Happy Holidays Everyone! Look, i've brought you a present:
For your consideration, it's ... "YOUR Major American Scandals in Chronological AND Alphabetical Order [the Wikileaks-style edit]!"
OK, it's not really in perfect alphabetical, or chronological, order for that matter, but it does go from A--
--American Revolutionary Soldiers' Pay, Shay's Rebellion, the 3/5th Compromise, Sally Hemming, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Election of 1824, the Spoils System, the Trail of Tears, the Panic of 1837, Manifest Destiny, "54 Forty or Fight," that "Little Texas Border Dispute" 1846-1848, the Glanton Gang, the Know Nothings, Slave Codes, Dred Scott, James Buchanan's complete political career, Bleeding Kansas, CSA, Martial Law at the Maryland Statehouse, Andersonville Prison, the Conspiracy Behind John Wilkes Booth, the Johnson Impeachment, Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, the KKK, Black Codes, the Election of 1876, Boss Tweed, Union-Pacific, Standard Oil Trust, Haymarket Square, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the entire military career of Phillip Sheridan, or William Tecumseh Sherman, Indian Schools, the Oregon Land Fraud Scheme, Open Range, the Oklahoma Land Theft more genteelly laughed off as "those Silly Sooners-guffaw," the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessey V Ferguson, the "Annexation" of Hawaii, the USS Maine, our Philippines "Stewardship," Food Poisoning of Army Rations in Spanish-American War, the Leadville Strike, the Tacoma Massacre, Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs, the Sedition Act of 1918, Prohibition, the Red Scare, Warren G Harding, Teapot Dome, Sacco & Vanzetti, Prescott Bush, "The Crash," the Bonus Army Riots, the Tuskegee Experiment and its Guatemalan cousin, our overall Guatemalan/Central American "policies" in general, Executive Order 9066, the Dresden Bombing, the Nazi NASA, Arbenz, Mosaddegh, the Bracero Program, Strange Fruit, Downwinders, George Wallace, Joe McCarthy, Lunch Counter Strike (or just name your major southern city in any time in any century), the Election of 1960, JFK-RFK-MLK, Gulf of Tokin, every breathing moment of Richard Nixon, Agent Orange, Ear-Necklaces, Cambodia, Laos, Air America, Co-Intel-Pro, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Salvador Allende, Chappaquiddick, SOA, Karen Silkwood, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, David Dukes, Ab-Scam, Diablo Canyon, the Lockheed Bribery "Deal of the Century," White Water, Mina, Arkansas Airport, the Run-Up to Iraq I, DU, Gulf War Syndrome Cover-up, the Keating Five, Hinckley, CA, George Ryan's Trucker's License Bribery Deal, Election of 2000, Enron, WTC7, the Run-Up to Iraq II, Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, WMDs, the various times missing billions of dollars have been "lost" in Iraq, Katrina & the Army Corps of Engineers cover-ups, Karzai the Opium merchant, Pat Tillman, Terri Schiavo, Patriot Act, Bridge to Nowhere, all the way from A (Abu Ghraib) --
-- to Xe.
There you go. You like your present? I really could just go on and on, couldn't i? All this annoying, not-nice history. And that's just the list i could think of. Bring out your own dead. The closer you look, the more there is to see. Our government has often betrayed us and ignored the people's attempts to make it behave. In fact, it's happened so often it IS the routine. How icky, how unpleasant. It is easier to simply dream of an "America that is always right and just and good," without all that ugly history stuff getting in the way. What's a slacker to do?
Luckily, the Millionaire's Club is here to help. You poor peons shouldn't have to think about this kind of thing. Just go sit in your boxes made of ticky-tacky, turn on the Idiocracy Channel, "stare at 'Funbags' there and enjoy your Brawndo. It's got the electrolytes that your body craves!"
Don't worry, be happy. Ignorance is Bliss. And Strength too, for that matter.
And, of course, once they have killed Julian Assange, that wicked Wikileaker, you will never have to hear of these unpleasant, icky, downright Un-American American historical embarrassments again. That whole Orwell thing about "who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present now, controls the past"? It wasn't just a cool line co-opted for a Rage Against the Machine song; it was very much a notice of the kind of universal memory a public can be willing to sacrifice in favor of the comfort of illusions and how rapidly that public can sell that memory for a pitiful portion of porridge when they think they need to, to keep the Millionaires' Club happy.
As we, the people, consider joining in the public burning of the heretic Assange, and contributing our anger to the international war on the very inconvenient truths Wikileaks exposes, let's take a second to consider who and what it is we are actually destroying.
WWJC, indeed? ("Who Would Jesus Crucify?")
That's right, that's what it's come down to dear readers, members among the powers-that-be are calling for you to call for the death and destruction of the kind of people who remind us of our leaders' failures to live up to the same ideals they force us to espouse ad nauseam. The 21st Century Pharisees and Sadducees are calling for us all to stone the prophet, sacrifice him to protect our ignorance, and on cue we blindly fling our fistful of gravel at the straw-man Assange, and join in the call to silence the truth.
The truth is, folks, America-as-we-know-it depends on and defends some ugly, ugly secrets. And until we change that, we can't possibly achieve America-as-we-dream-it. Don't get me wrong. I love America, but, like any other lover of any self-destructive sometimes suicidal sweetheart, I accept that sometimes, even the love of your life, sometimes, does the wrong thing, sometimes mistakenly and sometimes on purpose and, when you realize it, that love, be it spouse, or child, or country, that love has to be snapped back to its senses. You have to work to change it, and that work is your show of your love.
I admire the American Spirit. We are a people and a mythos of amazing accomplishment and it has led to the fantasy of universal great wealth. Oh there is great wealth all right. There's supposedly something like fourteen trillion dollars in GDP. But it's not for us consumers; we actually owe something on the scale of sixteen trillion in personal debt. Who do we owe it to? Well, the richest 5% own like 90% of everything, so we probably owe it right back to them.
How did that happen? We let them set it up this way. See our government, our rich, and our racists, usually in the same room, have done crooked things to us and been inhumane to the rest of the world for forever, and they've never really wanted us to pay too much attention to their follies. In the meantime, our citizens have done shameful things to each other since Day One as well. This is our history, a room littered with corpses, one wonders why we allow the facade that each new outrage is to be treated as an anomaly.
Yep, that's our history from A-Z, a history of disgrace, starting with our own most important heroes, the American Revolutionary War Soldiers. That's right, never forget, we're a country that started out not paying the soldiers who fought in our own national battle for independence. Volunteers who risked everything, many who lost everything, average citizens of uncommon valor and endurance, fighting our battles to gain our own nationhood as a republic of free slave-owning men, and as soon as that war was over, and we'd won our war to be free to own slaves, we betrayed those very soldiers who fought it for us.
Tough break, couldn't pay 'em, well, wouldn't anyway, at any rate, we didn't pay them in the end. Sent 'em packing, better luck next time. Know why? Folks didn't want to pay the taxes. That's right, the Articles of Confederation Government said they felt they already had too much debt and didn't want to raise taxes. So our first founding fathers screwed over our very own revolutionary army and then told everyone it was all going to be all right and everyone would behave from now on. And you can see how it's gone since then. You may have noticed the fairly long paragraph above.
Here's the truth: If you REALLY want to go back in the day, to a time when man was truly "free,'" you'd have to go back before agriculture, and even before organized hunting and gathering clans, back to a time when man was truly wild and purely free for sure, but often hungry, cold and miserable most of the time. Yes, even "freedom" has its limits, and as Hobbes once pointed out, life before organized social/governmental structures was "solitary, brutish and short." So mankind had to allow himself to be tamed in exchange for daily bread. And since that day, the ones who own the bread, own the rules.
If you were to accurately consider the timeline of the human historical period (about 5000BCE to present, say 7000 years of "civilized" history), about 90% of all the people who ever lived, lived in a society where the few powerful (the kings, the priests, the rich), have ridden the rest of us like serfs. Whatever the excuse used--glory, gold, or god--a ruling elite have been a given throughout history, despite the idea of rugged American Individualism.
Which is not to say that America is not a place where many can float through life and a few can make it beyond their wildest dreams, frequently by screwing someone else over. Remember that the richest one percent equals over three million people and that that richest 5% make a multitude the size of New York. And for much of the 20th Century, the rich and powerful in America kept their unspoken social contract with the public of America. There was plenty of bread; there were plenty of circuses.
Then the concept of constraint on business began to erode around Reagan's time and the plutocracy, no longer satisfied with mere hyperbolic wealth, began lusting for the astronomical. Forget the billions we hear about that Wall Street gives themselves as seasonal treats. That's a pittance next to the long green they're really riding. At a time when the total personal assets are a mere fifty-four trillion and the total US debt is over fifty-five trillion, the plutocracy has us leveraged in currency and credit derivatives to the tune of over five hundred and seventy six trillion. Yes, i am using the "t" word.
You only use numbers like that to measure galaxies, not GPDs, especially not when one out of every four kids is surviving on free school food. But this is the pass we have come to. The rich are no longer thinking of money in terms as an actual thing, but more as ideas of numbers that require scientific notations. The only way actual humans experience such a monetary scale is during periods of Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation where it's cheaper to burn money than to buy firewood, or in early1990s Yugoslavia, when the entire country blew apart.
