The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to be running an ad fighting back against Barack Bush's tax cuts for the rich.

This is exactly what liberals and progressives should be doing. Confronting corrupt politicians, regardless of party, is the only way we are going to restore democracy and freedom to America.

Continuing Bush's tax cuts for the rich is inexcusable. It is typical of what we have experienced from corrupt rightists like Bill Clinton, who cut taxes for the rich himself by cutting capital gains taxes.



Here's the embed code if you want to run this on your blog:
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They are raising funds to run this ad.

You also can sign the petition against Barack Bush's tax cuts for the rich.

 

Some corporate shills have been trying to create the media perception that the only people who opposes the highly carcinogenic body scanners in airports are Glenn Beck loving teabaggers. Nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, liberal organizations have been opposing these monstrosities on civil liberties grounds for some time now. Hopefully, awareness of the carcinogenic nature of the porno scanners will become more widely known as well.

The Privacy Coalition has a list of organizations that signed onto a letter sent last year to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano opposing the XRay scanners. Most of the groups that signed on were liberal. Here are the liberal groups that signed onto the letter.

American Civil Liberties Union
Americans for Democratic Action
Center for Democracy and Technology
Center for Digital Democracy
Constitution Project
Consumer Action
Consumer Travel Alliance
Consumer Watchdog
Consumer Federation of America
Cyber Privacy Project
Discrimination and National Security Initiative
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Fairfax County Privacy Council
Feminists for Free Expression
Florida Breast Cancer Resource Network
Identity Project (PapersPlease.org)
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Workrights Institute
Pain Relief Network
Patient Privacy Rights
Privacy Activism
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
Privacy Times
The Multiracial Activist
Transgender Law Center
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
World Privacy Forum

The scanners are blatantly unconstitutional. They are unreasonable searches and they certainly don't involve search warrants. The use of the carcinogenic porno scanners is based on the presumption that every person who flies is a terrorist and must prove their innocence, which violates the American principle of innocent until proven guilty.

Even more important is the fact that the scanner' use will result in a massive increase in cancer rates in this country in another ten to twenty years. I personally don't want to be part of that spike in cancer cases? Do you?

The pathetic thing is that we are throwing the lives of thousands if not millions of Americans as well as our constitutional rights in order to try to get a dubious degree of safety from a tiny risk, terrorism. Unlike terrorism, where the risk is remote, cancer is the second leading cause of death in this country.

Photo: stephanie says
 

Before I get to this particular activist campaign, I thought I would give what appears to be the answer to the question that piqued my curiosity. Who is the ghostwriter of Shrub's book? (The Daily Beast 3/9/10)

How did 28-year-old ex-Yalie and former speechwriter Christopher Michel become the man behind Dubya's memoirs? Bryan Curtis talks to Bush chief of staff Andrew Card and former speechwriters Matt Latimer and Marc Thiessen about how Michel went from Barbara Bush’s classmate to the confidant he dubbed “Junior Bird Man.”

Now, onto the substance.

Various activists are calling for people taking Shrub's Bush, which most bookstores are misfiling, and putting it in Crime sectionsm where it belongs. From CODEPINK's 11/12/10 press release: (bolding mine)

With the release of George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points, CODEPINK activists are mobilizing throughout the country to make sure Bush is greeted by protests. They have already "greeted him" at book signings in Dallas and Milwaukee, and will be outside his events in Miami this weekend as well as at the opening of Bush's Presidential Library in Dallas next week. Activists are also descending on bookstores to move Decision Points into the Crime section at local bookstores, and are downloading special "This Book's Author is a War Criminal" bookmarks to put in each copy.

"With his book, media appearances and the opening of his library in Dallas, George Bush is being treated as a respected statesman instead of what he really is: a war criminal," said CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin. "That's why we, the people, have to set the record straight."

Bill Quigley, writing on Michael Moore's website, discussed the true crime nature of the book as well. Somebody also started a Facebook Group which proposes moving the book where it belongs.

It's odd how something as innocuous as properly filing a book in a bookstore or library has become subversive in our incredibly censored and propagandized society.

As CODEPINK pointed out in their press release, there is a very serious issue behind this rather mild act of restoring correct order to book collections.

"High officials must be held accountable for criminal acts," says CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans. "Otherwise, it sends a clear message to future administrations--including the current one--that they are not required to uphold the basic tenets of human rights and international law."

Image: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

 

Photo: Muffett

Chris Hedges used to be a corporate propagandist for the New York Times. Now, he writes books for the same corporate elites, pushing their agenda in snide and cynical ways.

Hedges found a novel minority group to scapegoat, a classic fascist technique, in his book I Don't Believe in Atheists. In that book, Hedges coopts the language of the peace movement to demonize everyone who abstains from participating in the single biggest cause of war, religion. Of course, the wars that Hedges promotes through his efforts to promote religion are highly profitable to his corporate overlords.

Now, Hedges' is attacking a favorite target of corporations and the extreme right, those of us who are liberal. He uses the same techniques that the right has used for far too long to try to enforce the political hegemony of corporations and the financial elites. The only significant difference between Hedges' and Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh is that he hijacks the language of the left to promote the same agenda.

What is one of Hedges' favorite techniques to demonize liberals? He parrots the right's claims of which institutions are "liberal," institutions that sometimes fail to remotely resemble anything liberal. Check out this passage from Hedges' latest propaganda tome, The Death of the Liberal Class.

The liberal class refuses to recognize the obvious because it does not want to lose its comfortable and often well-paid perch. Churches and universities—in elite schools such as Princeton, professors can earn $180,000 a year—enjoy tax-exempt status as long as they refrain from overt political critiques. Labor leaders make lavish salaries and are considered junior partners within corporate capitalism as long as they do not speak in the language of class struggle. Politicians, like generals, are loyal to the demands of the corporate state in power and retire to become millionaires as lobbyists or corporate managers. Artists who use their talents to foster the myths and illusions that bombard our society live comfortably in the Hollywood Hills.

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions—the pillars of the liberal class—have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. The media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

Hedges' attacks on universities remind me a lot of the attacks on universities by Pinochet and other murderous tools of the global elites. This dubious critique is rather sneaky, though. It's no big secret that university administrators are cautious and rightist in their approach. That led to the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. However, Hedges' claims about the faculty and staffs in academia are wildly broad. Faculty and staff in colleges and universities are still major centers of resistance to the corporate hegemony. Hedges often lionizes Noam Chomsky in order to try to bolster his leftist credentials. Yet, Chomsky is a professor at an elite university.

Hedges might have a point if his critiques of academia were limited to Business Administration and Economics departments. However, Hedges isn't interested in analysis. Demonization of liberals is the tired and childish game he prefers.

Now, let's look at the other institutions that Hedges labels as "liberal," including media, the church, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions." The corporate media are rightist, largely due to media concentration that squelches the competition necessary for liberals to be heard. To blame liberals for a rightist media is the height of Palinesque political burlesque.

