Apparatchiks in a Class War
by ROB URIE

In coming weeks the recently re-elected Barack Obama will propose trimming the vestiges of the New Deal—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, in the decades long effort of bi-partisan Washington to consolidate total control of Western economies in the hands of a corporate plutocracy. The technocratic rationale Mr. Obama will offer is ‘demographics,’ the fact that, class differences aside, people are living longer than we used to. And for the susceptible among us, some misdirection about ‘living beyond our means’ will be added for good measure.

However, people have been living approximately as long as we currently do for several decades now. And the canard that ‘we are living beyond our means’ dates back to the 1960s. What has changed is that the liberal Democrat needed to sell ‘shared’ sacrifice to those on the receiving end of it—labor, the working poor and the poor, has been returned to office to finish the job. Sure Mitt Romney would do the same– there is a long, bi-partisan, history here. But to be clear–this fight is over the allocation of economic resources, not ‘scarcity’ thereof.

When Democrat Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 he did so in the midst of the first ‘jobless recovery’ caused by the massive financial looting of the Savings and Loans and the de-industrialization of America begun in the early 1980s. He ran as a corporatist Democrat under the mantra ‘it’s the economy stupid’ and promised to increase social spending and raise taxes on the wealthy to fund government.

Upon his election Mr. Clinton appointed Goldman Sachs financier Robert Rubin, first to his National Economic Council to coordinate economic policy, and later as Treasury Secretary. It was banker Rubin who ‘discovered’ the national debt ‘crisis’ that required the immediate attention of the Clinton administration. Mr. Clinton promptly abandoned his promise to increase social spending and laid the groundwork for cutting it, or as he put it ‘ending welfare as we know it.’

After Mr. Clinton left office and the budget ‘crisis’ behind, tax rates for the rich and corporations were drastically cut, two phenomenally destructive, expensive and unnecessary wars were undertaken, a massive prescription drug benefit that denies the government the right to negotiate drug prices with drug producers was passed, a corrupt, dysfunctional banking system was bailed out to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars and an infrastructure of domestic surveillance and control was built to ‘prevent’ terrorist attacks that the George W. Bush administration had been fully informed were to be carried out months before they actually were. To state the obvious: the budget ‘crisis’ was not raised to prevent any of these programs from being passed and funded.

As with Bill Clinton’s appointment of Robert Rubin to key economic posts, Barack Obama made his economic agenda known when he created his ‘deficit commission’ and stacked it with know-nothing neo-liberal hack and Morgan Stanley Board member Erskine Bowles and crusty antique Republican Alan Simpson of the public welfare dependent state of Wyoming. The hostility of both men to the social insurance programs now in their purview was a matter of decades-long public records. And in fact, Mr. Bowles had led a Clinton administration effort to ‘privatize’ a portion of Social Security for Wall Street. (The stock market return in the years since that effort was undertaken = 0%).

The coalition to cut social insurance programs runs from true believers who either don’t understand or don’t care about how national accounts work (the U.S. has a fiat currency) to Wall Street insiders who want to earn fees from privatizing Social Security to trans-national plutocrats who want to shift ever more public resources into their own pockets through corporate and individual tax cuts and through ownership and management of private insurance schemes. That a representative of all of these interests—Democrat Erskine Bowles, is Mr. Obama’s ‘lead’ in developing and pushing forward the rationales for cutting social insurance ties Mr. Obama directly to these interests.

Social Security and Medicare are funded with deductions made from the paychecks of working people. (Corporate contributions to these programs are part of the total compensation paid to labor, not the ‘property’ of the corporations). These are insurance programs in significant ways like private insurance, only more efficient and designed to provide a social benefit rather than to enrich insurance executives. Social Security can meet all of its obligations for the next thirty years and most of them thereafter with no changes or cuts to the program. The ‘crisis’ with Medicare is due almost entirely to expected increases in medical costs that a ‘Medicare for all’ healthcare system that has the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices would solve. And by providing pre and post-natal care to the working poor and poor, Medicaid means the difference between first and third world infant mortality rates.

