Remember most of us don't vote

As we move toward the big test, Obama vs whatever clown the Repubs finally decide to present, we must bear in mind that over one half (54%) of the eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. This is according to International IDEA, an organization that supports and measures voting rates worldwide. They also report that only 42% of eligible voters voted in the last Congressional election. That is lower than Afghanistan, which is in the midst of a civil war and a stuck with a corrupt (US inserted) quisling for President, had a 46% turnout in their last election. And even a miserable hellhole like Chad (find it on your world atlas) with one of the lowest annual per capita incomes in the world, $870*, vote in higher proportion than the spoiled f**ks in the US of A with a per capita income of $46,860*. Compare that to Denmark, which had at 86% turnout and Sweden at 84%. Is there a relationship between perceived well-being and participation in the democratic process?

Are times really that bad? Are many of us so demoralized about our flat-lined incomes and plunging home values that we again won’t even bother to vote? If so many people don’t vote because they believe elections are just placebo, a rigged event controlled by elite insiders, then that would be one thing. Then we might be on the cusp of something big. It would mean people were waking up to the need for real change. Then we would expect to see hundreds of thousands (as compared to merely hundreds) out in streets and maybe even a general strike or two. But, alas, people don’t vote for far more pedestrian reasons. They are either too distracted or too busy (read: too self-centered), or just too out of it to connect the dots.

But our elections do matter. This time especially. This time it is essentially the inept caretakers vs the certified crazies. The Republican Party has gone bonkers. They are more out of touch with textbook economic reality than any time in their history. In trying to match the needs of their handlers, the richest .01%, and the motley collection of indignant poorly educated, fanatically liberal hating and covertly racist base, they are intent on inadvertently damaging the prospects of their beloved mode production – capitalism. Myopic attention to “the Deficit” in times of inadequate aggregate demand is a recipe for disaster considering the present shaky state of the world economy. In their ideological blindness, they are significantly more dangerous than the wishy washy, caretaker, centrist Democrats. Neither party is the real answer. But one must vote for the Democrats simply to lessen the steepness of the downward trajectory. The Democrats may be fools and many of them may also be corrupt tools of the ‘corporacracy’ but they are not stark raving mad. They are not anti-science, ideological ostriches who want to return us to some idealized vision of the 19^th Century, and who want to crystallize into permanency our new Gilded Age with the 1 per centers locked away in their gated estates as the seas rise and food prices skyrocket, as we choke on our own fumes and cook the planet.

Elections are not decided by the votes from the loyalist bases of each party but by a bloc of poorly informed, distracted, malleable undecided voters – the proverbial ‘swing voters.’ This is where the corporate owned mainstream media most distinctly fails our democracy. These undecided voters sorely need honest, objective information and analysis not frantic ‘political sports reporting’ and cheap scandal mongering. The candidates’ personalities and verbal screw-ups might be entertaining and provocative in a sugar-rush sort of way, but it leaves the voters as empty vessels to be filled with well-designed political propaganda. As this next election shakes out into a final run, each side will spend hundreds millions of dollars on an obscenely expensive last ditch blast of dumbed-down, emotive political advertising most of it negative. The same ad agencies that nightly pump out an endless flow of putrid corporate propaganda to buy, buy, buy will turn to scaring and indoctrinating us to vote, vote, vote against candidate X because he or she is evil incarnate. The intellectual process of considering the implications of each candidate’s rosy cornucopia of polished, focus group-driven positions is totally left behind as people are encouraged to vote based on their raw emotions. And now with the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision lifting all restraints on corporate money flowing into elections, elections are set to become a billion dollar plus feeding frenzy of dueling agitprop pieces.

The Repubs are inveterate snake oil salesman. They are shills for the rich and very rich but have cajoled and tricked a pack of ignorant, liberal hating shmucks onto identifying themselves as loyal Republicans even as their interests are being eviscerated. But Obama has disappointed the educated and organized working classes. Like all politicians hustling for votes, he oversold what was possible with lots of touchy-feely, good vibes BS. It is not likely he can repeat that act. But the wise voters must realize will they have to hold their noses and again vote for the lesser evil; while the hoards of government fearing, anti-science, free marketeer dupes will vote for whoever emerges as the new front man for the right. But what will the ‘swing voters do? Will these passive TV-addicted couch potatoes, who have determined all recent presidential elections, again decide it’s time to ’throw out the bum’ and give the ‘others guys’, the GOP with their track record of proven abject failure, another shot? Unless there is some identifiable, tangible improvement in the economy, it will be a tight race indeed, a race between an Mr. Empty Suit (probably Mitt Romney), and Mr. Unfulfilled Promises, Barack Obama.

