'A Republic, If You Can Keep It'
Barack Obama is the wisest American president of my lifetime, which began during Harry Truman's presidency and includes John F. Kennedy, who might have outdone Obama had he lived, and Bill Clinton, who as president was terrifically clever but not so wise. Obama is wise in the ways a loving, seasoned sage is wise. And he's a canny strategist, playing a series of long, slow games against daunting odds and against time.
But time and those odds are not on the side of the republic he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. To say so, as I have just done, is not to underestimate or betray Obama; it is to try to face a predicament that won't be improved either by the fretting now rampant among his erstwhile supporters or by sagacious (and rather orotund) appreciations of him.
It's not about him. It's about the republic, as Benjamin Franklin put it to a bystander in the words that form the title of this possibly ill-starred post. Let me try to explain why I see it this way.
Last night I posted a response to Obama's West Point speech that some people took as the fretting of an unreconstructed Marxist, circa C. Wright Mills, and others took as the preening of a defeatist. Perhaps they were projecting.
Or maybe it was my title - "Commander-in-What?" Years as a columnist have taught me that even intelligent, busy people do not draw much from an essay beyond whatever its title seems to convey, especially if they're already worried about its subject. I fear that my title failed in its intention to emphasize the "What" over the Commander.
Or maybe it was this sentence: "'States hover like crows over the nests that nations make,' wrote the historian Robert Wiebe, and by the time Obama faced the state's gray ranks of cadets last night as their commander in chief, the crows of national security statism and free marketeering had cannibalized so much of the republic's strength that Obama found himself in command of the wreckage and Orwellian newspeak they've left behind."
When I wrote 'wreckage," I didn't mean the cadets and their instructors, who put many of us to shame. I've visited with them at West Point. Those I met are deeply thoughtful and brave. To my way of thinking, that adds up to being noble. How "thoughtful" are they? Well, West Point has hosted such lecturers from the "left" as Seyla Benhabib, Jeffrey Alexander,... and Noam Chomsky. Think about that for a minute.
The West Point instructors' and cadets' craving to hear viewpoints alternative to those coming from the Bush White House - even when they rejected those alternatives -- was so poignant during my own visit there that I felt unworthy even just to watch it and to listen to their questions and sense their keen attentiveness to the answers.
Few of us are as open as those cadets were to hearing what we may not want to hear and to facing hard truths. Then again, few of us are so driven by our work to take hard truths into account. According to a report by Amy Dockser Marcus in Wall Street Journal, students from Yale's pretentious Grand Strategy program who visited West Point to discuss George Packer's Assassin's Gate with cadets "decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have 'views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing' some day, said Minh A. Luong, the program's associate director."
So here we have West Point cadets, who'll defend as well as exercise the American right to speak one's mind, hosting Yale undergraduates who are learning to run the country by cultivating careerist habits of intellectual discretion and secret-keeping that don't belong in their liberal education at college. Arguably they don't belong in the democracy their West Point hosts defend by talking with Noam Chomsky and by risking not just their careers but their lives to defend what the rest of us are doing in open conversations like this one.
Daunting odds, such as the miscarriage of civic-republican leadership training I've just described, threaten the republic. These odds are set not conspiratorially, but sometimes mindlessly and yet systemically by immense concentrations of power that are dissolving republican habits and dispositions by penalizing them.
They do this not only by accelerating the material dispossession of the republic's middle and working classes, but also by promoting escapism and careerist self-protection like that of the young grand-strategists at Yale. Whether in the name of free market consumerism or national security, something awful is being insinuated into Americans' most intimate viscera and desires.
Just look around. Or look at a long assessment I wrote - "Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change" - for the quarterly Salmagundi that, tellingly, was taken up by the conservative Dallas Morning News.
Other daunting odds include the rules and premises that have governed the presidency and which Obama hasn't proved willing or able to change. Whether these rules and premises concern surveillance and civil liberties, or the predatory operations of finance capital, or the exorbitant costs of profiteering in health care, they remain formidably entrenched and debilitating of our society and economy.
The power of the presidency remains primarily the power to persuade, and Obama sometimes seems little more than a Don Quixote, tipping his lance at the windmills of the national-security state, finance capital, and health-care profiteers -- concentrations of power that someone will have to reconfigure.
At other times, he's less than Quixotic -- or more, but not necessarily for better: He has brought the great powers' representatives and apologists right into his administration with what we hope, but have yet to see, is a brilliant strategy to induce them to enlighten or adjust their interests to help stop society from breaking down before our eyes.
To see that breakdown, most TPM readers and contributors would have to travel less than ten miles from wherever they're sitting, and stay there long enough to get a hard knock or two. It's not about taking a field trip. It's about doing what might wound one's moral imagination, not just satisfy one's curiosity or sense of omniscience.
To suggest, as I have, that Obama isn't powerful enough because he lacks a strong push from what some people persist in calling the left (but what I would call a civic-republican majority) is not to criticize him. It is to indicate his predicament.
FDR may not have been wiser or tougher than Obama, but he did get a big push from militant labor and, equally important, in my estimation, from tough liberals like my distant cousins Jimmy and Nancy Wechsler (who dined with FDR, by the way, as I noted in this post.) Speaking to tens of thousands at Madison Square Garden in 1936, Roosevelt said that the bankers of America hated him. "And I welcome their hatred," he thundered. Obama isn't made that way, and the times and the polity aren't made that way, either.
Most people, whether for materially self-interested or purely temperamental or characterological reasons, aren't inclined to stare predicaments like Obama's in the face. We prefer to think ourselves canny realists even when we're really just sliding around cold realities and the heartbreak they bring. Sometimes we resort to ideological simplifications, wishful idealism, or rank decadence -- anything but face too much of the truth.
Sometimes it takes great literary fiction to puncture our "realistic" evasions, but fiction can become an escape, too, and most people now prefer entertainments that reinforce their presumptions and prejudices. Decadence often thinks itself liberating, but it's fooling itself, and it shows this by having its taboos! It designates things one simply cannot say if one wants to be listened to ever again. (See the Salmagundi essay I mentioned above.)
The same is often true of idealism: If you brook it, you're accused of bad faith or defeatism or some other self-indulgence. In politics, Ivan Turgenev wrote, the honest man will end by having to live alone. Victor Serge's novel Unforgiving Years drives home the tragedy of the political with a force that terrifies even the novel's own heroes into decadence or wishful thinking.
