Be prepared to be disappointed even if the Democrats take over in 2009. Even with a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate, a solid majority in the House and ownership of the White House, the Democrats could still let us down. Of course, the White House is still an 'if' since the Repubs still have their ace-in-the-hole: demagoguery. They can and will play their racism/xenophobia/nativism, hole card under the rubric of the “problem of illegal immigration.” This may or may not cut it depending how easy it will be to target a scapegoat during a recession when the “illegals” will be either heading home in droves and/or gobbling up last the few remaining low wage jobs.
In any case if under the present circumstances, with arguably the most inept, irresponsible and misguided individual to ever be President of the United States coupled with his relentless drive to transform our Constitutional into soggy, soiled toilet paper, the Democrats can't inspire and hearten us by just not being Republicans, then we indeed have a problem! And so far they haven't. The Pelosi-Reid Congress have most definitely has not inspired and heartened anyone. But the pathetic performance of Democrats in Congress aside, the lack of an aggressive forward looking program coming from any of the three real presidential candidates is even more disconcerting. The lack of much to hang your hat on on from : Hillory Clinton and Barak Obama aside from pious generalities does not bode well. Of the viable candidates John Edwards comes the closest to hammering home a message that gets to the point – the corporate overlords must be confronted. Clinton's and Obama's reluctance to commit to much of anything specific or very drastic speaks volumes about what we have in store when and if the present pack of Bushian Brownshirts are finally given a much deserved bum's rush. Actually these war criminals deserve more than simply being run off the premises. If there were any justice in the world and the US Congress was serious about preserving the Constitution, the top rung (Bush, Cheney, Rice, and whoever hasn't yet jumped ship) would be immediately impeached, and if found guilty driven from office, arrested and imprisoned.
Since the Pelosi-Reid Congress steadfastly refuses to consider impeachment, then the only other thing to do is to force the presidential candidates to get serious. Two interlocking problems should be on the table. One is the questionable GOP controlled election machinery that still persists in many so called 'Red States' ( by the way what is it with this stupid color coding of the States?) Two Presidential elections were essentially stolen by the Republicans by both transparent and opaque machinations in at least two of the so-called “battle ground states”, Ohio and Florida. Banana republic style election maneuvers were essentially ignored (or lampooned) by the corporate controlled media. Election irregularities in the Ukraine got more attention that they did in Ohio. Both Al Gore and then John Kerry, four years later, both wimped out big time and refused to fight back when the presidency was stolen right out from from under their noses. This serious concern of election integrity interlocks with a second more long term institutional problem – fact that the Democrats are a essentially a center-right party and are only marginally more progressive than their ostensible adversaries, the Republicans. As the Republican Party has dragged the entire political spectrum drastically to the right, the Democrats passively accepted this new (mal)alignment. Richard Nixon, who supported the establishment of the EPA (environmental regulation) and Family Assistance Act (welfare), would have been classified as a raving socialist by these new standards. Part of the reason for ignoring this recalibration of the political spectrum is that as we know the Democratic Party is in bed with the same corporations and their lobbies that have been essentially running the country under George W. Bush. Bush-appointed agency heads have been functioning like puppets on strings, strings pulled and jerked by the very corporations they are supposed to be overseeing and regulating – and everyone know it. And Democrats up until recently have only issued a few weak squeaks and whines in a egregious situation in which the regulators and regulatees are one.
The front running Democratic presidential candidates' tepid, platitude filled language and detail-less proposals reflects their corporate/ruling class perspectives and Washington consensus driven inclinations. Things need be kept vague and nonspecific so that new party coming in will not stray too far off of the farm once they get into power. If at this present juncture with the US on the brink of an economic meltdown, two ongoing budget busting military quagmires and a restive electorate crying for change composed of many who are experiencing serious downward class mobility (the American Dream in reverse); if under these circumstances the Democrats can't energize and excite their base for drastic and fundamental change, what is it going to going to take? And if they are this restrained in the heat of the campaign, what will they be like when the actually assume office?