*IMF 2010 estimates

Is a Sleeping Giant Slowly Awakening?

Before we had this thing called democracy, citizens traditionally made their displeasure known with their local autocracy in the old-fashioned ways - rebellions, insurrections and revolutions. And these ‘popular movements’ usually started with an unauthorized assembly of the lower classes whose members usually had a valid set of complaints - generally something to do with not getting enough to eat. And the target of these complaints was always the same –the well-fed, arrogant and privileged bastards who were running things both ineptly and primarily for their own benefit.

Fall 2011 something similar has sprung up - the Occupy Wall Street / 99er movement, and its target is again the well-fed, arrogant and privileged bastards who were running things both ineptly and primarily for their own benefit by somehow having high-jacked our democracy. Also interestingly its primary complaint overlaps with one of the chief complaints of the other recent (some say manipulated) pack of outraged citizens, the Tea Partiers. Members of both disgruntled groups, while being from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have at least one grievance in common, they both are greatly displeased with the financial establishment and the government’s response to its economy crashing, greed-driven actions, specifically the government bank bailouts and how the bailouts seemed to helped the bankers and no one else.

But the genius of this new Occupy Wall Street / 99er movement is its amorphous and autonomous nature. Even as it is mainly focused on a single fat target: greed, it leaves ample room for other related targets, which are in abundance to say the least. Whereas the Tea Partiers wanted to blame everything on our first non-white president, this new movement leaves this target rich environment wide open – bankers, the ultra rich, the moronic GOP, the pathetically ineffective Democrats - essentially the Establishment in general. Like an old time carnival shooting gallery, all kinds of outrages present themselves as delightful sitting ducks and colorful bulls eyes continually rotating by.

Here are some of some ‘sitting duck’ facts: *

• 46.2 million people Americans living below the poverty line, the highest number in 52 years of record keeping
• Corporations booked profits at a record $1.5 trillion a year, increasingly possessed by the super rich, while real unemployment stood at 16%
• Average income for the top 10% of Americans is $164,600 and $31,200 for the bottom 90% of Americans
• 10% of Americans control 2/3 of all wealth.
• We're 6.6 million jobs short of our pre-recession levels, and new workers enter the work force every day,
• Median full-time male workers make $48,000 a year, the same as 1969,inflation-adjusted.
• 98% of 27 million net new jobs created in America between 1990 and 2008 were in service sectors not easily outsourced, such as health care.
• 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics, more than 1 in4, live in poverty.
• Home prices have dropped to 2003 levels.
• The stock market is at 1998 levels and increasingly the domain of Wall Street insiders and computer trading.
• Wages declined more than 6% since 2007 while corporate and CEO income skyrocketed.

Here are some more that bear repeating: **

• The top 1% of the population receives nearly 25% of the all income and holds and astonishing 40% of the all US wealth.

• We are still engaged in two expensive official wars and at least four and maybe more unofficial ones.

• The military budget is at or above Cold War levels. Increasingly Obama, the Commander in Chief, is becoming interchangeable with Bush, in an open-ended, perpetual “War on Terror.”\

• As the planet warms and the weather gets ever weirder, the Denialsphere gets ever more traction as the Obama Administration turns its back on climate science.

• Many economists think we could well be headed for the dreaded ‘double dip’ as the ill-advised Super Committee confronts the politically contrived crisis of the Debt Ceiling and intends to lower government spending at the dead wrong time.
  

• Rising Medical costs reflected as health insurance premium rate hikes continue to reduce personal disposable income.

• Tea Party inspired GOPers in States houses and in Congress continues to overplay their phony mandate and pass every more draconian and reactionary legislation.

• Hoping to capitalize on widespread public discord and distress in the 2012 election, the GOP works day and night to drive the economy into the ground.

