Neither of the two pro-business parties, Republican or Democrat, will allow the US to default. They are playing a game of chicken. But, from the sounds of it, they are close to arriving at some sort of "deal". The present "deal" includes a punishing, cruel $3 trillion cut (of historic proportions) to the living standard of the majority of Americans. That means cuts to education, cuts to scholarships, cuts to health care, cuts to pensions, massive cuts to public transportation, cuts to unemployment insurance, cuts to the arts, cuts to cutting edge scientific research. It will mean worse infrastructure, canceling desperately needed maintenance on our country's bridges and roads, massive layoffs and severe pay-cuts for public sector workers, worse sanitation services, worse libraries, worse public parks. It means that Obama and the Democrats will sign off on all of this as their own. (The beauty of it for Obama and friends, of course, is that they can push through austerity while externalizing culpability by claiming that "Republicans made us do it", thus pacifying liberal discontent with the slashing and burning of the very policies and programs for which the Democrats have any "progressive" credentials at all).
But I'm telling you: just wait for it. When the "deal" is struck, we will be barraged by a celebratory chorus about how the Republicans and Democrats "put partisanship aside" and "did what was best for the whole country". We will hear endless praise for the "reaching across the aisle" to "compromise", to "come together as one", etc. etc.
We won't hear a word, however, about what the two parties came together to do. We won't hear a word about how this will represent the largest cut to public services in the history of the world. We won't hear a word about the fallout of this harsh plan of austerity for the majority of ordinary Americans. We won't hear a word about all of the consequences of the two parties' long-standing, unchallenged, stable agreement on the "need" for austerity, on the "need" to continue funding wars and occupations, on the "need" to extend to the Bush tax breaks for the richest of the rich.
But, you know, hip hip hooray that they "came together" and "put partisan bickering" aside or whatever. That warms my fucking heart.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Wait for it
Saturday, April 9, 2011
"Deal" Reached, Obama Elated
Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans have all reached a deal. They've resolved to make deep, punishing cuts to the living standards of the majority of Americans. $39 Billion in cuts will be made (though, of course, the cuts won't be made to the budget of the two (three?) ultra-expensive, as yet unpaid for, wars and occupations).
This is just such a great day for America. "Partisan squabbling" was set aside for more basic goals that both parties share. I just love the way Democrats and Republicans came together to pursue a cause they're both passionate about, namely austerity. I'm so pleased that the parties were able to "transcend politics", reach across the aisle, and do what's best for the ruling class. This warms my heart, you know? This is just like that magical moment when Obama and the Democrats came together with the GOP to extend Bush's tax breaks for the rich. At the end of the day, there's nobody quite as talented as Obama at bringing Democrat and Republican together around a common message of "prosperity for the few, austerity for the many". What an achievement. God Bless America.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Turning the Clock Back
Via the Guardian:
Planned Parenthood has become a symbol of the kind of government spending that fiscal conservatives reject. The clientele of Planned Parenthood is the intersection of many groups that are considered unworthy by fiscal conservatives: lower-income, female, assumed to be unmarried and/or queer. Conservatives have argued, roughly forever, that such women should be cut off from any federal spending, with the hope that deprivation will force them to marry for sustenance. If women can avoid childbirth, they're less needy, and in the conservative imagination, that much more likely to avoid getting married for support. The fact that Planned Parenthood touches on the anti-sex faction of the Republican party is an added bonus, ensuring that they'll have rabid support from anti-choicers.This is horrifying, to say the least. Republicans want to turn the clock back and re-institutionalize forms of gender domination that have been undermined by organizations like Planned Parenthood.
But I reject the framing of this as a "cultural issue" (and, in general, I reject the claim that gender oppression is a mere "cultural issue", though there are, of course, cultural dimensions to all forms of oppression). This is part of a broad onslaught against the majority of Americans: austerity. This is coming first and foremost from the ruling class, not from poor backward conservatives. And this particular destructive austerity measure will hurt working class and poor women more than anyone else. That is not to say that there aren't poor and working class people, especially men, who will get behind the assault on women's freedoms. They will, and they should be vehemently opposed and challenged for doing so, hopefully by a renewed and reinvigorated abortion rights movement in the US. But let's be clear: this isn't some isolated policy issuing in the first instance from grassroots reactionaries. This is part of a broad onslaught against working class living standards. But ruling class politicians in the GOP are smart: they break the onslaught up into different parts and try to sell the various parts as best as possible by pandering to racism, sexism, and other toxic ideologies.
Again, as always, it is a huge mistake to paint this as a battle between progressive Democrat politicians (who are supposed to stand up for women's rights) and conservative Republicans (who on the whole want to maximize the oppression of women wherever possible). This gets the Republicans right, but gets the Democrats wrong. This is not a "cultural" disagreement between "social liberalism" and "social conservatism", for two reasons. First, this is occurring in the context of the broad framework of austerity, accepted by both parties. The Democrats accept the need to make punishing cuts to public goods, and many of them even accept the need to cut funding for PP in particular. Second, the Democrats aren't crusaders for women's liberation. They mostly do nothing on that front, and, worse yet, the Democrats have been happy to throw women under the bus and allow assaults on abortion rights and other gains. Bart Stupak was a Democrat.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
How to Fix the Deficit
Here. Of course, there are problems with the NYTimes options. The sorts of taxes they allow you to meddle with are excessively narrow and confined to those already in existence (what about an intangible property tax, for instance?) Moreover, they only let you raise taxes on the rich to "Clinton-era Levels" which were already indexed to the neoliberal era begun under Reagan. For instance, we must note that the top marginal rate of income taxation was low during the Clinton-era. It would do this country some good to let everyone use this gadget with the added option of raising the top marginal rate on income as high as they like.
