A real snoozer so far

In November Americans will elect a new President. For most of us this campaign season has been a real snoozer. But this election, more than most, is deadly important. But one would never know it from the shallowness of the various campaigns and the disengagement of the perspective voters.

While acknowledging that voting for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (an empty suited fraud and a Repub hack posing as an ideologically pure number cruncher) should be absolutely beyond consideration for any sane non multi millionaire or billionaire, what we are left with is Barack Obama who is like a first round draft pick who ended up with only a so-so first season.

Suffice to say most fair minded people would agree Barack Obama faced historically daunting challenges when he assumed office in 2008. And the worst case was avoided . There was no repeat of the Great Depression which seemed quite possible at the time. But unlike FDR, who faced a similar economic catastrophe brought on by similar factors, the Obama Administration failed to take advantage of this once-in-a-century opportunity to make a major course correction. Recall the Bush-led Repubs were dead meat in 2008. They were seen by most Americans as responsible for having left behind a stinking pile of elephant shit – a crashed economy, massive debt, economic policies that were simply muted class warfare, and two still festering, grindingly expensive (unpaid for) wars.

Yet two years into the Obama Administration's first term, the Republican lunatics were somehow back running the asylum, their credibility miraculously restored. They were in fact again defining the national discourse by successfully foisting blame off on the Obama Administration for the ravages of the recession - and suddenly discovering 'the deficit' (that they had run up.) Besides shifting the blame on the sickly but slowly healing economy, they made sure his first real legislative goal, health care reform, was a ghost of what it could have been – and then tried to destroy even that. So in the 2010 midterms, the Repubs by marshaling residual reactionary energy on the right in the form of the so-called Tea Party movement they actually took over the half of Congress lock stock and barrel and nearly retook the the other half. Also many State governorships fell to the Repubs.

How did all of this come to be? Well first the Repubs discovered the magic of the filibuster redefining majority rule. They also took full advantage of having their very own cable “news” network as well as hundreds of angry white right wing radio talk show hosts. And add to that a rabid pack of hardcore paranoia-driven, fact-adverse Internet bloggers. Truth is never an obstacle the new brand of Repubs. The bigger the load bullshit to provoke their semi-literate base, the better. But without Obama having seriously underplayed his hand and losing all forward political momentum early on, all of this would have only been merely right wing chatter and sour grapes.

Here are two examples of missed prime opportunities:

• Obama blew his chance to effectively resuscitate the economy back in early 2009. Most reputable economists at the time predicted that the size of the proposed stimulus was inadequate to effectively reboot the economy. Both the world historical crisis of global warming and a crashed US economy provided an opportunity like no other. It was a WWII type opportunity to use tried and proven Keynesian deficit spending (yes, go deeper into the hole) to fire up our once powerhouse economy. A solution to these two seemingly intractable and unrelated problems could have been intertwined into a bold mammoth federally financed $2-3T 'green infrastructure' rebuild. The United States, still a powerful worldwide influence on every level, could have become a global showcase and world leader for sustainable 21st Century earth friendly technology. Obama and his advisors did not understand that global warming is a crisis like no other, something beyond the experience of humankind. Wars, revolutions, economic upheavals have all occurred countless times throughout history but humans have never overheated the atmosphere of the entire planet and then passively waited to see what would happen.

• And what about US health care reform? There was a broad consensus that radical reform was necessary to fix our dysfunctional and budget busting health care system. So what happens? Obama's opening gambit is a tepid, Republican-designed program that keeps most of the gamers untouched (health care insurance companies, hospitals, big pharma, medical equip manufacturers, overpaid specialists, malpractice opportunism, et al. ). Yet, the Obama proposal (later to be derisively dubbed “Obamacare”) as conservative and limited as it was, naturally was still hated by the Repubs. Why should they let him get a “win” on anything? Obama should have at least opened with proposing something big, something game changing - like a Single Payer System modeled on the VA or Medicare, real universal health care. Why can't we have what all the other wealthy industrialized countries have? Why not go over the head of the cynical negative bullshitter pundits on the right and center, the Repubs, the Bluedog Demos, and sell the idea directly to the American people. Medicare for All! And if it had to be downsized in scope, at least a fall back position could have the Public Option in competition with the greed based for-profit health plans. As it was his Affordable Health Care act barely got through Congress not just because of Republican intransigence but because it was so crappy and small bore.

These are just two examples. There are many more: his Neocon double down in Afghanistan (by the way how is that working?), killing alleged terrorists (and often their extended families) by remote control with drones in countries that we are not at war in, not reigning in the Orwellian national security state set up by Bush/Cheney, relying on Timothy Geitner, Larry Summers and other former Wall Street insiders to 'clean up' the Wall Street mess, opening the sensitive Arctic Ocean to oil drilling after the Gulf of Mexico got trashed from a massive drilling disaster, suddenly harassing Calif medical marijuana clubs, and other sorrows. That said Obama is light years better than anything the Repubs can come up with. He is reasonable on many issues, Osama Bin Laden was knocked off on his watch and he seems basically fair minded (maybe a little too fair minded at times.)

