Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 28 of 31

A blast from the past and a reminder about the future

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On April 24, 2011

73 Comments

Courtesy of the Black Agenda Report:

As election year 2008 began, Obama took the most pro-banker, laissez faire capitalist position on home foreclosures of the three major Democratic presidential candidates. John Edwards backed a mandatory moratorium on foreclosures and a freeze on interest rates, while Hillary Clinton supported a “voluntary” halt and $30 billion in federal aid to homeowners. But Obama opposed any moratorium, mandatory or voluntary, and balked at cash for homeowners and stricken communities

You don’t always get what you vote for, but the surprises aren’t usually on the upside.  Obama was given the opportunity to be the new FDR.  The financial crisis was a huge opportunity to break the power of the financial industry and the rich for a generation, and in so doing make it possible to have an economy which worked for everyone, to fix America’s energy problems, and to have universal healthcare.

Instead what happened is that Obama bailed out the rich and the financial industry, who were bankrupt, then refused to prosecute them for systemic fraud.  He did so in a way which left, by and large, the exact same class of people in charge of the financial industry, made the remaining banks bigger and more powerful, restored the wealth of the rich to pre-crisis levels and restored their profits.  Meanwhile employment has still not recovered (ignore the unemployment rate, it is a lie), wages are flat or declining, real inflation is through the roof, the price of oil is skyrocketing and the current discussion in DC is how much the poor and middle class should get screwed out of their Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in order to keep the rich filthy rich.  Oh, and how much tax cuts the rich should get.

America is in terminal decline.  There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith wrote, but that amount is not infinite.  The next chance you get to turn this around you will be starting from a much worse position.  A lot more pain will be unavoidable.

Obama is not turning things around, what he is doing is negotiating with Republicans how fast the decline will be, and how much and how fast it is necessary to fuck ordinary Americans in order to keep the rich rich.  If Obama wins another term, he will continue to negotiate the decline, then, odds are very high, a Republican will get in, and slam his foot on the accelerator of collapse.

This is why Obama must lose in 2012. I would prefer that he lose to a Democrat in a primary, then that Democrat wins, but he must lose regardless.  If he loses to a Republican, then 2016 you get a chance to put someone in charge who might do the right things (or even just some of them.)

No, those odds aren’t good. They suck.  Every part of them sucks.  And even if you get a Dem in 2016, you’ll probably choose the right most candidate, just like  you did last time, and he’ll go back to negotiating with Republicans over what parts of the corpse of America’s middle class they should dine on next.  “No, no, eat one kidney first, they only need one to survive, so that’s not too cruel.”

But it is still your best chance.  Otherwise you’re looking at full, Russian-style collapse.  What comes out the other end, I don’t know, but  you really won’t enjoy getting there.

And yes, if a Republican gets in in 2012, that’ll be awful. Just awful.  But it’s not like a Republican is never going to be president ever again.  That’s not on the agenda, that’s not possible.  It will happen, and he will substantially cater to the Teabaggers.  He will trash your country.  That’s baked into the cake now, all you can choose is how soon it happens, and work to replace him with someone who might do the right thing.

Remember, the question is not “if” this will happen, it is when.  The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you have another chance to get it right, and the less decline the US will have suffered. If President Teabag gets in after 4 years of Obama, the US will be in better shape at the start of his wrecking than it will be if he gets in after 8 years of Obama.  Obama is a disaster, who is making things worse, not better.  He’s just making it worse more slowly than a Republican.

You don’t always get what you vote for

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On February 18, 2011

45 Comments

but you sure don’t get what you don’t vote for.

Fianna Fáil, the party in power for 20 of the past 23 years, faces a drubbing in Ireland’s general election on February 25, with Fine Gael, the other centre-right party, appearing to pick up support rather than the left-of-centre Labour party or more radical alternatives.

Guess the Irish are like Americans, they need to suffer a lot more before they get the point.  Of course, to be fair, the left parties didn’t provide a clear different option, either, so eh, they don’t deserve to win.

Meanwhile a friend just emailed me about Wisconsin.  I’m happy people are protesting, but the governor said, long before he was elected, that he intended to break public sector unions.  He’s just doing what he said he would do.  If you didn’t want it, why did you vote for it?