The scare tactics being used to cut social insurance depend on the public’s misunderstanding of several related issues. In the first, the U.S. isn’t ‘broke’ because it can create money as needed—ask yourself: how were the bank bailouts funded? Next: what is an ‘entitlement’ when existing government policy overwhelmingly benefits the rich through favorable tax treatment, cost-plus government contracts, Federal Reserve bailouts and government guarantees of the banks. ‘Free markets’ have nothing to do with how the wealthy became so. The fight over ‘entitlements’ is over how government expenditures are allocated, not over their ‘scarcity.’

Social Security has an income ‘cap’ of $110,000 above which no deduction is made. A billionaire who became rich by sending jobs overseas—by firing and lowering the wages of labor, pays a smaller proportion of his or her income into Social Security than does the worker whose wages have been reduced. And by reducing the wages of labor, workers are left with less to pay in to these social insurance programs through payroll taxes. The problem with Social Security and Medicare is that a small group of connected plutocrats have ‘entitled’ themselves to far more of what labor produces. How often has the deficit ‘crisis’ been raised when there is a war to be fought for multi-national oil companies or a corporate welfare scheme like the bank bailouts to be paid for?

And this all ties back to Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act– if he and his corporate supporters were truly interested in fiscal discipline they would have pushed for far less costly ‘Medicare for all.’ Instead Mr. Obama pursued a deal with private health insurers that includes a ‘profit’ above the cost of a government program. Those wanting to argue the political infeasibility of Medicare for all are now confronted with a ‘liberal’ Democratic President who believes he can cut the programs that most of us have paid into under known terms for decades. If doing this is politically feasible while building a rational public health care system isn’t, we are truly doomed.

Ultimately Mr. Obama, like his ‘opponent’ Mitt Romney, is but an apparatchik in a class war launched by the rich against the rest of us. Left out of the contrived nonsense about an ‘entitlement’ society is who exactly is entitled. Were the government spending the rich live off of under the knife there would be no argument of scarcity—we have the wars, the bailouts and corporate welfare to prove it. But social insurance programs stand between over one hundred million of our citizens and destitution. And these are programs we have collectively paid for—they aren’t a ‘gift’ as the rich and their servants in government would have us believe.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

by The INSIDER, Counterpunch

Van Jones: Though dissed by Obama in one of his habitual betrayals, Van Jones has stuck to his guns on account of indomitable ambition. He’s likely to become a professional apparatchik in the Democratic party, following in the steps of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. He appears to be interested in creating an external platform like Operation Push to apply pressure on the party bigwigs.

President Barack Obama was elected merely a week ago in a presidential campaign that ran a bill of $6 billion.

“Campaign Season,” as its called by the electioneering professionals and most journalists, has officially come to an end in the eyes of most citizens and the press, both mainstream and “independent media” alike. For the “Professional Left” though, “campaign season” never actually ends, which explains why they refer to their form of activism as “campaigns.” It’s truth in advertising, at last!

The newest “campaign” in town is being run by….wait for it….a MoveOn.org offshoot in the form of “Movement Strategy Brunches” being held nationwide on Nov. 17-18.

“Drink Mimosas”

On Nov. 8, writing to a confidential email list, Liz Butler, a “Senior Fellow and Network Organizing Project Director” of the Movement Strategy Center, declared,

“We are asking you to set up a Movement Strategy Brunch – an informal, low-key way to bring together you and other local grassroots people at the local level to reflect, drink mimosas (or healthy green smoothies) and talk about the future. Sound fun? It’s supposed to be! After so much hard work, it’s nice to be able to kick back, drink some orange juice, and munch on a flaky croissant.”

The Movement Strategy Center is the Fiscal Sponsor for Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream, according to Rebuild the Dream‘s website. Jones’ front group for the Democratic Party set up shop in June 2011 when MoveOn.org gave $348K to Rebuild the Dream in start-up capital, according to its most recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 form.

Rebuild, as regular CounterPunch readers will likely recall, was responsible for the attempt to co-opt the Occupy movement not once, but twice – once in the fall of 2011 and once again in the spring of 2012.