Neither of those are a place or a time i hope to have my country taken back to; but as the plutocracy that runs this world is getting hungrier and feeling that old time religion, we are reverting to an aristocracy and a serfdom right before our very eyes. Through my life i have watched this menace grow, but the news lately cries out the truth as never before. This last couple of weeks have been overwhelming. Just like the corporatist nightmare future of every sci-fi dystopia, the rich are currently seizing their power with the Congress they just purchased for the task.
It's up to us to let them get away with it or not.
The recent Republican landslide will be a test to see how many 21st Century Americans are actually ready to party that hearty when we're talking Tea Party style, as in like it's 1773. First, as i noted in an earlier column, through recent speeches and campaign party platforms, it seems the true goals of the Tea Party movement aren't just some open ended "Take America Back" to some unspecified place and time, but to specifically take American governmental operations and social norms back to the ideas of the failed Articles of Confederation. You know, no national taxes, no governmental restraint of business practices, and state sovereignty over federal preeminence.
We all know how well that worked: it didn't. We scrapped it within six years.
The new idea was supposed to reach beyond the dog-eat-dog hierarchy and form a society based on establishing the kind of justice that both insures domestic tranquility and secures liberty, all the while providing for the common defense. It was an amazing goal, a wonderful myth. The idea of committing a government, on paper anyway, to "[promoting] the general welfare" was somewhat novel in 1787 among world governments.
If only we had had any actual intentions of keeping our word. It's always been a battle to deal with the reality of the rich and powerful running everyone's lives. And their partners in crime, our government has lied to us continuously and brazenly and then indignantly when we realized to dispute. From the beginning the government was not designed for the empowerment of the people. No matter what sham "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" -type America cartoons like Rush and Beck bleat and bray about, the initial American concept of "universal suffrage" actually only extended to about 8% of the population. As the history books so delicately phrase it, "Native Americans, African Americans and women were not considered part of the political process, so they were not included."
Neither, btw, were poor people include in the decisions in their government. Property rights were necessary for enfranchisement up till the 1820s, and the 1st presidential election the poor could and did vote en masse was in 1824. When the poor then voted in Andrew Jackson, a former poor orphan, though Jackson got more votes, a Washington backroom deal gave the presidency to the son of a former president, in that case John Quincy Adams.
Now, as the newly elected crop of GOP cranks prepare to take office, Judson Phillips, the president of Tea Party Nation, is calling for a return to property rights as a valid criteria for being qualified to vote. If you ever wanted for proof the Tea Party's idea of "way back when" involved servants and masters, look no further. Remember the "we the people" who were supposed all created equal actually referred only to White male taxpaying property owners, who had also signed their respective state's religious oaths of church loyalty. Keep in mind that despite the supposed freedom of and/or from religion written right into Article Six (1787) and the First Amendment (1791), religious oaths were common till about 1810.
Another old school idea currently being floated by the right is that those who don't pay federal income taxes should not be allowed to vote either. Not just those who refuse to file a return altogether, but even any law abiding citizens whose wages fall so low they owe nothing on the federal form would be summarily disenfranchised. I guess, according to Millionaires' Club rules, in the ultimate free market even your vote could bought and sold just like that. If the whole country is a seller's market, will anything ever be free?
And there is definite cause to worry as our reins of power shift hands from the do-little Democrats to these marketers of the Millionaires' Club. To be fair, there never has honestly been any pretext that the Congress of our country were truly the people's people. Sure, throughout the past they were always just the ones we were told we were picking, but now, more than ever before, those who buy their way into the statehouse then use that power to ensure the rich stay rich. As Bernie Sanders laid out in recent speeches before Congress, 80% of all the new money that has come into the system in the last 40 years has gone to the wealthiest 1% of the people. Right now about 12 cents out of every dollar goes to the richest one tenth of one percent. We are a nation that has 400 billionaires, at the same time one in seven Americans survives because of food stamps.
We will see how much they think they can get away with. Here in AZ, my not-so-lovey-dovey govey, Jan the Bruja, is already sharpening up her scalpel to lash away enough social services in the midst of her stalled economy to allow her to afford the lifestyle to which she's personally become accustomed, and, to continue to cut rich people's taxes in the upcoming budget. Jan is committed to making tax cuts a part of a working budget, even if she has amputate the state medical program that assists with organ transplants to do it. Which she has in fact now done, saying it's just too expensive to keep people alive when millionaires are needing their tax cut. Note the logic: taxes for the wealthy = necessary, life saving medical procedure for the average folk = unnecessary. You run along and die now poor person; soon you may not even be able to vote about it.
Then there came the belittlement of the meeting between Obama and Congressional GOP leaders. Not the part where the media dismissively tagged the critical event as the "Slurpee Summit;" but the following day when the 42 GOP good old boys from the US Senate sent their letter to the president promising to stall any and all legislation until they'd gotten their tax cut for the wealthy, even emergency health care for 9/11 1st Responders, i felt the gauntlet had been tossed. The rich will take care of the rich 1st or we won't take care of you at all.
Unemployment for millions did not matter at all unless the richest were guaranteed their right to send the government further in debt. And who were "our" politicians, sent to represent US, but instead were voting to do this for us/to us? They're the rich of course. And whom did Obama obediently bowed down to, to be allowed to afford to send out 13 more months of bread for the poor people to go with their circuses, and possibly even enough to afford a couple of extra lumps of coal for the old Christmas stocking.
"T'is the season to sing hymns of praise. Praise the rich, their kindness and mercy! We now resume with our regularly scheduled programming." Is that really what America looks like these days?
How many Assanges will we have to kill to hide those untidy facts? Are you still so sure to take up stones against the man, when he's merely revealing the fact that it is the machine that is trying to destroy you? And so dear readers, ponder this as you fondle your chunk of coal and wonder where the money went: History is like "Net Neutrality," or justice for that matter. If it doesn't matter enough to you to take care of it, then those nice folks who work for that nice old Millionaires' Club can always take it away from you ... if you'd like to let them.
They've done such wonderful work for us in the past. Of course we can trust them again, can't we? Aren't you glad to let your future rest in their hands? We are about to have a new year, that's for sure. Hope it's a present we want to be opening.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Ode to Assange (a poem)
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury,
in this court of public opinion,
before the execution is completed
and we close our eyes forever to secrets
for your consideration,
"IT'S YOUR American Scandals in Chronological and Alphabetical Order!"
Well at least from A--
--American Revolutionary Soldiers' Pay, Shay's Rebellion, 3/5th Compromise, Sally Hemming, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Election of 1824, Spoils System, Trail of Tears, Panic of 1837, "54 Forty or Fight," "Little Texas Border Dispute" 1846-1848, Glanton Gang, Know Nothings, Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, CSA, Martial Law at the Maryland Statehouse, the Conspiracy behind John Wilkes Booth, the Johnson Impeachment, Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, KKK, the Election of 1876, Boss Tweed, Union-Pacific Railroad, Standard Oil Trust, Haymarket Square, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the entire military career of Phillip Sheridan, Indian Schools, the Oregon Land Fraud Scheme, Oklahoma Land Theft, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessey V Ferguson, "Annexation" of Hawaii, the USS Maine, Philippines "Stewardship," Food Poisoning in Army Rations during the Spanish-American War, the Tacoma Massacre, Joe Hill, Sedition Act of 1918, Prohibition, Red Scare, Teapot Dome, Sacco & Vanzetti, Prescott Bush, Bonus Army Riots, Tuskegee Experiment and its Guatemalan cousin, Executive Order 9066, Dresden Bombing, the Nazi NASA, Arbenz, Mosaddegh, the Bracero Program, Strange Fruit, Downwinders, Joe McCarthy, Election of 1960, JFK-RFK-MLK, Gulf of Tokin, every breathing moment of Richard Nixon, Agent Orange, Ear-necklaces, Cambodia, Air America, Co-Intel-Pro, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Salvador Allende, Chappaquiddick, SOA, Karen Silkwood, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, Abscam, Diablo Canyon, Lockheed Bribery's "Deal of the Century," Mina, Arkansas Airport, DU, Gulf War Syndrome Cover-up, the Keating Five, Hinckley, CA, Election of 2000, Enron, WTC7, Patriot Act, Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, WMDs, the various times billions of dollars have been "lost" in Iraq, Katrina Levee Cover-up, Karzai the Opium Merchant, Pat Tillman, I say from A, Abu Ghraib, to Xe.
Now bring out your own dead and then tell me again
Why we should trust them.
I rest my case.
12/11/10
in this court of public opinion,
before the execution is completed
and we close our eyes forever to secrets
for your consideration,
"IT'S YOUR American Scandals in Chronological and Alphabetical Order!"