The Governor has a mandate.  Wisconsin voters gave it to him.

Independents Return to Obama…

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On January 24, 2011

17 Comments

… now that the election is over.  And I’m going to agree with Mandos, some people really do want “bipartisanship” of the sort Obama is now offering.  Or, more accurately, they like Obama now that he is moderating the governing party (the Republicans, who are actually driving policy now.)

The problem is (and this is a mirror of the warning I gave in early 2009) that the current most likely policies (as “compromised” with the House Pubs), which they think they approve of, are going to put the economy even further into a hole.  Give it a year to 18 months and the current economy is going to be a susperating wound, and it won’t matter that “independents” thought they wanted austerity, they’ll vote based on the results of the policies.

Or to put it another way, good for Obama for improving his poll ratings so close to an elec…

Yeah.

Thinking more than one move in advance=good.

And good policy=good politics.  Bleeding the patient when he’s anemic, even if that’s what he wants, won’t make the patient happy with you more than briefly.

Why DADT Repeal Will Pass and Dream Won’t

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On December 18, 2010

44 Comments

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.

An American Future

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On December 6, 2010

91 Comments

So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.

It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class.  The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe.

This is not a stable situation because the economics of it is not stable.  In order to bail themselves out they are enforcing austerity policies which are wreaking and will continue to wreak economic havoc in the real physical and social economies of the countries whose policies they control.  They are contracting the franchise, the membership of the oligopoly, pushing more and more people out of it, even as they impoverish millions of peoples at the bottom end of the economy.

They have created a two tier system of laws, where important people who commit trillions of dollars of systematic fraud are not prosecuted and where war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands are winked at, while small people are locked up for the most minor of crimes, where bankruptcy is essentially impossible for the small people, but the big people skate and are given whatever amount of money is necessary to bail them out of any bad decisions they have made.

They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.

When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional.  Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it.  If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information.

Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians of both parties, with Obama’s blessing, are set to extend tax cuts.  A few months ago the mantra was “deficits, deficits, deficits”, but now deficits don’t matter.  This isn’t to argue whether they do or not, simply to note that their real ruling ideology is that governments should only spend money on rich people, and that money spent on the middle class or poor is bad.

It will also, and I guarantee this, not help the economy.  The past 30 years, and the past 10 years in particular, have been a huge experiment in tax-cutting, and for ordinary people, the result has been stagnation and now an absolute decline.  Because ordinary people do not have pricing power, either as workers for their labor (since there are plenty of people who need jobs) or as consumers (because the oligopolies who sell food, energy, telecom and so on know you must have their services) every single red cent of tax cuts which go to the middle and lower class will be taken away by corporations and the rich.  Those corporations and rich will then use that money to either play leveraged financial games or to offshore jobs to low cost, low regulation domiciles.  Not only do tax cuts not do any good, they accelerate the loss of US jobs.  No, this isn’t what you’ve been told, indeed propagandized, for the last thirty years.  But how has trickle down economics worked out for you?  Are you going to believe your lying eyes, or the talking heads who tell you that tax cuts create jobs?

So the economic situation is going to get worse. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cyclical ups and downs, just that the trend line is down, down, down.  And every trend line reaches its end.  My guess, at this point, is that the US has only one business cycle left before a Russian style collapse.  The rest of the world just does not need to sell you oil for lousy dollars which don’t buy the future and don’t buy anything else, either.  At this point what must be gotten from the US are a few capital goods, jetliners (well, from the US or Europe), some software,the very best military equipment and some miscellanea.  That’s it.  That’s all.

The rest can be bought from other countries.  Now, if the next tech revolution was going to happen in the US, they’d have to keep their hands in, but it’s now clear that, no, that isn’t going to happen either.  American producers don’t, American consumers can only do so if heavily subsidized by China, and American technology is more and more a joke at anything other than killing people.

The US is going to be cut loose.

