Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing
this fringe, then the president and his party will have
to confront their real problem: their identification
with the titans who greased the skids for the economic
meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the
country has not. If there's one general lesson to be
gleaned from Christie's victory over Jon Corzine in New
Jersey, it's surely that in today's zeitgeist it's less
of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat
cat, even in a blue state.

Americans don't hate rich people, but they do despise
those who behave as if the rules don't apply to them.
"Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third
Term" was the cover line on New York magazine in
October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his
air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street
C.E.O.'s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the
rest of us with the bill.

The Obama administration does not seem to understand
that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It
has pushed aside the entreaties of many -- including
Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House's own
Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- to break up
too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by
the government's bailouts, low-interest loans and
guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire
system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard
the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on "Meet the
Press" dodging questions about the banks in general and
Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides.
"We're not going to let the system go back to the way
it was," he said.

Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy
Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington,
publicly questioned Geithner's fitness for his job,
given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations
of the derivatives that enabled last year's collapse.
On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White
House's consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent
corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt,
the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman,
told me on Friday it was "surreal" that Democrats were
now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing
"the golden chalice" of reform. If investors cannot
have transparency, Levitt said, "the whole system is
worthless."

The system is going back to the way it was with a
vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the
unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at
week's end, we learned that bankers were helping
themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the
bubble's peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine.
No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates
in late September felt that "large banks" had been
helped "a lot" or "a fair amount" by "government
economic policies," but only 13 percent felt the
"average working person" had been. Unemployment ranked
ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1
pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying
the Obama administration must take more action.

The recent murders at Ft. Hood recall Pascal's
observation that "Men never do evil so cheerfully and
so completely as when they do so from religious
conviction."

Of course, the assumption in this country at the moment
is that only Muslims are evil, which ignores Christians
doing evil to Muslims in Afghanistan or Jews
threatening to nuke Iran in the name of civilization.

In the end, it doesn't make much difference whether
your husband or son is killed by a Muslim major in Ft.
Hood, an American drone in Pakistan, or a Israeli
soldier in Gaza. In each case the dead are victims of
violent religious and cultural hubris.

Or consider that the war, along with that in
Afghanistan, was the creation of politicians blithely
willing to cause that many deaths to win reelection and
supported by generals and admirals who thought it was a
good idea and who then ordered Major Hasan and tens of
thousands of others to engage in battle as an
absolutely indisputable act of responsibility.

Or think about one little symbol of all this. Pull up a
photo of the Joint Chiefs, those responsible for
conducting wars like Iraq and Afghanistan and sending
people to fight in them. Notice their chests bedizened
by ribbons.

Now ask yourself: in what other field of human endeavor
could one wear ribbons indicating areas of service,
major campaigns, training, unit achievement, and
personal accomplishment without people regarding you as
completely mad?

And in what other job can you wantonly kill so many
people and be treated as a normal human being?

None of this excuses Major Hasan but it puts his acts
in perspective: a uncontrolled act of madness in a
deliberately insane system.

We don't think about such things much, because most of
us don't have to. The business of war has been
outsourced to the weakest parts of our economy, to
victims of our pathological economic system among
others.

It may be my bias, or my imagination, or my distaste
for toil, but from here America looks like one big
workhouse, "under God, indivisible, with time off to
shit, shower and shop." A country whose citizens have
been reduced to "human assets" of a vast and
relentless economic machine, moving human parts oiled
by commodities and kept in motion by the edict,
"produce or die." Where employment and a job
dominates all other aspects of life, and the loss of
which spells the loss of everything.

Yeah, yeah, I know, them ain't jobs -- in America we
don't have jobs, we have careers. I've read the
national script, and am quite aware that all those
human assets writing computer code and advertising
copy, or staring at screen monitors in the "human
services" industry are "performing meaningful and
important work in a positive workplace environment."
Performing? Is this brain surgery? Or a stage act? If
we are performing, then for whom? Exactly who is
watching?

Proof abounds of the unending joy and importance of
work and production in our wealth-based economy. Just
read the job recruitment ads. Or ask any of the
people clinging fearfully by their fingernails to
those four remaining jobs in America. But is a job --
hopefully a good one -- and workplace strivance
really everything? Most of us would say, "Well of
course not." But in a nation that now sends police to
break up the tent camps and car camps of homeless
unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle
class, it might well be everything.

But you won't hear anyone complaining. America
doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about
the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint
optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat
American personality. I assure them that our American
corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or
sedating its human assets into the appropriate level
of cheeriness.

Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of
life is monitored by an employer, a credit rating
bureau or the media's projection of the world, and
mediated by the financialization of life's every
aspect. Every action and movement is a transaction,
some as large as the mortgage, others as small as the
purchase of a bus token, or the cost of a cell phone
call, gasoline, vehicle maintenance and parking costs
for movement within the sprawling asphalt grids we
call communities. Even respite from work with its
vacation "leisure destinations" put on the credit
card, and even the greatest commons of all, nature,
has a cost of access, whether it be admission to
national parks or the cost of camping and other
"recreational equipment."

But the truth is that we are all very commonly issued
products of a profit driven workhouse where no human
commons is allowable, lest the workers find meaning
and joy in each other as human beings, and perhaps
become less work driven, less productive and less
profitable. Best that their lives remain mediated,
disembodied from the great commons of the human
spirit, unmoored from the great natural commons
binding all living things called Earth --

    images of which will be provided for your delight on
    The Nature Channel at 9 PM tonight.
    Until then, stay cheerful.
    Pay your bills on time.
    Good night!

The House bill is designed to remove the burden from
taxpayers, proposing instead that shareholders -- as
well as financial institutions with assets exceeding
$10 billion -- ultimately pick up the tab when the
government is forced to bail out a company for the sake
of stabilizing the financial system on the whole.
Still, that taxpayer safeguard does nothing to tackle
the issue of moral hazard. That is, the nation's
largest financial institutions would still be insulated
from certain risks, critics say, leaving them with
distinct business advantages over smaller competitors.

David Min, financial markets expert at the Center for
American Progress, said the resolution authority, by
definition, has to be unlimited in order to maintain
the government's credibility as an effective backstop.
But such a system, he added, will lower the capital
costs for the largest institutions, making it more
difficult for smaller banks to compete.

"The whole scheme of systemic stability really favors
larger institutions and encourages them to become too
big to fail," Min said.

Sherman agrees. "That is a huge gravy train to the top
20 [financial institutions] because it allows them to
borrow money at a lower rate," Sherman said by phone
last week. "Think of what this does to moral hazard."

No stranger to taking on the finance industry, Sherman
was a lonely voice in the push earlier in the year to
apply more stringent executive compensation limits to
bailed out Wall Street firms -- a push that went
precisely nowhere in the face of White House
opposition.

Some economists, notably Paul Volcker, former chairman
of the Federal Reserve and now head of the White House
Economic Recovery Advisory Board, have an alternative
solution to the too-big-to-fail problem. They want to
put back the firewalls between commercial and
investment banking -- firewalls dismantled in 1999 with
the repeal of the Glass-Steagle Act. But that proposal
has gained little traction on Capitol Hill, where the
finance industry remains a hugely influential player
despite its role igniting the recent recession. Min
said the Obama administration took a look through its
"political lens" and decided the tackle finance reforms
without reinstalling Glass-Steagle.

Frank's panel will hold a hearing on the House
legislation Thursday, with Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner testifying.

Expect some fireworks. At a Financial Services hearing
last month, Sherman pressed Geithner to apply some
limits to his request for new bailout powers. "Would
great harm be done to this statute," Sherman asked, "if
we limited the executive branch's authority to a mere
$1 trillion?"

An annoyed Geithner eluded the question before reaching
the conclusion that Sherman was "fundamentally
mischaracterizing" the provision. The Treasury
Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Sherman said he intends to offer a series of amendments
addressing the issue during the Financial Services
panel's markup of the bill, which has yet to be
scheduled. Included will be a provision to cap the
president's bailout authority at $1 trillion, and
another to strip out the resolution authority language
entirely. A potential third proposal -- to create an
oversight panel like that monitoring TARP funds -- is
one he's leaning against.

"I'm not looking for a TARP on steroids with
oversight," Sherman said. "I'm looking for an end of
TARP."

According to the "Tea Party" website, Tea
Party Express II: Countdown To Judgment Day"
is underway. Here's how their website
describes it:

    All throughout the recent Tea Party
Express national bus tour we kept receiving
calls from people around the nation who lived
far away from the route our buses took across
America. We vowed at the time to keep the Tea
Party Express effort alive -- and that's
exactly what we are doing.Join us from October
25th to November 11th, 2009 as we tell
Congress and the White House: "Enough!" Let's
stand up and stop the bailouts, cap and trade,
out-of-control spending, government-run health
care, and higher taxes! We're back and
determined to take our country back!

What will happen on their predicted "Judgment
Day"?

If you buy the biblical spin of the Religious
Right folks -- that make up the bulk of the
Tea Party movement -- the implication is
clear: Jesus will soon return, send all
Democrats, gays, blacks, progressives,
liberals, college-educated unbelievers, etc.,
to Hell, while saving what Sarah Palin calls
"us" "Real Americans" -- in other words
unreconstructed frightened and resentful white
lower middle class Americans.