Let me mention two taboos, especially strong among Obama's defenders as well as detractors these days, that cannot help him and cannot save the republic.
The first is the taboo against deconstructing seriously what corporate and finance capital have become and what they are doing to us.
Even Dwight Eisenhower warned (although only in his presidential farewell address) that a military-industrial-academic complex imperils the republic. But the Marxist left and new left made such a brutal and ludicrous hash of that civic-republican warning that a generation of liberals and former leftists remains embarrassed even to utter the words "corporate state." They're so desperate not to resemble what they've outgrown that they don't notice that global capital has outgrown them, seducing or wrenching them away from everything they hold dear.
In the Salmagundi essay, I envisioned David Brooks' sidling up to such penitent leftists in their summer homes, purring, "C'mon, you know that you love your real-estate and your unearned income, and that you love circulating commodities more than ideas.... And (wink, tickle)... it's okay!" Only nerds and unreconstructed ideologues keep fretting about the corporate state. Just look back over other people's writings and their lifestyles, at least until 2008.
By late in 2008, it did begin to seem that perhaps it was time to begin to undertake some consideration of the possibility of exploring the growing likelihood that corporate capitalism, like the once-beloved British monarchy well into the 1770s, no longer made as much social sense as we had been seduced or chastened into assuming. Tom Paine urged American colonists to bring their actual experience of the monarchy to the "touchstones of nature," to look at what their society was becoming, and to recognize, "'Tis time to part.". He warned against sleepwalking into tyranny.
But maybe Paine was histrionic, even a little deranged. Maybe monarchy wasn't really the problem. Certainly, few people had any idea what should replace it, and, for more than a decade, they blundered. Canada, which didn't replace it, did alright, but we think that that's mainly thanks to us.
Maybe so, or maybe Canadians were wiser, or maybe it's a mix. But do we have the right mix of boldness and wisdom now? I don't see it yet, and the likelihood that Obama is trapped -- or has trapped himself - into taking measures that are too little, too late haunts me everywhere I look, not least at West Point, whose paradigms are trying to catch up with realities its graduates must face more fatefully than the rest of us.
Another taboo I want to mention keeps many people from looking very deeply into liberalism's reliance on the virtues and beliefs that liberal states and markets themselves can't nourish or defend, because they have to value individual autonomy to an extent that makes it hard for them to distinguish bold, free spirits from free riders.
The counter-intuitive lesson of this essential liberal dilemma is that leaders and citizens of a republic have to be nurtured somehow all the more intensively, outside of markets and the state (including the military). This takes us back to matters of faith that don't go away.
For what it's worth, I wish we could appreciate what the Puritans -- who seeded the republic, almost despite themselves, by staking politics on inner integrity -- actually got right in their otherwise failed efforts to balance liberty with authority, positions of power with demands of personal conscience, capitalism with community, and "carnall lures" with other rewards and restraints. For anyone who's interested, I've sketched out an argument here. It does nettle some people.
Our problem isn't Obama. It's these swift, dark undercurrents of material gain and of faith or bad faith, running below the strategic and tactical battles in politics, which tries to sluice or ride them, depending on what the politics itself is made of.
These undercurrents can disrupt the promises of a republic like ours, which gets no security or freedom from trumpeting a "blood and soil" patriotism or multi-culturalist belongings. Its only lasting hope lies in a thicker civic culture that Obama embodies so well. But only a tremendous amount of pressure from people who are wise enough not to be too clever all the time can help him to summon and deploy that civic culture's virtues and faith against those who would exploit it or evade it because - in quasi-Puritan terms - they aren't up to keeping it.
A very wise and sensitive contribution. Do you see any chance of such a movement gathering and making itself loudly known?
One of the things that I think seriously hobbles America at this moment is that good people were not only sold on the idea they should shamelessly love consuming non-stop, but that they should be ashamed of ever getting out into the streets and doing something so silly as protesting anything. That's so "hippy". So unfashionable. So immature.
But I also want to say that even more than this is about Obama, our president, West Point and our soldier's lives, or America, our republic, it is also about our killing human beings in Afghanistan. I think we have a responsibility to stop others from doing this for the reasons they've come up with, some of which they themselves don't believe in, and if they do, there is plenty of evidence they are seriously deluding themselves.
I hope you've read Tom Englehardt's deeply-informed rant on the Huffington Post and also worth reading is Robert Reich on his blog, explaining why Obama is engaging in wishful thinking that China will cooperate in re-directing America away from a consumption policy, leaving this White House little choice but to keep on encouraging American to go shopping.
Can't go with you on the Puritans.
December 3, 2009 7:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim Sleeper says...
"Did you know that Barack Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review?"
"Yes."
(That's the part of the story that makes Barack Obama look smart. He won a student election in 1990.)
"Did you know that Barack Obama never published an article in a legal journal, or wrote a brief, or tried a case in court?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that it was his choice alone to commit (so far) 68,000 more troops to Afghanistan?"
"Yes"
"Did you know that President-elect Obama endorsed Tim Geithner's proposal (way back in November, 2008) for the United States to guarantee every bond by every bank in the United States?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that it was Obama's choice and his choice alone to appoint Tim Geithner and Larry Summers?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that Obama has already authorized more drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan than Bush authorized in 7 years?"
"Did you know that abuse of detainees in Guantanamo actually increased after Obama was elected."
"Yes."
"Did you know that Michelle Obama got a $200,000 raise immediately after Barack became a Senator?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that Barack Obama was crushed by Bobby Rush in a Democratic Congressional primary in 2000?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that Barack Obama's main financial backer paid a fine of more than $400,000,000 to avoid jail time for disappearing all the deposits in her bank?"
"Yes."
"Did you know that Barack Obama voted to fund the genocidal occupation of Iraq (which has killed more than 1,000,000 Iraqis) every time Bush asked for more money?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why Jim Sleeper calls Barack Obama "the wisest American President" of his lifetime?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because Professor Jim Sleeper is just a stupid suck-up."
December 3, 2009 11:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's something positively North Korean about Sleepers pronouncement: "Obama is the wisest President of my lifetime."
What next?
"Our Dear Leader Barack Obama, Cosmic Genius, Inventor of Underpants and Canned Food! Saviour of the People! Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize a few months before the huge new escalation of war in Afghanistan!"
December 4, 2009 6:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Remember when Obama said this?
