Category Archives: Election 2016

You Say You Want a Revolution? Well…You know…

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The fact-challenged narratives that are informing this election cycle, not to mention the caricature candidates, make it more clear than ever that the oligarchy has nearly completed its work. The Parties, in other words, are weakened almost unto death. If you think about it, the outcome that is most desired among the “400” (forget percentages – about 400 people run everything you care to name, the .000001% if you like) is a dysfunctional, factional, barely legitimate government that is constantly at odds with itself, distracting the voters from the actual daily business of government (which is protecting the interests of the 400) through personality cults, amusing theatrics, and of course the constant threat posed by “them” (terrorists, Mexicans, liberals, CEOs, the Clintons, whatever). The 2016 hate-filled presidential bread and circus express, complete with soulless money-grubbing media supplying big microphones to the loudest, most obnoxious voices steeped in ignorant fear and lies —  this serves as our new crass substitute for what once resembled a self-confident political process, at least most of the time.

So if you have the unsettling feeling that everything is about to fall apart,  remember it is by design, and this chaos is being purchased into existence by people who want it this way. The oligarchs will win a rare prize if the voters elect a president who is himself a card-carrying hater of all things federal, a head cheerleader for the destruction of the awful, corrupt “establishment” (i.e. the government as we know it, your friends and neighbors, AFSCME union members, civil servants, cops, teachers, librarians, toll booth workers, park rangers, the DMV, my dad the soldier). The picture is one of a deluded Nero fiddling away at airy ideological ditties in the White House while the massive bureaucratic engine of Washington goes quietly about its never-changing long-term tasks, such as preserving the unbalanced power structure via the tax code and other arcane regulatory regimes, thereby supplying oligarchs with the only self-enrichment and dynastic development tool they need in steady supply: your tax dollars in the form of supply-side tax giveaways and guaranteed interest payments on government “debt” (bonds). The oligarchs are happy to underwrite public debt when the government refuses to collect enough  taxes to pay for itself. Keeping tax rates low on the wealthy means they have plenty of money to lend Uncle Sam instead of just giving it to him, thus making still more profits off of profits that were barely taxed in the first place (i.e. capital gains). But hey, you don’t get rich writing checks to the government! What’s more, the condition serves to symbolically undermine a chronically “indebted” government as a poorly run, ineffectual, wasteful enterprise.

But don’t oligarchs also want safe streets, safe schools, good health care, etc? Sorry, the American oligarchy has already constructed its “parallel” elite society within the nation’s borders on your dime (private learning/health care/financial/social/leisure institutions, private security, gated communities). And of course if things get depressing at home they have the money to globe-trot to all the Earth’s ritzy destinations. Meanwhile their minions in Congress are actively neglecting public infrastructure and public institutions (the dilapidation of which emphasizes the “uselessness” of “excessive” government taxation). Of course, some  notable  exceptions to the “let it rot” philosophy of so-called “limited government” include law enforcement, prisons, the military and its many weapons, which will always be fully funded for obvious reasons. No, the ‘waste’ to be cut from government, the waste that is “ballooning” our national debt, is of course the social safety net – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The longer this trend continues, the more we will hear bought-and-paid-for politicians muse about how we “can’t afford” to care for our most vulnerable citizens.

This is the plan: eventual de-legitimization of representative democracy through cultural/perceptual manipulations that undermine the federal government’s efficacy in the minds of voters  – some of whom may then predictably demand a “political revolution” but won’t know what that means, nor how they are going to make it happen within a political system – and under the watch of a massive law enforcement apparatus – that is now fully controlled by their economic adversaries. This oligarchic control over a thug-like political class will, if they succeed, become the norm, will be the new face of our “democracy” as more and more disaffected voters walk away from what has become, frankly, a vulgar process that is beneath a sovereign individual’s dignity.

Most Americans, of course, aren’t even paying attention.

Tuesday Eve…

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Well, here we are, on the cusp of Super Tuesday and anyone’s game. The stalwarts of the GOP are hoping for a Trompe-l’œil, as in an invisible Trump who disappears after securing the nomination. I have my doubts. I believe the man may cinch it tomorrow, and I’m here on record saying so. I’m not glad of it, by no means, but the trajectory of the man – through the fractured body of the party – is unmistakable.

But what of liberals? I do think that Hillary will secure the nomination tomorrow, in spirit if not in outright delegate counts. A good showing will be enough, absent a rout, to demoralize the messianic wing of the party. I don’t celebrate this prediction, I merely validate it with my experience. Perhaps Bernie is what we need, but I do believe it will be another cycle or two before the electorate evolves to that. I do.

