they are voting for something. That’s what happened in 2008. Barack Obama ran a center-right campaign; if the gossip mongers who wrote Game Change can be believed – and there’s no reason to think they can’t – he was the establishment candidate from the get go. But because he could present himself as a Rorschach man, in whom voters saw what they wanted to see, he raised expectations; and because so many voters – left, right, and center -- allowed themselves to be deluded, many of them now feel betrayed.

But no one should feel betrayed because, while nothing (or almost nothing) has been delivered, nothing was promised either – as anyone who paid attention to what was really going on, as distinct from what they wanted to believe, would realize. Disappointment is another matter. I never expected much from Barack Obama, as readers of this blog know. But I did think that he was better than Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Now, I’m not sure. So I’m disappointed. But even before he started filling his administration with Clintonites and Wall Streeters, it was clear as day that, though the first of his hue to crack the ultimate glass ceiling, Obama is still just a Democrat. And, the name not withstanding, Democrats are anything but the party of the demos. All that can be said in their behalf is that they are the party of the Lesser Evil.

Thanks to American exceptionalism, there is no constructive way to express this disappointment electorally – because to vote against a Democrat one must vote for a Republican or at least vote (or not vote) in a way that makes it easier for a Republican to win. This is what the Coakley v Brown election for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts is about. This is why in the bluest of blue states [I still can’t figure out how the Republicans got red] a tea-bagger in sheep’s clothing might actually win.

I confess that I am ambivalent about the prospect. In a more democratic political system, it would be salutary to lose one for the (new) Gipper, even if it means electing a Republican Senator. But with our media and with our party system, it’s all but a sure thing that the wrong lesson would be drawn from a Coakley defeat. Though it is hard to imagine how anyone could think anything of the sort, the lesson that will be drawn will be that Obama’s “agenda” is somehow too left for the country at this time; that, like a good Clintonite, he ought to move even farther to the right. Needless to say, the opposite is true – had he and the Democratic leadership used the political capital they had a year ago more “audaciously,” they’d be no worse off than they now are, even if it all came to nought, and, win or lose, the country would be on a better track.

But, of course, the election is not just a (deformed) referendum on the Obama administration’s first year. Obama’s health care initiative is also at stake. Conventional wisdom has it that, if Coakley loses, Obama and Company will pressure House Democrats to accept the Senate’s version of health care reform and then ram through a vote – so that Obama will have a “victory” under his belt.

Maybe, this would be better for the country, not just the Democrats, than an outright defeat, though that is far from clear. There are some worthwhile insurance reforms in the Senate bill and it would increase the number of insured persons. But it would do so at great expense to the public and at some expense to many “middle class” workers. And it would benefit private insurance companies and other health care profiteers egregiously. It wouldn’t just enrich those malefactors either; it would entrench their power.

It would be far better, of course, to start over with a clear and defensible plan to make health care a right, not a commodity; a plan that would insure universal coverage, lower costs dramatically, and benefit everyone (except the profiteers). But nothing so sensible has a chance of happening – not in this “democracy.” More likely, if nothing passes, the cause of health care reform will be set back for another generation, just as happened with the last Clintonite reform adventure.

So, on balance, I suppose there is no choice but to hope that Coakley wins. But I wouldn’t mind if it doesn’t come out that way. What it boils down to is whether we should care more about consequences or desert. The consequences of her winning or losing are debatable, though it probably is true that, all things considered, it would be better if she wins. The one sure thing, though, is that the Democrats deserve to lose, and Obama with them.

Dems to Base: "Drop Dead"

2009-12-20T09:12:00.000-08:00

They should call it the Obama Doctrine and we should thank the Democratic leadership in the Senate for making its nature clear – most recently in their efforts to craft a health care reform (actually an insurance company enrichment) bill.

The Republican leadership, such as it is, follows just the opposite tack. Either out of guile or because they are controlled by the useful idiots they’ve been recruiting for decades, they play to those idiots, aka the Republican base. Whether this is a recipe for winning elections in 2010 remains to be seen. Maybe not because there’s a limit to how buffoonish Republicans can be and still win back the apolitical middle they lost thanks to George Bush and Dick Cheney. But as a recipe for influencing policy – which is, after all, what anybody who is not a party functionary or one of their media hacks cares about – it is a sure winner. It was Republican obduracy that empowered the Democratic right. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson were the lucky beneficiaries; but for Republican nay saying, they’d never have been able to act out their obstructionist strategies or to stick it to their colleagues (never mind the voters).

Mainstream Democrats responded like the cowards they are. At a time when “bipartisanship” means surrender, they were happy to oblige.

It should now therefore be clear to all that, win or lose, Obama and his Congressional comrades are weak and unable to govern; that all they can do is betray the hopes of their base. The Petreus-McCrystal-Gates axis realized this long ago; so has the Israeli Right, which could have been tamed but is instead, as usual, calling the shots. And despite their moral and intellectual deficiencies, Congressional Republicans have figured it out too. The time is long past due for the Democratic base to realize what has been going on and to react accordingly – which means taking initiatives and restricting Obama’s choices, as much or more than Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson do.

Meanwhile, even if Obama finally gets a bill that is not, on balance, an unmitigated disaster, what a difference a year makes!

Lose One for the Gipper!

2009-12-15T13:38:00.000-08:00

Like the Clintons before him, the Obama health care reforms began with the Commander-in-Chief giving away the store, and then negotiating down. Add to that Obama’s self-defeating “bipartisanship” and his unwillingness to stand up to right-wing Democrats – and Joe Lieberman – and voilà, an historical opportunity has been lost. [This is just one of many examples. Obama’s first year in office should go down in history as a year of lost opportunities.]

Spineless Democrats now seem poised to acquiesce in what amounts to a give-away to private insurance companies – and also to Big Pharma and the for-profit health care industry. They are satisfied, it seems, with minor insurance reforms which, they insist, make the best of a bad situation. But the bad situation is of their own making and Obama’s. And their real motive for acquiescing is to win one for the New Gipper, Barack Obama – at no matter what cost. Not that anything that can be represented as a victory is likely; at least not before Democratic spinmeisters and their friends in the “liberal” media get on the case.

In the minds of Democrats, it’s a “now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the party” moment. But if their heads were screwed on right and if they had half the courage of their convictions, they’d scuttle the whole effort and start over – without the “stakeholders,” the health care profiteers, calling the shots, as Obama insisted they must from the outset.

Now is the time to lose one for the Gipper. It will be good for America in the long run, and good practice too – for standing up against the Petreus-McChrystal axis that seems to have our War is Peace Commander-in-Chief in its thrall. Not that, with the Party of Pusillanimity in the majority (for what that’s worth!), there’s much chance of standing up to anybody.

Obama's War is Peace Prize

2009-12-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

Would Orwell have believed it: Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize just two weeks after he fixed the Petreus-McCrystal plan for perpetual war in Afghanistan and for a not very secret war in Pakistan in stone; while the occupation of Iraq continues; and just days after the Obama Justice Department intervened on behalf of torture lawyer John Yu, arguing that he cannot be sued in civil courts? This from the man who was elected to restore the rule of law and who has done nothing but protect Bush-Cheney era war criminals from prosecution.

The Nobel Committee claimed that Obama was chosen for his potential, not his accomplishments, and for his promise to reintegrate the United States into the community of enlightened states. That was a lame contention back when the prize was announced; by now, it is simply preposterous. Just ask the negotiators for developing countries how “multilateral” the United States is being, at this very moment, in Copenhagen. And reflect on the fact, announced while Obama was on his way to Oslo, that Attorney General Eric Holder, who was one of the good ones (compared to the unreconstructed Wall Streeters and Clintonites), has authorized death sentence prosecutions at about the rate Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, Bush’s last two Attorney Generals, did. [Bush’s first AG, John Ashcroft, maintained a slightly higher pace, but then he was an in-your-face Christian.]

One can only avert one’s gaze. But how can anyone whose head is still screwed on right not be revolted by the praise liberal commentators have been heaping on Obama’s speech? Yes, in a low-grade way and compared to what George Bush’s speech writers used to concoct, it was eloquent, thoughtful, and nuanced. But, for anyone with eyes to see -- for anyone who lacks Obama’s confidence that his, Obama’s, saying it makes it coherent and true -- the speech was intellectually shallow and morally depraved.

Notwithstanding the praise it has drawn, the part of what he said that actually made sense was hardly news. Obama declared that war (or, more generally, violence) may sometimes be necessary to advance peace (or non-violence). Thus he referenced the timeworn case for the permissibility of non-pacifist means for pacifist ends. Need I point out that this is what almost all non-pacifists already believe or that the case for it is or rather ought to be familiar to all educated people? Obama’s point is the theme, for example, of Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”; an essay he could hardly have failed to read back at Columbia along with a host of other classics that argue for a similar point. Still, the nuance Obama added was troubling. He introduced an explicitly religious motif – about the inexorability of Evil. As commentators on the Right, including Karl Rove, were quick to point out, this was vintage Bush boy. So too was his embrace of the Commander-in-Chief title and his insistence on his prerogatives as “head of state.”

Obama declared Al Qaeda evil. In passing, he maintained that America’s “enemies” in the Balkans and in other “humanitarian interventions” fall in the same category. It should be almost as unnecessary to correct these errors as it is to dwell on the Orwellian aspect of the whole event. But I can’t resist pointing out, yet again, that, by being in the thrall of warmed over Petreus-McCrystal “counter-insurgency” nonsense, Obama is inciting Islamicist resistance, not suppressing it. And neither can I fail to restate the obvious: that 9/11 was not an other-worldly eruption of Evil, but an understandable consequence of decades of American policy in the Middle East – that it was blowback for what the U.S. has done in Israel/Palestine, in Kashmir, in Afghanistan itself and, especially, for its support for corrupt but subservient Arab regimes. What is the Nobel laureate doing about these and other root causes? The short answer is Nothing. The slightly more eloquent, thoughtful and nuanced answer is not much different: from time to time, he talks a good earful, raising expectations he then betrays.

Whatever Obama may think, his saying “X” does not make it the case that X. And, despite what liberal pundits may think, his saying “X and not-X” simultaneously -- as in “escalate” and “wind down” -- is hardly a sign of greatness of mind. It only shows that his thinking is incoherent. Now that Obama has embraced the role of Commander-in-Chief, not just of our bloated armed forces but of American capitalism and its empire, this incoherence threatens to give rise to outcomes that are infinitely more worrisome than anything several hundred “evil” Al Qaeda operatives can contrive.

Bipartisan At Last!

2009-12-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

Letting Bush era war criminals get away with murder didn’t do it. Neither did giving away the store to Wall Street or sacrificing the public interest to the insurance, pharmaceutical, for-profit health care and dirty energy industries. Abject servility before the NRA and AIPAC and their ilk didn’t do it either; nor did putting the interests of the constituencies who put him in office – labor especially, but also gays, Latinos and even African-Americans – on the back burner. No matter how far to the right he veered, Barack Obama just couldn’t get the Party of No to say Yes.

Until now! In somber, “pragmatic” tones, Obama made his case for escalating the Afghanistan War and prolonging the occupation indefinitely. [Or until the impending 2012 elections necessitate rethinking. Does anyone believe that, if the troops really do start “transitioning” in July of 2011, it will be for any other reason?] The incoherence of his rationale – build an Afghan state, the better to defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan – was staggering. [I will leave for a later time or for others to elaborate why, for any conceivable American national interest, the Obama escalation is transparently counter-productive.] But the Republicans could hardly dissent. If they did, it would mean they don’t “support the troops.” It would also require them to break ranks with God and General McChrystal. Clever Obama! In one foul stroke, he won what he most longs for -- a Yes from the GOP.

I don’t expect that many will agree with this diagnosis. How, it will be asked, can bipartisanship explain such an obviously ill-conceived leap into the abyss? But it’s as good an explanation as any of the other contenders: that Obama is the prisoner of his own campaign rhetoric or of hapless Generals eager to get “counterinsurgency” right; that he fears what the Right will do if he “loses” Afghanistan; that the military industrial complex has something on him; that, as the acting steward of the American empire, he can’t be perceived to back away. No doubt, these factors have something to do with Obama’s dreadful decision, as does the inertia of war (we’re there because we’re there), and the willful impotence of what passes for a Left in this country, eager as it has been to cut Obama slack. But I stand by my contention: the main culprit is Obama’s obsessive, reckless bipartisanship.

Over the past year, it has become clear that the guiding principle of Obama’s governing style is to win the hearts and minds, or at least the grudging acceptance, of Republicans and Blue Dogs and Joe Lieberman – in other words, of the most execrable of the execrable. That was the Clintons’ idea too but, for them, it was, like everything else, just opportunism. Obama really believes in it. And, with a little help from his friends Petreus and McChrystal, he figured out how to get what he so desperately wants. Joy to the world, he must be thinking. Until the Party of No figures out how to get back on course, over in the West Wing, it will be a season to be jolly.

Obama Is the Enemy Now

2009-11-30T16:50:00.000-08:00

The Afghanistan War is not and never has been “a war of necessity,” as Barack Obama has claimed. By now, it is not a “a war of choice” either. It’s a pointless, inexorable, nightmare.

In the beginning, the Afghanistan War was arguably less pointless. It was a war of revenge. Too bad that it was fought mainly against the wrong target, against ordinary Afghanis, not “terrorists” or their protectors. Those pesky terrorists were just too hard to round up and kill. Most of them weren’t even in Afghanistan, even then. Still, back in the day when George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld set the moral compass, revenge was the best revenge.

As a legal scholar and reader of Euripides, Obama should know that revenge is a motive that civilized societies are supposed to rise above. But never mind: after 9/11, there was not holding back the Furies. Never mind too whether Osama bin Laden might have been captured “dead or alive” years ago but for the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon obsession with Iraq. The fact is that the Afghanistan War could never have been “won” in any plausible sense, and it certainly can’t be won now. If history teaches anything, it is that occupations breed resistance, not acquiescence. And if, say, the history of the Vietnam War is no guide (as apologists for escalation have lately been proclaiming), then surely common sense is. Put enough troops on the ground and, of course, the level of violence will diminish while they are there. But even if our economy were not wrecked, and even if the Home of the Brave was not already war-weary, it would be impossible to keep enough troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. Eventually, Obama’s “exit strategy,” whatever it may be, is bound to give way to the only sensible exit strategy there is: cut and run. The question is only whether that day will come sooner or later, and how much more murder and mayhem there must be before it arrives.

The sad fact is that Obama knows this at some level; and so do his advisors and all but the most deluded Democrats in Congress. Maybe even some Republicans know it too, if there are any sane ones left. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever “it” is, we’ll be there for as long as “it” takes. Why? Because we must “support the troops,” of course; in other words, because we’re there.

Is it that Obama is the prisoner of remarks he made about Afghanistan during the campaign? According to the conventional wisdom, he had to say that he was gung-ho for that war in order to show that, despite his opposition to Bush’s Iraq War, he’s no sissy; that, as well or better than Hillary Clinton, he could play Commander-in-Chief. [It is worth noting that, despite Obama’s supposed opposition, the occupation of Iraq continues unabated!]

Or maybe the problem is that Obama is the prisoner of forces in the military, the Petreuses and McChrystals and their demented ilk, who, having come of age as Vietnam was sputtering out of control, are aching for a chance to get “counterinsurgency” right?

Or is it, as many on the left now believe, that Obama is afraid of the right? Fear of the right is now the favored explanation for why Kennedy and Johnson did their own Afghanistan thing in Vietnam. Why not Obama too?

Or perhaps it’s the Nixon-Kissinger preoccupation with “credibility.” After all, a successful bully can never just walk away. I favor this explanation, though the correct answer is probably “all of the above” and then some.

I think credibility is the main culprit because I believe that Obama is nothing if not foolishly consistent. Our vaunted agent of “change,” has proven himself a good steward of the interests of the powers that be: not just on Wall Street but in the corporate boardrooms of health-care profiteers, reckless polluters, and wherever else contributions for Democrats lie waiting. Surely Obama would not treat those who benefit egregiously from U.S. world domination and perpetual war differently.

But whatever the reason, one thing is clear – that for many months many Americans were in the thrall of an illusion. Remember how all the Clintonites and Wall Streeters Obama brought into his administration were there only for their expertise, and how Obama, from his perch on Mount Olympus, would use them to promote the changes people thought they’d voted for? Can anyone be so deluded any longer? The problem isn’t just Obama’s needlessly excessive servility. It’s worse than that. Bush’s wars didn’t have to become Obama’s wars; not with all the political capital he had to squander. But they are Obama’s wars now. Thus the great non-white hope of the willfully blind months ago has become, for all to see, the enemy today.

It never made sense to cut Obama endless slack, but it surely makes no sense now that he has proven himself an enemy, not an agent, of “change.” Obama is no savior. He’s not even part of the solution -- not now, anyway. Can it still be made otherwise? Hope fades fast but, to the extent it still survives, there is only one way: fighting back. Militance is again abroad in the land – witness the building occupations at University of California and Cal State campuses and the demonstrations marking the anniversary of the Battle of Seattle. The time is past due to make Obama and his wars its target. Gentle lesser evilists will just have to deal with it! There is no other way.

Wishful Thinking

2009-11-25T06:34:00.000-08:00

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama was the Rorschach candidate -- what people saw in him depended more on their hopes than on what was actually there; and after eight years of Dick Cheney and George Bush there was a lot of pent up hope in the land. Obama took full advantage of it and won handily. Then, slowly but inexorably, came the crash. By the end of the summer, disillusionment was already a mighty force. If, as expected, Obama announces a major escalation of the Afghanistan War next week, expect disillusionment to be triumphant; expect all but the last redoubts of Obamamania to fall. In just a year after that Grant Park moment, Obama will have succeeded in disappointing nearly everyone; even those of us who never expected much. There are exceptions, of course; they can be found on Wall Street, in the military, and in the board rooms of corporations engaged in health care profiteering, environmental degradation and similarly nefarious exercises of business as usual.

To be sure, Obama is still better than Bush – much better. But Democrats know they cannot pin their hopes for the 2010 and 2012 elections on that; not in what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia. That’s why the wishful thinkers have transferred their hopes from Obama himself to such cartoonish characters as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs. If only these worse than Bush GOP “leaders” will run, baby, run! Or, failing that, if only they’ll do to “moderate” Republicans what Doug Hoffman did to Dede Scozzafava in up-state New York. Then, the “moderates” will stay with Obama, even if hardly anyone any longer believes it will do much good. Then, reduced to its base of misfits, losers and godly looney tunes, the GOP will effectively cede the election to its POP rival, the Party of Pusillanimity and now of Wall Street too.

Maybe, but don’t count on it. Like the idea that Obama would be an agent of change, this is wishful thinking. The lunatics now run the Republican asylum, but the more sophisticated pillars of American capitalism, the “malefactors of great wealth” who brought them on board, still have the resources to call them off and take their party back. With disillusionment in the erstwhile Rorschach candidate mounting, they won’t have to take very much of it back to win handily.

The question for progressives, though, if not for party functionaries is: why care? There is some reason – bad as things are with Pelosiites in power, a Republican controlled House and Senate would be worse. So, yes, by all means, lets hope Democrats win; lets even vote for them faute de mieux. But the main thing is what the lunatics do understand: that what really matters is not how many elections they win, but how much influence they have. Sarah Palin’s fans, few as they may be and oblivious as they are to the facts and to reason, have already had an enormous influence over policy; they have dragged the healthcare reform debate even farther to the right than it already was. Blue Dog Democrats in the House of Representatives and “moderate” (right-wing) Democratic Senators, not to mention Joe Lieberman, know this too. When will what passes for a left in the Lesser Evil Party catch on? If they don’t soon, forget about even the small “changes” that are still possible under Obama – as he capitulates far more than need be to the darkest forces of American capitalism, and as he takes over leadership of the Party of War.

Perils of Niceness

2009-11-19T11:09:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt that political factors constrain the Obama administration’s freedom of action severely, but it is impossible to say, with anything approaching precision, just how constraining those constraints are. They would have to be contested to tell, and the Obama administration hardly tries. Instead, groveling before the powers that be –“business as usual” in Washington – is the Obama style, notwithstanding claims to the contrary repeated throughout his campaign last year and still occasionally heard from willfully blind Obama supporters.

Bowing before the Emperor of Japan, as Obama did last week and as protocol requires, is a sign of weakness, according to the still unprosecuted war criminal Dick Cheney; a charge taken up by the Republican Party and therefore echoed across Fox News. This is ludicrous, of course; like almost everything else emanating from the bowels of the GOP. But it is true that the Obama administration exudes weakness – precisely because it does not test the limits of the constraints confronting it. This is one reason why the healthcare legislation passed by the House is so awful, even if, on balance, it does improve upon the status quo. Awful healthcare legislation is what you get when you grovel before health care profiteers. And it is why Israel is now flagrantly jerking Obama around – by authorizing illegal settlement expansion on the fringes of occupied Jerusalem just days after Hillary Clinton praised Bibi Netanyahu for his flexibility and openness to resuming negotiations. There are countless other examples that might be adduced: from the administration’s positions on environmental issues, on “free” trade, on questions of war and peace, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, of course, on Wall Street (re)regulation.

Again, it is not clear how necessary Obama’s groveling before entrenched economic and political power is -- though it is surely excessive. What is clear, though, is that the Obama administration, with the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate in tow, evinces weakness of another kind altogether; and that, despite what Rahm Emanuel and other Clintonite Obama advisors may think, there is nothing necessary about it. This weakness is a bi-product of Obama’s excessive civility – of his “niceness” in situations where ruthlessness is called for. Republicans don’t understand much, but they do understand the value of party discipline; and they understand that, when “reasonable” (cooperative) people are at odds with obstreperous ones, the obstreperous almost always prevail. Democrats are clueless about such things.

That’s why three right-wing Democratic Senators – Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln – can threaten to keep the health care bill Harry Reid fashioned from even reaching the Senate floor; and why Joe Lieberman threatens to filibuster the bill if it includes a “public option,” even one as innocuous as the one included in the bill passed in the House.

[Shame on the Senate leadership for allowing Lieberman, sanctimonious and treacherous as ever, to receive the public attention he craves by holding hearings on the Fort Hood shootings, raising the prospect of throwing the government’s case into legal jeopardy!]

It is also why Blue Dog Democrats have the power they do; and why anti-abortion Democrats, led by the hapless Bart Stupak, were able to join Republicans in putting women’s reproductive rights in mortal jeopardy. There is plenty of blame to go around for these shenanigans and others like them, but the buck stops with the Forgiver-in-Chief.

He is proving himself too nice to fight -- too deferential to people whose views are not only unworthy of serious consideration, but harmful in ways that exceed the harms inherent in the political constraints he faces. Obama is turning out to be the quintessential “reasonable” liberal; well-meaning, but ill-disposed to take a principled stand or even, as Robert Frost famously said of liberals generally, his own side in an argument.

Before it’s too late, if it isn’t already, Obama should look around and see that in the real world nice guys, as they say, finish last. He should realize that to cede an inch to the Moronic Minority – or to their representatives in both political parties -- is to give up almost everything. And he should realize that it is impossible to govern, much less institute “change,” without offending the Republican Party’s “base.” One need only look at the spectacle reported from Grand Rapids, Michigan yesterday where hordes of benighted non-readers gathered to buy the book of that cartoonishly incompetent Republican “superstar,” Sarah Palin, a petty and vindictive woman who can’t write and doesn’t think, and who would be yesterday’s lunch were she less easy on the eyes, less ostentatiously patriarchal and God-fearing (professing to Oprah her belief in “Todd and God”), and less identified with the delusions of the terminally mediocre.

Make nice to Palin people? Well, maybe some of the “patriotic Americans” waiting in line in Grand Rapids turned out just to see a celebrity; and maybe a few of them are teachable. But I wouldn’t count on very many of those true believers breaking loose. If the future is like the past, the hopelessly benighted will be always among us. Of them, all one can say is what William Blake, an author Sarah Palin may never have heard of, despite her attendance at any of a half dozen colleges, said -- that “as the air is to birds and the sea to fish, so is contempt for the contemptible.” In other words, it isn’t just bought and paid for Republicans and Blue Dogs and Lieberman who merit contempt, and who should be treated accordingly. Those who placate the contemptible, who shower them with "niceness," merit it as well.

Bad for the Party

2009-11-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

Republicans under Nixon and then Reagan recruited the useful idiots of the “moral” (moronic) “majority” (minority) to wrest control of Washington from the Democrats. In time, they took the Republican Party over too. In consequence, one would have thought that the GOP would have long ago divided against thanks to the cultural contradictions separating the nation’s rulers from the benighted souls who elect Republicans to do their bidding. But that rift has been slow to develop; no doubt because, in ruling circles, greed trumps all. However, with Obama in the White House, the useful idiots, reacting more to the promise of “change” than to the reality of it, have grown even more Angst-ridden, and also less cautious about expressing the racism Nixon set out years ago to exploit. Thus they are tightening their grip. The more they do, the more acute the cultural contradictions will become. It is happening already; the Scozzafava affair is a sure sign that a purge of “moderates” is underway. The pillars of the party can hardly be pleased. They could well turn to Democrats to fill the void; their traditional allegiances speak against it, but it would certainly be in their interest.

Thus it is becoming conventional wisdom that the Republicans are fashioning themselves into a mainly regional (Southern) party, and that they will therefore remain a minority party for an indefinite future. This is one instance where the conventional wisdom has gotten it right. So-called independents may be cool to Obama’s style of governance and to what they understand (or misunderstand) his policies to be, but the fact remains: the narrower the Republican tent becomes, the worse it will be for the electoral prospects of the Grand Old Party – all the more so, when the only ones let in under the tent are Palin-besotted, god-fearing, certifiable loonies.

But the conventional wisdom misses the point. For true believers, the idea was never just to elect Republicans. Why would any self-respecting reactionary care about that? The idea was and is to affect policy. This, the moronic minority has succeeded in doing beyond their wildest expectations of just a few months ago. With a Democrat in the White House and with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, they have dragged the entire political scene to the right. They will likely continue to do so, no matter how well or poorly Republicans fare in 2010. Last week’s events illustrate the situation perspicuously: Republicans lost a Congressional seat in up-state New York, but they turned the Obama-Pelosi health care reform bill into an anti-abortion bill that solidifies the power of private insurance companies over health care while guaranteeing that pharmaceutical companies will continue to be able to charge extortionist prices for their wares. Which matters more?

What goes for the Republican goose goes too for the Democratic gander. By recruiting and supporting right-wing Democrats – in accord with the theory and practice of Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer and with the approval of liberal pundits – the Democrats did win control of the House of Representatives in 2006 and of the Senate in 2008. They have a good chance too of retaining control of both houses in 2010, even if ruling parties do generally lose seats in off-year elections. But why should anyone to the left of the Clinton family care if this only means that Blue Dogs and Liebermans rule the roost?

The tea-baggers et. al. have a point, and not just, as it were, on the top of their heads. A principled, organized cadre of legislators can affect policy mightily whether or not their party is in the majority. Progressives would do well to take that lesson on board – in this respect only to become more like the lunatics who have taken over the Republican asylum.

There is not much risk involved. Bush era incompetence and Obama era Republican insanity have provided Obama and the Democrats with an unending string of opportunities, most of which they have dutifully squandered. Count on the gift to keep on giving – all the more so as the erstwhile favored party of the ruling class is purged of anyone who, like Dede Scozzafava, is more or less reality-based. That’s why were liberals to stand up more for themselves – for what has come to be called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” -- they would probably not put Democratic control of the House or Senate in jeopardy. But, again, that’s not the point. What matters is affecting policy. The idiots have shown the way.

Sinking In

2009-11-10T07:12:00.000-08:00

The full measure of the Pelosi-Obama 220-215 “victory” Saturday night, passing their health care reform bill, H.R. 3962 with all but one Republican and thirty-nine Democrats voting against, is finally sinking in.

Out maneuvered, the Pelosiite leadership allowed right-wing Democrats to turn the measure into significant anti-abortion legislation. If the victorious Stupak Amendment or some functional equivalent makes its way into the final bill, it will effectively prohibit private insurers participating in government organized “insurance pools” from offering funding for abortion services. This would be a major step backward from the long established and already horrendously backward Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal money from going directly to pay for abortions or related services.

As bad or worse, the House legislation, with its weak “public option” and mandated insurance coverage would provide a bonanza to the insurance industry, and also to Big Pharma, which could continue to sell its wares domestically at extortionist prices. A truly “robust” public option, available to everyone (or nearly everyone) would provide a way for America eventually to back into the mid-twentieth century – into a world in which health care is a right, not a commodity. So would the Kucinich Amendment, which would allow states to establish their own single-payer systems without fear of being put in legal jeopardy by rapacious private insurers. The Kucinich Amendment passed in committee; but, along with a robust public option, it is not included in H.R. 3962. Thus, as matters stand, the Pelosi-Obama “reforms” would further entrench the existing indefensible and failed system.

Who is at fault? Throughout the process, the so-called “stakeholders,” the profiteers, have acted predictably; their involvement has been deplorable, but it was only to be expected. It was also clear from the outset that the Pelosiite leadership and our pathologically “bipartisan” President would end up giving away the ranch. Their role has been deplorable too, but they too are only acting out their “moderate” natures -- which render them incapable of not groveling before power. Thus the blame lies with the so-called progressives. Whether out of pusillanimity, incompetence or just because they wanted to win won for the Gipper – not Reagan this time, but the New Gipper, the agent of “change,” Barack Obama – they won one for the religious Right (and the Catholic bishops) and for the insurance companies.

I have argued in countless entries that most of the self-identified progressives in the Progressive Caucus are hardly progressive at all by any reasonable standard; and that even the best of them are, for the most part, feckless. They are unwilling or unable to leverage their power in the way that, for example, Newt Gingrich’s minions did in 1994, when they executed their “contract” on America. Over eighty House members were on record as supporters of a single-payer system. As it turns out, had just a few of them organized themselves with a modicum of skill and resolution, they could have blocked the worst features of H.R. 3962 by threatening not to support the bill. They didn’t even try.

Dennis Kucinich was the sole exception – but his No vote was too little, too late. It was essentially a feel good vote, though I wonder how well he can feel voting in the same way as Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. Still, I sympathize: I too almost always vote “expressively” -- against not for someone because there is seldom anyone to vote for. But I realize, as should Kucinich, that these gestures are largely pointless.

The sheer impotence of progressive Democrats is staggering. Suppose, for example, that, after a wave of gun violence, popular opinion turned against the Second Amendment fetishism that does so much harm to our public safety; or that, after ever more blatant Israeli atrocities, public opinion turned against continuing to provide Israel with the blank check it is now given automatically. Suppose, in consequence, that a few less than usually pusillanimous Democrats were inclining towards doing the right thing. Then imagine how the NRA or AIPAC would yank on their chains. How different it is with the Progressive Caucus and its single-payer advocates!

To be sure, H.R. 3962 does include some worthwhile insurance reforms. If progressives continue to be unwilling or unable to make the bill better, then they should think about passing the insurance reforms on their own, and scuttling the rest – especially the assault on abortion rights and the solidification of the power of health care profiteers. Then true progressives can continue the struggle for genuine health care reform. But then too,unless his spin-doctors do an A+ job, it might look like a loss for the Gipper. Would that be a bad thing -- especially now, when Obama is on the brink of escalating the long failed wars he was elected to stop? I’m conflicted on that if only because I want our first African-American president to “succeed.” But one thing is clear: were Obama to continue along his present path, he certainly will “fail” and, even more certainly, he’ll deserve it.

Health Care in the House

2009-11-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

Score one for the pope, who got his way on abortion (no way, no how, unless he says it’s OK) but, even with this additional blemish on its face, the Pelosiites did get their milquetoast health reform bill through – by a hair. One and a half cheers for that, and two cheers if they learn something from the experience – if they figure out, at last, what their pandering, and Obama’s, to Republicans and Blue Dogs was worth. Don’t count on it, though; in all likelihood, one and a half cheers is all the outcome of months of Sturm und Drang will ever deserve.

We’ll never know whether it would have been worse had the Party of Pusillanimity gone for something worthy of three full cheers. I think not, if only because it would then have been possible to make a clear moral argument, the one that has been the consensus in all developed countries for decades; that health care ought to be a right, not a commodity. And since the Blue Dogs and the others purport to be deficit hawks, even as they eagerly vote to finance Bush’s and now Obama’s perpetual wars, it would have also been possible to make a sound economic argument about drastically reducing health-care costs while providing care to all without diminishing the quality of care people receive (indeed, improving it for all but the most fortunate under the old, profit-driven regime).

Of course, the liberals will say that had Obama and the Pelosiites gone for the obvious solution, the health care profiteers and their media flacks would have played even dirtier, and the political culture would have been even more debased. Maybe, but it’s hard to see how.

Still, even a not very “robust” public option, combined with sensible insurance reforms, is better than nothing, and far better than the ludicrous Republican proposal that emerged in the “debate’s” final days. Therefore last night’s much touted “victory” was indeed a victory of sorts. One and a half cheers for it, and more if the experience deflates bipartisan fetishism in Democratic ranks and sparks competition in the up-coming primary season. For there is no doubt about it (except in the minds of Democratic leaders): the Blue Dogs have to go.

Change Obama Style -- in Israel/Palestine and Afghanistan Too

2009-11-06T12:48:00.000-08:00

Whatever Hillary Clinton may say about how helpful Benjamin Netanyahu’s “promise” not to start new settlements in the occupied territories may be, and no matter how much Palestinians may find themselves without alternatives to acquiescence in the face of overwhelming Israeli military dominance, the fact remains that the prospects for a viable Palestinian state are rapidly diminishing as settlements expand; the point of no return may already have been reached. Because Israel is utterly dependent on American support – economically, militarily and diplomatically -- the United States effectively calls the shots there, even if only by giving Israel carte blanche to do whatever it pleases. In the present circumstances, there are three general courses U.S. policy can take; the first two involve departures from the past (i.e. change); the third would continue the usual policy of (depending on one’s point of view) malign or benign neglect:

1) The United States can demand not just that the pace of settlement construction slow down or even stop altogether, but that some, indeed most, settlements be dismantled – along the lines indicated in the near-agreement reached at Tabah in the final days of the Clinton administration. Unless Israel is forced to give back at least that much of what it has illegally appropriated since the so-called peace process began, a two-state solution will be out of the question because there will be no way to make a viable state out of geographically isolated Bantustans.