Butler oversaw the “99 Spring,” the front operation for both MoveOn.org and the Democratic Party. Prior to her current stint at the Movement Strategy Center in April 2012, Butler worked for 3.5 years as the Campaign Director for 1Sky, which in April 2011 merged with 350.org, currently in the throes of its “Do the Math” campaign.

The email was co-signed by Billy Wimsatt, a Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center, as well as an employee of Rebuild the Dream, two outfits that are interchangeable and one-in-the-same. A WhoIs.net search shows Wimsatt registered the website for the “Movement Strategy Brunches” on Oct. 16, a few weeks ahead of the Nov. 6 election.

“Consensual Domination”

Like its cousin the 99 Spring, the ”Movement Strategy Brunches” give well-meaning grassroots activists the illusion of having full control of things at the local level. “YOU organize it,” shouts its website.

Yet again, it’s the same players managing a brand new version of what University of California-Santa Barbara Sociology Professor William I. Robison refers to as “consensual domination” in his classic book, “Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony.”

“The Gramscian concept of hegemony as ‘consensual domination’ exercised in civil and political society at the level of the individual nation (or national society) may be extended/applied to the emergent global civil and political society,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “The emergence of ‘democracy promotion’ as a new instrument and the orientation in US foreign policy in the 1980s represented the beginnings of a shift – still underway – in the method through which the core regions of the capitalist world system exercise their domination over peripheral and semi-peripheral regions…”

The tools of imperialism have come home to the core of the empire, as they always do. This time, like the many times before, it’s in the form of “consensual domination” on the part of citizens who partake in “activism” that’s nothing more than freshly installed astroturf for the Democratic Party disguised as “democracy promotion.”

“These pseudo-revolutionaires no doubt believe their own propaganda, or their ‘memes,’ as they prefer to call them. But these liberal cultists are nothing more than convenient lap dogs for the ‘progressive’ millionaires who fund them and the Democrats,” said John Stauber, author of the book Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. ”They are well fed, they groom each other, they regurgitate the same talking points, and they consistently accomplish nothing in the real world except to push a false hope that they are leading a real Movement. In other words, it’s a classic form of cooptation, which is both made possible by the severe limitations of the political process and of course serves to limit it further. It is essential to maintaining a status quo that benefits the 1%. Follow the money, this is one big progressive cluster-fuck.”

___________
The Insider is the pseudonym of an activist who works inside the Liberal Foundation-Funded Democratic Party-Allied Belly of the Beast.

By Stephen Lendman

Greece exhibits failed and rogue state characteristics. It governs irresponsibly. It’s beholden more to foreign interests than its own. Banker needs are prioritized. Ruling authority outside Greece dictates terms. The country’s unable or refuses to provide public services. It threatens the welfare of its people. It spurns legitimate rule. It’s bankrupt but won’t declare it.

Governance in Greece combines travesty, tragedy and shame. Democracy’s birth place spurns it. It also displays an unprincipled disregard for human need at a time of rampant corruption and prioritized military spending.

In 2011, seven billion euros went for arms. Greece is the tenth largest weapons importer. It’s one of 28 NATO countries. Collective defense requires member states to purchase arms and buy them from alliance partners. As a percent of GDP, Greek defense spending is nearly double that of other EU nations. Germany is one of Athens’ main creditors. It’s also one of its largest arms suppliers. They account for 15% of Berlin’s weapons exports.

No justification exists. Greece has no enemies. It’s also broke. It can’t or won’t provide public services. It borrows hugely to repay and service debt, and rampant corruption is out-of-control.

Transparency International (TI) says “Greek people live in a state of ‘corrupt legality,’ meaning that the law often condones or even fosters corrupt practices. Corruption is endemic: not limited to any party or social class, nor to the public sector.”

“The public sector suffers from substantial gaps in both law and practice, thus allowing corruption to thrive. Public officials have been allowed to act for decades without any transparency or effective oversight.”