It’s not what the Occupy Wall Street people are asking for, its what everybody realizes - something is very wrong. We are in one hell of a jam and real action is called for. Our whole way of life appears to be coming apart at the seams and yet evermore fiddling takes place as the fires rage ever wider.

* From John McBride/Seattle comments to JoeNocera’s 10/14/11 NY Times column.:

** Courtesy of yours truly

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Connecting the Dots

We seem to be watching some kind of horrific three-ring circus in which all the acts are interconnected but not acknowledged to be so…

Ring 1: Geological/Nuclear Disaster in Japan

On March 11^th a slippage of continental plates off the coast of Japan slammed that country with a massive 9.0 earthquake and a huge tsunami. As routine as quakes are in Japan and well prepared as the Japanese were for such, the scale of this one has totally overwhelmed them. The scenes of devastation and the total leveling that resulted from the a 30 foot wall water that washed in from the Pacific Ocean ironically reminds one of the 1945 photos of Hiroshima after being hit by an atom bomb. Twisted broken rubble stretches almost to the horizon with only a few stubborn hollowed-out concrete structures left standing, with dazed survivors wandering heartbroken hopelessly searching for lost relatives and friends. Cars upside down and crumpled share space with fishing boats washed into houses. The scale of loss and tragedy is immeasurable. And to add insult to injury the latest photos show a dusting of cold unwelcome snow hiding the rusty nails and laceration producing knife-sharp metallic edges under endless piles of once life sustaining property. All that remains are horizons of hideous trash still containing the remains of loved ones. Many thousands are unaccounted in for a country that leads the world in utilizing state-of-the-art electronics with almost a German-esque reputation for keeping track of things. But as dreadful as all this is, this is only the least of it. No, something potentially worse also has weighed in - a nuclear disaster.

Japan, like most of the industrialized world, fell for the siren song of the “Peaceful Nuke” even as they suffered horrendously as the only country to ever have had nuclear weapons used against them. Now the Japanese are experiencing the downside of a reliance on peaceful nuclear energy as their Fukashima Dassii nuclear power threatens to totally meltdown. Already there has a partial meltdown of at least two reactors, and even worse the exposure of 125 tons of fuel rods from a holding pond that is reported to now be totally dry.

The hubris of the nuclear power industry and the energy industry in general in assuming that they could design out all probable dire geologic events brings to mind our own tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it also brings to mind the 'boys of Wall Street' who believed they had designed out all probable dire financial events with their fancy oblique tranched mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps resulting in a global credit meltdown and a nasty deep recession that we have still not recovered from.

Ring 2: Middle East in Turmoil

This geological news from Japan rightly has pushed the geopolitical news from the Middle East rudely aside. The Middle East is experiencing an earthquake of another kind. Suddenly starting in the backwater North African country of Tunisia and spreading like a string of Chinese firecrackers, rebellion and potential revolution has erupted in one despot-ridden Arab nation after another. The Egyptians inspired by Tunisia have successfully jettisoned their dictator through a brave, relentless and essentially peaceful struggle. Their success has emboldened people all across the region to join resistance movements and wage protests.

Brutal repression and now a full civil war has erupted in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’ 's private fiefdom, Libya. The US and its European allies have now militarily intervened on the side of the rebels essentially declaring war on the Libyan government in what may become another expensive, protracted quagmire. 'The Qaddafi approach' already has triggered similar harsh and desperate reactions from what goes governments in Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria. Where does intervention end? Most of these “republics” were considered stable “friendly” dictatorships and were not exactly on the US State Department's shit list with the exception of the dried up hellhole (and Al Qaeda stronghold) known as Yemen. Where and how this will all end is anybody's guess. One of thing is clear the Uncle Sam needs to be stuck in another war like he needs another hole in his head.

