Let's Get Clear On Something

Thomas Frank has said that, for a purportedly rightist party, the Republicans talk an awful lot about class resentment, but in a strangely inverted way: they define the elites in terms of cultural preferences rather than economics - "elitist, Volvo-driving, Latte-sipping, gay-loving liberal snobs in their big cities, sipping lattes and looking down their noses at the humble, hard-working common folk out in 'flyover country.'"

Thomas rightly points out that the one thing never mentioned by Republicans is the role of economics in the class structure.

The reason Republicans get away with this is the Democrats changed from having their policies grounded in economic fairness, and instead increasingly defined themselves by cultural issues. As the Republicans started defining themselves as champions of working people (a definition that, if you look at their economic policies, is ludicrous) the Democrats stopped talking about economic fairness and went along with defining themselves more along cultural lines.

One of the most disheartening things about the Democratic Party's haplessness is that it has allowed the Republicans to incrementally dismantle the hated New Deal, which they want to do because the New Deal costs Our Reptilian Corporate Masters power.

Our Reptilian Corporate Masters hate New Deal style policies because what they desire is a frightened, submissive, and most of all low-wage workforce, because that will allow them to Make More Money, And Thus Have More Power. The New Deal was absolutely hated by the oligarchy because it took away a lot of means of asserting absolute dominance over working people.

This is why single-payer health care represents such a threat to the Republicans' real constituency (the Oligarchy): fear of losing medical benefits keeps people from daring to step out of line and demanding better wages or working conditions.

This is why Our Reptilian Corporate Masters absolutely love crippling student loan debt: it is a potent tool to hold over folks to keep them from threatening the system. They want a population that is "educated" along the lines of vocational training (the knowledge that one is incurring a large debt tends to focus one's mind on the income potential of one's major...) rather than what used to be considered an "education" before the rise of Our Reptilian Corporate Masters in the late 19th century.

This is why raising taxes, and especially making our tax system more progressive (i.e., raising the tax rates as one goes up the income scale) is spoken of as That Which Must Not Be Done, if you listen to Republican rhetoric.

The thing is, actions have consequences, and the tiger the Republicans rode to success in the 2010 mid-terms will eventually start asking awkward economic questions of the Republicans, and then their venal fraud will be made plain. I pity them when that day comes.

True Hope is Subversive of Power

I seem to be on a Chris Hedges tear today. And I quote:

On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

We are in truly dire times; the time for hoping in Obama is past; we ordinary Joes need to get busy resisting.

All Hail Our Reptilian Corporate Masters

In a previous era, the role of the Court Jester was to use humor to tell uncomfortable truths to the king. Courtesy of the Onion:

20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America

WILMINGTON, DE—The nation looked on in reverence Friday as 20,000 citizens were decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive in the name of Corporate America, continuing the age-old annual rite to ensure bounteous profits in the coming fiscal year.

"Corporate America has always provided us with plenty," said High Priest James N. Cahill, who opened the ceremony by plunging the horn of a bull into a fair-haired child's abdomen and using the freshly spilled blood to write the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average upon sacred parchment. "JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and all in the great pantheon of publicly traded entities will continue to watch over us so long as we appease them each year with human lives."

Chris Hedges, On the Failure of the "Liberal Class"

While I obviously don't agree with him in every particular, I think his diagnosis of the central problem is basically right: the Democratic Party has allowed (even encouraged at times) the dismantling of the New Deal institutions that had been put in place to protect the economically vulnerable from the predations of greed and the power of the wealthy.

I see the Tea Party movement (the rank and file, not the astroturfing financiers) mostly as a symptom of the betrayal of the lower two-thirds of the US wealth scale by the institutions in our society whose historical role has been to defend them. The Democratic Party has been deeply corrupted by the limitless wealth available to the oligarchy who seek, and the evidence would indicate too often succeed at, buying their souls.

Someone once asked Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator from Ohio, why people in southeastern Ohio were becoming a reliable Republican voting bloc. He answered, "Because the Democrats stopped talking to them."

Precisely.

The thing is, eventually the people in Southeastern Ohio and the rest of the underclass across the nation will reach a point where they Will Not Be Ignored. I pity whatever institutions are in the path of their wrath then. I don't think the United States as a functioning entity will survive the coming convulsions. In fact, in many respects it is already gone, sacrificed on the twin altars of Greed and Imperialism.

