Month: November 2010

Tomorrow’s election is sad, particularly for those with their ears blasted by the two corporate parties advertising for the votes of the dwindling few who don’t get the joke, which is on everyone outside the top income brackets. Nonetheless, I will vote in the local and state elections, usually for Democrats, but half-knowing Governor Pat Quinn (here in Illinois) will do what the rich and big corporations want: instead of raising their taxes, (with bipartisan support) he’ll hellaciously cut back on stuff like public schools (hey, elite kids don’t go to there, so who give a damn?).

But on the national level, HELL no. How much Congresspeople from each party raised this 2010 election season from the “Finance/Insurance/Real Estate” sector: Democrats: $72.1 million; Republicans: $74.7 million.

Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of ordinary people. He shows how, in some respects, politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century returns us to a world familiar well before the start of the twentieth, when politics was a game played among elites.

Sad too to contemplate what some call the political event of the season, a Rand Paul security guy stepping (was it stomping; check the video) on a MoveOn operative’s shoulder (was it her head; check the video). That MoveOn so willfully and (yeah) knowingly misses what’s really going on in this country, and then hires college grads like Lauren Valle to spread the lame lie that DemoCorp (despite Clinton and now Obama) will save us from scary RepubliCorp. . . .

MoveOn.org activist Lauren Valle and Rand Paul supporter Tim Profitt were launched into the national spotlight following what may end up being the most infamous incident of the 2010 campaign season.

Valle was attempting to present Kentucky Senate candidate and tea party favorite Paul with a fake “Employee of the Month” award as part of MoveOn.org’s RepubliCorp initiative when she was wrestled down and briefly stomped on by Profitt. …

Oh well, you too can be a paid agent provacateur, if you know the rules (don’t tell anyone both parties are Corp and the election and Congress are a bipartisan sham):

RepubliCorp Bird-dogging Guide
…
RepubliCorp Stunts

They [sic] key to media attention is a little political theater. Here are a few idea for your bird-dogging event:

* Present your target with a RepubliCorp “Employee of the Month” award.

Under post-democracy, even the guerilla politics is corporate/Soros sponsored.

The Opportunity Agenda has created a series of tools for advocates and policymakers to use as they advocate for equal opportunity in the economic recovery process.

Our most recent tool is a new report, Economic Recovery and Equal Opportunity in the Public Discourse: An Analysis of Media Content and Public Opinion (PDF). This report analyzes mainstream media coverage and a large body of public opinion research regarding America’s economic recovery and the ways in which it is affecting different communities and groups within our society.

It is intended to identify trends in reporting and beliefs, with the aim of contributing to a more robust, more accurate, and more sophisticated public discourse on this subject.

The report consists of two parts: an analysis of media content, in the mainstream press and, to a lesser extent, broadcast news; and a meta-analysis of existing public opinion research on the economy, recovery, equality, disparities, and the role of government.

For the full report (PDF), please visit here.

We also have a recent memo offering communications ideas and messaging guidance helping to promote an equitable economic recovery that includes all Americans. Read Preserving the American Dream for All: Talking About Solutions for an Equitable Economic Recovery.

Well, I was kind of hoping that we’d see some closing of the gap in the polls as election day drew near and people started paying closer attention to the candidates. It hasn’t happened. In most cases, things have gotten significantly worse. I don’t really have anything smart to say about that. Sometimes the polls are off by a few percentage points, but unless the Democrats’ turnout operation has a miracle up its sleeve, we’re going to be sobbing in our beer tomorrow night. I’ll believe it’s really this bad when I see it. Until then, I’m not going to try to assess why it’s so bad. Maybe it isn’t.

There is no Republican Party anymore. There is only the Tea People Party (Call it the TP party if you like). Oh there may be a few holdouts in Maine who call themselves Republicans out of pure snobbery I suppose, but for all intents and purposes this year the Republican Party died. Because any so-called Republican who doesn’t toe the tea party line is going to be tarred, feathered and run out of that city that acts like a small parochial town: Washington, DC.

… Tea Party supporters are planning to keep up the political pressure long beyond Tuesday, regardless of the outcome of key races in North Texas and nationwide. [..]