Ring 3: Demos and Repubs Locking Horns

With Japan on the ropes with an unimaginably bad triple whammy set of disasters and the oil rich Middle East unraveling in unprecedented ways, the US also finds itself in another kind of crisis, one of a classic political nature. The US recovering from a deep recession is also saddles with a record national debt. Yet care needs to be taken not to suffocate the baby of economic recovery in its proverbial crib. Continued if not increased government deficit spending seems counter-intuitive in the midst of a period of deep red ink. But that is is exactly what is prescribed by most economists. Yet suddenly the Dreaded Deficit is front and center (which must be remembered was run up by mainly the Reagan and Bush II administrations.) The right is using The Deficit and their control of the purse strings to 'go postal.' An unholy alliance of shady billionaires, crazed libertarian anti-tax hardliners, reactionary poorly educated evangelical Christians, left wing conspiracy believing gun freaks and bought-and-paid-for Republican Party hacks are lined up against a young inexperience president (prone to preemptive surrender on key negotiating points) supported by a divided Democratic Party that has long since lost its moorings with its real base – the middle, working and under classes.

With the US oil addiction as the linchpin for supporting unpopular, despotic and kleptocratic regimes in the Middle East coupled with the oil industry's untoward influence on US energy policy, it's possible to see the connections between these three events as interlocking. The ultra energy industry-friendly Republican Party is tactically and strategically angling for a re-accession to power through whatever means necessary. So oil dependency and nuclear industry rehabilitation (despite Japan's plight) will continue irrespective of the consequences if the Repubs have their way. The nuclear industry, long since a basket case without government support, is also solidly supported by laissez-faire Republicans. Oil as a major CO2 producing and climate damaging fossil fuel, and nuclear energy both are associated with long-term deleterious effects to the environment (with Japan now getting a first hand experience.) The most obstreperous and deluded defenders or oil and nuclear power can be found in the Republican Party. And these very same deniers of the deleterious long term harm of oil and nukes are the very ones threatening to paralyze the entire US government (and economy?) if they don't get their way on a whole host of stupid, ill advised budget cuts/social agenda initiatives that will have zip effect on the looming deficit (that they have suddenly rediscovered.)

The annual US budget negotiation process is always ugly. This is where the Democrats Party and the Republican Party perennially wrangle over their supposed ideological differences. A lot of it is show. Most of the budget is locked in, and only a small sliver (12%) is ever in play. Neither side can really touch the big chunks without major legislation – commitments to the elderly and incapacitated (Medicare and Social Security entitlements) and the sacrosanct military side. And increasing taxes even in good times is always off the table thanks to 30 years of relentless right wing propaganda. This time it is really bad. Due to nearly a decade of breathtakingly irresponsible policy from a Republican president (off-budget wars, taxes cuts and refusal to reform Medicare) and now a kings hell of a recession (which wipes out revenues,) the deficit is indeed looming large in both absolute and relative terms.

To make matters worse the Repubs have interpreted their victory in the mid term election as carte blance to take declare war on all fronts: environmental regulation, public sector unions, teachers, abortion rights, publicly supported media, you name it all in the name balancing the budget. At both the state and federal level they are on the move with draconian agenda that would even make their saint, the late Ronald Reagan, queasy. The American population is just waking up to the true dimensions of their agenda. These madmen have no real idea of the implications of their actions. But if they stall the recovery and make the joblessness worse ( the number one concern in polls), all the better. It can be blamed on the Obama presidency. The GOP just wants to crush the opposition and enact their half-baked ideas and the fully-baked bidding of their corporate overlords. This has all happened because the American voters are easily bamboozled and often vote for tin-hatted charlatans, or else are they become easily discouraged and don't vote at all. So a veritable fleet of of ships of fools have commandeered the US House Representatives and many statehouses and governorships. This is a serious state of affairs to say the least. Let's just hope people wake up pretty fucking soon!

Strange Days

It is strange time we live in. In what is supposed to be a democracy, a coalition of rich greedy cold-hearted bastards (i.e. the Koch brothers) aligned with an interlocking network of bureaucratic money machines known as corporations have now commandeered the legislative and executive branches of many States and a 1/2 of the Federal legislative branch. And, of course, have significant influence on the judicial branch at both the State and Federal levels.