Well at least from A--
--American Revolutionary Soldiers' Pay, Shay's Rebellion, 3/5th Compromise, Sally Hemming, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Election of 1824, Spoils System, Trail of Tears, Panic of 1837, "54 Forty or Fight," "Little Texas Border Dispute" 1846-1848, Glanton Gang, Know Nothings, Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, CSA, Martial Law at the Maryland Statehouse, the Conspiracy behind John Wilkes Booth, the Johnson Impeachment, Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, KKK, the Election of 1876, Boss Tweed, Union-Pacific Railroad, Standard Oil Trust, Haymarket Square, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, the entire military career of Phillip Sheridan, Indian Schools, the Oregon Land Fraud Scheme, Oklahoma Land Theft, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessey V Ferguson, "Annexation" of Hawaii, the USS Maine, Philippines "Stewardship," Food Poisoning in Army Rations during the Spanish-American War, the Tacoma Massacre, Joe Hill, Sedition Act of 1918, Prohibition, Red Scare, Teapot Dome, Sacco & Vanzetti, Prescott Bush, Bonus Army Riots, Tuskegee Experiment and its Guatemalan cousin, Executive Order 9066, Dresden Bombing, the Nazi NASA, Arbenz, Mosaddegh, the Bracero Program, Strange Fruit, Downwinders, Joe McCarthy, Election of 1960, JFK-RFK-MLK, Gulf of Tokin, every breathing moment of Richard Nixon, Agent Orange, Ear-necklaces, Cambodia, Air America, Co-Intel-Pro, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, Salvador Allende, Chappaquiddick, SOA, Karen Silkwood, S&Ls, Iran-Contra, Abscam, Diablo Canyon, Lockheed Bribery's "Deal of the Century," Mina, Arkansas Airport, DU, Gulf War Syndrome Cover-up, the Keating Five, Hinckley, CA, Election of 2000, Enron, WTC7, Patriot Act, Scott Ritter and Hans Blix, WMDs, the various times billions of dollars have been "lost" in Iraq, Katrina Levee Cover-up, Karzai the Opium Merchant, Pat Tillman, I say from A, Abu Ghraib, to Xe.
Now bring out your own dead and then tell me again
Why we should trust them.
I rest my case.
12/11/10
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Current Comedy, 11/27/10:"The Things We Do as Democrats"
It was such a jaw-droppingly ironic sign of things to come, the sign i saw that morning, that i had to reach for my camera. I mean, literally, it was a sign at the top of the escalator, directing traffic to the various meeting rooms on the second floor of the Wyndham Hotel Saturday Nov. 20th. It was the kind of thing that made people visibly and even audibly respond when it caught and held their eye. You want a symbol? Well, here's your sign. Almost everybody spotted it, almost everyone winced. Some laughed. Some cursed. Buddies pointed and interrupted each other to draw attention to it. Some shook their heads as if exhaling a fly. I took this picture.
Like many others, I had come, as a Democrat to downtown Phoenix seeking to assemble with other Democrats, wandering if we were still welcome in the capitol city. I felt lost. We had lost, in a great-big, major way. It sucked, i wanted a new plan. I'd come to the Wyndham to find it. This hotel was supposed to play host to what was supposed to be the first post-election state-wide meeting of the party and there wasn't a donkey in sight.
I was there as myself of course, but also, as my wife's, Beth Weisser's, representative at the consolation-fest she would surely be in for as a recently defeated state senate candidate. The AEA had scheduled a training day the same day. We are both members of both and had to split forces to cover the bases, and sift through the clichés. Beth drew the short straw and i was off on an adventure.
As myself, i was there as an "elected precinct committeeman," which is, i guess, one tad better than being an "elected nothing," but i was still a novice, a babe in the woods, despite something like being a 6 year semi-active member of the actual party, as opposed to someone who simply votes Democrat based on the TV ads or some much. While working as a Democrat wasn't often a central part of my life, come election time, and especially since my wife candidacy, i gleefully put up some signs, pass out some flyers. I drink a lot of coffee while a wide variety of people explain to me exactly what the problem is. You know, good times; it's a party.
But then i am also this annoying self-supposed would-be journalist-type, a supposed jokester who skews Dems as freely as the GOP when desperate for easy targets. It is an odd role to play, being the kind of guy who would probably write a column like this, about a meeting like that with a sense of minor, but gleeful, mischief. Anyway, in any of those various roles that play the player, i was mostly there to ask, 'what the ____ just happened? '
"Shellacking." It is such an active verb, Mr. President.
As you may recall that was Obama's morning-after descriptor of choice for the defeat dealt the Democrats in this just past election. To be properly "shellacked," one is not "merely" or even "summarily" defeated. No. One must be brought down, killed, and subsequently disemboweled, immersed in acids, stuffed like a beaver, and THEN painted, varnished in fact with the shell secretions from lac beetles. That's right doused in beetle juice. It's the same yummy flavor all candy lovers crave on the shells of their shiny M&Ms, though there known as "confectioner's glaze." It's the kind of term use to describe what you would do with a roughly worn relic that was looking a little worse for wear. As in:
("Should we throw this here ol' stuffed iguana? It's lookin' a might bit scruffy about the elbows."
"Naw, just give it another shellacking.")
See? That what it means to get a good "shellacking," Mr. Obama. And i admit, that that was a fairly apt description of the appearances of many of my Dem colleagues that morning at the Wyndham. Like so many Dems there that day, i was still a little sore from my election-day shellacking and i was looking the restart button, hoping for some recantation-style postgame color done by penitent Dem leadership sans the spin cycle; and, more importantly, some quick pointers on how the rest of us were going to save our state from the hillbilly Gestapo Fox News had just put in charge of us.
I further went with the attitude that the Blue Dog Dems brought this turn upon us all and had a lot of explaining to do. The success of the Tea Party emblem for the GOP showed that Dems needed to differentiate from not assimilate with the GOP leaning segment of the voters. Yes, i am prepared to say it is the move to the right that has destroyed the Democrats, a move away from the public's and the party's best interests.
Twice in recent elections the Dems had first sold, then sold out the message they'd campaigned on, squandering American goodwill and momentum in support of them. The public has every right to be wary. As Jon Stewart quipped to Barack Obama, "It's like they're campaigning on 'Come on, Baby, give me one more chance." In 2006, Dems claimed they were rising up against the Bush regime and rallied the country and then, upon being swept into office on national good will for their message, they just basically became members of the Bush power-structure for the last two years of his presidency. Though Dems "controlled" Congress, between bluster and signing statements, Bush still wrote or rewrote government to his liking, consistently got military funding, torturer approval, and legislative endorsements for his Wall Street bail-out schemes.
Then in the face of the Bush economic crisis, America hired the opposition, the Dems to the rescue, to sort it all out and make the mess right, right? And instead, banks continued to get billions in bail-outs while millions are thrown out of their houses by these every same banks with no way to fight back, even after it is plainly shown that multitudes of these evictions are frauds. The fabled Stimulus package gets hollowed out to where it won't achieve much more than the ability to be stuck with a GOP label as an excess spending talking point.
Then there's a whole other massive expense of energy and goodwill on a health care reform that in the end ... ran the same course, dribbling down from mighty message to mealy mouth gesture, selling out the same people it claimed it was helping, following a tri-cornered hat waved around by a PR firm, all to keep powerful health and insurance interests entrenched and train a public to work against their own best interests, by fighting in the streets against universal healthcare.
And now those Tea Party people were going to be running my state? I needed some inspiration. So i wandered through the well-appointed lobby, looking for likeminded Donkey-lovers, searching for some sign it was all going to be all right. With no sign of a sign in sight. That's right, and when i asked for directions, it sounded something like 'over the river and through the woods.' All the length of the lobby and up the escalator there was no further sign of Democrat direction. As if we were hidden from the general public.
Finally up an escalator and just as you got sight of the second floor, the one and only sign of Democrats in the house came into view. It read:
Schizophrenia
Building Awareness
Advancing Understanding
[and the room name in smaller print]
AZ Democratic Party
State Committee Meeting
[and the room name in smaller print]
AZ Democratic Party
Breakout Sessions
[and so on]
Seriously, i wasn't there to play hall monitor, but i got in a little early, like several other out-of-towners, so i had some time to observe. Few of the people i saw come off that escalator got past that sign without some sort of reaction. And i had about an hour's time that morning lounging on the second floor luxury lobby furniture, to gauge the degree of irony appreciation in each escalator riders' registry as they saw the sign.
I spent some of that time with Rudy Clark, long-time Native American activist and lobbyist, and a retired teacher. He came down from Peach Springs this morning, but had done some time in the trenches in DC. He warned right now the Democrats look weak and frightened, "pushed into a corner, heading for failure." And Clark wondered why all state and national Democratic leadership allowed that characterization of Democrats to happen and become lodged in the public mind. He also wondered why the Republican party and in particular the Supreme court "had lost their minds, offering the extremely wealthy people even more advantage."
Statewide Clark, himself, felt a bit shellacked over victories by pro-SB1070 candidates. "I keep hoping Joe Arpaio will have something to do to take him to our reservation and then I'll ask him where are his papers and what's he doing in MY country?" Clark quipped.
Just before joining the crowd flooding into the main meeting hall, we caught up with the Safford contingent of Democratic activists. Jay Rasco took a second to explain what he saw as the upcoming GOP agenda: "If you keep the working man down, nose to the grindstone, everyday, nose to the grindstone just to keep up, and make sure they have lots of kids and have lots of bills, then they'll be too busy to rock the boat. That's what the GOP has in mind for us."
At a time when the "Party of Change" could be saddled so easily as the party of status quo the Dems had obviously lost track of their message. I was hoping to bring them back to their sense. But you know what they say, the first step to fixing a problem is being willing to admit that you have a problem in the first place; and the Dem hierarchy there that day were all as happy as campers, despite the fact we were all still drippy with beetle juice. Vince Rabago's campaign chairman, Gilberto Zaragoza, for example was a happy camper with party's campaign effort this year. "Everything went well," he concluded. "We did everything we could." Except win, of course.