How to drive on Las Vegas' Strip on a Saturday night:

1. Move car forward 5 inches, then stop.

2. Get out of car, cross street to Ceasar's Palace, enter lobby, ask concierge where the buffet is.

3. Ask buffet people when dinner starts.

4. Stop by bar, order and drink a scotch.

5. Go back out to car, start, and move forward 5 inches, to keep up with the "movement" of traffic.

6. Go over to the Bellagio, and play a few hands of blackjack.

7. Ask the pit boss how many people he's caught cheating, and have a 5 minute conversation about how he loves his job.

8. Stroll casually out to car, stopping on the way to flirt with waitresses.

9. Get in car, start, and move forward 5 inches, to keep up with the "movement" of traffic.

10. Discover that the Las Vegas Department of Fucking Up Traffic has the left 4 lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard blocked off because someone ran over a squirrel or something.

11. Start making calls inquiring about having your car heli-lifted out of traffic, so that you can make it home before your retirement age.

12. Realize when you're passing the Mirage that they have that icky Celine Dion "Titanic" song blaring from speakers.

13. Search in vain for some long, sharp instrument to destroy your eardreams.

14. Remember that your car has a radio.

15. Turn on radio and turn volume up to 11.

16. Realize that pedestrians are looking confused as to why an agitated-looking man has the NPR national news turned up so loud that his dashboard is melting.

17. Fail to care.

Interesting Interview - Maddow and Jon Stewart

Happy Birthday to TPM

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, which is indispensable reading for progressives, is turning 10 years old today. All the best, Josh, and many more.

New New Deal Needed

Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter With Kansas and other books)is a hero of mine. He remarked in a review of hack Joe Klein's book of a couple years back, Politics Lost:

Harry Truman was no centrist, and neither was he a radical. Still, listening to his ferocious ad-libs back in 1948 (which was, incidentally, not during the Great Depression), his audience could have had few doubts about what the Democratic Party stood for. Truman was explicit: “[T]he Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” He reveled in what Mr. Klein would call “class war,” calling a Republican tax cut a “rich man’s tax bill” that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor” and describing politics as a contest between the “common everyday man” and the “favored classes,” the “privileged few.” Even more astonishingly, Truman went on to talk policy in some detail, with special emphasis on Mr. Klein’s hated “jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah”: He called for the construction of public housing, an increase in the minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, a national health-care program and the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. And this sort of high-octane oratory propelled Truman on to win the election in a historic upset.

This is precisely what is called for in the present environment - and this is precisely what the oligarchy is spending millions of dollars to prevent from being discussed.

Wheat Fields Wavin'

So, I chucked the job, cashed out my 401(k), and began a road trip on October 6th. More soon.

Some Thoughts On Bullies and The Other

First of all, read this. All the way through. I advise finding a box of Kleenex before you do.

Then read his follow-up post, here.

I will post some of my own story soon, but I need to find a place of balance from which to post it. For now, let me offer a couple thoughts.

That second post is what I've been trying to get at with some of my previous reflections here and at Vox Nova: it is when we make someone an Other that we begin the descent into sin and barbarism. I had some particularly harrowing childhood experiences with bullies, involving (this is no exaggeration) literal torture. But looking back, the most difficult part of it was that as I was being tortured, I could feel the incredible, agonizing pain emanating from every pore of the ones inflicting torments upon me. As I suffered my own pains, I also felt theirs in a profound way. I empathized with their pain even as I suffered. I could see how sad, how desolate, the world must have looked through their eyes.

This was indescribably painful; it was also what saved me.

Republicans Suck

Because I've been getting served google ads pushing Republican candidates, I will say categorically that I would rather swim in nuclear waste than vote for any Republican, period.

[Update] Ok,, I just deleted the ad code.

The Bill Gates Index

My brother Mike keeps a "Mike Talbot/Bill Gates Index", in which he calculates how many years he would have to work at his present salary, and saving every penny of his income, to equal Bill Gates wealth. The Index stands at One million four hundred and seventeen thousand years.