Or maybe Obama was too busy recycling lies about the GWOT from Bush/Cheney to say anything that even makes sense, and the previous quote was really Dennis Kucinich.
But we couldn't elect Kucinich!
Trying to elect Kucinich would have been insane!
Sort of like trying elect an anti-slavery radical like Abraham Lincoln...
December 4, 2009 6:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
In accord with my previous comment, and because readers' blogs are still disabled on TPMCafe, I'm publishing my very brief new diary here, too.
December 4, 2009 7:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Please indicate which of the Presidents in Jim Sleeper's lifetime you think were wiser than Obama.
I also supported Dennis Kucinich, but I think you may be over-reacting to Jim's opening statement.
Was it Kennedy or Johnson -- because of the "wise" ways they handled Vietnam? (Or was Nixon the wise one, because he got us out?)
Maybe you're thinking Bush Sr. -- I'd have to say you could make an argument there, with respect to his handling of Iraq (especially compared to his idiot son).
Note that Jim didn't say Obama was the wisest candidate in 2008. He said Obama was the wisest President of his lifetime.
I think it's too late to get Kucinich elected. Even if the rest of the country suddenly saw the light and agreed with us. (The impeachment process alone would take months. Not to mention the fact that Joe Biden is the VP.)
-- ARG
December 5, 2009 11:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent find Ruta!
Verifies what we "crazy" people on the left have been saying which is that not only is Obama wrong on Afghanistan: he KNOWS he is wrong and he understands full well that what he is doing is bad for our country but he is doing it becuase he doesn't have the courage or the will to lead the country in the right direction which is to withdraw our troops now before making a bad situation much, much worse and much, much harder from which to withdraw.
December 4, 2009 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
oops! didn't read the whole thing. My bad.
December 4, 2009 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
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December 5, 2009 6:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think this was a great post. You have touched (among many things) on something I think bears a lot more discussion - our republic is at risk because it is now being "run" to serve the interests of large corporations and those who profit from large corporations. The mantra of ever-growing profits has become the cancer that kills its host, but, when it come's to taboos, that's the ultimate. Obama didn't start that, for that matter, neither did GW Bush, but the bill is finally coming due for policies and decisions stretching back to the 70's.
I think a lot of people's growing frustration with Obama is as much about WHY he's doing or not doing various things as what he's doing or failing to. WHY is he so wishy-washy about healthcare reform, but determined to expand this war? Because to be out front and firm about healthcare, and to be willing to pull back in Afghanistan are both examples of genuine confrontations with, as you put it, "the windmills of the national-security state and of finance capital and of the health-care industries, concentrations of power that someone will have to reconfigure."
Obama is not alone, by any means, in his disinclination to face up to these issues - I don't think anyone in Washington has the stomach or the guts. Obama may just end up being the poor schmuck in the driver's seat when the ultimate s$$t hits the fan.
December 3, 2009 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I believe that our Republic is at risk because of the confluence of some unhealthy trends (forces): (a) the excessive concentration of wealth; (b) the refusal to challenge core ideas, e.g., "American ingenuity will save us...," etc.; and (c) the unequal distribution of public money for infrastructure to all regions and groups in the country.
We are losing the idea of "union."
December 3, 2009 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Most Liberals to are not that liberal except maybe in speech. Certainly not in deed. As you have observed their backgrounds are very different from the Union and Labor movements of the 20s and 30s which begot such people as Woody Guthry and W. E. B. DuBois and others who championed the cause of the working man and spent time among them and actually experienced their plight.
Today's liberals such as Chomsky and Howard Zinn and James K. Galbraith are the idols of this professional class liberal. Those also referred to sometimes as Limousine liberals.
They talk a good talk and profess to be the defender of the underclass (of which they have little personal experience) so long as the solutions to the problems of the poor and working classes do not effect their own personal "bottom line."
More a theoretical embrace of liberalism and progressive policies. Their support of Obama, I suspect, was simply because he WAS black. And the mere idea of a black president appealed to their left leaning intellect. He could have turned out to be Robert Mugabe and they would still have voted for him.
A very different bread indeed.
C
December 3, 2009 8:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that liberalism today and for several decades now is much more invested in the outcomes of our day's social issues, and sometimes war and peace issues, than in what used to be called economic justice issues. A focus on the latter might entail, for example, more than tepid support for labor law reform and rebuilding the labor movement. My experience is that many people who think of themselves as liberals come off as being much too cool to declare themselves pro-union, let alone act on that. Or to get their hands dirty by doing things such as attending rallies or marches, per the first two paragraphs of buonasera's excellent leadoff comment in this thread and implied, it seemed to me, in Jim's post.
I assume you meant to refer to John Kenneth Galbraith rather than his also highly estimable son, Jamie, the U Texas economist. On style, yes, of course, the elder was professorial. But look to the substance of his ideas. He wrote about concepts that are highly resonant and important today--notably, countervailing institutions. Boy do we ever need countervailing institutions today. But we probably need--one of Jim's points, implied I thought--one or more social movements to get them (again?). See buonasera's comment above.
Howard Zinn is a professor whose writings are mostly popular, written in a non-academic style, and meant, it seems to me above all else, to remind progressives of their usable pasts, and what it took to get those accomplishments. I don't see him at all as part of the problem you are writing about.
Chomsky will sometimes say things worth saying that few others will say and I credit him for that. But in what I have seen of his writings he won't be caught dead ever hinting at a positive agenda for change and how that might be pursued. He's all about deconstructing for all of us the actions of the powerful. Which has its place, to be sure. And he documents his sources. I just don't look to him for intellectual or moral leadership in the service of an affirmative agenda.
December 3, 2009 10:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I understand your overall point, but Howard Zinn is no limosine liberal. Howard grew up poor, worked his ass off as a young man. Joined the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier in WWII and went to school afterward on the GI Bill. He has organized "old style" from that day to this on campuses and in workplaces all over the US. No limosine liberal is he. This is not conjecture. I know this first hand. Everything he has ever done has been directed at organizing the common people for their own defense economically and otherwise.
December 4, 2009 4:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
I did not say he was one of the limousine liberals. I said he was their idol. They worship them from afar.
C
December 4, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay. I misunderstood.