As for the church, is Hedges joking? Religion is, by its very nature, reactionary, backwards, elitist, and corrupt. When religious individuals do social good, they inevitably go against the tenets of their religions. Religion is no more "liberal" than Hedges is "progressive" or "leftist."

Hedges also shows tremendous ignorance about the Democratic Party and its history. Most Democratic voters are liberal or progressive, but the institution itself barely can be considered a real political party. It always has functioned as a networking society for politicians, special interests, and their employees. Claiming the Democratic Party as a liberal institution would be comical if Hedges wasn't using such claims to attack people who actually are liberal.

As for the arts and organized labor, both are liberal institutions. Both do offer resistance to the wealthy elites that Hedges criticizes while doing their dirty work. Both resist the power of those elites while under a state of siege that has gone on at least since 1980. If Hedges thinks those two liberal institutions have failed or dead, how does that offer any kind of resistance to anything? Why does Hedges go out of his way to weaken those institutions even further instead of calling for improved funding and laws to make them stronger forces for democracy? For instance, issuing a clarion call for the Employee Free Choice Act would have done a lot more good over the past two years than incessant whining about organized labor not doing enough. Hedges seems completely impervious to the concept of solidarity.

Of course, Hedges' love/fear affair with the teabaggers, which he espouses on nearly every interview I hear him on, is hugely beneficial to the corporate and wealthy interests behind that scam. There is nothing that is authentic to the teabagger scam. The gullible who are fooled by it often have legitimate rage, but they have allowed themselves to be misdirected by the oldest tool in the American elites' economic playbook: racism.

Racism kept poor whites siding with slaveowners who were screwing them over, though obviously nowhere near as badly as the slaves. Racism was used, even more often in the South, to divide and conquer labor organizing. Misogyny and heterosexism have been added to the corporatist playbook in the 20th Century. Has Hedges resisted these diversionary tactics that also oppress the majority of people in this country?

Nope.

Instead of attacking racism as the central organizing tactic behind the teabagger scam, Hedges has a history of a drooling fascination with white supremacy. Here's a passage from his "Liberals Are Useless" rant. (Yes, I know, it's really Chris Hedges who is worse than useless.)

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

Why is it that the weakest and most sniveling of men always have the silliest macho fantasies? Why does Hedges go for the most ridiculous divide and conquer tactics and pretend that people of color, who also are often working class, and liberals are the ones abusing the working class? Hedges is doing the bidding of the corporate overlords who make life far too much of an abusive, awkward, and painful experience for everyone who isn't rich.

I've already written about how Hedges goes along with the agenda of his former employer, the New York Times, to wildly exaggerate the supposed power of the teabaggers in order to try to intimidate liberals into going along with the rightist takeover of American politics. Teabagging Inc. is the real life equivalent of the apocryphal Potemkin Villages in exaggerated accounts of Russian history. Teabagging Inc is a fake village filled with just enough real idiots to make the scam appear credible. Hedges' talks about proto fascist elements in America. They certainly do exist, but they are the corporate orchestrators of the teabagger scam, not the suckers who fall for it enough to participate in the staged and inauthentic protests.

For someone who pretends to be morally superior to liberals, Hedges nihilism and defeatism make his political involvement not merely useless, but counterproductive. Calls to action would be vastly superior to Hedges' incessant whining. Exposing the scams of the right would be a productive and worthwhile stance by Hedges. Yet, Hedges chooses to act as a cog in the same corporatist machine instead.

Chris Hedges and Jon Stewart play disturbingly similar roles, with equally tedious behavior. Hedges' is corporate America's reliable "leftist" who devotes all of his time to savaging the left, while Stewart is the same elites' reliable "liberal," who ridicules and attempts to marginalize liberals and liberal points of view. Both of them spew bigoted nonsense to further the corporatist divide and conquer plan.

Neither of them are fooling me in the slightest.

 

Ned Lamont's primary defeat in Connecticut is certainly a setback for him. He defeated Traitor Joe in the 2006 Senate primary, only to lose now to a lesser known candidate while running for governor. It might be tempting to think it was the result of a failure by his campaign, but any tactical failings by Lamont were minor compared to his main difficulty:

Liberal and progressive voters weren't motivated to show up at the polls.

If Obama, Reid, Pelosi, etc had been going on a two year campaign to deliberately outrage and demoralize the left of the Democratic Party, they couldn't have done a better job of it. They have governed like Bush/Cheney/Palin/Limbaugh/Gingrich/Beck Republicans, and then they act all shocked when liberal and progressive voters are thoroughly disgusted with them. The recent tantrum by Robert Gibbs is symbolic of the broader arrogance and cluelessness among Party leaders.

Midterm elections are about mobilizing a party's base, yet the Democrats have slimed organized labor, healthcare activists, queers, women, people of color, environmentalists, and peace activists. The DC Democrats have consistently put Wall St. ahead of Main St., just like the Goppers.

The only tactic the Democrats seem to have left is negative campaigning against the Republicans. The GOP's candidates certainly leave plenty of room for negative campaigning, but negative campaigning doesn't motivate voter turnout. In fact, it tends to reduce voter turnout, which historically has helped Republicans.

Will the Democrats heed the wakeup call that Lamont's defeat represents? I seriously doubt it. They are just too bigoted and too bought and paid for by corporate interests.

 

The corporate media never thought much of Cindy Sheehan. And, when she started criticizing pro war Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2007 and 2008, partisan Democrats on the blogs often either attacked her or ignored her for holding the same opinions and values they praised her for when Republicans controlled all three branches of government.

It's really an embarrassment. Sheehan is still one of the brightest and most committed activists for peace and social justice issues. She should be a leader in liberal thought and action, yet liberals too tethered to the Democrats are ignoring her or resenting her for speaking out against politicians like President Obama who go against the values and policies supported by grassroots Democrats.

In a recent blog posting of hers, Sheehan makes numerous points. Here are some of the most telling.

To some of us, the problem is not so much that Obama has proven to be a dismal failure—because we know that he has been a huge success to the ruling class and corporations--but that partisan politics always overshadows common sense and true peace. We lost a lot of time giving Obama a “chance,” and thousands have lost their lives and their ways of life.

I was outraged when, after three days in office, Obama authorized a drone strike into Northern Pakistan that killed dozens of civilians, but I was excoriated for being outraged. I was devastated when he announced an increase in troops (3 times so far) to Afghanistan, and attacked for not caring about Afghan women (the ones our Empire are “protecting” by killing them and their children). I was laughed out of town when I was infuriated that Obama had declared himself “Judge, jury and executioner” of American citizens. People who formerly supported me told me to “shut up and go away, you have had your 15 minutes of fame.”

In some ways, its similar to the way that Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake has been the target of a smear campaign by the HMOs, the health insurers, and their Democratic enablers. She has been attacked by the notoriously misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and rightist DailyKos and by other "A List" Democratic bloggers for sticking to the same positions that they advocated on healthcare before Obama, Pelosi, and Reid demanded that everyone go along with a wealthcare bill that robs the vast majority of the country and hands the booty over to the super rich. Some blogs featured wild and unsubstantiated headlines claiming that Hamsher was part of the teabagger movement even though the position of the Democratic politicians on healthcare was far closer to those of the teabaggers than Hamsher's. The body of the postings didn't live up to the salacious headlines, but it created a partisan feeding frenzy among naive left bloggers who wanted so much to believe in a party apparatus that had abandoned them.