(As a former right wing evangelical
anti-abortion leader who built a good career
from these folks -- until I quit in disgust
with myself, the anti-American nature of the
movement and the takeover the Republican Party
by extremists -- I know of what I speak.)

If you put the secular/right's
"tree-of-Liberty-must-be-watered-by-the-blood-of-tyrants-
Timothy McVeigh spin on the Judgment Day scenario;
then there will soon be a hoped for bloody day
of reckoning for the occupant of the White
House.

As I tried, for about the seventeenth time, to make sense
of the healthcare negotiations, I suddenly realized that
I wasn't watching a political debate at all; rather it
was one of those conflicts you read about in other
countries that are so hard to understand from afar - the
sort in which militant and/or religious sects with hard
to remember names and unpronounceable leaders engage in
struggles usually reduced by the press to simple goals
such as "power" or "strengthening their position."

But instead of Shiek Wahoodie Marzapan or the Terratus
Mozaki faction, we have Max Baucus, Olympia Snow and the
Blue Dogs. And it all makes about as much sense.

That is, until you stop framing it as a political
division and recognize that we are really dealing with
quasi-religious fundamentalists engaged in a simple turf
battle in which the goal is not healthcare or the lack
thereof, but relative standing at the end of the
conflict. In domestic terms, it is much more like a mob
dispute than a traditional political debate. To be sure,
some of the language seems political - talk of a public
option, mandates and so forth - but this is mostly just
part of the Muzak accompanying the mayhem - symbols that
help make the whole thing appear rational.

In fact, politics is pretty much dead in America and has
been for some time.

Of course, politics has never been just about such high
minded things as goals, ideas and reforms. Such causes
have always had to struggle for air against the forces
described by Walt Whitman as including "the meanest kind
of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers,
pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,
custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels
well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels,
disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers,
pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures
of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers,
lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers,
policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of
conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside
with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made
from the people's money and harlots' money twisted
together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings
and born freedom-sellers of the earth."

But - whether promoted out convenience or noble purpose -
such causes did at least exist and everyone argued about
them - albeit often futilely.

For example, here is one such statement of goals:

"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present
strength, under the protection of certain inalienable
political rights -- among them the right of free speech,
free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from
unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights
to life and liberty.

"We have come to a clear realization of the fact,
however, that true individual freedom cannot exist
without economic security and independence. . . People
who are hungry, people who are (and) out of a job are the
stuff of which dictatorships are made.

"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as
self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second
Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and
prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of
station, or race or creed.

"Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative
job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the
nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food
and clothing and recreation; . . . The right of every
business man, large and small , to trade in an atmosphere
of freedom from unfair competition and domination by
monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family
to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and
the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The
right to adequate protection from the economic fears of
old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment; And
finally, the right to a good education.

"America's own rightful place in the world depends in
large part upon how fully these and similar rights have
been carried into practice for all our citizens."

Now, if you were to clip the foregoing and wander around
the White House and Capitol Hill looking for someone to
advocate such a program, you would be lucky if you came
up with anyone other than, say, Russ Feingold, Bernie
Sanders and perhaps a bare majority of the Black Caucus.
. . .

The others - from the president on down - would regard
such a program as naive claptrap not even worthy of
discussion. And not a single mainstream reporter or TV
show would give it the slightest attention.

Which will give you some sense of what has happened in
the 65 years since these words were broadcast nationally
during a fireside chat by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We like to think of ourselves as so much more
sophisticated than those crazy Muslims with their
innumerable and indecipherable sects, yet that is
precisely what our politics has become as well.

It is not about great issues but about minor factions. It
is not about causes to be advocated but subcultures to be
preserved. It is not about mass politics but about
atomized preferences. And, of course, it is no longer
about votes because they have become almost superfluous -
symbolic reflections of the dollars that really matter.

If we toss out our traditional political paradigm and
start to look at America as if it were one of those
countries we like to occupy, destabilize or develop an
exit strategy for, it all begins to make more sense.

We find ourselves in a country in which at least three
major fundamentalist mujahideens are struggling for
power: the conservative, liberal and establishment. Each
share such characteristics as absolute confidence in
their righteousness, absolute certainty in their beliefs,
absolute contempt for doubt, reduction of their opponents
to the status of devils, and the acceptance of warfare as
a noble exercise as long as they get to pick the target.

In a healthy democracy, two or more parties propose
specific programs to better, in their view, the state of
the nation. But not one of the contemporary American
mujahideens has shown any serious interest in such
matters for the past several decades. It has been left to
minor sects like the Greens and Libertarians to still
worry about issues.

Conservatives, for example, have seemingly forgotten
their erstwhile concern for small government and lower
spending and have chosen to define themselves instead by
what they oppose: primarily abortion and gay marriage.
There are about 1.2 million abortions a year and about
150,000 gay marriages or similar unions. In other words,
conservatives have established as a primary goal changing
the annual behavior of less than one half of one percent
of the American public.