Below is the history of the top marginal tax rate on income (i.e. the rate paid by the richest earners who constitute less than 1% of the population.... right now it means that the rich pays 35% on every dollar earned over $373,000):
What you should notice first is that it was raised significantly in the 1930s (from 26% to 60%, later from 60% to 80%). It remained above 60% from the 1930s until the 1980s when Reagan cut it back down to pre-Depression levels. That is, it remained significantly above 60% during the longest, most sustained period of economic growth in the history of the United States (the so-called "long boom" from WWII through the early 70s). When the NYTimes says "Clinton-era rates", they mean a meager 40% top rate, but there's no reason in principle why we shouldn't raise the top rate significantly higher than that right now. After all, in the 1950s it was even as high as 90% under Republican presidencies! So it's just false and disingenuous to claim, as Republicans (and many Democrats) do, that high top marginal rates mean anemic growth. In reality, the fight over taxing the rich has nothing to do with growth or efficiency, and everything to do with class power. That is, the profit-hungry ruling class doesn't want to pay for this crisis themselves: they want to force the working majority to clean up their mess. Their credo is: socialize the losses and risks, privatize the profits and earnings. And their sway in Congress is such that the lowly Democrats hardly even hesitated in pushing through an extension of the Bush Tax give-aways for earners over $250,000. Obama didn't even fight for his campaign promise to return taxes on the rich to pre-Bush levels, and I think that speaks volumes about what the Dems stand for. By further eroding the funding for the public goods that are now on the chopping block, they paved the way for the brutal cuts that are being proposed now. There is no reasonable way to interpret the "budget war" as a struggle between Right and Left. It is a struggle between hard-Right and soft-Right. It is a debate between two bullies about how many times to punch us in the stomach; it's not a debate about whether we deserve to be beat up at all.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Wall Street Records Record Revenues 2009-10
The five largest U.S. firms by investment-banking and trading revenue -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley -- will likely have a better fourth quarter than the previous two periods, driven by equity underwriting and higher volume in stock and bond trading, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Even if this quarter only matches the third, the banks’ revenue will top that of any year except 2009.
The surge has come after the five banks took a combined $135 billion from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and borrowed billions more from the Federal Reserve’s emergency-lending facilities in late 2008 and early 2009 following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Since then, the firms have benefited from low interest rates and the Fed’s purchases of fixed-income securities.
Read the rest here.
Can somebody please get these people some big tax breaks right away? I'm deeply worried about their well-being. It's not enough that they received gargantuan sums of public money through TARP. It's not enough that they're breaking records with the highest profits ever. So it's clear that they're desperately in need of huge tax breaks.
Good thing Obama and the Democrats are here to help them out. I'm sure the Dems will brag about having done so when they're running for re-election in 2012. This will surely make them more "competitive" in vying for corporate funds once campaigns get rolling.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Complete Bullshit
From the NYTimes:
If all they care about is "mutual trust", "respect" and "bipartisan cooperation" why are the Democrats even concerned about losing seats? If it's all about singing "Kumbaya", what's the worry about having the Republicans gain more power? If politics is just about pretending there's no disagreement, what's the problem? This blathering about "trust" is delusional.Before Mr. Obama and Republicans can secure each other’s cooperation, people in both parties say, they must first figure out a way to secure mutual trust.
After two years of operating at loggerheads with Republicans, Mr. Obama and his aides are planning a post-election agenda for a very different political climate. They see potential for bipartisan cooperation on reducing the deficit, passing stalled free-trade pacts and revamping the education bill known as No Child Left Behind — work that Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, says could go a long way toward repairing “the current state of anger and animosity.”
“I’m a big believer in less of singing ‘Kumbaya’ together and going on retreats than in rolling up our sleeves and doing work together,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview. “That’s how you build respect, that’s how you build trust, that’s how you build relationships. I think it’s a way to move beyond some hurt feelings on both sides. Do it through the work.”
Consider the following. "They see potential for bipartisan cooperation on reducing the deficit, passing stalled free-trade pacts and revamping the education bill known as No Child Left Behind — work that Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s education secretary, says could go a long way toward repairing “the current state of anger and animosity.”
Allow me to translate. This means: the Republicans and Democrats already agree that Bush's NCLB was good and needs to be extended; they agree on forcing austerity on working people in order to make them pay for a crisis caused by Wall Street; and they agree on pushing through "free trade" agreements like NAFTA. Great. I can't wait for them to get to work on all of that.
So, keep sending those checks to Moveon.org. I'm sure the money will be well-spent punishing teachers, privatizing schools, and slashing social spending. I mean, at least the Democrats and Republicans will be "transcending their differences" and cooperating when they do it.
In all seriousness, I think liberals would do well to consider more closely the region of genuine consensus among Democrat and Republican politicians. They agree on doing quite a lot, particularly when it comes to excluding various progressive possibilities. This region of agreement constricts the questions that can even be raised within official political chambers.