Sin

Station 6: Veronica Helps Jesus

Christ Speaks: Can you be brave enough, my other self, to wipe my bloody face?
Where is my face, you ask?
At home whenever eyes fill up with tears,
at work when tensions rise,
on playgrounds,
in the slums, the courts, the hospitals,
the jails
– wherever suffering exists –
my face is there.
And there I look for you
to wipe away my blood and tears.

I reply: Lord, what you ask is hard. It calls for courage and self-sacrifice, and I am weak. Please, give me strength. Don’t let me run away because of fear.
Lord, live in me, act in me, love in me. And not in me alone – in all of us – so that we may reveal no more your bloody but your glorious face on earth.

Clarence Enzler,
Everyone's Way of the Cross

I have seen the face of Christ - in the aged face of a kindly black woman who answered the door when I was selling door to door in the ghetto. I prepared to give her my pitch, but she looked with such tenderness into my eyes that I could not try to make her want something she didn't need. She had looked past my salesman veneer, and in her beatific smile I was confronted with the devastating love of Christ Himself. It was as if she took attentive, simple joy in my existence, and saw me as God sees me. I mumbled something about how whatever it was I was selling wasn't something she needed, and I was sorry to have bothered her. I felt like weeping.

I have seen the face of Christ - in the tears and simple, terrible anguish of an 11-year-old kid whose best friend had been killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. He could only say, over and over as if saying it would bring his friend back: "He was my friend...he was my friend..."

I have seen the face of Christ - in the tent cities of the recently homeless, formerly middle-class people who are learning to break the spell of isolation and alienation they had accepted without question in the suburbs, and are now realizing - at a terrible price - the fundamental interconnectedness we all share.

I have seen the face of Christ - in the face of a homeless man to whom I had promised an extra cup of Kool-Aid after the meal hall had shut its doors. I remembered and took him his cup. The look of gratitude in his face at having been remembered is something that broke my heart. Christ was saying "thank you." My only thought was, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you..."

I will hold the Christ-light for you,
in the night-time of your fear,
I will hold my hand out to you,
speak the peace you long to hear.

I am convinced that the most devastating effects of sin come from inventing a "them" that is apart from "us."

There is no "them" - but there is most assuredly an "us." Every fellow human on this earth, no matter how remote geographically or ideologically, is "us."

We Americans spend our days immersed in lies - advertising is ubiquitous. On the train on the way to work, billboards beside the highway, television, radio, the web, magazines, newspapers - filled with lies designed to tell us that some product they are pitching can fill the yawning emptiness in our souls. Some of us make our living writing copy for those ads. Most of us, to one degree or another, buy into the basic idea being peddled - that the product being pitched can fill the hole in our hearts that can only be filled by the Love of God.

What do you think God thinks of the immersive BS that fills our eyes and ears and minds every day? That says if we buy a luxury car, have a kitchen that features stainless steel appliances, granite counter-tops and a professional-looking grill, have that kitchen located in a coveted section of an exclusive neighborhood (who or what is being "excluded" and why?), then we can finally find the contentment we've been aching for? (Real Estate ads, incidentally, can read like a catalog of sins, a veritable how-to book for achieving alienation.)

This whole edifice exists because, at the most fundamental level, you and I have built it - some of us directly, most of us by just going along without meaningful protest or objection. We've just gone quietly along, afraid to question (perhaps even to ourselves) the virtue of a system that is our only realistic way of making a living (mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.)

What we've built we can change.

Please pray for me, that I may find the courage to challenge the soul-impoverishing Machinery of Night. I will pray the same for you.

Amen

What Digby said

And wouldn't you know it, people seem to be falling back on tired, conservative tropes. I think that might be because nobody in the damned Democratic party can be bothered to explain to them any other way of thinking about this. (It's a "center-right" country dontcha know.) So yeah, a little ideology would be quite helpful, but only if we actually want to solve these problems rather than hasten the pace of the country's implosion.

Right - and I don't think "implosion" is hyperbole on her part. Conservatives would rather destroy the country than let the Democrats score a point. I'm sensing that this is something that no one on his staff wants to tell the president.

Memo to Rahm

David Kurtz, over at Talking Points Memo:

Democrats in Congress wield the power of the majority and the advantages of incumbency but they're also facing a potential trouncing at the polls in November.

So how are congressional Democrats planning to use the tools still at their disposal to hold on to their majorities?
...