We must start now from a position of demanding a total housecleaning. First we must demand a sweeping, ambitious environmental program to make the US a world class model for environmental responsibility. This must be done. It is now no longer a partisan matter. Even the those Republicans who are not brain dead have grudgingly admit that it is getting warmer, and it is a problem. The global corporations that benefit by externalizing their costs by befouling and destroying our Commons, locally and globally, must be brought to heal. But whole industries are at fault. It will be a battle royal. And this program must address both global environmental and global poverty issues simultaneously - otherwise it will fail. Turmoil and recourse to reactionary religious ideology is germinated where their is desperate poverty and corrupt autocratic regimes – many propped up by the US. The new president must immediately negate and reverse every single element of Bushian-GOP dogma. It's all wrong. They must totally change the extant frame of reference especially this stupid so called “Global War on Terror (GWOT.”) It should now be clear now that the GWOT is merely an excuse to jettison civil liberties and put us on a permanent warfare footing – a neo-Cold War. Really confronting the appeal of reactionary militant Muslim religious ideology would involve confronting global poverty in a full-on serious way including the inexcusable poverty in oil rich nations as well the more resistant form in the many hapless overpopulated hellholes where there is nothing much to sell but their future and our future (i.e. destruction of the remaining tropical forests which serve as carbon sinks.) In fact we must jettison this whole “war on whatever” mentality. 'War is not the answer' as the bumper stickers used say. For instance the so called War on Drugs has not produced anything more than bloated bureaucracies, police corruption, over zealous politically ambitious prosecutors and a self perpetuating prison-industrial complex. Just as many people get high as ever. Drug abuse (aka addiction) is a personal problem not a criminal act. The Democratic Party establishment must stop worrying about their right flank. Corporate funding of right-wing Murdochian type media is a worldwide phenomena. The shrill, yammering, prevarication spouting talking heads on Fox, CNN and others can be negated by simply getting truth and reasoned analysis out. With an independent honest, truth seeking government funded alternative media, their lies and spin-meister driven programming can be easily disarmed and exposed as it is in the Blogosphere. With an intelligent alternative, a revitalized and a gutsy public broadcasting system, the profit-driven non Murdochian corporate media outlets would be shamed into providing better investigative journalism as well as factual, contextual coverage of critical issues. The 'tits and ass' and 'if it bleed it leads' stuff can still be there for libido challenged airheads but it doesn't have to be front and center 24/7 as it is now.
The real question we must ask ourselves - is real reform possible? Obviously fundamental structural change (confronting the contradictions of capitalism) is out of the question for now. But it is possible to go beyond the present dominate ideology of the ruling class – Neoliberalism wedded to 'Warfare Keynesianism' which what we have had since WWII? Regardless of all the claptrap about Monetarism and Supply Side economics from academic opportunists, we have been depending on government spending to float the economy every since the Great Depression. Can we at least move into a mode of tamping down the excesses of pedal-to-the -metal “free market” capitalism in which the only 'free market' is the freedom of corporations to rip us off while trashing the environment? Of course, the last time this power was challenged was in the 1930s. The whole economy had collapsed due to rampant speculation, and then ill advised lazzie faire government policies (again under the a Republican, Herbert Hoover) had made things much worse. But American capitalism was saved by FDR and the Democrats over the (politically) dead bodies of the Republicans and their supporters, propertied classes, the real beneficiaries of the system - and they never forgave them for that. But where is the next Roosevelt? It could be John Edwards if he could break through of his corporate media defined pretty boy persona and really resonate with the voters. His candidacy must catch fire. Hillory Clinton and Barack Obama, both creatures of the establishment, must cancel each other out. The whole thing is still up in the air. So many things are out of whack and everyone knows it, yet the campaigns seem to deal in generalities and personalities not aggressive new proposals.
The prospect of moving from an economy driven by military expenditure to one driven by building a totally green, sustainable economy must be placed before the people in a forthright way. But in order do this a president will have to turn away a half century of Warfare Keynesian policy and return to real Keyesianism the real model that John Maynard Keynes had in mind – public spending that benefits everyone especially the poor that primes the pump and gets things running again. It's called counter-cyclical deficit spending. Will it work when are already deep in the whole from Bushian excesses - a looming federal deficit? That is a good question?
