Catching Up with the Obama Dilemma

Croak! “Conservative Democrat.” The Democrats are the USA’s new conservative party, while the Republicans are its crazy right-wing party. I don’t think the Dems are in as much trouble as you–after Joe Barton’s apology to BP, maybe not much at all–though a lot can happen in four months. But where is the new left going to come from? Is The Big Zero going to be followed by More Nothing?

I’m sorry, but you’d have to have been in a coma between 2001-2009 to seriously equate Obama with GWB. I know time heals all wounds, but seriously.

That said, yeah, Obama has been a huge disappointment. Look: we were presented with two lousy choices in 2008. Among those of us who supported Obama, it was a choice between (1) a candidate we knew would govern the way he is governing now, plus the Clintonian baggage, or (2) a candidate who was far from ideal, but presented the possibility of not governing the way he, unfortunately, is now.

We picked the possibility of change, and unfortunately we didn’t get it. I’m sad about that, but I don’t regret the choice. Anyone who thinks HRC wouldn’t be as lousy for real progressives as Obama is delusional, and I’m not one for settling. The point, however, is not whether Obama or Clinton would have been a better choice, but that we need better choices.

Unless things change radically between now and 2012, I would totally support a progressive Democratic challenge to Obama in the 2012 primary. I also believe our first priority as progressives should be to reform campaign financing and election laws to return real power to the people, and if nothing else, ensure that in 2016 we have a real progressive choice.

Really, the fight is in the Supremem Court. If the Supremes continue to maintain that corporations have the same voting and spending power as actual people, than nothing will get resolved in favor of campaign finance reform or returning power back to “the people”. Which with this court will all know will never happen. Basically we are screwed.

The Supreme Court fight is over, the left lost (not that it put up much of a fight). As Ian has pointed out, the real battles were over Roberts and Alito and they were confirmed because the Democrats wouldn’t mount a filibuster (or even threaten one with any credibility) to stop it. Elena Kagan will likely be more conservative than the GOP-appionted Stevens she replaces. In fact, as Stevens has pointed out, every Justice for the last 40 years or so has been more conservative than the person he or she replaced:

I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative,” he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues. “Including myself,” he said, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” — nominated by Richard Nixon in 1971 — “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”

“This is most likely because he is not a progressive.”

That takes same sayin’ with the straight face. The man is a torturer in his own right, a murderer by drone, an enemy of the constitution he has sworn to protect from enemies foreign and domestic, and is aiding and abetting the cover-up of war crimes and torture to an extent and in a manner that, before his election, was considered criminal, and an aberration to boot.

Hostis humanis generis. The lack of “progessiveness” is the least of the issues here. This president is as functionally incompetent, as dishonest, and far more damaging than his predecessor. Bush was a tumor on the body politic, Obama governs a moribund nation towards the terminal state.

This is what Obama did – he justified stupidity. He brought out the bigotry and the ignorance in a party that tried to rise above it, and now justified, they hate giving it up.

He ran the most retrograde, degrading campaign since the state’s rights campaigns in the south in the middle of the last century.

It’s hard to disagree with anything that Ian has posted above except that I don’t think that the dems losing the house and/or senate comes anything close to dooming obama in 2012. clinton proved that you could sell out the base to court corporate money and lose both the house and the senate and still get re-elected … although he did run against a semi-comatose bob dole and even had perot sniping votes from dole. I just look at the reps … and the demo-zombies that will bang a D just becoz they are one … and wonder who the hell they could run that could beat him. But, then again, if the economy keeps on its current course, enough people may vote for the alternative just for alternative’s sake.

obama had been much worse than I thought he’d be and I didn’t think much of him to begin with. He deserves much worse than to just lose an election and then seamlessly hop aboard the post-presidential speaking engagement money train.

Z

This is off-topic, but many people, myself included, have concluded that the best way to maintain social cohesiveness … and rebuild the country’s infrastructure … would be to put the disgruntled and unemployed people to work doing something positive for society in a federal jobs program. But, of course, there is zero talk of this and one of the primary reasons for this IMO is that the plutocrats don’t want us to assemble in any way. They don’t want the unemployed to come together and work side by side becoz they don’t want to create any social cohesion that may lead to a movement against their rule. They’d rather hand us money to sit at home isolated from the rest of malcontents.

Z

They’d rather hand us money to sit at home isolated from the rest of malcontents.

Agreed except, they would like that money cut off, too. It is inconceivable to them (and Obama has repeated this propaganda) that gov’t. should or even can create jobs, despite abundant evidence all around them that it should and can (and has and does).

Private companies are dictatorships. Even publically-held companies are ruled by those with the most money/shares. Their strategy, acknowledged or not, is to deal with employees one-by-one, keeping them subdivided from each other. A union is a group of employees, and a group with collective bargaining power has more power to deal with the dictatorship that “manages” the company than individual employees. A democratic gov’t. has even more power than a union to deal with the individual dictatorships. Hence, the desire/need for these dictatorships to weaken/eliminate unions and weaken/eliminate democratic gov’ts.