OK, well, I mean what popular proposals are Democrats planning to make Republicans vote against between now and the August recess, when the 2010 campaigning really heats up and they can beat them up over their no votes?
...

Um, OK, what about a coordinated legislative strategy on jobs and the economy that builds relentless pressure on Republicans as the elections approach making them vote for popular items that drive a wedge between them and their base?
...
Alright then, maybe a coordinated communications strategy with the White House?
...
Hmmm, how 'bout coordinated communications strategy amongst themselves?
...
Ookaay, perhaps agreement that they're on the same team?
...
Collective recognition that losing in November is a bad thing?
...
Yeah, I should have known better than to ask.

Memo to Obama political team: what good does it do to "put [incremental] points on the board" if the other team is outscoring you??

My 8 year old nephew could come up with better strategies than the clowns at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Oh, and Rahm? Yeah, yeah, you're a fucking genius. Right.

My only question is, COULD YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW YOU COULD BLOW A LEAD LIKE YOU HAD IN JANUARY 2009? All you had to do was look beyond the trees of particular policies and see the forest of opportunity you had in 2008 to COMPLETELY REMAKE THE POLITICAL CONVERSATION IN AMERICA ALONG PROGRESSIVE LINES.

But no: you did the fucking DLC thing and tacked to the right (ALWAYS to the right) which communicated to the American people that THAT'S WHERE YOU THINK THE SOLUTIONS ARE: ON THE FUCKING RIGHT!

And now you and the Democrats are, ludicrously, facing a trouncing in November.

Do me a favor, Rahm: when the Democrats get their asses handed to them in November, I know you'll want to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies, or "Extremists" or Liberals or all the other people you're helping the Republicans to demonize, but instead of wasting our and the country's time on that, why not do the honorable thing and resign?

Renaissance or Status Quo?

Josh Marshall, on the signs of a Republican resurgence in November:

In general, I think the big political tell over the last couple months is the mounting evidence of a stalled recovery coupled with the fact that administration is basically backed into a position of immediate fiscal retrenchment which means we may be tossed back into the water. But this time with our hands tied behind our back.

My own sense is that the first 19 months of Democratic control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government has been a missed opportunity, and an enormous one.

When Obama and the new congress took office, they had a country which was staring terrified into the abyss, angry at the oligarchs who created that abyss, and ready to be led in a new direction by the soaring rhetoric of Hope from their new president. The Reagan/Gingrich-Era conservative revolution was about played out, and people were ready for a change.

This was a shining, golden opportunity for a charismatic Democratic leader to begin a New Era in American political life. The story the Right had been selling for decades - that if only government got out of the way of business, it would boom and benefit everyone - was now easy to dismiss as the fairy tale it was: Between 1980 and 2010, the productivity of the average America worker increased by over 40%, while the median wage barely budged. All the benefit of those productivity increases went to the top of the wealth ladder, and stayed there. People were actually talking about things in just those terms.

The thing is, none of this has changed. The opportunity is still there, if only the Democrats will only seize it.

Speaking of David Brooks

His latest column is the usual concern-trolling nonsense I expect from his unctuous, oily mouth. The real treat is in the comments that follow it:

Twice a week you write a column, and the thesis of that column is always the same: we, the little people, ought to want to suffer a little more in order to make sure that our reptilian corporate masters become incrementally wealthier.

Here, the superstructure you build upon your predetermined thesis is that those entrepreneurs in Racine and Yakima, to whom you have surely actually spoken rather than just making them up, are more concerned about debt than they are about the recession. Facts do not back up your assertion. Repeated public polling has shown that Americans are much more concerned about jobs than they are about debt. You dismiss the stimulus bill, whose only real problem was that it wasn't large enough, by claiming it didn't create jobs, when the more accurate statement would be that it didn't create NET jobs: it merely prevented millions more jobs from being lost.

And, of course, we could balance spending on stimulus by raising revenues, specifically by raising taxes on corporations and the very wealthy. But since you are paid very, very well by our reptilian corporate masters, you would never suggest that taxing them at the 70% rates that were commonplace until the upper class really took power with the ascension of Reagan, as such a restoration of the progressive tax code would force them to purchase a slightly less opulent second yacht. And how would THAT look?