And if liberals are frustrated with Obama and Co. for handling the Republicans with kid gloves, they might inquire as to why this might be. I don't think it's merely an expression of incompetence or naiveté. To be sure, when Obama says he's happy to cooperate and "trust" Republicans, a good amount of that is over-the-top and has got to be bullshit. But in a way (and this is what liberals continue to miss) he's not just making a strategic error here. This is, I think, an expression of the political trajectory of Obama and the Democrats. If you can agree that budget-cut fatalism and austerity for working people is the only way, which D's and R's certainly do, that's a real reason to think you can work together in the future. That's an obvious strategic move if your politics are obstinately pro-business.
But although there is certainly closeness between the politics of the two major parties, there is no comparable closeness between these parties and the interests of the vast majority of people. In fact there's a massive gap between people's consciousness and our ossified political institutions. The way forward for progressives can't be to keep flushing their time, energy and resources down the massive toilet known as the Democratic Party. The way forward has got to be to speak to people's frustrations with the system and to organize this energy into a force for change. And the only way to do this is to grasp that such a movement would necessarily have to be free from the chains of our electoral mechanism.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Exactamente
"Obama está más ciego que los ciegos, ve el problema y no lo quiere solucionar. Lo que queríamos era escuchar que impusiera una moratoria a las deportaciones. Le está echando la culpa a los republicanos y no asume la responsabilidad". -el reverendo José Landaverde (Hoy, 7.2.2010)
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Political Questions We Cannot Raise
I just ran across this excellent video of Chomsky on the political system in the United States.
One moment of his talk that I found particularly striking was his claim that "most of the issues that the public cares about...weren't even allowed to come up (in discussion surrounding elections" (5:01).
As Chomsky puts it, "many major issues that the public cares about... are big economic issues...issues on which the public has extremely strong opinions...but none of it could be brought up in the election" (5:38).
This is a key point in making sense of politics in contemporary societies. It's not just that we are encouraged to internalize the wrong answers to political questions (e.g. we shouldn't want single-payer health insurance because that means "big government"). The most damaging problem is that we aren't even able to raise the most important political questions at all.
Some social scientists have called this phenomenon "nondecision-making":
Nondecision-making is a means by which demands for change in the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community can be suffocated before they are ever voiced; or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or, failing all these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision-implementing stage of the policy process". (see Bachrach and Baratz (1970: p.44))But this analysis of politics is not one we obtain by default. If one were to simply internalize what's said about politics in, say, the New York Times, they would have an entirely different analysis of politics from the one above. The default understanding of power that we are spoon-fed in Civics textbooks and mainstream news media is as follows. The boundaries of what is to count as a political issue are set by the established political system. Politics is simply the narrow agenda discussed among elites in existing political institutions.
Now, take note of what this excludes. Among other things, this entire approach to politics completely ignores potential issues that the established political system prevents from becoming actual. As Bachrach and Baratz point out, this approach to politics totally ignores many key issues, especially issues that "...involve a genuine challenge to the resources of power or authority of those who currently dominate the process by which policy outputs in the system are determined". Merely raising certain question that pose a threat to existing relations of power is proscribed from the agenda.
This method of exclusion is precisely how our electoral system functions. We have two more-or-less pro-Business parties with minor differences (there are, of course, differences, but they are minor all things considered), and political questions are restricted to rather small set of relatively uncontroversial matters. We are asked to focus in on disputes over minutiae, whereas the big questions about which the public has strong views are frozen out of the discussion. For example, polls have shown for many years now that the idea of single-payer (or Medicare for all) is popular with the public (something like 60% support it, which is more support than Obama got in the 2008 election).
Of course, the public is never asked to vote on whether we should have a for-profit, market-based healthcare system or a public, single-payer system. What they are asked to do is to choose between a Democrat or a Republican every election cycle, neither of whom desire to challenge the powerful position of the private health insurance industry (which is what it would take to get single-payer passed). Thus there is a large gap between what the public wants and what they are able to ask for via the electoral system.
What can we do about this gap?
I'll weigh in on what I think about what we can do in a moment. But if you ask certain Democrat-friendly liberals, they'll tell you that we just need to elect a couple more "progressive" Democrats to office in a handful of states. Perhaps we could exchange a Joe Liberman for a Ned Lamont, they'll argue, and that would more or less solve the problem.
This is preposterous. Notwithstanding the utter powerlessness of the existing bloc of "progressives" in the House and Senate, the problem isn't the lack of a couple of "more progressive" individuals in the Democratic Party. The problem is a systemic one, that has more to do with institutions and practices than the preferences of any one individual in the Party. You can waste valuable resources and time trying to elect a person that starts off supporting single-payer. But in order to function within Washington and the Democratic Party apparatus that person will have to conform to protocol and the requirements of operating within this instutional backdrop.
What, then, should we do about this massive gap between public preferences and a political process dominated by elites?
I find myself returning again and again to two important examples. I'll restrict myself to the first, which is the Civil Rights Movement (or, what, at the time (according to Angela Davis) was simply called the "freedom movement"). (The other example I find particularly interesting is the massive wave of labor militancy in 1934 that led to the passage of the most progressive elements of the New Deal).
First of all, consider where the politics of race stood in the 1940s-50s in the United States. The "major political issues" defined by the agenda set by the established political process and mainstream press did not include the problem of racism as a major concern. The interests of the masses of ordinary black people were simply not on the radar of the established political system. Despite a couple of landmark events and Supreme Court decisions, the issue was by and large pushed aside by the political system.
But by 1964, there was enough pressure on the entire political system to force the passage of major civil rights legislation, against the default prerogatives of the ruling party (i.e. the Democrats).