“A line has been crossed between all levels of government and the American people,” said Angela Cox, president of the Johnson County Tea Party. “We are not shy when it comes to raising our voices when need be and also praising those and their actions that actually do the ‘will’ of the American people.

“We will be keeping a watchful eye on all in Congress and state legislatures and maintaining open communications with those that are smart enough to listen,” she said. “Those who neglect the voice and opinion of the American people will be repaid with very short terms in office, and their political careers will quickly come to an end.”

And the TP line, though it may be financed and partially managed by lobbyists for every major industry hoping to benefit from the deconstruction of the Obama administration, is subject to the whims of whatever snake oil poison the Glenn Becks of our nation are willing to pour down the gullet of the vox populi. It isn’t a message based on reason. It isn’t a message based on policies that will help individuals who are losing their jobs and homes. It is based solely on keeping primarily older, white Americans angry and fearful.

We have had movements somewhat like this before. The closest ones were the Know Nothings of the 1850’s and the political influence of the Klu Klux Klan in much of the nation during the first two decades of the 20th Century.

But we have never had a movement backed to such a degree by the “economic royalists” as FDR called them. Nor have we ever had a political movement that has the 24/7 media platform that FOX News and conservative “hate” talk radio provides to pundits and politicians and political figures who claim to be its putative leaders.

Emotion always fuels elections. Obama won the Presidency in large part of the swell of positive emotion for “Hope and Change” that his campaign in 2008 created. Yet even back then, in the rallies held by Sarah Palin we saw the dark side of our political present: Fear leading to anger leading to hate.

And as soon as Obama won, those individuals and corporations who were threatened by any change to the status quo began to promote and amplify that fear and that anger. They created this “grass roots” movement with their money and their friends in the media.

We saw its first fruits in the town halls where thuggish individuals shouted down any Congressional Representative who supported health care reform. We saw it in the constant drumbeat of lies and disinformation and outright propaganda that foamed from the mouth of Beck and his ilk at Fox and elsewhere. We saw in the the cynicism of Republican opportunists in the Senate who attempted to obstruct everything the Obama administration proposed in order to fuel that anger and rage.

To be fair, the administration must accept its fair share of blame for failing to recognize soon enough that this was not your father’s political mudslinging and calculation by the opposition, but a war to the death, a war to destroy our Republic as we know it. For that is the ultimate goal of those who hold the financial reins of the TP party.

These people and corporate powers are seeking to channel the unfettered rage of the TP party’s adherents in order to fatally weaken the power of government at all levels, but especially at the Federal level. And to do that they have used coded and some not so coded appeals to racism, homophobia, nativism and greed. They have promoted the worst, most malicious conspiracy theories regarding the President, national Democratic leaders and their supporters.

They have incited violence through the use of violent rhetoric that has lowered our political discourse to the lowest common denominator. And they have allied themselves with some of the most absurd, ignorant, rancid and dangerous figures to take center stage in our nation’s long political history: Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, etc.

They have adopted these fringe candidates and their incoherent message of outrage and lies and fed them unprecedented amounts of money in order to recapture Congress from the Democrats, a weak and centrist national party whose political principles are not much different today than those held by President Eisenhower.

Their ultimate goal is to remove Obama from the Oval office in 2012 if not before and leave our nation a democracy in name only. We got a taste of what that type of government was like during the Bush years, but if they succeed, the policies they implement and the corruption that would accompany their triumphal return to power would be the Bush years on steroids.

And the tragedy would be that all these angry people who fell for the con would be harmed even more by the cruel and ugly social, economic and foreign affairs agenda of these “white collar” criminals. Except this time, rest assured, the TP party backers will rig the game better.

They’ll make certain that this time they won’t take the fall for any of the inevitable disasters that will arise from their “privatization,” corruption and incompetent non-governance. Instead, with their unlimited funds they’ll continue to stoke the anger of the TPers by scapegoating minorities, immigrants, non-Christians (including Christians who aren’t “real” Christians), scientists and, most of all you and me.