In any case such a policy by whoever means confronting a whole host of strong institutional adversaries – essentially the whole military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex and its hand maidens in both parties. It will be a tough uphill battle. And the right wingers and Neocons will go ballistic especially in the mass media that they control.
We face major domestic problems while inextricably entangled in dual expensive geopolitical military quagmires – Iraq and Afghanistan (with Pakistan now imploding into civil war, too) with a backdrop of a growing international perception of the US having become an imperialistic warmongering, resource-hogging bully of a nation. We face an ever worsening health care system hat sucks up ever
more money while leaving millions with either inadequate or no health care at all, a shrinkage of our middle class through the continued loss of living-wage manufacturing jobs to low wage platforms, and an ignored and angry under employed, uneducated underclass who have a created to ghetto gangster subculture. And all this while storm clouds gather for a major recession. If the economy turns down sharply all of the tools for recovery will which have dulled and damaged by by eight years of quintessentially irresponsible voodoo economics - massive military spending while reducing the federal revenue stream by lowering taxes for the already filthy rich. Recovering from the tyrannical Bushian/GOP siege of the last eight years will be difficult. It will be more difficult than even what faced Bill Clinton in the post-Reagan years, especially if the global economy crashes Clinton eventually presided over a high-tech boom brought on by the maturing of the Internet. The options the Democrats will have once in power may be sharply limited. And there is a danger that the American public, ahistorical by nature and confused by context-less mass media presentations, will blame those who take the reins of power for whatever transpires regardless of the predetermined realities they inherit.
Yet unlike the Clinton years when the lurch to right was still in full swing and Slick Willie had to roll with it, now most people are pretty much burned out with all of the hollow sanctimonious rhetoric of the hypocritical and corrupt Republican bible-thumper supported right wing. People really are ready for change. They really would like a departure – honest leadership even if it is by someone who could be placed in that was once dreaded political category - “a liberal”. Taxes are still unpopular; they always will be. But lying about the incidence of the tax (who pays, who doesn't) will no longer cut it. Everyone knows now that the upper 1%, already rich as Crocus, got massive reductions in their taxes while everybody saw no real change. And all the investment by the big boys which was supposed to flow from their reduced taxes ended up in speculation, off shore accounts or in invested in factories in wage slave countries like China. Whatever limited prosperity that did occur in last few years was not due to the magic of “supply side” economics or the wonders of “privatization.” It was due to the normal functioning of a what is know as a “mixed economy”- government spending interlaced with private investment - and lots of credit. Of course as we now a new crisis emerging as a result of the misuse of credit on all levels but most specifically massive levels of irresponsible loans on real estate – billion of dollar worth. The old financial markets are being rattled to the core.
Now we are at an incredibly important juncture. And the US Democratic Party is our only hope. So far its recent performance has been to say the least disappointing. Not since the late 1960s have Americans been so ready for change – real change. This time it is not just the young people as it was in the 1960s when the college kids, intellectuals, artists and young working class rebels were in open insurrection but the WW II generation was still in power and dragged their heals in firm opposition voting for Nixon twice . This time the discord cuts through all, ages, all social classes and all political perspectives. The moment must be seized. It is not a revolutionary moment but it is something akin. A deep malaise infects the country. It is akin but not identical that which occurred and undermined the presidency of Jimmy Carter (which he honestly acknowledged but was politically skewered for.) But Jimmy Carter was a conservative Southern Democrat at a time when the Republican Party was in the doghouse with American public due to the spectacular (and highly entertaining) slow motion implosion of one the Nixon presidency but otherwise people were burn out on change. Carter was a caretaker not a activist. The 1970s were an era of diminishing energy and increasing cynicism.
Now after nearly three decades of reactionary Republican agendas, shameless cynical pandering to religious troglodytes and wide scale corruption, the time is ripe for some fresh new energy – a new progressive, green, strongly left of center agenda. And everyone knows it – except the professional Democrats. What will it take to get them off dead center?
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