You mock the more liberal among mainstream economists by basically calling them eggheads whose theories don't work in the real world. But the truly laughable and demonstrably false economic theory is the one which claims that making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of everyone else will result in greater prosperity for the nation. It has been tried, over and over again, and we've been trickled down on enough. This country needs more stimulus and unemployment spending, not less: while there are indeed long-term debt issues, these can be addressed quickly and easily by cutting military spending and restoring the progressive tax structure that made America prosperous throughout the mid-20th century.

NY Times's cluelessness, and the Decline of Trad Media: Related?

[T]his is just the Times typically looking at the nation's problems through the lens of the upper class -- as Linda puts it, "stories about the recession where people struggle along without their nanny, and find that the recession reconnected them with their soul, instead of making them live in a refrigerator box."

David Brooks specializes in the "Recession Is Good For Our Souls" Genre of editorializing.

Brad DeLong for White House Chief of Staff

The situation is grim. So why isn't everybody running around with their hair on fire?

Why aren't there irresistible political demands for more government action to steer us toward a better economic recovery --or at least to hedge against a double-dip in what seems likely to be called not a "recession" but a "depression" when historians get around to writing about it?

I have my theories:

1. widening wealth inequality and an upgrading of the class position of reporters and pundits, who are no longer ink-stained wretches immersed in mainstream America;
2. the collapse of union power, which ensures that nobody who sees real workers on a daily basis sits at the table when the deals are made;
3. increasing job security for the powerful in Washington, aided by the growth of the lobbying apparatus that envelops the mixed-economy government;
4. the collapse of professional integrity among the Washington press corps, which no longer dares to call balls and strikes as it sees them, preferring to say only that the Democrats say it was a strike and the Republicans say it was a ball, and that opinions on the shape of the earth differ.

I don't know which theories are right. But the situation does leave me feeling like one crying in the wilderness. (Say not "we are children of the market!") I cry out to boost aggregate demand -- by banking policy, by monetary policy, by fiscal policy, by spending increases, by tax cuts, by anything -- I don't care what! (Well, I do, but not by much)

This really gets at the heart of things. The American leadership (in government and the press) are failing their fellow citizens.

1. The President needs to pull himself together (cough fire Rahm cough) and address the country's suffering with that famous eloquence of his -- and then follow up with effective policies, or else risk destabilizing the country.

2. We on the left need to make ourselves way, way more active and visible to those who lead the country. We no longer have the luxury of self-indulgent despair. We need to get busy.

Some Thoughts on Middle Age

I think back to me at 18, and for all the tumult of being that age, my life stretched before me with seemingly limitless, even frightening, promise. I had not yet known failure of any significant scope. I had yet to have my heart broken. I was going to change the world, dammit, and I wanted answers, and clear ones at that.

Things seemed simpler, or maybe it was easier to convince myself they were. Men in my peer group typically did a stint in the armed forces, and I enlisted in the Army with scarcely a thought to the justice of my country’s causes, or the effects of propaganda on my decision-making.

If my body ached, it was my own damned fault (well, mine and rum’s, anyway...). Time had yet to start insisting on its supremacy, had yet to supply me with the pains of its passage – pains of both body and mind. I understand the temptation in men my age to vainly try to hold on to a mercilessly vanishing youth — but that would require me to surrender wisdom, too, and more; being 18 again would mean the erasure of some memories by which I mark the years, experiences which have softened and mellowed the fabric of my soul.

I would lose the morning I got up before dawn, walked out into a meadow and watched the sun come up over the Vermont mountains and frosted-blue grass and fiery autumn woods. I would lose my first real love, and the way her face looked that one night as the moon lit its contours with blue and sacred light; I would lose the moment, praying the Stations, when Christ showed me His pain with such tenderness that I wept and gave Him some of mine.

Bob Seger once said in a song, "I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then."

Me? Nah. For all the melancholy and aches and increasing limitations, I’ll keep the lessons I’ve learned.

A Gun is Not a Penis

I mean, here's the thing: I hunt deer. I am a gun owner (well, technically not currently, but you know what I mean...). Guns are not Magical Totems Of Manly Power. They are a means of getting venison and wild turkey, both of which are delicious.

Lots (most?) of my fellow lefties are against hunting, and there's a lot to be said for that. Me, I think that, if I'm going to eat meat, it's more moral to kill an animal myself - one who's had a nice life roaming the woods munching on leaves and mating with does - as opposed to eating a cow that was raised in a pen, and spent the last few weeks of its life knee-deep in its own shit in a stockyard someplace. And, of course, not eating meat at all is something I can totally respect.

