Washington is in gridlock and no matter how I analyze things, I cannot see how that can possibly change even after the next election. The best possible foreseeable outcome of next year’s elections will be that the president is reelected, the Democrats retake the House of Representatives, and maybe pick up two or three seats in the Senate. If that happens, the Democrats will still be four or five seats short of the sixty senators needed to do anything. We’ll be back to the early part of 2009, before we briefly had 60 senators. We won’t be able to do anything substantial about climate change and nothing will be done that isn’t approved by Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Dick Lugar, and whomever else is willing to make a deal. The left will continue to wonder why the president can’t do anything to the left of Joe Manchin and Mark Pryor.
So, yes, the system is broken and isn’t even capable of being fixed through the normal political process. Maybe that helps explain why there’s a nascent movement on the left that is anti-Wall Street but has no concrete demands.
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What’s different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
Yet, for the left to organize into something that can break the deadlock in Washington, they have to have some kind of political impact. And it’s very hard to have an impact that doesn’t primarily empower the right. Disruption tends to lead to calls for law and order. The truth is that the progressive left has almost no power in this country, and almost no progressives who actually hold office have much interest in carrying the ball for radicals to their left.
The last time we had an economy like this, we also had a strong, global communist movement and a growing fascist threat. Those two movements created a lot of room for Roosevelt to maneuver in the middle. Roosevelt also had supermajorities in Congress that allowed him a lot more freedom to experiment. We can’t replicate those conditions in today’s climate. But if I can make any constructive advice to those who are marching in anti-Wall Street protests around the country, it is to make these people less interested in selecting our next president for us and more concerned about unruly mobs who want to know when they’re getting their future back.
Also, this guy needs an attitude adjustment.
For those of you who can’t watch videos, it’s a BBC interview with a trader who is predicting the collapse of the EuroZone and is excited to make money off it even as he predicts we are all going to lose our life’s savings.
He could be right. Maybe you should follow his advice. But it’s hard to overcome the impulse to drag him through the streets, isn’t it?
The best possible foreseeable outcome of next year’s elections will be that the president is reelected, the Democrats retake the House of Representatives, and maybe pick up two or three seats in the Senate. If that happens, the Democrats will still be four of five seats short of the sixty senators needed to do anything.
Yes, that is the best possible scenario. And in that scenario the Democrats would have the option at the start of the session in January 2013 to modify the Senate rules to reduce or eliminate the filibuster and to eliminate the ability for a single Senator to stop progress on any bill. (This latter “feature” always bugged me – why hasn’t this been used more frequently? Why does it always seem to be allowed to happen only in the interests of gigacorps. I suspect there is something more to it than what is made public.)
In fact, if the Democrats DON’T choose to do this they deserve to all be primaried in 2014. Because if they don’t, that would be firm evidence that they actually don’t support the platform they claim to represent.
GreenCaboose, I’m pronouncing you a genius bc I was just thinking pretty much exactly the same thing. If nothing else it’s inexcusable for the Senate not to have altered the rules to get the President’s judicial appointments through. Surely we’re in Guinness Record territory here, there can’t have been another President in history to have spent a full 4-year term with so many judicial appointments blocked.
But the fact is, we knew in 2008 that the Senate rules needed alteration. Tom Coburn had been routinely abusing the secret hold powers (hence the name “Dr No) even during the GWB reign. It amazes me how surprised everyone has acted at Reepub intransigence since then. It’s what they do. It’s what they’ve been doing. It appears to be working for them now, albeit with some political cost attached, luckily not fatal.
The problem is that the filibuster is what makes the Senate different and non-redundant (as most senators see it, anyway).
Even Russ Feingold opposed changing the rule.
So, you’re right. But it ain’t happening.
What would Republicans do, given the situation were reversed?
Well, granted they could probably get 5 or so Democratic Senators to cave on everything, so maybe they wouldn’t get rid of the filibuster if they had a 55+ majority. But let’s suppose that the Democrats were as unified as the GOP is now – you can be sure the GOP would change the filibuster.
The idea that they believe in the filibuster as an institution is just another excuse. If they believe in their platform and their supporters then they have to find some way to make it happen.
And, by the way, if the Democrats had the take-no-prisoners approach of the GOP you can be sure that not only would the filibuster have been reduced in January, 2009, but also that DC would have been admitted as a state with 2 more guaranteed Democratic senators (leaving the area around the Capital and White House as the new District of Columbia). There are all kinds of tactics and options, if you have the right mindset.
That is unlikely as long as Democrats remain a big tent party.
How unified is the GOP?
Drag him through the streets?
What do you mean? The man is a hero for telling it like it is. He is sitting there matter-of-factly stating that the world is not run by governments – it is run by Goldman Sachs.
Some speculation that he is associated with The Yes Men.
Trader’s Goldman Sachs comments spark BBC hoax claims
The BBC says that they double-checked and he is for real.
They’ve been hoaxed before. Maybe he’s for real but his own cryptic statements are certainly interesting.
I consider this a tell, given the circumstances:
Marketing.
The Wall Street actions have the potential to become something serious (Tahir Square, anyone?), but that is an extremely long shot. More likely is another futile exercise, in the manner of G8 protests, or worse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot.
Oh, and Roosevelt also had Huey Long breathing down his neck.
As for the Senate: under what possible conditions could the cloture rule be changed? In the 1970s, the Democrats reduced the votes needed to achieve it from 2/3 to 3/5. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Republicans tried something similar if they win a majority in 2012 (gah), especially if they’re hellbent on privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
As far as Alessio Rastani is concerned: he seems the latest incarnation of Rothschild’s immortal dictum “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” What really annoys is the supreme confidence with which he predicts financial Armageddon: guys like him have been wrong about so many other things, and it seems to me that his oh-my-god-you’re-all-gonna-die shtick is aimed a getting new
investorssuckers for his “independent trading.”He reminds me of the Taxi episode when Louie becomes a stock broker. Louie, referring to gene technology, says, “Sure there’s a chance that a mutant virus could get loose and kill half the world’s population. But what do you care if you’re in the other half and rich?”
What gives the right and Wall Street (in a sense the grassroots right is astroturfed by Wall Street) power is the current political culture of waiting for the politicians to wake up and do the right thing. Waiting for the politicians to work out the solutions through the compromise that occurs in a bought-out House and Senate.
I’m granting you that you are correct about the direction and the best case for federal electoral politics.
I will also warn you that David Graeber is only one datapoint as to what is going on in the process of this movement.
The fact is that progressives (or the left) can both participate in electoral politics as a rearguard move and move forward by building a new grassroots consensus. The fact is that nobody has really engaged the grassroots in enough of a detailed conversation to allow them to come to a practical consensus instead of respouting talking points or ducking for cover (the independents). The grassroots is continually being told by the media, the parties, all sorts or ideological movements and even the blogosphere what “the grassroots thinks.” Most of which are projections of the teller (including this one btw–even Zeno had a paradox).
No one bothers to ask folks to work out solutions knowing the facts (or actually evaluating the facts and coming to a judgment as to their accuracy and salience). Folks don’t know the realities of the budget because (1) they think it’s higher than their pay grade and (2) the never are given the real data in a form that is like the real data they have in their own lives. And there is no process to present this challenge (indeed, the communication in politics is so agenda-driven that it operates to obfuscate).
Yes, you can’t avoid politics. But politics is the process of making social decisions. What the general assembly is doing is politics, fundamental participatory democratic experimental politics.
Ten days is too early to judge its impact.