People really, really, really want to be lied to. And most progressive and liberal pundits are either so brain dead stupid they don’t remember the lies of the 08 convention and how Dems and Obama actually governed or are corrupt.
Evil? Or Stupid?
A question not just for Republicans any more.
I hear from people who know him he’s actually quite bright. Which means that he probably understand the consequences of this:
In a surprise move, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has submitted his proposal to limit local property taxes to the State Senate for a vote on Monday, a tactic that seems designed to isolate Democratic lawmakers in the Assembly who have qualms about the measure…
… The bill did not include any proposal for reducing costs or liberating municipalities and school districts from state mandates, elements that even some supporters said were critical to ensuring that a cap did not bankrupt local governments.
Needless to say, municipalities are already under great fiscal pressure. This, along with Cuomo’s stated goal to attack public sector unions, is simply another part of the attack on government which actually helps people. Starve the beast, cause a fiscal crisis, and voila, end of government programs. Note also that this will make the education problem worse, and access to good education even more uneven.
People like Cuomo aren’t the problem, though, the fact that Democrats nominate people like him and voters elect them as the lesser evil, that is the problem. Cuomo’s job is to make sure that the people who hollowed out the US economy and caused the financial crash don’t pay the price of their evil, but in fact stay in charge of society despite causing a Depression and being bankrupt (but we’ll all pretend they aren’t, so it doesn’t count.)
This, this is why America is going down. Because Americans keep electing people like Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama. Earn your money while you can, folks, ’cause your leaders are determined to crash out the economy. And if oil prices don’t stop increasing, you won’t even have a year, you’ll have six months before the next downturn.
Stuart Zechman, writing about centrists such as Obama, states:
It’s not that they desire or welcome obscenely high foreclosure and unemployment rates –don’t get me wrong– but it’s that they don’t agree that New Deal-style policies to help ordinary people are worth the cost in terms of shifting government into an adversarial relationship with finance and industry. They don’t want the kind of government that has the kind of responsibility we’re talking about, and so they’ll tolerate and even excuse double-digit unemployment and the banks’ rampant fraud rather than accept that role.
Stuart is still falling into the “they’re not evil” trap.
The fact is that high unemployment keeps down wages, and that keeps down the costs of their big donors—big corporations. It is a win for them. As for the foreclosure crisis, almost any sensible solution would require some sort of cramdown, which would hurt the financial firms which are centrists largest donors.
No, actually, while centrist politicians might in some theoretical “how many angels dance on pins” sense prefer that there not be a foreclosure crisis, they don’t mind that much, and high unemployment is a positive for the people they actually work for.
You can’t serve two masters. Centrists serve major corporations. If they can do something for ordinary people that doesn’t hurt those donors, sure, they may do it, but if not, forget it.
Gays dropped their votes to Dems significantly from 2008 levels. Hispanics voted for Democrats at about 2008 levels despite horrible policies against them. You only have leverage if you are willing to defect in a high profile fashion.
Ok, another edition of pointing out the painfully obvious.
Most votes in Congress are Kabuki. There was never any chance that Bush tax cuts weren’t going to be extended, and this was obvious far before the election, for example. Unions were never going to get the Employee Free Choice Act.
Also, stop paying attention to who votes for what. If a Dem votes against an obnoxious bill, it is almost always because leadership has released them to vote against it. Close votes almost never really are.
Dozens of Dems in the House promised not to vote for a health care bill without a public option. Leave aside what you think of it, given that they broke that promise as a group, why would you trust them on anything?
Obama in specific, and the Congressional leadership in general thinks that their problem in 2010 with the base was because they didn’t have enough show votes which failed. So they’re going to have a lot of show votes. But virtually everything that passes is essentially what Obama wants to pass. (For example, the stimulus bill was essentially identical to Obama’s original stimulus bill.)
If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be a “moderate” Republican. He is not a progressive, not a liberal and neither is Harry Reid. Pelosi would be liberal in a different world, but she will do what the President tells her to do, she’s a good soldier. Originally she wasn’t going to pass TARP, for example, unless an equal percentage of Republicans voted for it, but when Obama came out in favor of it, she fell into line.
There is no constituency in Congress for liberal policy. None. Even those who prefer liberal policy, like Sanders and Pelosi, will not do anything to actually make sure it happens, or to stop conservative policy.
This is why I generally don’t write about legislative fights any more. There is no point, the outcome is usually determined long before the actual vote, and everything you see is just theater for the rubes.
We are past the point where legislative actions matter. At this point, assuming the political system can be reformed at all, you require new leadership, capable of holding legislators to principles. You require outside groups who will hold legislators responsible, which means not micro-politics groups. Virtually ever micro-politics group, that is any group which looks after one interest or one constituency, will sell out liberal interests. So you have teachers unions accepting wages paid for by cutting food stamps (ie. starving the children they teach) and you have the auto workers endorsing the Korean-US trade deal which is bad for everyone but them.
A movement of the left made up of self-interested groups is no movement at all. The first, second and last rule of movement politics is solidarity. Any movement made of people or groups which will sell out the rest of the movement is not a movement, and they will be played off against each other to give cover for the worst sort of policy. If you are interested only in your own issue, whether that is environmental, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, trade, unionization or whatever, then you are part of the problem and your willingness to betray is why the left fails over and over again.
Hang together, or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said.
The left has chosen to hang separately.
Seriously, Jerome was, in Democratic terms, the centrist’s centrist.
I’ve ended my hyper-partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party. In moving beyond the past decade’s partisan affair with Democrats, I am ready for a real revolution to happen in this country.
It has got to happen over the next two years, and its going to take progressives, libertarians, tea partiers, coffee partiers, conservatives… everyone that is not part of the problem (the financial/political/military elite). Get radical, first by moving beyond attachment to a single party or a political identity. Radicalize them both, go independent; whatever, and if that’s not you too, then get out of the way.
Of course, I’d say a political identity in terms of an ideology is important, still, given Jerome’s self-confessed prior hyper-identification with the Democratic party, this is rather remarkable.
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