2) Or it can impose a one-state solution in which, as throughout the modern world, members of all ethnic groups enjoy equal citizenship rights and full human rights. Since the very idea of an ethnic state rightly offends modern (post-American and French Revolution) sensibilities, this is plainly the preferred outcome for everyone who is not in the thrall of Israeli nationalism, Jewish ethnocentrism or Christian Zionism. But since a secular democratic state in “the Land of Israel” would entail the end of a Jewish state, and since Israeli nationalism, Jewish ethnocentrism and Christian Zionism are weighty positions in the United States and Israel, this outcome would be much harder to implement than a two-state solution with a viable Palestinian state.

This is why (1) is what the United States should impose, even if it is morally and philosophically indefensible. It is indefensible; the idea of a Jewish state – not a state of its citizens but of a self-identified ethnic group scattered around the world -- was always a bad idea – even in the aftermath of the Nazi Judeocide when, thanks in part to the efforts of anti-Semites and Zionists alike, Western countries, the United States especially, were unwilling to absorb more than a handful of Jewish refugees. But belief in the legitimacy of a Jewish state in “the land of Israel” has become so entrenched in our political culture, and in the political culture of Israeli Jews, that it may now be impossible to expunge the idea. There may be no alternative other than to come to terms with it.

The Obama administration is, of course, officially in favor of a two-state solution, as is most of the rest of the world and most of the (increasingly disorganized) leadership of the Palestinian national movement. But, as in so many other areas, Obama only “talks the talk” – raising expectations that are soon dashed thanks to his singular reluctance to turn his words into deeds.

Of course, in the case of Israel/Palestine, the transition from words to deeds would be unusually difficult even if the will were present – because the Israel lobby has a stranglehold over the Congress of the United States. To implement real, not just verbal, changes in American policy towards Israel would require that Obama spend vast amounts of his rapidly diminishing political capital. He could have done it last spring; maybe he can do it still. But don’t hold your breath.

3) Thus the most likely prospect is that the United States will continue to permit Israel to dictate its Israel/Palestine policy – continuing the status quo in Israel and the occupied territories. The State Department’s reaction to the Goldstone Commission Report – saying only how “disappointing” it is – is a portent of things to come. Israel will therefore remain the settler state it has always been, and will continue its policy of creating “facts on the ground” accordingly. It will also continue to crush opposition to its Apartheid regime on the West Bank and to its on-going crime against humanity in Gaza -- by any means it deems necessary. Count on Obama to let it happen.

The Occupation has persisted now for more than forty years, and its trajectory has been, almost without exception, from bad to worse. Unless Obama rises to the occasion, expect the downward trend to continue into the near and not-too-distant future. But it can’t go on forever; the demographics of the situation and strategic factors beyond American control make a Final Solution to the Palestine Question impossible. In the long-term, supporting the status quo will mean not only a further diminution of Israel’s Herrenvolk democracy and its generally liberal civil society, but a diminution in the very prospect of maintaining Israel as a Jewish state.

The end of Israel as the state of the Jewish people would not be an outcome to regret. The beneficiaries would not just be the indigenous population of Palestine and peoples elsewhere who are historically or currently Muslim. The end of Israel would be good for “diaspora” Jews too, inasmuch as Zionism has hijacked Jewish identity and the Jewish religion – to no good ends in either case. I would venture that the end of Israel as an ethnic state would be an especially good thing for Israeli Jews as well. If nothing else, it would relieve them of the burden of oppressing their Arab compatriots. It would even advance the cause of establishing a safe haven for world Jewry, one of the few Zionist aims that is worth preserving. After all, the Israeli settler state is now the only place on earth where, thanks to the Palestinian resistance, Jews are in danger just for being Jewish. But the end of Israel as a Jewish state is an outcome that will be vigorously resisted in ways that could well put the region and indeed the planet in grave jeopardy. The American government can prevent this result. But don’t count on Obama to do anything of the sort. He’s too much of a go-with-the-flow and don’t-make-enemies kinda guy.

Change Obama style is change in words only – and even then, if the words are carefully parsed, there’s less change spoken of than most people assume. In this case, that’s bad for Israelis and for Palestinians and for diaspora Jews. It’s bad for Americans who are not Jews too.

The so-called realist position in international relations theory holds that there are genuine “national interests,” interests of the entire nation as distinct from its national elites. I am skeptical of this contention. But if anything does count as a national interest, surely a more “balanced” Israel/Palestine policy is a prime candidate. From a realist point of view, unqualified support for the policies of Israeli governments may have been warranted when the “enemies” were “International Communism” or Arab nationalism. Then, arguably, it was useful to have an independent state in the region that could function as an offshore military asset of the American empire; which is more or less what Israel became after 1967. But when the enemy is religious fanaticism, Islamicism, there is little that Israel can do that is in the American national interest. What it does instead is help generate even more fanaticism. Along with the continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s Israel/Palestine policies are doing untold harm to the American national interest already. Needless to say, Obama is doing nothing to change this unhappy state of affairs, except by raising expectations that his inaction then quickly confounds.

* *

Political difficulties in the way of doing the right thing are less formidable in the case of Afghanistan, where nothing like an Israel lobby exists. But, even there, it is change Obama style, not real change, that is in the offing.

Would withdrawal, a “strategic retreat,” be in the national interest? Here the situation is more complicated than with Israel/Palestine. There is no doubt that the American people, the vast majority anyway, would be better off were the United States not at war with Afghanistan – if only because it would diminish the likelihood of the kind of blowback experienced eight years ago at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, for America’s ruling elites, the situation is not so clear. To be sure, there are sectors of American capitalism that benefit from on-going wars, and Afghanistan is not without strategic importance. But, even from the vantage point of those who do benefit from the Afghan War, it is far from obvious that the benefits outweigh the risks. After all, blowback blows back over everyone equally.

Once upon a time, Barack Obama called the Iraq War a “stupid war.” For reasons having mainly to do with his electoral campaign in 2008, the Afghan War got a different billing; it was somehow a “war of necessity.” That made no sense then, and it makes even less sense now. The time is long past due that Obama should come out and declare that the Afghan War is a stupid war too.

This would hardly be news to anyone. But, for our elites, it hardly matters. They know it’s a stupid war from which no good will come, but they also believe that, once in, there is no obvious way out. Like street-level gangsters who think they must never be seen as weak, the commanders of our capitalist economy think that they cannot permit their state, the imperial center of the empire from which they benefit egregiously, to seem to back down in defeat. As their counterparts did four decades ago in Vietnam, they will therefore do their best to keep the war going beyond any chance of victory -- whatever “victory” might mean in this case -- just to avoid (or postpone) an outcome they cannot abide.

That’s why the “debate” over what to do next, eight years into a long lost war, is between the likes of General Stanley McCrystal, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator John Kerry; and why withdrawal is “off the table.” McCrystal wants more troops – 40,000 of them at least – to keep the murder and mayhem going Iraq-surge style. He and his fellow “counter-insurgency” advocates – including the hapless but wildly popular General Petreus – are proponents of “nation building;” they therefore propose staying engaged in Afghanistan for as long as it takes. Leaving aside the moral fact that Afghanistan’s fate is for the Afghan people to decide, not American elites or defense intellectuals or Generals who lead economic conscripts into battle, the good General is plainly pissing in the wind. It is beyond the means of the American military to accomplish anything like what he has in mind. This is why his might be called the throw good money after bad strategy. And not just money – lives and limbs too.

Meanwhile, our Vice President wants a technological fix – targeting “terrorists” only, wherever they may be (in other words, expanding efforts to bring the war into the tribal areas of Pakistan, in plain disregard of our ally’s sovereignty). His strategy, compared to McCrystal’s, would probably save lives and money, but it would also destabilize the region as much or more than McCrystal’s would. No surprise there: Joe Biden has always been a reliable source of atrocious ideas. I never thought I’d say it, but I’m glad that Obama made Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State. It could have been worse; it could have been Joe.

That leaves John Kerry, who proposes keeping things pretty much as they are. Kerry’s position is the most honest of the three main contenders: it reflects a realization that the only reason to remain in Afghanistan -- the only achievable outcome, in any case – is to avoid, or rather postpone, the appearance of defeat. Ironically, Kerry’s proposals, eschewing even the appearance of change, would do the least harm. But they are still bound to lead eventually to as bad or worse consequences for Afghanistan as would immediate withdrawal, and like Biden’s proposals, though to a lesser degree, they will continue to destabilize the region.

I’d wager that Kerry will win the debate. After all his pondering, Obama will decide that the best, least bad, course of action is just to keep on keeping on. He owes it, after all, to the ruling class.

But this is foolishness. No good will come from muddling on ahead in Afghanistan, just as no good will come from letting Israel continue to dictate America’s policies in the Middle East. For anything good to come out of the present situation the only real alternative is, as it were, to give peace a chance. That would be a real change, not a change Obama style. But for that to happen, Obama would have to be the agent of change that most of his supporters thought he was. A year after he made an indelible mark on history just by the fact of having won, Obama has yet to show that he is anything of the kind.

A Bad Day for Plutocrats

2009-11-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

The good news is that election day 2009 was a bad day for plutocrats; New Jersey’s sitting governor, John Corzine, lost his bid for reelection. That he was an incompetent administrator and a right-wing Democrat sweetens the result, but the best part is that he was a former CEO at Goldman Sachs. New Jersey voters therefore had the rare opportunity, and exquisite pleasure, of voting against Wall Street, the “homeland” of the masters of most Democrats (including Barack Obama) and all Republicans . But, alas, good news seldom comes unadulterated. By kicking Corzine out, voters put Republican Christopher Christie in. The standard bearer of the Greater Evil Party will likely be even worse than his predecessor was.

Plutocrat Michael Bloomberg did succeed in buying himself reelection as mayor of New York City, spending some $100 million of his own money to that end. The good news there is that, confounding expectations, he only won by about 5% of the votes. Bloomberg made his billions in the financial news industry not in finance itself and, despite some conspicuous shortcomings (in the civil liberties area especially), he has done a far better job than Corzine as a chief executive. It is therefore not wishful thinking to conclude that winning by only 5% against a little known and poorly funded opponent who was all but ignored by Obama and other leading Democrats represents a repudiation of plutocrat-friendly capitalism too.

Nevertheless, count on Democratic Spinmeisters to ignore or disparage “populist” rage against Wall Street, and to conclude instead that the 2009 election results attest to the wisdom of Obama-style centrism. Strictly speaking, the case the Spinmeisters are likely to make applies to Republicans, not Democrats, inasmuch as “centrist” (actually, right-wing) Democrats did not do all that well yesterday. But Democrats are eager to seize on any opportunity to conclude that making nice to all is the wisest course to follow, no matter how ill conceived or disabling that strategy may be. On the other hand, having put the inmates in control of their asylum, Republicans are impervious to notions that their “base” doesn’t already accept; they are beyond – or rather beneath – the point of drawing conclusions based on evidence. This is why I would not expect much support for centrism to emanate from their quarters in the weeks and months ahead.

Leaving aside the fact that centrism helped few, if any, Democrats yesterday, the electoral results do provide Obama-inspired Spinmeisters with a thing or two to spin. Virginia’s new Republican governor, Robert McDonnell, has the credentials – and also the character and intellect -- to please even ardent tea partiers, but he did run towards the center and he did win the election. The fact that McDonnell had the good fortune to be opposed by Creigh Deeds, an undistinguished, right-wing Democrat, is a consideration that promoters of centrism will surely ignore. But the best evidence the cheerleaders for centrism will adduce is, of course, the victory of Democrat Bill Owens, a Blue Dog in waiting, over the hopelessly in-over-his-head Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in an up-state New York Congressional District that has voted Republican for the past century and a half. Because the Republican base had already dispatched the “moderate” Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, several days earlier -- with more than a little help from national GOP “leaders” like Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty and from Fox News and its ilk --the lesson will surely be drawn: that “moderation” is the path to victory.

Maybe it is, for what is left of the Republican Party. But if Democrats draw that conclusion too, count on them to become even more like what their electoral rivals would still be had the movers and shakers of American capitalism not let their useful idiots take their favorite party, the Grand Old Party, over. Already today, many of the most burdened victims of the system in place associate Democrats, even more than Republicans, with the Wall Street establishment. The last thing Democrats should do, if they want to take advantage of the opportunities provided by a self-destructing GOP, is to embrace that perception. It’s a losing gambit – a point it cost John Corzine dear to find out, and Michael Bloomberg too.

Wrong Lessons

2009-11-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

The Age of Obama will be remembered as an age of missed opportunities. Team Obama is missing another one right now -- by not using the illegitimacy of Afghanistan’s Bush installed Karzai government as an excuse for a “strategic retreat,” saving countless lives and billions of dollars, while diminishing homeland insecurity in the process. With the cancellation this morning of the planned November 7 election re-run -- after Karzai’s only rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew -- the illegitimacy of the corrupt and now out of control Karzai regime has become blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, the best we can hope for from Obama is that he will not increase troop levels -- withdrawal being “off the table, along with so many other morally urgent and politically expedient measures and policies.

The Age of Obama will also be remembered as a time when ostensibly right-thinking pundits drew all the wrong lessons from developments on the political scene. Witness the reaction to the sudden withdrawal, also this weekend, of Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava from the race to represent New York’s 23rd Congressional District in tomorrow’s election. Whether or not the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, beats the Democrat, Bill Owens, the conventional wisdom is that the contest was a battle for the soul of the Republican Party – between broad tent “moderates” and crazed tea-baggers – and that the latter won. The lesson drawn: that if the GOP doesn’t put the tea-baggers in their place – turning them back into useful idiots, not lords and masters – they will not come back into power any time soon because the only way to win general elections in most jurisdictions (New York’s 23rd being a possible exception) is to run to the center.

This has long been the unjustified and patently false belief of the movers and shakers of the Lesser Evil Party, the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity; and it is advice Obama has taken wholeheartedly on board. It is why right-wing Democrats, so-called Blue Dogs (a designation demeaning both to dogs and the color blue), are running the show.

Let me be clear: Scozzafava supported Obama’s insufficient but still useful stimulus package, and her positions on gay and reproductive rights are in the American mainstream; this is all to the good. Hoffman, on the other hand, is, to put it mildly, morally and intellectually “challenged.” In the race to the bottom, Scozzafava therefore beats Hoffman, just as some (not all!) Blue Dog Democrats beat Scozzafava, the “moderate” Republican. Let me be clear too: lesser evilism has its place. Except in cases where going for the lesser evil (in the short-run) is likely to make outcomes worse (in the middle- or long-run), it is obviously wise to opt for the lesser, not the greater, evil.

But it does not therefore follow that running to the center, as Democrats do and as mainstream columnists and the talking heads of cable news (Fox excepted) think Republicans should, is anything to applaud. Quite the contrary. Running to the center is what has given us the race to the bottom now being conspicuously played out in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The electoral contest there does have much to teach “progressives.” But the right lesson is emphatically not the one that the generators and sustainers of conventional wisdom draw.

The lesson is that there is no more need for progressives to suffer Blue Dogs or, for that matter, Pelosiites intent on taking opportunities “off the table,” than there is for tea-baggers, birthers, deathers and other assorted looney-tunes to suffer “moderate” Republicans. All it takes is mobilization at the base and support from a few nationally recognized party figures.

What the Lesser Evil Party has instead is a largely demobilized base – thank the lingering effects of Obamamania for that! – and “progressive” leaders who, notwithstanding some conspicuous displays of courage in the on-going struggles over health insurance reform, are loathe to do anything that might put their role as “players” in jeopardy. Thus the race to the bottom continues. Indeed, its pace has accelerated since Obama took office -- driven now by the inmates who run the asylum the GOP has become and by the increasing disillusionment of Obama voters,as it becomes clearer, day by day, how the “change” so many thought they had voted for isn’t happening on his watch.

Would, therefore, that the Democratic base were more like the Republicans’. Depraved as the tea-baggers et. al. may be, there is actually something to learn from them: that it is not necessary for voters to remain helpless spectators while the people they vote for – most of whom are just feckless followers of their parties’ paymasters -- treat their interests and beliefs with contempt.

Overreaching

2009-10-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

I used to think that the Israeli settler state had finally definitively overreached with its Gaza Anschluss last winter,. Notwithstanding the moral capital Israel relentlessly squeezes out of the Nazi Judeocide (deeming it a “Holocaust,” an event of metaphysical, indeed theological, significance, beyond the course of ordinary human history), I expected that the world would finally say “Enough!” I was wrong. Even now, after the Goldstone Commission findings, Israel remains free to do pretty much whatever it wants to Palestinians -- and to Lebanon too -- largely because, for the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration, nothing short of gas chambers would count as overreaching. For this sorry state of affairs, the blame lies not just with Republicans and Blue Dogs; Pelosiites are as bad if not worse, and the handful of “progressives” in Congress aren’t much better.

Indeed, in the more-than-enough-is-never-quite-enough department, Democrats are even worse than Republicans. This is not always evident on matters of substance, inasmuch as Democrats have left-leaning constituencies they must placate or at least not treat with obvious contempt when they join Republicans in advancing the interests of their corporate paymasters. But it is clear on procedural matters. Republicans enforce party discipline; they are not afraid to coerce and, if need be, to punish anyone bold enough to stray. That’s why Olympia Snowe was the only one of his co-thinkers on the other side of the aisle whom Max Baucus was able to pry loose from the Party of No; and why even she is now retreating back into the Republican fold. On the other hand, Democrats will forgive anything – even Joe Lieberman.

Barack Obama came into office committed to overlooking (forgetting or, if need be, forgiving) Bush-Cheney era war criminals. But at least he had a principled, though spurious, reason – he wanted “to look forward, not back.” Thus his continuing reluctance to restore the rule of law by bringing these criminals to justice, though contemptible, is not especially abject. On the other hand, agreeing not to strip Lieberman of his seniority in the Democratic caucus -- even after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary in Connecticut, ran against a Democrat in the general election, and then, two years later, campaigned actively for John McCain and other Republicans -- is contemptible and abject.

We have Obama to thank for the fact that Lieberman has been getting away with so much party treachery. I wonder whether now that the chickens (or rather the chicken-hawks) are coming home to roost, he is having second thoughts. Obama evidently has the stomach to suffer a sanctimonious twit, but Lieberman is worse than that – he is also more than just normally corrupt. This is why when Connecticut based health insurance profiteers call in their chips, he is eager to accommodate them – by threatening to join the Republicans in filibustering the milquetoast insurance reforms that Senate Democrats will soon be putting forward. If, G-d forbid, the Senate plan includes a public option, as we now know it will, Lieberman says he’ll oppose it by any means necessary. No matter what his constituents think, the insurance companies must have their way.

It shouldn’t be too hard, even at this late date, for Obama and Harry Reid to lean on Joe Lieberman – to insist that on procedural, if not substantive, matters he accept party discipline. Republicans would demand much more from any potentially wayward senator in their own unseemly midst. But for the lesser evil party, almost anything, no matter how damaging, is forgivable. For Democrats, overreaching may be conceivable in theory, but it is almost always unachievable in practice.

However, unlike Israel, Lieberman has no lobby. His power consists just in the media attention he is able to elicit as a Republican in Democratic ranks. But what Obama and Reid and the others have given, they can just as easily take away. That they have not yet done so attests only to how utterly abject (accommodating, forgiving, “bipartisan”) they are.

I have gone on in countless entries about how desperately in need of a backbone Democrats are. They are in need of basic human dignity as well. For as long as they have none, the likes of Joe Lieberman will be free to overreach with impunity, walking all over the ruling party of the world’s most powerful state, just as Israel has been doing for decades.

Could Be Worse

2009-10-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Forget about anything with the word “change” in it: “could be worse” should be the motto of the Obama administration. That is faint praise – after Dick Cheney and George Bush, everyone knows, or should know, that it could indeed be worse, much worse – but “could be worse” is about the best that can be said on Obama’s behalf.

Examples abound from every corner of the planet, but especially in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where the Obama administration is, so far, only flirting with disaster; not plunging into it. And, in at least one case, on management of the economy (minus the controversial and unforgivable bail outs of Wall Street profiteers and other “too big to fail” predators) conventional wisdom now agrees. But for Obama’s stimulus package, “Main Street” would be in even worse shape than it now is. Thus it could be worse, but it could also be better because the stimulus was too meager, especially with state and local governments, required by law to balance their budgets, producing counter-stimulus packages of their own.

The inclusion of a public option in the Senate’s health care bill is another, especially timely, example. On the one hand, there will be a public option in the bill because “progressives” in the Democratic Party (I use the term loosely) stood firm. Could it be that after decades of unadulterated pusillanimity the majority party is finally developing a backbone? But Harry Reid’s public option is not a single-payer system (Medicare for all) nor is it a National Health Service type of public option (Veterans Administration health care for all). Thus while it may help many of the 40 million plus uncovered Americans to get health insurance, it will not do very much to lower health care costs.

It would do more in both respects if everyone, not just the uninsured, could buy into it, and if states with reactionary governments (and also, not incidentally, worse health outcomes than is the American norm) were not free to “opt out.” But, as presented yesterday, the Senate bill severely restricts who can buy in and does permit states to opt out. The bill would be better too if it had a real employer mandate and if it didn’t tax so-called Cadillac health plans, many of which unions won for their members by sacrificing wages and other benefits.

Still, we have to look on the sunny side. What will be in the Senate bill is better than nothing, and better than what we would have if Democrats were still determined to cower, for “bipartisanship” reasons, before Olympia Snowe, their one possible Republican collaborator. And, since Reid is nothing if not shrewd, if he decided to include a public option in the bill, it probably means that he has persuaded the most right-wing Democrats in the Senate, Snowe’s co-thinkers, not to hold their colleagues hostage to a Republican filibuster.

Thus Obama will very likely get the kind of health care bill he has been promoting. It’s not much of a solution for what ails us, but it could be worse.

Stages of Enlightenment

2009-10-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, Barack Obama, the Rorschach candidate in whom people saw what they wanted to see, was, for an alarmingly large number of voters, an agent of “change.” This illusion flourished throughout the primary campaign, notwithstanding the absence of any supporting evidence, and it survived his selection of Joe Biden as a running mate. It persisted too as Obama, once elected, loaded his administration with old Clinton hands, including Hillary Clinton herself; and as he re-empowered the Clinton economic team, insuring that Wall Street’s hold over the economy would be maintained. Nevertheless, in due course, as counter-indications accumulated, a bit of light penetrated the Obamamaniacal miasma. Thus, at some point after the first Hundred Days, a new, slightly less untenable illusion insinuated itself into many hearts and minds.

Specifically, the idea was born that Obama is a master-tactician who brought the Clintonites and the Wall Streeters into his administration only to benefit from their “expertise,” but that he was riding them; not vice versa. In the end, many believed, he’d somehow make it all right. Of course, there was no evidence for this belief either; with illusions there seldom is. Accordingly, by August, as the Moronic Minority of tea-partiers, birthers, deathers, tenthers, and other constituents of the Fox News-talk radio demographic mobilized with more than a little help from their corporate friends, this illusion too fell victim to the light.

Thus a more enlightened view has taken hold; it is even on the threshold of becoming the conventional wisdom. We’ll know it has arrived when Cokie Roberts, the doyenne of conventional wisdom, declares it. For the time being, though, Maureen Dowd will have to do. Her column in this morning’s New York Times is exemplary. According to Dowd and many others nowadays, the problem is that Obama’s is too conflict averse, too disposed to get on everyone’s good side, and too inclined to compromise. If he would just get over it, the expectations that were riding on his presidency will get a new lease on life. Insofar as this belief takes hold, our political culture will rid itself of disabling illusions. But we will still not achieve a genuinely enlightened view.

This is because the Obama-is-too-nice theory, though true, is superficial. The flaw in Obama’s governance style is more profound than Dowd claims, and it has very little to do with his or anyone else’s psychology; it is a structural problem. In a word, Obama is a creature of the regime, just as anyone who got into the White House in anything like the usual way would have to be. Of course, his quest for “bipartisan” compromises has made matters worse, and he is, in any case, constrained by the various messes Bush era torturers and free marketeers bequeathed him. But, above all, what shapes his policies is the overriding need American presidents have to serve the interests not of the people who elected them, but of the country’s elites. The problem is not just that these elites are the paymasters of all Republicans and nearly all Democrats; though this also makes matters worse, much worse, than need be. The more basic problem is that, this side of genuine change – radical, structural change – the interests of our elites must be served; because the regime exists for them and does well only when and insofar as they do.

In a more enlightened political culture, Obamania would have been tempered by the realization that a state in a capitalist society like ours has to serve the requirements of the capitalist system and must therefore operate, broadly speaking, in ways that accord with capitalists’ interests. Then Obama would have raised fewer expectations that he would go on to disappoint. But it is also the case that when a state in a capitalist society does its job poorly, as it did spectacularly under Cheney and Bush, opportunities are greater than usual for making things better not just by changing the system (which is a pipedream at this point), but even within the framework of the old regime. They would also know that capitalist crises, such as the one Obama inherited, make the prospects for constructive change within the system greater still. This was the case in the United States in the 1930s. Then the Roosevelt administration rose to the occasion to some extent. It was, again, the case last year – when opportunities that had not existed for decades briefly opened up. It goes without saying that Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress – not just the Blue Dogs, but the “liberals” as well – have not risen to the occasion at all; and that, to the extent opportunities still exist, they still show no signs of doing so.

Thus while there is now a more enlightened view of Obama than there used to be, there is still not nearly enough enlightenment. One need only look at how America’s “quality” media – National Public Radio is the best example – frames its accounts of policy debates in Washington. Leaving aside all the many “things” they do not “consider” but should, if the idea is indeed to enhance democracy, the journalists and commentators at NPR, along with their counterparts at The New York Times, The Washington Post and other supposedly liberal media, take for granted the framework within which our political leaders debate the issues they do address, marginalizing views that are obviously better than the ones in contention. The health care debate and the debate over the Bush-Obama Afghanistan War are cases in point. In a more enlightened political culture, mainstream media would at least acknowledge that the obviously best policies were dispatched into the night and fog even before the current debates began. This they have yet to do.

With health care, for example, it is obvious -- at least for anyone who thinks that health care should be a right, not a commodity – that a government run single-payer system or its functional equivalent (operating through not-for-profit, highly regulated private insurers) is indispensable. There is no other way to lower costs significantly and no other way to guarantee universal coverage. Every other developed capitalist country effectively decommodified health care along these lines years ago; a single-payer system is not a radical departure from capitalist norms. But it is anathema to American capitalists in the insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health care industries, especially now that the system they have constructed for their own benefit has grown to involve more than a sixth of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. This is why Democrats with Obama in the lead, along with Republicans, have taken the obvious solution “off the table.” Our media have let them get away with it, leaving the progress of enlightenment stalled.

Or take Afghanistan. The debate now raging is between Generals in search of fresh cannon fodder, and “doves” reluctant, as it were, to throw more good money after bad. The leader of the good (less bad) guys, it seems, is Joe Biden, the imperialists’ best friend, whose presence on the Obama ticket should have led even the willfully blind to realize that an Obama presidency would not be all that different from the Clinton or, for that matter, the Bush presidency on matters of concern to the beneficiaries of American world domination. Biden thinks that, for now, no additional troops should be sent into the Afghan “quagmire,” while the Generals look forward to another “surge.” But neither Biden nor anyone else whom Obama takes seriously favors immediate withdrawal, the obviously right way to deal with an ill-conceived war that was lost long ago. Biden just wants to fight the war Colin Powell-Bill Clinton style – from the air (ideally with unmanned drones) and with less self-defeating “nation building.” The indications now are that Biden will lose. But even if his side doesn’t, it’s far from clear that less harm will be done than if the Generals get their way. The murder and mayhem and waste of treasure needed elsewhere will go on indefinitely no matter who wins; and the occupation will continue to generate resistance (and, yes, terrorism), and to destabilize a strategic region awash in armaments, including nuclear weapons. Joe Biden on one side; Stanley McChrystal on the other. How pathetic is that!

Immanuel Kant declared the motto of Enlightenment to be “dare to know.” That is a hard thing for Obamamaniacs, past or present, to do because faith in Obama has always rested on illusions -- on beliefs based, not on evidence, but on wishes and hopes. But, with the stakes now so high, it is urgent that even the true believers confront reality and deal with it accordingly. I am confident that, in time, even the most Obamamaniacal among us will see the light; that they will realize that Obama, though better in countless ways than his predecessor, is hardly the agent of change he was once widely thought to be. The evidence is mounting and it is compelling. For everyone’s sake, it is better that this next stage of enlightenment be reached sooner rather than later. If not now, when?

It Just Keeps Getting Worse

2009-10-14T05:22:00.000-07:00

In a last minute move to scuttle “reform,” the health insurance industry had their whores at PricewaterhouseCoopers issue a spurious “report” on the likely consequences of the so-called Baucus bill, that concoction of the Senate Finance Committee which flacks for insurance profiteers mostly wrote, but in which the lobby didn’t get quite everything its paymasters wanted. This report was not just flawed, as even commentators in the corporate media and spineless Democrats made plain; it was a threat, by the insurance companies, to raise premiums if they don’t get everything they want – specifically, disabling financial sanctions against individuals who refuse to buy their offerings.

At the very least, President Obama might have seized this opportunity to come down really, not just in an “inspirational” way, for his milquetoast “public option.” Needless to say, he did nothing of the sort. Instead, he heaped praise on the Finance Committee for finally passing their awful bill; in other words, for giving away the store (albeit not quite all of it) to those who add nothing to health care, but only take away. That’s not all. The biggest heap of praise went to an asinine Senator from Maine who voted for the bill, Olympia Snowe. Because she is a Republican, Snowe is Obama’s trophy; she is what he has to show from all those months of “bipartisanship.”

What a trophy! Thanks to Obama and Baucus and the rest of them, the nation’s healthcare and therefore the health of its citizens has come to depend on the good graces of a Senator whose words of wisdom yesterday included among other gems, “my vote today is my vote today” and “when history calls, history calls.” No, she wasn’t channeling Gertrude Stein; Snowe is as tone deaf in poetry as in policy. She was threatening to change her mind in the future, depriving Obama of his “bipartisan” victory.

Why? Not, presumably, for reasons of principle, and not even to hold out for more “campaign contributions.” To observe Obama’s fave Senator in action, even just on C-Span, is to discover the answer. Olympia Snowe likes the attention and wants it to keep on coming. She may not know much, but she does know that if she had voted the Greater Evil Party’s line, she’d have immediately become yesterday’s lunch. Perhaps this is par for the course in our upper chamber. But it is manifestly sub-par how eager our President was to oblige.

I must say it again: even for those of us who never expected much of Obama, he continues to disappoint. And, as the months go by, the pace of disappointments quickens; our bipartisan President just keeps getting worse.

What Obama's Nobel Could Do But Won't

2009-10-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

Worrywarts are good for at least one thing: they make plain what events make more probable. Since the Israeli elite is comprised of world-class worrywarts, Israeli elite opinion is therefore good for that too. Witness the piece by Leslie Susser for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (October 12), “Obama’s Nobel, Israel’s Problem?” Evidently, there is great concern in the Holy Land that, having been anointed a Man of Peace, Barack Obama will be much less likely to permit Israel to make war on Iran (and a fortiori to let the United States be drawn into any such venture); and, since Obama’s professed nuclear abolitionism was reportedly a factor in the Nobel Committee’s deliberations, there is a "danger" that he will now press as well for a nuclear-free Middle East. Israeli elites are particularly worried that Ahmadinejad will have the wits to make definitive, Iranian renunciation of nuclear weapons contingent on the West’s insistence that Israel lose its more than two hundred nukes.

Too bad that Israeli worrywarts, along with so many others throughout the world (and on the Nobel Committee), “misoverestimate” Barack Obama. But the Nobel Committee’s folly does indeed open up the opportunity Susser identifies. It also provides an occasion for massive cuts in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. And that’s not all, inasmuch as the time is long past due for Britain and France to go non-nuclear – and why not, inasmuch as the rationale for their puny, but costly, nuclear forces vanished two decades ago along with the Soviet Union. There is, of course, the question of national pride, but the British lost theirs the moment they decided that a “special relationship” with the United States was in their national interest, and the longstanding determination of the French not to be too blatantly subservient to the United States vanished along with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. But, alas, in hoping for a nuclear free Western Europe, I am misoverestimating the British and the French.

Then there is the opportunity to deflate the worst danger inherent in Obama’s senseless determination to continue the occupation of Afghanistan and to extend his war there into Pakistan. Neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis are quite as bellicose as the Israelis, but geographical and historical circumstances put the India-Pakistan theater at far greater risk for a nuclear conflagration. Surely, the first order of business, even for those determined to keep the United States in a state of perpetual war, should be to press for nuclear disarmament on the Indian sub-continent.

The realization of these hopes, along with so many others, depends on the President of the United States being the man the Nobel Committee thinks he is. Although the evidence never supported that belief, had they made the award four or five months ago, they would have found many Americans thinking similarly. Now, there are not so many. Evidently, the news has yet to reach Norwegian shores. But, even on this side of the Atlantic, the hopes that led so many to believe (and be disappointed) survive. What many Israelis fear and what most of the rest of the world hopes for is indeed “change we can believe in.” But if it wasn’t clear enough before, it should be clear to all by now that delivering on that promise, as opposed just to talking about it or seeming to promote it, is not what Barack Obama is about.