December 4, 2009 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, I can't really take issue with your diagnoses of the moral sicknesses that abound in our society. The depravity, stupidity, frivolousness, avarice, imbecility and manifold, dissipating hedonistic addictions are evident to anyone who turns on a television set and reads a newspaper. The commercialization of every aspect of human life and relationships, with its inescapable, noisy blare of grotesque falsity and manipulation engendered by omnipresent marketing, have left many Americans permanently numb, shell-shocked, withdrawn and depressed. Our commercial culture works to addict people to incessant need, primitive emotionalism and stupidity by constantly stimulating their most shallow and dangerously uncontrollable passions and wants. Their abused and vulnerable minds are further attacked by a mass popular media mthat presents a stunningly low level of spiritual existence and aspiration as normative. We see a disturbing inability to distinguish between illusion and reality, and the cultural reign of a gossip and celebrity culture lorded over by self-loathing, jibbering nitwits and supercilious nihilists who seem bent on turning every last shred of elevated human endeavor and dignity into a big, worthless joke.
My only shoot of optimism springs from the fact that I have come to believe in such a thing as the "human spirit" that even we very clever, amoral and malevolent human beings don't know how to kill, no matter how hard we try.
I will only repeat my belief that what you are pining for is really a revolution to create something that never really was, not a rescue operation to save something that is slipping away. Or perhaps better, you want to create something on a large and enduring national scale that has only existed in short-lived, small-scale local communities.
America since its founding has been a land full of raucous and unspeakable violence, mindless aggression, a zeal to dominate, slavery, a civilization-hating impulse toward escape and barbarism, exploitation and dog-eat-dog individualism. The American revolution itself was driven just as much by greed, hucksterism and intemperate fanaticism as noble ideals. Yes, there are plenty of noble ideals and dreams in various writings, documents and books. Sometimes, an occasional wise legislator or jurist puts some piece of those dreams into practice. But the actual, living country has almost always been under the domineering thumbs of its plunderers and enterprising economic conquerors.
December 3, 2009 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting points Dan K. I can't help but think that we've slipped at least a few rungs down from wherever we were before when I consider the moral hazard, or lack thereof that exists in any corporation that has grown "too big to fail" following the events/bailouts of the past year. That is the primary difference that exists today, that such corporations can and will act with impunity unless we move to restructure incentives and regulations to promote and provoke better corporate behavior. Prior to this age in which 49 of the largest economies on the planet are corporate economies, we might have relied on some sense of "doing the right thing" to influence the actions of the personalities that underlie corporate behavior. I think we may have slipped down the rabbit hole with regard to those prior restraints on corporate greed, and now the fix can be bought with a concerted PR campaign along with a half billion $ or so given to charity.
December 3, 2009 10:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, we agree on much here, and your first paragraph puts it with a terrific eloquence that ought to be re-published beyond this thread. Let me respond also to this important point:
"I will only repeat my belief that what you are pining for is really a revolution to create something that never really was, not a rescue operation to save something that is slipping away. Or perhaps better, you want to create something on a large and enduring national scale that has only existed in short-lived, small-scale local communities."
The American Revolution was conservative, on the one hand, in that it sought to defend many long-standing (or long-ballyhooed) "rights" against a monarchy and a mercantilist and colonial regime that had served their purposes in settling the colonies but were perceived to have turned against "the rights of Englishmen" and the emerging and growing affirmations of what we now regard as classical liberalism.
At the same time, though, the Revolution plunged the country into uncharted depths and currents; it wasn't as if the Roman or Venetian republics were sufficient as models for the authors of the Federalist Papers. So I'm wanting another revolution that will conserve or defend some things against new encroachments and abuses but that, inevitably, will also create some things that never were. That's a creative tension, but why is it necessarily a contradiction, either in history or in theory?
December 4, 2009 7:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
The observations concerning West Point were the keenest I have read.
The observations about Puritanism, well, isn't that the part of our legacy that the architects of the Constitution were so wise to disown?
The landscape around West Point, and all up and down the Hudson in fact, into New York, bears as much, or more, Dutch than Puritan in its European-derived elements, thankfully. (It's that little difference that is so striking when you pass into New England.)
The Army Corps of Engineers was once the best in the world. But a Dutch visitor to New Orleans observed recently that such shoddy work would never be found in her home country.
We are, in several senses, below sea level as a culture right now, so the anecdote might be worth taking seriously as to where we should look to- I don't want to use the Puritan word- redemption?
December 3, 2009 10:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
You want to do sociological and/or sociopolitical analyses? Fine. Just keep Obama's name out of it.
Obama's a Chicago pol whose principal motivation is getting reelected. It's a long slog to 2012, and he has to undermine each challenge as it appears to be gathering strength.
Today, the growing threat to his second term aspirations comes from Gen. David Petraeus. Obama's tactic is to isolate Petraeus, keep him down in Florida and keep the nation's attention on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has no known presidential aspirations, and off Petraeus. But you can't keep the nation's attention on a general -- a second class one at that -- unless you can give him a big war to fight.
Thus, 30,000+ troops and photo ops.
December 3, 2009 11:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
If your analysis is right- and I have no reason to think it isn't- I must revise upward my estimate of Obama's strategic skills.
In a military-worshipping, apocalyptic-minded culture, sidelining the universally acclaimed savior of the cradle of civilization- the Tigris and Euphrates are half the waters of Eden!- would be a coup that even Nixon would justly congratulate himself for.
I wouldn't play poker with the guy, that's for sure.
December 3, 2009 11:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, you wrote: "To suggest, as I have, that Obama isn't powerful enough because he lacks a strong push from what some people persist in calling the left (but what I would call a civic-republican majority) is not to criticize him. It is to indicate his predicament."
I'm not sure "civic-republican" is how very many Americans would identify their politics but if your larger point is that any push tagged as coming from "the left" likewise says to most Americans "not me", then I think that's accurate as a factual matter.
I think you're also right if you mean to imply that the grievances and positive actions that appear to be needed concern literally most Americans and the broad public interest, bumping up against powerful vested interests who are blocking needed actions. Most Americans should be able to "see", if not themselves, then someone they know who would have skin in this game.
Possibly the term "populist" would have positive resonance for many in the heartland--it has what would in some respects be the added benefit of eliciting surefire and sneering disdain from most of the media commentariat, who, along with the economic and political elites are at the moment being blamed fairly indiscriminately en masse for our travails.
How about "progressive"? "Radical centrist"?
The point is that any mass movement that might emerge that stands a chance of attracting enough support to challenge concentrated power and provide enough of a push to maybe get the politicians to do what is needed probably will have to be identified with many of these labels, or perhaps a new one entirely that has little historical resonance, and therefore also baggage, attached to it.