Despite the fact that the long-standing and wide spread nickname for her organization within the Democratic Party is mockingly referred to as the "uncoordinated campaign," Michelle Davidson, the coordinator of the party's "Coordinated Campaign," was shockingly proud of her efforts as well; and could and did substantiate her claims of actively running an extensive campaign, through numerous charts of various grafts ... though polling had shown that by May of '10 the public's goodwill for Dems had decidedly dwindled. Considering all the robo-calls that were made, the pieces of campaign literature created and distributed, and the personal connections pretended, and, all of it duly documented on the big screen PowerPoint presentation, Davidson's campaign had indeed stayed busy, fiddling away as the whole titanic enterprise sank beneath waves of GOP voter resentments.
Recent shellacked Mesa state representative candidate, Mike Conway, thought of the backlash he was already seeing, and said bitterly, "I am already sick of hearing about 'Obama-care.' I mean come on, at least the Democrats do care!"
Conway elaborated, "Look, i did better than some of the targeted candidates. If the targeted candidates did this badly, the ones who got additional funding and support, if they did this badly, then what does that say about the effectiveness of state party efforts, no matter what their expense of energy?"
If the Arizona Democratic Party leadership was aware of this widespread dissension, they were in emphatic denial. For the first 1/2 hour of their presentation it seemed possible no one had told these assembled experts the results of the election. They were very busy talking about their success in fundraising and the challenge of logistics and how good they had done as if losing by 20% or so was a fine race run.
Unfortunately if the rank-in-file were there to get a display of what party higher-ups cared about, it was obviously still money, to the point of being oblivious about almost all else. As state party chair Don Bivens gushed ecstatically, "We raised the money we wanted and spent it the way we wanted to."
The roster of morning speakers were likewise money minded. Bivens set the tone for treasurer and others who focused on the success the party had had in fund-raising. True early on in the election cycle the fundraising for Democrats versus Republicans, both nationally and to a degree in AZ showed that Dems while anemic were more robust than the Republican party. In fact in 2009, prior to the Citizens United case, the Republican party was supposedly on the fundraising ropes.
The first person to move past applauding effort expended and openly acknowledge the actual vote count was state treasurer candidate, Andrei Cherny, "We had an unmitigated disaster and there are people all over the state who don't even realize the consequences that will devastate their lives for years to come." It roused the most vocal applause all morning.
On the floor the party leadership spent as much of that morning's energy as they could get away with by blaming Obama. Over-all the talking points that morning were AZ racists love SB 1070 and Obama let us all down. And then there was that most predictable of mechanisms, the backlash of midterms. Yet we had our best year ever ... except for that losing part. One of the more comic unintentional ironies was when a presenter noted, "We had more data than ever and better data than ever. So we made a huge investment in data collection and it came out to tell us exactly what we expected all along: 65% of the GOP showed up to vote, only 55% of Democrats," and thus we lost. A spokeswoman for the Goddard campaign added, "As Democrats, we see ourselves as a party of intellect. The GOP present themselves as a party of emotion and the emotion they build on most is fear."
When the floor opened up to Q&A, i was offered a chance to frame a question for the panel and scrambled through a series of near misses, such as: "Nationally the pundit class is claiming the message of this election is that Republican ideas should rule. How are Democrats to take this?" Or, "Nationally this race showed that the plutocrats can in most cases buy the candidate of their choosing. The big corporate money went to the GOP slate of ideas. Are we, as a country, fated to that kind of existence, to be bought and sold by such hateful ideas."
OR, "The division is clearly between money and people, in this next election, does the Democratic party intend to work for the money or work for the people?" or rephrased, "Let's be honest about the moral of the Citizens United Supreme Court case decision. This election showed the plutocrats can buy the elections that they want. Their message was clearly hate, fear, and division. This meeting has talked about money quite a bit already. Does the Democratic Party in AZ intend to work for the money or work for the people?"
In the end i chose to rephrase my Goddard question from earlier articles: "The GOP works closely with the Tea Party. The move showed to be a success. How does the Democratic Party intend to try to rebuild their connections with the liberals and progressives who typically energize a party and whom the Dem party turned their backs on this election?"
But dear reader you're going to have to satisfy yourself with your own answers to those queries because in the end my question wasn't taken and we were all sent scurrying for a quick lunch.
Returning, i noticed the sounds of a street musician across the hotel's main entrance. I dug out some change and said, "So, there's a political convention going on over there," and i pointed to the hotel. "Yeah?" he seems unimpressed. "Getting much?" my pocket change clanked in his hands. "Not much." "No surprise," i said. "No surprise," he echoed behind me.
When i got inside the first person i spoke to was this wise Indian woman, a Hindi Indian, woman, at the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, in a discussion of recruiting candidates. She was inspired and explained, "If you don't have to worry about winning then you can be more fearless with your message." I hoped to let that be a guide for me for the afternoon sessions.
Torn between my wife's favorite, the Federated Democratic Women, and the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, i decided to split my time with both, but first chatted up Phil Hettmansperger and District 4's Ken LaKind about the need of Democrats challengers in all races in all districts. Hettmansperger had been a recurring state candidate.
In the course of conversation, LaKind hoped i would delineate for him and his neighbor an explanation of the banking scandal and why both GOP and not just Dems, like Dodd, were culpable. The neighbor, on a rightwing news diet, believed that the Democratic Party was consistently at fault for Wall Street deregulation because of Clinton era deregulations, in particular the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall. But as the powerful, but under-heard video "I'm not Voting Republican Because I Have a Memory," dutifully documents, it's actually the GOP who have been in power through every major banking scandal in the last century.
The 1999 reversal of Glass Steagall was orchestrated by three Republicans, Gramm, Leach and Bliley, not Clinton, in a time when the Republican Whitewater lynch mob ran the Congressional show. Next, just as his brother, Neil, had dabbled in the Silverado Saving & Loan Scandal decades earlier on daddy's watch, George W Bush backed banks bilking the public again and again, until they had leveraged the whole apparatus to fall over on itself; and then, instead of taking the lumps, they pushed to have the public bail them out, to keep them in business so those very same banks could then throw us all out in the street. And then post it as their record profits and use them to pay GOP record corporate donations.
The impact of those donation dollars was plain to see on the faces in any of the caucus breakout sessions i attended that day. Finally i ducked into the Women's caucus. The sweet gray haired ladies who had spotted the promise of my dear sweet wife, Beth Weisser, and who had then paid the expenses to send her to the women's candidate training program, Emerge Arizona, were still there and still as earnest as ever. It made one feel proud to see such a collection of the heritage of Democratic women had in Arizona, including friends and acquaintances of former Dem governors Rose Mofford, '88- 91, and Janet Napolitano, '03-09. I mean the original little old ladies were still there, still running the meetings, now a little older than ever.
The ladies talked about a cookbook they had going as a fundraiser. They talked about some resort time they could sort-of raffle off. And then there was a fine-looking paperback edition of the collection of quotations by extraordinary women edited longtime AZ Dem powerhouse Ms. Carolyn Warner. She spoke of coming back from DC after the election and riding with both McCain and Harry Mitchell.
About that point i asked AZ Dem Party State Secretary, Brittni Storrs, her take on the average age of the people in the fairly filled room. She speculated, "mid-50s, somewhere in the 50s." I asked for her age: 23.
When the talk again returned to dealing with fundraising i raised my hand. Unlike my chances on the main floor that morning, in the women's caucus i got my question asked. I said, "I don't mean to be impertinent, but i have to wonder. Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court case, the GOP has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions. How are you going to battle that kind of fundraising with cook books?"
Not missing a beat, Warner challenged that rather than figure a way to work with Citizens United, which was clearly a path to ruin, the Dems had to lead the way in creating the legislation prohibiting corporate funding of elections. furthermore, Warner warned, it needs to be pressed for now, during the lame duck Congress before Republicans take power in January. Warner called for all Arizonans, and all Americans in general, to call dramatically on Congress to pass such an amendment while we the people still have a chance to own what remains of our country. I was so struck by her speech i promised her to write of it and have. See?
And just then, fear not campaign lovers, as it happened in every session i attended, it somehow seemed Rodney Glassman, fresh from baby and ripe with one liners, was already in campaign mode with a nuanced road-ready "thank you everybody" speech about how he goes from room to room with no planned speech, but he hears the same issues being discussed in each of the breakout rooms. [Insert preferred caucus-centric issue here.] Playing the outsider, in 3 different breakout sessions i attended, Glassman roused himself and others to the call they needed to tear down the walls between the caucuses, if only the leadership would let everybody speak.
Meanwhile over at the Rainbow Caucus, at least in the few moments i saw, i was just wishing everybody would shut up--recurring infighting diluted the fun of being gay about politics. Instead of addressing issues like strategies for refuting impending GOP anti-homosexual agenda, they were battling over web pages and availability of minutes. The thing about caucuses, when they start being more about their own personal politics, than about how they intersect in the larger political landscape, their energy is absorbed on their own Peyton Places and they lose effectiveness. For those jostling for position, the battle must be breathtaking. For the rest of us, there because GSA issues are the essence of human rights issues, the tug-of-war turned tedious quickly. Just sayin'.
Luckily, i just barely slipped into that meeting in time to help it degenerate into the after-talk indicative of such gatherings as political caucuses; and then slipped out and onto the only caucus to prove worth really catching that day for me, the only place with the rush and tingle of the excitement of possibility ... was the progressives. The Progressive Democratic Caucus of Arizona, our state's branch of the PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), that is, a congregation of every liberal cause imaginable.