But despite Republican propaganda Obama is not and never will be left-of-center on anybody's political spectrum. He, following in Bill Clinton's footsteps, is firmly a center-right politician on most issues. This position was formerly proudly and responsibly occupied by the old GOP before it went nutzo. When the Demos moving rightward under Bill Clinton and his “triangulation”, it essentially drove the Republican Party further into wacko, tin hat land. Although you would never know this from the way mainstream media delivers ahistorical, context-less, analysis-free news.

The problem for Obama now is how to energize his base after doing so little to service it. People, especially the sectors that vote Democratic, are easily demoralized by politics and politicians. Once disappointed they retreat into cynical apathy or else manifest the old 'throw out the bum' syndrome. Some of us vote for the lesser of the evils because we realize as pathetic as the Demos are, they are all we have as a barrier against a full corporatist plutocratic takeover. Remember no matter how a bad country's economy gets the very rich stay very rich – great personal wealth knows no nationality. There will always be Caymans Islands and Switzerlands.

Put on your raincoats heavy weather on the way

A coming blitzkrieg of ugliness, a veritable shit storm of hyperbola, is bearing down upon us. Relentless political propaganda with unlimited corporate funding (thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision) will spew forth like diarrhea from our big HDTVs. It has already started in the so called 'battleground States.' How it plays out and which side prevails is of major importance. Carefully crafted bullshit will determine our future. Will the ongoing middle class-killing wealth extraction from the producing class to the ownership class continues unabated? Will the present US recession/depression or whatever it is be exacerbated and feed into a global economic meltdown by a tragically premature implementation of budgetary austerity? Barack Obama, who despite a disappointing first term, still represents the least dangerous approach to the crisis. But although he has lost much of his luster, he still retains his gift for oratory and some lingering measure of charisma. His opponent Mitt Romney, decidedly uncharismatic and only a second choice for most of the Repub base, is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with whatever will get him into the White House. With a very polarized electorate, and many States, indeed whole regions, locked into ideological rigidity, the election will turn on which candidate and party can carry a majority of the 12 or so fickle 'swing States.'

This Presidential election is deadly important. Some may argue that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are two sides of the same coin, and in some ways they are right. But while Romney is a moderate Repub pretending to be an extremist, if he prevails a new viral version of Republican ideology will overwhelm his centrist inclinations. In short the whack job extremists will take over. What limited cushion a center-right Democrat like Obama provides will go out the window. The crazies in the new hard right that presently controls the House of Representatives will be in the drivers seat. And heaven help us! Also a whole pack of baying hounds could well come in on Romney's coat tails - and the Senate could easily tip. We think things are bad now – imagine a monolithic control of all three branches of government by a raving mob of Paul Ryan acolytes and social reactionaries. Even Barry Goldwater would be scared shitless. At least Goldwater had some integrity. This crew thrives on, as did the Bush II Administration before them, wholesale prevarication and boldly false realities.

Hanging over this whole election year like some evil specter of doom is a draconian federal spending reduction law poised to go off automatically if no budget agreement is reached. It is weird pseudo-agreement formulated as a gun-to-the-head threat to force comprise (but so far failing to so.) Obama's offers at compromises were humiliating capitulations. But as bad as the they were, they were not a sufficient enough servile surrender to satisfy the rabid pack of pitchforkers in the House GOP.

It all boils down to which side can effectively convince the so-called undecided voters in a few critical 'battleground States' that the other party's candidate is evil incarnate. Ironically two major coastal population centers are off the table – New York and California. All speeches, photo ops, interviews, debates and most importantly political advertising will need to be directed at this small by critical population of voters, many who are only marginally informed. This is indeed a sad state of affairs. It leads to a dumbing down of complex issues, much abject pandering, bucket loads of schmaltz - and that's just on the Demos side. From the Repubs there will be their standard anti-tax demagoguery, repackaged supply side economics, dog whistle racism and lots and lots of liberal baiting. Both sides will engage in much old fashioned flag waving jingoism (“American Exceptionalism” as it is now called by the Repubs.) But the biggie will be white-knuckled concern for the new boogieman looking in the window – The Deficit with much overwrought talk of Zimbabwe-level hyperinflation on the horizon.

While the swing voters in the 'purple' States are the primary target, there are at least four other distinctive voting blocks at play and whose votes are not necessarily a foregone conclusion:

• The mainstream GOP which has transformed itself itself into something new under the sun – an institutionalized American far-right party. Ronald Reagan succeeded where Barry Goldwater failed. Goodbye Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and even Richard Nixon. Many old line golf playing country club type Republicans must be a bit embarrassed by what their Grand Old Party has mutated into.