Meanwhile, the brunt of suffering under the healthcare system and the crap economy is being inflicted on the middle class and the poor. The rich are doing fabulously well. The Democratic politicians are doing precious little change this.

It's worse abroad. Things for the Iraqi and Afghan people keep deteriorating. The reconstruction still isn't being done, but more destruction piles up. Obama hasn't been withdrawing from Iraq. He's been replacing regular troops with mercenaries who commit more atrocities while costing the US Treasury far more money. He's been hugely ramping up the US presence in Afghanistan, using a strategy of killing civilians because our troops are so overburdened and burnt out by far too many deployments in south and southwest Asia they can do little else at this point.

Really, where are the peaceniks? Where are the liberals with enough common sense and human decency to fight back against "Democrats" like Obama, Reid, and Pelosi who keep treating us like shit?

Photo: D.C.Atty

 

The highest duty of any patriot is to work to make his or her country the best it can possibly. That represents the highest value of liberalism, and liberals have fought for generations to do just that. We need to ask ourselves something.

Are we still living up to this standard?

There are some rather unpleasant realities that very few people in our society want to face. There is very little difference between the politicians on matters of substance. Whether you are talking about Barack Bush or George W. Bush, Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi, you are talking about a set of politicians whose values and political agendas are almost identical. They vary in terms of style and the ability to coherently articulate positions, but they all have pushed for same substantive policies the overwhelming majority of the time. Those policies are overwhelmingly rightist.

Spectator sports and brand loyalty marketing have conned people all over the political spectrum into picking teams or selecting brands and obediently going with them without giving much thought to the whole process. Rationalization and denial have become national pastimes.

In the real world, the differnces between the Democrats and Republicans are no more meaningful than those between Coke and Pepsi, the Yankees and the Mets, Dodge and the former Plymouth, or the Patriots and the Jets. Yet, people beat their chests and root, root, root. During campaigns they buy, buy, buy.

The political discourse is poisoned by this not only in terms of substance, but also in terms of style. Having little important to disagree with from Democrats like Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, Republicans just keep getting nastier, more bigoted, and crazier.

Why are most liberals going along with this? Why aren't we questioning more? Why aren't most of us swing voters with a Green Party that agrees with us on the vast majority of issues? Why do so many on the left pretend that voting for the overwhelming majority of Democrats is anything but a wasted vote?

We need to start thinking critically and logically. We aren't helping ourselves or our country by going along with this rightist crap.

 

Photo: Damian Kettlewell for Vancouver-False Creek

Corrupt, far right "Democrat" Blanche Lincoln faces a Green Party challenger in her Senate race. (Independent Political Report 6/9/10)

Democrat Blanche Lincoln and Republican John Boozman, winners of their parties’ primaries for this year’s US Senate race in Arkansas, will face Green Party candidate John Gray, retired engineer and current Mayor of Greenland, AR. Lincoln, a leading beneficiary of retail giant Wal-Mart who was supported in a close primary race by President Barack Obama, has drawn the ire of progressives for her opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act and her efforts to weaken health care reform.

John Gray, the Arkansas Green Party candidate, is running on a platform that includes: enacting a Medicare For All single payer health care system, ending corporate personhood, fixing trade to make America self-sufficient and eliminate the trade deficit, breaking up “too big to fail” corporations, and ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

You can learn more at John Gray's campaign website. I particularly like his proposal to bring back the tariff system.

If liberals limit our options to the Democrats, they will be able to take us for granted just like Blanche Lincoln and the Clintons have been doing for years. We have to make Democrats earn our votes.

 

Chris Hedges is not particularly well regarded among most atheists, and with good reason. His anti atheist bigotry and scapegoating have become legendary. I could discuss his fanatical bigotry at length, but there are other elements of his attitudes and ideology that deserve critique.

One of the things that I find so disturbing about Hedges is the ahistorical nature of his analysis. Let's look at his commentary on British Petroleum and the people that enable it. The opening sentence may be more literate than the rantings of Sarah Palin, but it is equally ill informed as the rankest Palin nonsense. (TruthDig 5/17/10)

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die.

This is even more amazing given the fact that Hedges' worked as a reporter in the former Yugoslavia. (The fact that he worked for a vapid, rightist publication like the New York Times does make it a bit less surprising, though.) In another commentary, he engages in a particularly ludicrous example of economic reductionism, claiming that the Balkan War was caused entirely by economic collapse, rather than ethnic hatreds. Hedges' conveniently neglects the fact that the most influential cause of the carnage in what once was Yugoslavia was religion. The brutal totalitarian regime under Tito was able to keep the lid on those religious hatreds, but they exploded when the Soviet Union fell and when the charismatic strongman was no longer there.

Hedges has written passionately about the death and suffering there, but he has neglected to even notice that the people inflicting the suffering did so out of their belief "that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value." Their notion of the sacred was as intense and meaningful to them as Hedges' view of the sacred is to him.

One could provide plenty of other examples of the brutal and murderous nature of belief in the sacred. Many histories of slavery in the US have conveniently failed to mention the sacred component of supporting slavery in a society that believed in a Christian Bible the endorses the monstrous practice. In every place where slavery was abolished, the vast majority of the clergy opposed abolition, and quoted the Bible to support their notion of the sacred. This was just as true during the campaigns for abolition in Northern states as it was during the treasonous Confederacy. The genocide of the vast majority of the indigenous people of this country was as sacred to the most of the killers as anything Hedges' holds sacred.

Ultimately, the word "sacred" has no basis in fact, reason, or observation. It can mean anything to anyone, and once asserted, justifies an absolutist pursuit in whatever direction it is assigned. That is incredibly dangerous.

However, Hedges' assertion of the sacred, also has another counterproductive element to it. It allows him to project a sense of superiority over the people who don't have his particular sense of the sacred. This is by no means Hedges' only effort to establish how much better he is than everyone else.

Aside from atheists, Hedges seems to assert the greatest sense of superiority over liberals, of all people. In his sermon Liberals Are useless, Hedges has this to say about liberals.

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

Anyone who doesn't see the irony in the last sentence hasn't read much of Hedges' work. Anyone who has actually worked with liberals who are challenging the permanent war economy can easily grasp how ludicrous this caricature is.

Even when liberals do make the mistakes Hedges criticizes us for, they do so in a system that Hedges is very much a part of. Most liberals are dissatisfied with the Democrats, but the Republicans always manage to be a little worse in their deeds and truly terrifying in their words. The corporate media that Hedges used to be very much a part of, try to narrow the possible choices down to such a narrow range that the conservative Democrats who deserve Hedges' wrath often seem to be the only reasonable alternative.