Obama's Nobel Prize

2009-10-09T04:40:00.000-07:00

Since April Fools Day is months away, my first thought, when I turned on the radio this morning and heard that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was that The Onion had taken over NPR. But it’s for real. They gave the prize to a man who, as I write these words, is meeting with advisors to decide not how to withdraw America’s army of occupation from Afghanistan, but instead how many more troops to send there; to the anti-(Iraq)War candidate who has continued the indefinite occupation of that country; to a leader whose motto might as well be “trillions for ‘defense’ (war),” but not one penny more to the national debt for “reforming” (sort of) health care.

But, then, I realized that this morning’s news is not as bizarre as appears. After all, the Nobel Committee, decades ago, gave the prize to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and then to the likes of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. [The great comedian-song writer Tom Lehrer once said that he stopped writing songs when Kissinger won the prize because, after that, there was nothing left to satirize.] Obama isn’t even the first sitting President to win the Nobel. He is preceded in that “honor” by two of our most stalwart imperialists: Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.

Just as I never expected much from Obama, but am still mightily disappointed, those who have learned not to expect much from the Nobel Committee should still be outraged. More often than not, this eminently “political” prize is awarded to deserving (or, at least not, patently undeserving) people; more often than not, the award does register a worthwhile point. But giving it now to Obama as he ponders how to continue the empire’s perpetual warfare regime demeans the Committee’s less Onion-like efforts. This is why this award deserves derision, and why the Nobel Committee deserves condemnation.

Evolution

2009-10-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

In the beginning Reaganites did their best to free American capitalists from vestiges of New Deal and Great Society reforms. Their guiding idea was that capitalists have a “right” to do pretty much whatever they want to the rest of us. They didn’t quite succeed in turning back the advances of recent decades, but they did leave a lasting mark on the political culture – disabling the spirit of New Deal and Great Society institutions, if not the institutions themselves. The task of demolition fell mainly to the Democrats under Clinton. For electoral reasons, Reagan and then (Poppy Doc) Bush continued Nixon’s “southern strategy” – mobilizing Know Nothing and racist enthusiasms for the back to laissez-faire cause. The Clintons had less benighted constituencies to appease. Thus, whether from conviction or plain opportunism, they were “liberals” – social liberals – while their Republican rivals, radical as they might be, were “conservatives – social conservatives. Around that essentially apolitical axis, “partisanship” has intensified in recent decades. At the same time, on traditional political differences pertaining to the economy and society, there has been a remarkable degree of consensus.

Thus “Clintonism” (as I have referred to the phenomenon in preceding entries) is, at its (rare) best, a version of Eisenhower Republicanism -- though, as befits the times, with better racial politics. Ike never tried to reverse the New Deal; it was enough for him just not to advance it. Bill Clinton sometimes did play Ike to Reagan’s (and Poppy Doc Bush’s) Taft, the anti-New Dealer, but for the most part, he played the Reagan game. He was better at it than Reagan was, partly because Reagan and Bush had moved the political culture so far to the right. But the main reason he was more successful was that he was able to talk “left” (socially liberal), while acting right, covering his deeds with legitimating words. This is how, more even than Reagan himself, Bill Clinton led “the Reagan Revolution” to victory.

It was much the same on foreign policy. Reagan still had to contend with
”the Vietnam Syndrome,” a drag on the empire’s predations. He did his best to put it to rest – securing public support with military victories over such foes as Grenada. Bush continued along similar lines -- taking on Panama. Then, by invading Kuwait, Bush’s old buddy, Saddam Hussein, presented him with just the opportunity imperialists craved. With no Soviet Union to restrain him and with competent advisors leading the way, he rose to the occasion. Even so, the empire was not quite free of the Vietnam Syndrome; thus it fell to Bill Clinton to deliver the coup de grace. He did so mainly, but not only, by participating (from a safe distance) in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the ethnic cleansing of its constituent parts. Among its many, mainly untoward, consequences, that “humanitarian intervention” showed those uppity Europeans, who wanted to rule the roost in their own continent a thing or two! Liberals, of course, still credit Clinton for his Balkan adventures. Typically, though less enthusiastically, they also credit him for his murderous sanctions against Iraq, the condition for the possibility of the Bush boy’s continuing war there. In short, his social liberalism enabled him to win a lot of mileage for his capitalist masters – not just on the home front, but overseas as well.

As I have argued many times before, what I call “Pelosiism” is the stage of Clintonism appropriate for the waning days of the Cheney/Bush administration, a time when public opinion had drifted leftward. Pelosiites talk left – to a degree the Clintons would never have dared, even if they had the inclination. But when it comes to doing anything constructive, much less “radical,” Pelosiites go missing. Or, what comes to the same thing, they see to it that the obvious solutions are “off the table,” so long as there is any chance they might offend their paymasters, the powers that be.

Thus it was that the prototype for Obama’s governing style was Nancy Pelosi’s insistence that the impeachment of Cheney and Bush would never be. No matter how obvious their high crimes and misdemeanors, the Democrats would do nothing about them. Tellingly, even now, the Obama Justice Department is still doing nothing, or next to nothing.

It is much the same with “Obamaism” – that is, Pelosiism (and therefore Clintonism and, in a sense, Reaganism) in power. This latest evolutionary stage involves more than just talking a good line and then doing nothing, or almost nothing, to make it happen. It has more to do with the other dimension of the Pelosite “advance” on classical Clintonism: with taking solutions to pressing problems that are obvious – not radical or visionary, but just obvious -- “off the table,” and then starting out from, and willingly backing off, pale approximations of those solutions.

Health care reform is a plain example. Obama knows well that if the goal really is to lower costs substantially and to institute universal coverage, a single-payer system is the only way. He has even said so explicitly several times lately (not just in the good old days when he was not yet a national political figure). But, at the same time, in league with the Pelosiites in Congress, he has taken single-payer “off the table,” replacing the obvious solution to the many problems besetting the current system (or lack of one) with an incoherent and vaguely specified mishmash that includes a milquetoast “public option.” That pale approximation of what the situation calls for is the most we can now hope for. Moreover, if we’re lucky enough to get it, it will most likely fail. After all, what Obama and the others will eventually settle on will have been designed by the insurance industry, which, from the beginning, has been calling the shots.

Or consider the ongoing “debate” within the administration (and between the administration and unchastened insubordinates in the military, like the vaunted General McChrystal) about how to continue the Bush-Obama Afghanistan (and now Pakistan!) War. If the idea is to combat “terrorism,” the obvious first step is to stop churning out terrorists; and the way to do that is, again obviously, to end the occupation of Afghanistan with all deliberate speed – in other words, to admit defeat and withdraw, as the moribund British and Russian empires did (in the British case more than once). But according to the old CIA hand and Bush (then Obama!) Defense Secretary, Bill Gates, on CNN yesterday, that too is off the table.

Why are our later-day Pelosiites so intent on squandering lives and treasure in that distant quarter of the world? The details await historical inquiry, but the short answer is already clear enough: because the elites Obamanians serve are like Mafia bosses. Anything that smacks of “cut and run” is unthinkable for them and therefore for their functionaries; because what matters, above all, is saving face or, as they used to say expressly in the Vietnam era, maintaining “credibility.”

The same principle is at work in the health care debate too: the interests of elites – in that case, of health-care profiteers in the insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health care industries – must, at all costs, be served. Needless to say, these costs too are measured in lives and treasure.

Thus has Reaganism evolved – through a series of small steps out of which what we have gotten, despite the hopes generated by that Grant Park moment last November, is a discernible, though, in the end, only a barely cosmetic change.

Right Republicans

2009-10-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Political lore has it that Joe Kennedy used to say: “Show me a Republican, and I’ll show you a son of a bitch.” Since it takes one to know one, he should know. But that was back when the pillars of the WASP establishment were, to a man (I use the term deliberately), Republican. Nowadays, the Grand Old Party is comprised mainly of folks with whom those gentlemen and their ladies would never think of breaking bread or welcoming into their houses (except to work there) – ill-informed, status-anxiety ridden, racist, God-fearing morons. This is what Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s recruitment of useful idiots has come to. Even so, for the most part, ruling class types remain in the Republican fold – after all, their greed knows no bounds, and the idiots are useful. Meanwhile, however, cultural contradictions are intensifying, and who knows where it will end. For the time being though, it is fair to say that “son of a bitch” is much to kind. Show me a Republican and I’ll show you a reprobate (at least as regards anyone already born) with the mind of a laughing stock or, what comes to the same thing, a Limbough/Beck/Palin fan. To whoever says otherwise, I say “you lie!”

The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party is, of course, good news for Democrats. But it would be far better news if the Democratic base had more than a handful of representatives in Congress, and if the White House was not so resolutely “bipartisan.” Small as it may be, the Republican base is well represented in Congress. Show me a Democratic legislator nowadays and there’s a better than even chance I can show you a son of a bitch – a bought and paid for one to boot. But show me a Republican legislator and I’ll show you an authentic representative of the Moronic Minority.

[There are other advantages that the Republican base has over the much larger Democratic base. Among other things, the political entrepreneurs and public relations hacks who rile the Republican base up have the backing of very deep corporate pockets, while the Democratic base is self-generating and, for the most part, self-sustaining. Also, unlike the Democratic base, the Republican base has a network of well-funded, dedicated mass media, not just Fox News, pushing its case.]

Witness the endless “deliberations” of the Senate Finance Committee – with its five miscreant Democrats (led by the profiteers’ flunky-in-chief, Senator Max Baucus) and its Republicans. Noxious as the other Democrats on the committee may be – I’m thinking especially of Charles Schumer – it’s hard not to root for them against the others. After all, what they are promoting is significantly less bad than what will emerge from Baucus’ bipartisan efforts. Nevertheless, there is a stubborn fact that cannot be denied: that on the question of the “public option,” the good (less bad) guys are wrong and the Republicans, along with their Democratic co-thinkers, are right.

They’re wrong, not in wanting a public option, but in insisting that a real one – one that is not transparently a sham – would do no lasting harm to the insurance industry but would only keep private insurers “honest” by forcing them to compete. Like Obama’s claim that real health care reform can be “deficit neutral,” this is nonsense. If the mere addition of a competitor were so beneficial, then costs should be lower and access greater in proportion to how much competition among private insurers there is in different markets now. Where is the evidence that competition has this effect? There is none for an obvious reason: because the only way one more competitor would lower costs and improve access significantly is if its costs were significantly less than its competitors. Any public option that is not just a sham concocted to placate “liberals” as they cave in entirely, would lower costs and improve access by reducing administrative costs and, above all, by eliminating the profit motive. It would therefore be a harbinger of a system of health care provision in which, as in civilized countries, health care is a right, not a commodity. Thus the Republicans are right, and the Democrats (or rather the “liberals” among them) are wrong. The public option is the camel’s nose in the tent. Get it in place and we will finally be on track for backing into where we should long ago have gone directly.

After all, other things being equal, who but a doctrinaire libertarian – in other words, a free market theologian – would prefer to pay more just in order to keep health care a commodity? Outside the cesspools from which birthers and deathers and tenthers are spawned, not anybody at all, except perhaps the handful of capitalists who profit directly from the system in place. That’s why a public option, assuming it’s one worth having, is so important.

Wrong-headed and dumb as they may be, the Republicans are therefore right about one thing – the debate over a public option is not about holding private insurers “honest.” It’s about whether, in matters of illness and health, we will inch towards the only viable cure for what ails us or, as Republicans and their co-thinkers in the Lesser Evil party prefer, hurdle towards disaster by letting private ownership and market mechanisms work their many harms.

Democracy

2009-09-30T07:36:00.000-07:00

In NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan – Britain, Germany, and Italy, especially -- support for immediate withdrawal from the Bush-Obama Afghan War is overwhelming; anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the population, according to recent polls. But the “democratic” governments of NATO states are nevertheless steadfast in their support for the American “counter-insurgency.” It is not entirely clear why; after all, they could band together to counter the imperial hegemon. No doubt, part of the explanation is that, despite economic integration, there remain too many political animosities among European countries for concerted political integration to be feasible, especially in foreign policy. Better, therefore, to accept direction from a super-power above the fray. A more important factor, though, is that the elites of NATO states – and of Japan and other first-world powers – still find it in their interests for their countries to remain subordinate to the United States. Exactly why this is so in particular cases is not obvious, but the general contours of the situation are clear enough.

[It bears comment, in this regard, that, if American power, prevails so thoroughly in countries that, collectively and even individually, rival the United States economically, how much more able the United States is to rule events in countries that depend substantially on American economic, military and diplomatic support. The U.S. could force any Israeli government, no matter how reactionary and chauvinist, to make peace with the Palestinians; it could reverse the coup in Honduras, and so on, if only it wanted to; and, in the Israeli case, if only domestic political considerations were less disabling.]

Meanwhile, according to a spate of new polling date, on the home front, where opposition to the war in Afghanistan, though growing, still lags far behind European levels, support for a “public option” in health care reform already approaches levels of support abroad for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. [I suspect that, had Democrats not taken it “off the table” before the so-called debate began, support for a single-payer system would be equally strong, if not stronger -- if only because the proposal makes vastly more sense than the cowardly mishmash Obama and his Congressional allies are pushing.] Nevertheless, yesterday, all Republicans and, depending on the “amendment” before them, five or three Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee voted to quash the public option. Thus it seems, yet again, that in the Land of the Free, legislation does indeed follow the median dollar, not the median voter. Profiteers in the insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health care industries own the Republican Party, they own Finance Committee Chairman (stoolperson) Max Baucus, and they own many a “conservative” Democrat as well. Thus we should not be surprised with the outcome.

But who cannot be outraged! Who can fail to see that what “democracy” has come to mean – at home and abroad – is that, where elite interests are engaged, elites rule through ostensibly democratic forms? There is only one way to change this – it is to wage a protracted struggle, in and over “democratic” institutions, for democracy’s sake. It is trite, but nevertheless true that, as countless demonstrators have for many decades proclaimed: “the people united, can never be defeated” – not by “pro-American” elites and not even by health care profiteers with deep pockets hell bent on getting the Max Baucuses of the world to do their bidding.

Here, in the United States, where the undemocratic nature of our democracy is particularly egregious, it should be clear to all how much our system of campaign finance works to denude our institutions of any semblance of real popular control. It is because our campaigns are financed as they are that a Max Baucus is possible, and that we have swarms of equally pernicious Democratic legislators. It may even emerge, when this latest “health care reform” effort is finally concluded, that the way not just to genuine health care reform, but even to the piddling reforms the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are promoting lies through campaign finance reform.

Supreme Court Justices who willfully confuse free speech with political corruption are in the way of course; and thanks to George Bush (and Democrats who acquiesced in his judicial appointments), the problem has become much worse. Needless to say, in time, even Supreme Court justices can figure out which way the wind is blowing; if they couldn’t, we’d still be living under Jim Crow. Meanwhile, though, people are being killed and injured in (or rather not in) our hospitals and clinics – just as people continue to be killed and injured in the Bush-Obama wars. And people are being bankrupted through our health care system, just as we and other NATO countries squander our treasure on a transparently lost – and ill-conceived -- cause. This is why it is more than ever urgent to nudge history along. The Roberts Court does need a weatherman, and the weatherman is us.

Conspiracy Theories, II

2009-09-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

The “vast right wing conspiracy” is back, according to Bill Clinton on “Meet the Press.” Isn’t it odd how liberals don’t seem to mind that conspiracy; how they don’t call the Clintons “conspiracy theorists” or suggest, by implication, that they are somehow unhinged. Maybe it’s because there’s very little that the right is doing that is “conspiratorial,” at least according to the dictionary definition of the term. They’re totally up-front about their insanities. Too bad liberals weren’t more “conspiratorial” in a similar way. They might have prevented or at least impeded some of the Cheney/Bush administration’s catastrophes “of choice.”

The target this time, according to Bill (not Hillary!), is Barack Obama. But nowdays, it seems, the conspiracy, though equally “virulent,” is “smaller,” thanks to “demographic changes.” In other words, reading between the lines, what Clinton said was: “I had it even worse (yea, me).” Whenever I see that man I cannot help but remember Leopold Bloom’s reflections on Blazes Boylan in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses – “Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporeal proportion (a bill sticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a boaster).” Hillary’s husband is no bill sticker, not in his public parts anyway; but he is most assuredly a bounder, a bester and a boaster.

Sunday morning was bad enough. What cruel divinity thought to follow it the next day with an interview with Madeleine (Mad Maddy) Albright on NPR’s “Morning Report.” NPR called back its icon, Susan Stamberg, for the honor of interviewing our former Secretary of State. Did she ask about the half million Iraqis killed by sanctions -- whether Ms. Albright still thinks it was “worth it” -- or about the countless other ways her foreign policy (and Clinton’s) paved the way for Condoleezza’s (and W’s)? Not a word! It seems that Mad Maddy has written a book about her costume jewelry and its role in diplomacy, and that’s all the ladies discussed. Imagine listening to that first thing in the morning! Worse still, and in the same vein, imagine waking up to an interview with George Packer about his September 28 New Yorker “Reporter at Large” piece on Richard Holbrooke. Packer’s article isn’t exactly a puff piece. But it is innocent of any hint that Holbrooke, an inveterate Henry Kissinger wannabe, along with Albright and the Clintons were on any side other than that of the angels in the years they maintained and enhanced the empire through several military adventures, “humanitarian” and otherwise, and various other offenses against international law and morality.

First Bill Clinton, then Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke. It’s enough to recall the age-old question – with “liberals” like these, who needs a “vast right wing conspiracy?” Many of the right’s wiser souls, including one of the “conspiracy’s” main financiers, Richard Mellon Scaife, seem to have come around to this view; they learned to stop worrying and love the Clintons. They should love the Obama administration too, since it is so thoroughly Clintonized. If there is anything at all to Clinton’s claim that the “conspiracy” is now smaller than when he was its target, maybe that’s why – because the unhinged fringe has fewer sugar daddies to fund its delusions, now that some of the plutocrats who turned them into useful idiots have come to realize that the Clintons and Obama are, in the final analysis, on their side. “Demographic” changes, indeed.

Conspiracy Theories

2009-09-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

It’s a welcome development that, for the first time in years, liberals are no longer so thoroughly on the defensive that they feel free to go after the left. For this, we have the Moronic Minority, “the Republican base,” to thank. By being so appalling, they have inched public opinion over into the liberal camp, emboldening liberals to go on the offensive. However, it remains to be seen just how robust the liberals’ new backbone will be. By my reckoning, the chances remain better than good that, true to form, they will cave in to the Moronic Minority yet again – on health care reform and climate change and everything else of (economic) consequence, and on matters of war and peace. But the left is a different story; there the liberals have a softer target and, for fund raising purposes, a more profitable one.

Thus, within liberal precincts, there has been a resurgence of the idea that “extremes” are not only bad, but essentially the same. This is a slightly more thoughtful version of the now familiar Moronic Minority identification of fascism and Nazism with socialism and communism. It is therefore only slightly less wrong-headed. But be that as it may, the thought does underwrite the kind of centrism liberals favor. The center is moving (ever so slightly) leftward and, in the liberal view, it is where the action should remain. To that end, tarnishing all “extremists” with the same brush makes sense.

Reemerging in tandem with the idea that all “extremism” is bad is the idea that what “extremists” have in common is a predilection for “conspiracy theories.” This bit of conventional wisdom has been called upon, in the past several weeks, by those who, mistakenly in my view, see the Republican base’s acting out this summer –the tea parties, the town hall meetings, Mad Joe Wilson’s outburst et. al. -- as evidence of a “populist” revolt, rather than just corporate-manipulated astro-turfing. Dangerous, out of control “populists,” the story goes, are nothing if not “conspiracy theorists.”

But as a moment’s reflection will establish, history abounds with conspiracies, a point everyone, including the movers and shakers of the dead center, would acknowledge, at least implicitly. What, after all, do they think their Department of Homeland Security is supposed to investigate if not conspiracies? And what about the rest of the national security apparatus and that pillar of Order, the FBI? The latest, much publicized conspirator du jour is an airport shuttle bus driver in Denver named Najibullah Zazi. He, along with some fellow Afghanis in Queens, New York, are supposed to have conspired to do something (exactly what is not clear!). Maybe, this time (for once!), the government will be able to make a legally defensible case; usually, they can’t even make a plausible case. But, in any case, the point remains: it is always an empirical – and, in principle, decidable – question whether or not a purported conspiracy is real. Calling one or another claim to that effect a “conspiracy theory” settles nothing; it is, in Harry Truman’s apt expression, a red herring.

One could say, of course, that a “conspiracy theorist” is someone who sees conspiracies where none exist, with the plain implication that the phenomenon is evidence of a kind of paranoia. But, of course, even paranoids are sometimes right; sometimes others really are conspiring against them. To repeat the obvious point: it is in principle always an open question whether purported conspiracies are real.

In practice, “conspiracy theory” functions politically, much as “terrorism” does. People, especially people in power, use the expression to discredit positions they oppose. Thus, so long as liberals remain disposed to let President Obama keep Wall Street criminals in command of the country’s financial system, they will call those who blame Wall Street for ordinary peoples’ economic woes “conspiracy theorists.” It is worth noting, though, that, even now, it is hard to maintain that aspersion; the evidence of Wall Street’s role in causing the current crisis – evidence, in effect, of Wall Street “conspiracies” gone bad – is too overwhelming. Or consider how those who claim that the Israel lobby played a major role in leading the Bush administration into its war against Iraq are deemed “conspiracy theorists.” My view, for what it’s worth, is that this contention is probably wrong; that the Israel lobby dictates American policy towards Occupied Palestine, but plays little role in American Middle East policy elsewhere. This, however, is an empirical question; and a contrary view – like the one articulated, for example, in John Mearscheimer and Steven Walt’s The Israel Lobby – is hardly implausible, much less delusional.

It should also be noted that those who look for conspiracy theorists on the left have a hard time coming up with examples. The people who claim that Cheney and Bush are in some way behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the “truthers,” are often cited, notwithstanding two inconvenient facts -- that this is hardly a view that any significant or even insignificant portion of the left holds, and that there are “truthers” across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, for liberals, this “leftist” conspiracy theory is somehow of a piece with the ravings of birthers and deathers and tenthers and other Moronic Minority looneys.

I am by no means a truther. But I must say that the “evidence” truthers adduce is at least as compelling as anything the Department of Homeland Security has made public in support of its alleged conspiracies – including its conspiracy du jour in Denver and Queens. What is a bomb making manual, some telephone calls, and a trip to New York in comparison with the fact that Cheney and Bush were prepared in advance to seize the opportunities 9/11 provided them for their many nefarious domestic and foreign projects? And since when is the cui bono? (“who benefits?”) question no longer relevant for identifying when and where real conspiracies exist? I don’t take the truthers’ claims seriously mainly because the cover-up would require a level of competence that vastly exceeds anything else the Bush administration was able to muster in eight dreadful years. But the point remains: the case the “truthers” make is at least as plausible as almost anything – and perhaps literally anything – emanating out of the Department of Homeland Security.

The lesson is plain. Meaningless name calling is no substitute for thoughtful reflection and historical analysis. Let Fox News and its ilk blather on about “conspiracy theories.” It demeans liberalism when liberals follow their lead. But, then, liberals have never been particularly eager to see the world as it is because, doing so, would make their centrism indefensible. It is therefore easier just to go along with the blather, especially insofar as the idea is still to stand with Obama on the middle of the road.

Seize the Anger/Seize the Time

2009-09-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

A conventional wisdom is crystallizing in liberal and mainstream circles, according to which the tea parties and town hall meetings and Congressional outbursts aren’t just expressions of racism and status anxiety egged on by corporate PR firms and Fox News; they are also, perhaps mainly, expressions of “populist” outrage at Wall Street and Big Government. I suspect that the conventional wisdom was more on target a few weeks ago when the bruhaha was attributed to corporate-funded “astro-turfing.” But however that may be, the idea has emerged that President Obama should do something dramatic to seize the anger and get his mojo back.

Thus, in its September 28 edition, The Nation editorializes that Obama should turn the rising tide of anti-Wall Street anger to his advantage by issuing an executive order forbidding executive compensation at institutions rescued by the federal government from exceeding $400,000 per annum, the salary of the President of the United States. That’s not a bad idea – it would mark one small step for equality and one more substantial leap (well, maybe not exactly “substantial”) for putting the banking system back on track. Of course, actually putting the banking system back on track by restoring the Roosevelt era regulations Bill Clinton and his Wall Street hands -- now they are Obama’s Wall Street hands! -- undid would be a better idea still, and reforming the banking system to better serve the people would be even better. But in the Pelosiite world of contemporary liberalism, just about everything to the left of Eisenhower Republicanism, and a good deal to the right of it too, is “off the table.”

Nevertheless, the fact remains: if it makes sense to seize the anger for electoral advantage, it makes even more sense to seize the time to move the country forward. To that end, measures like the one The Nation proposes fall short, and the measures the Obama administration has been proposing fall shorter still.

The administration fumbled on health care not just because it was dead-set on “bipartisanship,” but also, relatedly, because it was determined to ameliorate the dreadful – indeed, shameful and unsustainable – situation in which decades of “capitalist medicine” have left us only to the extent that the “stakeholders,” i.e. the profiteers, could be brought along. But if liberals stick to their guns, as enough of them may, some good might come out of Obama’s feeble reform efforts nevertheless. There is still a chance, albeit a slim one, that we will get a “public option” worth having – one that is susceptible to being transformed into something that, in time, will save lives and money by displacing private insurers. But if, in the end, things work out not too badly, it will not be because Obama has seized the time; it will be because the times are pushing his administration and the Democratic Party forward, forcing them to do some pale semblance of the right thing. [It goes without saying that the Republican Party is beyond ever doing the right thing, and that no force on earth can make them.]

Health care reform was one area where Obama could have seized the time, but didn’t. There are many other opportunities, however. Obama could, for example, insist on a full restoration of the rule of law by holding Bush era war criminals accountable for their lawlessness; in other words he could bring Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and the rest of them to justice. Or, in the next few days, when he meets with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in New York, he could force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians by closing down its (patently illegal) settlements in the portion of mandate Palestine that the international community recognizes as Palestinian, and then to acquiesce to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. In this, as in bringing our own torture regime to justice, he’d have ample support. After all, where support for Israel is concerned, it isn’t just AIPAC any more: there’s now a pro-two-state-solution, pro-Israel lobby as well, J-Street; they are large enough already to give even a timid politician like Obama cover. Indeed, with just a tad of courage, Obama could easily turn Netanyahu’s jerking the U.S. around to the advantage of the peace camp, by mobilizing U.S. public opinion against the Israeli settlements and against Israel’s multi-party prevarications on the question of a Palestinian state. Obama has all the cards. If only he weren’t afraid to play them, he could make a giant leap forward for peace; while, not incidentally, diminishing the threat of Islamicist terror attacks in the Middle East and in what we nowadays call “the homeland.”

One more thing Obama could do in that regard is accede to common sense by conceding that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were lost a long time ago, not that it was ever clear what it would have meant for them to be “won.” There are many Democratic legislators who believe this; many Pentagon bureaucrats do as well. So do most Americans. There are also other impeccably sound moral, economic and strategic reasons to end these wars. All that it would take, at this point, is a little courage; a virtue in short supply in Democratic precincts.

Of course, for Obama to seize the time in these and other ways he would have to reinvent his administration; to make it more like what most Obama voters thought they had voted for. He has the vision to do it, and the knowledge. What he lacks is the will. He could and should seize the time; so far, though, he seems unwilling even just to seize the anger.

Who Does Baucus Think He's Fooling?

2009-09-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

“Bipartisanship” fetishism has its limits, as even Barack Obama is beginning to see. After all, it strains the credulity of even the most willfully blind Democrat to think that, for bipartisanship’s sake, one must give up on almost everything – especially if, as in our on-going health care “debate,” the not-very “other” side is determined not to go along any way. Even corporate media pundits are finally coming around to this view!

So who does Max Baucus think he’s fooling with his terrible “health insurance reform” bill? Those who call it an Insurance Company Protection Act are on target, as are those who point out that it is the three million dollars worth of “campaign contributions” from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that account for Baucus’s unyielding bipartisanship. It’s not that like ordinary Democratic cowards, he’s afraid of Olympia Snowe; it’s that, like the Republicans, he’s owned by the health care profiteers.

Make no mistake: Baucus is not being devilishly clever – coming out with a bill so bad, with such dire consequences for those whom Bill Clinton once called “the great forgotten middle class,” that his fellow Democrats will have no choice but to move forward in a better direction. Baucus is not clever; he’s a bought and paid for hack – as bad as any Democrat can be (and that’s saying a mouthful!).

The Silent Majority versus the Moronic Minority

2009-09-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Remember Nixon’s “silent majority.” It was made up of the un-cool, middle aged working stiffs who stood for good old American values like short hair and support for the empire in all its predations, while remaining politically impassive – the very opposite of insurrectionary blacks seeking “liberation” or spoiled, sex- and drug-crazed white kids looking to stop the Vietnam War. Nowadays, of course, almost everyone claims to have been against that war. But, in fact, until war weariness and Watergate sent his popularity plummeting, depleting the ranks of his silent defenders, Nixon was probably right about which side was in the majority. [Post-war France provides another example of this phenomenon. Nearly everyone claimed to have been in the Resistance. In fact, very few were, and most French people collaborated more or less actively with the German Occupation.]

But that was then. Nowadays, the shoe is on the other foot and the foot has grown much larger. Today’s silent majority is, if not exactly progressive, at least not reactionary; it is comprised of nearly everyone who has his or her head screwed on right. Meanwhile, the ones making noise, lets call them “the Moronic Minority,” are a tiny assemblage of misinformed, alienated and resentful creatures – recruited by corporate PR types from the minions whom daytime television, talk radio, and Fox News long ago pre-moronized.

America has seen it all before, even in recent decades, especially when there were Democratic presidents in office -- or Republicans like Ike, who were no worse than Democrats. Eisenhower and Kennedy had to contend with the John Birch Society and the Minutemen; Clinton had the militia movement. However in those days, the craziness, though sometimes violent, was effectively sequestered; it therefore had little effect on policy. Now, thanks to the internet and the cable news networks, it is spilling over into the mainstream. The problem is made worse by the fact that the Republican Party -- even at its best, the party of the Greater Evil -- has all but turned itself into the Moronic Minority’s political vehicle.

What Richard Hofstadter long ago called “the paranoid style” in American politics has been a factor in our political life almost since the country’s founding. But it only becomes a serious threat in those times when a portion of the elite identifies with it or exploits its potentialities. That is what is happening now.

On the other hand, there has been progress of a sort in comparison with the recent and more remote past. Today’s Moronic Minority, like its ancestor political movements, is transparently nativist (anti-immigrant) and racist. Can anyone doubt that the fact that the President is African-American rattles the cages of tea party militants or that, in their minds, “illegal immigrants” are the new Negroes! But, on matters of race and ethnicity, no matter how unhinged they become, the demonstrators at town hall meetings or in the halls of Congress at least have the decency not to be too overt. Following the lead of Fox’s hapless Glen Beck, they even accuse the other side of “racism,” effectively conceding what their predecessors never would -- that racism is a bad thing. It’s progress too that “Nazi” and “fascist” are terms of reproach for these later-day Know-Nothings; or, at least it would be progress, if those who use these words as derogatory epithets had any idea what they meant. [That they conflate “Nazi” and “fascist” with “socialist” and “communist,” and then claim that this has something to do with health insurance, is reason to think that they haven’t a clue.] In addition, today’s Moronic Minority, though comprised mainly of fundamentalist Protestants, is not anti-Catholic. This too is progress; but we should not forget that part of the explanation for this happy turn of events has to do with the unholy alliance between Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants in the inaptly named “pro-life” movement.

Most startling of all, there seems to be little, if any, anti-Semitism in today’s Moronic Minority, in stark contrast to right-wing movements of the past. But even that advance is not quite as much an improvement as one might suppose, inasmuch as throughout our political culture, it is taken for granted that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are more or less the same thing. Once that mistake is taken on board, it is only natural that birthers and deathers and tenthers and tea partyers would assume ostensibly philo-Semitic attitudes. How, after all, could they not identify with a state whose very existence depends on ethnic cleansing; indeed, one that periodically wages wars on Muslim peoples, and imposes an Apartheid regime on Muslims in the territories it has occupied for more than forty years! How could they not be pro-Israel and therefore pro-Jewish? Then too there is the theology that runs rampant in Moronic Minority ranks, according to which Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled in the Holy Land before their very eyes. Of course, the original Crusaders were as delighted to kill Jews as Muslims. But they were Papists, after all; and therefore, Christian Zionists think, in the thrall of the Anti-Christ, not that they would say so directly given their anti-abortion driven détante with Rome. The Crusaders therefore didn’t realize, as fundamentalist Protestants do, that killing Jews was not the business of right thinking Christians; that pleasure is reserved for God who, at the end of time, will see to it that Jews who do not accept Jesus will get what they deserve. Until then, Christians should make common cause with Jews in killing Muslims, the better to hasten the Final Days.

Still, all this “progress” is small consolation. The fact remains: unhinged Know-Nothingism is again dragging the political “center” rightward. Would that the Left were similarly vociferous; would that it would drag Obama and the Democrats in control of Congress the opposite way!

But today’s equivalent of the militant minority of the Nixon era has gone into hibernation; the champions of Reason have faltered. Part of the problem is the transparently untenable idea, still held by many, that President Obama will, through sheer charisma, make things right. Part of the problem is exhaustion after countless, feckless “marches on Washington” and demonstrations elsewhere. What a waste of time and effort they have been!

[In that regard, it is worth noting how The New York Times and The Washington Post always underestimate the size of anti-war demonstrations by orders of magnitude. In contrast, both papers were more than happy to declare that “tens of thousands” of “anti-government” (i.e. anti-Obama for the wrong reason) demonstrators descended on Washington on 9/12.]

