For thirty years now, the folks Teddy Roosevelt once identified as "the malefactors of great wealth" have been busy destroying the Grand Compact that once governed American labor relations and society, formerly stipulating that the upper class and middle class and even the working class would all do pretty well, comparatively speaking. But that was not enough for the greedy rich. So they hired political hacks like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and they rewrote the terms of the deal. Whether it's tax policy or trade relations or labor organizing and negotiating rules or government benefits, the new new deal is the same across the board. Way more for the rich, way less for the rest of us.
Of course, people notice. So the first line of defense was to dumb them down enough such that they would at least be slow to notice, and so that they could be sold bogus solutions. Those policies and that rhetoric have been the second line of defense. "It's the fags and the towelheads and the nigrahs and the feminazis and the wetbacks and the gubmint who've made you miserable", said every regressive from here to the horizon, for decades now. It worked pretty well up until 2006 and 2008, when the folks saying it were in charge and yet still weren't delivering prosperity, and when the schadenfreude of someone else being kicked in the teeth no longer delivered sufficient comfort to placate the ripped-off masses.
Now comes the third line of defense, when all avenues of democratic change and redress are being closed off. Congress and the White House both nominally controlled by the party of the people are no less the tools of the plutocracy than when the GOP was sitting in those seats. Now the Supreme Court has likewise been captured, and we should anticipate many more of the kind of rulings we've been seeing, underwriting big state and big corporate power at every turn. Poor Justice John Paul Stevens. What a beautiful anachronism he has become, a vestige of a more humane and more innocent time, back when Democrats were still Democrats, and Republicans still approximated human beings. Now, with the floodgates open, and with more and more judicial positions at the state level being drowned in electoral campaign money, all the doors are being closed, just as planned.
I don't know what form the fourth line of defense will take, but I'm pretty sure it will involve blood. The events in Iran lately or China's Tiananmen Square are probably instructive in this regard.
The third item of note in this Week From Hell was the closing of Air America. I'm pretty close to the last person in the world who will miss this attempt at a progressive answer to the wall of horror over there on radio right. The programming of Air America, with a couple of notable exceptions, was dismal beyond belief, ping-ponging between screeching shriekery and apolitical inanity, and rarely resting for even a moment in-between on anything articulate or informative or thoughtful. You know, if I wanted embarrassing political commentary on my radio, I already had Limbaugh and Hannity and Savage and all those other drooling thugs with ganglion cysts where their brains were supposed to be to choose from.
Still, the idea that it's so hard to inject thoughtful discourse into the national dialogue in any moderately broad-based medium is really depressing, even if in this case it might have been more to do with spectacularly bad management than it was because of spectacularly dumb Americans.
We are in a really bad place now, and it feels as though all the avenues offering even a glimmering of hope and redemption are closing down simultaneously. Progressive commentary is being silenced in the supposed marketplace of ideas, while vitriol-spewing hard-right thugs proliferate like so many Spanish Fly-addled bunny rabbits. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars worth of corporate influence have now been unleashed to further overwhelm the already daunting odds of fair competition in electoral contests, and to fully secure the purchasing of favorable policy for special interests. And this was done by a radical one-vote majority of the Supreme Court, who took it upon themselves to go out and change a hundred years worth of Congressional legislation as well as recent precedents of the very same Court. Just calling balls and strikes? No. More like just balls. These guys went out an bought land, built a stadium, wrote the rules and invented an entirely new game.
Then, of course, there's the so-called progressive party, now in charge. You know, the one that's supposed to provide an alternative, in a democratic system, to the party of death, destruction and deceit. Yeah, that one. Except it turns out that the Democrats are no alternative at all. At least when it comes to policy. If, on the other hand, you like your politicians to be embarrassingly weak, inept and ineffectual, then the latter-day Three Stooges Barack, Harry and Nancy offer a refreshing break from the linebacker eyes and the freight train punch of the GOP killers.