How was this massive gap closed?
First, consider how it wasn't closed. The political movement for racial justice that began to pick up steam in the early 60s did not directly focus on electoral politics at all. They did not focus on creating PAC's to funnel funds to the Democrats, they did not focus primarily on lobbying elected officials, and they did not emphasize playing within the conventional political rules. They did not simply ask nicely and sit back and hope that elected officials would "do the right thing".
They formed organizations and social movements independently of the political system and by means of direct actions, marches, agitation, consciousness-raising, organizing, propagandizing, and so on they put the problem of racism on the table in a way that the political system could not ignore.
Visionaries like MLK and Malcolm X did not go on TV and talk in the narrow terms of electioneering and Congressional maneuvering. They did not accept the constraints of what was then considered "politically realistic" or prudent. They challenged those very constraints and in-so-doing altered the horizons of what was politically possible.
Malcolm X did not attenuate his own criticisms of the existing order so as to avoid pissing off elites. He didn't think of those determined to maintain racial hierarchies as potential "stakeholders" in a public discussion about policy: he publicly challenged the very legitimacy of their authority.
Yet this entire political orientation, which could instructively be applied to many other political situations, is foreign to the default conception of politics pedaled by politicans, pundits and the mainstream news media. The default conception teaches us to think of ourselves as isolated consumers, not as potential participants in a collective project. We are told to think highly of such vacuous notions as "centrism", "moderation", and "bipartisanship". Oppositional politics are shunned as "divisive" or "polarizing". The result is that any serious criticism of the status quo is frozen out of the discussion: you simply cannot raise such objections at all, no matter how much public support they may have.
Ask yourself this: If we had a vote tomorrow, a national referendum, on whether or not we should have stay in Iraq indefinitely or get out immediately, what would the outcome be? If polls and the discussions during the 2008 election are any indication, an overwhelming majority of Americans would not vote in support of Obama's extension of Bush's foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Or, take Obama's proposed spending freeze. Obama has suggested that we totally freeze all social spending, except for defense spending (which should be allowed to continue to increase). Now, if there was a national referendum asking people whether or not the United States should spend the billions slated for the Pentagon on (A) funding uncessary foreign wars and occupations or (B) on schools, public transit and public services... which do you think people would choose?
But neither of these are questions that can be raised within our political system. These questions do not map onto the disagreement between Republicans and Democrats since both of them more or less agree that we should buck the public will on both counts. That's part of what it is to have two different factions (with a small set of distinguishing features) of what is in effect one pro-Business party.
Although there were massive shifts in electoral balances of power (think of the makeup of the Senate in 2004 vs. 2008), there have not been corresponding shifts in policy. Despite the fact that the country completely repudiated the GOP at the ballot box two election cycles in a row, the Democrats have basically kept the agenda set by Bush intact. The Paulson Plan for bailing out Wallstreet was continued, EFCA was suffocated and set aside, Immigrant Rights were ignored, foreign wars and occupations were escalated, drone bombings increased, freezes on social spending were proposed, etc.
If the Democrats cannot deliever when they have control of every major branch of government, with super-majorities in the Senate, when can they deliver? What do we have to look forward to? Should we hold our breath until they finally get back to the point when they obtain a super-majority again? Isn't this supposed to be the end of the rainbow in terms of electoral power?
I think it's time to divest from the Democrats and start exploring oppositional, independent political organizations that empower ordinary people and enable democracy from below.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Bullshit on stilts
said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. “I just believe in the disinfectant of the sunshine. The more we have got questions on both sides, gradually the American people are going to see more and more and more that we really do need health care reform.”Complete robotic balderdash. I could be a Democratic Senator, it's easy. Just keep repeating nonsense like this over and over: "both sides" "American people" "bipartisanship" "moderation", "good ideas" blah blah blah. And for that matter, I could get a job as a political analyst with the New York Times without changing my tune. Take a listen:
"Mr. Obama will face adversaries who are well prepared to joust with him on the finer points of health policy before a large audience that will be judging both sides and looking for signs of bipartisanship."Let's see what we have here. The NY Times is telling everyone that they're looking "for signs of bipartisanship". Are they? Do we have any basis whatever for this claim? If that's true, then why did so many people vote for Democrats in 2008 if they were first and foremost concerned about this nebulous idea of "reaching across the aisle"? If we don't have any determinate idea about what should be done and which party should do it, why do we even have elections?
[..]
"One way Mr. Obama could throw Republicans off stride would be to make a bold opening offer to embrace one of their health care priorities, like limiting medical malpractice lawsuits — an idea one Democrat close to the White House said had been under consideration."
What else is the NY Times pontificating about? Well, they've got a brilliant strategy that would enable Obama to "throw the Republicans off stride". Evidently what he should do is start off the negotiation by offering to embrace "tort reform". What a brilliant idea, indeed, one that has worked wonders for Obama throughout his presidency so far. In effect the advice is to focus on "bipartisanship" in itself, rather than the ostensible goal of whatever policy is in question.
Why doesn't he just ask the Republicans nicely and then claim that they're "mean" if they say no?
Suppose you're buying a car. In a capitalist society, buyers and sellers are pitted against one another in an agnostic relationship in which their interests fundamentally diverge. Buyers want to purchase low and sellers want to sell high.
Now, you don't walk up to the salesperson and begin by offering them some piece of "what they want" and expect them to then to reciprocate. Market transactions are not reciprocal (and this, in my view, is a knock against the market itself). What the salesperson will do in this case is simply continue their strategy of trying to get the highest price they can. That is their goal, not trying to arrive at some compromise because that has some intrinsic worth.