The reaction to that will be war.  Maybe in Iran, maybe in Korea, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Where doesn’t really matter, but it’s going to happen, because it’s the only card the US will have left and after Obama destroys the Democratic party by gutting Social Security, Veterans benefits and overseeing the cutting of Medicaid, yes, President Teabag is going to get in, whether Obama is primaried or not.  And the only way to both provide stimulus and get the resources the US is going to need and no one else will soon want to sell to the US, is going to be war.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  If you can get out, get out.  If you can’t get out, but you have children, get them overseas—send them on exchanges, send them to overseas relatives for a year, send them to a foreign university (they’re better and cheaper).  Get them out, even if you can’t get out.

The game isn’t over in the US, but the smart money is that the first revolution in the US isn’t going to be a revolution of the left, it’s going to be a nutbar revolution from the right, and it is going to be extraordinarily ugly.

In the meantime, if you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family.  Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust.  (Don’t trust any corporation.)  And, if you can, organize.  Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally.  Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system.  It’s over.  We tried, and we failed.  It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.

The Primary Obama Movement Begins Today

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On November 3, 2010

160 Comments

The 2010 electoral massacre is over and Democrats are licking their wounds.

Let me put it simply, what went wrong went wrong from the very top of the party.  In both political and policy terms, the President of the United States, the head of the Democratic party, created this disaster.

Nothing tracks electoral success better than the economy.  Barack Obama did not do what it took to pull the economy out of the doldrums.  This is true both with regards to the stimulus, which was too small, too larded up with tax cuts and too ineffective and with regards to the Federal Reserve, where Obama’s chosen chairman Ben Bernanke is about to drop stimulus (nicknamed Quantitative easing 2) on the economy after the election instead of doing it before the election. There was no economic reason not to do it months ago, when it would have helped both struggling Americans and Democrats.

Barack Obama took pains to let down or gratuitously harm virtually every major Democratic constituency. Whether it was increasing deportations of Hispanics, whether it was putting in a Presidential order against Federal money being used for abortions which was more restrictive than Rep. Stupak had demanded, whether it was wholesale violation of civil rights climaxing with the claim that he had the right to assassinate American citizens, whether it was trading away the public option to corporate interests then insisting for months he hadn’t, whether it was not moving aggressively on card check (EFCA) for unions, or whether it was constantly stymying attempts to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Barack Obama was there making sure that whatever could be done to demoralize the base was done.

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans think that the policies Obama pursued were socialistic, progressive or liberal.  They think this is what left-wing governance looks like.  In 2 years Obama has managed to discredit the left, possibly for a generation.

Oh no, Republicans!

The argument against running a 2012 primary challenger against Obama should be familiar to all of us.  It is the argument of fear.  The argument of the lesser evil.  Primarying Obama makes a Republican win more likely, and if a Republican president gets in, it will be so much worse for you!  No matter how bad Obama is, President Teabag will be worse.

That’s the truth.  The stone cold truth.  Republicans will be worse and a primary makes it more likely that Republicans will win.

Here’s another stone cold truth.  If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.  Obama and Democrats had a historic chance to fix America.  The rich who run America, whom the Supreme Court in Citizens United gave permission to outright buy elections, could have been broken when Obama took power.  All that was necessary was to force them to take their losses.  Contrary to what apologists for wealth have told you, this would not have meant disaster for the economy, there were ways to protect regular Americans while making the rich take their losses.

Instead Barack Obama, as in so many other ways, continued Bush’s policies, and kept the rich bailed out. The end result has not only been the tsunami of foreclosure issues which still threaten to swamp the banks, has not only been trillions in dollars of taxpayer money being used to keep rich people rich (much more money than was spent on the stimulus), it has been the wholesale transfer of money from poor to rich: an absolute decline in total wages, average wages and median wages of ordinary Americans, while Wall Street pays themselves even higher bonuses than before, gives record money to Republicans and the rich pay themselves more.

America has been in long term decline for between 30 and 40 years, depending on how you count it.   It is no longer enough for Democrats to simply accept the new Republican norm every time they take power.  Accepting Bush’s wars, Bush’s economy and Bush’s civil liberties violations meant that Bush won. Obama institutionalized Bush.

This long term decline is in danger of becoming terminal.  The banks are still bankrupt, States and cities are in constant crisis, the housing crisis is nowhere near over.  Wages are dropping and jobs are being offshored.