But Obamamania and exhaustion are not the whole story; misplaced civility, the ‘niceness’ liberals promote, is part of the problem too. To the degree, often exaggerated, that protests helped bring the Vietnam War to an end, it was not because masses of well-behaved demonstrators assembled together to plead their cause. For that sort of thing to have had much effect, we’d have to have had a much more democratic polity than we did back then or than we have now. What helped to restrain Nixon and Kissinger was the “war at home” – and in the military – because it threatened the maintenance and reproducibility of the existing order. The anti-Iraq war movement never rose to that level. It was too decorous, too “respectful” of contrary views, too supportive of “the troops,” too inclined to assume that, with compelling arguments, the enemy was persuadable. On the unhinged and otherwise mindless Right, they know better.

Obama’s “bipartisanship” is cut from the same cloth as the civility of today’s left opposition, except that it is even more plainly disabling. Thus he and his co-thinkers still labor to find “common ground” with the nut cases who came to Washington on 9/12 and with the public relations manipulators and political entrepreneurs who stirred them into (re)action, making paranoia, yet again, a major factor in American political life. Instead, like those to his left, Obama should learn what the nut cases in the streets can teach him: that rational discourse is an improver only to the extent that people are rational; and therefore that, in a world like ours where Unreason is rampant, a little, unreasonable obstreperousness (for Reason's sake) – or, better yet, a whole lot of it -- can go a long way.

Liberals Enraged

2009-09-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

Could anything be more ludicrous than liberals enraged? Dopey Joe Wilson called Barack Obama a “liar” and, in less than a day, they raise more than a half million dollars for his opponent. Good thinking, liberals – elect another Blue Dog, why don’t ya!

Note: Obama is a liar: as I pointed out yesterday, he lied in his speech to Congress about being open to good ideas. He’s for “death panels” too. Where there is private insurance, there are death panels comprised of capitalist profiteers and their flunkies, and Obama is very definitely for private insurance or, as we ought to call it, “the private option.”

Still, it is enlightening, now that the liberal media have turned on Dopey Joe, to find out more about the lowlifes Republicans elect. It seems that like his co-thinker, Mr. Plumber, this Son of the Confederacy is not really even a “Joe”; it turns out that he’s an “Addison Graves”!

Anyway, had liberals been outraged, as they should have been, about how Obama and Company let Van Jones succumb to the swords and daggers of the Mighty Glen Beck and his followers – in other words, to the leader of a gaggle of Fox News listeners with incipiently fascist dispositions; had they instead listened to Jones when he tactlessly uttered a truism, they’d have already taken to heart the plain fact that Republicans are “assholes.” But instead of raising a dime or two for Jones, or even supporting him with their mouths, they prefer to follow their Leader down the path of “niceness.” They might realize that it’s not just racism and resentment that has made the GOP a party of faux-Joes; it’s also “civility” like theirs – “bipartisan” civility. That civility is also what keeps Bush and Cheney and their underling torturers from being brought to justice; and it’s why Obama’s “reforms,” to the degree they’re at all ameliorative, are so utterly milquetoast. But then, as Robert Frost famously put it, a liberal is someone who will never take his own side in an argument.

Opportunities Missed

2009-09-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

Republicans are good for one thing: handing opportunities over to Democrats. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson did it again last night: before a national audience watching President Obama address a joint session of Congress, he yelled out that Obama was a “liar” – at that point in Obama’s speech when he declared that he was not proposing health insurance for “illegal aliens.” Needless to say, Obama was telling the truth as any minimally informed Congressman should know; needless to say too, in this case as in others (for instance, when he declared that not one cent of federal money would go to pay for abortions), Obama’s “bipartisan” concessions are anything but estimable. Judging by the reaction of the corporate media, Wilson’s “incivility” was a boon to the Democrats; much as was the town hall blathering of “birthers” and “deathers” and “tenthers” and other unhinged morons, spurred on by Fox News and even less savory instruments of the GOP’s propaganda machine.

Democrats are good for one thing too: doing as little for the public good as they can with the opportunities that fall their way. Had Obama just said, from the beginning, that health care ought to be a right, not a commodity, and therefore that no one who doesn’t contribute to health care should profit from it, we’d now be on the point of joining the rest of the world in this regard. I’ve suggested before, and I continue to believe, that corporate opposition to a single-payer system would be no more intense than the opposition has been to Obama’s vague and not very coherent “guidelines” for reform, notwithstanding how much Obama’s reforms will do to “grow” the client base for private insurers, even if a “public option” survives the “sausage-making” now underway. But, following the lead of the Clintons before him and for reasons that are all too plain, Obama, along with the Pelosiite leadership of the House and Senate, ruled single-payer out of bounds from the get go.

In last night’s speech, Obama didn’t fold on the public option – not yet. He only said that it is one of several means to the end of providing affordable and universal (well, not quite universal) coverage. Thus he suggested that “the left” was wrong to fetishize the idea or, as the pundits say, “to draw a line in the sand” at that point. This was a skillful way to evade what is really going on in the “debate.” The right fears, and the (not-very) “left” hopes that a public option will be a Trojan Horse leading to a single-payer system. These fears and hopes are well-founded. If a public option is robust enough to be worth having, it will be attractive to almost everyone who is not a heavy investor in the insurance industry or a dogmatic free-marketeer. As John Edwards made clear in the early Democratic debates, a public option can be a way to back into the obvious solution. This is the hope and the fear that Obama, along with nearly everyone else in the political class and the corporate media, is intent on obfuscating.

It was interesting to see how Obama dealt with the obvious superiority of single-payer proposals last night. First, in good “centrist” fashion, he threw a sop to both the “left” and the “right” – saying that there are good arguments in favor of both single-payer systems and for relying on unregulated markets; in other words, good arguments in favor of the obvious solution but also in favor of the empirically and theoretically unsustainable convictions of free-marketeers. But then he said that, given how much of the American economy involves health care, it would be impractical to do anything other than build on and improve upon the system in place. This is a contention Obama makes whenever the issue arises. What he never does is support his claim with compelling arguments. The reason why is plain – a transition to a single-payer system is no more impractical than what Obama is proposing. What it is is detrimental to the interests of the health care profiteers (in the insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health care industries) who own the Republican Party outright and the Democratic Party nearly as completely.

I’m no expert, but I do know that there is nothing especially disruptive about people transitioning from private insurance to Medicare when they reach the age of 65. Here then, off the top of my head, is a way to make single-payer practical: beef up Medicare and then progressively lower the age for joining the system (going down from 65 to 55 would be a reasonable start); while making SCHIP an entitlement for all children (progressively raising the age for admissibility). Add to that the insurance reforms Obama is proposing for those in the middle and we would indeed be well on our way to where the rest of the developed world has been for more than half a century. If there really are fiscal concerns about going this route, then the steps up and down could be calibrated to take them into account. Meanwhile, one might think about the fiscal benefits of ending the hyper-costly Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and rescinding the deficit-swelling tax cuts Republicans, along with many Democrats, gave to the super-rich in the early days of the Cheney-Bush administration.

No doubt, there are other, better ways, to get from here to there. Obama claimed last night that he was interested in hearing about “good ideas” and that his door is always open. At that point, it would have been salutary, though uncivil, for someone to yell out that he is a “liar.” For he is surely not interested in the thinking of the victims of the system in place or in hearing about ideas, no matter how compelling, that those who commodify health care oppose. If his door is open to anyone, it is to the bought and paid for legislators he is trying to woo and to the lobbyists of the interests they represent. For everyone outside this “bipartisan” consensus, the doors of power are, as always, firmly shut.

Van Jones

2009-09-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Back when it looked like Hillary Clinton was a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, I urged the formation of Monica Lewinsky Democratic Clubs in every corner of the nation, in the hope that she – and other Clintonites – would be shamed into oblivion. Needless to say, that plan fell on deaf ears. Now, in an equally vain effort to impede the rightward drift of the Obama administration, I urge the formation of Van Jones Democratic Clubs. Jones was, after all, one of the very few Obama appointees who told it like it was (“Republicans are assholes”) and who comes out of a genuinely left-wing background. To his honor, he was “outed” by Fox News – with the imbecilic Glen Beck leading the charge. It should come as no surprise that Barack Obama acquiesced. This has always been how he deals with those who speak inconvenient truths -- Jeremiah Wright, for example.

In a posting this morning, AlterNet’s executive director, Don Hazen, claims that Jones’s resignation (firing) is actually a good thing for “progressives”; that he can do more good outside the administration than buried within it. But how seriously can one take the judgment of someone who, in contrasting Jones with other potential leaders of a movement to put the Obama administration back on the road to “change,” groups together Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers and Robert Reich; someone, moreover, who, just a month ago, urged AlterNet readers to thank Bill Clinton for all the “good” he has done by sending him warm greetings on his birthday?

No, AlterNet – Jones’ firing is yet another victory for the vilest and most obstreperous sector of the corporate media; and, as such, another sad consequence of Democratic pusillanimity and “bipartisanship.” I’ve long maintained that a Clintonized Democratic Party is beyond redemption but, just in case I’m wrong about that, Van Jones Democratic Clubs might be just the answer!

Who's Afraid of Olympia Snowe?

2009-09-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

As I have noted countless times, the ruling class types who were the pillars of the Republican Party of old have effectively ceded control of the Grand Old Party to the useful idiots Ronald Reagan and others enlisted into their ranks. Thus the GOP today is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Worse still, it is in league with the Dark Side – especially now, with the election of an African-American President. To their everlasting shame, Republicans have aided and abetted those who make it their business to cultivate that seedbed of resentment which, it seems, is always with us -- reawakening what Richard Hofstatdter long ago called “the paranoid style” in American politics. Nevertheless,, one must admire the Republicans for their obduracy, if only because it works. The GOP is well on its way towards blocking the timid reform measures advanced by its electoral rival, the Democratic Party -- or, as I prefer to call it, the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity.

If only the good and reasonable legislators who comprise “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” would learn a trick or two from their vile and ludicrous competitors! This may be happening. At long last, as the Obama administration careens rightward on health insurance reform, there is hope that the not very progressive Progressive Caucus is finally developing a backbone. It is far from clear, though, whether, in the end, progressive legislators will indeed resist Obama’s call to be “good soldiers” – by conceding just about everything. They could still cave – winning yet another one for the Gipper (figuratively speaking, of course).

The conventional wisdom has it that if nothing that can be called “health care reform” passes, it will sink the Obama administration. This is nonsense. The Obama administration is sinking itself thanks to its bipartisanship, and unless it is forced to hold its ground, at least on this central theme of its first year, it will only sink deeper into the muck.

Progressive legislators should remind themselves that, so far, Obama has effectively betrayed or at least neglected every progressive constituency that supported him; that, contrary to what they assumed a few months ago, he is turning out to be a determined practitioner of continual war (today in Iraq and Afghanistan, tomorrow who knows where), a flunky for Wall Street interests, and, in general, just a more intelligent and less inept version of George Bush. Being better than Bush is old news; it is now time, as Obama’s liberal shock troops might say, to “move on.”

Even the remaining Obamamaniacs should appreciate this by now; even they should expend all their efforts in encouraging the Progressive Caucus to remain firm in its resolve to defect if its very minimal demands are not met; especially, if some viable “public option” is not part of the final bill.

Sadly for those who do want to win one for this Gipper, it is a truism that one cannot credibly threaten to defect without being actually willing to do so if need be. The lunatic Right understands this well; it is the source of their power. Progressive Caucus members, along with others in the POP are beginning to understand too. Our task is to keep them on course; to encourage them to hold fast.

Progressive Caucus members should be made to realize that if they do not stop Obama from conceding too much when they have the means to do so, they will have effectively ceded control of the health and welfare of their constituents and the financial solvency of the United States itself (in an era of ever-rising health care costs) to the likes of Olympia Snowe – and perhaps a few other “moderate” Republicans and “conservative” Democrats. Enough already. That hapless characters like the ones Obama is courting should be calling the shots is an insult to the American electorate and, needless to say, a guarantee that Obama’s “victories” will be Pyrrhic victories only. Are the Democrats afraid of Olympia Snowe? Is Barack Obama? By Wednesday night’s joint session of Congress, we’ll probably know.

The Scales Are Falling

2009-09-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I thought that the only “serious” candidate vying for the Democratic nomination in 2008 (that criterion ruled out Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel) who offered any hope at all, however slight, for seizing what was plainly a rare historical opportunity for significant, beneficial “change” – who might, just might, take on corporations and banks and other “malefactors of great wealth” at least to the extent that the more radical Progressives and New Dealers did when similar opportunities presented themselves – was John Edwards. I thought so mainly because I thought Edwards could be counted on to advance organized labors’ interests, and that, if he could succeed in doing so, it would shift the domestic balance of power somewhat – at least back to where it was before our politics went south under Ronald Reagan and his successors (including Bill Clinton).

Unfortunately, the Edwards campaign ended badly, months before it became known just how badly it ended. Thus primary voters were left with a choice between a full-fledged Clintonite Restoration, led by the First Lady of Clintondom, and a lesser Clintonite Restoration, led by Barack Obama. To my relief, the lesser Clintonite side won. But then Barack Obama picked Joe Biden to be his running-mate; and later, after the election was over, he proceeded to pile Clintonite after Clintonite into his administration -- even to the point of making his erstwhile rival his Secretary of State. Thus it became clear to all with eyes to see that the anti-Clinton side’s victory was largely illusory; that it would not be our fate even to enjoy cosmetic changes in the Clintonite Restoration underway. For a long time, though, few had eyes to see. The vast majority of liberal voters, along with “independents,” were mired in a happy, Obama-induced, illusion, dreaming the dream of “change.”

In the months that followed, even those of us who never expected much from Barack Obama, still found ample reason to be disappointed. But we are less alone than we used to be. The ranks of the disappointed are growing by leaps and bounds.

For Obama’s first hundred days and beyond, countless folks who should have known better all along exercised all their ingenuity in cutting the new President slack, even as the evidence mounted that instead of “change,” what we would be getting was just a more competent version of the politics that has blighted our land at least since the Reagan days. Thus, instead of ending the (long ago lost) Bush Wars, Obama continued the one in Iraq and intensified the one in Afghanistan. Instead of re-regulating Wall Street, Obama and his team of Wall Street functionaries, bailed out its most flagrant predators and profiteers. Instead of proposing health care (actually health insurance) reforms that, like the ones John Edwards advanced, would lead inexorably to a single-payer system, he let a bought and paid for Congress develop an incoherent mishmash with, maybe, a milquetoast “public option.” Instead of addressing labor issues, the Employee Free Choice Act especially, he has done almost nothing for working people beyond humoring the leaders of their unions. Instead of bringing Bush and Cheney and other Bush era war criminals to justice, Obama is busy “looking forward.” Instead of making good use of his once enormous political capital, Obama engaged in foolhardy and ultimately self-defeating “bipartisanship.” And so, on and on.

Nevertheless, Obamamania survived for months after the Inauguration. No matter whom he re-empowered, no matter what policies he proposed, it was all deemed part of a master strategy, too clever for words, out of which would come the “change” Obama promised. But you can only fool most liberals most of the time; and you can’t do it forever. At long last, reality is kicking in. The scales are dropping away from the dreamers’ eyes.

Thus I find that I have less to say than I used to about how wide the gap is between the reality of the Obama administration and the hopes it engendered -- because so many others, many of whom have access to major media outlets, are saying it for me. There is, of course, some gratification in having been right all along. But this is of no consequence in the face of the ever-increasing likelihood that, yet again, a major historical opportunity is being lost.

Within the next week or two, decisions will be made in the White House about what kind of health insurance reform will go forward and about whether the Afghanistan War will continue full-throttle – for no plausible strategic purpose and at great cost, not just to the treasury but to the security of the “homeland” as well. Thus there is still a chance, albeit slight, that Obama will find it within himself and within his party of bought and paid for cowards to salvage something worthwhile from what could have been. I wouldn’t bet on it, however.

The situation will become clearer soon enough. What is clear now is that to prove pessimists like me wrong, it will be necessary for the scales to fall entirely away from the eyes of those who want to push Obama along. Contrary to the conventional, Obamamaniacal wisdom of the recent past, Obama is no Lone Ranger. Long ago, he decided to run – and govern – from within the corporate fold, and without shaking up the political establishment. In other words, he decided not even to try to expand the constraints in the way Edwards might have. So long as Obama remains fixed in this mode – and there is no reason to think he has any inclination to change – there is no reason to impute any inscrutable strategic genius to his bipartisan panderings. It is true now, as it always has been, that, where Obama’s governance is at issue, what we see is what we get – provided we see clearly what is there, not what we would like to be there as we dream. For the “change” Obama promised to come to pass, the baseless idea that he is already somehow making it come to pass must be thoroughly and completely overcome.

Leave it, therefore, to Clintonite liberal groups, like moveon.org, to defend Obama’s milquetoast reform policies against the lunatic Right. Partisans of the change Obama seemed to speak of should, instead, rail against Obama from the left – to force him, kicking and screaming, if need be, to restore the rule of law (by bringing Bush era criminals to justice), to end the Bush (now Obama) wars, to continue the call for single-payer health insurance, to regulate (not placate) Wall Street, and to force Obama to champion the interests of the constituencies who elected him – organized labor, above all. To collaborate with the mainstream of the Party of Pusillanimity, not to mention its right-wing Blue Dog component, is now more than ever to reinforce a problem that there is still a chance to begin to solve. The time is long past due to see this clearly, and to militate accordingly.

Birth of a Backbone?

2009-08-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

Writing for The Nation, William Greider claims that the jury is still out on whether President Obama somehow lost his strategic and tactical genius as the health care “debate” has unfolded or whether the more progressive aspects of his mishmash of vague proposals were always just window-dressing and that he is and always has been a Blue Dog-Max Baucus think alike. Perhaps Greider is right. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that the latter hypothesis is the right one. My evidence: that from the moment his campaign got going, Obama positioned himself towards the center-right of the group seeking the nomination (only Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were worse); and that from the moment he won the nomination, he bounded further rightward; a process that has only become worse since Inauguration Day. I have supported these claims in countless preceding entries.

I have also argued repeatedly that the Democrats are nothing if not pusillanimous, and that “progressive” Democrats are among the most pusillanimous of all. I think Obama and Company were of a similar view. They seem to have been convinced that no matter how thoroughly the Obama administration would morph into a more competent version of the Bush administration, that liberals would stand by their man. But now, for the first time since Obamamania began, it’s beginning to look like the jury may be out on this last contention too. At long last, some House Democrats – in both the Progressive and Black Caucuses – along with some of their supporters in organized labor and on Obama-friendly web sites are showing signs of evolving into the vertebrate subphylum.

It seems that the retreat from a “public option,” floated over the weekend by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and others, was the last straw for many, and that at least some Democrats are now prepared to do the right thing – which, as I maintained recently, requires standing firm, even if it means scuttling heath insurance reform altogether. It now appears that this show of nascent courage has even registered in the highest circles of our “bipartisan” President’s administration. This is a turn of events to be welcomed wholeheartedly, and encouraged by all means. This means turning up the heat, and demanding action – not just on Obama and Company, but on liberal Democrats as well. Remember, liberal Democrats are, in the end, still Democrats -- so, no matter how hopeful things might seem, there is always the danger that they will revert back to their true, spineless nature.

Now Is the Time!

2009-08-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

Even by the standards to which we’ve become accustomed, Republicans have long been, almost without exception, morally and intellectually execrable. They would be nothing more than a joke but for the fact that, with Democratic connivance, their power, as a wing of the reigning duopoly, is effectively institutionalized. Then remarkably, in the past few weeks, they’ve become even worse: rousting America’s Pathetic White Furies into action at the behest of those of their corporate masters who feel most threatened by Obama’s milquetoast health insurance reforms. In short, the Republican Party is fast approaching the point where it can no longer count as a “respectable” Right.

But there is nevertheless something sublime about Republican obstinacy; something “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party” needs urgently to take on board.

If reports this weekend are correct, if Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are willing to give up entirely on “the public option” – not just to gut it, but to abandon it altogether – in order to appease right wing (“Blue Dog”) Democrats and to aim for “bipartisan” support; and if it’s true, as it seems to be, that, in order to win over (i.e. neutralize) the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists, Obama and Company have agreed to permit the lobbyists’ clients to charge pretty much whatever they like for their wares, as they have been doing all along, then the time is now past due for our ever so “reasonable” democratic Democrats to “just say No” too.

Now is emphatically not the time to win one for the Gipper – or rather for his twenty-first century “liberal” incarnation —but rather to outdo the (barely) respectable Right in obduracy. Democrats may think they need a “victory” at all costs, and many so-called progressives may agree. But if Obama gives up on even the pale semblance of reform he had been defending, then he is headed for a Pyrrhic victory only, and that’s the last thing anybody this side of the Blue Dogs needs.

In 1993, the Clintons set the cause of health insurance reform back a generation. Win or lose, Obama is doing it again.

Because he has been following the Clintons’ lead, this was to be expected. Of course, the conventional (Cokie Roberts) wisdom is that Obama learned from the Clintons’ mistakes. And, indeed, he involved Congress in crafting the legislation, as they did not (until too late), and he didn’t involve his wife, as they did. But these are trivial differences. Obama’s big mistake, like theirs, was to put the “stakeholders’” interests, the interests of the profiteers, above everything else, especially the interests of the stakeholders’ victims. Thus he set out to patch up a system that needs to be radically overhauled. In this way, Obama gave it all away before the “negotiations” even started, just as the Clintons did. Now he’s giving even more away as negotiations proceed.

This is why now is the time for Democrats who have not sunk to the Blue Dog level, to learn from those who have nothing but obduracy to offer. If it comes to that, they should have the courage to scuttle Obama’s “reforms,” not acquiesce in them. If they are clear and emphatic now, though, it might not come to that. In any case, as the public “discussion” bounds rightward, there is no other way.

This is a matter of the utmost urgency. It is becoming as clear as can be that as health insurance reform goes, so goes the rest of what most Obama voters thought they were electing. If there’s to be any chance of stopping the Bush (now Obama!) wars, establishing a “new deal” for organized labor, moving forward in a serious way to avert ecological catastrophes and, for that matter, setting our decrepit capitalist economy on a better course, a little backbone – here and now – is an indispensable first step.

Will Democratic “progressives” in the House and Senate evince a little backbone now, in the face of impending disaster, or will they cave? If the future is like the past, the answer is, alas, all too predictable.

Town Hall Meeetings

2009-08-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

There are so many questions Obama should be made to answer. To cite just a few timely ones, he should be forced to explain:

-why he thinks it’s so important not to concede defeat in Afghanistan, even at the cost of squandering American and Afghani lives, depleting the U.S. treasury, and insuring the generation of a fresh supply of terrorists?

-why, along with putting everything else pertaining to organized labor on the backest of back burners, he let the so-called Amigo Summit just concluded pass without even a mention of renegotiating NAFTA (as he promised to do repeatedly during the campaign)?

-and why he’s intent on violating U.S. and international law by not prosecuting everyone, from the top down, involved in torture, rather than, at most, just a handful of underlings who “went beyond” the criminal instructions supplied by functionaries of the Cheney/Bush administration?

But since health care (actually, health insurance) reform is the issue of the moment, how about this: “don’t you think, Mr. President, that a coherent and defensible plan for reform – in other words, a plan for transitioning from the mess we now have to a single-payer system – would have incurred no more opposition than the incoherent and still unformed mishmash you’re now promoting?” Or, equivalently, “don’t you think profiteers in the insurance, pharmacological and for-profit health care industries would (indeed, could) then have done no more than they already are: “lobbying” (essentially bribing) legislators while enlisting unscrupulous Public Relations operatives to spread lies, strike fear and stir up racial animosities within the most benighted sections of the American populace – formerly the useful idiots, now the “base” of the Greater Evil Party?” Or simply, “don’t you think it would be easier to promote a plan that is bold and genuinely “pragmatic,” rather than a plan that, like the one Democrats will put forward, is neither?”

Somebody, please ask him! And if some certifiably delusional idiot on Medicare, railing against government programs, tries to shout you down, don’t be intimidated. If Obama is too stuck on “bipartisanship” to vanquish the Furies, then it’s up to us; and if he’s too stuck on conventional ways of thinking to do what is plainly necessary, then it’s up to us to make him and his bought and paid for Democratic colleagues and co-thinkers do the right thing.

Perils of Bipartisanship: the Dark Side

2009-08-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

It may not yet be too late to salvage something decent out of the mess that “health care reform” has become, but time is running short, and the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are still up to their old, bipartisan tricks. It is becoming increasingly clear that this bipartisanship of theirs is putting more than just health care reform in peril.

Obama won the presidency in large part because it had become clear to a majority of voters that the Cheney/Bush administration had been flagrantly god awful. It helped too that John McCain was uncharismatic, and that he picked a cartoon character for a running-mate. In those circumstances, all Obama had to do to win large sectors of the electorate over was to position himself towards the center of our rightward-skewed political spectrum. Then, as in judo, he was able to turn his opponents’ attacks into instruments of their own undoing – in a way that even ill-informed, clueless, apolitical “swing voters” could appreciate. But that was then, and this is now. Now it’s legislators, not the people they purport to represent, who must be won over. These are not people who can be persuaded by compelling arguments; they’re too busy paying the piper. The judo maneuvering that won the election for Obama is therefore powerless against them; especially not while health care profiteers are busily stuffing their pockets.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party had long ago turned itself over to its useful idiots, the folks who appeal to the Fox News/right-wing talk radio demographic. While shamelessly playing to this “base” in the 2008 election, John McCain at least had enough decency to reign in the looniest of his supporters when the mood at some of his rallies turned ugly (and, in a not very disguised way, racist). But nowadays, there is no one in charge, and the Republican leadership, such as it is, only wants to obstruct. Being outnumbered in Congress and vastly outnumbered in the general population, they have therefore hit upon the strategy that worked for their German and Italian counterparts in the 1920s and 30s. They have taken to stirring up the furies.

The first inklings of this strategy were the “tea parties,” organized, not very surreptitiously, by Fox News and like-minded (and funded) public relations firms. The tea parties were a joke, but the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina for the Supreme Court, nevertheless breathed new life into “the movement.” As per the conventional wisdom, it unleashed the anxieties of the most “left behind” segments of the still (barely) majority white community, and incited the pent up rage of those who feel most in jeopardy. Then came the Gates affair and Obama’s indisputably correct (but nevertheless rescinded) remark that Gates’s arrest and shackling in his own home was “stupid.” After that, it all went viral, as the corporate media – including its “liberal” wing -- desperate for ratings, took the bait, showering derisory publicity on each and every lunacy the far-right can conjure up. But even bad publicity has been good for changing the terms of the debate – even farther to the right.

Thus even the so called “birther movement” has become a factor in our politics. These are the folks who insist that Barack Obama is not a “natural born” citizen, and is therefore not “really” the President. No matter that they have made a cause of a delusion – an expression of a wish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Their dumb obstreperousness has given them a mainstream hearing.

The crowds turning out to disrupt town hall meetings on health care reform are cut from the same cloth – and are often the same people. They too are impervious to rational argument, oblivious to the facts –and, in this instance especially, militantly opposed to their own best interests. Evidence is mounting too that their “spontaneous” demonstrations are supported financially by public relations operatives in the pay of the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. This is diligently reported and exposed. But, no matter: right-wing obstreperousness, shading off into threats of violence, has helped put even Obama’s milquetoast reform proposals on the defensive.

For this, Obama and his advisors are largely to blame. The problem isn’t just that, wanting to avoid the mistakes the Clintons made a generation ago, they erred in the opposite direction, turning much of the task of fashioning health care legislation over to lobbyists for the so-called stakeholders (the health industry profiteers) and to legislators who do their bidding. That misdeed explains why reform is still a work in progress, and why what will finally emerge becomes worse with each passing day. But it doesn’t, by itself, explain the reemergence of the dark side. That is a consequence of a more far-reaching mistake on Obama’s part -- his dogged insistence on going bipartisan; in other words, in this instance, on taking seriously the views and desires of a morally and intellectually bankrupt, but nevertheless semi-“institutionalized,” political party that has been taken over by its loonies.

No doubt, in the end, Obama will score some kind of “victory” on health-care reform. But, increasingly, it seems that any bill that passes will do little more than mandate a few worthwhile insurance reforms. At this point, it is even still up in the air whether the proposals that Congress will finally enact will include a “public option” worth having, or will permit states to institute worthwhile public options on their own.

In a saner environment, private, not public, options would be in jeopardy. After all, single-payer trumps all the other contenders: it alone makes health care a right, not a commodity; and it alone promises to cut costs without diminishing the quality of care. But despite widespread popular support for making health care a right, and despite significant Congressional support as well, single-payer is, for all practical purposes, “off the table.” Even proponents of Obama’s “public option” now have to fight to keep that pale approximation of a solution alive. Thus, in recent weeks, we have witnessed the evolution of a “debate” between those who want much too little change and those who want no change at all – while proponents of genuine change, “change we can believe in,” are cast into the margins.

This sad state of affairs is a consequence of Obama’s unrequited but determined “bipartisanship,” and of the Democratic Party leadership’s determination to “win” at all costs -- even to the point of sponsoring and supporting Democrats who might as well be Republicans. The result is plain: right-wing, aka “Blue Dog,” Democrats and two or three “moderate” (not flagrantly obdurate) Republicans have become the “swing voters” who hold the fate of health care reform in their bought and paid for hands, while a newly empowered Right drags our political culture ever more deeply into the realm of the irrational and the vicious.

The empowerment of the Republican mob is arguably even more to be regretted than yet again missing an opportunity for bringing America’s health care system into the mid-twentieth century. Sensing victory, the health care profiteers and their functionaries in the media and the public relations industry have taken it upon themselves to do whatever is necessary to keep their income flows intact. The result is already ugly and it is likely, in the weeks ahead, to become even uglier.

It didn’t have to be this way. Had Obama and Company not gone for a vague and indefensible mishmash intended to bring Republicans along, but instead opted from the outset for a coherent and defensible plan – for a single-payer system or some close facsimile -- they would have encountered no more virulent opposition than they have already. Indeed, they would now stand a better chance for success, if only because they’d be promoting a plan that makes sense. But instead they went the “bipartisan” route.

In doing so, they empowered the Fox News/talk radio audience even more than Republican plutocrats had done previously – breathing new life into the most morally and intellectually retrograde currents of our political culture. In this way, Obama’s bipartisanship has put even more than health care reform in peril.

Corruptions

2009-07-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

It is looking ever more likely that good old-fashioned corruption will undo the Obama administration’s milquetoast plan to reform the health care system. All that needs to happen is for “the public option” to be compromised away, along with the ability of states to set up single-payer systems on their own. The problem is not graft per se; at least not for the most part. It’s the whacky idea, sustained by obtuse Supreme Courts for more than three decades, that constitutionally protected free speech blocks serious efforts to keep moneyed interests from making “campaign contributions” more or less as they please – in other words, from buying benefits by “investing” in candidates.

In this era of “change,” the health care profiteers this time around have been hedging their bets. Some pharmaceutical interests and some in the for-profit health care industry, along with the AMA, decided to cast their lot with “reform.” Of course, if they start to smell blood, they will probably still jump ship. But they will be winners either way, since liberal Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have already given them most of what they want. The private insurance industry, however, fears an “existential threat” in the so-called public option. That’s why, for the most part, they’ve cast their lot with the blathering ideologues of the Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts, the “Blue Dogs.” The insurance industry is poised to make the month of August a time for “pre-positioning” right-wing forces in preparation for “Obama’s Waterloo,” as the pathetic but dangerous Jim Demint, Senator from South Carolina, famously put it.

Obama could still prevail. Indeed, if only he’d cease his self-defeating bipartisanship and tamp down his zeal for working out deals, his administration could still deal old-fashioned corruption a blow. Then, unfortunately, the moneyed interests would not exactly lose out. But neither would their nefarious greed unequivocally impede a pale semblance of progress.

Thus old-fashioned corruption may still be dealt a blow. Even in our not very democratic system, this is possible in dire enough straits; and the straits now are dire enough. The question is whether liberal Democrats and the Obama administration will rise to the occasion.

But even if Obama gets his way, real (small-d) democrats will have little to celebrate; for defeating the bought and paid for Blue Dogs and Max Baucuses of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, and their even worse colleagues in the Greater Evil Party, will not get to the heart of the corruption that afflicts us. Our democracy is riddled with another, deeper corruption that is much harder to extirpate.

It is worth recalling that, until the end of the eighteenth century, “democracy” was regarded in educated circles in much the way that “anarchy” now is – as a theoretical possibility that no one in his right mind would actually favor. That sense of things changed irreversibly when the American and French Revolutions, and cognate movements elsewhere, turned the demos, the people (in contrast to elites), into actors in the political arena. It took several decades, though, for the perceived challenge democracy posed to property to subside.

The first line of defense was to restrict the franchise to (male) property holders. But that strategy seemed increasingly frail as democratic sentiments continued to rise (in tandem with anti-democratic sentiments of various, but mainly ecclesiastical, colorations). It all came to a head in Britain in the 1840s with the Chartist movement -- where a clear attack on propertied interests took the form of a struggle to extend the franchise to adult males regardless of property qualifications. The Chartist threat was a major factor in the development of the modern party system. It is that system that has made “democracy” safe for capitalism – though at the cost of corrupting the democratic ideal fundamentally, irrespective of how much old-fashioned corruption there may be.

The party system works differently in different places. In parliamentary regimes, there are usually many (bureaucratized and disciplined) political parties that are obliged by circumstances to govern through coalition arrangements. On the one hand, this system does allow most citizens to express themselves politically inasmuch as they are able to find a political party with which to identify. On the other hand, the exigencies of coalition governance generally stifle democratic aspirations; usually because small parties, representing parochial interests at odds with the interests of the majority, must be accommodated. Even so, on the whole, the system does permit a semblance of “rule by the demos.” This is especially true when, as in most countries, old-fashioned corruption is not, as it were, constitutionally protected.