Feel the Crisis

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I keep reading, keep learning more and more about the dynamics of the current crisis in the Democratic party. It’s interesting, because we know the GOP has been in crisis for some time, as perhaps best evidenced by the Tea Party insurgency and the ideological chaos it has created over the last several years.

Democrats did not have to be in crisis – it seems very likely that without Bernie Sanders, Hillary would have had a pleasant walk to the nomination. Instead, Bernie’s “insurgent” campaign has quickly transformed the party into a party in crisis, just like the GOP. Bernie’s success has derailed the now-quaint notion that in November a bickering, leaderless, fractured GOP would easily hand the White House to Democrats, happily unified and ideologically pragmatic under Hillary. Obama’s late surge of progressive and foreign policy productivity (with the glaring exception of Syria) appeared to set the stage nicely for a smooth Obama-Clinton transition, one that might “calm the waters” that were full of the chop produced by so many flailing, desperate conservatives trying to explain away the president’s victories on such issues as marriage equality, health care, and Iran – all on the watch of a GOP Congress.

On a side note, it is equally fascinating to contemplate the nature of the nation’s “crisis” – the belief among so many that we are “on the brink” of some national calamity, that we need to take drastic measures to right this faltering ship of state. On the conservative side, it is hardly surprising that they are whipping up a useful panic. It is paramount they convince their voters of the veracity of two ideas: one, that the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2009 was unrelated to the Republican president who had been in charge the previous seven years; and two, that as bad as our Great Recession and failed Iraq war decade was, things are “even worse” after seven years of Obama. Combine this with the Sanders campaign’s dire warnings of an amoral oligarchy dominating the political system like old-school Robber Barons, and what you get is a general message from both national parties to their respective constituencies: America as we know it is on the brink of destruction!

Sanders supporters, of course, believe this crisis in the Democratic party is necessary, a good thing, in the same manner that Trump’s supporters see his candidacy as necessary to clean out the Washington cesspool. (By the way, have you ever noticed that “cleaning out the Washington cesspool” is pretty much the promise of every would-be politician going back to Reagan? And yet its stink has only gained in potency.) “We are tired of waiting,” they say, for someone to drive a stake through the heart of Wall Street. And that’s certainly understandable after the debacle of 2008, which revealed in stark detail the “real two Americas” – not conservatives versus liberals, not red states versus blue states. No, the real battle is billionaires versus everyone else, and the billionaires are not just winning. They control the rules of the game – and the umpires – to ensure they will win every time.

Thus what might have been — the Democratic campaign story of calm, cool, rational pragmatism and a smooth transition of power competing with the GOP campaign story of chaos, belligerance, intraparty warfare and populist hysteria. But that’s all over. Now, it’s two identical stories of populist hysteria (acute ideologies aside), both pregnant with the exciting promise of tearing down a “captive” American political structure so it can be “built back up again” in the image of “the people.” Leading the great purge will be the Messiah of one’s choice, either Trump or Sanders (or Cruz if you’re a “political Christian” – a handy new term I just came across).

This dynamic creates a kind of “we don’t care” equivalency among the party’s new “leaders” who, as it happens, do not belong to, or even like, the parties they nominally lead. Trump disses Republicans (and everyone else) as stupid and incompetent, Sanders thumbs his nose at the Democratic “establishment” and party luminaries. Their followers and surrogates do the same. Each candidate’s acolytes are helping them destroy from within the parties they have commandeered, the parties to which they have hitched their timely ideological wagons. They destroy their parties knowingly, with those on the right believing the GOP leadership has “betrayed” them, and those on the left feeling they are in a no-win shell game with a “billionaire class” that easily controls a co-opted Democratic party “establishment”.

I will not say that it would be “better” to have kept it simple with Hillary, especially since that ship has sailed. I do believe it would have been easier, an uncluttered path to a White House that could, at least – perhaps – temporarily forestall the Koch revolution (now ongoing at your local state legislature and governor’s office, which are most likely under GOP control). At least, the Koch’s version of revolution could probably be held off for a few more years – until the Kochs can count 34 GOP state legislatures and call a constitutional Convention of the States (they now have 31).

But the loudest voices on the left are saying that mere “protection” for progressive priorities and the slow, incremental gains the Obama administration achieved – and for which Hillary is the party’s chosen standard bearer – these gains are simply not enough. Too little, too late, and too tainted with establishment fingerprints. Besides, polls tell them they are going to win everything with Bernie – so why compromise on ideals? It’s understandable.