The status quo of Democrats coming in after Republicans and accepting Republican policies as a fait accomplit must end.  If it does not, the US will experience a full-on meltdown.  Not a great depression like in the ’30s (though the US is in a Depression) but a meltdown like that which occurred in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, where the population actually declined, food was hard to find, brown outs were common, medicine was in short supply, and so on.

Any suggested policies or electoral politics which does not act to stop this terminal decline, this end of America’s golden age is unacceptable.

The price of this may well be that a Republican president gets in in 2012.  That will be bad, but if it happens it is a necessary sacrifice, because until one of the two major parties is one which will propose and then execute solutions which work, all Democrats do is slow down America’s terminal decline.  Better that President teabag gets in in 2012 and then there is a chance at a good President in 2016 than that the US have to wait till 2020 at the earliest.  And hey, a successful primary could cut this short four years, the primary candidate could win the primary and the election.  47% of Democrats want Obama primaried. That’s not because he has rock-solid support.

Obama must be primaried and he must be primaried from the left

The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down.  If the left does not do this, left wing politics and policies will be discredited with Obama.  This is important not as a matter of partisan or ideological preference, it is important because left wing policies work.  It is necessary to move back to strongly progressive taxation, it is necessary to force the rich to take their losses, it is necessary to deal with global warming, it is necessary to deal with the fact that the era of cheap oil is over, it is necessary to stop the offshoring engine which is destroyin the American middle class.

Only left wing solutions to these problems will work. America has spent 30 years, since Reagan, trying to fix its problems by going more and more right wing, and it has been a disaster.  Each additional step to the right has made the problem worse.

The first step to fixing America is fixing the Democratic party, and the first step in fixing the Democratic party is fixing Barack Obama and destroying, forever, publicly and in the most high profile way possible, the idea that Democrats can ignore and abuse their own base.  The lies spewed by corporate media figures who earn millions of dollars a year, that every time the Democrats lose, it is because they were too left wing, so more tax cuts are necessary, must end.

If you love your country, or if you’re concerned for the future of yourself or your children, primary Obama.  If you don’t, you may never get a chance to elect someone who will do what is necessary to save your country.

Why Democrats Lost for Complete Idiots

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On November 2, 2010

49 Comments

The Democrats gained control of both Congress and the Presidency in 2008.  They then pursued ineffective policies which didn’t fix the economy. They increased deportations of Hispanics. They restricted abortion rights for women.  They spat on gays repeatedly.  They betrayed unions.  They gutted civil rights, going even further than George W. Bush (who never said he had the right to assassinate Americans.)  They saved bankers who then rewarded themselves with record bonuses and salaries while average American wages actually declined.

The base was demoralized, not because the Dems went too far left, but because they went too far right.  The non-Democratic voters were angered because they elected Democrats to fix the goddamn economy and to not be George Bush, who they were sick of.  Dems didn’t do what they were elected to do.

That’s why Dems are losing – because they demoralized their own base in a base election year, because they didn’t fix the economy, and because they thought Americans wanted them to be George Bush, just a bit smarter.

This isn’t a repudiation of liberalism or progressivism or socialism (Americans wouldn’t recognize a socialist if he gave them real universal healthcare) it is a repudiation of a Democratic party which failed to fix the economy and which became identified with bailouts for the rich.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this, is, forgive me, a complete idiot.

Election Open Thread

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On November 2, 2010

41 Comments

If you feel like talking about the election, feel free to do it here.  In most cases, I don’t care if Dems lose, they deserve it, but a couple likely losses will sadden me: Feingold and Grayson.

Update: Grayson has lost.  Blanche Lincoln is also down.

Update 2: Feingold down.

Digby on Grayson:

Regarding Grayson,well we have a little controlled experiment. His neighboring first term Democratic congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas, in a very similar district, took the opposite approach to Grayson. She ran as hard to the right as she could get away with, never had a controversial thought much less uttered one, was rewarded with big money and support from the DCCC — and she lost too. This race was bigger than both of them. Florida is turning hard right.

Update 3: As a friend pointed out at this point it looks like in the House 25 Blue Dogs lost, and 4 progressives.  Therefore the Progressive movement is doomed.

Yeah.

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