If you start off with a tepid demand, the effect of more compromise is an even more watered-down and tepid demand.
Health care isn't a "debate", it isn't a "compromise" and it isn't a "conversation". It is a power struggle. Whatever ends up in the final bill will be the result of the relative balance of power (broadly construed). And we forget this at our own peril.
The ideological fantasies pedalled by the NY Times under the guise of "analysis" obscures the basic facts about how politics functions in a society like ours. The Republicans (even less than the Democrats) don't care about health care reform: their goal is to derail it and forestall and serious change. Does anyone really doubt that this is true?
The Democrats realize something has to change, but their goal is to "change" it in such a way that nothing important really changes. This is, admittedly, less obvious to many people, but no less true. Of course, is the paper of record actually stuck to gathering the appropriate facts and scrutinizing the statements of politicians.... perhaps it would be more obvious than it is at present.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Far Left Obama in Action
(via SW.org):
The Obama administration is promising that it will regain momentum on the issue of health care by...giving up even more to the Republicans in the spirit of "bipartisanship." Asked if he was willing to start from square one, Obama told CBS's Katie Couric that he wants to sit down with members of both parties and "look at the Republican ideas that are out there."
Is Obama too far Left?
Yes, according to self-serving wanker Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Indiana). I quote: "Whenever you have just the furthest-left elements of the Democratic Party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country, that's not going to work too well."
I don't have a TV, but I'd be curious to know whether he was able to tell that bold-faced lie with a straight face. Since it's his job to say shit like this with a straight face, I suppose I'm naive to think that he'd have any problem pulling it off.
"Furthest left elements"? Like who? Firebrands like Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman?
Or maybe Bayh is referring to all of the "radical Left" Goldman Sachs alums that staff the Obama cabinet?
First of all, it's news to me that there even is a Left in the Democratic Party. But to the extent that there's anyone remotely progressive in the party at all, they are a marginalized minority who rarely make any trouble for a party who's willing to concede to the Right on everything that matters. The House Progressive Caucus, for example, briefly toyed with the idea of refusing to vote for a bill that didn't have a public option... but of course they all caved on that "threat." And don't even get me started on how all of these "life long single-payer advocates" suddenly sat down and shut up when the "reform" discussions began (i.e. the ones in which "all options were supposed to be on the table").
The fact of the matter is that Democrat leadership has been talking about "moderation", "bipartisanship" and "caution" ever since 2008. Democrat apologists have been clamoring for "centrist" policy all along. Moreover, right-wing hacks like Bayh himself have been the ones with the most influence on policy.
Of course, in a way I'm wasting my time in taking Bayh at his word, when he knows full well that he's bullshitting. Bayh is simply trying to increase his leverage and individual power by weighing in against his own party. He's regurgitating Fox News talking points in order to try to piggy-back on whatever steam the GOP has picked up since Scott Brown. And what's more, like the majority of the complacent members of his party, he probably feels that there is very little at stake in taking this tack (i.e. I doubt very seriously that he's losing sleep over whether or not there are cuts to education, large numbers of uninsured and unemployed, and so on).
SW.org has an excellent editorial on this phenomenon, here. The analysis here is, in my view, right on.
If millions of people are furious with Obama, it can't be because his Administration and the Democratic supermajority are "too far Left" and are "imposing their agenda against their will".
People voted for Obama in droves because he said he was going to tax the rich and spend it on health care. Polls routinely show that people want the government to provide a national health insurance plan. Oregon recently passed a referendum designed specifically to tax the rich.
If people are furious with Obama, it's because he's not Left enough. That is, because he and his Congress are sitting back passively while education and transportation are cut, public employees are laid off, 50 million are uninsured, unions are busted and black unemployment reaches double digits.
What have the Democrats done since 2008 that Bush didn't already do? Aside from the stimulus bill, which was tepid (i.e. much smaller than the situation required) and conservative (i.e. loaded with tax breaks), what the fuck have they done? Escalate the war in Afghanistan, consider privatizing Social Security, propose spending freezes (exempting Pentagon spending of course), and spend months on a "health reform" bill that at the end of the day looked more attractive to health insurance corporations than to ordinary Americans.
Did we even need to elect Democrats in 2008 to get all of that? There's reason to think that even Bush would have been convinced to pass a modest stimulus bill like the one Obama put forward, if his last months in office are any indication.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Barack "Hoover" Obama Proposes Fiscal Austerity (exempting War spending)
Aren't you glad we have a Democratic president? Aren't you glad that we have massive Democratic majorities in Congress? You'd better be. Otherwise we might have had some jerk in the White House talking about freezing new spending initiatives for things other than war and occupation. Right?
Well, wake up and smell the coffee.
The long and short of it is this. For things like education, public transportation, and health.... its the tough medicine of austerity. But for the Pentagon budget and Homeland Security, these suffocating restrictions on spending simply need not apply.
For the things that matter, we get this strange fatalist claim that we can't but make punishing cuts.
For the things (e.g. foreign war and occupation) that some groups claim voting for Democrats aims to combat, there is evidently an endless treasure chest of goodies.