Once a wannabe movement is either claimed or owned by any of these minority strains of political opinion--or is tagged to one of those strains by others who may wish to limit its impact--it immediately loses potential support.
I have no idea how a mass movement along these lines could get started. Here's a crazy off the wall thought--have someone from one of the sensible policy shops which actually have some reasonably specific and eminently doable and sensible suggestions for what public policies would actually help, such as, say, the Economic Policy Institute (which is pushing a jobs bill and certainly supports financial sector reform as well), contact a few well-known Hollywood types who might be willing to lend their names to a mass demonstration/rally major media appeal to recruit ordinary citizens from all across the country to just show up on the Mall in DC on some announced date.
There are Hollywood types who have invested seriously in activism on these types of issues, such as Danny Glover. If even a handful of household names such as Oprah Winfrey or George Clooney or Tom Hanks would support such an effort, who knows?
The media campaign to recruit ordinary people to show up at the rally could be titled something like "This Time, You're the Stars", to emphasize that these famous people are not the subject or the stars of this initiative, but are just lending their efforts to help our country and our fellow citizens in need at a difficult time for our country.
Just thinking out loud. We need somethin'. In predicaments such as the one we face now, the threshold for what would ordinarily count as thinking too crazy to consider changes.
December 4, 2009 12:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
"the likelihood that Obama is trapped -- or has trapped himself - into taking measures that are too little, too late haunts me everywhere I look"
Well, if the first ten months of a four-or-eight-year administration is already "too late," then what chance does he (or by extension, do we) really have anyway?
December 4, 2009 12:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
The unsinkably optimistic Mr. Sleeper returns!
The idea that Obama would be a better President if only there were greater pressure on him to do so is just not very credible at all.
Obama is a DLC/corporate Democrat at best. He's no liberal that's for sure and I don't think he gives a rat's ass about the Republic you rightfully fret about. He is not half as smart as Harry Truman and isn't even in the same league as Jack Kennedy. What on earth would make you say something so far off the mark and for which there is so little evidence? Obama has not demonstrated any particular brilliance in his political career and certainly did not do so as a student in either college or law school. Sure, he's above average in intelligence, but that's not all that unique or special.
Obama, in truth, is a very unremarkable, exceedingly conventional Washington DC politician whose timid style of leadership is distinguished by his willingness to do exactly as the powers that be wish him to act no matter how negative those effects are upon the country or the common people. Obama is the quintessential status quo politician whose unique physical characteristics helped him bamboozle the voting public into thinking he was substantively different than the others even though he was the most conservative of the three leading Democrats running for President last year. He bamboozled them into thinking he was for changing the status quo that the vast majority of Americans left and right agree has become a malignancy on the body politic in this country. His actions as President demonstrate very clearly he didn't mean a word of it. Obama lacks any unique vision of anything and hopes to restore America to it's pre-Bush position of economic and military predominance worldwide by tweaking the way business in Washington is done at the margins here and there. For a man who has risen as far as he has in politics, he demonstrates an unbelievable naivete regarding bipartisanship that has seriously reduced the effectiveness of his stimulus and healthcare proposals yet he continues to insist on making his bipartisanship fantasy a reality. His escalation of the war against Afghanistan and her people has no justification politically or militarily. The escalation is immoral as well as futile. There is not a chance in hell that the continued US military presence there will do anything other than waste lives and money in addition to threatening the stability of Pakistan.
December 4, 2009 1:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Oleeb, I guess you may be right about Obama. But you miss the point. Was FDR a radical? No. Was he wiser or smarter or more principled than Obama? I see no reason to think so.
Obama operates in a political context that has only one side, corporate and military power. There is nothing on the other side. FDR put in place a welfare state because socialism scared him and his corporate backers out of their wits. Today, there is nothing for the corporate masters to fear but fear itself. There is no organized labor, no radical street politics (other than those who are manipulated by same corporate power). Nothing but an atomized society with neither the consciousness nor capacity for organized resistance.
I think it is just pathetic how much people here invest in Obama's innate goodness. It reeks of courtly obsequiousness and the personality cult of the supreme leader, and quite telling that this is today the affectation of "liberals." But honestly, there is something similarly pathetic about being invested in Obama's badness. Who cares how corrupt or weak willed or duplicitous he is? Had he been a different person he wouldn't have been elected. The problem is not Obama. The problem is that we the people we've been beaten to a pulp, and we need to retreat, regroup, recover, rethink and reboot ourselves as political agents. There will be no savior.
December 4, 2009 7:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
FDR was a liberal interested in the welfare of the common American. There is nothing at all analagous going on with Obama. Yes, the circumstances are different and he has an obligation to at least attempt to lead in the right direction. Nothing of the kind is happening. FDR did not campaign on substantive change, but seeing how bad the situation was upon taking office acted decisively by initiating sweeping, dramatic and immediate changes in how the government approached the crisis. Obama campaigned on being an agent of change and has done anything but work for changing the corrupt, malignant way Washington works. If anything he is attempting to bolster most of what is wrong with Washington. It is not a valid argument to say no power exists on the left to support changes Obama might like to see. First of all labor is at least as powerful now as they were in 1933 when they were only beginning to rise. Second, the majority of people support dramatic changes that Obama refuses to support and public opinion means one helluva lot. Third, there is also the blogosphere ready, willing and able to support real change but he gives the blogosphere little or nothing to get behind. Fourth, his campaign built a huge organization that he has turned into a cheerleading squad for the status quo instead of using the power and energy of the millions ready to follow his lead. So, while your argument makes some sense if you ignore all of these factors, it really doesn't hold a whole lot of water when you do consider them.
December 4, 2009 10:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
FDR's best argument to the elite that backed him was that if they don't take the change he offers, they will get a much radical change forced on them by workers with hammers and peasants with pitchforks. Whether he also cared about common Americans is beside the point.
There is a lot of public opinion that Obama could tap into, blogoshepre, what's left of labor, the pary base, etc., if he wanted to lead that way, which he isn't. But there is no ORGANIZED threat coming from the street and from labor. A diffuse hostile public opinion is uncomfortable, but in itself ignorable. What is required is a militant base ready to fight. We don't have it. We had it in the thirties when the US was rife with socialists, communists and anarchists that were a real political threat. This isn't about whether Unions exist per se, but about whether they are capable, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of organizational capacity, for any sort of militancy.