“As a result, lack of integrity, tendency to demand and accept bribes, and unfaithfulness to public service have proliferated. Wrongdoing has eroded the rule of law and facilitated a culture of impunity.”

Privileged elites hide wealth in favored tax havens. Doing so explains part of the problem.  Unaccountability lets them get away with what no one should tolerate. It’s especially outrageous at a time of economic crisis and appalling human deprivation. Force-feeding more pain exacerbates deplorable conditions.

Last May, dominant parties polled poorly. Voters rejected austerity. Many voted with their feet and opted out. Ordinary Greeks are beset by crushing wage, benefit, and other social cuts. Impoverishment, homelessness, and unemployment result. Public anger expresses itself in street protests, strikes, and opportunities sought elsewhere. Some of Greece’s best and brightest are leaving. Why stay without job prospects or futures. Other professionals abroad aren’t returning.

Dire economic conditions created a lost generation. Brain drain exodus affects the country’s future. Greece is inhospitable to human welfare. Who can survive without jobs, income or futures?  Rage against rogue governance grows. On November 6, The New York Times headlined “Normal Life on Pause, and a Sense of Simmering Rage,” saying:

Proprietors go out of business for lack of enough customers and revenue to cover expenses. Deepening Depression conditions exist. Greece’s economy is on a downward spiral to oblivion. “The vitriol toward politicians is in many ways more intense than the outrage expressed toward the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.”

“Politicians here rarely venture out in public, and when they do, even the most obscure member of Parliament is accompanied by at least one bodyguard.”

On November 7, more austerity measures were enacted. Included are some of the most draconian so far. Street rage became violent. Prior to the vote, 100,000 angry Greeks marched on parliament in Syntagma Square.  Why they haven’t stormed it so far they’ll have to explain. Don’t be surprised if they go ahead in a country best described as a tinderbox ready to explode.

People only take so much. Once pain levels exceed a threshold of no return, all bets are off. Politicians are playing with fire. Revolutionary anger is visceral. One spark too many may ignite it. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse crowds. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails at security forces. A bus stop and kiosk were set ablaze. Athens resembles a war zone.

Dozens of arrests followed. Hundreds or thousands more won’t quell rage. Greeks are justifiably mad and show it. It’s just a matter of time perhaps before the whole country explodes. Strikes brought Greece to a halt. Hospitals operate with skeleton crews. Commerce shut down. Journalists walked out. They joined strikers. Broadcasts and publications were suspended.

Troika authority demanded and got another $17.2 billion in budget cuts. At issue is qualifying for $39.6 billion in bailout funds. Greece barely gets enough to pay bureaucrats. Debt service and bailing out bankers get top priority. The term bailout is a misnomer. Grand theft and extortion more accurately explain policy. Ordinary Greeks are victimized. So is Greece’s economy.

It’s a shell of its former self. It’s a zombie waiting for its obituary to be written. Bankers responsible for crisis conditions are rewarded. Irresponsible governance steals from ordinary people to pay rich ones and corporate crooks. Prime Minister Antonis Samaris heads Greece’s rogue government. On Wednesday, he said Athens took “a big, decisive and optimistic step. A step toward recovery. I am very pleased.”

The more Greece borrows, the greater its debt, the harder it is to service and repay, the more future aid that’s needed, and faster the country heads toward total collapse. Catastrophic conditions are pushing people toward deplorable living conditions and starvation. Prioritizing debt service and repayment by greater borrowing guarantees an eventual bad ending.

Impossible to bear pain may become uncontainable rage. More than buildings may burn. Politicians may be targeted. They could be tarred, feathered or shot. University of the Aegean lecturer Panagiotis Sotiris told Russia Today: “Every austerity package in the last two and a half years was supposed to be the last one. So it won’t be the last one this time. We are going to see more of this.”

With minimal discussion, parliament “pass(ed) a huge law. We are very far from democratic procedure. This is a set of measures, which are actually dictated by the Troika.”