But, of course, you always wind-up back there anyhow. What the last thirty years make increasingly clear is that the Democrats have simply become a sort of halfway holiday from the worst excesses of the GOP, a kind of spring break from the serious business of wrecking a superpower. When things get really obnoxious under Republican rule, the Dems come in to provide the requisite comedic interlude for a few years. When the economy is good, they may even be invited to actually stay a bit longer, as Bill Clinton was provided, of course, that he didn't actually mess with anything that mattered. When money is tight, however, comatose ineptitude as a governing philosophy doesn't play so well, and the duration of the Democratic intermission gets short.
Such is the meaning of another of the dismal events of the past week, the president's State of Potemkin speech. What a piece of crap that was. What an abysmal laundry list of platitudes that will be not be remotely remembered by anybody in ten years or even ten days. This White House seems to have now gone full-on Bill Clinton, trotting out silly quarter-measure policy initiatives that even they don't believe in, begging the rabid right to punk them yet again and again, and studiously avoiding any action or rhetoric that would threaten even half a percent of the take collected every day by the predatory governing interest structure for whom America is not a country so much as a handy aggregation and collection apparatus.
Among other indicators, Obama's fleeting and half-hearted pep talk on health care merely the signature issue of his administration, mind you, and the item that consumed almost all the country's political oxygen over the last year made clear that he has now decided to walk away from the issue, though the awkwardly-timed SOTU address made it necessary for him to pretend that he's not. (Remember, just a week or two ago, when they were trying to schedule the address to triumphantly follow his signing of the bill? My, how things have changed, and my, how fast it's all gone down the toilet.) In this respect he's gone Clinton as well. Make an awful attempt at health care reform, write really bad legislation, handle the strategy and politics of it stupidly, wreck yourself and your party in the process, then just walk away and leave the dying corpse there, squirming in the dirt.
Does this turn to Clintonism mean Barack is going to start screwing White House interns, too? Perhaps, because his fiscal politics are Clinton-like, as well. Trying to placate the insatiable right, he leaves untouched a growing military budget that so dwarfs those of the entire rest of the planet combined as to inescapably render America the international sociopath among nations, while practically echoing Clinton's "the era of big government is over" swill with his spending freeze on domestic programs. Hey man, they're only poor people, aren't they? It's only the environment, isn't it? It's just education, right? Who cares? Meanwhile, predictably, the right begins to boo and hiss literally right as the words pass across the president's lips. This is classic Obama: breathtakingly tepid nothingburger supposed solutions to serious political problems that piss off the left because they want him to be going the other way, piss off the middle because they want something that works, and piss off the right because not even troglodytes like John McCain are mentally ill enough to satisfy them anymore.
The sad and what I think will eventually prove quite ugly truth is that this administration is simply not up to the requirements of the times. Part of this country's mythology about itself and not a terribly inaccurate view, in some ways, either is that each generation of Americans rises to meet the call of history, the challenges of their respective moments. But for a very long time now, this generation has not, and Barack Obama is just the latest in a sorry string of losers who have sought to deceive, distract or simply coast on inertia, while the long-term prospects for the country crumble under our feet.
Obama's peculiar sin is that he unlike Reagan or Clinton or the pathetic Bush family goobers is stuck presiding over the national decline at the moment it has slipped into fourth gear, and at a time after which all those other clowns have more or less exhausted the suite of remotely plausible diversionary tactics.
But those difficult circumstances could also have been his opportunity instead. Like the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts of the past, he could have risen to the occasion of what history demands here and now. Instead, his is a cowardly presidency, afraid to offend even criminals, stuck in the middle of the road like a deer in the headlights of the eighteen-wheelers barreling down on him, and stupidly believing that if he merely doesn't move at least he will survive his own inaction, whatever happens to the rest of the country. Obama is purely the wrong actor for his time. At a moment when Americans want action, he continues to avoid acting, thinking he is saving himself, even as all the indicators from tea parties to losing elections in three states he won a year ago to plummeting job approval ratings scream out for him to do otherwise.