Combined, they proved a thrilling ménage to behold. The Progressive Caucus in fact, proved the only caucus on campus where the hotel staff had to bring in additional seating and the bustle of people gathered and chairs being passed down, added a thrill to the build up for the meeting. Chairs lined back walls and people stood along the sides. The room buzzed with the power of ideas. Dynamic PDA speaker and leader Jeff Latas revved up the crowd to the point cheering and speechifying erupted spontaneously.
And have no doubt, the populism was indeed popular. Despite the fact they appeared to be thought of as an unwanted evil stepchild by the party leaders, the progressive caucus was far and away the largest caucus there that day, the loudest as well. On a day when only 240 or so even attended the statewide committee meeting, over one hundred people signed in at the Progressive Caucus, a group that has longtime bad blood with the establishment money boys like Bivens in ADP (Arizona Democratic Party--yes, those are the same letters as PDA, except in a different order).
In fact, ADP leadership refused to grant the PDA a seat at the executive committee with the other caucus leaders and had even tangled for the helm of the state party back in Jan of '09, when progressive leader, former Pima County party chair Paul Eckerstrom handily defeated Bivens in a short-lived upset. As detailed in Stephen Lemon's New Times article, "Eckerstrom Upsets Bivens for Dem Party Chair; Pullen Beats Back James Challenge for GOP Spot," unhappy with the continuing erosion of the Dem brand in AZ, Eckerstrom and the Progressives tried to upset the "Kingdom of Maricopa" strategy of the central Democratic leadership. (Dem higher-ups and the ranks and file are quick to note that 60% of all the votes cast in this election were cast in Maricopa County. That includes Tucson, that includes Flagstaff and all the hinterlands rolled together.)
Progressives, however, counter that the only way to retrain this reddest of red states is to get the progressive message out in every election and force a frame on the debate that is away from issues like abortions and gay marriage. In a mirror of the national collapse of progressive momentum following the Obama election, Fresh out of the gate with Obama's taking office Arizona Progressives unified and surged in the vote, derailing Bivens and briefly seating Eckerstrom who vowed to take a "15 County" approach for the state party that was similar to Howard Dean's widely-lauded "50 State" approach of working in all races, even long shots to spread the progressive message.
But less than a month after the upset, Lemons was again reporting on the Brew-ha-ha. This time that Eckerstrom had resigned acknowledging he wasn't ready to meet the time and travel demands of actually being state party chair. Not only had progressive upbraided themselves, apparently, there had also been considerable dissent among the old school rank and file Dems at the thought of having progressives shaping the party agenda, and even talk of fundraising drying up if Bivens was not back on top as the led money man for the Dems.
Guess what? Presto-change-o, Eckerstrom's back out, Bivens is back in and the Dems have been battling an image of being sell-outs every since, with the upstart progressives still scrambling to reform their coup.
The saga of the progressives' lunge to regain their credibility was written between the lines of oratory and there was plenty of that to be had around that floor. It was the one place where those rallying cries were seen as entirely unironic and/or non-delusional. And there were plenty of rallying cries to be had. Helmed with grace and quick wittedness orchestration by Dan O'Neal, the meeting, as documented on the PDA website in "Democrats Need To Act Like the Opposition Party and Put Up a Fight," by Dianne Post and Barbara McCullough-Jones, was a round robin of at-large calls to action (yours truly's included).
A veritable who's who of liberal activist causes in AZ, including "Arizona Institute for Peace, Education and Research (AIPER) and Radio Phoenix, the ACLU, NAACP, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, DFA, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Code Pink, Arizona Progress ACTION and the End War Coalition. It was the only place where people openly looked like hippies, traded wit in addition to whining and where i felt like my "ImpeachBush.Org" ball-cap and peace signs weren't a deficit to my message.
I even spoke twice, muddled in garbled wishful thinking, first about acknowledging the importance of accepting the reality of the plutocracy and of figuring a way to market liberal ideas to plutocrats as a viable option to their current apparent preferred brand of rightwing oppression.
My other speech went something like:
"The Dem party needs to not lose sight of the fact that the youth of America does not support GOP ideas. They voted against the McCain-Palin brand of Bushco Redux in '08 by more than 24 million votes. This go-round, despite two disappointing years of failed Dem rhetoric and a forced fed diet of "Democratic party portrayed as posed ineffectualism" by the mainstream media, young voters still voted against GOP candidates and propositions by nearly 20%.
Unfortunately more than fourteen million of those young 2008 voters stayed home this go-round, dooming Dem chances because the Democrats dropped the ball for marketing their ideas. The Democrats need to become as exciting a logo for progressivism as the GOP have been by co-opting the image of the Tea Party to symbolize their conservatism. We had the youth and lost them and we need to inspire them back again. The Dems need to look cool to young people or we won't get this thing fixed. And Dems are not going to energize a youth vote, or anyone else's vote, by insisting the brand be about old school moneyed politics as usual. That is exactly the stigma kids detest about the GOP. Kids want to believe in something, but we need to act like we believe in something more than fundraising."
I am sure i didn't say all of that correctly, but i said my piece. Kind people that they were, they let me finish the whole speech. But the meeting only had so much time and soon we were back to the main hall for the afternoon general assembly and a final round of "we'll get 'em next time"-type speeches from the various, and numerous, defeated statewide candidates, minus Penny Kotterman, among others.
Though some genuine winners were in the mix, the roster of speakers shared a tone of trying to not speak of the grapes as too, too, sour. Re-elected Southern AZ Congresswoman Gabbie Giffords stood proud when her turn at bat came round. "We didn't do anything wrong," she bragged of her role in the Democrat-led Congress' widely lauded immensely productive legislative record. Yet every achievement she listed was in fact, in the end, a sold-out, compromised-to-the-point-of-meaningless, backroom deal designed to satisfy a sneering GOP who hate giving even an inch to win a mile; and to serve Dems who would rather manufacture PR points, rather than actually accomplish anything.
For those keeping track, again Rodney Glassman made it clear he was still hoping to run for something, and Andrei Cherny made it clear the rest of us should hope he would run again as well. The tearjerker sweetheart prize of the afternoon had to go to Felecia Rotellini, whose speech left not one dry eye in the house, including her own. She had been the closest statewide candidate in the election, getting 48% of the vote. Like Cherny, Felecia felt like a future of AZ Democrats. Afterwards, she also called my lovely wife Beth, "An Unsung Hero." So, of course, even if she hadn't already seemed like the most competent Dem candidate among what i took to be a highly qualified slate, Rotellini won my heart with that remark.
Still, my favorite speaker that day, on a day of great hope but many mixed messages, was the big man himself, Terry Goddard, who rose to thunderous applause and mixed standing ovations. Though the outgoing Attorney General, Goddard's not going anywhere as a force in AZ Dem politics anytime soon. Like the other Dem elite, Goddard was happy with the level of productivity the mechanism of the state party machine created, proud of the work Dems had done together.
"We need to keep doing the things we do as Democrats and we need to keep doing them right," Goddard cheered. It was a stirring line in a speech that included the line that got me stirred up: the part when Goddard concluded that though Arizona had "never been a land of hatred and racism," in this election, really, the only way Dems could have won this election would have been to "join the immigrant bashers."
I about choked on my cookie. That is to say, i had a hard time with Goddard's claim about AZ racism. Considering that our state is widely acknowledged to now be and to have long been so racist a society that it used to be known as the "Mississippi of the West," so much so it led to historic civil rights action in the 1960-70s, and was later the target of a Public Enemy protest song in the 1990s. And that as a territory Arizona once allowed Tempe to make it a crime to be "Sonoran" back in 1872; and that the city Goddard once was mayor of was founded by a disgruntled Confederate soldier, Jack Swilling. Considering all that, i wanted to speak up to him. Unlike watching his speech on TV, when it was over i could, and actually did, walk over and asked him about it.
While Goddard acknowledged the history, he clarified he believed the current crisis is the result of people like Russell Pearce and Fox News. As he said in his speech, "Russell Pearce was not elected to be the Voice of Arizona, but you just watch, because he thinks he was."
Before i left i had to ask, "So, back before the election, i asked you a question about Prop 203 and i felt you made it seem like supporting 203 would put you out of the mainstream--"
"I know," Terry smiled, "I read the articles"
I looked up and Terry Goddard was smiling at me. So i forged on, "--and yet that's exactly where you wound up being. Marijuana got like 200,000 more votes than you did. What do you make of it?"
Goddard scratched his cheek, "I don't know what to make of it. I don't think it was the right decision, but Arizonans voted in a lot of decisions that day. Almost as many people voted for marijuana," Goddard explained, "as voted for Jan Brewer."
Quickly i quipped, "Are you saying a person would have to be stoned to vote for Jan Brewer."
"No, but I'm laughing when you say it" Goddard lol-ed. So did i.
And we left it at that.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Like many others, I had come, as a Democrat to downtown Phoenix seeking to assemble with other Democrats, wandering if we were still welcome in the capitol city. I felt lost. We had lost, in a great-big, major way. It sucked, i wanted a new plan. I'd come to the Wyndham to find it. This hotel was supposed to play host to what was supposed to be the first post-election state-wide meeting of the party and there wasn't a donkey in sight.
I was there as myself of course, but also, as my wife's, Beth Weisser's, representative at the consolation-fest she would surely be in for as a recently defeated state senate candidate. The AEA had scheduled a training day the same day. We are both members of both and had to split forces to cover the bases, and sift through the clichés. Beth drew the short straw and i was off on an adventure.