Here, in the Land of the Free, where electoral campaigns are, for the most part, privately financed, old-fashioned corruption is built into the system. But even if our judicial and legislative branches were more (small-d) democratic, even if the Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign funding were set aside, the pressures that work against real democracy in parliamentary regimes would corrupt democracy in our system too. The difference would be that, as happens now, centrist-tending coalitions would form (implicitly) before elections take place – effectively disenfranchising many, perhaps most, voters. There is always the “danger,” of course, that, in primary elections, “fringe” candidates will prevail by appealing to their respective parties’ “base.” In recent decades, this seems to have been more a problem for Republicans than Democrats. Being afraid to take their own side, “liberal” voters in Democratic primaries have tended to vote like pundits – gravitating towards “the center,” as conventional wisdom defines it (not because that is where they are in their aspirations, but because that is how they think Democrats can win). John Kerry’s victory in the 2004 Democratic primaries exemplified this phenomenon perspicuously. That a more progressive candidate than Obama did not prevail in the 2008 primaries was, at least in part, a consequence of similar ratiocinations on the part of Democratic voters.

As I’ve pointed out in countless entries, Obama ran to the center-right in the primaries and has been moving rightward ever since. Thus, no matter how much Rahm Emanuel goes on about not letting a good crisis go to waste, that’s exactly what the Obama administration has done – with health care reform and nearly everything else.

With health care, the time was right: we could have replaced the increasingly untenable status quo with a single-payer system. But, for that, instead of taking the obvious solution “off the table,” Pelosi-style, Obama would have had to defend it forthrightly, spending his political capital as freely as he doles out real capital to our real rulers on Wall Street. And because Republicans could never be brought on board, he would have had to drop the whole bipartisan effort that has blighted his presidency to date. That was not to be, because that would constitute a real challenge to the underlying corruption of the regime; something Obama has not shown the least inclination to take on. Single-payer is superior in every way to the mishmash Obama is promoting, but that is an irrelevant, if inconvenient, fact. For Obama and the rest of the Party of Pusillanimity, the POP, it is more important to pay obeisance to the structural corruption that is our party system by supporting the GOP-POP duopoly than to do the right thing.

Obama’s bipartisanship in this matter at least, is therefore not just an ill-conceived strategy. It is that, of course, but it also represents a (re)affirmation of the system in place. The catastrophes Cheney and Bush bequeathed Obama made that system vulnerable in ways it has not been for decades. Had there been a will, there would have emerged a way if not to change it fundamentally, at least to reform it structurally. But this was not to be. In consequence, even the modest reforms Obama envisions may not be either.

Of course, no Democrat could lead an assault on our two-party system itself. But there was a chance fundamentally to modify the structural corruption of democracy that our two-party system institutionalizes. Then the health care crisis could be made better. Then too the rest of an agenda suited for our time could fall in place.

This would be a victory for (small-d) democracy as well. For then those of us not stuck in the dead center, as defined by the arbiters of conventional wisdom, might actually be genuinely enfranchised for the first time. We might then have something not just to vote against, but instead to vote for. It isn’t happening though. Thus, sadly but predictably, we can only conclude that the time is now past due for even the most inveterate Obama boosters to face reality; and to realize that, barring a major change of course, “change we can believe in” is not going to happen on Obama’s watch.

A Flicker of Light

2009-07-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

It was just a flicker. At his prime time July 22 news conference on health care reform,one of the corporate media stage props pre-selected to ask questions asked President Obama how close to 100% health insurance coverage would be enough to satisfy the “guidelines” he has given Congress. Obama replied that the only way to insure 100% coverage would be with a single-payer system that provides health care for everyone as a matter of right. Then he launched into his usual answer – about how he proposes to get close but not all the way there. Thus, briefly, a flicker of light shone through. It was then immediately quashed by the unforgiving steamroller that is Obama’s “pragmatism.”

How much more salutary it would have been had Obama gone on, for just a few more seconds, to say what he clearly knows to be the case: that a single-payer system is unthinkable – notwithstanding the plain fact that its superiority over the alternatives (including the left-most version of Obama’s still vague plan) is indisputable. It is unthinkable because health care profiteers in the private insurance industry, Big Pharma and the for-profit health delivery system own Congress. So, Obama might then have said, “we might as well just get on with seeing what we can accomplish within that constraint.” If only Obama had dared say this, he would have done more to advance public deliberation and debate than anything any President has done in decades.

It’s a familiar syndrome. Everyone, Obama included, knows that the only feasible way to bring a semblance of peace and justice to Israel/Palestine is to establish a Palestinian state on all or nearly all the territory Israel has occupied illegally since 1967. But, of course, this is unthinkable given the Israel lobby’s control over Congress and the White House. Thus Obama babbles on about a two state solution and halting settlement growth (he doesn’t dare talk of dismantling settlements!). His babble may be enough to unnerve the right-wing politicians who run Israel, but everyone understands that it’s just words. Because American legislators are bought and paid for, the obviously right solution is unthinkable.

Or again: everyone with the sense they were born with – including Obama most emphatically -- also knows that continuing the occupation of Iraq and ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan is all but guaranteed to make “the homeland” less, not more, secure – and also to squander public monies needed urgently for constructive purposes (including health care). But “cut and run” is an unthinkable option. After all, it would prove the empire vulnerable – and the many interests who also own Congress, not just the military-industrial complex narrowly defined, can’t have that. Thus perpetual war has become the norm. Since Obama has become president, hardly anyone even notices anymore.

Ditto for turning the economy over to “the malefactors of great wealth,” as earlier generations of Progressives called them; the people who brought the economy to the brink of collapse, and who continue to do so, as they enrich themselves egregiously. In these matters too Obama, along with nearly everyone else, knows better. But with bought and paid for Democrats (and Republicans), doing otherwise is unthinkable. It is hardly even mentionable in policy debates.

The problem is not just Obama’s “pragmatism” (which comes to nothing more than unprincipled and ultimately self-defeating tactical flexibility). It’s that who pays the piper calls the tune. Back in the darkest days of the Cheney/Bush administration, it was easy enough for “liberals” to see how wrong-headed everything was, and how the country was headed for disaster upon disaster. Not so anymore. Instead, in Obama’s Washington, the who-pays-the-piper phenomenon has reached almost totalitarian levels. The obvious, the known to be obvious, has become unthinkable, with only the occasional and easily quashed flicker of light showing through.

Right and Righter

2009-07-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

If David Brooks is good for anything, it is for getting everything wrong by about 180 degrees. Today’s column in The New York Times is true to form. There he “argues” that liberal Democrats (in whose ranks he includes President Obama) are committing “suicide” by “overplaying” their electoral mandate, much as Republicans did in the aftermath of George Bush’s electoral victories. According to Brooks, the Democrats are way to the left of the American people. Only the right-most flank of what I have been calling the POP (the Party of Pusillanimity), the Blue Dog Democrats, gets it right. Evidently, the Republicans in Congress are too coarse, too obstructionist, and too transparently stupid even for Brooks. So, for the time being, he’ll cast his lot with the Blue Dogs.

Like most of what The Time’s “conservative” columnist writes, these latest reflections hardly merit comment. But they do inadvertently bring two thoughts to mind:

-first, that to the degree Obama is slipping in the polls (which is how Brooks and other pundits have been spinning recent poll results where Obama is still doing extraordinarily well), it is not because his proposals are too far ahead of the people who voted for him, but because they lag so far behind. The “anti-war” candidate is continuing one of the Bush wars he was elected to stop; and, at great cost (not just to the treasury but also to the safety and security of the American people), escalating the other. The candidate who was supposed to clean up Wall Street has put Wall Street predators in charge of the economy – with utterly predictable results. The candidate who was supposed to bring the United States to the level of other developed countries with respect to health care has seen fit to take the obvious solution, single-payer, off the table, while promoting (for the time being) only an anemic “public option.” The candidate who was supposed to bring transparency to government, to end preventive detention (and other violations of U.S. and international law), to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and so on and on – has been prevaricating shamefully. Obama cannot even find it in himself, so far, to bring anyone, much less the ringleaders of the Cheney-Bush torture regime, to account for clear violations of bedrock human rights and inviolable principles of international law. Overreaching? Hardly!

-Brooks’ babble also raises a question about the real liberal Democrats, the ones to the left of the “bipartisans” in the White House. They’re hardly out of step with the American people; in fact, even genuine conservatives should be in favor of ending the Bush wars, saving capitalism from the capitalists, and making health care a right, not a commodity. Real conservatives should also favor transparency and the rule of law and, so long as they’re more worldly than godly, they should not even object to such challenges to “family values” as gay marriage and gays in the military. Thus the positions most members of the “Progressive Caucus” advance are hardly outside the mainstream; they are not even genuinely “left” positions, but only positions the left (along with nearly everyone else) can get behind in the circumstances. Yet these “progressives” have been remarkably unable to influence outcomes! Unlike the Newt and his minions back in 94 when they took out a contract on America, or the Blue Dogs now, they seem constitutionally unable to “leverage” their power – which could become considerable with only minimal effort, given just the force of numbers. Even more than Obama, their error is not that they are too bold or too far ahead of the people they “represent.” Where they go wrong is in their strategic and tactical ineptitude and their eagerness to acquiesce in whatever Obama and his “bipartisans” propose.

Thus, yet again, Brooks gets it just about 180 degrees wrong!

Roberts Redux

2009-07-16T06:27:00.000-07:00

A Martian who had last visited earth for the John Roberts confirmation hearings and then returned for the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor might reasonably conclude that Roberts and Sotomayor are of one mind on almost anything – or rather that they both operate on a legal plane where precedent decides almost everything and the narrowest possible construal of legislative intent decides the rest. Had that Martian also attended the hearings for Sam Alito, he, she or it might have come to a similar conclusion about that nominee as well. But if pressed to say which of the three is the most independent thinker, the Martian would have to opt for Alito. Worse, unless that Martian was well versed in the nuances of Democratic and Republican politics and able to draw inferences from the tone of the questioners, he, she or it would be quite unable to discern any political difference between Roberts, Alito, and Sotomayor. I feel sorry for Sotomayor for having to go through this nonsense -- and not just because she has to accord “all due respect,” as they say in Washington, to Senatorial cretins. But girls gotta do what girls gotta do; and, given the white male resentment Republican senators exude, that dictum holds especially for wise Latina ladies.

Call it kabuki theater, call it farce. In either case, the hearings would be a major bore but for two things -- both of which are, unlike Sotomayor’s testimony, outrageous. Only the first, however, has any entertainment value. That would be the chance to witness conspicuous displays of stupidity from Republicans. I would hazard that, in a free and fair election, most observers would vote Jeff Sessions MIP, Most Imbecilic Player. However, I’d vote for Tom Coburn for his performance in not understanding how dumb his questions about his “right” to defend himself with a gun were. I especially liked how, when he finally stopped badgering the wise Latina over the point, he opined that, as a doctor, he understands how difficult it can be not to think like a doctor – implying that the reason Sotomayor just couldn’t get his point is that she thinks too much like a judge. [Coburn is the Senator who advised his pal and fellow Christian cultist Senator John Ensign to pay off his mistress and her family, but who won’t talk about it, claiming “doctor patient privilege.” Coburn is an obstetrician!]

There is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching Republicans act dumber than fifth graders, but there is none in watching Democratic senators, with one partial exception, endorse the persona Sotomayor is obliged to project. Al Franken was the partial exception. The rest of them had not an unkind word to say about the Roberts court, plainly the most noxious and reactionary in recent history. Instead, they outdid themselves suggesting how Robertsonian Sotomayor is, notwithstanding her Latina “identity.” They couldn’t even find it in themselves to cast aspersions on Antonin Scalia – the Mafiosi character I call “Tony Two Vote” (because it was his second vote for the Bush boy, along with the votes he marshaled from the other right-most Supremes, that unleashed the horrors of the past eight years). When Sotomayor joins the Court, as she surely will, it will not make the Roberts court appreciably better; for that, she’d have to be replacing one of the more reactionary Justices. Her appointment, much like Obama’s milquetoast stimulus package, will just keep what is very bad from getting even worse. But there was at least a chance for Democrats, even the milquetoast Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, to explain to a receptive public just how awful the Roberts court has been. So far, they haven’t done anything of the kind, and time is running out. It has been yet another “educative” moment lost.

Fidelity to the Law

2009-07-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

As everyone with more grey matter than a Republican senator knows, the stock phrase Sonia Sotomayor invoked in her statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, that her guiding principle as a judge has always been “fidelity to the law,” implies exercising judgment; after all, what else are judges are for. [As everyone also knows, in exercising judgment, one cannot help but rely on one’s own life experience; what else do the Republican Sentators think all those white male Supreme Court Justices have been doing all these years!] However, judges exercise judgment within the sometimes broad, sometimes narrow constraints of the legal system. They draw conclusions in “gray” areas where reasonable people can disagree about what the law requires. But not all areas are gray. “Fidelity to the law” implies recognition of this fact as well.

Until the past few days, the Obama administration – intent on “looking forward” – has been, to put it mildly, unmindful of Sotomayor’s guiding principle. Along with a compliant media, intent on promoting the rather dubious idea that serving justice would be a “distraction” from Obama’s domestic and foreign “agenda,” they have been the main protectors of the Cheney-Bush torture regime. But now, finally, key House and Senate Democrats have stopped playing ball with the administration on this point. This happy turn of events has come about, it seems, because CIA Director Leon Panetta told them that Dick Cheney told the CIA to keep Congress in the dark about a pet assassination program of his. [If this allegation turns out to be true, as it surely will be (if it is properly investigated), that would in itself be a violation of U.S. laws dating back to the Ford administration.]

With key Democrats on board, The New York Times was sufficiently emboldened to confirm what journalists not “of record” have been reporting for a long time. Thus the truth has been brought in from the margins, setting a process in motion that is more consistent with Sotomayor’s principle than Obama’s practice to date. Obama might still quash it, of course; but with each passing day, as “revelations” mount, he’d have a harder time doing so. The very egregiousness of the Cheney-Bush administration’s infidelity to the law is now forcing the prospect that justice (or, more likely, some semblance of justice) will be served.

Thus Attorney General Eric Holder is floating the prospect of a special prosecutor (though it isn’t entirely clear yet what his or her mandate would be). Neither is it clear whether this is Holder’s initiative or Obama’s; no one outside the highest echelons of the Justice Department and the White House really knows how much freedom of action Holder has in these matters. But whatever lies behind what Holder is reported to have in mind, the appointment of a special prosecutor is an initiative worthy of enthusiastic support. It is therefore urgent that we bring public pressure to bear! The Justice Department and the White House must be made to understand that, notwithstanding all the slack Obama’s admirers are eager to cut for him even as he betrays their “hopes” for “change,” now is the time to make “fidelity to the law” the Obama administration’s guiding principle too.

What "Bipartisan" Means

2009-07-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

One reason why our “democracy” is so undemocratic, not just by the standards of democratic theory but even in comparison with other existing so-called democracies, is that our electoral competitions are all but monopolized by two semi-institutionalized parties. On the whole, the Democrats are, by far, the lesser evil of the two, partly because they are “nicer” and more competent, but mainly because they depend for votes on constituencies like organized labor that, however feebly, force them into less onerous positions. But the two parties do not really differ in principle; they both represent, first and foremost, the interests of our economic elites. For this, our system of (private) campaign finance, sustained by philosophically indefensible Supreme Court decisions going back more than three decades, is partly to blame. But we should not forget that both parties are ideologically committed to the status quo in any case -- to such a degree that even full public financing would not entirely solve the problem, even if private financing (unequal economic power spilling over into electoral competitions) could somehow be proscribed.

What then does “bipartisanship” mean? Not quite what the word suggests: that two ideologically distinct political formations collaborate on common purposes. Rather, with Democrats and Republicans differing only on degrees of onerousness, it means that the two wings of what is essentially a one party state collaborate for the sake of realizing the interests of the elites they represent.

[Just to be clear, I do not mean that all Democrats are less onerous than all Republicans. There are few, if any, decent Republicans left, but there are plenty of indecent Democrats – they even have their own “Blue Dog Caucus.”]

This, at least, is what “bipartisanship” means to Barack Obama and his fellow “bipartisans.” The problem they’re confronting, though, is that the Republicans are unwilling or unable to go along. They’d rather just obstruct. They’re doing this partly for reasons they consider principled but mainly because they think it will help them eventually in electoral competitions to pander to the Fox News/right wing talk show demographic. This last belief is transparently false, but then, as noted, they are not the brightest bulbs on the tree.

Which fact underscores what the true meaning of “bipartisan” in our time and place is. What the term betokens is an unstinting dedication to suffer fools. For anyone who doubts this, watch, if you can bear it, the Sotomayor hearings about to begin – and wonder why anyone, even Barack Obama with his infinite patience and ill-conceived governing style, would want to take such fools seriously, much less go “bipartisan” with them.

Under Cover

2009-07-03T07:22:00.001-07:00

As is often the case, Stephen Colbert got it about right – Mark Sanford’s mistake was not getting caught at the Atlanta airport coming back from a tryst with his Argentine soul mate. It was getting caught at the Atlanta airport coming back from a tryst with his Argentine soul mate the day before Michael Jackson died. Characteristically, the Obama administration is more sagacious.

Thus in recent days, more or less under the radar of the all-Jackson-all-the-time cable networks, Obama has ratcheted up betrayals of his voters’ expectations. The CIA inspector general’s report on “enhanced interrogations” (torture) that, thanks to an ACLU law suit, was supposed to be released a month ago but wasn’t, and that was then supposed to be released today but won’t be, is now scheduled for release in two months time. Evidently, our self-declared proponents of transparency and the rule of law think they can play out the clock in their efforts to protect the war criminals of the Cheney-Bush era from prosecution. The less we know, the more likely they will succeed.

Worse than that, though, is how the Peace President has given carte blanche to the Pentagon to finally get “counter-insurgency” right. After failing miserably decades ago in Vietnam, and failing again in Iraq, they’re now back at it, big time, in Afghanistan – in other words, in the continuation of a war that has been lost for years. Is there a point to invading southern Afghanistan en masse and then staying there indefinitely to win over “hearts and minds”? Not really, unless, as in Iraq, the idea is to make more terrorists. But reason not the need! Obama, it seems, only wants to get right – or, rather, to do competently – what Bush and Company did incompetently. His Afghanistan “surge” is, accordingly, a (vain) exercise in competence for competence’s sake.

Strictly speaking, Obama’s antics in Afghanistan only betray the spirit, not the letter, of his campaign promises. After all, like other “peace” Democrats -- Howard Dean among them -- he never exactly opposed the Bush War in Afghanistan, just the ill-advised Bush War in Iraq. It is in that still on-going lost war that Obama is at odds not just with the spirit, but also the letter, of his campaign promises. According to the lame timetable for withdrawal that he once made so much of, he was supposed to be pulling entire brigades out of the country by now. Instead, he’s pulling “combat troops” (as if there are any other kind!) into bases around Iraqi cities, leaving the dirty work of sustaining the occupation to Iraqi forces, while foreclosing absolutely no options for the U.S. military. There are some 140,000 American troops in Iraq now, and the numbers are not expected to decline significantly for a long time, or ever to decline to zero in the foreseeable future.

But who cares now that the Michael Jackson spectacle is in full bloom! Certainly not MSNBC or CNN. However, we should not hastily conclude that it’s all their fault. The “public” is making them do it. Where are the “culture critics” who can explain why? Michael Jackson was a creature of the Bad Old Days of Seventies and then Reagan era mind-numbing pop. His genius was commercial, not artistic. Thus his most memorable, indeed his only, contribution to race relations was to break down the race barrier at MTV! Before he turned creepy and, as much as medically possible, white, he was a fair singer and a good dancer; nothing more. Yet even the people for whom Barack Obama wasn’t black enough, the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world, are now adding their own two cents to the mass hysteria. If it is so important to them to celebrate dead black superstars, they have had, in recent years, far more worthy exemplars from which to choose – Ray Charles, for example, or since mindless “entertainment” now seems key, James Brown. Why all the fuss for a washed up, washed out “troubled soul”?

Someday perhaps somebody will explain this strange phenomenon. But there is nothing strange or hard to explain in the way liberals, especially the ones let into the media after the 2006 elections, are adding to the hysteria. For these Obamamaniacs, Jackson-mania gives their Supreme Leader cover to do his worst. If they can keep the Jackson “news” coming, Obama may even be able to get away with outdoing his already thoroughly “bipartisan” self by junking that half-assed “public option” in his health care reform program altogether. Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus await his acquiescence.

Great Expectations

2009-07-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Though the plain fact is easily lost on all-Michael-Jackson-all-the-time cable networks, Barack Obama seems to have come to the conclusion, six months into his term, that so long as he talks a good earful, he can neglect or even betray his most loyal constituencies – acceding instead to bureaucratic inertia and the wishes of America’s corporate masters.

But will Obama’s friendly, but skeptical, audiences in the Middle East be similarly forgiving? In Cairo several weeks ago, he talked a good earful. He generated great expectations. What will happen if, in due course, nothing happens? In particular, what will happen if the Israel/Palestine conflict gets put on the back-burner – along with the Employee Free Trade Act, the prosecution of Bush era war criminals, the promises of transparency, of homosexual equality, of serious efforts to avert environmental catastrophes and all the rest?

The short answer is: there will be hell to pay. That’s why Obama’s Cairo speech, along with other expectation raising gestures, could misfire badly. Given Obama’s governing style, that could well come to pass. Time will tell, and there isn’t much time left. The only thing that is clear at his point is that Obama could make good on the expectations he raised -- if he wants to badly enough. That’s a big if.

Because Israel is utterly dependent upon the U.S. diplomatically and on the U.S. (and Europe) economically, and because, even with its nuclear arsenal, it is largely dependent upon the U.S. militarily as well, Obama – or any American President -- can in principle force Israel to pursue peace. But, at this point, that would require more than just “facilitating” negotiations. Involving the U.S. in negotiations worked, sort of, for Jimmy Carter at Camp David; it brought about a Cold Peace between Israel and its only real military rival, Egypt. It might have worked for Bill Clinton at Taba too; there was a chance there to force Israel to live side by side with a viable Palestinian state. But Clinton was too weakened politically by “the Lewinsky affair” and other factors, and he was on his way out in any case. It was an opportunity missed.

That was ages ago, however, in diplomatic time. Negotiations alone can’t work now – especially not with a right-wing government in Israel, vulnerable to pressures from theocrats and nationalists even farther to the right, and opposed not by feckless social democrats (Labor is part of Netanyahu’s coalition!) but by the party of Ariel Sharon. It probably couldn’t work any more even in a more propitious political climate because of demographic changes within Israel: there just aren’t enough progressive and “moderate” Israelis any more or professionals and entrepreneurs who would benefit from peace to counter the theocrats (many of them benighted North American Jews), the nationalists (many of them recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union), and a “mizrahi” underclass brimming with hostility towards their Arab cousins who want – and need – an eternal enemy.

This is not to say that there is nothing Obama can now do; quite the contrary. The United States is now, more than ever, in a position, in concert with other world and regional powers, to impose a durable settlement of the conflict – by simultaneously promising to guarantee Israel’s security (if not within its 1967 borders then within the framework established at Taba) and by threatening Israeli elites with isolation and outright abandonment if they don’t go along. Bilateral negotiations, facilitated by the United States, were never the best way to force Israel to make peace. More direct interventions by the powers that created a Jewish state and that sustain it were always more likely to result in success. Now the better way is the only feasible way.

This is to say that Obama must force Israel’s business and political classes to take on the settler movement and their ideological allies. They can do it, if Obama makes them an offer they can’t refuse. Of course, for Obama to do this, he would have to take on the Israel lobby. That’s not as ominous a prospect as may appear because the Israel lobby is fast becoming a paper tiger. It never really represented mainstream American Jewish opinion; most American Jews, after all, are indifferent to Zionist concerns and only vaguely attached to the Jewish state. Recently, the Israel lobby – essentially a lobby for the sectors of Israeli society that doom a negotiated settlement – has been increasingly threatened by growing numbers of mainstream American Jews willing, in varying degrees, to stand up to it. J-Street, the liberal-moderate alternative to AIPAC, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Israel lobby is also weakened by the diminished power of fundamentalist Protestants, including “Christian Zionists,” in the post-Bush era. For as long as there has been a powerful, organized Israel lobby (in other words, since the 1967 and especially the 1973 wars), there has never been a better time to become free of its influence.

Obama knows what he has to do, and he has the political skills and political capital to do it. But he has so far been too much the Democrat to do much of anything bold or visionary, much less this. On the domestic scene, he has yet to pay a price for his “pragmatic” “bipartisanship” – in other words, for his pusillanimity. That’s because it has so far been only his liberal supporters he’s been stringing along. Just as liberals won’t take their own side in an argument, as Robert Frost wisely put it, they positively thrive on being shunted aside for civility’s sake. They value their own “reasonableness” over everything else, including results. However Obama’s Cairo speech was not addressed to American liberals, but to people in the Muslim world – or, better, the historically Muslim world. They are wiser to the ways of the world and therefore not likely to be so forgiving.

Bush Rules (Still)

2009-06-30T06:14:00.000-07:00

Bernie Madoff got a hundred and fifty year sentence, but if you go by the standard of the amount of harm done – or even by the number of people swindled – there are far worse criminals out there still. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are among the most conspicuous. They deserve a hundred times a hundred and fifty years in prison. But they are protected by the Forgiver in Chief, by He Who (liberals still think) Can Do No Wrong. Therefore, instead of making license plates, they are raking in millions in book advances and speakers’ fees. This in the name of “restoring the rule of law” – and, oh yes, “looking forward,” being “bipartisan” and the like!

Barack Obama has truly extraordinary political gifts. He can make anybody think he’s on their side even when, especially when, he’s not especially. Witness his meeting yesterday with representatives of the LGBT community, the constituency he’s so far betrayed the most -- or rather second most, since we must not forget (as Obama has) organized labor. It’s not just Orwellian; it’s downright uncanny. Or, back in the rule of law department, witness his efforts to “close Guantanamo” by keeping scores of inmates in indefinite preventive detention. Amnesty International is on to him, but most liberals still are not.

Obama’s unconstrained “pragmatism” is replete with unintended ironies. Thus today, as the anti-war candidate pulls U.S. troops out of Iraqi cities – sort of, they’re just moving to bases in the burbs – the Iraqi government, while celebrating its “independence,” is putting oil contracts out for bid. It’s the first time since Iraq nationalized its oil fields some forty years ago. Mission accomplished!

It's the Liberals, Stupid

2009-06-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

Although the shapers of public opinion do their best to make folks oblivious to the obvious, everybody knows that our political class is bought and paid for. How much better our public life would be if, as was suggested on “Car Talk,” our legislators dressed like NASCAR drivers. Then everyone would know who their corporate sponsors are. How much better still if, like in a real democracy, we had real public financing of electoral campaigns – to a degree that would eliminate incentives to stuff Congressional pockets!

It is also becoming clear, even to the willfully blind that Barack Obama’s “bipartisan” governing style, his Pelosiism, is woefully inadequate to the tasks of governance. Even Paul Krugman now outright says so.

But it’s not just the system or the scourge of “bipartisanship” that is to blame; it’s also the liberals. Yet again, they are busy doing what liberals famously do – not taking their own side in an argument. This is what leads far too many on “the left” of the mainstream to acquiesce to “bipartisan” compromises – on climate change, health care, economic recovery or whatever. There’s a formula for it: start from what Obama proposes, then compromise down. It’s unadulterated Clintonism, and it stinks.

The deeper problem, though, is that liberals are too, well, liberal. This is especially evident in constituencies Democrats take for granted. Nothing, short of real public finance, would be better medicine for our body politic than a revitalized labor movement. Yet organized labor is willing to trust the Supreme Leader as he voices support for the Employee Free Choice Act, on the rare occasions lately that he says anything it at all, and then don’t mind that it’s all talk. Worse still, it never occurs to the labor chieftains to propose anything even mildly more radical – for example, doing away with the shackles of the Taft-Hartley laws.

The gays are worst of all. True, they’ve finally shown some irritation with Obama’s retreat from his campaign promises. That forced the Great Triangulator to throw a few crumbs their way – specifically, to provide partial benefits for same-sex partners of some federal employees. I would bemoan this shabby treatment more if I could muster any enthusiasm for the “equality” they seek.

Abolish Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Fine, but how about adding on an anti-imperialist or even just an anti-militarist afterthought! Evidently, these liberals cannot envision an equality more profound than the guarantee of equal opportunities to maim and murder for imperialism’s sake.

Then there’s gay marriage. Sure, it is unjust to treat people differently because of their sexual orientation. But who among gay marriage advocates dares point out that marriage “as we know it,” gay and straight, is the most egregious infringement of church-state separation in our political system! If people want to marry for expressive or, God forbid, religious reasons – let them. But in a secular society, the state’s policy should be strictly hands off. Every legitimate public interest can be adequately addressed by a sufficiently robust conception of “civil union.” Let that be what states provide – for everyone equally. Civil unions for all who want them, period! Anything else, including the right to describe intimate relations in terms associated with traditional marriage, should be relegated to the private sphere.

Do our liberals know better? I think, like Obama, they do – most of them, anyway. But until their practice – and the ideas behind it – become truer to what they know, then, like Obama, they will remain part of the problem, not part of the solution.

What's In a Name?

2009-06-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama is truly blessed.

The “useful idiots” Ronald Reagan and his ruling class masters drew into the GOP have taken over the party’s public face completely– and they are dragging the party down beyond anyone’s expectations. Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford are the latest, most spectacular examples of God-fearing, gay baiting, family values and, especially in Sanford’s case, free-marketeering imbeciles self-destructing. That liberal pundits depict Sanford’s travails as tragic, rather than deliciously bathetic, only goes to show how mindless liberal pundits are.

As Obama gears up to be the first American President since Eisenhower to try, albeit gingerly, to exert pressure on our utterly dependent client state, Israel, the viciously right-wing Netanyahu government, outflanked by parties to its right and to the right of their right are busily involved in enacting transparently racist laws. They want to disenfranchise Israeli Arabs by requiring their political representatives to swear oaths to support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; and they want to imperil, and perhaps someday even deport, Israeli leftists by imposing prison terms on anyone who dares say or write otherwise. [Thus their policies are not only racist but also patently self-contradictory.] Were this turn in Israeli politics more widely known, it would relieve some of the Israel-right-or-wrong pressure that deforms our political culture. That it is not more widely known only goes to show how morally bankrupt liberal pundits, and the media they work for, are.

As Obama prepares to engage Iran diplomatically, his critics to the Right – John “Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain especially, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham – have been busy making fools of themselves and showing how little they’ve learned from the debacle the neo-conservative Bush foreign policy establishment has visited upon the world, by insisting that Obama do more to make American “support for democracy and freedom” the issue in Iran. Obama was blessed during the campaign to be running against fools such as these, and now they’re back in full swing. It’s not just that they’re obviously wrong; they’re also playing a self-defeating game. By calling on Obama to be more outspoken in support of opponents of the Ahmadinejad government, the neo-neo-cons of the Republican Party have made it harder for themselves (and their Israeli colleagues) to get their way. Do they really think that public opinion will support “bomb bomb bomb(ing)” people they depict as heroes?

The list goes on. Polls reveal enormous public support for freeing the health care system from the scourge of health care profiteers – private insurance companies especially; for sticking it to Wall Street predators rather than sticking everything back in their bloated pockets; for doing away with Clinton and Bush era homophobic laws; for coming out strongly against right-wing, homegrown terrorists and supporting women’s reproductive rights; and so on. But what does Obama do about it? The short answer is: very little.

With each passing day, Obama waxes more and more Pelosiite. [As I have explained in counteless entries, going back to the beginning of this blog, Pelosiism is later day Clintonism. Like classical Clintonites, Pelosiites overestimate the power of the Right and then triangulate with a view to placing themselves, as best they can, in the center of the center. If this means betraying their most ardent supporters, so be it; they can always be taken for granted. If it means displaying abject spinelessness, they not only don’t care; they’re oblivious. If it means acquiescing in crimes of historical dimensions, then that’s OK too. Pelosiism is opportunism for opportunism’s sake.] The difference from the Clinton era is that now the opportunities for “real change” are so much greater and the stakes so much higher. This is why there is even more reason to reproach Pelosiites than the Clintonites of yesteryear; and why it is rapidly becoming the case that Obama is even worse than Bill Clinton. But none of this has yet dawned on most of the already betrayed Obamamaniacs still out there. Along with the “boost don’t knock crowd” in Washington’s “liberal” “think” tanks, they remain all too willing to give their Supreme Leader the benefit of every doubt.

The gods have truly blessed Barack Obama by handing him a consummately pathetic GOP, unworthy of its semi-established status. But, along with his co-thinkers in the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity (or, what comes to the same thing, the Party of Pelosiites), he has so far seen fit to squander his blessings with reckless, “bipartisan,” “pragmatic,” “centrist” abandon.

Who Benefits?

2009-06-22T07:28:00.000-07:00

Once Iran’s Supreme Theocrat (“Leader”), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threw his support behind the current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, the “winner” of Iran’s fraudulent presidential election [of course, he may also have won “fair and square”; this no one now knows], the full weight of the theocracy fell in behind Ahmadinijad. Thereafter, to oppose him is “objectively” to oppose the theocracy itself, even if all many of the demonstrators really care about is electoral fraud. For the most part, those demonstrators support another theocrat, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The consensus view in the Western media is that a Mousavi victory is preferable to a Ahmadinjad victory; this also seems to be the view of most well-educated Iranians, women and young people especially. Perhaps they are right; perhaps a Mousavi government would be slightly more liberal than the Ahmadinijad government has been. But this was and is an intra-theocratic struggle, waged within the regime not in (revolutionary) opposition to it. In the final analysis, the leaders of the contending sides don’t differ all that much – even in comparison with (pre-Bush) Republicans and Democrats.