Ordinary Greeks have no say. Parliament surrendered to diktat authority. A banner one protestor held expressed mass sentiment, saying: “TRAITOR SAMARAS GET OUT”

In August, Greek unemployment hit a record high. Officially at 25.4%, one in four workers have no jobs. Monthly for the last three years, figures rose. True unemployment may be much higher. Moreover, most jobs pay subsistence wages and poor or no benefits. Young people are hardest hit. In the 15 – 24 age category, 58% are jobless. It’s likely closer to two-thirds. In the last three years, wages have been cut up to 60%. Around 70,000 small business ceased operating.

The latest austerity round targets another 150,000 jobs, further wage cuts up to 30%, pensions cut up to 15%, and fewer healthcare benefits. Bureaucrats across the board are affected. Minimum wages, holiday benefits, and severance pay will be reduced.

Education will also be hit hard. Universities will be shut. Mass staff reductions will follow. Retirement will be raised from 65 to 67. Job protections are weakened. Layoffs are now easier. Redundancy notice was decreased from six to four months. The done deal isn’t quite complete. On November 11, parliamentarians have to meet Troika officials. Their revised budget must be approved.

Greece also wants more. It seeks a further “emergency growth package.” It’s worth another 10 billion euros. It’s nowhere near enough for what Athens needs. Expect more bailout deals to follow. On November 5, Greek journalist walked out for the second time in a week. They’re protesting plans to merge their social security fund with a national system.

Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras initially couldn’t get a  parliamentary agreement to merge the social security funds of journalists, civil engineers, lawyers, and others into the National Organization for Healthcare Provisions (EOPYY). On November 7, the measure passed.

Greece stands at the abyss of collapse. It’s mired in deepening Depression. Since 2007, it’s economy shrunk nearly 22%. It continues heading south. Ordinary Greeks bear the greatest burden. Multiple rounds of wage cuts, layoffs and lost benefits created unforgivable hardships. Bad as things are now, more force-fed austerity is planned. Expect no end of it ahead. Greece is banker occupied. It’s debt entrapped. Class war rages. Living standards plummeted precipitously. Troika authorities demand state-run enterprises, public land, tourist sites, ports, water, and other Greek crown jewels stripped of all worth and sold at fire sale prices.

Brussels calls it a rescue. Ordinary Greeks know it’s impoverishment and unemployment. It’s financial warfare. It’s more destructive than pillaging armies. It grabs everything in sight and wants more. Corrupt politicians steal what they can and agree. Ordinary people bear unconscionable pain. Earlier hard times produced Nazism.

World War II followed. Failure to learn from history risks repeating it. At issue is doing it disastrously. No one seems to notice or care. It may be too late to matter once reality hits home. It may come sooner than most imagine.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.  http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour   

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For sheer unadulterated vileness few rightwing scoundrels can match Florida’s Rep. Allen West (in military garb), now removed at last from the halls of Congress. Scum like this gets routinely elected in America, as those willing to fight for the plutocracy can always count on a rewarding career.—Eds

The greatest and most enduring significance of Tuesday night’s election results will likely not be the re-election of Barack Obama, but rather what the outcome reflects about the American electorate. It was not merely Democrats, but liberalism, which was triumphant..

To begin with, it is hard to overstate just how crippled America’s right-wing is. Although it was masked by their aberrational win in 2010, the GOP has now been not merely defeated, but crushed, in three out of the last four elections: in 2006 (when they lost control of the House and Senate), 2008 (when Obama won easily and Democrats expanded their margins of control), and now 2012. The horrendous political legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney continues to sink the GOP, and demographic realities – how toxic the American Right is [3] to the very groups that are now becoming America’s majority – makes it difficult to envision how this will change any time soon.

Meanwhile, new laws to legalize both same-sex marriage and marijuana use were enacted in multiple states with little controversy, an unthinkable result even a few years ago, while Obama’s late-term embrace of same-sex marriage seems to have resulted only in political benefit with no political harm. Democrats were sent to the Senate by deeply red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, along with genuinely progressive candidates on domestic issues, including Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, who became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate. As a cherry on the liberal cake, two of the most loathed right-wing House members – Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois and Allen West of Florida – were removed from office.