A lot of American gun-fetishism just seems childish to me.

The Chattering Class Club

DougJ has an amusing rant over at Balloon Juice - "meta" talk on the left blogosphere can get tiresome, but this is right on:

And things aren’t getting any better. I spent the last week with too weak a WiFi signal to post, comment, or do much of anything internet-related besides read the RSS feed on my phone. Obviously, it’s my fault for what I’ve chosen to put on my Google reader, but the entire fucking thing was Kevin Drum congratulating Matt Yglesias on how well he countered Ezra Klein’s point about Megan McArdle. And half the time the topic was how clubby SCOTUS had become.

Cokie is dead, long live Ana Marie Cox.

Johnny Reb They Ain't

Hunter, as usual, is hilarious:

And I admit, a small bit of me almost hopes they manage pull off their own little Beer Belly Rebellion, just so the New Oklahoma Drunken Asshole Redneck Wolvereeeeenes Coors Light Freedom Brigade could finally go up against the U.S. Army like they want and get a nice, barrel-end view of all the pretty gadgets our tax dollars have been buying to use against crazy people waving guns around.

FDR Populism

If, for some strange reason, you really want your heart broken some time, read FDR's first or second second inaugural addresses or virtually any utterance of Harry S Truman (the ones about economics, anyway) and then compare and contrast with the current Thing That Used To Be Liberalism.

FDR:

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties, over Vietnam and (to a lesser extent, civil rights); blue collar and union guys vs. the "New Left" college radicals. That split has consistently and only served one constituency well, really; the rich. It is worth remembering that the central, core, consensus issues that have united the left's most dominant constituency (the New Deal coalition) were economic in character.

The consensus left position, the set of beliefs that really distinguished you as "left," used to be very simple, and went like this:

It is legitimate and necessary to use the power of the central government (through progressive taxation, income redistribution and support for labor) to restrain the tendency of big business to concentrate wealth in the hands of an elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distinctive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change.

FDR again:

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

When the Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy, I'd love it if the Democrats countered that by pointing out that the Republicans have been trying that for years, and really just want to give more money to their rich friends and weaken the government's ability to stick up for working folks. They might also say that we Democrats want to pass a big jobs bill to give our constituency, ordinary Joes and Janes, a chance to practice their legendary work ethic and provide a future for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Krugman and others have been calling for the Democratic Party to take the golden opportunity of the current crisis to break out the economic populist rhetoric to sell economic populist policies.

This would seem to be an obvious and winning strategy that could plausibly lead to a couple generations of electoral and ideological dominance.

More Like This Please

Funniest Facebook Status Update in, Like, Ever

Well, that didn’t take long---a death panel showed up in my living room this morning. They have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. At the moment I have 'em repainting the rumpus room. This could work out well, I'm thinking.

It IS Waterloo, Alright...

One of Life's Enduring Mysteries

Here’s the thing I’ve never understood. If I walk into a club looking like a nice, respectable guy who is likely to be considerate, caring and a good provider, women will ignore me in droves; but if I walk into a club with tattoos on both arms, a scar on my face and generally create the impression that I’m a likely to be little tardy calling my parole officer, I’ll be freakin’ mobbed. WTF is up with that, anyway? Can someone of the female persuasion just explain this to me, please??

To the American Right: Get a Pair, Okay??

"Freedom was attacked today, and freedom will be defended."
So said George W. Bush on September 11th, 2001. It struck me then, and still strikes me today, as fundamentally wrong.
"Freedom" was not attacked that day; symbols of American economic and military dominance were attacked. Power was attacked that day, not "freedom."

Bush's War on Terror was and is a huge mistake, and needs to be
declared null and void. Responding to the attacks of September 11th as
if they were an act of war, and not a criminal act, is giving Al Qaeda
and Osama bin Laden  precisely what they want; legitimacy as "holy
warriors" when they only deserve infamy as brutal criminals. They need
to be opposed with skilled international policing, not a big, stupid,
endless "war."