As myself, i was there as an "elected precinct committeeman," which is, i guess, one tad better than being an "elected nothing," but i was still a novice, a babe in the woods, despite something like being a 6 year semi-active member of the actual party, as opposed to someone who simply votes Democrat based on the TV ads or some much. While working as a Democrat wasn't often a central part of my life, come election time, and especially since my wife candidacy, i gleefully put up some signs, pass out some flyers. I drink a lot of coffee while a wide variety of people explain to me exactly what the problem is. You know, good times; it's a party.
But then i am also this annoying self-supposed would-be journalist-type, a supposed jokester who skews Dems as freely as the GOP when desperate for easy targets. It is an odd role to play, being the kind of guy who would probably write a column like this, about a meeting like that with a sense of minor, but gleeful, mischief. Anyway, in any of those various roles that play the player, i was mostly there to ask, 'what the ____ just happened? '
"Shellacking." It is such an active verb, Mr. President.
As you may recall that was Obama's morning-after descriptor of choice for the defeat dealt the Democrats in this just past election. To be properly "shellacked," one is not "merely" or even "summarily" defeated. No. One must be brought down, killed, and subsequently disemboweled, immersed in acids, stuffed like a beaver, and THEN painted, varnished in fact with the shell secretions from lac beetles. That's right doused in beetle juice. It's the same yummy flavor all candy lovers crave on the shells of their shiny M&Ms, though there known as "confectioner's glaze." It's the kind of term use to describe what you would do with a roughly worn relic that was looking a little worse for wear. As in:
("Should we throw this here ol' stuffed iguana? It's lookin' a might bit scruffy about the elbows."
"Naw, just give it another shellacking.")
See? That what it means to get a good "shellacking," Mr. Obama. And i admit, that that was a fairly apt description of the appearances of many of my Dem colleagues that morning at the Wyndham. Like so many Dems there that day, i was still a little sore from my election-day shellacking and i was looking the restart button, hoping for some recantation-style postgame color done by penitent Dem leadership sans the spin cycle; and, more importantly, some quick pointers on how the rest of us were going to save our state from the hillbilly Gestapo Fox News had just put in charge of us.
I further went with the attitude that the Blue Dog Dems brought this turn upon us all and had a lot of explaining to do. The success of the Tea Party emblem for the GOP showed that Dems needed to differentiate from not assimilate with the GOP leaning segment of the voters. Yes, i am prepared to say it is the move to the right that has destroyed the Democrats, a move away from the public's and the party's best interests.
Twice in recent elections the Dems had first sold, then sold out the message they'd campaigned on, squandering American goodwill and momentum in support of them. The public has every right to be wary. As Jon Stewart quipped to Barack Obama, "It's like they're campaigning on 'Come on, Baby, give me one more chance." In 2006, Dems claimed they were rising up against the Bush regime and rallied the country and then, upon being swept into office on national good will for their message, they just basically became members of the Bush power-structure for the last two years of his presidency. Though Dems "controlled" Congress, between bluster and signing statements, Bush still wrote or rewrote government to his liking, consistently got military funding, torturer approval, and legislative endorsements for his Wall Street bail-out schemes.
Then in the face of the Bush economic crisis, America hired the opposition, the Dems to the rescue, to sort it all out and make the mess right, right? And instead, banks continued to get billions in bail-outs while millions are thrown out of their houses by these every same banks with no way to fight back, even after it is plainly shown that multitudes of these evictions are frauds. The fabled Stimulus package gets hollowed out to where it won't achieve much more than the ability to be stuck with a GOP label as an excess spending talking point.
Then there's a whole other massive expense of energy and goodwill on a health care reform that in the end ... ran the same course, dribbling down from mighty message to mealy mouth gesture, selling out the same people it claimed it was helping, following a tri-cornered hat waved around by a PR firm, all to keep powerful health and insurance interests entrenched and train a public to work against their own best interests, by fighting in the streets against universal healthcare.
And now those Tea Party people were going to be running my state? I needed some inspiration. So i wandered through the well-appointed lobby, looking for likeminded Donkey-lovers, searching for some sign it was all going to be all right. With no sign of a sign in sight. That's right, and when i asked for directions, it sounded something like 'over the river and through the woods.' All the length of the lobby and up the escalator there was no further sign of Democrat direction. As if we were hidden from the general public.
Finally up an escalator and just as you got sight of the second floor, the one and only sign of Democrats in the house came into view. It read:
Schizophrenia
Building Awareness
Advancing Understanding
[and the room name in smaller print]
AZ Democratic Party
State Committee Meeting
[and the room name in smaller print]
AZ Democratic Party
Breakout Sessions
[and so on]
Seriously, i wasn't there to play hall monitor, but i got in a little early, like several other out-of-towners, so i had some time to observe. Few of the people i saw come off that escalator got past that sign without some sort of reaction. And i had about an hour's time that morning lounging on the second floor luxury lobby furniture, to gauge the degree of irony appreciation in each escalator riders' registry as they saw the sign.
I spent some of that time with Rudy Clark, long-time Native American activist and lobbyist, and a retired teacher. He came down from Peach Springs this morning, but had done some time in the trenches in DC. He warned right now the Democrats look weak and frightened, "pushed into a corner, heading for failure." And Clark wondered why all state and national Democratic leadership allowed that characterization of Democrats to happen and become lodged in the public mind. He also wondered why the Republican party and in particular the Supreme court "had lost their minds, offering the extremely wealthy people even more advantage."
Statewide Clark, himself, felt a bit shellacked over victories by pro-SB1070 candidates. "I keep hoping Joe Arpaio will have something to do to take him to our reservation and then I'll ask him where are his papers and what's he doing in MY country?" Clark quipped.
Just before joining the crowd flooding into the main meeting hall, we caught up with the Safford contingent of Democratic activists. Jay Rasco took a second to explain what he saw as the upcoming GOP agenda: "If you keep the working man down, nose to the grindstone, everyday, nose to the grindstone just to keep up, and make sure they have lots of kids and have lots of bills, then they'll be too busy to rock the boat. That's what the GOP has in mind for us."
At a time when the "Party of Change" could be saddled so easily as the party of status quo the Dems had obviously lost track of their message. I was hoping to bring them back to their sense. But you know what they say, the first step to fixing a problem is being willing to admit that you have a problem in the first place; and the Dem hierarchy there that day were all as happy as campers, despite the fact we were all still drippy with beetle juice. Vince Rabago's campaign chairman, Gilberto Zaragoza, for example was a happy camper with party's campaign effort this year. "Everything went well," he concluded. "We did everything we could." Except win, of course.
Despite the fact that the long-standing and wide spread nickname for her organization within the Democratic Party is mockingly referred to as the "uncoordinated campaign," Michelle Davidson, the coordinator of the party's "Coordinated Campaign," was shockingly proud of her efforts as well; and could and did substantiate her claims of actively running an extensive campaign, through numerous charts of various grafts ... though polling had shown that by May of '10 the public's goodwill for Dems had decidedly dwindled. Considering all the robo-calls that were made, the pieces of campaign literature created and distributed, and the personal connections pretended, and, all of it duly documented on the big screen PowerPoint presentation, Davidson's campaign had indeed stayed busy, fiddling away as the whole titanic enterprise sank beneath waves of GOP voter resentments.
Recent shellacked Mesa state representative candidate, Mike Conway, thought of the backlash he was already seeing, and said bitterly, "I am already sick of hearing about 'Obama-care.' I mean come on, at least the Democrats do care!"
Conway elaborated, "Look, i did better than some of the targeted candidates. If the targeted candidates did this badly, the ones who got additional funding and support, if they did this badly, then what does that say about the effectiveness of state party efforts, no matter what their expense of energy?"
If the Arizona Democratic Party leadership was aware of this widespread dissension, they were in emphatic denial. For the first 1/2 hour of their presentation it seemed possible no one had told these assembled experts the results of the election. They were very busy talking about their success in fundraising and the challenge of logistics and how good they had done as if losing by 20% or so was a fine race run.
Unfortunately if the rank-in-file were there to get a display of what party higher-ups cared about, it was obviously still money, to the point of being oblivious about almost all else. As state party chair Don Bivens gushed ecstatically, "We raised the money we wanted and spent it the way we wanted to."
The roster of morning speakers were likewise money minded. Bivens set the tone for treasurer and others who focused on the success the party had had in fund-raising. True early on in the election cycle the fundraising for Democrats versus Republicans, both nationally and to a degree in AZ showed that Dems while anemic were more robust than the Republican party. In fact in 2009, prior to the Citizens United case, the Republican party was supposedly on the fundraising ropes.
The first person to move past applauding effort expended and openly acknowledge the actual vote count was state treasurer candidate, Andrei Cherny, "We had an unmitigated disaster and there are people all over the state who don't even realize the consequences that will devastate their lives for years to come." It roused the most vocal applause all morning.
On the floor the party leadership spent as much of that morning's energy as they could get away with by blaming Obama. Over-all the talking points that morning were AZ racists love SB 1070 and Obama let us all down. And then there was that most predictable of mechanisms, the backlash of midterms. Yet we had our best year ever ... except for that losing part. One of the more comic unintentional ironies was when a presenter noted, "We had more data than ever and better data than ever. So we made a huge investment in data collection and it came out to tell us exactly what we expected all along: 65% of the GOP showed up to vote, only 55% of Democrats," and thus we lost. A spokeswoman for the Goddard campaign added, "As Democrats, we see ourselves as a party of intellect. The GOP present themselves as a party of emotion and the emotion they build on most is fear."