Unemployed people desperate for jobs provide a labor pool of potential low-wage workers and help keep employed people from demanding higher wages. If those unemployed people were instead employed at gov’t. jobs, the dictatorships would have to pay higher wages to lure those employees to work for the dictatorships.

There is also the matter of funding the wages for those gov’t. jobs. If the gov’t. borrows money from banks (sells treasury bills) and pays those back with interest, then the dictatorships at the banks consider that to be money well spent. But if gov’ts. issue their own sovereign money as wages for productive jobs (creating, say, a new transportation system), while paying no interest to the banks for that money, then the dictatorships at the banks will not profit and will consider that money spent to be a threat to them, which it is.

Medicare works, therefore Medicare must be destroyed. Other industrialized (“financialized”?) countries have not-private medical services sectors that work better than the U.S.’s and for less money, therefore those approaches cannot be allowed here. Social Security works, therefore it must be destroyed and replaced with “private” retirement plans (divide and conquer the rubes).

Why is it that the most progressive and liberal candidates weren’t even in the running for the Democratic nomination? Hmmm?
…
Dems always choose the rightmost candidate to be their presidential nominee–he was the right most of the candidates in domestic terms.

After losing three presidential elections in a row (fixed elections, or not), that is, Reagan and Bush, with liberal-minded candidates, the Democratic party was traumatized, which made it possible for the DLC to come to power. For example, Dukakis’s campaign was the last one in which addressing poverty was a plank of the Democratic party’s platform (do parties even pretend to have platforms any more?). After that period, the conventional wisdom became that raising campaign money was the key to getting in office, and that meant turning to the corporations and/or PAC money. The result is what we have today: two parties representing corporations. “What’s good for corporations is good for America” might as well be both parties’ motto.

The question now is: Will that paradigm continue, or will people look at the problems facing the country and reject the messages delivered by corporate-financed campaigns? Unfortunately for those who would like an orderly transition to better officeholders, there are only two paths for rejection at the moment: massive non-turnout at the polls and revolution. Massive non-turnout would likely to be ignored.

Changing chairmen of the various committees has been shown not to make a difference. The past decade has shown Citizen Nader to be the most prescient of public speakers.

This is Japanification, and yeah, in broad terms if not specifics, that’s what I predicted.

I think that this is too simple a description of what is occurring in the U.S. economy.

The distribution of income in Japan is much more equal than it is in the U.S. As you, Ian Welsh, have acknowledged, the greatly unequal distribution of wealth in a country leads to a many bad consequences for the population.

(Uneconomic, but not irrelevant: There is a much greater sense of public responsibility for one’s actions in Japan than the U.S. I can only repeat what I have read and heard many times with regard to this observation. I don’t have first-hand experience with it.)

Japan has run a substantial trade surplus for the past two decades while the U.S. has run a substantial trade deficit.

Japan has universal and low-cost health care for its population.

The U.S. economy will not be “Japan-ified” in ways that matter for the population:

– It will not begin running a trade surplus
– It will not provide universal or low-cost health care for its population
– It will not redistribute the income and wealth more equitably

It seems to me that those who would use the characterization of “Japanification” to describe the economic policy of the U.S. are not so much criticizing that policy for its slow-growth results so much as they are insulting the Japanese for saying that their economic policies are like the U.S.’s.

I wish we had true “Japanification” in the the U.S. economy.

Ian Welsh, 2010 April 28:

https://www.ianwelsh.net/greek-and-european-insolvency/

Haven’t commented much on this, but let’s cut to the chase. Greece is going to default. Period. The only question is when.

Ian Welsh, 2010 June 21:

I didn’t expect the PIIGS, though they don’t surprise me, either, however a global wave of austerity (Hooverization) is something I thought quite likely, and it is happening.

So, Greece is not going to participate in the global wave of draconian cuts?

And if Greece defaults, what will the other PIIS do? Ireland has already started its draconian cuts policy, so that only leaves Portugal, Italy, and Spain. Somehow, after Greece defaults (“Period.”), the banks in the U.K. (just starting its draconian cuts policy), France, and Germany will be fine.

And the U.S. will begin its cuts after the first Tuesday in November.

Americans keeping wanting to elect people like Obama, and so do Democrats. That’s one thesis, anyway. As such, they get what they deserve.

In general terms, I agree. For multiple elections, I have seen people in Democratic primaries vote not for what they believe and not for what they think is in their best interest, but have voted “strategically,” that is, they have voted for the candidate they think is most “electable.” They wanted a winner who would get the repubs out of office. The problem with this “strategic” voting is that it is a break down of representative democracy. If people do not vote based on what they want or what they think is in their best interests, then the people who end up in office do not represent them/their will.