It looks increasingly like Ahmadinijad will prevail. The state’s repressive apparatus seems to have remained loyal to the theocracy; according to news reports this morning, it is cracking down brutally on Mousavi supporters. More importantly, Mousavi and those close to him have remained loyal too – to the regime, if not to the current incumbents of its highest offices. The masses in the streets may have been on the brink of becoming revolutionary, and the spirit of revolution could soon revive. But it would be a revolution without a clear direction; and without a cohesive and genuinely oppositional leadership to take control of the state. Lacking these things, the popular demonstrations would probably have petered out in due course. Now it seems that the theocracy will repress them into oblivion. The dynamic for “real change” (the real thing, not the debased version we in the United States know too well) was there; but the obstacles in its way were daunting and, worse still, there was no clear path forward.

Who benefits from this unfortunate turn of events? In the short run, certainly not the Iranian people; they can now expect a new wave of repression. Not Iranian elites either, since their legitimacy, both at home and abroad, will be in deep crisis for an indefinite future. But at least they will have escaped with their pious hides. The real beneficiaries are the West, especially the United States, and Israel. The Right within the West and Israel benefit most of all.

This is not just because a weakened Iran is good news for them, especially after the Bush-Cheney – now Obama! – wars in Iraq and Afghanistan massively – though, of course, unintentionally -- strengthened Iran’s hand throughout the region. It is more because the more easily demonizable Iran’s leadership is, the more the West and Israel can use the specter of Iran to gain support for their continuing ill-conceived machinations throughout the Middle East and central Asia. No one in the world today is more demonizable than Mahmoud Ahmadinijad – not even Kim Jong-Il comes close.

We can see already how Republicans and “moderate” Democrats (including almost certainly Joe Biden and very likely Hillary Clinton) are waxing “Wilsonian” again – urging Obama to intervene more forcefully or at least more conspicuously in a situation they thoroughly misunderstand. Given how “bipartisan” and prone to compromise Obama can be, they may succeed in derailing the (somewhat) wiser course Obama seemed to be forging. Israel benefits too, especially the Israeli Right. With Ahmadinjad more than Mousavi, their “existential threat” remains intact. They need that threat desperately, along with what they can label “anti-Semitism” wherever they can find it or conjure it up, to keep their own quasi-theocratic ethnic project from exhausting what little moral capital it can still call upon. Shameless exploitation of the Nazis’ industrialized genocidal campaign against European Jewry only goes so far.

Expect the theocrats in Iran to blame the West for the unrest. According to news reports, this is already happening. It is worth remarking, though, that, this time around, the theocracy’s ire seems directed more at Great Britain than the United States. Perhaps Obama’s vaunted “opening” to “the Islamic world” is bearing fruit. But, of course, this could change in an instant if the Republicans and their co-thinkers in the Lesser Evil Party get their way.

Blaming “the West” and Israel serves the theocracy’s purpose, and the West and Israel have long provided the theocrats with ample ammunition. But the larger fact is that the Iranian theocracy serves the West’s and Israel’s purposes too. It’s a vicious circle, which, in light of recent events, is not about to wither away.

We Ain't Seen Nuthin' Yet

2009-06-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

This piece by David Swanson amplifies the point I made in an earlier entry on the perfidy of all but a tiny fraction of Congressional Democrats in voting last week for “emergency” funding for the Bush – now the Obama – wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Democratic perfidy is about to get even worse. The news in recent days has been full of indications that POP (Party of Pusillanimity) “moderates” -- with Max Baucus, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, in the lead -- will ditch “the public option” in Obama’s saccharine health care “reform” proposal altogether. Just a few days ago, it looked like the worst they would do is water it down – enough to obliterate the obvious advantages of public over private provision.

Joe Kennedy is reputed to have said “show me a Republican, and I’ll show you a son of a bitch.” Times change. Now he would have to add “imbecile” to the description. Even so, Democrats are doing their best to make it the case that Republicans hang onto their Greater Evil status by a hair. “Show me a Democrat,” a later day bootlegging, skirt chasing plutocrat and pater familias might say, “…and, with only a handful of exceptions proving the rule, I’ll show you a liar and a hypocrite and a son of a bitch.” And since times change, we should also add “bitch” tout court – “with all due respect” for Nancy Pelosi and her ilk.

Regime Change in Iran?

2009-06-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Will street protests topple the Iranian theocracy? Probably not, according to most informed observers. It is even unlikely that the clerical authorities will reverse the results of the fixed election that started the protests going. The reason why even that much democracy is unlikely is the same as why genuine regime change is – because there is no political force in Iran today capable of leading it. The contestants for power in the last election were all, by design, theocrats themselves; none of them – Mir-Hossein Mousavi, least of all –have any quarrel with the regime in place. And there are no other political forces or charismatic leaders outside the electoral arena for the Iranian masses to rally around. The ruling clerisy is apparently divided, even at its highest levels, but it remains united in wanting to maintain its power. Thus the prospects for change are bleak.

There is hope, however – just not very much. Even in a theocracy, the people, once mobilized and energized, can change conditions fundamentally. In this instance, it seems that they are mobilized only by disgust with the status quo; not with a positive vision of a radically better alternative. That too impedes regime change. But, alas, in Iran as wherever else Abrahamic religions flourish, acquiescence is among the wages of “faith.” The Divinity has a way of seeing to it that the center holds. But illusions are not invincible. So long as the people, the demos, remain politically active, nothing is entirely out of the question.

This is why the political struggle we are witnessing in Iran is an inspiration; notwithstanding the sorry fact that it is, for the time being and, very likely, for the foreseeable future, a struggle among reactionary theocrats. Too bad that, in this respect, Americans are so un-Iranian! We surely have as much reason for disgust as the people now on the streets in Iran. But eight years of the Cheney/Bush torture regime couldn’t even produce a militant anti-war movement. Now, with Obamamania still flourishing despite all the betrayals of “change we can believe in,” the people are even farther from power – not just from seizing it, which is out of the question in the Home of the Brave, but even from affecting its operation significantly.

Until a few days ago, the punditocracy in this country was confident that the demonstrations in Iran would either wither away after a few days or be crushed – Tienanmin style. They expected a replay of the crackdown on the massive student demonstrations of 1999. But, unlike ten years ago, what is happening now seems to involve all sectors of the population, not just students; and it seems to be going on in many, if not all, parts of the country, not just in Tehran and other large cities. It is therefore not clear that a Tienanmin reaction is even possible.

But this doesn’t mean that the people are bound to win. Iran’s theocrats are wily – like the best bourgeois politicians. They seem to have assimilated the lesson of Charles DeGaulle in 1968. DeGaulle was the consummate counter-revolutionary strategist. He realized that to win, he had to remain aloof, doing as little as possible to encourage the popular movement, while insuring behind the scenes that the military and the rest of the state’s repressive apparatus would remain loyal to the regime. Then, without a political leadership willing and able to transform the regime fundamentally, popular unrest would eventually subside to a degree that “the forces of order” would be able safely to reestablish control. DeGaulle’s strategy worked -- thanks mainly to the debility of the French Communist Party and the impotence of the far Left. The Iranian people today don’t have even that much going for them; how could they after living for thirty years in the grip of retrograde clerics!

Nevertheless, what is happening now is bound to change the political atmosphere in Iran and the world, especially if Ahmadinejad’s electoral “victory” stands. Thanks to the past week’s events, and to events to follow, the Iranian government will have had the wind taken out of its sails. That’s good news for Obama, who has so far played his cards wisely. At least in this matter, he has resisted the temptation to go “bipartisan” – by compromising with bellicose neocons and other self-styled “Wilsonians.” It’s also bad news for Netanyahu and the Israeli Right (and “center” and “moderate” “left”). No doubt, in Jerusalem’s darkest recesses, they are fretting mightily over the prospect of losing an “existential threat.” Should it come to that, expect them to conjure up what they will call “anti-Semitism” wherever and whenever they can. If they’re to keep on going as they are, they can’t do without it.

Who the Good Guys Are

2009-06-17T04:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, June 16, another “day which will live in infamy,” the House of Representatives passed a $106 billion emergency funding bill for the Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will keep the murder and mayhem going through September. The final vote was 226-202. But for the efforts of Tim Geithner and Nancy Pelosi, the vote would have been a lot closer; they pressured dozens of self-described anti-war Democrats to win one for Barack Obama. In the end, 221 members of the Lesser Evil Party – even that can no longer be said without irony! -- voted to keep the imperialist wars Bush and Cheney started going.

The 32 good guys were joined by all but five of their colleagues from what is still, all things considerd, the Greater Evil party. The Republicans have no quarrel with murder and mayhem and no beef with imperialism. They voted No because the Obama administration inserted language into the imperialist war funding bill that would bail out (mainly foreign) banks – by loading taxpayer money into the International Monetary Fund. That was also worth opposing. I suggested yesterday that many of them also had less savory motivations. They are Republicans, after all.

Anyway, here is a list of the good guys, Democrats who resisted Obama and Pelosi and the rest of the Pusillanimous Party’s leadership – in order to do the right thing. Congressional Democrats not listed below are, at best, cowards or deluded Obamamaniacs. Of course, most Democrats don’t rise even to that level.

THE GOOD GUYS: Baldwin; Capuano; Conyers; Doggett; Edwards (MD); Ellison; Farr; Filner; Grayson; Grijalva; Honda; Kaptur; Kucinich; Lee (CA); Lofgren, Zoe; Massa; McGovern; Michaud; Payne; Pingree (ME); Polis (CO); Serrano; Shea-Porter; Sherman; Speier; Stark; Tierney; Tsongas; Waters; Watson; Welch; Woolsey

Why Does Obama Placate the Right and Take the Left for Granted?

2009-06-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Why does Obama placate the Right so zealously? One thing is sure. It’s not because their ideas have merit. That’s the one thing that unites “moderate” and “conservative” Democrats, and all Republicans. In a sane world, no one would bother with what they have to say. But in our world, the two party system is quasi-institutionalized. Therefore, the Republican Party cannot be ignored; it is an unavoidable pole of attraction. Morally and intellectually bankrupt as it may be – and how else describe a party that gets marching orders from Rush Limbaugh or that contemplates putting Sarah Palin in the White House! – Republicans drag the political process rightward. Then there’s the sorry fact that Obama chose to govern through Clintonite apparatchki – in other words, through right-leaning opportunists. Rahm Emanuel is among the worst of them, but they are all bad news. Clintonites are disposed by nature to pander to the powers that be. Then, of course, there are the well-funded “special interests” Obama feels obliged to flatter, even when he does not altogether obey their demands. His speech yesterday in Chicago before the American Medical Association is the latest example. [It should be noted that the AMA has, for decades, menaced public health by supporting healthcare profiteers egregiously. It is and always has been part of the problem, not part of the solution.]

Those are reasons why Obama placates the Right. But why does he hardly bother even to address the concerns of those who favor positions to the left of his own? The short answer is: because he can. There are plenty of self-identified “progressives” in the House of Representatives and a few in the Senate as well. But, as I have been arguing in countless postings, they are singularly unwilling to leverage their power, much less to wield it effectively. The contrast with the Right is striking. If “conservatives” know anything, it’s that whoever is the most obstreperous will usually get his (or sometimes her) way, no matter how stupid the cause. Liberal Democrats should learn this lesson. In a world where nice guys finish last, they’re not nearly mean enough.

And even in those rare instances where they do rise to the occasion, the Pelosiite leadership in Congress is there to quash their efforts. Pelosi and Company are at it this very moment: working to assure that progressive Democrats -- along with Republicans opposed to Obama’s plan to sink more taxpayer money into the International Monetary Fund -- won’t succeed in defunding the Bush, now the Obama, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[This is one area, by the way, where, for the wrong reasons (xenophobic animosities and ill-conceived fiscal worries), Republicans may actually be doing the right thing. What they’re opposing is, in effect, a bail out for foreign banks (and bankers). It shows, yet again, how even a stopped clock is right twice a day!]

These are reasons why progressive legislators must be compelled by their constituents to act effectively; why otherwise they will remain feckless. Only “we, the people” can get them on track. But with Obamamania still rife, where will we find the will, much less the means? That is, as they used to say, the $64 (later the $64,000) question. Until we figure out the answer, we’ll continue to be mired in a situation where the majority of Americans support positions to the left of Obama’s, but where legislators who represent their views can be and usually are ignored with impunity.

Obama = Hoover

2009-06-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

Will we ever get an official accounting of the crimes (war crimes, crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity) committed by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush? Will they be brought to justice? It is becoming increasingly difficult, even for the willfully blind, not to realize -- not if Barack Obama can help it.

Will our immoral and strategically disastrous wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars lost long ago that now serve mainly to keep the imperialist project free of the taint of abject defeat, even at the cost of producing new generations of terrorists, be brought to an end? Many of the folks who voted for him thought Obama good for that. But by now, who can deny that while he may deescalate one of them without quite ending the murder and mayhem, he’s hell bent on escalating the other.

No sane person last November thought that American capitalism was about to be replaced by anything better; but, in the face of a crisis approaching Depression level proportions, there were many who thought Obama would at least force a more human face on the capitalist system; that he’d force capitalists to “serve the people” better. That’s what happened in the Roosevelt era. But who now thinks that Obama – or, rather, the old Wall Street hands he selected to deal with the situation – have it in them to do anything of the kind?

Will the ecological catastrophe towards which the world is heading be diverted? The expectations of Obama voters notwithstanding, hardly anyone still expects more than token gestures from the Obama administration.

Will Obama help us get the healthcare system we need? No way. Single-payer is “off the table.”

Will Obama address the issue of nuclear proliferation satisfactorily? Will he force Israeli leaders to accept a two state solution in Israel/Palestine? Will he end the blockade of Cuba? Will we get genuine transparency in government under Obama? Will CIA and special forces “dark ops” be quashed? Will he even close Gitmo, without resurrecting it somewhere else, probably somewhere extra-territorial? It’s now clear that Obama won’t even lift a finger to help the citizens ofWashington D.C. gain representation along with taxation? The list goes on. George Bush’s successor is officially on the right side, more or less, on many issues. Nevertheless, these questions answer themselves.

Blame Congress with its bought and paid for imbeciles on one side and its bought and paid for cowards on the other. [There are also, of course, a handful of powerless exceptions, holding forth meekly for doing the right thing.] Blame the corporations. Their oceans of money, stuffed into the pockets of a servile political class, constrain what political scientists would call “the opportunity set” Congress and the White House confront. Blame the schools, blame the media – both do a good job of dumbing down political discourse and keeping citizens ignorant and acquiescent.

But, conceding all that, it is becoming increasingly plain that in this (potential) watershed period Obama is culpable too. I never expected much from him. [I am proud to say that I didn’t even vote for him! As I habitually do, I voted for Ralph Nader in protest.] But, even before taking office, as he reassembled the Clintonite minions – indeed, even before he became the official Democratic nominee, when he selected Joe Biden to be his Vice President – Obama has been a manifest disappointment to progressive Obamaniacs and to Obama-skeptics alike. In office now for several months, it just keeps getting worse. Soon, reality will have intruded enough so that the honeymoon between our rulers’ CEO and what passes for a Left in this country will be over; one can see it happening already in the so-called progressive media. Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters and fans are beginning to jump ship.

As happens when illusions pass, everybody pretty much complains about the same things, pretty much in tandem. But, occasionally, there are fresh insights. Harper’s magazine is often a good place to look for them. The current issue (July, 2009; unfortunately not available on line except to subscribers) does not disappoint.

In an article entitled “Barack Hoover Obama: the best and the brightest blow it again,” Kevin Baker draws parallels between Obama’s governing style and the style of our last genuinely intelligent, knowledgeable and worldly President, Herbert Hoover. Baker’s contention, in short, is that both Presidents know (or knew) better than their actions suggest, and that they are both self-made prisoners of the ambient political culture. If Baker is right, Obama, like Hoover, is a tragic character – obliged by necessity (or rather by his understanding of what necessity requires) to cede power to advisors in the thrall of a conventional wisdom that is manifestly inadequate for the tasks at hand, even as he envisions better, more radical, alternatives. As everyone knows, Hoover’s unwillingness to take bold measures made the Great Depression disastrously worse, setting his party back for generations. Baker warns that it is looking increasingly like this will be Obama’s fate as well.

Obama’s style and wit suggest JFK, but what he promises, in fact, is less Camelot than Vietnam (in the form of an endless quagmire in Afghanistan). Obama’s political acuity and guile recalls FDR’s. But Obama has boxed himself in too much to experiment with anything like a New Deal. That’s why we are not living through the Second Coming of Camelot or the Roosevelt years. Quite the contrary. Obama is, or is likely to become, the Herbert Hoover of our time.

According to the dominant historical narrative, Hoover was a non-entity with implacable conservative instincts, in way over his head. He might have been able to muddle along well enough in better times. But thanks to the stock market crash of 1929 and the bank failures that followed, he had mediocrity or worse thrust upon him. Baker’s article corrects that misapprehension. On his account, Herbert Hoover was capable of greatness – he had both the intellect and the opportunity – but he made himself a slave of the norms of the political culture of his time. That, Baker claims, is what brought his administration down in failure. Now history is repeating itself; Obama is making similar mistakes. Baker’s article is an eye-opener. Would that Obama would read it and that it would open his eyes too while there is still time to change course. There isn’t much time left. As in the Dylan song, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

* *

The same edition of Harper’s also contains a fine piece by Ken Silverstein on the massive effort to quash the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) waged by the leaders of what the media euphemistically call “the business community.” Nothing could more effectively improve public life in this country – and raise the level of public discourse – than a reempowered labor movement. Obama knows this. Seeking labor votes, he endorsed EFCA during his run for office, and he continues to voice support. But will he spend his still considerable political capital to make EFCA happen? It doesn’t seem likely, not with so much else on his plate. While saving health care for the health care profiteers, keeping the Bush (now Obama) wars going, retaining the power and riches of Wall Street predators, and letting the environment go to hell, where will he find the time?

The Great "Debate"

2009-06-12T12:49:00.001-07:00

As the healthcare “debate” unfolds this summer, we’ll have a test of just how stifling corporate control over the legislative process is. Everyone, including relevant elites, knows that the present system is unsustainable – never mind, unjust and inefficient – and must be reformed. And no one who is not a beneficiary of the status quo cares much for health care profiteers, private insurance corporations especially. Thus reform is in the air.

At the same time, many Democrats and all Republicans have seen to it that the obvious solution, single-payer health insurance, is “off the table.” Nevertheless, there is an effort, at least for now, spearheaded by Ted Kennedy and other liberals and supported by President Obama to come up with a pale approximation of the solution – by instituting public alongside private health insurance. Should something like that finally become law, there are two possibilities: either the public plan will not impinge, except superficially, on the interests of healthcare profiteers; or it will. If it does not, then we’ll know that, at least in this domain, corporate control swamps common sense, public opinion, and even enlightened self-interest. But if we do get a public plan worth having, then, as I argued recently, it will be evidence for a different hypothesis: that the main reason why liberal Democrats have taken single-payer off the table is some combination of cowardice and incompetent, murky thinking, not campaign contributions or promises of future riches. We’ll know soon enough.

But the great “debate” now underway is not about that, at least not according to the liberal media (for example, NPR this morning). It’s about whether the government should be in the insurance business. I suppose a principled libertarian could produce a coherent, though flawed, argument on the No side, but that’s not what we’re hearing. Instead, “moderate” and right-wing Democrats, marching in tandem with the Greater Evil Party, seem oblivious to incoherencies, as if their intent is just to lower the level of public discourse (not that it isn’t already low enough!). That they could get away with such blatantly mindless drivel speaks to the failure of American schools (and colleges and universities) and media to educate the public up to the point where they can meaningfully participate as citizens. To cite just one much in the news and especially egregious example: listen to anything Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley says – and weep.

It’s not rocket science; it’s not even basic civics. Either health care is a right (like education or legal representation for persons charged with crimes or any of a variety of other “services” even “bipartisans” and “moderates” support) or it’s a commodity (like Plymouths or Pontiacs). Again, a principled libertarian might opt for commodification. But that’s not what most naysayers think. If pushed or even just forced to think about it, most of them. I am confident, would agree that health care ought to be a right. But if health care is a right, then obviously there’s no principled reason to keep the government out. The only plausible grounds there could be is that governments are somehow inefficient. But then the naysayers are in plain defiance of overwhelming evidence to the contrary: from a patient’s point of view, Medicare, for example, is remarkably efficient; private health insurers are not. QED.

But, of course, the “debate” NPR reports on is oblivious to the obvious. The point of it is not to address genuine concerns, but to help Republicans and “moderate” Democrats pull off what their corporate masters are paying for them to do. That’s why, no matter what it looks like, defenders of positions even worse than Obama’s are not dumbing down for dumbing down’s sake or even, in many cases, because they don’t know better. They’re dumbing down public discourse the better to shift our impending national “conversation” onto a course that will ease the way for a “solution” healthcare profiteers can welcome.

Given public opinion nowadays, liberal Democrats, properly mobilized, could almost certainly defeat the insurance, drug and for-profit healthcare industries – and their legislative flunkies -- handily. But that would take standing up to powerful economic interests; and that, in turn, would require liberal Democrats to have backbones – an anatomical feature they conspicuously lack. But maybe, just maybe, this time around, enough of them will be able to find just enough courage not to set the cause back, Clinton-style, for another generation. If Obama can see past the folly of bipartisanship, even if only long enough to get reform through, there is a chance. Then, to be sure, we won’t have a very good solution for what ails us -- that’s “off the table” -- but at least we won’t have to deal with anything too plainly awful. And we’ll know that not all Democrats are bought and paid for all the time; that if they seem to be, it’s only because they’re muddled and, by nature, cowardly instead.

Single Payer/Public Plan

2009-06-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Healthcare reform can be complicated when it comes to writing legislation acceptable to all the bought and paid for representatives of the various special (as opposed to popular) interest groups -- the insurance companies, the drug companies, the for-profit health care providers and so on. But the solution to the many problems our health care system faces is simple: make health care a right, not a commodity; get for-profit insurance companies out of the health insurance business altogether, replacing them with a public agency (as in Medicare or the Veterans Administration); and have the One Big Insurer negotiate costs with the pharmaceutical industry and set guidelines for healthcare provision with a view to the patients’ interests, not the interests of those who would profit (and profiteer) off the healthcare system.

Thanks to popular pressure, this single-payer solution sketched above is no longer entirely excluded from the Congressional shenanigans now under way. Why just the other day, Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was bold enough to meet with a handful of single-payer advocates! Baucus had previously refused to do anything of the sort, and even had a number of single-payer protestors at his committee’s hearings arrested for disrupting the sham proceedings he was presiding over. Baucus has also stashed away more campaign contributions from the health insurance industry than any other legislator. Thus everybody knows that his gesture was window-dressing; that the point of it was to diminish criticism, not to improve policy. There is, after all, plenty of criticism going around. This is one of those areas where media hostility and indifference have not succeeded in steering public opinion the wrong way. Nevertheless, so long as Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate are adamant about not doing the right thing, single-payer will get nowhere.

But now it looks like a pale second-best to the obvious solution has a chance. Thanks largely to Ted Kennedy and a few other “progressives” in the Senate, support is growing for a plan that Obama might get behind and that therefore might pass. According to initial reports, the Kennedy plan, still a work in progress, is similar to what John Edwards, and later Hillary Clinton, proposed during the campaign: it would mandate insurance coverage for everyone (during the campaign, Obama opposed mandates) – with subsidies for those who cannot get insurance through their jobs and who cannot afford to pay for it on their own. And it would establish a public insurance agency, either Medicare or something modeled on it, to compete with private insurers. How the mandate would be enforced, how large the subsidies would be and, above all, what kind of coverage the public plan would provide are still unsettled questions. Nevertheless, with single-payer effectively out of consideration, this has become the least bad position in the current “debate.” Count on opposition to it from Republicans and many Democrats – the “blue dogs” Obama courts assiduously. For them as for nearly all Republicans, any kind of public competition with “the free market” is anathema. And don’t expect Obama to abstain from going bipartisan on this one either. As becomes clearer with each passing day, though still light years better than Bush, Obama seems constitutionally incapable of doing better than wallowing in the middle; thus he is fast becoming a past master at disappointing (indeed, betraying) Obamamaniacs. Even so, with public opinion clearly on the side of bold moves, the plan that “progressive” Democrats forge may get through without being too badly compromised. But it won’t be easy.

Remember, though, that this allegedly best feasible option is not much of a solution. How good or bad it is depends, in large part, on what the public plan it will include, assuming Democrats hold fast on that key point, would provide. But even if the public plan is generous, it would not do much to lower costs because, unlike with single-payer, there would still be wasteful administrative costs at both ends – for health care providers, who would have to deal, as they now do, with myriads of (private) insurance plans, and, at the other end, with the for-profit insurance companies. The executives of these firms are in the health insurance business to make as much money as they can for their shareholders and for themselves -- tasks that raise (inefficient) administrative costs egregiously.

Nevertheless, if the public plan offers benefits comparable to good private plans, it just might provide a mechanism for backing into the obviously better solution – for who, other than doctrinaire free-marketeers, would want to be privately insured if they had a public alternative as good? Surely, no one in his or her right mind. This, I think, was what John Edwards envisioned. If the Kennedy plan is fleshed out along the lines Edwards proposed, it could set in motion a process that might, in time, end well – while modestly improving the situation from the beginning.

Thus the Democrats’ plan might turn out to be – not awful. But one has to wonder why Democrats who know better, Obama among them, don’t just go for single-payer? It’s a good question. The insurance companies’ hold over Congress and the White House no doubt explains something, but not the whole sad story. The illness merchants have been generous indeed – to those able to do them favors. But the forces gearing up to fight against what Obama and the Democrats will propose, if their proposal is even minimally decent, will fight as vigorously against a flawed plan as they would against single-payer. If insurance company profits are threatened significantly, count on them to fight it tooth and nail, just as they would the far better, single-payer alternative it has effectively replaced.

Of course, if Obama and the Democrats come up with something insurance companies won’t mind too much, it’s a different story. Then, much like tobacco industry executives finally came to see, health care profiteers would realize that it is best for them to concede a little to keep a lot. But if the Democrats remain steadfast; if, to the end, they support the pale approximation of a solution that is now being discussed, there’s no rationally defensible reason why they shouldn’t just go for the obvious solution itself.

I suspect therefore that the explanation lies less with campaign contributions or opportunistic political calculations or any of the other usual culprits, than with the “mind set” of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, itself. The Democrats’ GOP rivals may be bereft of sound ideas and, in comparison even with right-wing Democrats, unusually “challenged” morally and intellectually. But they are magnificently obstinate. Ridiculous as their positions are, their pursuit of them – and their dedication to obstruction for obstruction’s sake – almost rises to the level of the sublime. In marked contrast and notwithstanding Obama’s celebrated praise of audacity years ago, the stalwarts of the POP are so wedded to inching forward cautiously, even in cases where a smidgen of audacity is plainly called for and likely to succeed, that they just can’t forbear from acting like the invertebrate creatures they are.

Faith Based Diplomacy

2009-06-05T14:07:00.000-07:00

[Note: I would have liked to post the following thoughts on the day of the Cairo speech, but I was unable to do so because my satellite collection to the internet was down, thanks to the mean spirited mischievousness of the alleged Divinity, who has been hurling rain and thunder down upon these parts with reckless abandon.]

With Cairo in lockdown, President Obama gave an eloquent and inspiring speech, short on details and full of weasel words. No surprise in that! As expected, the neo-cons and other friends of the Israeli Right have reacted cautiously but critically; they don’t dare tear into Obama now. As expected too, pro-Obama liberals (are there any other kind?) reacted enthusiastically-- pointing out, correctly, that Obama went further than any American president ever has in saying sensible things, and that his style and approach was better by many orders of magnitude than George W. Bush’s. At the same time, knowledgeable people at home and abroad have voiced skepticism that Obama’s words – “moderate” words, I might add -- will be followed by the deeds they imply. After all, the evidence so far on Obama’s style of governance is not encouraging. He talks a good earful and he has an abundance of political capital to spend. But when it comes to spending it, his first instinct is to go “bipartisan” or, what comes to the same thing in the current lingo, “pragmatic” -- keeping things pretty much on the track they were on before the Cheney-Bush criminal enterprise took a hard right turn. Obama’s (actually, Wall Street’s) economic recovery policies and his (actually, the insurance and pharmaceutical corporation’s) plans for health care reform are examples. So is his “stewardship” of the endless and already lost Bush wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why expect anything better when it comes to setting things right with “the Muslim world”? Whatever Obama might like to do – and I continue to believe that he knows better than his actions suggest – the constraints he faces are enormously powerful, and he has so far been singularly unwilling to spend political capital to counter them.

However, there is one very salutary thing Obama could have easily done in Cairo that he did not. He could have inserted the adjective “historically” into the phrase “the Muslim world.”

Is it not odd that “the West,” a cultural and political configuration, or the United States, a country, is nowadays unthinkingly juxtaposed with “Islam,” a community of co-religionists! I think this is insulting to “Muslims,” even if many of them seem to welcome it. People living in historically Muslim lands or descended from people who did deserve better. But in a political culture like ours, where religion -- along with military service (but that’s another story) -- is deemed worthy of unlimited respect in public discourse, don’t expect very many people outside the “hard” left, or what’s left of it, to agree.

To be sure, George W. Bush did once use the word “crusade,” suggesting to those with a sense of history that 9/11 marked a return to the late medieval struggles of Islam and Christianity. But his handlers soon corrected the mistake. They understood that, in today’s world, it makes little sense to invoke long out-dated notions of Christendom. Nowadays, no one this side of George Bush thinks that “the Christian world” -- or, in an ecumenical (and anti-Muslim) spirit, “the Judaeo-Christian world” -- is a meaningful designation. This is because, when it comes to us, everyone who still has the sense they were born (not “born again”) with realizes, without always realizing that they do, that only very indoctrinated or very deluded or very ignorant people genuinely believe what their ancestors did. Certainly, no one who accepts rational standards for belief acceptance does. The particular beliefs the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- advance are just too outlandish to be taken seriously. So is the core belief they share – in the existence of an all powerful, all knowing, perfectly good Being, who created all that is, and who takes a personal interest in what goes on “down” here on earth.

Of course, the West, especially the United States, is full of self-declared Christians and Jews and, in recent decades, self-declared Muslims too. But I would hazard that apart from the truly benighted, none of them really takes any of the nonsense they claim they believe seriously. Professed believers, the sensible ones anyway, if they are sincere, are in a state of self-deception, of “bad faith.” The West, especially the United States, abounds with believers in bad faith.

If there is a real divide in the world today, it is not between Islam and Christianity (or Christianity plus Judaism) but between those who are Muslims or Christians or Jews in bad faith – ironically, they’re the more sensible ones! – and the true believers, who have yet to assimilate lessons drawn conclusively by Enlightened thinkers more than two and a half centuries ago. In addition to the multitudes in bad faith, there are also alarmingly many true believers in “the West,” especially in our United States. But, fortunately, not so many as there were when notions like “Christendom” still made sense.

Is the historically Muslim world really so far behind? No doubt, there are pressures throughout that part of the world, similar to those in this part, that encourage professions of (bad) faith. With the Left in eclipse and imperialist predations on the rise, add on too the sad development that Islam, or at least “fundamentalist” versions of it, has become the “anti-imperialism of fools,” in much the way that, in another time and place, anti-Semitism became, as August Bebel famously put it, “the socialism of fools.” No doubt too, the ignorance and resentment that produce true believers in the ostensibly enlightened West also operate in the historically Muslim world. It would not be surprising if, after years of domination by maleficent Western powers, ignorance and resentment are even more virulent there than here. But this is hardly a state of affairs to encourage, much less to assimilate into the common sense of our political culture. That’s just what we do when we speak of “the Muslim world” without inserting “historically” into the phrase. If we can talk about the West as a cultural and historical unity; we should be able to talk about the historically Muslim world in a similar way. To do otherwise is to pander to backwardness.

That’s what Obama did, enlisting almost universal praise (even from “progressives” and even from “Muslims”). How easy it would have been for him, when speaking of his father, to emphasize that, though descended from Muslims, his father was a thoroughly secular man. It might not have been politic – at least for his principal audiences at home and abroad. But it would have been courageous – and right. But then what can we expect from someone who, plainly knowing better, declares himself a Christian. As Edmund Gibbon, referring to the world of Roman antiquity before the onslaught of Christianity, put it long ago: for the magistrate all religions are equally useful. [He also noted that they are all equally true to the benighted masses, and equally false to the learned (whom he called “philosophers”).]

How relevant is it that many “Muslims” welcome being identified religiously? I think it is appropriate to answer that question rhetorically: how relevant is it that many women welcome being objectified sexually or otherwise demeaned?

Liberals invented freedom of religion – in the modern sense, where religion is a matter of private conscience only, without political significance. By now, they have won over all right-thinking people. In this respect, we are all liberals now. We all believe that people should be free to believe even the most outlandish nonsense, and to live according to whatever rules they please. But it is one thing to protect religion from state and societal interference, and something else to encourage it in the “private sphere.” Unfortunately, encouraging it or, at least, legitimating it is what liberals, Democrats especially, have been doing with a vengeance ever since that day in 2004 when Karl Rove drove John Kerry to defeat by cynically calling out hordes of true believers. And it is what liberals of all political parties have been doing in more “moderate” ways for decades. Enough already!

Christians talk about loving the sinner, hating the sin. The time is long past due for liberals to recover the venerable and once widely shared conviction of everyone on the political Left, liberals included, that, for as long as they are in our midst, we should love the believers, but militate against, not pander to, their inexcusably preposterous beliefs.