As Krugman points out, BHO's justification for the freeze is identical to GOP rationale for opposing spending altogether:
Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: “American families are tightening their belt, but they don’t see government tightening its belt.” Obama now: “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.”It's obvious that the Democrats are a political dead-end for those on the Left. Even Krugman has, basically, the right line here:
The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn’t seem capable of doing what’s necessary.I agree. The changes that are needed and the reforms that people want are being stone-walled by our electoral/legislative institutions. This is why we need to organize independently of the Democrat Party and create the conditions for demanding (rather than asking Democrats nicely and sending checks via moveon.org) the reforms we need.
asdf
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Lenin on the Death of the Obama Dream
Read it here.
Here's an excerpt:
The unpopularity of Obama's proposals cannot be reduced to right-wing hysteria, which is only persuasive for about a fifth of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans. Such shrill nonsense motivates a right-wing base and, for that reason, cannot be dismissed - but let's get some perspective here. For a start, Americans hate the current healthcare system. The majority in poll after poll favours something like a single-payer or national insurance health system. That isn't reflected in every poll, of course, but the overwhelming trend is for Americans to prefer a government-run health system to the private, heavily subsidised, system. Secondly, this is Massachusetts we're talking about here. This is a state where a powerful majority voted 'yes' on a ballot initiative favouring a single payer system in 2008. The vote against the Democrats in their heartland was not a vote against socialised medicine, because that is not what was on offer.Best line in the piece:
It is easy to blame the lousy performance of Croakley, or whatever her name was.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The Pink Elephant in the Room
Mark my words, very soon we are going to be awash in commentary claiming that the Democrats have been "outmaneuvered", that the "populist Right" is on the rise, that America is a "center-Right nation".
Of course, if the Democrats are unpopular right now and anger toward Obama is on the rise, it's not because of the Republicans, the Tea-Baggers or Fox News Pundits. It's due entirely to the Democrats own actions.
Is it really that peculiar that working-class people in mining towns in West Virginia, who voted for Obama in droves, are now furious that his year in the White House has done nothing, literally nothing, to improve their condition?
Is it really that strange that Black Americans, who voted for Obama in record numbers, are disillusioned with a party and a President that escalates foreign wars while Black unemployment reaches the double digits?
Is it really surprising that a President whose entire message was "change we can believe in", having spent a year furiously trying to prevent things from changing, is now unpopular with a country that was uncharacteristcally excited to vote for him?
What we need to do right now is talk about means of organizing people independently of the Democratic Party.
Groups on the Democrat-friendly liberal left need to cut the umbilical cord and gear up for a fight. The disillusionment people are feeling is real, and should not be cast aside as cynicism. The political definition of cynicism right now is believing that progressives and leftists must perpetually subordinate themselves and their demands to the conservative Democratic Party apparatus. I, for one, staunchly refuse to forfeit my political energies to an institution that is hopelessly pro-Business, anti-Health Care reform, pro-war, and so on.
Lance Selfa on Scott Brown
Lance Selfa has an excellent analysis of the recent senate election in Mass. I haven't looked at NYTimes this morning yet, but I can already imagine all of the "wisdom" coming from pundits to the effect that "the democrats must move to the Center". The Democrats can shove it. Who gives a shit whether or not they have a super-majority, when they never threaten to do anything progressive enough to warrant a GOP filibuster?
If you haven't already heard, just rest assured that Scott Brown is a "left-leaning Republican" who is "more liberal than some of his counterparts in other states". Yes, evidently "left-leaning" means vowing to defeat even the most tepid, counter-productive forms of health reform. Once we dilute the political content of "left-leaning" so heavily, it's difficult to see why Democrats of this persuasion don't vote Republican more often. Ugh. If it were up to people like this, we wouldn't even have the pretense of multiparty democracy... we'd just have the TPA (the Tepid Party of America) which stood for rabble-rousing values like "moderation", "good sense", "centrism", "bipartisanship" and "experience".
Of course, making it appear as though people have a choice is a far more stable means of reproducing this sad state of affairs.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Black America in Free Fall
Reading things like this, this or this are, to say the least, jaw-dropping and enraging. It's no accident that Obama's approval ratings are the lowest of any first-term president at this point since Eisenhower.
As the percentage of Black children living in poverty soars in the direction of the heart-stopping figure of 50%, one wonders what to make of Jesse Jackson's recent decision to give a major speech at the Left Forum in March in New York City. While it has always been the case that Jackson has been, in some broad sense, a man of the Left, a venue like the Left Forum is a touch more radical than is usual for him.
My general experience with Jackson, things like this notwithstanding, is that on the one hand he often makes critiques of the status quo that are powerful and insightful. Unfortunately, these critiques often end with a coda like "but, nonetheless, we have to support the Democratic Party and help persons X, Y and Z get elected". His decision to oppose the Democrats in the 80s was, on my view, politically important and courageous. But since then he hasn't really been a figure with the independence from the Democrats to have any hope of challenging their conservatism.
Thus I'm interested in why he's speaking at the Left Forum, and particularly why he's speaking there now. I don't think he would've done this sort of thing in 2008, nor do I think that the figures discussed in the news articles above about Black suffering are irrelevant here.