For both Democrats and Republicans (whatever these labels now mean), it’s “Revolution” or nothing. So I guess we may well see what a revolution looks like up close and personal. If history is any guide, it won’t be pretty. And history also instructs that no matter what the revolution itself looks like, its aftermath will look like all the revolutions: consolidation of power among those who took the reins of power, eventually putting “the people” right back where they started – trying to extract “public service” from entrenched political bosses whose chief priority is to preserve their hard-won place at the top of the heap.

 

Dear Charles Krauthammer

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An Open Letter to Charles Krauthammer:

I sometimes wonder if you, like your Obama-obsessed comrades in Congress, are aware of just how damaging your views are to the prospects of international accord and some measure of peace.

Given your nonstop belligerance toward the president and Democrats in general, perhaps this is by design. Perhaps you are a warrior and nothing more, and as long as you are battling against the “prince of lawlessness” that you imagine your nemesis to be, you are convinced your cause is righteous. Perhaps everything you believe can be packaged into the idea that the president must somehow be destroyed, and all other priorities are expendable until this goal is reached.

You are not alone, of course, in holding this deluded philosophy, which has prevented so much potential progress from being realized over the last six years. (Congratulations?)

Mitch McConnel failed in his single-minded priority for the GOP as announced on the occasion of Mr. Obama’s inaugaration – despite a massive effort by the right, Obama’s second term is well under way. Unlike the various illegalities practiced under the former administration (see Libby, Scooter and Plame, Valerie), the hoped-for scandals and indictments of the Obama team are not going to happen. No, not even continued chants of “Benghazi!” will help you now. So you too have failed in your crusade. After six years of harping, you have convinced exactly no one outside your ideological camp that Ken Starr’s political corpse should be resurrected to run down and hog tie another successful Democrat. Can you not simply own that failure and move on? Can you not step out of the ring now that you are on the canvas?

What I am getting at is this: continuously undermining the Hurculean task of managing U.S. foreign policy in a world shattered by extremism, factionalism, and a general collapse of civilization in many regions is not productive for the U.S. and its citizens – people like me. It is good only in the eyes of obsessive people like you, who have no sense of proportion, and of course it’s good for America’s sworn enemies. That goes without saying.

I really don’t care how much you hate the man, nor do I care about the prospects of the GOP, or the Democrats for that matter. I share this lack of compassion for tired, out of touch, insular political parties and their self-interested agendas with MANY fellow citizens. So by extension I don’t care about you, nor am I going to be swayed by your baseless ideologically inspired sophistry.

But I do care about shills like you poisoning the well of ideas here at home, joyously squeezing the bellows of hatred and ridicule into the fires of burning nation states for the sole reason that it might help make the president look weak and increase the prospects for a Republican White House in 2016. Yes, I realize this is “the game” from the GOP perspective, but some of us are through playing it. When I think of the alternative you offer by implication – a “strong” president like former ‘president’ Cheney and his brilliant plans for a “free Iraqi people” and “cheap oil for everybody”, I can’t help but shudder with dread that many low-information American voters would take you up on it.

I realize someone like you will never admit the truth about Iraq – namely, that it was plunged into chaos and sectarian war as a direct result of an unjustified, unprovoked, poorly planned American invasion based on lies told by Cheney’s neocon gang, followed by a dismantling of the regular Iraqi army by the American “governor” of that briefly conquered (and now lawless and leaderless) state.

The disbanding of the Iraqi army, especially, was sheer foreign policy idiocy, as was pointed out at the time, and everyone who was paying attention knows it. These Iraqi men – trained, armed, and then stateless – now form the core of the Islamic State, Sunni warriors cut loose from the now-Shia controlled Iraqi government structure by American decree, men who know they are enemies of Shia Baghdad and who face the prospect of trying to survive under an Iranian puppet regime emboldened by a decade of state-destroying adventures known collectively as the “War on Terror”.

(Yes, I know the new conservative line is that IS was born of Syria’s war, because this allows conservatives to blame IS’s rise on Obama’s “inaction” there – but I am not buying, because without the instability created by the U.S. over a decade of war, IS would just be another Islamist extremist group that CAME to Syria to expand the fight against Assad. They would not be in Iraq or Libya today.)

This is all the result of Cheney’s actions, not Obama’s. No matter how much you want the 2012 Status of Forces agreement to be Obama’s ‘blunder’ that ruined Iraq, you and I both know who put that agreement in place as a matter of history and law. And you and I both know the Iraq “adventure” was an abject failure from beginning to end. It was not Obama’s war. It was not even America’s war. It was Cheney and Halliburton’s war, to the tune of billions in war profiteering.