More on all that in my next post.
But there is one other thing I want to say, regardless of the above.
May I be blunt, here? The American right seriously needs to get a pair.
Begging the government to torture people who frighten you doesn't make
you a tough, clear-eyed realist; it makes you a bed-wetting, sniveling
coward who dishonors every brave American who fought to obliterate and
bring to justice Hitler's torture brigades and the rapists of Nanking.
Look -- It used to be that Americans defined their enemies as Those Who Torture:



I mean, really: What is the big, unprecedented deal about Al Qaeda
anyway? Yes, 9/11/01 sucked, and I'd definitely rather not go through
that again. That said: the extremist criminals killed just under 3000
people that day, and destroyed or damaged under 20 buildings and 4
aircraft. That was bad, no argument there...but "an enemy unlike any
other"??! Pull yourselves together.
Worse than the Civil War (a million killed and wounded)??
Worse than World War II? (Somewhere between 45 and 60 million total
killed, including up to 11 million gassed, hanged and machine-gunned by
the Nazis and Japanese, and virtually every city in central Europe and
East Asia reduced to lego-sized, smoldering fragments?)
Worse than The Cold War? I mean, think about this for a second: the
United States spent 40-odd years under the constant threat of having the entire country vaporized by ruthless, amoral totalitarians who had publicly and repeatedly vowed our destruction.
And now you're begging the government to torture people whose most recent attack amounted to some pathetic, deluded criminal failing to detonate his own underwear??
Your childish, pants-wetting cowardice would be funny in a pitiable
sort of way, except for the fact that you've convinced so many of my
fellow Americans that Torturing People Is The Only Way To Defeat The
Magically Powerful Terrorists. No, that's not funny at all: it fills me
with  shame, but also righteous rage. Osama is laughing in whatever
cave he's holed up in.

Oh - and the "Greatest Generation" you fetishize? You dishonor them
and the sacrifices they made with your pitiful cowardice. The ghosts of those who fell on a thousand battlefields (who, by the way, were really, actually Defending Freedom) have every reason to be ashamed of you.
</rant off>

We need "More and Better **Leadership**"

Digby, yesterday:

I also think that Democrats really don't like to govern because it makes them feel exposed. They have prostituted themselves to business and adopted neo-liberal principles, but they have to pretend that they are representing working people and the poor.

Well, there's your problem right there.

If you really want your heart broken, read FDR's first or second second inaugural addresses or virtually any utterance of Harry S Truman (the ones about economics, anyway) and then compare and contrast with the current Clusterfuck That Is The Democratic Party.

I suspect a lot of this goes back to the way the left split in the late sixties; blue collar and union guys vs. the "New Left" college radicals. That split has consistently and only served one constituency well, really; the rich. It is worth remembering that the central, core, consensus issues that have united the left's most dominant constituency (the New Deal coalition) were economic in character.

The consensus left position was simple, and went like this: It is legitimate and necessary to use the power of the central government (through progressive taxation, income redistribution and support for labor) to restrain the tendency of big business to concentrate wealth in the hands of the elite few, and thus provide social and economic stability.

See? Simple.

Everything else needs to flow from that crucial, central, distictive-to-the-left premise - and when it does, suddenly the national conversation starts to change. The Republican Party says we need tax cuts to stimulate the economy; the Democrats point out that the Republicans have been trying that for years, and really just want to give more money to their rich friends and weaken the government's ability to stick up for working folks, but we Democrats want to pass a big jobs bill to give our constituency, ordinary Joes and Janes, a chance to practice their legendary work ethic and provide a nice life for their children.

Like that.

In short, I and Digby and (to some extent) Paul Kruigman and others have been calling for the Democratic Party to take the golden opportunity of the current crisis to break out the economic populist rhetoric to sell economic populist policies.

This would seem to be an obvious and winning strategy that could plausibly lead to a couple generations of electoral and ideological dominance. So, why are we not seeing it?

What has happened is that the Democratic Party leadership has become corrupted by proximity and fealty to the wealth and power of our economic elites. Incrementalism and pressuring the current bunch has not worked, because they are too corrupted; we need new and better leadership. It's time to clean house. The leadership has failed us. It's time to acknowledge that and replace them.

Why? Why won't the Democrats do the populist thing?