So the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly “no”.

Consider the very first controversial issue Obama is likely to manage, even before the glow of his victory dims, literally within the next couple of weeks. It is widely expected – including by liberals [4] – that Obama intends (again) to pursue a so-called “Grand Bargain” with the GOP: a deficit- and debt-cutting agreement whereby the GOP agrees to some very modest tax increases on the rich in exchange for substantial cuts to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, the crown legislative jewels of American liberalism.

Indeed, Obama already sought [5] in his first term [6] to implement sizable cuts [7]to those programs, but liberals were saved only by GOP recalcitrance to compromise on taxes. In light of their drubbing last night, they are likely to be marginally if not substantially more flexible, which means that such a deal is more possible than ever.

In other words, the political leader in whose triumph liberals are today ecstatically basking is likely to target their most cherished government policies within a matter of weeks, even days. With their newly minted power, will they have any ability, or even will, to stop him? If history is any indication, this is how this “fight” will proceed:

STEP ONE: Liberals will declare that cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits – including raising the eligibility age or introducing “means-testing” – are absolutely unacceptable, that they will never support any bill that does so no matter what other provisions it contains, that they will wage war on Democrats if they try.

STEP TWO: As the deal gets negotiated and takes shape, progressive pundits in Washington, with Obama officials persuasively whispering in their ear, will begin to argue that the proposed cuts are really not that bad, that they are modest and acceptable, that they are even necessary to save the programs from greater cuts or even dismantlement.

STEP THREE: Many progressives – ones who are not persuaded that these cuts are less than draconian or defensible on the merits – will nonetheless begin to view them with resignation and acquiescence on pragmatic grounds. Obama has no real choice, they will insist, because he must reach a deal with the crazy, evil GOP to save the economy from crippling harm, and the only way he can do so is by agreeing to entitlement cuts. It is a pragmatic necessity, they will insist, and anyone who refuses to support it is being a purist, unreasonably blind to political realities, recklessly willing to blow up Obama’s second term before it even begins.

STEP FOUR: The few liberal holdouts, who continue to vehemently oppose any bill that cuts Social Security and Medicare, will be isolated and marginalized, excluded from the key meetings where these matters are being negotiated, confined to a few MSNBC appearances where they explain their inconsequential opposition.

STEP FIVE: Once a deal is announced, and everyone from Obama to Harry Reid and the DNC are behind it, any progressives still vocally angry about it and insisting on its defeat will be castigated as ideologues and purists, compared to the Tea Party for their refusal to compromise, and scorned (by compliant progressives) as fringe Far Left malcontents.

STEP SIX: Once the deal is enacted with bipartisan support and Obama signs it in a ceremony, standing in front of his new Treasury Secretary, the supreme corporatist Erskine Bowles, where he touts the virtues of bipartisanship and making “tough choices”, any progressives still complaining will be told that it is time to move on. Any who do not will be constantly reminded that there is an Extremely Important Election coming – the 2014 midterm – where it will be Absolutely Vital that Democrats hold onto the Senate and that they take over the House. Any progressive, still infuriated by cuts to Social Security and Medicare, who still refuses to get meekly in line behind the Party will be told that they are jeopardizing the Party’s chances for winning that Vital Election and – as a result of their opposition – are helping Mitch McConnell take over control of the Senate and John Boehner retain control of the House.

And so it goes. That is the standard pattern of self-disempowerment used by American liberals to render themselves impotent and powerless in Washington, not just on economic issues but the full panoply of political disputes, from ongoing militarism, military spending and war policies to civil liberties assaults, new cabinet appointments, immigration policy, and virtually everything else likely to arise in the second term.

Indeed, nobody takes STEP ONE in that depressing ritual even a little bit seriously. Nobody believes the declarations of progressives about what is “unacceptable”, about what their “red lines” are, about how they will refuse to go along with what they are given if it contains what they declare intolerable. That’s because STEPS TWO THROUGH SIX always follow, and until that pattern is broken, STEP ONE will continue to be viewed as a trivial joke.