• The Frankenstein monster of the GOP base, opportunistically cobbled together over the years by party operatives, it has now become an almost uncontrollable mob. It is comprised of an hodgepodge of inveterate liberal haters: anti Federal Reserve and tax phobic Tea Partiers, bible thumping evolution denying Christian fundamentalists, “Birthers” stubbornly clinging to a lie, Second Amendment gun nuts wallowing in paranoia, 'free market' Ayn Randian-ophiles, plus assorted racists, gay haters and red neckian anti-immigrant 'nativists". And they all have one thing in common - they all positively loath Barack Hussein Obama.

• The loyalists of the Demo Party. These are the spokespeople and pundits one mostly sees on MSNBC and PBS supporting Obama on various fronts and gratuitously denigrating Repubs while only gently chiding their man, Obama, even as he stoops to conquer. For practical reasons they are reluctant to break with the Administration, tacitly accepting its position on most issues. But they are, too, dismayed by the Democratic Party's and Obama Administration’s reluctance to wage a robust counter attack on the new dangerous surging right.

• The Occupy movement is now the wild card. People even who don't agree with them  respect their principled audaciousness and their role in identifying the real powers that be, the .01% behind the curtain and the banker elite. Their rabble-like style, resolute resistance to authority and sometimes even anarchist tendencies get mixed reviews from the 99% they claim to represent. Yet it is a welcome if yet indeterminate factor. Will their stance well left of Obama and outside the established political framework help or hinder his reelection? Will they grudging vote for the lesser evil in their mind, Obama, or not even participate? Obama has a poor record in supporting his Demo base especially the economic left (Glass Steagall anyone?), minorities, labor or the greens.

• Then of course we have the disaffected 'swing voters.' How will they respond to the propaganda blitz headed their way and designed to turn their pretty little heads? Many are in bad shape financially and/or emotionally – unemployed or underemployed, or their mortgage foreclosed on or underwater, or they have a new but shittier job, or there are just plain fed up with a dysfunctional system. They are perched in front row seats as they sadly witness a once proud nation slide inexorably into decline. Will they be stupid enough to take the time honored approach of disaffected voters and throw the toggle switch 'tossing the bums out' and vote the erstwhile bums back in? The Repubs are counting on it. The Repubs count on short attention spans, poor memories and the fine American traditional of hating taxes. And now that the Federal and State revenues have been decimated by decades of tax cut pandering, the Dreaded Deficit (that the tax cutters conveniently ignored as they actively participated in its run up) can be disingenuously blamed on the hapless fall guys - the Other party, the feckless Democrats.

The mainstream media will continue to do its part in keeping us bewildered yet titillated and provoked but no closer to understanding much of anything. Stay tuned!

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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Reflections 1

I found this in a journal that that I sometimes write in . Apparently I wrote it back in January of this year. I thought I'd share it.

1965-1975

We weren’t wrong and we weren’t right, we were young and the world had not yet gone into reverse.  Yet looking back I feel a certain embarrassment at our levels of blind self-righteousness – or least at mine as a reflection of the generational delusion as a whole.  That said, I’ve found little that I can repudiate of what we once believed or more precisely toyed with as possible.

There was I believe genuine wisdom and well grounded ideas immersed in the tangle of overstatement and delusional idealism.  Sometimes profound new ideas pointing to a real course correction for the human race as whole would bob to the surface.  But then they would sink again amidst the swirling flotsam and jetsam of the day to be lost amidst the cacophony  spewing forth from gifted charlatans, revolutionary romantics and charming blowhards.

In the 1950’s a crude adolescent-oriented, electronically amplified music was born of the mating of southern ‘Rockabilly’ and urban ‘rhythm and blues’ - ‘Rock and Roll.’ It would dominate popular music for the next 50 years. But by the mid 1960’s a new generation of musicians built on and enhanced this foundation by going back to the source – the solid art of guitar blues chords coming out of the Mississippi Delta by way of Chicago. This new improved version of “rock and roll’ began to be respected even by Jazz aficionados. And when spiked by psychedelic drugs it became a force to reckon with especially when leavened with powerful socially conscious poetry-infused lyrics from veterans of the folk music revival of early 60’s.  The “roll” part was dropped and it became simply known as ”Rock.” And as such it would have worldwide impact, and serve as the soundtrack for a brave attempt at crashing the gates of the existing order.

Of course as we know those gates survived that assault and were subsequently stoutly reinforced.  Decades have passed and dreams of overthrow have dissipated into sad nostalgia, a nostalgia that mixes the usual remorse for a wasted youth with something more, a longing for a time when people actually believed the future held hope.   

Jan 18, 2011