I'm really not getting this: it would seem to me that the best way to insure a new era of Democratic domination would be to:

1. Enact real, actual health care reform, along European lines. This will be popular, and would show the Republicans to be fear-mongering assholes;

2. Some combination of banking reform (revive Glass-Steagal, say) and way high taxes on banking industry bonuses to impose consequences on the banking industry for being reckless and for nearly destroying our economy

3. Populist tax increases on the wealthy and near-wealthy;

4. The EFCA, to give workers more of a chance to bargain for a larger piece of the economic pie.

This would seem to be obvious to me; the fact that nothing the administration is doing even faintly echoes any of this does not fill me with optimism about our chances in 2010 and 2012.

Howard Dean quoted Truman back in the '04 campaign: "If you run a fake Republican against a real Republican, the real Republican will win every time." The Obama administration does not seem to get that this is an absolutely essential insight.

WTF happened to the Party of the Common Man?

To answer my own question: once they were purchased by the money powers, it was all pretty much over for the Common Man. Republicans: "Yeah, we'll fuck you. Hard." Democrats: "So will we, but we'll feel real bad about it, and besides, we'll use Vaseline."

I am sick to fucking death of political parties that stand up for oligarchs and plutocrats, while letting working people die from a thousand cuts. I mean, fuck these people.

It's time to look at other options in terms of political strategies, folks.

Given the Supreme Court's more or less formal establishment of a plutocracy, they (the plutocrats) have too much money to be opposed through conventional, "inside the box" methods. They will attempt to bury Obama in a tsunami of slick, expensive propaganda that will get the (slickly re-branded between now and 2012) Republicans into power.

Well, fuck that.

A strong progressive movement will lead Obama and the Democrats where we need him and them to be.

It has become clear to me that progressives need to build a movement, a strong one, that is populist in character. A strong enough movement will not be ignorable by Obama and the chickenshit, kowtowing-to-plutocrats Democratic leadership in the House and Senate.

"We want the Wall Street Fatcats to pay a price for messing up our country; we want the greedy rich to start paying their fair share again; we want our government to work for us again, rather than for a few rich puppeteers who currently pull the strings. WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK."

...like that. Not conciliatory, but scrappy. Not Bill Clinton, but Harry S Truman.

Not covered in plutocrat pocket lint, but making it clear that their only "owners" are the concerns and interests of ordinary working people - the heroes who built this country, and whose labor and virtue keeps it strong. The people whose sons and daughters do the actual fighting in our nation's wars, while plutocrats profiteer and plunder and won't send their kids off to defend this country.

The Democrat's fundamental problem is not so much what they stand for or how they explain it or not being clear enough about their "values" - No. It is that they have become foggy about who they stand with: working people. The working and middle classes. The Republicans have been able to present themselves as populists(!) because the Democrats forgot their role in society; It is the job of Democrats to use the government to help balance society by (through progressive taxation and income re-distribution) reining in the tendency of capitalism to concentrate incomes and wealth at the top and thus provide stability. See how simple that is? We defend working people from the worst tendencies of greedy plutocrats. THAT is our core mission. THAT's who we stand with.

Successful Politics is way more about "Who" than it is about "What".

New New Deal

When the left was most ascendant, the issues they rode to that success were economic in character. Think of the decades-long dominance of the New Deal coalition.

The premise of those economics were clear: one of the important roles of the central government is to counter-balance the power of big business and the rich - through things like:

1. Steeply progressive tax rates (the top marginal tax rate (the rate charged in the highest portion of rich folks' income) during even the administration of that notorious Leninist, Ike, was between 91 and 94 percent)

2. Support for Unions in the Wagner Act and other initiatives, to give bargaining power to labor, either directly (for union members) or indirectly (for other workers in unionized industries whose wages rose to match the union workers')

3. Public Works to take up slack in the labor market during recessions (the interstate highway system, the TVA, and much else.

4. Strong support for a minimum wage, to exert pressure "from the bottom" on wages further up the income scale

...and much, much else.

The Democratic Party would do well to build a new identity whose foundation is economic and strongly populist. There are too many people who call themselves "liberal" because they are pro-choice, eat organic food and drive a Prius - while opposing things like Single-Payer Healthcare, raising the minimum wage, ensuring a supply of affordable housing for everyone, the Employee Free Choice Act and much else. You know, the kinds of things New Dealers would do (and benefit electorally from.)

I sometimes wonder whether Harry Truman would even recognize the Democratic Party today.