Right before the Massachusetts contest, Barack sent an email urging me to help out the hapless Coakley campaign. He said, "David, If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election". And then he went up there and did a rally for his candidate, telling people that "Bankers don't need another vote in the United States Senate. They've got plenty." And then his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told us that a key theme of 2010 will be asking voters "whether the people they have in Washington are on the side of protecting the big banks, whether they're on the side of protecting the big oil companies, whether they're on the side of protecting insurance companies or whether they're on the people's side."
Of course, people notice. So the first line of defense was to dumb them down enough such that they would at least be slow to notice, and so that they could be sold bogus solutions. Those policies and that rhetoric have been the second line of defense. "It's the fags and the towelheads and the nigrahs and the feminazis and the wetbacks and the gubmint who've made you miserable", said every regressive from here to the horizon, for decades now. It worked pretty well up until 2006 and 2008, when the folks saying it were in charge and yet still weren't delivering prosperity, and when the schadenfreude of someone else being kicked in the teeth no longer delivered sufficient comfort to placate the ripped-off masses.
Now comes the third line of defense, when all avenues of democratic change and redress are being closed off. Congress and the White House both nominally controlled by the party of the people are no less the tools of the plutocracy than when the GOP was sitting in those seats. Now the Supreme Court has likewise been captured, and we should anticipate many more of the kind of rulings we've been seeing, underwriting big state and big corporate power at every turn. Poor Justice John Paul Stevens. What a beautiful anachronism he has become, a vestige of a more humane and more innocent time, back when Democrats were still Democrats, and Republicans still approximated human beings. Now, with the floodgates open, and with more and more judicial positions at the state level being drowned in electoral campaign money, all the doors are being closed, just as planned.
I don't know what form the fourth line of defense will take, but I'm pretty sure it will involve blood. The events in Iran lately or China's Tiananmen Square are probably instructive in this regard.
Still, the idea that it's so hard to inject thoughtful discourse into the national dialogue in any moderately broad-based medium is really depressing, even if in this case it might have been more to do with spectacularly bad management than it was because of spectacularly dumb Americans.
We are in a really bad place now, and it feels as though all the avenues offering even a glimmering of hope and redemption are closing down simultaneously. Progressive commentary is being silenced in the supposed marketplace of ideas, while vitriol-spewing hard-right thugs proliferate like so many Spanish Fly-addled bunny rabbits. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars worth of corporate influence have now been unleashed to further overwhelm the already daunting odds of fair competition in electoral contests, and to fully secure the purchasing of favorable policy for special interests. And this was done by a radical one-vote majority of the Supreme Court, who took it upon themselves to go out and change a hundred years worth of Congressional legislation as well as recent precedents of the very same Court. Just calling balls and strikes? No. More like just balls. These guys went out an bought land, built a stadium, wrote the rules and invented an entirely new game.
Then, of course, there's the so-called progressive party, now in charge. You know, the one that's supposed to provide an alternative, in a democratic system, to the party of death, destruction and deceit. Yeah, that one. Except it turns out that the Democrats are no alternative at all. At least when it comes to policy. If, on the other hand, you like your politicians to be embarrassingly weak, inept and ineffectual, then the latter-day Three Stooges Barack, Harry and Nancy offer a refreshing break from the linebacker eyes and the freight train punch of the GOP killers.
But, of course, you always wind-up back there anyhow. What the last thirty years make increasingly clear is that the Democrats have simply become a sort of halfway holiday from the worst excesses of the GOP, a kind of spring break from the serious business of wrecking a superpower. When things get really obnoxious under Republican rule, the Dems come in to provide the requisite comedic interlude for a few years. When the economy is good, they may even be invited to actually stay a bit longer, as Bill Clinton was provided, of course, that he didn't actually mess with anything that mattered. When money is tight, however, comatose ineptitude as a governing philosophy doesn't play so well, and the duration of the Democratic intermission gets short.