So, one and a half cheers for Obama – for a speech that, for all its fair and balanced “moderation,” pushed the “reset” button on relations between the United States and “the Muslim world.” It would have been two cheers, if he had spoken of the historically Muslim world instead. For anything more than that, for the full three cheers, words, no matter how well or poorly chosen, are not enough – not in a part of the world where, for the best of reasons, skepticism still reigns and where, as everywhere, actions speak louder than words.

Progress and Farce: the Sotomayor "Debate"

2009-05-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

For most of the time since the idea of “democracy” emerged in ancient Greece, Western political thinkers, with a few exceptions, regarded the idea as unworkable or contemptible or both – in much the way that most political philosophers today regard the idea of “anarchy.” Significant support for “democracy” did not develop until late in the eighteenth century and the idea remained controversial for many decades thereafter. Well into the twentieth century, there were political formations that were officially “anti-democratic.” But with the defeat of fascism after World War II, that ended; everyone became a “democrat.” Lately, the consensus has been shaken in some parts of the world by the rise of theocratic regimes, but even “Islamic republics” do not expressly oppose democracy; indeed, some of them, Iran for example, are quite democratic according to many of the usual measures. But at the same time that there is near universal support for the idea, disagreements rage about what “democracy” is. The “peoples’ democracies” that not long ago abounded throughout the Eurasian landmass and that still survive in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia bear little resemblance, at an institutional level, to so-called “Western democracies” which, in turn, bear little resemblance to the “democracies” assumed by most philosophically minded democratic theorists. Thus nowadays the term is what philosophers call “essentially contested”; everyone or nearly everyone is a “democrat” at the same time that there is no consensus on what “democracy” is.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of “democracy’s” fortunes represents progress of a sort. It reflects an incontrovertible and probably irreversible fact: the emergence of the demos, the people (in contrast to elites), as full-fledged participants in the political scene, even as rule by elites remains unshaken everywhere. The fact that everyone now claims the democratic mantle as their own also shifts the nature of political debate in generally salutary ways. There is no consensus on what “democracy” is, but there is a consensus among “democrats” of all stripes on some points pertinent to that question; for instance, on the idea that political regimes are accountable, ultimately, to the people whose lives and destinies they control. The more consensus there is, even if only on vague generalities, the more constructive debates about what “democracy” really is and what “democrats” really want become.

There are many other essentially contested concepts in our political culture; for example, equality of opportunity. No one is against equal opportunity, but debates rage over what that ideal involves. To a large extent, this is what the debate over affirmative action is about; defenders defend preferences for certain classes of people as a way to equalize opportunities across the population; detractors reject special preferences for the same reason. “Freedom” is another example – who today is against it! – even as conceptions of freedom diverge significantly. It is the same with “justice.” In these cases and others as well, the gap between theory and practice cannot just be explained by hypocrisy and deception, though there is plainly no lack of either. There are also “philosophical” differences lurking beneath the nearly universal support these very general ideas now enjoy. That this is so shows that progress has been made; not nearly enough, but progress nevertheless. It shows that we are moving in the right direction, albeit at a tiny fraction of a snail’s pace.

Thanks to Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice of the Supreme Court, it has become clear in recent days that “racism” or rather “anti-racism” has become an essentially contested concept too. Nearly everyone, it seems is officially against it – even blathering right-wing talk show hosts, Fox News pundits, and GOP luminaries. No doubt, this represents progress too. At least for the time being, we are past the days when overtly racist doctrines can become official state policy or when right-wing political movements expressly endorse racist views. Even the Jean-Marie Le Pens, Jörg Haiders, and Avigdor Liebermans of the world are obliged to pull their punches.

But in the Sotomayor “debate,” it is not like it is with “democracy,” and “equal opportunity,” or “freedom” or “justice.” This is not because there is nothing to discuss about what racism is. There are interesting questions that might be raised about that and about connections between racism and the various forms of ethno-centrism and theocracy that blight our planet’s politics. There are many questions to be asked; many debates to be engaged.

The reason why the current “debate” is unilluminating – indeed, farcical -- is that the right-wing drivellers and pundits have no coherent concept of what “racism” is. There is no “philosophy” underlying their comments, not even implicitly. For them, the word is just a tool to deploy to confuse and inflame.

[Or so I understand. My information about the latest from Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, G. Gordon Liddy, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Tom Tancredo and a few others comes mainly from the copious examples adduced by Rachel Maddow on her show on MSNBC. I haven’t the stomach to watch Fox News, much less to listen to talk radio. Life is too short.]

No doubt, the Obama administration is subtly encouraging the blather; it is to the Democrats advantage, after all, when Republicans make a mockery of themselves. Obama is still preposterously popular, so perhaps the current spate of race-baiting in the guise of “anti-racism” is comparatively harmless. But, according to all the polls, at least a fifth of the American population is so benighted, so ignorant and so uninformed that Rush Limbaugh and the Fox pundits and, what is by now nearly the same thing, the Republicans do have a “base” they can rally by playing the “anti-racism” card; in fact, it seems that that’s the whole idea. But this is a dangerous game. As became evident in the presidential campaign last year, there are more than a few nativist, know-nothing, God-fearing bigots out there who can easily be driven over the edge. That this could happen in the guise of “anti-racism” is, I suppose, a development to be applauded. It is further evidence that progress has been made. But that will be small consolation, should the Limbaugh-listeners et. al. become unhinged. Even with an African American President and a Latina on the Supreme Court, it could still happen here.

Love Me, I'm a Moderate

2009-05-28T06:58:00.000-07:00

For all I or anyone else knows, Sonia Sotomayor may turn out to be the best Supreme Court Justice going; after all, the competition is not very steep. Her qualifications are outstanding. And, although I’ve never been quite sure what “the American dream” is supposed to be, she surely exemplifies it. Then there is the welcome symbolism of elevating a Latina and a woman to the post. Some knowledgeable people question the intellectual depth of her rulings as an appellate judge; they wonder whether she can be a “liberal” counterweight to Antonin Scalia, the most overrated “conservative” (reactionary) Justice in recent history. Somehow they forget that anyone with the sense they were born with – Judge Judy, for example – could trounce Tony Two Vote (it was that second vote for Bush that unleashed the horrors of the past eight years) in any intellectual contest whatever.

In nominating her, Obama did good for a change. He also did something shrewd. As Republicans mobilize their “base” to oppose her, they will alienate themselves even more than they already have from the growing ranks of Hispanic voters, doing in their electoral prospects for the foreseeable future. They will also reveal themselves as the shallow, ignorant and mean-spirited fools they are; as if it isn’t clear enough already.

Yet, in promoting her nomination, the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, the party that “won” the last election, stresses how “moderate” she is. Once again, Obama’s “bipartisanship” is running amok. It would be laughable, were it not of a piece with the rest of Obama’s practice of governance: maintaining the rule of law by obstructing the prosecution of the war criminals Cheney, Bush, et. al.; fixing the financial crisis by saving the fortunes of the Wall Street predators who brought it on; fixing the health care crisis by assuring that private insurance companies and Big Pharma will get the lion’s share of the “solution”; fixing George Bush’s wars by continuing the occupation of Iraq and, at great cost to “homeland security” and international order, escalating the war in Afghanistan. Call it “pragmatism” or “centrism” or “moderation.” It is fast becoming the hallmark of the Obama presidency.

Thus, until Sotomayor is confirmed, we will hear her praised endlessly for her “moderation.” New York Senator Charles (Schmucky Chucky) Schumer has been tapped to shepherd her through the confirmation process. The man is nothing if not a moderation freak. With the frequency that the lately loquacious Dick Cheney invokes 9/11, expect him to invoke the m-word. It will be a sickening spectacle for those of us who think that the Right, having lost the last election (which is not the same thing as the Left having won!), should not continue to rule. Meanwhile, we can only hope Sotomayor has the good sense and judicial temperament not to take the Obama-Schumer characterization of her to heart.

Symbiosis

2009-05-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

As Vice President, Dick Cheney avoided the media like the plague; now he can’t make himself available enough. One can only guess what he thinks he is accomplishing. Perhaps he believes he’s performing a public service by defending his (officially, George Bush’s) policies so vociferously; after all, he does have the moral and intellectual shallowness to believe what he says. No doubt too, he’s positioning himself (and his commander-in-chief) for vindication if and when the next big “terrorist” attack comes; he’s shrewd enough to attempt that. Perhaps his motives are more clever still: by casting the “debate” over torture as a dispute about security policy, he could be trying to save himself from prosecution, laying the groundwork for the (spurious) argument that, in the Land of the Free, one does not criminalize policy differences.

Needless to say, in a saner world, there would be no “debate” at all. Cheney has admitted, even boasted, of committing war crimes. A good case could be made as well that he has committed crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity. Along with Rumsfeld and Bush and the rest of them, Cheney should be brought to justice, not taken seriously. End of story!

So far, though, the Obama administration has been taking Cheney seriously, even if only as a foil. Thus the spectacle of back to back speeches on national security and the rule of law: Obama’s delivered yesterday at the National Archives; Cheney’s, moments later, at the American Enterprise Institute. Since, unlike Cheney, Obama is no fool, he must be playing along for a reason. It is instructive to speculate on what that reason might be.

Obama, of late, has become an almost Orwellian figure – talking one way while doing just the opposite. He advocates for transparency, while keeping “the facts” (including pictures of torture victims, each one worth a thousand words) away from public view, just as his predecessor did. He advocates eloquently for the rule of law while reviving military tribunals for erstwhile “enemy combatants,” and even going so far, in his National Archives speech, as to propose indefinite preventive detention (with the window-dressing of judicial review) for “terrorists” who, for one reason or another, cannot be tried within the legal system. Even George W. Bush didn’t go that far!

I will speculate presently on why Obama has taken this turn. What I would point out, first, though, is how having Cheney babble on in the public eye facilitates it. Cheney may have taken upon himself the role of Obama-opponent-in-chief. But, in fact, what he is doing is strengthening Obama’s hand. This would be a welcome result, except that it is becoming increasingly clear that strengthening Obama’s hand is tantamount to facilitating his rightward drift.

There is still enough Obamamania around that Obama can get away with most anything. If only he’d use his “political capital” for good – for instance, by forcing Israel to stop obstructing the two state “solution” that it officially favored – at least, before the advent of the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime in Tel Aviv. But Obama is using it instead to perpetuate Bush administration policies, albeit with name changes and countervailing rhetorical declarations. The degree to which Obama is betraying his supporters’ expectations is remarkable even for those of us who never expected much more from Obama than cosmetic changes (from the Clinton, not the Bush, presidencies). Why so much recent bait and switch?

The main culprits, of course, are the constraints under which our bought and paid for political class operate. But I suspect there is something else going on in addition, something signaled by the excessive, indeed pathological, “bipartisanship” Obama and his minions promote. Notwithstanding the profound fluidity of the present political conjuncture, notwithstanding the fact that there is now more opportunity for real change than has existed for decades, Obama seems to have bought into the proposition that it is well to govern from the center. The jury is still out on how good or bad that idea is; Obama is so impressive and so politically adept that even I cannot bring myself to conclude just yet that it is an unequivocally bad idea, notwithstanding the mounting evidence that it is. Maybe, one hopes, he’s just “faking right.” That’s almost certainly an “illusion” in Freud’s sense, an expression of an unconscious wish. But, whether governing from he center is as bad an idea as the evidence suggests, it is plain that circumstances have shifted the center leftward – at least in domestic affairs. To an extent that would have seemed impossible just a year ago, a progressive role for an affirmative state has come back onto the agenda. But, at the same time, the Cheney-Bush legacy, kept alive by Cheney’s endless speechifying, is moving the center towards the right. By not bringing Cheney and the others to justice, by taking them seriously instead, Obama, wittingly or not, is encouraging this process.

Cheney’s speeches pull the center rightward not because his ideas, such as they are, have any appeal. Outside the twenty percent or so of the population who still think Cheney and Bush governed well, his ideas have no more appeal than they have merit. But, even if hardly anyone takes what Cheney says seriously, the constant reiteration of Bush era lies, half-truths and rationales, legitimated by Obama and echoed in media coverage, frames policy discussions in an unhealthy, indeed disabling, way. The problem, in short, is this: Cheney and Bush did so many wrong things so poorly that doing these same wrong things well has a certain appeal. Thus in the security “debate,” Obama proposes to get it right, where “it” designates more or less Cheney’s and Bush’s policies. The result is that with Obama’s help, those policies, implemented competently and in ways that pay homage (dishonestly) to the rule of law become the centrist position.

How ironic that, despite widespread support for “change we can believe in,” and despite recognition of the need to prosecute Cheney, not legitimate his ideas, this despised and deposed “acting” President continues to influence policy. It is because Obama has unwisely locked himself into a symbiotic relationship with his de facto predecessor. This may work to Obama’s advantage in the short run. But it surely works to the disadvantage of all who truly do respect the rule of law. The Obama-Cheney relation, which has lately come to loom so large on the political scene, is an unhealthy relationship from which nothing good can come.

GITMO NIMBYs

2009-05-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that the Republicans’ problem is not, as the punditocracy claims, a “lack of ideas”; it is a surfeit of stupid, base and servile ideas. But who can fail to be impressed by the sheer obstinacy of the Party of No, and by their adeptness in leveraging their power, notwithstanding their unpopularity! Stupidity and shrewdness are starkly evident in the so far successful campaign of Republican legislators to keep GITMO “terrorists” away from anywhere near where their constituents reside; indeed, off American soil altogether. Their rationale is not that American prisons cannot contain GITMO inmates; such a contention would be too reasonable for the stalwarts of the Greater Evil Party, not to mention too difficult to defend inasmuch as the claim is transparently false. That’s why the Republicans have gone NIMBY – attacking Obama, and rousing their “base,” by exploiting the well-known Not In My Back Yard sensibilities we denizens of the Home of the Brave so often evince.

Thus the Republicans demonstrate, yet again, how fiendishly clever they are – almost to the point of sublimity. If only the “democratic wing” of the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity, had been half as obstinate, how many Cheney-Bush era evils might the world have been spared! If only they would learn from their GOP counterparts even now, we might now be spared having to live in a country where real terrorists -- the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and, of course, the George W Bushes of the world – are free to live the high life and to amble freely about in between appearances on Fox News.

But that’s not the way of our Democrats; they’re too forgiving, too “bipartisan,” too (stupidly) “nice” for anything like that. Thus yesterday’s spectacle -- where the Democrats joined the Republicans in denying the Obama administration the funds to shut Guantanamo down until Obama comes up with a plan for resettling GITMO inmates that NIMBYs can live with. Yet again, “bipartisanship” translates into POP capitulation and GOP rule -- as Democrats, in true Pelosiite fashion, take everything that might actually implement genuine lesser-evilism “off the table.”

Specter

2009-04-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

With Arlen Specter’s defection from the Greater Evil Party, the Democrats will have a filibuster proof Senate -- once the buffoonish Norm Coleman ceases and desists from obstructionist litigation, or the judicial system runs its course, and the comedian Al Franken assumes the Senate seat he seems to have won. Or, more precisely, they’ll have a filibuster proof Senate if everyone who caucuses with the Lesser Evil Party stays on board. That’s not at all a sure thing, even in Specter’s case. The only thing that is sure is that he could honestly run on the slogan: “better than Lieberman.”

Arlen Specter has made a career of being a tiresome windbag, just “liberal” enough to do well among Pennsylvania’s less benighted voters and just bellicose enough not to be too much on the outs with the GOP leadership. Acting on principle has never been his forte. Even in comparison with other Senators, the man is a rank opportunist. But that character flaw is not such a bad thing when it comes to switching parties – as Specter has now done twice. After all, what principled reason could there be for being a Democrat or a Republican when neither wing of our semi-official duopoly has any principles at all.

Not long ago, when he still thought he could keep his Senate seat and his Republican affiliation too, Specter flip-flopped on EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act – betraying his misguided supporters in the labor movement. If he doesn’t flip flop back in short order, organized labor should do everything in its power to make his life miserable, and along with it the lives of the Democrats – Joe Biden, Ed Rendell, and even our “bipartisan” President – who engineered his defection and who have warmly welcomed him into the Democratic fold. Labor has given its all to getting Obama elected and to supporting his agenda, foolishly demanding nothing in return. Now is the time to start demanding. If Specter doesn’t come back on board, they should run a pro-labor candidate against him in the primaries or, better yet, in the general election.

With the Obama administration in Wall Street’s pocket, it could be a risky move. But it also just might unleash events, as unpredictable as was Specter’s defection, from which all would benefit. Ours is a political culture where the duopoly’s disabling hold over the state has proven all but unshakeable. But then, the strategy that has worked well elsewhere – where organized labor fields its own candidates and, in the right circumstances, launches its own political party – has never been tried, at least not in recent decades. If not now, when? And if not in Pennsylvania, where? – should the old fool miscalculate (perhaps by calculating that he should not seem as unprincipled as he is) and remain stubbornly on the bosses’ side.

"Bipartisanship" versus Governance

2009-04-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

One can never be quite certain that Obama isn’t “faking right” so that he can be in position to do the right thing. But with each passing day, it seems more likely that he isn’t faking: that he’s a go-with-the-flow “centrist” to his core. That’s why he backed down, sort of, on his bipartisan determination to “look to the future” by not prosecuting Bush administration war criminals. But, of course, in this matter, nothing is yet settled -- he could still backslide. For justice to be done, pressure from believers in the rule of law must be relentless. Otherwise, it is sure as can be that Obama will again veer off course.

Sadly, this change of heart is the only inkling of victory to date. In all other matters of consequence, Obama’s reckless bipartisanship is leading to disaster. The title of William Grieder’s latest, “Testicular Politics: Obama is Getting Punked By the Big Dogs of Banking, Does He Have the Balls to Do What’s Right?” gets it right. The same thing is happening in foreign policy. To cite just the most egregious recent example, it is reported that the new extreme right-racist government of Israel wants to take the two state solution off the table unless the U.S. comes around to its view on Iran. This is chutzpah on steroids; in a better possible world, it would embarrass even the likes of Alan Dershowitz. Well, maybe not him, but anyone a shade more decent and less ethno-centric. But Israel could get away with it – if Obama doesn’t have the balls. In this case, in addition to everything else, Obama would have to stand up to his own party in Congress – as recent events concerning Jane Harman, doyenne of the Lesser Evil Party’s right wing, and the ostensibly liberal Nancy Pelosi, aka the Whore of AIPAC, illustrate.

Then, there’s health care. If Republican obstinacy doesn’t derail Obama’s efforts to go bipartisan, he’ll have succeeded not only in marginalizing the single-payer alternative, but in sacrificing universal coverage too. The “partisan” Democratic plan, if true to its word, would at least make public coverage (the same available to federal employees and members of Congress) available to anyone who chooses it. That should put the kaybosh on private insurance in short order. [To keep the Democrats relatively honest on this score, proponents of the Obama plan should be asked at every opportunity just what they think private for-profit insurers contribute to health care. Let Max Baucus and Company wriggle out of that one!] The Clintons set the cause back a generation by not having the balls to take on the private insurers and Big Pharma from the getgo. If Obama is permitted to go bipartisan on this one, that unhappy outcome could happen again.

It all comes down to this: “bipartisanship” or governance. It’s not too late for an enraged citizenry to push Obama and his “team” away from the snare and delusion they are inclined to favor. Obama’s (possible) change of course on prosecuting Bush era criminality proves that. But it won’t be easy – particularly with Congressional Democrats, a few brave souls excepted, dragging everything within their grasp to the right.

Criminal Obama

2009-04-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

Obama has not disappointed me; I never expected much from him. It was clear from the outset that he would govern from the center-right, just as Bill Clinton did and as Hillary Clinton would have had she become President. I didn’t even vote for him; living in a “safe” state and in a country with grotesquely undemocratic electoral institutions, it seemed infinitesimally more expressive to vote, yet again, for Ralph Nader. That’s why, unlike so many others, I’m not disappointed; but I am surprised.

I’m surprised that the Clintonite Restoration he promised was implemented without even cosmetic changes. I’m surprised, even so, that he would turn economic recovery efforts over to the perpetrators of the present crisis, and that he would stay the course as they line the pockets of Wall Street bankers at the taxpayer’s expense. I’m surprised that, having beaten his eponymous Clintonite rival by running against the Iraq War, that he would backtrack so blatantly. I’m even surprised that he’s so determined to escalate the Afghanistan War into a genuine quagmire and breeding ground for terrorists – notwithstanding all he said about the “importance” of that doomed effort during the campaign. I’m not surprised that his health care plan would continue to subsidize private insurance companies and the pharmacy industry – after all, he campaigned on that plan – but I am a little surprised at how zealously he has tried to marginalize the not-for-profit, single payer alternative, the one real solution to America’s healthcare woes. I’m not surprised that he would continue to pander to the military and the intelligence community (most recently, the CIA) or to the Israel lobby (even to the dismay of African Americans in Congress, who wanted the United States to participate in the second “Durban Conference” on racism). I must say, though, that letting the Chas Freeman appointment go because neo-con bloggers and Charles Schumer wanted it that way was over the top. I’m not surprised either that he refuses to take on the NRA at this point; that may even be a shrewd move. But I am surprised that it fell to Hillary Clinton, not Obama, to state the obvious: that the lack of an assault rifle ban in the United States is a major factor contributing to the drug wars in Mexico and to their overflow back into the United States. The list goes on. On style, Obama gets an A+; on substance, he’s just what one would have expected – only worse.

BUT if he makes good on his declared intention not to prosecute CIA torturers and the war criminals who advised them, not to mention the higher ups who gave the orders the torturers followed, then under both American and international law, he too is a criminal – an obvious point confirmed just yesterday by Manfred Nowak, the UN rapporteur on torture. “Looking forward” (only), as Obama calls it, is worse than implementing center-right policies with more than the usual zeal. It’s an affront to justice. It crosses the line from dreadful politics to outright criminality.

This is so obvious that even right-wing Democrats, like Diane Feinstein, can’t help but see it, and speak out about it. How ironic that the agent of “change” is turning out to be worse than Diane Feinstein. But that’s what’s happening. It is still possible, though, to parse Obama’s words – and Rahm Emanuel’s – Clinton style, with a view to finding wiggle room for the administration to appoint a special prosecutor. That’s precisely what should happen. Now is the time for everyone committed to the rule of law to force Obama to do this; to force him to back away from the threshold of criminality – saving him from his forgiving, “bipartisan,” centrist self. Will we be up to the task?

Viva España

2009-03-31T07:25:00.000-07:00

Praise is due Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, led to his arrest in Britain in 1998. Garzón has begun proceedings in Spain against six senior Bush administration officials for the use of torture against (Spanish) detainees in Guantánamo Bay: Alberto Gonzales (formerly White House counsel, then Attorney General), David Addington (formerly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff), Douglas Feith (formerly Under Secretary of Defense) , William Heyne (formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel), and John Yoo and James Bybee (formerly senior Justice Department legal advisors). Unbelievable as it may be in a country officially dedicated to the rule of law, Yoo is presently a Law Professor at U.C.-Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appellate judge in California. The case must now be referred to a prosecutor, who, according to informed sources, would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.

The officials in question are just a rung below the very top – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al. Typically, this is how prosecutions of this sort work: prosecutors go first for lower lying fruit.

Coming on the eve of Obama’s first trip to Europe as President, this is a fortuitous turn of events. Thanks to Garzón, the only legal way out for Spain now not to pursue the case against the Gang of Six would be for the U.S. itself finally to press charges against them – and, since one thing is bound to lead to another, against their “superiors.”

Obama so far has shown no sign that he will let this happen, much less make it happen. Instead, as Cheney brags repeated about the torture regime he concocted, Obama has allowed the matter to turn into a debate about “security” policy. That is emphatically not what it is: torture is illegal under international and domestic law, and both Cheney and Bush have publicly admitted their culpability in the on-going commission of this crime.

If the Forgiver-in-Chief continues to protect his predecessors for the sake of “looking forward,” then he too will become an accomplice in war crimes. Intentionally or not, Garzón has put Obama in a position where he must do the right thing or else forfeit the claim to be better (less morally and legally retrograde) than Cheney and Bush. Obama must now, at the very least appoint, a Special Prosecutor, who would take the prosecution out of Spanish hands and put it where it belongs – in the American legal system.

But, of course, “must” is one thing, “will” is another. To bring Bush and Cheney and the rest of them to justice, we need public outrage directed towards Obama’s “bipartisan” pusillanimity. And, for that, we need to break through the wall of silence that the media are already beginning to erect around the good news from Spain. There is plenty of outrage already in the Land of the Free about bailouts and subsidies for obscenely wealthy Wall Street malefactors (and, not incidentally, campaign contributors). But there is always room for more. Now is the time to make it as clear as can be to Obama and the Clintonites he has chosen to surround himself with that he cannot afford not to bring to justice the leaders of the criminal administration that preceded his.

Hoping Obama Succeeds

2009-03-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

Ever since Rush Limbaugh, the GOP’s driveller-in-chief, said he hoped Obama’s presidency would fail, liberal critics of Obama’s banker-friendly “bail out” plans have felt obliged to repeat ad nauseum how much they hope Obama succeeds. To date, liberals have been less vocally opposed to Obama’s plans to fight on in the endless wars Bush started. But, from that quarter too, expressions of hope that Obama will succeed abound.

Not wanting to take on a popular President directly, obstreperous Limbaughites in Congress – the ludicrous Eric Cantor, for example – have lately been more nuanced in what they say about their hopes. Needless to say, they express ambivalence for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, they are right to be ambivalent.

There is a sense, of course, in which ambivalence is unwarranted. Obama is, as it were, the Jackie Robinson of presidential politics. As such, it is his burden to be better than his rivals, and better too than his successors. One can therefore only hope that he be, or seem to be, among the “great” American presidents – one of the few that leads the country in a sound direction through extraordinary and difficult times. Since judgments of presidents are always comparative, that should not be too difficult a challenge to meet – especially in the circumstances Obama inherited. After Cheney and Bush, “greatness” in the sense in question has become indispensable even for minimally satisfactory job performance – for the first time since the Roosevelt era. As a highly intelligent, well informed, articulate and even eloquent leader, Obama should be up to the task – of besting all presidents since FDR. One must hope that he is.

But hoping that he “succeeds” in Afghanistan and Iraq is another matter. Inasmuch as both profoundly ill-conceived wars are already lost, succeeding in them amounts just to saving face. Elite opinion in the United States is unanimous on the necessity for that. But just the opposite is what the people, in contrast to their rulers, need. For the United States to make a successful soft landing in the turbulent times ahead, what is required, above all, is an Iraq-Afghanistan Syndrome that dwarfs the salutary but short-lived Vietnam Syndrome of the 1970s. We will survive and flourish only to the extent that our leaders are forced to relinquish their imperial ambitions. To that end, defeat is not enough. There must also be the appearance of defeat. But this is precisely what Obama proposes to spill yet more blood to avoid. One can only hope that he fails.

With regard to his economic policies, the situation is more ambiguous. On the one hand, whatever staunches the misery is unequivocally welcome. If only for this reason, one must hope Obama’s efforts succeed. But inasmuch as those efforts are, for now, more about saving bankers than saving banks, inasmuch as they aim to restore the old regime, not to replace it, “success” will likely mean more – even greater – trouble ahead. Obama’s liberal critics have done fine work explaining why. Why, then, do they also claim to hope these plans succeed? Is this not yet another example of liberals not taking their own side in an argument!

Had liberals been more obstreperous in the days when Bush and Cheney were doing so much harm some of that harm might have been averted. Instead, they were intent on being “reasonable” --cooperative, “bipartisan,” cowardly. They still are. In this regard, there is actually something to learn from their morally and intellectually “challenged” rivals in Rush Limbaugh’s and Eric Cantor’s Greater Evil Party.

The Humpty Dumpty President

2009-03-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

It was clear from the outset, to anyone not overcome with Obamamania, that the “change” Obama promised would be largely cosmetic. Then, in the days before the inauguration, it became clear that, at least in economic and foreign policy matters, it would not even be that – as Robert Rubin protégés, along with other Clintonites, including Hillary herself, were given all the top slots. The fruit from that poison tree is now beginning to emerge.

What we’re getting is Bush Redux, minus Bush incompetence. Under Obama, the old adage that finance capital knows best, the conventional wisdom since the Days of Reagan, still guides economic policy. The difference is that the former deregulators, supposedly chastened by events, are determined to do the same old same old better – and, at the same time, to make the world safer for hedge fund managers and concoctors of inscrutable financial “instruments” by regulating away their untrammeled greed. Thus Treasure Secretary Geithner proposes to get credit flowing by recapitalizing banks and other financial institutions in a way that assures that tax payers bear the risks of their future machinations, in return for greater transparency and a few other milquetoast concessions. It’s even worse than under Bush: now the free marketeers can gamble with other peoples’ money, knowing that they can keep their winnings and that their losses will be forgiven. The Geithner plan will likely blow up in his and Obama’s face -- sooner than later. Then maybe the powers that be will have no choice but to do the kinds of Rooseveltian things they ought to have done in the first place. In the meantime, unemployment will rise and misery will increase.

Of course, in the long run, the “depression economics” à la Paul Krugman that will be their last resort is likely unworkable too, inasmuch as today’s capitalism, unlike the capitalism of the Great Depression and World War II era, is so rife with overcapacity that investments in the “real economy” are not able any more to keep the system going; for that, we now need bubbles and other shenanigans. But depression economics can address the immediate crisis better than any politically feasible alternative. It can buy time for popular movements to grow and develop – and to figure out how, in light of the failures of the past, capitalism can be not just ameliorated, but replaced by something qualitatively better.

But instead Team Obama is hell bent on resurrecting the old regime on a sounder basis. It will be our misfortune that they will find that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, cannot put the Humpty Dumpty of contemporary late capitalism back together again.

Then there are those pesky Bush Wars. Sensible imperialists (they exist, Obama is one of them) never had any time for the war in Iraq. But once it got going, no imperialist, no matter how sensible, could walk away in defeat. That would be bad for the empire. So the issue there is saving face. Peace candidate Obama has decided that the best way to do that is to wind the war down at a snail’s pace, but never really to end it by withdrawing all troops and contractors (mercenaries). Would John McCain have done it differently? Would the Cheney-Bush torture team if they were still in control? All we can say for sure is that they would have wound the war down less competently. Where so many lives and fortunes are at stake, competence is not to be despised. But neither is it to be confused with change.

Meanwhile, the peace candidate will, as promised, escalate the war in Afghanistan. This is ostensibly a war against the Taliban. But, according to informed observers, there are hardly any genuine Taliban left, especially in Afghanistan. What there are, in the so-called Tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, are various Pashtun factions that identify in one way or another with the Taliban or, more vaguely, with the kind of theocracy the Taliban favored. There are also “international brigades” of islamist fanatics. Apparently there are enough “insurgents” to wage guerilla war against no matter how many U.S. and other countries’ troops Obama can muster. But here too what matters, above all, is saving face. Since that’s hardly a saleable position, Obama and Company insist, just as Cheney and Bush did, that more war will somehow make “the homeland” more secure. Of course, it will have the opposite effect. Change indeed!

Continuing the Afghanistan War could well turn that theatre of the old “War on Terror” into Obama’s Vietnam. It could force the Obama administration to scuttle its feeble efforts at progressive reform, much as Vietnam forced LBJ to give up on the Great Society. But saving face for the empire’s sake trumps all else.

Now there is something to the idea that having broken it, it’s up to the U.S. to fix it. But the way to fix Afghanistan is not to break it more. All the king’s men should know at least that much. But, according to press reports, the only one of Obama’s top advisors to express anything like this eminently obvious view was, of all people, Joe Biden. Given all the Clintonites in the upper echelons of the administration, it’s not too surprising that the one with the most sense is someone who hasn’t the sense he was born with. But, still, how pathetic is that!

The Peace President

2009-03-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

When the Bush administration signed on to the Status of Forces Agreement last Fall, it acquiesced to the demands of the Iraqi government. No longer Washington’s stooge, the government headed by Nouri al-Maliki called the shots. In signing on, the United States relinquished all the neo-colonial privileges and concessions it imposed on Iraq after the invasion, and agreed to end its occupation by 2011. Although one wouldn’t know it from media accounts or from the representations of U.S. officials, this was an admission of defeat. For their own reasons, most of the relevant players in Iraq were content to have the American occupation continue for a while, as they negotiate their respective positions once the occupation ends. They were also willing not to contradict the American government’s narrative, according to which, by 2011, the U.S. will have done enough “nation building” for Iraqis finally to be able to govern themselves. What the United States gained by the Status of Forces Agreement was a situation that, with ingenuity and deceit and with the active collaboration of the mainstream media, they may be able to depict as a “victory.” The Iraqis were evidently willing to concede on that point, if only because there’s no percentage in humiliating a country that has proven itself all to eager to wage war against them. Thus the United States surrendered in a face-saving way.

But the fact that the United States lost the war Bush started doesn’t mean that the it can’t revisit the scene of its crimes, should the balance of forces in Iraq change in ways that make yet another intervention desirable to whoever is the Commander-in-Chief at the time. The Bush government effectively reserved the right for its successors to try again. Thus 2011 was always more of an aspirational goal than a date certain.

Is it different now that Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief? Obama’s February 27 speech at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina appeared to signal the beginning of the end-game in the Iraq War – “combat” troops are to be out in nineteen months (not sixteen, as Obama had promised in the campaign!) and all troops are to be out in 2011, as per Maliki’s agreement with Bush. But like Bush, Obama has left himself wiggle room for keeping troops in Iraq beyond 2011, should it be “necessary” – that is, desirable for furthering what he takes America’s interests to be. Thus the anti-war candidate voters thought they elected has turned out, in this instance at least, to be on the same page as George Bush. The only significant difference is that the Obama plan is explicit on the time-line for withdrawal, though it isn’t clear what difference this makes, given the “flexibility” built into the de facto surrender document, as construed by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Obama wants troops out of Iraq in order to stop the hemorrhaging of taxpayer dollars in times of monumental deficits, but also, mainly, to reposition them to Afghanistan. To their credit, Obama and his national security team acknowledge that Afghanistan could turn into a much worse “quagmire” than Iraq has been; it could be Obama’s Vietnam. But they are willing to take the chance – and, if need be, spill the blood! – ostensibly to deny Al Qaeda the safe haven it enjoyed before the post-9/11 American invasion.