The sticking point, for me, is whether (1) Jackson will push for independence from the Democrats, or (2) if he will try to quell dissatisfaction on the Left (particularly the Black Left) with the Democrats and try to bring them back aboard. My hope is that it is the former. Whatever else is true, there's no sense in supporting the Democrats if you believe in healthcare, racial justice, full employment, stopping unjustified wars, workplace democracy, or women's rights. You might add public transportation and public universities to the list of things the Democrats don't care about. If these important initiatives wither on the vine when we have a Democratic President, Democrat super-majority in the Senate, Heavily Democratic House and so on... what's the use of electing Democrats? It shouldn't even be a dilemma for those on the Left anymore: the Democratic Party is not worth one ounce of support from progressive and left-minded people. In order to get the things we care about (e.g. healthcare, jobs, education, and so on), we're going to have to organize independently of the Democratic Party and demand them. This isn't a utopian idea: the Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Act both have extra-electoral struggle to thank for their passage.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Against Electoral Politics
What is politics? What is the terrain of the political? What's at stake?
Ask many people these questions and their answers will understandably point to Washington, elections, Democrats, Republicans and so on. Having an interest in politics, on this view, means watching CNN, following the inane daily hubbub on Capitol Hill, etc.
But as Alain Badiou astutely points out, "If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure." This is a fecund observation that is worth unpacking further.
The definition of politics offered above seems, on the face of it, uncontroversial. What should the raison d'etre of our electoral institutions be, if not to facilitate collective decision-making, organized by certain principles, aiming to unfold the new possibilities currently repressed by the dominant state of affairs?
Yet this is patently not what electoral politics are about in the US. Here, elections are about an endless, narrow see-saw maneuver between Democrat and Republican parties. Consider for a moment what this narrow back-and-forth is not: it is not a struggle between different substantive political visions. Nor is it a disagreement over how a just social order would be organized. It is, for all intents and purposes, a process of narrow bickering between two pro-business entities. Politics, if it has any place in this process at all, is merely a small, incidental side-effect.
Today we're trained to think that the highest form of political activity possible is voting for either a Democrat or a Republican. We're encouraged, then, to think that politics itself is an individualistic practice in which we go, alone, behind a curtain to decide to cave in to one or other pro-business organizations. I think it's fair to say that things haven't always been like this. At other periods in world history, there have been serious debates about big questions, about what kind of society we want to live in. It is helpful here to revisit some of the debates from the early 20th century on the Left about tactics, strategy, and elections.
At the very beginning of the 20th century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest Marxist, left-wing party in the world. The labor movement in Germany had been growing steadily in membership and in power, and it looked for a time as though the SPD was leading the charge for another, more just kind of society. The SPD's leading theoretician was Karl Kautsky, a fiercely dogmatic defender of Germany's existing parliament as a strategic means for constructing a socialist society.
An interesting debate was instigated by a polemical brochure entitled "Terrorism and Communism", penned by Kautsky, directed at discrediting the tactical and strategic trajectory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Trotsky wrote a reply in 1920 with the same title, that was later published as a book (republished recently by Verso, and introduced by Zizek).
For Kautsky, the debate between reformists in the SPD and Bolshevik revolutionaries is one of "democracy" versus "dictatorship". He casts his own reformist view as the "democratic" alternative to the allegedly violent, impetuous and "authoritarian" strategy endorsed by the Bolsheviks. The crucial question here, however, is what does Kautsky mean by "democracy"?
He means a representative parliamentary system coupled with capitalist control of industry and social life. In other words, he conflates democracy as such with a certain kind of electoral procedure situated in the context of a particular configuration of capitalism. In short, he reduces democracy itself to the parliamentary mechanism such as it was in early 20th century capitalist Germany.
Trotsky's reply (and we might add here that Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin and others shared this view) is that we cannot speak of democracy at all unless we talk about the conditions it would require to realize it. The view is simple: you can't speak of "democracy" (or freedom and equality) in the legal sphere if workers are in chains in the social and economic spheres. You can't institute true democracy by legal procedures alone if such procedures are instituted against the backdrop of massive inequalities of power. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in the foreword to the recent Verso edition of Trotsky's text:"For Trotsky the true stakes of the debate are not simply democracy versus dictatorship, but the class 'dictatorship' which is inscribed into the very form of parliamentary dictatorship.... the true question is... how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured."
In other words, our question here must be: what extra-electoral conditions would have to obtain in order for democracy to be realized?
Now, surely some will object here that if this is Trotsky's view, he'd do well to eschew the language of 'dictatorship'. This objection, however, misses the mark. What Kautsky blithely dubs "democracy", Trotsky calls a form of dictatorship. In other words, parliamentary democracy under capitalism is, for Trotsky, a form of class "dictatorship". This is analogous to Rosa Luxembourg's distinction between "bourgeois democracy" and "socialist democracy", the main difficulty with "bourgeois democracy" being that there's not enough of it. It not extended to the social and economic sphere; those spheres are under the control of the capitalists who own the commanding heights of the economy.
Let me try to spell this out a little more clearly. If Trotsky and other Marxists are correct to define capitalism as a mode of social organization in which the major productive resources and institutions are privately owned by a specific class (rather than democratically, by all), then we must conclude that parliamentary procedures are compatible with a high concentration of undemocratic economic power. Another way to put the point is to lean on Marx's distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. For Marx, the transition from feudalism to liberal capitalism represented a great step forward in that it granted a larger degree of "political" (read "legal", "electoral") equality and freedom than feudal societies allowed. But, Marx held, merely political emancipation is not enough; the bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism didn't go far enough. Democracy, he argued, had to be extended not only to political/legal institutions, but to social and economic institutions as well.
Thus, if you're committed to human (rather than merely legal) emancipation, if you're committed to radically rethinking economic and social organization, Trotsky's worry is that you cannot accomplish this within the parameters of parliamentary procedures under capitalism.