Such is the meaning of another of the dismal events of the past week, the president's State of Potemkin speech. What a piece of crap that was. What an abysmal laundry list of platitudes that will be not be remotely remembered by anybody in ten years or even ten days. This White House seems to have now gone full-on Bill Clinton, trotting out silly quarter-measure policy initiatives that even they don't believe in, begging the rabid right to punk them yet again and again, and studiously avoiding any action or rhetoric that would threaten even half a percent of the take collected every day by the predatory governing interest structure for whom America is not a country so much as a handy aggregation and collection apparatus.
Among other indicators, Obama's fleeting and half-hearted pep talk on health care merely the signature issue of his administration, mind you, and the item that consumed almost all the country's political oxygen over the last year made clear that he has now decided to walk away from the issue, though the awkwardly-timed SOTU address made it necessary for him to pretend that he's not. (Remember, just a week or two ago, when they were trying to schedule the address to triumphantly follow his signing of the bill? My, how things have changed, and my, how fast it's all gone down the toilet.) In this respect he's gone Clinton as well. Make an awful attempt at health care reform, write really bad legislation, handle the strategy and politics of it stupidly, wreck yourself and your party in the process, then just walk away and leave the dying corpse there, squirming in the dirt.
Does this turn to Clintonism mean Barack is going to start screwing White House interns, too? Perhaps, because his fiscal politics are Clinton-like, as well. Trying to placate the insatiable right, he leaves untouched a growing military budget that so dwarfs those of the entire rest of the planet combined as to inescapably render America the international sociopath among nations, while practically echoing Clinton's "the era of big government is over" swill with his spending freeze on domestic programs. Hey man, they're only poor people, aren't they? It's only the environment, isn't it? It's just education, right? Who cares? Meanwhile, predictably, the right begins to boo and hiss literally right as the words pass across the president's lips. This is classic Obama: breathtakingly tepid nothingburger supposed solutions to serious political problems that piss off the left because they want him to be going the other way, piss off the middle because they want something that works, and piss off the right because not even troglodytes like John McCain are mentally ill enough to satisfy them anymore.
The sad and what I think will eventually prove quite ugly truth is that this administration is simply not up to the requirements of the times. Part of this country's mythology about itself and not a terribly inaccurate view, in some ways, either is that each generation of Americans rises to meet the call of history, the challenges of their respective moments. But for a very long time now, this generation has not, and Barack Obama is just the latest in a sorry string of losers who have sought to deceive, distract or simply coast on inertia, while the long-term prospects for the country crumble under our feet.
Obama's peculiar sin is that he unlike Reagan or Clinton or the pathetic Bush family goobers is stuck presiding over the national decline at the moment it has slipped into fourth gear, and at a time after which all those other clowns have more or less exhausted the suite of remotely plausible diversionary tactics.
But those difficult circumstances could also have been his opportunity instead. Like the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts of the past, he could have risen to the occasion of what history demands here and now. Instead, his is a cowardly presidency, afraid to offend even criminals, stuck in the middle of the road like a deer in the headlights of the eighteen-wheelers barreling down on him, and stupidly believing that if he merely doesn't move at least he will survive his own inaction, whatever happens to the rest of the country. Obama is purely the wrong actor for his time. At a moment when Americans want action, he continues to avoid acting, thinking he is saving himself, even as all the indicators from tea parties to losing elections in three states he won a year ago to plummeting job approval ratings scream out for him to do otherwise.
Right before the Massachusetts contest, Barack sent an email urging me to help out the hapless Coakley campaign. He said, "David, If you were fired up in the last election, I need you more fired up in this election". And then he went up there and did a rally for his candidate, telling people that "Bankers don't need another vote in the United States Senate. They've got plenty." And then his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told us that a key theme of 2010 will be asking voters "whether the people they have in Washington are on the side of protecting the big banks, whether they're on the side of protecting the big oil companies, whether they're on the side of protecting insurance companies or whether they're on the people's side."
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