Your point about the cheer leading squad is a case in point. Sure they will support him if he moved in the direction of real change. But why should he give en that they would support him anyway?
What I disagree with is the fundamental model of social change that assumes that what matters is getting the person with the correct disposition in office. It's not enough that there is a majority vaguely in favor of change. And it's not enough that there is a President that wants change (and I am not saying that Obama is that kind of President. I agree with you that he isn't). What is needed is an organized force that imposes change on those who oppose it. We need the upper class to be AFRAID.
Until that happens, nothing will change. You can take this prediction to the bank.
December 4, 2009 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Do you really think labor was more powerful in 33 than now? If you do, you would be wrong first of all.
Second, and most importantly, FDR did not operate in a vacuum and his actions were in tandem with labor albeit labor taking a more forward position. Obama, in contrast, has done everything he can possibly do to suppress action by labor and everyone else left of the right wing extremist Republicans from doing anything that would jeopardize his corporate, Republican lite agenda. So again, to assert that somehow the people who elected him must lead him and pointing out the FDR example is just not a good analogy. Obama is not singing from the same hymnal as labor and the progressives. He is downright opposed to most of the progressive agenda and his actions prove that. He says he is for EFCA but is letting it die on the vine. He says he is for a public option in healthcare and he is actively working to kill it. He says he is for transparencyin government and yet stakes out positions even more extreme than Bush held. He says he is against torture but allows it to continue at Bagram and elsewhere. He is not in any way an allie of the common people or of the organizations that represent workers or the left and if they were more forcefully opposing his agenda and demanding more he would not change anything he is doing. He is completely tone deaf to his own constituency and so self involved in the preposterous idea that he does, in fact, possess a great intellect that he is performing in office like the amateur he is. It is simply illegitimate and untrue to blame the fact that he's a conservadem on the absence of a more motivated or powerful constituency on the left.
December 4, 2009 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
not singing from the same hymnal
Boy, howdy...
December 4, 2009 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you define "strength" as the take home salary of union bosses than the answer is of course no. If you measure it by the ability to organize strikes, militant actions and riots, and by the cultural force of militancy and militant consciousness, then the answer is absolutely yes. Herbert Hoover was nearly assassinated during the 1932 elections. The Bonus Army marched on Washington. The Pacific Waterfront was completely shut down. There is really no comparison to what is gopossible on today.
I don't disagree with you about Obama, but you should ask why he became President on a wave of progressive hope. Here's the fact. Obama, who is and always was a corporate shill, is the farthest to the left candidate that the hard core base of the party thought had a chance to get elected. That sums it up.
And why is that?
December 4, 2009 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Labor Movement today, even in it's weakened state is far more powerful in every way than the nascent labor movement of 1933.
December 4, 2009 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obviously, either we do not live in the same world, or we do not use words in the same way.
December 4, 2009 8:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is here, oleeb, that I must agree with evildoer. Obama has certainly nothing like these guys to worry about. FDR and his corporate owners had reason to fear the workers and the peasants in ways that have long since been dealt with, leaving Obama free reign to further solidify the strength of the corporate class in the absence of any significant opposition.
There is no labor movement, beyond the movement of our jobs overseas (or even to other states) to be awarded to the lowest bidder. There simply are no Joe Hills, Mother Jones's, Big Bill Haywoods, Clarence Darrows, Eugene Debs, or others active today to keep the pols and their corporate owners honest under threat of anarchy and insurrection.
I fear that FDR was indeed placed into a situation wherein he and the corporate class felt sufficiently threatened by the workers and peasants to require them to embrace the New Deal. This represented a surrender to the power and the force of the labor movement they confronted.
But I also believe they took a lesson from the experience, and have embarked on a mission since those days to ensure they would never be placed in such a weak position again from which they would have to compromise their wealth and their economic advantage to gain control of the rabble. And, unfortunately, I think they have been very successful in realizing their objective, as we workers find ourselves with no power base at all from which to force our way into gaining any sort of economic justice or even political consideration of the most elemental degree.
December 6, 2009 12:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
True, the workers are not yet up in arms but that was mostly spontaneous back in those days and not organized. The bonus army, the hoovervilles all over the country, the rent strikes, etc... That is, I believe, coming, But labor today has more influence, clout, whatever you want to call it, than it did back then. The difference between then and now was that there were more elected representatives who were actually with labor and with the people. Now, most of the Democrats are so compromised by their dependence upon corporate sponsorship they don't have the balls to do what is right on their own. But if they had an actual leader in the White House saying we must do this and with my organization that raised nearly a billion dollars for my campaign last year, I can guarantee your fundraising will not suffer because you did the right thing and you can tell the insurance lobbyists to go fuck themselves. Nothing of the kind is taking place. In true Democratic fashion, Obama uses his organization solely for his own agrandizement, acts every bit as scared and compromised as the typical DC Democrat in Congress and so we see no real movement and no real leadership being provided at this critical moment in history. Obama is choosing to do nothing or to do the wrong thing by backing the bad guys as opposed to the people and that is a fundamental difference. FDR cared. I honestly don't think Obama gives a damn about the little people and his polcies demonstrate that pretty clearly.
December 6, 2009 2:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oleeb,
I don't particularly disagree on the facts. Perhaps FDR was a better Mensch than Obama. I leave that question to their respective biographers.
What disturbs me, and I think this is part of the problem we're facing, is your attitude, which is the attitude of a beggar waiting for someone to throw them a dime rather than of a worker and citizen demanding his or her fair share.
Who cares if Obama cares? !@#$ them all!
December 6, 2009 5:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
And you will not see it today because todays Left are mostly educated professionals and upper classes who have not had to do much (if any) real physical labor or take the risks involved in doing so.
The socialists, communists and anarchists you refer to had always been on the front lines fighting for their rights and working conditions and taking the personal risks involved with this.
You are not likely see todays left involved in any such actions.
C
December 4, 2009 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I think it is just pathetic how much people here invest in Obama's innate goodness."
I did. But no more.
December 4, 2009 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Talmud teaches, "where the penitent stand, the completely righteous cannot stand.
December 4, 2009 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the people . . . need to retreat, regroup, recover, rethink and reboot ourselves as political agents. There will be no savior. evildoer
"The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised . . . ."
Bummer!
December 4, 2009 2:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, that hurts!