In short Americans through a mix of ignorance, fear, cynicism and apathy have allowed a batch of charlatans and fools to be elected all across the country, most recently to the US House of Representatives. These are craven pols who have not a clue as to how to get the engine of US capitalism fired back up again - if it is indeed possible. These are people who believe only what is convenient to believe. This is well beyond mere intellectual chicanery, which implies one knows the truth but is using one’s wits to refashion it, such as the legal machinations of a mob lawyer or the verbal maneuvers of a clever college rhetorician. This not just a convenient tweaking of the truth being injected into an argument, but whole new realities being conjured up and fervently believed in. For instance now the GOP appears to believe the modest under whelming but necessary health care reforms enacted by the Democrats last year will actually increase unemployment.

Remember this mauling of reality has been going on for awhile now, having been pioneered and refined during the George W. Bush presidency. In the Bush years claims that were overwhelming proved to be false, and somehow retained legitimacy in the minds of the ultra-right. These ‘zombie facts’ supported the horribly unnecessary, budget-busting invasion of Iraq. Some of these include:

• Sadam Hussien had weapons of mass destruction but were just never found.
• Sadam Hussien was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist act against the US.
• The US invasion of Iraq actually benefited the people of Iraq.
• Waterboarding is not torture.

This is the realm of what once called the Big Lie and was once associated with totalitarian governments likes those of the Nazis and the Stalinists. Repeat something that is false, a big fat lie, with enough volume and frequency (read: right wing radio and Fox “news”) and it becomes believable at least to some (and unfortunately enough to swing elections.)

Difference of opinion is usually based on difference of interpretation of the same data. But what if each side uses it's own data? What if the established arbiter of the legitimacy of the data is accused of being in league with one of the sides? Then you have no touchstone of fact-based objective reality. That is what we have come to. The party now taking control of one half of one the three branches of government has arbitrarily decided to eliminate the referee, the independent bi-partisan body, the Congressional Budget Office, from involvement in projecting results of proposed budgetary bills. Apparently they make up their own numbers and any CBOs analysis will be castigated as simply biased in support of their opponents. This is very wrong and will create another fictitious reality, another boldfaced pack of lies in the guise of objective truth. It’s sick. It’s duplicity. It’s the GOP in action!

The American Middle Class are Chumps

How does the Republican Party so effectively bamboozle the middle class? As a political party they are not their friend. The Republicans do everything possible to reduce the numbers of their own supporters. But the chumps keep coming back for more. Republicans hate unions which bring middle class wages to blue-collar workers. They despise safety nets such as unemployment insurance or especially European-type income floors that keeps people falling into the abyss of full homelessness. They are fully supportive of off-shoring jobs ( as well as corporate profits to avoid taxes.) First it was manufacturing and now we see technical/clerical jobs going to low wage countries. Yet millions every election buy the same bogus line of bullshit hook line and sinker - to whit everything that is wrong with the US is somehow the fault of “The Liberals” and “Big Government.” In fact some of the more militant members of the hard core Republican loyalist middle class recently went on the war path bringing their guns and wearing silly colonial outfit to town hall meetings, some even threatening invocation of “Second Amendment rights”, armed insurrection, when a the Democrats were merely trying to repair a badly broken, budget busting health care system. What in the hell is going on? Is it in the water?

We are at a strange juncture. The so-call “free market” economy, that many of us especially the Republicans hold so dear, is not delivering. Instead we are entangled in a king’s hell of a perpetual recession. Even though technically “it is over” (small GDP growth is occurring), millions are still out of work. The initial crash was so severe it verged on becoming another 1930s scale Great Depression. And it happened under again a Republican administration. Yet again the hapless Democrats inherited it and are now being blamed for it. So it now behooves the Republicans to keep it going as long as it takes to retake Congress and the White House. The fall guy Democrats were voted back in en mass in a wave of messiah-desiring fervor. The knee-deep-in-shit situation that the new administration stepped into almost guaranteed disappointment from the left and malicious second-guessing from the right, then the growing realization by the right that is was to their advantage to make things worse.

The Demos under Obama inherited quite a mess - not one but two ongoing wars, a financial system in paralysis, housings prices in free fall leading to a wave of foreclosures not seen since the 1930s, and unemployment nearing 10%. And to make matters supremely worse due to the abject failure of Republican driven “supply side” econ theory, government debt was already before the recession at astronomical levels. Recall the notion behind Reaganian ‘SS Economics’ is that if we lower taxes, there will be adequate new investment and thus new tax revenues generated that it will actually compensate for the lost revenue from the lowered taxes. This especially presumably applied if the taxes are lowered for the investor class: the upper income tiers, millionaires and billionaires. The cake and eat, too plan didn’t fucking work! Ask David Stockman, Reagan’s head of OMB. The deficit skyrocketed in the Reagan years. The other net result was a massive retribution of wealth upwards.