One of the most useful tools of frightening liberals into staying in line has been the largely Astroturf teabagger "movement." The National Equality March, which was hastily organized and which had a very low budget and little if any corporate support, turned out 200,000 people in DC, ten to one hundred times the turnout for the teabagger rallies in our nation's capital. Those teabagger rallies were much better funded, and an army of rightist media elites promoted the shit out of them. Yet, the corporate media has wildly exaggerated the strength of the teabagger scam, focusing on the most scary sounding fringe elements to try to make liberals witless with fear.

It certainly scared Hedges senseless. In his commentary, "Is America ‘Yearning for Fascism’?," Hedges engages in sensationalistic fear mongering that puts his former corporate media colleagues to shame. If you took what he wrote seriously, you would think that brownshirts were coming for us all within the next few months.

Hedges is quite correct that there is a lot of perfectly legitimate anger in this country, and he also is correct in noting that liberals have been too frightened to effectively speak to that anger. But, he fails to see that the Palin's and Beck's of this country have been wildly ineffective at getting their followers to do more than watch their shows and buy their products. The teabaggers are a paper tiger, one with a paper trail to corporate lobbyists and PR people. Yet, Hedges would have us believe that they are an enormous army poised to take over the country.

Hedges perpetuates so much disinformation that permeates the corporate media. Then, he sets himself up as morally superior to liberals and others who base their decisions on that very same bogus information. Hedges is worse than useless. He is a major part of the problem. Chris Hedges has unwittingly played a function surprisingly similar to that of Judith Miller, though his intent is different. Hedges functions as a cog in the same machine that keeps many liberals doing exactly what Hedges condemns them for. Sigh.

Hedges' rhetoric about liberals not being willing to step "out of the mainstream" is bizarre and counterproductive as well. On the vast majority of issues, liberal views are the mainstream. Most people are against the Iraq War, and the healthcare plan that consistently polled the highest was Medicare for All. On queer issues, which the readers of this blog are usually the most familiar, the only issue where the nation is deeply divided is same sex marriage recognition. On the rest of queer civil rights disputes, the overwhelming majority of Americans are on the liberal side of the issue.

Tricking liberals into thinking that we are isolated and marginal is one of things that corporate media do best. Yet, Hedges seems incapable of stepping out of the mindset promoted by his former employers to see this.

The aspect of Hedges' discourse that pisses me off the most is its passivity, resulting from its sterile, faux moral superiority. Instead of working to point out the actual facts and proposing useful actions that people can take, Hedges isolates himself in his little bubble and pontificates downward at the rest of us. Telling people they are useless doesn't motivate them to take action or even look for alternative points of view. Hedges really, really needs to read some Howard Zinn.

"TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

Sometimes I wonder if liberals should all bow in the direction of Hedges just once, say "we are in awe of your superiority," and feed his ego in the hopes that he would try to write or do something productive for a change.

 

Last week, President Obama went to Iowa, which always has been friendly territory to him, to market his wealthcare plan. If you look at the text of the speech, it's amusing to see just how much bullshit he included with it. Let's look at some of the lies.

Lie:
"If people like their plan, they will keep their plan."

Facts:
The wealthcare bill will seriously damage the plans of at least two groups of people with coverage now. The plans won't be even close to the same.

1) People on "Medicare Advantage" (the HMO version of Medicare) will face dramatic reductions in services because of funding cuts. Even worse, the HMO version of Medicare is a trap. Once people are in that version, they can never go back to regular Medicare. The tradeoff of a lack of premiums and lower quality care already existing in "Medicare Advantage" mean that the population of seniors most likely to be hurt by these cuts are the elderly poor.

2) People With Mediocre Plans, which the corporate media call "Cadillac Care" (they must really, really hate Cadillacs) will face cutbacks in care, higher premiums, and higher copays when the excise taxes on those plans go into effect in 2018.

---

Lie:
"The days of the insurance industry running roughshod over the American people are over."

Facts:
1) The insurance companies and HMOs wrote this bill. They already have started discussing the loopholes they put into place which will keep them from having to cover sick children.

2) The regulations in this bill require sick people and their families to enforce them. If they are relatively lucky, they can go to court. The HMOs and insurance companies have all the best lawyers in the field. However, if the contract for the HMO or insurance company requires arbitration, then people are forced to go to an arbitration system that is completely rigged in favor of the corporations.

---

Lie:
"And so if you already have insurance, this reform will make it more secure and more affordable."

Fact:
Every time insurance companies have managed to get laws passed making any kind of coverage mandatory, they have shot premiums through the roof.

---

Lie: (worded differently in different parts of the speech)
"And costs will come down for families, businesses, and the federal government, reducing our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades."

"But we have built into the law all sorts of measures to assure that in years to come, health care inflation, which has been rising about three times as fast as people's wages, will start slowing."

Fact:
This cynically ignores the fact that instituting heavy fines for not buying defective insurance will cause premiums to go up dramatically.

---

Deception:
"And I want seniors to know: despite what some have said, these reforms will not cut your guaranteed benefits."

Fact:
This bill will result in cutbacks for many in benefits not guaranteed by law. (This is a trick more than a direct lie, though the intent to deceive is the same.)

---

Two Lies in One Sentence:
"Once this reform is implemented, health insurance exchanges will be created, a competitive marketplace where uninsured people and small businesses will finally be able to purchase affordable, quality insurance."

Facts:
The new lie contradicts the fact that HMOs and health insurers don't provide quality insurance. They provide something which is universally known to be a defective product. Even with the subsidies, the insurance won't be affordable for the overwhelming majority of the uninsured. Insurance will become more expensive for people who already have it.

(I should note that, in this sentence, Obama reminds me of one of the hucksters who sell crap products on cable TV as "affordable, quality" products. They leave out that the junk they are selling is "not available in stores" because the stores don't want to deal with the returns.)

---

I'm not going to pretend that I'm surprised by a politician lying. But, what really is surprising is that so many liberal blogs aren't calling President Obama on it. This is the same wealthcare proposal Bush and the Republicans would have pushed through if they were in power, and the sales pitches would be only modestly different.

Politics isn't team sports. Policies have very real impacts on peoples' lives, and that has to be taken a lot more seriously than many blogs on the left are doing so far. We need to stop cheering on the donkeys vs. the elephants and pay attention to what's actually going on.

 

Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the infamous Phonycrat spin factory, the Daily Kos, now has Dennis Kucinich in his crosshairs because Kucinich is committing the ultimate offense of not being bought and paid for by the HMOs and health insurers.

From Democracy Now! 3/11/10:

MARKOS MOULITSAS: [I’m going to hold] people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of healthcare. And I don’t care if you’re a Republican or you’re a conservative Democrat or you’re somebody like Dennis Kucinich. The fact is, this does a heck of a lot for a lot of people. And like I said, it’s not perfect, it definitely needs to be improved, but it’s a first step. And God knows, it’s taken us a long time to even get our toe in the door, given the corporate interests that are arrayed against any kind of real reform. So I think this is a first step. It’s definitely not the end of the path. It’s not the ideal solution. But we are—our foot’s in the door. And if somebody like Kucinich wants to block that, I find that completely reprehensible.