Here's the argument for why this might be the case. Holders of large concentrations of economic power can make use of this power outside of the electoral arena. Capitalists can make threats. They can lay off politically active workers that are 'trouble makers', they can close factories, they can threaten democratically-elected governments with disinvestment, layoffs, etc. They may purchase and privately control and own media institutions. Often, after hundreds of years of capitalist development, they've managed wield military institutions to serve their interests.
The point here is that economic power is not relinquished without a fight, and we have no reason to expect that fight to be waged "fairly", within parliamentary bounds, by the ruling class. Even when regulations and limits are imposed upon capitalists by governments, capitalists will relentlessly deploy their economic power to game the system and find ways to get such limits and regulations repealed. In extreme cases, when it appears that a government will make real, systemic changes... the ruling class has been known to support right-wing coups and reject parliamentary democracy entirely. An instructive case study here is socialist head of state Salvador Allende in Chile circa 1970-73.
Allende was elected by a broad coalition of center-left and left-wing parties in Chile amidst uproar from the landed elites and ruling classes in Chile. When Allende tried to reform economic institutions and put land reform into law, his efforts were stonewalled and sabotaged by economic elites who used their power to "go on strike", lay off workers, suffocate the economy and try to bring the country to its knees.
Multinational corporations in Chile such as the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) set to work quickly to fight against Allende, and they weren't interested in trying to win the battle over electoral terms (a battle, the company's owners realized, they'd have little way of winning in the face of a broad popular mandate for Allende's policies). We now know from memos circulated amongst elites in ITT and the American-owned Kennecott Copper Company that their goals were to "“to strangle the Chilean economy, sow panic, and foment social disorder in order to encourage and create the opportunity for the armed forces to step in and replace Allende". Also- their influence convinced the US and related institutions like the World Bank to impose an economic blockade on Chile to help the destabilization effort.
The point of this is that all of these efforts were effective against a democratically-elected government precisely because of the concentrations of economic power under capitalism. Admittedly, "dictatorship" somewhat overstates the case, but the case of Chile in 1973 makes the point that capitalist's stranglehold on economic power must be challenged directly in order for real democracy to be possible.
So, either you are open to the reconfiguration of social/economic organization or you are not. If you are, as socialists purport to be, then you cannot be dogmatically committed to the narrow strategy of merely trying to elect certain people within predetermined parameters (e.g. Democrat or Republican). You must be committed to a broader conception of political activism, one that embraces extra-electoral struggles (strikes (conventional, sit-down, wildcat, etc.), community organization, grass-roots protest and demonstration, sit-ins, etc.) as a means to alter the entire political center of gravity. In other words, the goal of a progressive social movement is not to merely operate within narrowly circumscribed procedures prescribed by the existing order, but to dynamically create the conditions for its own success.
We've recently lived through a massive change in electoral holdings of power. In 2004, people were talking about a "permanent Republican majority". Four years later, the GOP has lost control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, while the Democratic majority in the Senate sky-rocketed to 60. But for all this massive changing in electoral terms, the political content of the change (as we see today) is extremely thin. The continuity between the last days of the Bush government and the Obama administration is extremely discouraging. Foreign policy has essentially stayed the same. Regulation of financial markets is about as forthcoming under Obama as under Bush in 2008. The response to the crisis of giving spectacularly large amounts of welfare to Wall Street was virtually the same under Paulson as under Geithner, in fact the "Paulson Plan" was implemented lock stock and barrel under the latter's tenure. After all of these massive interventions to save the assets of powerful economic elites, Obama even had the audacity to talk of the importance of "market solutions" and the "private sector" when discussing health care. The message was clear: massive government spending for economic elites will be forthcoming and plentiful, but all we've got fo the majority of the population is the thin gruel of laissez-faire.
Aside from snagging a bit of low-hanging fruit (raising the minimum wage, redirecting some much-needed, overdue funds into education and infrastructure), the Obama administration has not deviated from the course taken by Bush. For all the talk of change, this has been a rather smooth transition from 8 years of Bush compared to what, in electoral terms, was a major alteration of course.
What further proof do we need that the end-in-view must not be "getting Democrats elected"? Whatever else is true, the Civil Rights Act was not passed by a drive merely to "get the right people elected". Neither do not have Social Security or unemployment benefits because of electoral fetishism.
Rather than being a means of change, current Federal elections in the US are a way of staving off real change. We must not forget that the large swells of community energy, activism and volunteerism that was poured into getting Obama elected reflected real needs and real discontent with the existing order. The heartbreaking reality, however, is that the election of Obama siphoned off all of this important energy and defused it.
The question we are confronted with is: now that this swell of energy and excitement has been betrayed, what can be accomplished within the parameters of electoralism? Do we have an electoral means of holding those in power accountable? However we answer, no honest response could have anything to do with getting more Democrats elected or with staving off a Republican backlash.
Monday, October 12, 2009
More on Obama's tepid centrism
From Greenwald @ Salon, here's a nice follow-up on the issue Arvilla draws our attention to and comments on. And here's another bit on Rahm, Obama and the issue of pressure and organization.
In passing, I think it's important to point out that the recent march on Washington for equality was probably the most significant progressive political event in the U.S. during Obama's reign so far. If nothing else, what the Obama phenomenon has made clear for me is that the Democratic Party is not a progressive force in this country; it is by and large an institution that will only enact significant reforms when there is organized pressure from the Left to do so.