When the floor opened up to Q&A, i was offered a chance to frame a question for the panel and scrambled through a series of near misses, such as: "Nationally the pundit class is claiming the message of this election is that Republican ideas should rule. How are Democrats to take this?" Or, "Nationally this race showed that the plutocrats can in most cases buy the candidate of their choosing. The big corporate money went to the GOP slate of ideas. Are we, as a country, fated to that kind of existence, to be bought and sold by such hateful ideas."
OR, "The division is clearly between money and people, in this next election, does the Democratic party intend to work for the money or work for the people?" or rephrased, "Let's be honest about the moral of the Citizens United Supreme Court case decision. This election showed the plutocrats can buy the elections that they want. Their message was clearly hate, fear, and division. This meeting has talked about money quite a bit already. Does the Democratic Party in AZ intend to work for the money or work for the people?"
In the end i chose to rephrase my Goddard question from earlier articles: "The GOP works closely with the Tea Party. The move showed to be a success. How does the Democratic Party intend to try to rebuild their connections with the liberals and progressives who typically energize a party and whom the Dem party turned their backs on this election?"
But dear reader you're going to have to satisfy yourself with your own answers to those queries because in the end my question wasn't taken and we were all sent scurrying for a quick lunch.
Returning, i noticed the sounds of a street musician across the hotel's main entrance. I dug out some change and said, "So, there's a political convention going on over there," and i pointed to the hotel. "Yeah?" he seems unimpressed. "Getting much?" my pocket change clanked in his hands. "Not much." "No surprise," i said. "No surprise," he echoed behind me.
When i got inside the first person i spoke to was this wise Indian woman, a Hindi Indian, woman, at the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, in a discussion of recruiting candidates. She was inspired and explained, "If you don't have to worry about winning then you can be more fearless with your message." I hoped to let that be a guide for me for the afternoon sessions.
Torn between my wife's favorite, the Federated Democratic Women, and the LGBT Rainbow Caucus, i decided to split my time with both, but first chatted up Phil Hettmansperger and District 4's Ken LaKind about the need of Democrats challengers in all races in all districts. Hettmansperger had been a recurring state candidate.
In the course of conversation, LaKind hoped i would delineate for him and his neighbor an explanation of the banking scandal and why both GOP and not just Dems, like Dodd, were culpable. The neighbor, on a rightwing news diet, believed that the Democratic Party was consistently at fault for Wall Street deregulation because of Clinton era deregulations, in particular the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall. But as the powerful, but under-heard video "I'm not Voting Republican Because I Have a Memory," dutifully documents, it's actually the GOP who have been in power through every major banking scandal in the last century.
The 1999 reversal of Glass Steagall was orchestrated by three Republicans, Gramm, Leach and Bliley, not Clinton, in a time when the Republican Whitewater lynch mob ran the Congressional show. Next, just as his brother, Neil, had dabbled in the Silverado Saving & Loan Scandal decades earlier on daddy's watch, George W Bush backed banks bilking the public again and again, until they had leveraged the whole apparatus to fall over on itself; and then, instead of taking the lumps, they pushed to have the public bail them out, to keep them in business so those very same banks could then throw us all out in the street. And then post it as their record profits and use them to pay GOP record corporate donations.
The impact of those donation dollars was plain to see on the faces in any of the caucus breakout sessions i attended that day. Finally i ducked into the Women's caucus. The sweet gray haired ladies who had spotted the promise of my dear sweet wife, Beth Weisser, and who had then paid the expenses to send her to the women's candidate training program, Emerge Arizona, were still there and still as earnest as ever. It made one feel proud to see such a collection of the heritage of Democratic women had in Arizona, including friends and acquaintances of former Dem governors Rose Mofford, '88- 91, and Janet Napolitano, '03-09. I mean the original little old ladies were still there, still running the meetings, now a little older than ever.
The ladies talked about a cookbook they had going as a fundraiser. They talked about some resort time they could sort-of raffle off. And then there was a fine-looking paperback edition of the collection of quotations by extraordinary women edited longtime AZ Dem powerhouse Ms. Carolyn Warner. She spoke of coming back from DC after the election and riding with both McCain and Harry Mitchell.
About that point i asked AZ Dem Party State Secretary, Brittni Storrs, her take on the average age of the people in the fairly filled room. She speculated, "mid-50s, somewhere in the 50s." I asked for her age: 23.
When the talk again returned to dealing with fundraising i raised my hand. Unlike my chances on the main floor that morning, in the women's caucus i got my question asked. I said, "I don't mean to be impertinent, but i have to wonder. Thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court case, the GOP has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions. How are you going to battle that kind of fundraising with cook books?"
Not missing a beat, Warner challenged that rather than figure a way to work with Citizens United, which was clearly a path to ruin, the Dems had to lead the way in creating the legislation prohibiting corporate funding of elections. furthermore, Warner warned, it needs to be pressed for now, during the lame duck Congress before Republicans take power in January. Warner called for all Arizonans, and all Americans in general, to call dramatically on Congress to pass such an amendment while we the people still have a chance to own what remains of our country. I was so struck by her speech i promised her to write of it and have. See?
And just then, fear not campaign lovers, as it happened in every session i attended, it somehow seemed Rodney Glassman, fresh from baby and ripe with one liners, was already in campaign mode with a nuanced road-ready "thank you everybody" speech about how he goes from room to room with no planned speech, but he hears the same issues being discussed in each of the breakout rooms. [Insert preferred caucus-centric issue here.] Playing the outsider, in 3 different breakout sessions i attended, Glassman roused himself and others to the call they needed to tear down the walls between the caucuses, if only the leadership would let everybody speak.
Meanwhile over at the Rainbow Caucus, at least in the few moments i saw, i was just wishing everybody would shut up--recurring infighting diluted the fun of being gay about politics. Instead of addressing issues like strategies for refuting impending GOP anti-homosexual agenda, they were battling over web pages and availability of minutes. The thing about caucuses, when they start being more about their own personal politics, than about how they intersect in the larger political landscape, their energy is absorbed on their own Peyton Places and they lose effectiveness. For those jostling for position, the battle must be breathtaking. For the rest of us, there because GSA issues are the essence of human rights issues, the tug-of-war turned tedious quickly. Just sayin'.
Luckily, i just barely slipped into that meeting in time to help it degenerate into the after-talk indicative of such gatherings as political caucuses; and then slipped out and onto the only caucus to prove worth really catching that day for me, the only place with the rush and tingle of the excitement of possibility ... was the progressives. The Progressive Democratic Caucus of Arizona, our state's branch of the PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), that is, a congregation of every liberal cause imaginable.
Combined, they proved a thrilling ménage to behold. The Progressive Caucus in fact, proved the only caucus on campus where the hotel staff had to bring in additional seating and the bustle of people gathered and chairs being passed down, added a thrill to the build up for the meeting. Chairs lined back walls and people stood along the sides. The room buzzed with the power of ideas. Dynamic PDA speaker and leader Jeff Latas revved up the crowd to the point cheering and speechifying erupted spontaneously.
And have no doubt, the populism was indeed popular. Despite the fact they appeared to be thought of as an unwanted evil stepchild by the party leaders, the progressive caucus was far and away the largest caucus there that day, the loudest as well. On a day when only 240 or so even attended the statewide committee meeting, over one hundred people signed in at the Progressive Caucus, a group that has longtime bad blood with the establishment money boys like Bivens in ADP (Arizona Democratic Party--yes, those are the same letters as PDA, except in a different order).
In fact, ADP leadership refused to grant the PDA a seat at the executive committee with the other caucus leaders and had even tangled for the helm of the state party back in Jan of '09, when progressive leader, former Pima County party chair Paul Eckerstrom handily defeated Bivens in a short-lived upset. As detailed in Stephen Lemon's New Times article, "Eckerstrom Upsets Bivens for Dem Party Chair; Pullen Beats Back James Challenge for GOP Spot," unhappy with the continuing erosion of the Dem brand in AZ, Eckerstrom and the Progressives tried to upset the "Kingdom of Maricopa" strategy of the central Democratic leadership. (Dem higher-ups and the ranks and file are quick to note that 60% of all the votes cast in this election were cast in Maricopa County. That includes Tucson, that includes Flagstaff and all the hinterlands rolled together.)
Progressives, however, counter that the only way to retrain this reddest of red states is to get the progressive message out in every election and force a frame on the debate that is away from issues like abortions and gay marriage. In a mirror of the national collapse of progressive momentum following the Obama election, Fresh out of the gate with Obama's taking office Arizona Progressives unified and surged in the vote, derailing Bivens and briefly seating Eckerstrom who vowed to take a "15 County" approach for the state party that was similar to Howard Dean's widely-lauded "50 State" approach of working in all races, even long shots to spread the progressive message.
But less than a month after the upset, Lemons was again reporting on the Brew-ha-ha. This time that Eckerstrom had resigned acknowledging he wasn't ready to meet the time and travel demands of actually being state party chair. Not only had progressive upbraided themselves, apparently, there had also been considerable dissent among the old school rank and file Dems at the thought of having progressives shaping the party agenda, and even talk of fundraising drying up if Bivens was not back on top as the led money man for the Dems.
