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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A Perverse Symmetry

I wrote this last week. It appears the tide has turned and just maybe the reactionary right has over played its hand. See the recent NY Times poll.

Anyone following the standoff in Wisconsin will see a certain perverse symmetry. A Republican dominated Supreme Court first radically alters campaigning financing rules with the Citizens United decision to allow corporations and their primary adversaries, trade unions, to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections under the rubric of “free speech” Of course the good justices knew full well this is like pitting a the NFL against some high school football league in terms of available cash to spend on elections. In the US union membership has been steadily falling from over a 1/3 of the workforce in 1945 to only 7.9% by 2004. Private-sector union membership has shrunk the most, to a mere 6.9% of the private sector workforce as of 2010, while public-sector union membership is still running at over 36% . So is there any mystery as to what is going on in Wisconsin? It is plain and simple. The Republicans Party and the oligarchy (read: a cabal of the ultra rich) that it represents is using the recession and the concurrent problems with state budgets to destroy the last surviving remnant of the union movement - public-sector unions.

So with private-sector unions on the rocks due to union busting and race-to-the-bottom global economics, Republicans and their minions in the media have of late been concentrating on undermining the support with the American public for the surviving public-sector unions. And this super recession is a perfect opportunity. The five Supreme Court (presumably opposed to “judicial activism”) who voted in favor of giving First Amendment rights to corporations and unions were obviously aware that private-sector unions in the US are in serious decline. So it was easy to allow money equals free speech for corporations and for their polar opposites, unions. Private sector unions are becoming a paper tiger, especially with the US economy seemingly permanently unable to create enough jobs. Yet public sector unions are still strong. So prior to the upcoming watershed of an election in 2012, Republicans have their long knives out for the last bastion of American organized labor - public sector unions.

And feeding into this is the perpetual dissatisfaction of Americans with our education system. This dissatisfaction is being used to undermine faith in a unionized part of the public-sector union movement - the American schoolteacher. School teaching always been an underpaid and under-appreciated profession. Teachers are constantly being pilloried and blamed in the media for all the myriad ills of the American education system. Bad teachers that can't be fired ' because of their unions' and 'their awful tenure system' is a constant refrain by the right. The underfunding and neglect of the very school districts that need support the most, those that serve the inner city poor is conveniently ignored, as is the the societal feedback loop of social decay and despair in the underclass families that serves up students with horrendous disadvantages. Instead it is all blamed on the hapless teachers who work in these drug and gang infested war zones. Perennial underfunding of education at the state level was caused by the so-called taxpayers revolt mania which started in California in the 1980s with Jarvis Gann and which spread like wildfire across the country. And, of course, there it is always easy to generate animosity and jealousy against 'government workers' by creating the perception that people with cushy 'government jobs' have it made and that the state budget crisis is the fault of their greedy, obstreperous unions.

When this stubborn kings hell of a recession hit, many states suddenly found themselves seriously in the red, and it was time to find a scapegoat. So it was easy to blame it on the defined benefit pensions and solid health plans that state, county and city workers have been able to achieve usually by trading off cost-of-living wage increases. The perpetual underfunding of governments at all levels due to tax cut madness especially for upper tiers of income is conveniently ignored. But with Wisconsin, it was only different. Compared with other states their budget deficit was only shallow hole. But one which the Republican libertarian ideologue of a governor made deeper with irresponsible tax cuts. Make no mistake this is a test case. If a manufactured budget crisis can be used to destroy public-sector unions in Wisconsin, all of the states with real budget problems will be pushovers for attacking the concept of public-sector unions and collective bargaining in general. Make no mistake this is class warfare!

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.