And he’s elected, not to run for president, which he seems to do every four years. He’s not elected to grandstand and to—and to give us this ideal utopian society. He’s elected to represent the people of his district, and he’s not representing the uninsured constituents in his district by pretending to take the high ground here. What he’s doing, he’s undermining this reform. He’s making common cause with the Republicans. And I think that’s a perfect excuse and a rationale for a primary challenge.

Only a true rightist nutjob would say that voting to fine uninsured people for not being able to pay astronomic premiums is "representing" them. Moulitsas isn't some naive blogger who posts a couple of times a week and doesn't have the time to find out what this wealthcare bill is actually about. That guy lives and breathes politics. He is perfectly aware of what the wealthcare bill actually does.

1) Fines people for not being able to afford health insurance.

2) Makes it possible for the HMOs and health insurance companies to add astronomical premium hikes to already sky high rates.

3) Cuts life saving care for people on Medicare.

4) Puts into place unconscionable restrictions on abortion. (Yes, I know the Stupak restrictions are even worse, but that's still no excuse.)

5) Creates tax penalties for employers that provide mediocre health plans instead of terrible ones. (The mediocre plans are what the corporate media refer to as "Cadillac Care.")

6) Shovels a lot more of our nation's wealth in the direction of the HMOs and health insurers and away from the middle class and the poor.

Contrary to the DLC/HMO spin, this wealthcare bill is not about "incrementalism." It's a gigantic plunge backward.

Moulitsas' spin on healthcare and so many other issues that liberals and progressives care about is starting to resemble that of a concern troll (Urban Dictionary).

In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns". The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally.

Suggestion to Liberals and Progressives with DailyKos Diaries: Start Your Own Blogs

The Daily Kos is a large site, and starting a diary there may seem like a good way to drive web traffic towards your ideas. However, if your views are to the left of Evan Bayh, good luck in getting them featured there. Lotsa luck if you ever support a Green or Independent candidate against a far right Phonycrat.

Having your own blog may seem to be more work. But, remember, it takes a lot of work to get your diary noticed in the land of Markosbots. And, its a largely hostile audience to liberal and progressive views. If you have your own blog, you get far more editorial control, and the same amount of work will get you at least as big of an audience. (Interestingly enough, the comments/viewer ratio for Kos diaries is much higher than that of blogs, which can mask the size of your blog's readership if you don't use some kind of web stats such as Google Analytics).

Blogger and WordPress both are viable platforms for hosting your blog, and they are free. I prefer Blogger for a host of reasons I will omit for now for the sake of (relative) brevity. Both are pretty user friendly, though I found Blogger easier to pick up.

You get to express yourself freely with your blog. Also, you don't have someone exploiting your labor who holds you and your views in utter contempt like Markos Moulitsas.

Photo: nmfbihop

 

The European left has a lot of problems with Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Most of them are valid, some are not.

Many on the European left say that Wilders is an extreme right politician. That is an oversimplification. Wilders is pro queer, and he supports much more of the Dutch welfare state than the overwhelming majority of Democrats do here in the US and the Labor Party does in Britain. Wilders also is an atheist, which is forbidden in far right electoral politics. Wilders favors expanding democracy in the Netherlands, specifically supporting direct election of more public officials. He also bases much of his appeal to the vast majority of Dutch people who lead secular lives.

Many of Wilders' views are reprehensible and rightist. Wilders wants to create several official state religions so he can exclude Islam. He wants to reinstate childish and counterproductive restrictions on the use of drugs not patented or sold by Big Pharma. Wilders is so reckless that he actually wants to build more nuclear power plants in the Netherlands.

The most controversial of Wilders' views, at least that I'm aware of, are his efforts to ban immigration from non Western countries and to restrict the growth and practice of Islam. There are legitimate reasons to disagree with these policies, to put it mildly. However, the attacks on the policies tend to ignore the problems causing so many Dutch people to agree with these proposals. A couple of years ago, I wrote about a conversation I had with a Dutch gay man which illustrates some important points. I don't know if he agrees with Wilders' platform, but his experiences illustrate the problems that Wilders takes advantage of. Here's the beginning of that post.

A recent conversation I had with a Dutch gay man really opened my eyes to a point of view on the difficult relationship between the Dutch majority and the Muslim majority. It is different than the racist stereotype (which probably applies in some cases), the views of American Christians who hate Dutch Muslims because they aren't Christian, and the claims of many on the European left about Islam and the West.

The Dutch have managed to build a largely secular society where women are free to have abortions (with government funding too) and queers are treated as equals. The Netherlands deserves a tremendous amount of credit for this achievement.

Many Muslim immigrants have attacked abortion and advocated outlawing it. Many Muslim immigrants make bigoted statements against lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people and advocate against equality for queers under the law.

There is a sizable segment of the Dutch population that just wants to keep their basic human rights. Also, immigrants have an obligation to respect the societies they move to. Immigrants certainly have a right to their own ways, but they are obligated not to impose those ways on the countries where they are guests.

The Dutch worked long and hard to tame the beast of Christianity. Now, they are being confronted with another beast, Islam.

The behavior of many Islamic immigrants to the Netherlands is actually quite similar to many of the early European colonists in what would become the US. Those colonists often went to America to flee persecution in Europe only to advocate and practice persecution against their neighbors in the colonies.

The reality is that Islam is a homophobic and misogynistic religion. So are Christianity and Judaism. Yet, many who are otherwise left in their political leanings launch hateful and bigoted attacks against anybody who speaks out against the bigotry of these religions. What we have here is the insufficently unexplored phenomenon: religious privilege.

About.com's Agnosticism and Atheism section has a good review of religious privilege in terms of Christianity.

A more generalized description of religious privilege follows.

Religious Privilege Is:

1) The belief that, just because you see your religious beliefs as sacred, others are obligated to believe so or act as if they do.

2) The tyrannical and hypocritical notion that religious views should not be held to the same levels of scrutiny as any other views. This is very commonly asserted in regards to homophobic and misogynist religious views.

3) Insisting on any kind of state subsidy for your religious beliefs.

4) Asking for or receiving exemptions from the laws everyone else has to obey, based on religious belief.

5) Claiming that religions should be subsidized by not having to pay their fair share in taxes.

6) The claim that belonging to your religious group makes you superior to people who do not.

7) Making religious claims to support political positions or trying to involve religion in public policy in any other way, shape, or form.

8) Using any means to impose your religious tenets on anyone else.

I'm sure that other examples of religious privilege can be explored, but the pattern should be obvious by now. Religious privilege is a form of discrimination just as any other kind of status based privilege is. It's a form of bigotry and discrimination that atheists are beginning to speak out against more forcefully.

The left in Europe has made strong and bigoted statements in favor of religious privilege for Islam as a misguided and emotional response to the bigotry that targets Muslims in Europe. In the US, the left's acquiescence to religious privilege is based both on intimidation by Christian and Jewish groups and by the religious beliefs of many among the American left.