This year’s elections may already be lost if you believe the pollsters. But the real danger is not the election results, but what these people will do to take down our republic in the next 2 years. Democrats and their supporters waited too long to understand the nature of the beast that confronted them (though many on the liberal and progressive blogs tried our damnedest to warn them of the error of their ways).

Tomorrow likely will be a very bad day. The only question that remains is whether Obama and the Democrats will take the correct lesson from their defeat, and learn to fight back effectively over the next two long years against these demons of hate by actively promoting a progressive agenda as an alternative to the negativity and anger on the right. Based on their past record, I am not very sanguine that they will.

NRSC Chairman John Cornyn says that the Republicans will not be able to take over the Senate tomorrow, and that is hopefully true. But it doesn’t mean what you might think. Unlike every other democratic body known to man, the U.S. Senate doesn’t operate by majority rule. On every issue not directly related to passing the budget, it requires 60% of the sitting members to agree, or consent, for the Senate to move to a new piece of business. That is why dozens of Obama’s nominees have not received a confirmation vote. That is why we couldn’t pass the health care bill that the president campaigned on. That is why the Wall Street reforms were weaker than they should have been. That is why the stimulus bill was smaller than it needed to be to fix the economy and significantly bring down the unemployment rate. That is why we couldn’t get a vote on climate legislation or immigration reform. That is why we couldn’t pass a Defense Appropriations bill that contained the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On a whole host of issues that have been upsetting to both progressives and the electorate at large, the Republicans thwarted the majority in the Senate and demonstrated that they had effective veto power over the president’s agenda. And this was in spite of the fact that for most of the last two years the Democrats had 58%-59% of the votes in the Senate. If it had not been for a brief period between late September and mid-January when the Democrats actually had the 60 votes required to move from one issue to the next without the consent of the Republicans, there would have been no health care reform at all.

It’s still important to have the majority because the majority gets to chair the committees that mark up legislation, and the majority gets to set the agenda. But having the majority doesn’t mean that you can actually do anything if you don’t have 60 seats. The Democrats currently have fifty-nine. Most experts predict that come next January the Democrats will have between 52 and 55 seats. There hasn’t been a contentious bill that passed through the Senate over the past two years that had more than three Republican votes. What this means is that we should not expect anything to pass that isn’t basically crafted by the Republicans. We should not expect anyone to be confirmed unless they are pre-approved by the Republicans.

So, when John Cornyn says that the GOP will not be able to win a majority of seats in the Senate, he is probably right. But it doesn’t mean that they won’t have won control of the Senate. They had near-control of the Senate for most of the past two years. They will now have near-total control of the Senate.

And that means that regardless of what happens in the House, our country is going into a prolonged holding pattern. We will fight each other, but solutions to our problems will have to wait.

Oh good, thanks to Politico, we can move on past the midterms and start discussing the next presidential elections:

The establishment-vs.-activists narrative is hardly novel in presidential primaries. What’s different this time is that the anti-establishment candidate — Palin — would enter with unmatched celebrity and media advantages, at a time when the establishment is weaker than it’s been in many years.

There are a bunch of Republicans who thought Sarah Palin and the whole Tea Party thing was kind of cute but want no part of them once Tuesday’s elections are over. They’re falling over each other to give anonymous quotes to Politico reporters. Unfortunately for them, they now realize that they’ll have difficulty in beating her in the Republicans primaries and caucuses.

Me? I don’t think she has the work ethic to run a long campaign. But that’s really the only reason I think she can’t win the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary. If she did somehow win one or both of those, she’d probably roll to the nomination. The Republican base is totally insane.

We’re about to enter into the most poisonous political climate that this country has endured since the fight for full equality for blacks in the 1960’s. The electorate is going to absolutely HATE what they get out of the next Congress, and they’ll be none too pleased with the Establishment.

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin.

They’re going off the rails on a crazy train. It may ride them through to ownership of the House, but it ain’t coming smoothly into the station in November 2012. Our challenge for the next two years is going to be almost entirely about making sure that Sarah Palin and the influx of new Republican scoundrels get their fair share of the blame for the absolute mess in Washington.