There is a compelling case to be made that the best way to achieve that goal is to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible. But Obama and his advisors, along with the hapless General Petraeus and some top brass in the Pentagon and on site, seem determined to take another course. They imagine that an infusion of troops -- accompanied by bribes to local warlords (“counterinsurgency”) -- will set things right enough that the U.S. can leave the mess it stirred up. In other words, they want to do in Afghanistan what they are already doing in Iraq; hoping that by doing so they will be able again to save face.

Even Republicans, the saner ones anyway, realize that this is the best the U.S. can hope for in Afghanistan. Thus, even in this era of spurned “bipartisan” initiatives, they are more on board with Obama’s plan than many Democrats are. Even John McCain voiced support for Obama’s position. Democrats who know better, as many of them do, are still too much in the thrall of that Obama-knows-best frame of mind that took hold after the election to press actively for a peace “we can believe in.” They therefore only squawk, and then go along. This degree of “bipartisan” consensus is not surprising. On foreign policy and military matters, the Greater and Lesser Evil parties differ more on means than on ends.

Though Bush started it, Obama, if he is not careful, will soon own the Afghanistan War. Surely, he understands that it could be his undoing, just as the Vietnam War was LBJ’s. Surely, he understands too how much better it would be for all the relevant players, including the Afghan people, if the United States would just go away. Why then has he dumped the anti-war posture he assumed in the campaign and taken up the cause of permanent war?

I’ve remarked on the reason often in earlier entries: it is that if you’re determined, as both Democrats and Republicans are, to run the world, you can’t afford to look weak or vulnerable. In Afghanistan, the situation is clouded because there is a defensible objective – denying a safe base for terrorists intent on harming the United States. The problem there is not so much the end, as the means. More troops and more fighting will, in all likelihood, produce just the opposite of the desired result. But, no matter. The main thing is that, since we are there now, we can’t leave until a way emerges for us not to look like we are being forced out.

That this conviction is the real cause of Obama’s regretful but determined bellicosity is even more transparent in the Iraq case because there is no plausible objective to be gained by staying there until 2011 or beyond, other than avoiding the appearance of defeat. A strategic retreat – running away to fight another day – is out of the question. Like gangsters intent on maintaining power through sheer intimidation, superpowers must always get their way. The Empire is now in Obama’s hands, and he wants to be sure that it keeps on going under his stewardship.

Those of us who think it urgent that the U.S. abandon its imperial posture, if only to avoid blowback from the intensifying turbulence that America’s wars create, must therefore stand against Obama in this regard. His “base” has never demanded much from him. Even still, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the idea is abroad in the land that Obama knows best. Maybe he does, but he won’t act on what he knows – unless his base gives him no alternative. So far so much of that base remains so mesmerized that the danger is grave.

This is one instance where it would be well to follow the Republicans’ lead. They are nowadays a pitiful lot; their leading “thinkers” make even George Bush look good. The just concluded CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee) conference in Washington showed just how morally and intellectually bankrupt the Grand Old Party has become. But they do know one thing: how to leverage their power. They know how to discipline themselves in order to forge unity, and they understand the value of plain obstinacy. If only “progressives” in the Democratic Party were more like them in these respects, we might just avoid the quagmire towards which Obama is heading.

The Main Obstacle

2009-02-27T07:53:00.000-08:00

Cowardice and “bipartisanship” are obstacles in the way of the “change” many Obama voters, the ones not just voting against McCain, thought they voted for. But the main obstacle is something else: it’s the way we finance electoral campaigns. If only we could reduce private contributions to insignificant amounts and rely on public funding instead, real change can follow.

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) that only minimal, easily circumvented, restrictions on campaign contributions are permissible, the quasi-official view has been that no matter how much money talks, restricting campaign contributions restricts free expression in violation of the First Amendment. This is not the place to address the few merits and many shortcomings of this way of thinking. The Supremes were wrong, but untangling and then addressing the questions involved is complicated. However there is nothing complicated about the observation that the system now in place impoverishes political debate. It leads to the marginalization of positions that are, in many cases and by almost any standard, sounder than those that it legitimates, and it even makes it possible to ignore plain facts.

Notwithstanding how the “mavericks” McCain and Palin made an issue of “earmarks” and “pork” in the 2008 presidential race, a theme Obama seems to have adopted, the problem has less to do with what monied interests purchase when they “pay to play” than with what they are able to remove from political debate altogether. Three timely examples will explain what I have in mind:

-first, the virtual exclusion from discussions of the Iran Question of the indisputable though seldom acknowledged fact that Israel has many more nuclear weapons than the Mullahs could ever dream of. In view of Israel’s proven eagerness to go to war, its insistence that Iran poses an “existential threat,” and the likelihood that the next Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, will be even more bellicose than the current one, this stubborn fact is plainly relevant to assessing Iran’s position on developing nuclear weapons and to reflecting on what an appropriate “response” to Iranian ambitions might be. Nevertheless, the combined weight of the Israel lobby and the various “defense” lobbies has effectively removed this very relevant fact from public discourse.

-or consider health care. Plainly, it would be better to get private insurers out of the system altogether; all they do, after all, is skim off huge amounts of money while generating inefficiencies in the process. But they’ve bought their way into the system to such an extent that “single payer” – government run -- health insurance remains off the agenda now as much as it was a generation ago when Hillary Clinton botched up efforts to secure universal coverage. That we’d be better off without private insurers involved in the health care delivery system is, at once, perfectly obvious and utterly beyond the pale. We have our system of private campaign financing to thank for that unfortunate result.

-then there is the financial crisis; the need, acknowledged by almost everyone, to get credit flowing again. Could anything be more obvious than that insolvent financial institutions, big and small, should be nationalized; that their managements should be replaced and that their stockholders, not taxpayers, should take the hit? If nothing else, it’s a matter of simple fairness. The “financiers” made off like bandits by gaming the system. Now that the sky has fallen, they should be the ones it falls on hardest. But it also makes economic sense because there is no quicker and surer way to make loans available again, and because so long as credit is frozen, the efficacy of the Obama stimulus package is diminished. So far, though, the Obama administration seems interested only in saving the bankers (i.e. the gamblers) and their banks – by indemnifying them for their losses with yet more taxpayer money. In time, it may become clear, even to the Wall Street operatives Obama appointed for his economic team, that saving bankers is not the way to save the banking system. But given how “generous” Wall Street has been to both Democrats and Republicans, it is far from clear what the effect on policy of this realization will be.

Needless to say, full public financing would not make everything better automatically. It would not alter the stifling structural constraints that a capitalist economic system imposes. All liberal democracies, including those with saner, more democratic electoral systems, confront these obstacles. But, so long as we are doomed to operate within that framework, full public financing would remove the main obstacle in the way of what Obama voters were hoping his election would bring.

Ironically, public financing is perhaps the one feasible, major reform around which “bipartisan” support should be forthcoming. Republicans may be second to none in baseness and servility, but even they must hate groveling before their corporate paymasters. In this instance, inertia, not ideology, is the problem – that and, of course, the Supreme Court.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. The problem is that there isn’t much will. Electoral reform is one of those issues that comes up at election time and is then forgotten as more pressing concerns arise. It is happening again. But if it is permitted to happen, “change we can believe in” will never get beyond the “aspirational” stage.

Sticking It To CEOs

2009-02-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

With much fanfare and popular support, Mississippi Senator Claire McCaskill called a few weeks ago for a $400K salary cap for executives in firms getting public bailout money. $400K is the salary of the President of the United States, though of course, presidents get perks that even the titans of corporate America can only dream of. The “populist” clamor for sticking it to CEOs got to be so intense that even President Obama, the Forgiver-in-Chief who only wants to “look forward,” felt obliged to weigh in. He supported the idea, kicked in another hundred grand, and then implemented the proposal in his stimulus package in a way that will affect almost no one. Still, it’s the “symbolism” that counts. Overnight, top executives have been transformed from heroes into villains.

Needless to say, they deserve all the contempt we can muster and, in most imaginable circumstances, it makes sense to villainize them. But this latest “populist” eruption, for all its merits, can be profoundly misleading. It also reveals how mindless and ahistorical what passes for a “left” in our country has become.

It can be misleading because it puts the blame for economic turbulence on “malefactors of great wealth” instead of on the system they exploit for their own advantage. Had the Bush Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve (with Timothy Geitner leading the way) not let Lehman Brothers collapse, the current spate of crises in the financial sector would doubtless have unfolded at a different pace and perhaps with less severity. But the incompetence of the Bush administration and the Fed is not the reason why credit is now virtually frozen. The problems are structural -- and were therefore bound to have their due, one way or another. Similarly, had Wall Street and its overseas counterparts been a tad less greedy, the misfortunes engulfing the world economy now might have been mitigated somewhat. But, in the final analysis, the crises we face did not result from the misdeeds of bad individuals. Again, the problems are systemic – a point that largely eludes acknowledgement among those whose sympathies lie with “the wretched of the earth.”

This is why calls to stick it to CEOs are largely beside the point. Moveon.org, the popular base of “left Obamaism” congratulates itself for the largely symbolic pay caps in the stimulus bill. So do others who have stuck their own two cents into the fray. These contentions are not without merit. They show how Obama can be pushed into taking a more progressive direction than his Wall Street friendly advisors might like. But they also show how intellectually bankrupt those who rally behind “populist” causes have become.

For one thing, it’s not clear what our new populists think the problem with exorbitant CEO salaries is: is it that they’re inefficient?, that they represent a kind of profiteering (but of whose wealth? the stockholders?), or is the problem that top executives’ salaries offend egalitarian principles so egregiously that even liberals must take notice? Perhaps it’s some inchoate mixture of all of the above or something else altogether. But, at an intuitive level, it is plainly the offense to equality that is doing the work. Presumably, no one on the “left” gets exercised about shareholders being taken advantage of or about how corporations might be made meaner and leaner.

If the problem is indeed inequality, it’s not that there aren’t ample bodies of theory available to enlighten the discussion. For more than a quarter century, equality has been Topic A in academic social and political philosophy and in cognate fields. Inevitably,all this attention has yielded advances in understanding. However, as is often the case in our political culture, these advances have not made their way into either mainstream or dissident thinking. For those outside narrow academic precincts who know about them at all, their interest is strictly “academic.” The result is that proponents of the new populism are blissfully ignorant of work that could make their efforts more coherent. Thus their opposition to exorbitant CEO compensation is only intuitive, not principled. It is of a piece with the reflexive goody-goodyism that has become emblematic of “progressive” politics today.

This is why the “pay cap populists” endorse positions that thoughtful egalitarians can only find bizarre. What they favor is not equality, on any plausible construal of what that notion involves, but generous limits on inequality – for those who work in corporations and financial institutions. [If they have opinions about athletes or actors or pop stars or, for that matter, investors, they keep them to themselves.] Specifically, they favor 1950s levels of inequality – levels that were, needless to say, thoroughly inegalitarian, though better than what we have today. In effect, they are not so much fired by egalitarian sentiments as by nostalgia for the Eisenhower era.

On matters of fiscal policy, Bill Clinton was an Eisenhower Republican too – albeit a timid one. Ike launched the inter-state highway system; Clinton let highways and bridges deteriorate. But it is one thing to adapt Eisenhower policies to current conditions, and something else to turn those policies into a vision of ideal arrangements. That’s the point we’ve now reached. Of course, the 50s were followed by the 60s, the era of “the imagination in power.” If we’re doomed to cycle between those poles, and if we don’t want to succumb entirely to the situation we now face, we’ve got to get to work quickly to get on to the next phase. To that end, it’s far from clear that that pay cap populism is something to encourage.

I’ve already suggested that vilifying outrageous salary levels draws attention away from the structural features of the economic system that make these outrages possible. The problem, though, is that the idea that there are alternatives to the system in place has fallen into desuetude. Today’s “populists” don’t favor alternatives to capitalism; they only favor saccharine ameliorations of some of capitalism’s deplorable consequences. For them, this is not even a principled choice; the idea that there are fundamentally different ways of organizing modern economies is a relic of a bygone era to which, if they think about it all, they bid good riddance.

Indeed, it is only for those of us “of a certain age” and perhaps also for the generation too young to have been warped by the Reagan-Clinton-Bush Family consensus -- for those of us for whom “red” means something other than “Republican” -- that the current crisis in global capitalism does not betoken a crisis of capitalism itself. Europeans and others, with richer socialist traditions to fall back upon (even as they have fallen farther away from them in recent decades) are not quite so disabled. In any case, the time is long past due for anti-systemic resistance.

Caps on executive compensation can be accommodated within Obama’s “pragmatic” framework. Perhaps they can even gain a measure of “bipartisan” support – especially if they are more symbolic than real. This is not something to be despised. But neither is it anything wholeheartedly to praise. The time is upon us already where it has become urgent to transcend the horizons of the Obama framework. To that end, congratulating ourselves over pay caps in the stimulus bill can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Moderate Muddle Heads

2009-02-09T07:14:00.000-08:00

If there is any greater obstacle than reempowred Clintonites to “change we can believe in,” it is “bipartisanship.” That’s what enabled the free market theologians of the Republican Party to frame the debate on Obama’s woefully inadequate but urgently needed “stimulus package.” They will not have their way, but they have already done grave harm. With Obama’s help, they’ve put the muddle heads in the “middle” in charge.

The free marketeers’ views are ludicrous, of course. But at least they are guided by a principle, and they have the virtue of consistency. It is hard not to admire those benighted legislators, if only for their obstinacy. Had “progressive” Democrats been similarly uncompromising, they might have prevented some of the most egregious of Bush’s and Cheney’s crimes. But, of course, that is not the Democrats’ way.

Do the Republicans in the House and Senate believe their own drivel? To the extent they do, who can blame them? It’s not just watching Fox News or listening to Rush Limbaugh or having a crush on Sarah Palin that moronizes those who are already predisposed to be stupid. Throughout the entire Reagan-Clinton-Bush family era, free market theology has been in the air we breathe. It has become an article of faith for many Republican voters. Even the Clintonite-Wall Street crowd Obama restored to power was on board with similar views – until quite recently, when reality struck.

Thanks to the Republicans’ obstinacy and Obama’s “bipartisan” flexibility, it now seems that the “moderates” will get to call the shots. Thanks to them – thanks specifically to three Republican Senators, Pennsylvania windbag Arlen Specter and two Maineacs, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins – the Senate will finally pass something. What they will pass lacks the virtue of consistency or fidelity to principle. In fact, it’s plain stupid. It cuts the size of the stimulus, at a time when it should be increased; and its cuts are targeted to be maximally counter-productive. It reduces aid to states, increasing unemployment and diminishing services, and it provides tax credits for homebuyers in a way that will likely reinvigorate real estate speculation. This is where bipartisanship leads. The result is so bad that now even liberals who had been inclined to give Obama every benefit of the doubt are expressing outrage -- witness Paul Krugman’s column, this morning, in The New York Times.

Maybe it’s not too late for Obama’s bipartisan nonsense to stop. Maybe he will use his Elkhart, Indiana town meeting today or his prime time news conference tonight to change course. Obama must realize by now that a change is long past due. Even Larry Summers was up in arms yesterday, on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show, about the cut in funding for the states! On the other hand, maybe Obama is still too much in campaign mode not to continue making nice to Republican snakes in the grass in order to win the favor of the morons in the middle – not just the “undecided” voters who got his undivided attention before November 4, but now their legislative counterparts, the ones on both sides of “the aisle” whom the media deem “moderate.”

The next few days will tell.

Republicans to the Rescue

2009-02-06T04:47:00.000-08:00

Yet again. Democrats keep making the least of opportunities presented to them, but the Republicans keep them coming. There are signs, though, that even the Party of Pusillanimity has reached its limit, and that the “bipartisan” crap will soon end (at least for awhile). As Senator Charles (Schmucky Chucky) Schumer put it, “it takes two to tango, and the Republicans aren’t dancing.” If enough Democrats take his words to heart, maybe their flawed but indispensable stimulus package will finally happen.

Then the problem will just be that, in the face of an impending economic catastrophe, the Wall Street malefactors who brought it on -- or, rather, their “left” (Clintonite) wing – will be in charge of programs that don’t go nearly far enough and that hover too much around the old, failed ways. But that’s better (less bad) than a Republican concoction of barely warmed-over free market theology. After all, for voters who thought that with Obama they’d be getting “change” they could believe in, half a loaf – or, is it a third or only a quarter? – is better than continuing victimization by high-flying predators.

Daschle Out

2009-02-03T18:16:00.000-08:00

Judd Gregg was probably going to lose his Senate seat in 2010 anyway, so why not serve the ruling class better as Commerce Secretary? On the other hand, Tom Daschle always had the option of going back to feathering his own nest – which he decided to do once his tax shenanigans got to be a “distraction.” Like Judd, he won’t have to change masters. And he can also do good by going back to doing well – good, that is, for the insurance industry, Big Pharma and for the barons of corporate medicine. Still, Dashcle was one of Obama’s better (less bad) appointments. However I can’t say I’m disappointed. Obama probably isn’t disappointed either. After all, now he has yet another chance to appoint a Republican.

Worse and Worser

2009-02-03T05:04:00.000-08:00

Fortunately, Obama is running out of appointments. If he had many more to make, he might just disappear into the muck. Joe Biden was bad enough; then came the Clintonites, including the Better Half of that dreadful eponymous couple, then the Bush carryover Robert Gates, the Wall Street crowd Robert Rubin tutored – and, yes, a few beacons of “change,” but no genuine “progressives,” in peripheral positions. Now that making nice to Hillary has morphed into “bipartisanship,” Obama’s stick-it-to his-constituency style, lauded by the media for its “serenity,” has reached a new low. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire’s unabashedly rightwing Republican Senator, will be Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Gregg is not too rabid a social conservative – after all, his constituents are (comparatively) enlightened New Englanders – but on everything else, everything traditionally political, he’s as bad as all but the most ludicrous of the Republican Senators.

When rumors of a Gregg appointment surfaced last week, the thought was that Obama was being consummately shrewd. New Hampshire has a Democratic governor, John Lynch. Once Norm Coleman has exhausted all his legal machinations to keep comedian Al Franken out of the Senate, then the governor would appoint a Democrat – and voilà, a filibuster proof majority. But Mr. Bipartisan ain’t mean (Republican) enough. Evidently, he brokered a deal where, Democratic governor or not, a Republican would succeed the Republican. Maybe it will be a better Republican than Gregg – University of New Hampshire President Bonnie Newman has been mentioned and maybe she’d be less bad (who knows?) -- but a Republican nevertheless. The Obama-can-do-no-wrong crowd – yes, it still exists – claims, reading off of Rahm Emanuel’s talking points, that this is like stealing the other team’s quarterback. Yea, sure. It’s more like giving the other team the ball. But, then, what’s new!

Will Obama's Presidency End Next Week?

2009-01-30T04:29:00.000-08:00

Word is percolating up, from the murky recesses of Fox News, that Karl Rove will defy the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena to testify about the “politicization” of the Justice Department. Apparently, he has said he won’t show up. That’s what happened last May. Then, Bush instructed the Justice Department not to prosecute Rove for contempt or otherwise to enforce the subpoena. Rove was, after all, “Bush’s brain.” To the Bush administration’s crack legal minds, that sorry fact creates a “privilege” that must never be breached.

The same miscreants are still claiming that the privilege exists. All informed commentators agree that, legally, this is nonsense. But, if the recent past is any guide, it’s not out of the question that the “change” President, Mr. Bipartisan, might decide that it’s better “to move on” or “look forward” or whatever the cowardly phrase of the hour now is than to restore the rule of law. If he does, it will mark the day his Presidency died.

GOP vs. POP

2009-01-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

One can only admire the obstinacy of House Republicans, not one of whom voted for the stimulus package – despite the election, despite public opinion, despite Obama’s popularity, despite everything. When not just repeating the old shibboleths about the evils of taxing and spending, they justify themselves with arguments that are, at best, borderline incoherent. The latest version: that there isn’t enough spending on “infrastructure,” though there is also, somehow, too much spending and not enough tax cutting. In a word, they’re idiots. But they know how to leverage their power.

That’s what they did back in the early days of the Clinton administration. It’s how we got the Contract (with/on) America, and how the likes of Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich got to be so powerful. Their positions were no more coherent then, though they were more in tune with the Zeitgeist of that still Reaganite era. Nevertheless, they were able to take power and hold onto it until 2006, doing untold damage – in accord with the wishes of their benighted “base.”

If only the POP, the Party of Pusillanimity (or, equivalently, Pelosiism) was similarly diabolical! We might then have been spared some of the wreckage of the past two years; we might even have been relieved of Cheney and Bush a few months earlier. But, of course, that was out of the question – not only because the Democrats have a tradition of abject cowardice, but also because many of the new additions to their Congressional ranks –for example, New York’s (actually David Patterson’s) new Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand -- were Rahm Emanuel recruits, with views even farther than usual to the right of the Democratic “base.”

But the so-called Progressive Caucus was another matter. They could easily have done what the Gingrich-Armey gang did. But, for that, they’d have had to have broken free from the Pelosiites, and defied their erstwhile Progressive Caucus colleague, Nancy Pelosi. They were too dense or too nice or both. Finally now, at least the House Judiciary Committee, with John Conyers in the lead, is showing a little more backbone: they are investigating Bush era Justice Department abuses, and they’ve issued a subpoena for Karl Rove! Lets hope they don’t back down. More importantly, lets hope Barack Obama and Eric Holder don’t make them back down. By early next week, when "Bush's brain" is scheduled to testify (under oath!), we’ll see which way the wind is blowing.

Meanwhile, Obama seems to be turning into the anti-Gingrich by making unprecedented gestures of “niceness,” and self-defeating concessions, to his obstreperous, and not particularly loyal, opposition. Maybe there’s some shrewdness behind the madness. More likely, Team Obama is still in the campaign rut – going after the moronic middle that thinks (if that’s not too strong a word!) that “bipartisanship” will make everything right.

To this, the “base” that put Obama in office and gave him a mandate for “change” should say with one voice – “enough already. Mister President, everybody who will ever like you already does. If the election were held today, you’d double your landslide. So stop campaigning and start governing.” Step number one: learn from the GOP. They have no defensible principles and no coherent strategy. But because they are mean sons of bitches who know no scruples, they are and always have been tactical geniuses. Now is the time to be like them – to put away childish, “bipartisan” things, so that, as your choice for invocation speaker, His Holiness Reverend Rick, might say, “thy will be done.”

Transformative Presidencies

2009-01-27T07:35:00.000-08:00

America is good at producing leaders who are plodders, capable only of “stewarding” the regime from one crisis to another. Bill Clinton and the Bushes, both of them, are examples. All three were of a piece in being weak on what the first Bush called “the vision thing,” though they differed in competence (on that dimension Clinton and the first Bush stand on one side, the Bush boy on the other) and, at the margins, they plod along differently because they draw voters from different sectors of the population. In this respect, the now fallen House of Bush stood as one, while the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, because they pander to different constituencies, take a somewhat different path. Needless to say, neither Bill Clinton nor either of the Bushes led “transformative” presidencies – except in the sense that George W was so god awful that, despite himself, he “transformed” many things (for the worse). It is said – for example, by Barack Obama -- that Ronald Reagan was a “transformative” President. In reality, he too was a plodder – or, rather, since, like George W, though not to the same extent, he was ignorant and lazy -- his advisors and handlers were. In the late seventies, while Jimmy Carter was still the Plodder-in-Chief, capitalism began one of its periodic crises and reconstructions. Because the Zeitgeist happened to coincide with the interests of the capitalists to whom Reagan was most accountable, he, or rather his advisors and handlers, managed to transform a few things, not as many as widely imagined, just by ratcheting up the kind of plodding they inherited.

Then there are politicians who “grow” in office. They are the ones most likely to be genuine transformers. LBJ was an example, though he threw it all away on Vietnam. RFK might have been an even greater example, had he not been assassinated before he got the chance. According to a spate of recent articles, the historical icon of the moment, Abraham Lincoln, was yet another example. The Great Emancipator was not even in favor of abolishing slavery, at first. Neither was he ever a proponent of racial equality, though he might have become one, had he too not been assassinated. Transformative presidencies are rare because leaders of this sort are rare.

Obama will probably not grow in office; he doesn’t need to – he already “knows” enough. Like the Clintons, he is a politician above all. But, unlike them, he isn’t just a plodder – if only because he hasn’t been busy pandering 24/7 for nearly as long as they have. If the Clintons, either of them, ever knew enough to do more than plod, they forgot it all a long time ago.

The problem, then, is not to “educate” Obama; it’s to force him to use what he knows. Here, the most apt model is FDR, though there are many dissimilarities. By most accounts, FDR, unlike Obama, was an intellectual lightweight; and, having been born into privilege, he lacked Obama’s experience of the world. But FDR was capable of supporting (though not always obtaining) sweeping, transformative changes when circumstances necessitated bold departures in governance. The FDR model resembles plodding more than growing, but there is a qualitative difference, and not just because the circumstances – then, like now -- were more dire than usual. It takes a special – and rare – leader to see beyond this or that crisis to a point where they become agents of a “vision thing.” FDR was capable of that, at least to some extent.

Not every President who fits the FDR model more than the others is a hero in retrospect, though they are all, in varying degrees, transformers. Richard Nixon, the most criminal President ever before George W. Bush, is an example. Nixon set in motion processes that defused an impending crisis, of potentially devastating proportions, in race relations. He transformed the scene he inherited. He did it mainly through cooptation, and so the consequences were not unequivocally for the good – a point to which growing numbers of incarcerated black males can attest. On the other hand, Nixon did make “integration” more than just a formal right, and he did qualitatively enlarge and transform the black middle class. To a considerable extent, Nixon’s transformative presidency made Barack Obama’s presidency possible. Still, the man was a crook and a war criminal – to a degree that makes even Dick Cheney seem benign.

Thanks to the neo-Hooverite policies of the Bushes, the last one especially, but also thanks to Clinton and Reagan and even Jimmy Carter, Obama faces an FDR moment. Will he rise to the occasion? The evidence so far is not unambiguously hopeful. Obama drifted so far to the right during the transition period that it is a wonder that Obamamania still flourishes on the left. Who to the left of Bob Gates can deny that Obama’s national security and foreign policy appointments were dreadful, and that his economic policy team is not much better? Nevertheless, since taking office, Obama does seem to have gotten off on the right foot – at least so far as the headlines go. For anyone who takes the trouble to read the fine print (about Guantanamo, for example), the situation is less clear. Still, by undoing some of Bush’s most egregiously retrograde and lawless policies to the extent that he is able on his own, Obama has redeemed himself somewhat, at least for now.

Thus there is indeed a possibility that the Obama presidency will be like Roosevelt’s or better – if his “base,” the masses of people who voted for him and who are still in the thrall of Obamamania, rise to the occasion themselves. Obama may also continue to get help from the Republicans – not because they’re disposed to cooperate, but because they are not. If the Greater Evil Party leadership remains sufficiently obstinate, as they show every sign of doing in the negotiations around the impending stimulus package, they may force Obama to come to his senses and abandon his vaunted, self-defeating “bipartisanship.” But no matter how stuck in their ways Republicans remain, the main burden is on us, on “we, the people.”

We should fight on every front – on Israel/Palestine, on health care, on a host of environmental issues, and so on. But there are at least two crucial areas where Obama seems adamant, so far, in resisting what is clearly urgent and right.

One is, of course, bringing Bush et. al. to justice. If nothing else, prosecuting them for torture is a no brainer. There is no question that, under both U.S. law and international law, torture is a war crime. Bush and Cheney both have confessed publicly to this crime; Cheney has even boasted of it. Should Obama not prosecute them, he’ll be guilty of even worse than complicity – Nancy Pelosi style. He’ll be an accessory to a war crime. He knows this well enough now; he doesn’t have to “grow” to find it out. We must make it clear to him that “we, the people” know it too, and that we will hold him to it.

Then there’s the Afghanistan War. Obama and his national security team are on track for escalating that failed and wrong-headed venture. So far, the so-called peace movement has given him and them a free pass on this. But if Obama, the peace candidate, keeps the Bush wars going, and especially if he makes them (or, at least one of them) worse, it will all be finished; his transformative presidency will fail. Thanks to Bush et. al., plodding is not now an alternative; and it is not in Obama’s nature anyway. Therefore the question now is: will Obama go the FDR route, or will he end up like LBJ. To a very large extent, the answer is up to us.

Way to Go, Big Dave

2009-01-23T04:28:00.000-08:00

The race to the bottom is back. After playing the Caroline Kennedy appointment for all its was worth, NY Governor David Patterson, the “Decider,” is reportedly about to name Kirsten Gillibrand to “Madam Secretary’s” just vacated Senate seat. Gillibrand was a corporate lawyer in New York City from a politically connected family. She was recruited two years ago by, you guessed it, Rahm Emanuel to run for Congress in an up-state, largely rural Republican district. Like so many other Emanuel picks, she is to the right of a party that is far to the right of its base. But Gillibrand was not the only “blue dog Democrat” on Patterson’s list. Evidently, he chose her over the others to placate the “women’s vote.” Shades of the master strategist John McCain, Sarah Palin’s Big Dave. But, in the end, who knows what he was thinking! Maybe it’s not as patronizing as it seems; maybe he just thinks that the way to beat the increasingly repellent Rudy Giuliani in 2010 is to field a co-thinker. Maybe he thinks, not unreasonably, that Gillibrand is a good match with Charles (Schmucky Chucky) Schumer or a worthy successor to Slick Willy’s wife. Remember, though, it could have been Caroline. Maybe someday we’ll learn why it isn’t. Whatever the reasons, be sure that the clownish Patterson is part of the story.

Not Caroline

2009-01-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

The real story will no doubt emerge in time. For now, it seems odd, to say the least, that Caroline Kennedy would have withdrawn from consideration for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat because she is worried about her Uncle Teddy’s health. If anything, that would be a reason to persevere. In any case, it’s a disappointment. Had Kennedy gotten the post, had she done well (as she would have since her uncle would assure that she had a more than capable staff), and had she developed the requisite political skills (which she now conspicuously lacks), she could have gone on to win the seat the traditional way in 2010, and again in 2012, when Hillary Clinton’s term expires. Then she’d have been well placed to run in 2016 to become the first woman President of the United States. How sweet it would be if that Senate seat was indeed the launching pad to the White House – but not for Hillary!

How much sweeter too if, before too long, Hillary’s husband’s machinations lead to her untimely departure from the Secretary of State position for which she is so poorly suited. Bill Clinton will never be brought to justice – for killing nearly a million Iraqis through sanctions, for his crimes against the peace and his support for ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, for the death from the air that he visited from time to time upon defenseless populations – but a pale semblance of justice would be forthcoming if he and his “entitled” better half are made to depart from the political scene. That would have happened, had only Obama not been so “magnanimous.” But the alleged divinity, the One all those snake oil salesmen (and women) at the National Cathedral yesterday entreated, works in mysterious ways. Until the news of Caroline’s withdrawal broke, it seemed that She just might have something up Her sleeve that would put Obama’s mistake to advantage. Now, alas, it’s clear that that too won’t happen; that notwithstanding the pronouncements of those ecumenical charlatans, Providence is decidedly overrated.

If Only

2009-01-20T06:35:00.001-08:00

At the end of more than a few episodes of “Get Smart,” Maxwell Smart would say something like: “if only they had done all that for niceness.” Those words keep coming to mind as millions throng Washington for Obama’s inauguration. If only they had come to stop Bush’s wars or to demand single-payer health insurance or to demand that the United States force Israel to stop visiting death and destruction upon Gaza.

Even so, there is much to celebrate today. It has to do with race. After all, Obama will be sworn in as President in a city that, just sixty years ago, was still officially segregated! That he won the election shows not only that “change” is possible. It also shows that, despite our not very democratic electoral institutions, we the people can bring it about – at a pace that our political class and their media flunkies can hardly comprehend.

That Cheney and Bush are about to be dispatched is also something to celebrate. May we see then next in shackles and orange jump suits! That’s an exhilarating thought for persons with a sense of justice, but also a sobering one. The Forgiver-in-Chief is likely to let his predecessors and their underlings get away with worse, much worse, than murder -- for the sake of “bipartisanship” and “moving on.” It’s the same mistake, magnified, that Bill Clinton made when he assumed office at a time when it was still possible to prosecute Reagan and (poppy doc) Bush and their underlings for the crimes of Iran-Contra. But, of course, Clinton, like his wife, was and is an opportunist slug. One hopes (still) for better from Obama. But as he relentlessly reempowers Clintonites and pals around with Republicans, the chances of getting more get dimmer by the day.

Maybe, though, just maybe the throngs will take consciousness of their power in numbers. Then, maybe, they’ll be back to stop the war in Iraq that Obama may not end or the one in Afghanistan that he vows to make worse (under the guise of waging it more “wisely.”) Maybe, they’ll be back to demand a sane health insurance policy!

On Inauguration Day in 1993, hardly anyone thought that the Clinton administration would continue the “Reagan Revolution” (actually, an anti-New Deal, anti-Great Society counter-revolution). But it did – as much as it could. We must take care to assure that Obama doesn’t do something similar by attempting to realize the neo-con’s vision for the Middle East – projecting U.S. and Israeli military power to divide, weaken, and conquer the peoples of the region. Should matters drift that way, the Democrats, as always, will be worse than useless. Only we the people, united and in immense numbers, will be able to stop him.

Today’s celebrations will be truly “historic” to the extent they encourage a sense of that power, peoples’ power, to emerge!