Until the European left can more forcefully speak out against the rampant misogyny and homophobia that is commonly preached in Europe, their responses to the Wilders of the world will seem bizarre and irrational — largely because they are. The idea of some European leftists defending a misogynistic and fascistic practice like the Burqa only becomes more painfully disturbing when one remembers that most women who wear them do so because of economic and violent intimidation. More importantly, the Burqa is based on the woman hating notion in Islam that the female body is a dangerous thing that must be covered in order to keep men from completely losing their minds and their control.

When well meaning people defend the dangerous heterosexist rhetoric that is so common among Islamic clerics in Europe, just as it is common among Christian clerics here in the US, they are not only asserting religious privilege. They also have found a new excuse for their own heterosexist attitudes and agendas. This kind of bigotry can have very real consequences, as it did for a gay man in the Netherlands who was gang assaulted by Muslim youth.

Apologists for religious bigotry claim that the Muslim youths in Europe and the Christian youths who queer bash are not very deeply involved in the religious beliefs and are "ignorant" of the views of those faiths. This is ironic because they are acting out quite consistently with the ideologies of the Bible and Koran. Even if this claim was based on an accurate accounting of the backgrounds of the assailants, it would still be wildly deceptive. The preachers of the respective faith intentionally demonize queers in the hopes that their rhetoric will result in bigotry, discrimination, and violence against us.

In that previous blog posting, I also made a point that is well worth repeating.

When some on the left attack secular values and government, they have lost their way. Religion is a reactionary force in society, and one of the most important projects of the left is to reduce the role of religion in the state and everyday life. It really doesn't matter what the religion is.

I should expand on this slightly. Part of the reason why religious belief is inherently reactionary is that it requires a kind of thoughtless, anti intellectual faith that defies all reason and evidence. All religions are completely silly to the rational mind.

Religious belief requires an enormous amount of socially approved brainwashing. The brainwashing and the social approval of that brainwashing condition people to accept other kinds of brainwashing, including that which promotes prejudices and gets people to lash out bizarrely against their own economic interests.

The European left would be far more effective if they acknowledged the very real problems of misogyny, heterosexism, and religious extremism which are far too common in Muslim communities while working to educate people that these irrational belief systems were and still are used to keep Muslim people from challenging the real systems of economic power and oppression. An acknowledgment of the enormous corruption in the Islamic Republic of Iran while simultaneously acknowledging the rampant corruption in the Roman Catholic Church as well as in most Protestant Christian churches would be a helpful as part of that process.

 

(Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

Image paired with the story:
Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered

The great historian Howard Zinn may be gone, but his amazing legacy remains. Here are two wonderful quotes from him that should inspire liberal and progressive activists at the worst of times (or the best).

"The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government will try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. My hope is that you will not be content to be successful in the way our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you."

- Howard Zinn - Address to Spelman College, 2005


"to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress. We find ourselves today at one of those critical points."

- Howard Zinn

I think the part about "no act too small" is really important. It is easy to get discouraged because you are only one person, and, separately, your actions may not make that big of a difference. Remember, you are part of a large community of activists, bloggers, and others who are doing all sorts of things to achieve the same goals. Be happy to be a part through what you are doing, and try to do a little more.

 

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have lots of problems with the Obama Administration and the Senate Democratic leadership continuing the Bush regime's policy goals on most issues. Well, it turns out that I'm not the only liberal or progressive that is losing patience with this.

Cornell West expresses his frustrations with President Obama very diplomatically, but very powerfully. (Hat Tip: GDAEman)

Last week, 13 activists were arrested protesting US militarism in front of the White House. I think a lot of people were under the impression that they would be able to stop protesting once Obama was elected. Wrong.

Speaking of protesting, doctors supporting single payers got arrested in an act of civil disobedience outside of the hotel where Obama and House Goppers had their little spat. From the 1/29/10 Single Payer Action press release:

During his State of the Union speech on Wednesday, Obama said he wanted to hear from people on a better approach to health care reform that will “bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses.”

“Let me know, let me know, let me know. I’m eager to see it,” Obama said.

Flowers, Paris and the majority of doctors and nurses in America believe that approach is a single payer national health insurance system.

Obama himself, when he was a state Senator in Illinois in 2003, said single payer was the way to go.

But last year, he cut deals with the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries in a now failed attempt to get through tinkering reforms.

Obama is so used to Republican critics who can't answer challenges on policy alternatives that he thinks that his critics on the left can't either.

Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive is so disgusted with the way this administration is going that he has called for the firing of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Firing Rahm would be a good start, but Gates, Clinton, Geitner, and Summers should not be forgotten when discussing Obama administration officials who should get canned.

Cindy Sheehan is doing a great job articulating frustrations with the Obama administration on her blog. Dean Baker is taking Obama to the rhetorical woodshed for supporting tax credits that would give businesses incentives for hiring fewer workers. Noam Chomsky is fond of referring to "Brand Obama." (Hat Tip: After Downing Street)



Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors has a more snarky approach to describing the anger that liberals feel towards this administration. I highly recommend it.

Many partisan Democrats will urge us to be infinitely patient with President Obama. Liberals and progressives were told the same thing with Bill Clinton, and he acted like a horrible, far right Republican his entire administration. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.

In 1993 and 1994, Bill Clinton and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate played a sick game of chicken with the party base, practically daring them to stay home or vote Green. We all remember what happened in 1994. It happened again this month in Massachusetts.

 

In the previous posting where I encouraged liberals to think boldly and expansively, I quoted something I wrote on somebody else's blog:

I don't really think the only choices are to put up with Obama's crap or go back to the Bush era. The corporate media work daily to try to limit our imaginations and make us feel utterly helpless. We should not let them win.

Some might accurately point out that, on most matters of substantive policy, Obama has kept us in the Bush era. Given the reality that Obama is a political opponent of liberals most of the time, and the Republicans are political opponents of liberals all the time, what do we do?

Become Swing Voters Between the Democrats and the Greens
One of the reasons Democrats tend to provide lip service but little else to liberals is that they can take most of our votes for granted. Swing voters get disproportional attention. Does this mean we should vote GOP sometimes? Setting aside the moral concerns, there is a strong practical reason why no liberal should ever, ever vote Republican, no matter how frustrating the Democratic opponent might be. When you vote Gopper, the message the Democrat running against the Gopper gets is that they are too far to the left, which is precisely the opposite of the reason you don't want to vote for the Phonycrat.

Voting Green in cases where the Democrat isn't actually a Democrat is much more productive. It sends a message to that Democrat that they have gone too far to the right need to move left to regain your vote. Being a swing voter between the Democrats and the Greens also gives the Republicans a reason to move towards the center. They are better off if you vote Green. So, it is in their best interest to minimize the differences between the Democrat just as it is in the best interest of the Democrat to maximize the difference. In other words, voting Green part of the time nudges both major parties to the left.

We tend to think of voting exclusively in terms of who wins and loses that specific election. It is so easy to forget the use of the vote as a behavior modification tool.