With last night’s results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/glenn-greenwald-right-crippled-now-lets-make-sure-dems-dont-sell-out-social-security-and-medicare

Links:
[1] http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/glenn-greenwald
[3] http://t.co/bdCPrcN8
[4] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83197.html
[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-debt-talks-obama-offers-social-security-cuts/2011/07/06/gIQA2sFO1H_story.html
[6] http://americablog.com/2012/03/obama-wanted-cuts-to-social-security-and-medicare-during-failed-grand-bargain-talks.html
[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/obama-medicare-eligibility-age_n_894833.html
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/washington-0
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/liberals
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/conservatives-0
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/social-security
[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

How Obama Made an Easy Race Too Close

Obama in 2008, acting very proper during the campaign. Many people had begun to believe in his promise.

Nader forgets, however, that if the Republicans can today make a credible bid for the presidency it is in the first place because Obama and his team literally resuscitated them in 2008, instead of dealing this vulture party a lethal blow when it lay sprawling on the canvas—as the majority of the nation demanded. —Eds

by RALPH NADER
One day before Election Day 2012 and the incredible has come true. Obama is neck and neck with Romney when, even with his disappointing record, Obama should be landsliding Romney and his Party of Big Business.

For all his billions plus campaign dollars, President Obama has missed out on repeatedly emphasizing the most obvious flaws of the Romney/Ryan campaign for a complete takedown.

If a year ago, people with a casual interest in politics were told that Obama’s opponent was a man who has secret bank accounts abroad, withholds his tax returns, maneuvers his various incomes in tax escape islands abroad, runs a takeover business that destroys or exports jobs, declares contempt for 47 percent of Americans receiving public benefits, adopts the Ryan Budget that shreds  America’s public services, corporatizes Medicare, bloats the military budget, and further entrenches the domination of the one percent over American workers at a time of overall declining livelihoods and growing poverty, wouldn’t they conclude that the President was a shoo-in for re-election?

The Democrats failed to follow a cardinal rule of politics. Never let the public forget your opponent’s most serious liabilities. Sure, Obama’s televised ads battered Romney during the summer. Sure, when Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, the Democrats portrayed the Ryan budget as cruel, dishonest and economically destructive (e.g. in the name of spending austerity, the Ryan budget still contains deficits past the 2040s, by his own admission).

But in the final eight weeks of the campaign you repeat these grim and dim positions over and over again. If you don’t, Romney’s ads and the dittoheads running Obama’s campaign involuntarily converge to produce voter amnesia.

Have you seen the Democrats hammering in the secret tax returns and bank accounts lately? Have you seen the grisly details grinding down people’s economic, health and safety well-being and sense of security contained in the unchained Ryan budget? They have virtually disappeared from the horse-race obsessed mainstream media – print and electronic – and pointedly from Obama and unions advertisements. Until the final hour, repetition of your political opponent’s worst failings before the undecided voters, that a winner-take-all election makes so pivotal, is the recipe for victory. It also changes some decided minds and induces some Romney-leaning voters to stay home. Better yet, it throws the Republicans on the defensive all the way down to local elections.

But then what can you expect from a visionless political party that has more money than strategic brains. Obama’s advisers tell him to run by himself and not with his Democratic members of Congress, who he needs to retake the House and keep the Senate in order to and get anything done in his second term. Worse, as Matt Bai wrote Sunday in The New York Times, Obama has had no narrative for America’s future.

The Democratic National Committee went along with letting their chief nemesis in Congress- Speaker John Boehner – run unopposed by a Democratic candidate in his Ohio District. Unopposed! A free ride! Newt Gingrich never did that when, as a junior Congressman from Georgia, he led the movement to dump Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright and shortly thereafter defeat the sitting Speaker Tom Foley in Foley’s own Washington state Congressional district.

But then who ever thought the Democrats had the energy, persistence and brashness to take on their opposing political giants and topple them?

Kevin Phillips was so right when he said years ago that the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the former go for the jugular while the latter go for the capillaries.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

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