December 5, 2009 7:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately, you have made here a succinctly profound statement. There really is nothing else that needs to be said in understanding the "disappointment" that is expressed by the working class as they are offered patronizing platitudes in place of actual economic justice.
(See my response to oleeb further down thread)
December 6, 2009 12:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
I meant, of course, up thread. Up, Down, Left, Right.... I guess it all seems the same to me somehow.
December 6, 2009 12:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're disoriented ;-)
December 6, 2009 7:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
1.)Like it or not, oleeb, the President has done what he had to do under the circumstances. And he has staked his presidency on the decision. If you don't like it, you have the freedom to gather with others likeminded and register, in the ballot box of November 2012, your verdict on his course of action.
2.) Dan K above opines "I will only repeat my belief that what you (Jim Sleeper) are pining for is really a revolution to create something that never really was..." And Dan is right about that except that the revolution for which we yearn did live in one brief shining moment of time but because of its purity was nailed to a cross...
yet lives on in the deepest desires of humans and will one day prevail if you will believe.
December 4, 2009 7:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Barack Obama is the wisest American president of my lifetime."
Then you must have been born yesterday.
How could you possibly make a comment like this when the president hasn't even shown an ability to corral the congressional members of his own party?
As has been noted elsewhere, there are reasons why academics like Obama have very, very rarely ascended to the presidency. While it's true that Obama is well read on history and has a tremendous grasp of some of the most critical issues facing our country, that does not mean that he has the knowledge or experience to invoke "change."
There is a reason why most past presidents have been lawyers, doctors, or businessmen. These fields, generally speaking, not only require a great deal of knowledge, but also a necessity to APPLY that knowledge. A lawyer must know the law codes and then practice them in a courtroom. A doctor must have knowledge as to the part of the body (or mind) that he or she diagnoses and treats. Similarly, a businessman must have a broad knowledge of running a business and expanding his or her services to clients.
But an academic only needs to know and inform. That will hardly help in situations like we're currently seeing in the senate. Closed door meetings amongst disagreeable party members over the size and scope of health care reform. Knowledge, in and of itself, is a great thing. But you must also be able to apply it and negotiate with the other party or other countries (who have an agenda of their own to cultivate).
To his credit, Obama has been slow and cautious thus far; very careful to avoid costly mistakes. But the open road of the freeway has suddenly caught up with the rest of the traffic and the president must now tend to the series of decisions that make his job very difficult. It is only now that we will see what he's made of.
December 4, 2009 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Barack Obama is the wisest American president of my lifetime."
I agree with you Gettysburg
December 4, 2009 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Evildoer,
I am impressed with your post from above and with respect to FDR. His corporate backers were afraid of the public wrath if taken to the streets. Thus, the New Deal. And yet, I am thankful for the New Deal, but I am more thankful for LBJ's "participatory" Democracy of 81 pieces of legislation in his first year in office. And to me, this is the yardstick to measure a First Rate Leadership Model. Consequently, Obama will continue to maintain a second tier model, at best.
As a Native American/Chicano, the demographic trends favoring greater voting strength for Hispanics and which will be a virtual God_Send for America. To wit, the notional from the label of a "progressive" will finally meet its burial ground, and done in proper order. Thus, the onset of a label for the "aggressive" Moderate is appropriate and which will transcend Liberals and Progressives.
Why?
Just a handful of notionals for consideration.
1. The $300 million "tag".
2. The legislation to prohibit political parties from accepting the memberships of bigots and racists. (The demise of the GOP)
3. The Academic-Military Draft.
4. TransNational Technology Centers.
5. Our "littest citizens".
Yup, ask a "progressive" about these five notionals, and they will give you the traditional blank stare of even the lacking of a faintest idea of what is being mentioned.
And Hispanics aren't shy in expressing themselves. Take,for example, Bush's War of Choice. 90% of Native Americans, 90% of African Americans, and 73% of Hispanics opposed Bush's War of Choice. By my back of the envelop calculation, white America, at about 90%, supported Bush's War. That means that white America is inherently and criminally stupid. So, when it comes to America's wealth of a self-annoited "expert", take no offense when I vehemently disagree with these self-proclaimed experts. Needless to say, but I will, I find it a tad disgusting that I have to listen to these fools on the Sunday Morning Talking Heads Circuit.
Now, I'm done with this rant of mine and thanks to the internet, I don't have to spend $500 an hour on some 'expert's couch to rid myself of this nonsense. :-)
Jaango
December 4, 2009 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
That means that white America is inherently and criminally stupid.
I'm not going to take the other side of this debate. But don't misunderestimate our ruling class. If they know one thing it is how to co-opt.
December 4, 2009 5:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
how to co-opt.
Prez will join Jerry Rubin in the Co optee Hall of Fame...
But, y'know, Saul Alinsky could not be co opted. And I guess I thought, you know, that...
December 5, 2009 10:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim- A wonderful essay. I think you are right that FDR had the support of a Democratic Socialist labor and intellectual movement that was not afraid of the Fascist right. That may be the difference between 1933 and 2009.
December 4, 2009 7:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for this post and all the comments. This is the best piece and discussion I've read in a long time.
December 4, 2009 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
evildoer,
Thanks for your response. I thought I had inadvertently killed this thread. And as such, I thought I would post another comment to 'ease the pain' of any perceived or offended Reader.
However, I am reminded that two Constructs prevail. The "gifting" process as represented by the Dineh Society or the Navajo, and your zeroing in on the notional for "co-opting" within the political process.
Now, I have always been curious as to how the "co-optees" determine the 'trade-off' relative to the ascribed determination of the 'value' or their price point? And of course, accepting the responsibility by the 'co-optee's' decision-making for diminishing the agenda as well as tarnishing the reputation of the 'co-optee'? But I will leave that for another day and for another discussion.
Jaango
December 5, 2009 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Capitalism did not force tends of million Americans to vote keep the worst US administration since the 1920s going in 2004, or vote for the most mentally feeble vice president in the history of the western world in 2008, or dumb-down public education in America, or buy houses they couldn't afford.
December 5, 2009 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, it's sort-of a truism that "capitalism did not force...." But if you really look at what capitalism is, at how pervasive and disruptive its pressures, incentives, and seductives are in the daily lives of most people, how much consumer marketing and the debt system lure and distract people, I think that you begin to see a relationship between "capitalism" as we now know it and the ways people vote, the things they tend to trust.