I should also mention the long term benefit of voting Green, since voting behavior affects the distant future in addition to the immediate present. Voting Green helps build an institution that may one day be a major party challenger. Our country hasn't always had a two party system, and the second party within the more common two party system haven't always been the GOP.

Stay a Registered Democrat
From a practical perspective, the only significance of partisan registration is the ability to vote in primaries. Even if you end up voting Green in the general election, it still is useful to push the Democrats towards the left, especially in contested primaries. Being an independent just minimizes your political importance, no matter how emotionally satisfying it is, given how rotten the vast majority of Democratic and Republican politicians are. Green Party primaries are usually uncontested, and the candidates almost never win in the general, so Green registration isn't terribly productive, yet.

Note: if you are in a state with open primaries, then you might as well disregard this point since your partisan registration has absolutely no practical significance whatsoever.

Support Liberal Primary Challengers
I'm not just talking about voting. I also mean giving money and volunteering if you can. Blog in favor of them too, while you are at it. The Democratic Party desperately needs improvement at the moment, and supporting primary challengers sometimes brings in new people. It usually pushes the Phonycrat away from obsessively following the GOP party line too.

Support Independent Social Movements
This is critical. We can't rely on politicians to push our agendas. We need to get out there and push for things ourselves. Social movements played enormous roles in pushing presidents like FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon to the left. We need to be the people who continually piss off all political parties. In the bizarre area of human interaction known as politics, you get a lot more with vinegar than honey.

When the Republicans Are Reprehensible, Attack Them For It
Being understandably pissed at the majority of Democratic politicians doesn't mean that you should let the Republicans off the hook for their behavior. When the Republicans support corrupt or bigoted policies, condemn them for it. When they make up nonsense to stoke racist, misogynistic, or heterosexist fears, condemn this behavior in the strongest terms. This isn't spectator sports. You are under no obligation to pick teams between the Republicans and the Democrats. Give the birthers and the religious extremists heck.

When the Democrats Are Reprehensible, Attack Them For It
Hateful, corrupt, and bigoted behavior are wrong regardless of who is involved. When Phonycrats act like the most brain dead of Goppers, don't let them get away with it.

When the Democrats Do Something Worthwhile, Praise Them For It
It can be easy to forget to do this when you are pissed off at the Democrats, and most of the time you don't have the opportunity. However, it is important. There is one catch, though. When Reid, Pelosi, Obama or any other conservative Democrat appears to be doing something good, there often is something nasty in the fine print. Be careful. Don't trust. Verify.

Fortunately, we do have Dennis Kucinich and a few other Democrats that we can hold up as models of what we actually want Democrats to do. We should publicize their views and their behavior. Liberals need to be bold enough to say to the Democratic Party that we deserve entire caucuses of Democrats as compassionate and incorruptible as Kucinich.

The Upshot
The overarching point of this all is that we liberals need to think of ourselves as bold, independent agents, not tied to any party and tied to very few politicians. No matter how hard the corporate media try to marginalize us, we need to get out there and champion our values as passionately as the right does theirs.

 

This posting is part 1 of a response to a discussion that has jumped between the blogs of Writer at This And That and myself. You may find the background helpful for putting this in context. If not, skip to the main posting.

Writer was discussing a posting on the Daily Kos, which I freely admit is a blog I generally try to avoid, because I find it so annoying. The gist of the posting Writer was discussing was that we are somehow obligated to support President Obama in a way that reminds me of sports fan for fill in the blank local team. The arguments for doing so were (stripped down to the actual substance):

1) Look at the nice symbolic gestures President Obama makes.

2) Obama inherited difficult issues which justify his generally conservative approach to policy.

3) The right's attacks are so reprehensible that we must support this president.

The posting, as is usually the case on the Daily Kos, reflected a lack of liberal values and very low standards. Here was my comment (on Writer's blog):

I don't really think the only choices are to put up with Obama's crap or go back to the Bush era. The corporate media work daily to try to limit our imaginations and make us feel utterly helpless. We should not let them win.

Writer asked in response:

...you mention there are alternatives, and I agree that there are, but what are they? We have this dicotomous government and we've had it for so long that other options (practical, doable, not having to change the very basis of society options) are hard to see. I then I have friends (you among them) who say there are options, but typically don't say what they are.

One of the reasons that liberals and progressives haven't gotten very far since the 1970s is that the only people who have taken seriously the notion of making structural changes in our society have been on the right. One question that you might want to ask is:

Is it possible to dramatically change the structure of our society?

It is easy to see one area of human endeavor that has changed the very basis of society: technology. Twenty five years ago, the Internet was pretty much limited to email and USENET in universities, the military, and other institutions that did research. Most people never had used a computer to do anything. Penmanship was a very important skill, one that I admittedly wasn't terribly good at. Most people still watched broadcast TV instead of cable. Remember what it was like before cell phones?

Technology may seem too impersonal and apolitical to sufficiently address the point. What about something that has made major changes in the world of politics? Well, corporate/wealthy interests and their pawns on the right side of the political spectrum have dramatically restructured our economy. In the name of the mythical "free market" and "free trade," tens of millions of jobs have been exported to other countries; the rich have seized a far greater share of our nation's wealth and income from the middle class and the poor; major media have become much more concentrated and propagandistic; civil liberties have been sacrificed to corporate interests; and officials in both political parties are trying to keep us locked in a perpetual state of war that reminds one of the endless wars described in Orwell's 1984.

We have been fed pablum from the media avoiding these issues or discussing them as if they are the results of impersonal forces of nature when they actually have been the result of a relentless jihad by far right pundits, academics, and organizers, all very well paid by rich people whose investment in this political machine has more than been paid off in enormous, unearned wealth. (Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine provides a coherent and compelling roadmap through much of this.) This professional far right elite also has been supported strongly by easily manipulated drooling knucklewalkers on the fringe right as well as by some more ordinary middle class conservatives who live in a fantasy world where they subconsciously identify themselves with the people who are screwing them over by blindly doing their bidding.

If the right can dramatically reshape our society, why can't the left? By giving up on this entirely, Americans to the left of center have ceded the life affirming initiative and sense of hope that the right so readily provides its morons and fantasizers. Given the fact that the policies we support are in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in our country, our fearful and reticent approach to politics is something can only be maintained by relentless brainwashing by corporate media.

We need to stop them from getting away with this.

Going outside of economics, think about the huge social impact of the queer civil rights movement. Two areas which we have made a huge impact during my adult lifetime are the vastly improved self esteem and confidence in many lgbt people and the distinctly improved treatment of queers in our society, though I would be the first to admit that both are areas where the is a whole lot more progress must be made.

The other area that gets less attention is that the queer movement has asserted and institutionalized the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment as political goals worth fighting for. This assertion obviously has its roots in the social movements of the sixties, but the queer movement is the only one which, to date, has persisted in making this structural claim in our society in a sustained fashion. Other civil rights movements have made tremendous contributions to the notions of equality and justice which are nothing to sneeze at, but the queer one has made meaningful happiness something that is considered worth fighting for rather than frivolous.