So as we know the Democrats under Bill Clinton, ever embattled by fake scandals like Whitewater and Troopergate and finally nearly impeached, managed like a good 1950s’ moderate Republican get the budget in order, and we had few good years relative to the national debt. After particularly close election and with the help of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, enter one George W. Bush. This is the same person whose own father, George H.W. Bush, as a presidential candidate and one time moderate Republican accurately coined the term “Voodoo Economics” for this bogus and dangerous idea of cutting taxes to the wealthy to create jobs. Well “W” being his own man returned again to voodoo economics full force engaging and not one two wars (both off-budget,) a poorly designed increase in Medicare benefits and another very generous irresponsible but popular time limited tax cut for all but especially for the so called job creating upper income tiers. Supply Side was back! Result: another huge spike in the Deficit. All this is widely known.

Now here are in 2010 and Bush tax cuts are due to expire automatically. But we are still in the toilet relative to a real recovery. So expiration of the Bush tax cuts would amount to a sudden tax increase. But suddenly also again The Deficit now at is front and center, with a august presidential commissions and pundits right and left agonizing over “under funded entitlements” and other future shortfalls. Draconian changes are being proposed like cuts in middle class tax deductions, Social Security and Medicare eligibility. All aimed at the middle class. And this unbelievably still with 9.8% of the population are officially unemployed (with more not counted or working only part time.) Astonishingly the right wing of the Democratic Party and the Republicans in mass are suddenly simultaneously concerned with the dreaded Deficit but are also all or retaining a budget busting, deficit exploding, irresponsible retention of a "temporarily " lowered income taxe for all including inexplicably the very wealthy who have shown they don't fucking invest it US jobs. How do they get away with it?

In this context we have another sad spectacle of the Obama caving in on another core principle. He promised to let the budget busting counter-cyclical dysfunctional upper income tax cuts expire. But the Repubs naturally want it to all stay intact so they and their rich friends will continue to wallow in money. And they will filibuster any proposed change to the end. If the thing expires as designed everybody’s taxes go up come the come Jan 1. In the middle of a recession it would be another kick in the balls to the economy. But only for middle classes who will spend most of it, the wealthy really don’t need the money and will only speculate with it. If they were going to use it fruitfully in as trickle down supply side investment way, they would have already done it. This is class war - blatant, redistribution of income upwards. They were already rich when the tax cut hit under Bush. They had managed to accrue great wealth under the old tax code. Bush just made his friends richer! These people are motherfuckers of the first magnitude. They have driven the country into penury and then have the audacity to call Obama a “socialist” when he tries to enact minor but necessary minor rational reforms.

Obama could hold out and let the damn thing expire and take it to the people exposing on prime time the supreme hypocrisy of the Repubs. But, alas, also the federal extension on unemployment is also due to run out. And the Repubs will filibuster this one too. Both would have to be ought in the trenches with Obama using his bully pulpit to rally the masses. He would need to be a fighter not a conciliator. Even the Repubs would respect him. On both of these issues he has the majority on his side. It would be a two front war and real political gamble to let two both of these hits occur in the same time frame. But it would it could turn things around like a game-changing pass that was caught but not a “Hail Mary.” He would have reenergized the same masses that came out in 2008 and voted him in and other Demos in a near landslide. But that is not the Obama we have. We have a different guy.

The Wreckage of a Crashed Opportunity

As we pick through the post mid term election wreckage the recriminations and blame spews forth from all points of the political spectrum. While the gloating and back patting on the right commences. 'Overreach' and 'under reach' are oft used terms. Also the accusation of a ‘lack of focus’ is often thrown out (see Paul Krugman’s 11/5/10 NY Times column.) It is certainly ironic that Barack Obama would write a book titled The Audacity of Hope and would arrive on the political scene with such a resounding message of hope, and yet would show so pathetically little audacity. Month after month we watched in dismay as Obama tried to curry favor and offer humiliating compromises to his political enemies who responded by consistently moving the goal posts ever further away. It was obvious to the even the least politically astute among us that his opponents had only one thing in mind - his complete political destruction. Why someone as intelligent and politically successful would believe compromise and bipartisanship would work in this poisoned milieu will surely be hashed over by future historians.