Just because some extremists blamed everything that's evil on capitalism, as if there had never been evil in the heart of man before capitalism came on the scene, is not an excuse to excuse capitalism for accelerating and insinuating that evil into many people's lives. C'mon and open your eyes and think a bit harder!
December 6, 2009 12:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
When capitalism becomes too big to fail, everything else becomes too small to succeed.
December 6, 2009 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Capitlaism forced x" is a category mistake. It's like saying that architecture causes buildings, or that war causes people to shoot each other.
Under capitalism, certain things are more likely, because they are in accordance with capitalist tendencies. For example, under capitalism, state institutions are progressively enslaved to the goal of capital accumulation, which explains why GWB's "war chest" during the 2000 election was more important than his feeble mind in determining the outcome. Under capitalism, exchange value becomes the only value, and therefore concepts such as integrity are whittled away, which explains why our journalists went along with the Boy Emperor and sold his virtues to the public.
Of course, other systems of governance can also produce stupid rulers, as Emperor Commodus proved.
December 6, 2009 6:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
See below . . .
December 6, 2009 8:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Under capitalism, exchange value becomes the only value, and therefore concepts such as integrity are whittled away . . . .
What the Right fails to understand is that capitalism is inherently incompatible with "traditional values" and, in fact, the pervasiveness of capitalism is the primary cause of the decline in those traditional values. Self-interest--the driving force behind capitalism--is merely the cardinal sin of greed relabeled. And Janet Jackson exposing her boobs at the Super Bowl halftime is the inevitable consequence of self-interested capitalists seeking to maximize their rents. As you say, exchange value has become the only value, and in an environment in which the vice of greed has been transformed into the virtue of "enlightened" self-interest, the so-called traditional values can persist only as fossils. Like Tyrannosaurus rex, they may still inspire awe, but they can no longer bite.
December 6, 2009 7:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
“Reframing” Sound Money
One of my favorite ‘stalking horses’ when it comes to political commentary, is writer Robert Robb of the Arizona Republic newspaper which is located here in the Sonoran Desert. He comes at his efforts from the mindset of the libertarian-conservative perspective, and which has proven itself to be inherently wrong for these past 30 years, at least, from the starting point of the Reagan Fiasco. And his latest effort is to encourage the conservative that ‘sound money’ is the idea that will prove to be a winner in the next and subsequent elections for the Right. And I say, “not so fast!”
For me, politics is a personal endeavor. So, when it comes to War and Peace or the old political adage of “guns and butter,” I have given up on white America relative to War since the love affair with the ‘military-industrial complex’ is not going to disappear over night or anytime soon, as evidenced by Obama’ speech on Afghanistan. Sadly, I have been proven correct when both Gates and Clinton suggested that there is no current exit strategy being considered for the near term or for the next three years.
As to the Peace, or domestic policy, I am heartened that white America will come of age or when I consider the demographic trends among the Hispanics, given that with the increasing vote levels, a new notional is being crafted that contains a series of a political subset and which is the reframing of political thinking and comes to us in the form of 1) the confused conservative, 2) the “regressive” Moderate and 3) the “aggressive” Moderate. Thus, the conjunction for determining the viability of the “independent” voter is a fiction, at best. And with this in mind, I posit the following when it comes to the Right.
During the Bush Era, conservatives lost the claim for being for ‘smaller government’ and consequently, any claim to taxes, spending, and governance, and collectively, was tossed into the political gutter. And when, adding the notional for no new taxes, more tax cuts, and an obvious love affair with a regressive flat tax, the idea that a conservative war tax, and which I agitated and aggravated for in the past(2002) will not meet with any success, much to my dismay for any tongue in cheek humor. And that’s life in our political slow lane.
However, “sound money” and the reappointment of Ben Benanke do not go hand-in-hand, but my fellow Democrats in the Senate will confirm his appointment for a term at the Federal Reserve. This decision-making it tantamount to recognizing Bernanke’s stellar knowledge on the Great Depression but conveniently lost is that he was the Honcho-Jefe of Bush’s Council on Economic Agitators. And in doing so, existing “progressives” are enthralled and will vote for affirming Obama’s nominee, thusly, nothing changes for the Democrats who are now in charge, or so it seems.
Given our national history, nothing will change for the short term, but at some point in the future, minimum wage workers will find their voice when they realize that the budget-deficit cutting states start having to cut the ‘goods and services’ delivered by the states to the local citizenry with education always being the foremost item on plate for heavy duty cuts. And for Native Americans/Chicanos, the higher than normal drop-out rates will become even more of a serious issue that will engender a political activism. And if education is married to immigration reform, all hell will break loose here in the Sonoran Desert, and perhaps, all across America, since Hispanics are now residing in the unlikeliest of places.
Obviously, Robb too, is not a fan of Bernanke when he writes the following:
“Bernanke is a key advocate of the loose money policies of the Greenspan Fed that contributed significantly to the real-estate bubble. He has been printing money like crazy to buy everyone’s debt—real estate, consumer loans and, most dangerous of all, monetizing the federal government’s red ink.”
And yet, if you’re a homeowner and your home is underwater, there is a Shame being visited on the homeowner, but none of this Shame is visited on the Lenders. Thus, being underwater on your mortgage means that the contract ‘value’ is far exceeds the current market ‘value’. And if this is happening to you, Corporate America has taken hostage of your ‘credit rating score’ and you, as the homeowner, have no recourse or alternative available to you since my fellow Democrats don’t perceive any ‘value’ to be attained by addressing your “held-hostage” credit rating. Thus, the Shame is all yours. Sadly, there are no co-optees in the political arena in which their “price point” can be determined or even measured. To wit, as a homeowner, you have been ‘ostracized’ by both the Republicans and the Democrats, and “regressive” Moderates have historically had this decision-making authority handed to them by the “aggressive” Moderates from the standpoint of an intentional ‘default’ within our political processes. And “how” to move these “regressive” Moderates into the camp of the “aggressive” Moderates, is our overriding challenge and our challenge for next year’s election.
Jaango
December 7, 2009 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
What is behind "But the Marxist left and new left made such a brutal and ludicrous hash of that civic-republican warning that a generation of liberals and former leftists remains embarrassed to utter the words 'corporate state.'" It doesn't embarass me...
Here is the top of the Schema-Root.org (encyclopedia of current events) branch on the military-industrial complex:
http://schema-root.org/commerce/corporations/military/
Looks like a "corporate state" to me.
December 7, 2009 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
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