This also is part of why lgbt civil rights find their most rabid opposition among people who are unhappy and unfulfilled and among religious groups that promote misery among their flocks in order to keep them desperate for relief in afterlives that don't even exist. Make no mistake, many of our heterosexual supporters are pushing for us in order to assert their own rights to the pursuit of happiness. I say, more power to them.

Seen in this context of people being able to modify our social structure in important ways, the notion that all we can do is to strongly support center-right politicians who are in conflict with far right politicians is not consistent with the historical record we have seen in many of our own lifetimes. If you go farther back in time to the union and civil rights movements before the sixties, you again can see that the ability to reshape society can be found among the sufficiently motivated and dedicated.

We need to use tactics in the here and now to try to achieve that vision, no doubt. I'll talk about tactics in the next post.

 

I remember when the Goppers pushed the phony baloney impeachment of Bill Clinton. Clinton was widely unpopular among liberals and progressives for his conservative, Republican policies. Yet, the unfair and anti democratic impeachment fraud led many on the left to sympathize with a President who brought us financial deregulation, NAFTA, the WTO, scapegoating and punishing women of color on welfare, draconian budget cuts, and a harsher version of military ban signed into law, replacing the previous executive order.

I saw so many liberals identify with Bill Clinton, our political enemy. It was so surreal.

Now, the Goppers have gone even further. They are trying to rile up their nutjobs into assassinating Barack Obama and other center right Democrats. This is vile and unpatriotic. It's no wonder that so many liberals and progressives are defending politicians who are, once again, their political opponents.

We are allowing ourselves to be backed into a corner by the far right tactics. There must be another way, and there is.

We need to strongly attack and condemn the far right for what they are doing. But, that must not stop us from speaking out against policies of center right Democrats that are far too similar to the corporatist agenda of the last 29 years. Speaking out against conservative policies pushed by Democrats also has the beneficial tactic of raising questions in the minds of some of the rightists as to just how "liberal" the Democratic Party leadership really is.

We are in a difficult situation, but losing our nerve only makes things worse. Failing to learn from our mistakes during the Clinton Administration is not a luxury liberals or this country can afford.

 

Now that there is new credit card legislation, the banksters are finding new ways to steal. It is enhancing the level of anger at "credit card companies" who are actually banks.

One site that has chronicled bankster misconduct in this area for some time is www.newcreditrules.com. That blog's approach is less hostile than some.

A relatively new word that I just discovered is plasectomy. It is defined in the Urban Dictionary as follows:

The process of cutting up or otherwise destroying credit cards as part of a plan to become debt-free, most commonly through financial adviser Dave Ramsey's "Total Money Makeover" plan.

Here are some of the more entertaining ones from YouTube.







The weird thing is that a Faux News personality was leading the populist anger against the "credit card companies." Liberals need to get much better attuned to perfectly legitimate populist anger and direct it at the banksters who are responsible for the problem.

At least one lefty is getting a clue about this. Here's a fun Ted Rall animation on the subject.

The US corporate media seems to be portraying Gordon Brown's problems as having to do with insufficient political skills. Yet, Brown replaced Tony Blair, who was wildly unpopular, before the financial crisis took place.

Looking at American television when Tony Blair was usually shown licking the boots of George W. Bush, it is easy to forget how Blair usually projected himself to domestic audiences in the UK on the BBC. Instead of sniveling and humiliating himself, on domestic matters, Blair was charismatic and forceful. He was clever, and his handlers always had just the sound bite to keep the opposition at bay.

The problem was that charisma, a strong personality, and great sound bites war thin after years of Thatcherite policies. It wasn't bad enough that he humiliated the UK by genuflecting and appeasing an unelected tyrant like George W. Bush on the international stage. Blair also favored watered down versions of Tory policies that disposed the majority of the British population. Sugar coating dispossession can't work indefinitely.

Once Blair wore out of his welcome, Labor replaced him with the seemingly earnest Gordon Brown. However, Brown favored the same Thatcher-lite policies that he helped implement as a member of Blair's cabinet. This contributed to the depth of despair when the global economic crises arrived, and it also contributed to Brown's inability to act in a forceful way to intervene in the economy that both major parties had been moving in a laissez faire direction for decades.

The Conservative Party is winning the local and EU elections by not losing ground in the polling while Labor is losing a tremendous amount of votes to third parties. Neither party would be close to a majority of seats in the more significant House of Commons if not for the winner take all system in Britain that inevitably gives bizarre results when there are third parties. Proportional representation is a much more reasonable electoral system, yet the British seem to dislike it as much as we do. The upshot is that the Tories are gaining power without gaining support.

The media are focused on the improved performance of far right parties, but they are ignoring the improved performance of the Greens. The main lesson to be learned is that people in the UK want a real alternative to the Pepsi vs. Coke politics of the Conservative and Labor Parties.

Sound familiar?

It should. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is governing more like a Republican than a Democrat, to put it mildly. He has more time politically than Brown because the GOP is in a state of disarray, ceding much of its leadership to gargantuan loudmouth whose mind seems to still be terribly altered by Oxycontin. Gopper rhetoric reminds one of the British National Party. While sentiments like that have more adherents here than in the UK, it isn't a strategy to build a majority or to even put up a strong national fight.

American liberals could easily start electing Green or independent liberal candidates in certain House Districts. However, these American liberals, like the British left, seem to be too beaten down by the atrocities of Bush (or Thatcher in the UK) and corporate media propaganda to mount serious political challenges where the opportunities exist (e.g. in Nancy Pelosi's district or in several districts here in NYC).

The danger of a gutless left adrift with a sense of helplessness is that the only real alternatives to the Crest vs. Colgate politics we are getting here in the US are coming from the far right.

 

In comments on GDAEman's blog, I discussed the idea of promoting left populism. GDAEman alluded to the fact that I hadn't described the term.

I see left populism as a view of politics that promotes progressive values in the context of peoples' daily lives. It promotes freedom, justice, and equality in practical terms based on peoples' struggles rather than on abstract theory. It recognizes that activists who have worked on issues for decades have given more thought to solutions than abstract generalists relying on theories. If you want to see a good example of left populism, go to Michael Moore's website.

One must be careful to contrast left and right populism. Right populism glorifies peoples' prejudices to distract them from their interests. Left populism combats prejudice on its own merit, but also condemns it in the context of the politics of distraction. Much of the promotion of various "isms" in the corporate media is a variation of the pickpocket's trick of having an accomplice bump into or otherwise distract a victim who won't know that his or her valuables are being stolen until it is too late.

Right populism tries to discuss class as an aspect of an ethnic group or other minority, leaving the vast majority of the economic elites free from any scrutiny at all. The Sarah Palins of the world talk about the working class regularly, but pretend that their most dangerous enemies are other working class people. Sound suspicious?

Obviously, this is a cursory introduction to the notion of left populism. But, it is important to start a discussion. Far right and conservative elites control the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Their policies and arrogance are creating a tremendous amount of legitimate anger in this country. That anger needs to be acknowledged and addressed productively rather than being dismissed. The latter is just too dangerous.