Of course, to your mind hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead Americans, many billions of taxpayer dollars down the drain, the hatred of the civilized world toward the “imperialist” bullies running America (believe me, I lived it), and the easily foreseen current state of affairs in Iraq brought on by vain American adventurism – none of these is anywhere near the horror of…what? Obama not waging war (which he is not allowed to do anyway) on every rogue actor on the planet? That seems to be the prescription, though you and your Congressional cohort are for some reason reluctant to articulate the actual war plans: the cost justifications, the logistics of fighting on multiple fronts from Ukraine to Syria to Libya, the assurances that non-state actor “x” is our “friend” and will steadfastly fight our cause against non-state actor “Y”, and the viable end-game scenarios for these actions that would justify the cost in lives, money, and international reputation. You imply Obama is refusing to pursue these lines, but you know they don’t actually exist – never mind, progress is not the goal, I know. You don’t need to actually have a goal beyond embarrassing the president and weakening our position as a nation in the eyes of the wider world.

By the way, isn’t it Congress’s prerogative to declare war? Why don’t they then?

By continuing to argue, sans facts, that the Obama administration’s foreign policy is somehow the “cause” of the world’s sectarian strife, you undermine actions the administration and its many allies are actually taking to address these foreign conflicts and nascent threats. At every turn, you attempt to stoke phony “outrage” over administration “bumbling” rather than suggest useful or insightful (as opposed to fantastic and impossible) changes or enhancements to policies that are in fact in place and quietly working.

With your cynical sarcasm and ridicule of U.S. policies, effectively saying “It’s hopeless” to try to assist the president, you signal to your acolytes in Congress that the only course for the GOP is to pre-emptively undermine anything Obama would try to do toward a shared goal of American safety and prosperity. In doing so you trade the cause of peace and security for petty, ephemeral partisan victories that amount to nothing in the real world. (Hint: Obama will not run again in 2016. Promise.) Your goal, if you have any beyond Obama’s destruction, appears to be to convince Americans the country is in worse condition in 2016 than it was in 2008 (though it is not by any fair measure you care to name) and that it’s all the fault of one man, thereby paving the way for a Republican White House because, you know, lesser of two evils, right? You seem adamant in your need for this to be “true” to the point of helping useful global chaos to be realized and tangible, at least in the minds of voters. But it’s not true. The world is always unstable, and the Obama years mark one of the few times the U.S. was agile enough to largely stay out of it – allowing us to concentrate on the many domestic challenges we face (one of which is massive war debt and a huge population of disabled veterans who will need lifetime care, not to mention a treasury depleted by war adventures).

If I thought you were rational, I would ask you to consider only this: as many areas of the Middle East still burn with the fires set by an unthinking, shoot-first American foreign policy circa 2001-2007; as Russia continues to devolve into a failed kleptocracy due to its structural economic weaknesses and Putin’s monomaniacal insanity (not to mention his knowledge that Obama will be both restrained from acting on foreign soil and simultaneously pilloried for inaction by the GOP Congress for electoral purposes); as stateless terrorists in austerity-crippled Europe probe for weakness and terrorize the citizenry; and as Syria continues to crumble while Congress signals it will not support the president’s plans there (again, because they value embarrassing Obama and protecting theselves against primaries over defeating Assad); remember that the United States has somehow – even under Obama – managed to emerge from the Cheney-era’s Great Recession and costly middle east war adventures to steer the country toward a return to prosperity; we have somehow also managed to avoid another costly, pointless war; we have somehow managed to prevent any significant foreign-launched terror attacks. If I thought you were rational I would ask you to recognize that these are good things, not bad things, that they are positive developments for the U.S. despite the world’s general condition.

In other words, we are the envy of a chaotic world right now, an island of peace, enjoying stability and prosperity (relative to 2009) amid the world’s present chaos. All signs point to a continuation of this pattern and a return of American economic dominance and worldwide influence (absent Congressional sabotage in the form of debt default threats, sequesters, thoughtless tax slashing and such). Deficits are shrinking every year; manufacturing is making a comeback; the previously steep annual increases in health care costs are slowing dramatically under Obamacare; the dollar is stronger than it has been in years. The Dow Jones is in record territory. There have been – and I predict there will be – no indictments of Obama administration officials, because they are playing by the rules whether you choose to believe it or not.

Your calculated, hateful rhetoric, your fake sputtering frustration at the “grave ineptitude” of the administration, words that paint a picture of a ‘failed’ presidency, a ‘weak’ president, a ‘lawless’ president simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone who knows the truth of history. Unfortunately, many do not know the truth, because they are listening to the likes of you, in your collective, fact-free Obama-hating echo chamber, instead of looking at the actual historical record, the actual events and decisions that led to the wrecked domestic economy and the factional, warring, America-hating Middle East Obama inherited in January 2009.