If one side stops playing by the rules and begins misusing traditional Senatorial prerogatives such as the filibuster or the right for a single senator to hold up legislation or routinely blocking all executive appointments or refusing to even pretend to negotiate, why would the other side not counter with similar ‘creative’ maneuvers? It is like one side is playing big league baseball dirty, firing 92mph spitballs, why would the other side responds by playing elementary school softball by the rules?

Is it simply not in Obama’s DNA to match their guile and ruthlessness? Progressives had such a rare opportunity with big Democratic party majorities in both houses of Congress, a young fresh face in the White House and the America public ready to see some fur fly. Now all that is history. An ugly backlash was spawned and was allowed to reproduce itself into a dangerous virulent reactionary surge. We watched at first in bemusement and then increasingly in alarm as his enemies used his reluctance to press his advantage against him. The whole Tea Party thing could have been nipped in the bud had the President early on, with his wit and oratorical gifts, taken these crazies to task over their absurd allegations and laughable stupidity like “death panels” and “getting the government out of my Medicare” and the mismatch between lowering taxes and (a sudden belated) concern over a soaring deficit. It would have been so easy to show the absurdity of this crap on prime time. But for whatever reason they (Obama and his advisors) left it to the left and right wing pundits, editorial writers and bloggers to fight it out. And the corporate media loved it, since the function of the corporate news media is to entertain not inform. Provocations pseudo controversies and spectacles, like the early yell-fest tea bagger/party town hall meeting confrontations, were grist for their ‘infortainment’ mills. And the GOP biggies egged em on, some even joining in. When something is a boldface lie it should be the media’s job to expose not let it fester and evolve into a legitimate “point of view.” This is wrong and it is undermining are whole system.

Repubs have become a shrill but appealing one trick pony with a simple syllogism: taxes = bad, taxes = government, therefore government = bad. As political formation they have mutated into something far worse than simply the old GOP of the past, a party representing the American haut bourgeoisie and it’s small town wannabes. They now have become of party of the proudly ignorant, the staunchly anti-intellectual and the covertly racist, demanding we follow a path that will drive our country even faster downhill toward second tier world economic status. And the resulting public reaction to increased impoverishment could well trigger some very grim times indeed. Remember what happened to the democratic German Weimar Republic of the 1920’s.

The most ill informed and ideologically blinded now have the wind at their backs. Yet they are so full of shit on so many levels it is difficult to keep track. Some of the absurdities they believe are breathtakingly stark such as:

• Darwin’s theory of evolution can be easily called into question by religious theology.
• Global warming is a world-historical hoax and research on it is a scam mainly driven by the “liberal” scientific community seeking cushy government grants.
• Environmental protections should always and at all times be resisted.
• Capitalism works best without any restraints whatsoever.
• Lowering taxes especially for the very rich always results in aggregate economic expansion.
• The US military budget is sacrosanct.
• The deficit only matters with regard to entitlements.
• Unpaid-for wars and lowering government revenues through tax cuts can be ignored as a cause for a growing deficit.
• Our health care system was fine before “Obamacare” was enacted and needed only minor tinkering.
• Proposed ‘end of life counseling’ paid for by Medicare = Death Panels.
• The 2009 stimulus package failed to produce any jobs.
• The bank bailout of 2008 was the Obama Administration’s idea.
• Barack Omama is a socialist and/or Muslim and/or a Marxist and not a US citizen.

What do you do when your debating opponents who have their own bogus belief structure unfounded on reality? You can only debate something if certain rational ground rules are agreed upon, one of them being neither side is entitled to his or her own facts.

We can only hope that the Obama does not fall prey to the idea that further capitulation will help win him a second term. Somehow a popular counterweight of concern, anger and practical aggressiveness has to take hold or we are all destined for a collective slide into some new, awful reality.