But it is also the case that candidates are to blame because they lie about what they believe in order to get into office. I don’t think that there is any other reasonable explanation for what Obama has done, as shown in the Daily Show clip (reposted from above):

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-15-2010/respect-my-authoritah

Yes, as I’ve also written, more than once, I don’t think the Japanification scenario…

I understand that you’ve written that (I remember reading it more than once). My quarrel is with the term, which I realize you did not invent. Japan is portrayed as having this awful economy because it has slow growth. However, the people who do that in the mass media have a propaganda agenda. They are objecting to the fact that the Japanese are spending gov’t. money for the benefit of the Japanese. “Gov’ts. must not be allowed to spend money for the benefit of their people! If they do that, where would we all be? Look at that awful man in Cuba or Venezuela or France!” The population of the U.S. would be much better off if its economy was “Japan-ified,” that is, universal health care, equitable wealth and income distribution, longest lifespan…. “My god! Stop! Japan is hell on Earth! Japanification! Japanification! What about the money wasted — wasted! — on infrastructure projects?!!” At that point, mentioning the trillions of dollars wasted on weapons and mercenaries by the U.S. probably won’t register.

Why is it that the most progressive and liberal candidates weren’t even in the running for the Democratic nomination? Hmmm?

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! Ooh!

Because… the “Two Party System” is the oxymoronic name for the one-party system that controls our country. That this one-party political and financial aristocracy will never knowingly field a candidate whose policies may in any way ever threaten the international oligarchs who run this nation. That America’s political system is moribund, and will continue to consume the wealth of this nation like a dying star consuming hydrogen until America collapses in a manner not unlike that of the Soviet Union. That among the political elite are some cunning folk who are quite aware of this, and who are working towards just that goal, in the hope of being one of the Big Fish in the Smaller Ponds of a fractured America. And that among others, particularly international corporations and oligarchs with no actual national identity, the idea of the collapse of the American Republic is seen as nothing more or less than the Ultimate Tax Break and the Ultimate Deregulation. The death of America would mean the death of everything from the 40-hour work week to the prohibitions against slavery and child labor.

Did I get it right? Aw, dang, I forgot to phrase it in the form of a question!

How the hell does a Democratic president come out with a bank rescue plan to the right of James F’in Baker

Agreed, but let’s keep matters in perspective. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (a million?) have been killed by an occupation that had no legal reason to occur. Obama’s response? “Let’s look forward, not back.” The Congress’s response? “Huh? What? Um, uh, what he said.”

As bad as the TARP and other financial responses are, it does not compare with having your family being killed when your house is blown apart. Even what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians pales in comparison.

I’m perfectly willing to say that Obama was the best of a bad lot of choices. The problem is that our electoral system will only ever offer a bad lot of choices. Short of some kind of progressive Manchurian candidate, the election system is owned by America’s aristocracy, and the differences between Republicans and Democrats are largely splitting hairs from where I stand, way on the left side of the progressive spectrum.

I was warning about this in beginning of 2009, because if Obama’s economic policies didn’t work, and if he continually alienated the base, it was going to cause problems.

Not to be picky, but it is conventional wisdom to predict that the party in power in the white house loses seats in the mid-term elections. You have a *lot* of company in your prediction here. A surprising and, if true, prescient prediction would be that the democrats were going to gain seats.

Recall that in the 2002 mid-term elections, the republicans gained seats, against the historical norm. This was the first election after the 2000 “election” and as a result was getting started with more widespread electronic ballot “counting.” Until actual reform of ballot counting is enacted, elections (especially elections for federal office) are suspect. (See, the “election” of 2004). Needless to say, this is getting very little attention.

I think the argument made was something along the lines of, “if Hillary really was a progressive, she’d quit the cabinet rather than carry out Obama’s foreign policy.”

Correct.

Not my argument, but it has a certain logic.

Would you argue that Colin Powell should have resigned from bush’s cabinet? Powell more or less had this argument with himself and justified his staying with the “good soldier” argument that he interpreted George Marshall as making back during the Truman administration.

President Obama is guilty of not fulfilling every leftist Utopian fantasy inspired by his aspirational campaign message. He has failed to beat down Senators and Representatives who have openly opposed his most liberal prescriptions (such as more stimulus) and we haven’t even gotten to the Republicans. Those who believe in the Myth of One Great Man are “disappointed”and feel “betrayed” by this historical figure.

It is going to take more than 17 months to clean up the mess left by the Republicans, and to some extent, President Clinton (NAFTA, DOMA, Dot.com bubble, etc..).President Obama is just the beginning of process that will take a t least a generation and every inch of progress will be trench warfare. Politics is not an endeavor for the immature or impatient.

After the election, some settled in behind their keyboard to critique President Obama as if they were observing their lawn crew. Luckily, those of us who understand that a Republican return to power is unacceptable have never stopped organizing, never stopped going door to door, never stopped working.

I am proud of President Obama and understand that this isn’t the 1930’s, or 1960’s. There will be plenty of us that will continue to work while others complain. Unlike Congress, the country isn’t eager to have crazies in the Oval Office again. This is class warfare and you’re either comfy aand complaining or you’re fighting. President Obama is beside the point and it’s sad that some very smart people still don’t get it.