About the only major policies that establishment
fundamentalists have pursued during this same period has
been to find new ways to transfer wealth from the many to
the few and to periodically change the identity of their
major enemy - i.e. the devil incarnate - and thus
periodically redefine themselves. Over these three
decades the devil has been serially located in El
Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Iraq,
Panama, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. And the most deadly
horned beast of all has been the one selling drugs, the
war on which having cost more American lives than any
conflict since Vietnam.

But the only clear victory in all of this was in Grenada
and, as Ted Turner recently noted, the last country to
actually surrender to us was Japan. Yet not one
significant member of the establishment mujahideen has
apologized for the futility and cost of their warrior
fantasies and, as of this morning, not one leader of the
establishment has apologized for their near disastrous
financial policies and misdeeds from which we are now
desperately attempting to recover.

But then, the enemy was never there to be defeated but as
a constant threat enforcing the loyalty of one's
constituency. As Ernest Becker put it, "war is a
sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular
hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to
mutilate or kill foreign enemies." With it you need no
progress, no policies, and no change in the system at
all.

All you need is an enemy, with the greatest threat not
being the enemy itself but that it might disappear.
Constatine Cavafy put it well a century ago:

Night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
And said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Few in public office have said it so bluntly, a
remarkable exception being the State Department's
director of policy planning in 1948, George Kennan, who
argued, "We should cease to talk about vague and. . .
unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of
the living standards, and democratization. . . We are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

While an establishment or conservative movement obsessed
with power certainly has plenty of precedents in history,
this tendency was mitigated in the United States during
its first two centuries because, for better or worse,
Americans of all stripes believed in things and their
politics reflected this.

But what is rare enough to be deeply disturbing has been
the transformation of the American liberal constituency
into a similar sect - one searching for power without the
necessity of purpose. Certainly since its cynical
acceptance of Bill Clinton, mainstream liberal Democratic
politics has not displayed more than a passing interest
in any major policy - sharing with the right a reliance
on things like gay marriage and abortion while ignoring
massive economic, environmental and civil liberties
issues. To be sure, there are progressives and groups
that have tried to take up the slack, but they have been
uniformly ignored, or even dissed, such as the refusal to
invite single payer advocates to White House discussions
on health care, which mainstream liberals barely noticed.

Further, liberals have increasingly taken to acting like
conservatives. They are defining themselves by their
enemies rather than by their own beliefs and programs.
For example, their obsession with the faults of Fox News
argues that true virtue lies in not being Sean Hannity.
There was a time when liberals had higher standards than
that.

Worse, the liberal paradigm has assigned to much of
America the sins of Rush Limbaugh, condemning the very
people who should be converted, disparaging much of our
land as mere "fly over country," and showing no respect
for the problems of those who live in such places. These
are the characteristics of a snotty private club, not a
political movement.

There are a couple of reasons why all this is deeply
disturbing. The first is that almost without exception,
the best political ideas - from democracy itself to a
minimum wage or ecological preservation - have come from
the left. For liberalism to go into sleep mode or retreat
into a cocoon of smug self identity endangers the whole
nation.

The second is that one of the hidden dangers of politics
without purpose is that it becomes increasingly corrupt
and supportive of aggressively narcissistic and
anti-democratic abuse. This is what happened in Nazi
Germany as the disintegration of liberalism became an
important part of the cultural rubble upon which Hitler
climbed.

There is nothing, however, that prevents the rediscovery
of real politics in America. Admittedly, it would be
difficult given the almost total bias of the media
towards the personality rather than the substance of
power. But there could still be a progressive populist
movement that would promote a real economic reform
movement, defend the weak against the powerful, the local
against the centralized and rediscover the sort of rights
of which Roosevelt spoke 65 years ago.

Since the media is a key part of the establishment
mujahideen, it will not voluntarily admit this to its
viewers and readers, but we are living in a nation of
increasingly angry, restless, confused folk and if they
are not offered decent and realistic answers they will
become increasingly susceptible to the worst kind of
lies.

Yet for it to happen, we must first accept the degree to
which the system we were taught we lived under simply no
longer exists. That our politics have lost honor and
soul, with conscious programs and polices replaced by the
transactions of mobs, exemplified by healthcare
negotiations in which the major winners will inevitably
be the healthcare industry and the biggest losers those
in whose name a final measure will be passed.

And we must also view that part of unempowered America
with which we find disagreement not as irreparable
rightwing junkies but as fellow citizens who have been
deceived, misled and screwed. And then, issue by issue,
turn them into allies as together we rediscover what
politics was meant to be - and still can be - about.