Guess what? Presto-change-o, Eckerstrom's back out, Bivens is back in and the Dems have been battling an image of being sell-outs every since, with the upstart progressives still scrambling to reform their coup.
The saga of the progressives' lunge to regain their credibility was written between the lines of oratory and there was plenty of that to be had around that floor. It was the one place where those rallying cries were seen as entirely unironic and/or non-delusional. And there were plenty of rallying cries to be had. Helmed with grace and quick wittedness orchestration by Dan O'Neal, the meeting, as documented on the PDA website in "Democrats Need To Act Like the Opposition Party and Put Up a Fight," by Dianne Post and Barbara McCullough-Jones, was a round robin of at-large calls to action (yours truly's included).
A veritable who's who of liberal activist causes in AZ, including "Arizona Institute for Peace, Education and Research (AIPER) and Radio Phoenix, the ACLU, NAACP, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, DFA, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Code Pink, Arizona Progress ACTION and the End War Coalition. It was the only place where people openly looked like hippies, traded wit in addition to whining and where i felt like my "ImpeachBush.Org" ball-cap and peace signs weren't a deficit to my message.
I even spoke twice, muddled in garbled wishful thinking, first about acknowledging the importance of accepting the reality of the plutocracy and of figuring a way to market liberal ideas to plutocrats as a viable option to their current apparent preferred brand of rightwing oppression.
My other speech went something like:
"The Dem party needs to not lose sight of the fact that the youth of America does not support GOP ideas. They voted against the McCain-Palin brand of Bushco Redux in '08 by more than 24 million votes. This go-round, despite two disappointing years of failed Dem rhetoric and a forced fed diet of "Democratic party portrayed as posed ineffectualism" by the mainstream media, young voters still voted against GOP candidates and propositions by nearly 20%.
Unfortunately more than fourteen million of those young 2008 voters stayed home this go-round, dooming Dem chances because the Democrats dropped the ball for marketing their ideas. The Democrats need to become as exciting a logo for progressivism as the GOP have been by co-opting the image of the Tea Party to symbolize their conservatism. We had the youth and lost them and we need to inspire them back again. The Dems need to look cool to young people or we won't get this thing fixed. And Dems are not going to energize a youth vote, or anyone else's vote, by insisting the brand be about old school moneyed politics as usual. That is exactly the stigma kids detest about the GOP. Kids want to believe in something, but we need to act like we believe in something more than fundraising."
I am sure i didn't say all of that correctly, but i said my piece. Kind people that they were, they let me finish the whole speech. But the meeting only had so much time and soon we were back to the main hall for the afternoon general assembly and a final round of "we'll get 'em next time"-type speeches from the various, and numerous, defeated statewide candidates, minus Penny Kotterman, among others.
Though some genuine winners were in the mix, the roster of speakers shared a tone of trying to not speak of the grapes as too, too, sour. Re-elected Southern AZ Congresswoman Gabbie Giffords stood proud when her turn at bat came round. "We didn't do anything wrong," she bragged of her role in the Democrat-led Congress' widely lauded immensely productive legislative record. Yet every achievement she listed was in fact, in the end, a sold-out, compromised-to-the-point-of-meaningless, backroom deal designed to satisfy a sneering GOP who hate giving even an inch to win a mile; and to serve Dems who would rather manufacture PR points, rather than actually accomplish anything.
For those keeping track, again Rodney Glassman made it clear he was still hoping to run for something, and Andrei Cherny made it clear the rest of us should hope he would run again as well. The tearjerker sweetheart prize of the afternoon had to go to Felecia Rotellini, whose speech left not one dry eye in the house, including her own. She had been the closest statewide candidate in the election, getting 48% of the vote. Like Cherny, Felecia felt like a future of AZ Democrats. Afterwards, she also called my lovely wife Beth, "An Unsung Hero." So, of course, even if she hadn't already seemed like the most competent Dem candidate among what i took to be a highly qualified slate, Rotellini won my heart with that remark.
Still, my favorite speaker that day, on a day of great hope but many mixed messages, was the big man himself, Terry Goddard, who rose to thunderous applause and mixed standing ovations. Though the outgoing Attorney General, Goddard's not going anywhere as a force in AZ Dem politics anytime soon. Like the other Dem elite, Goddard was happy with the level of productivity the mechanism of the state party machine created, proud of the work Dems had done together.
"We need to keep doing the things we do as Democrats and we need to keep doing them right," Goddard cheered. It was a stirring line in a speech that included the line that got me stirred up: the part when Goddard concluded that though Arizona had "never been a land of hatred and racism," in this election, really, the only way Dems could have won this election would have been to "join the immigrant bashers."
I about choked on my cookie. That is to say, i had a hard time with Goddard's claim about AZ racism. Considering that our state is widely acknowledged to now be and to have long been so racist a society that it used to be known as the "Mississippi of the West," so much so it led to historic civil rights action in the 1960-70s, and was later the target of a Public Enemy protest song in the 1990s. And that as a territory Arizona once allowed Tempe to make it a crime to be "Sonoran" back in 1872; and that the city Goddard once was mayor of was founded by a disgruntled Confederate soldier, Jack Swilling. Considering all that, i wanted to speak up to him. Unlike watching his speech on TV, when it was over i could, and actually did, walk over and asked him about it.
While Goddard acknowledged the history, he clarified he believed the current crisis is the result of people like Russell Pearce and Fox News. As he said in his speech, "Russell Pearce was not elected to be the Voice of Arizona, but you just watch, because he thinks he was."
Before i left i had to ask, "So, back before the election, i asked you a question about Prop 203 and i felt you made it seem like supporting 203 would put you out of the mainstream--"
"I know," Terry smiled, "I read the articles"
I looked up and Terry Goddard was smiling at me. So i forged on, "--and yet that's exactly where you wound up being. Marijuana got like 200,000 more votes than you did. What do you make of it?"
Goddard scratched his cheek, "I don't know what to make of it. I don't think it was the right decision, but Arizonans voted in a lot of decisions that day. Almost as many people voted for marijuana," Goddard explained, "as voted for Jan Brewer."
Quickly i quipped, "Are you saying a person would have to be stoned to vote for Jan Brewer."
"No, but I'm laughing when you say it" Goddard lol-ed. So did i.
And we left it at that.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
"The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2), now revised
Hey Folks,
The editor's at OpEd News kicked back my original submission of "The People's Work," calling for revisions. I looked, saw they were right, and have made dozens of changes. I would like my writing more if i did not make mistakes, but since i do, please take this apology and try this edit instead--mikel
"The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2), now revised
"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"
--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe
UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."
Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.
While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-Wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.
The math is simple: Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.
Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.
Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole. All the GOP won was some ill-timed name recognition and brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government shall become for the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.
This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.
For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually gain their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.
You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The Right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free." But the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.
Then there's the "Reconstructionist"/"Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.
Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.
As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"
Well, excuse us, the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And, what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything, including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul, and all of the folks who simply are, or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?
Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion-doctor murderers and their fan club, who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be. As if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.
Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]" IS the whole point. For those folks, this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but for the religious right, it's their daily bread. Oh well, for the unraptured rest of us, it's the fabled lake of fire, while Christians get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity, and ever and ever, amen.
Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" Libertarian voices in Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power, to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.
And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by-then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.
If these "Tenther" types get their way, Social Security, like all other social services, will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest-possible-cost services to only the oldest of survivors. See? Through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred; and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. That's the power of the market for you. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless."
Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," swelling the population third world country style, further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have tried to do every since the invention of money whenever a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods. Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.
And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.
Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.
On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then that would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, FEMA camps, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.
I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built in those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.
So none of that stuff will ever happen.
That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror.
In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is more than $660,000, with an average of well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In Boehner's speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.
As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY ARE the rich. It all makes sense now.
Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new "record bonuses," "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks at still more interest. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.
The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. There is some suggestion the future of American values may continue to evolve for the better.
Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls this go-round, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.
Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones do not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got to bear enough Wall Street bull for that as it is.
There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round, the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.
Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" were less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?
These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years.
Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys that briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it vacuumed itself off the pages of our American Heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers than to pay its own bills.
Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government was supposed to be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them. And best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.
A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.
The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in their statehouses all across the land. Claiming outrageous taxes, state governments stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.
Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.
But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.
Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren beneath tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies; all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?
And those righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses. Racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.
I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their forbearers equally small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.
I prefer a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call ideas like the Articles of Confederation "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose a form of more perfect union.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
The editor's at OpEd News kicked back my original submission of "The People's Work," calling for revisions. I looked, saw they were right, and have made dozens of changes. I would like my writing more if i did not make mistakes, but since i do, please take this apology and try this edit instead--mikel
"The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2), now revised
"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"
--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe
UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."
Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.
While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-Wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.
The math is simple: Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.
Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.
Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole. All the GOP won was some ill-timed name recognition and brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government shall become for the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.
This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.
For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually gain their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.
You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The Right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free." But the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.
Then there's the "Reconstructionist"/"Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.
Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.
As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"
Well, excuse us, the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And, what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything, including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul, and all of the folks who simply are, or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?
Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion-doctor murderers and their fan club, who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be. As if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.
Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]" IS the whole point. For those folks, this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but for the religious right, it's their daily bread. Oh well, for the unraptured rest of us, it's the fabled lake of fire, while Christians get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity, and ever and ever, amen.
Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" Libertarian voices in Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power, to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.
And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by-then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.
If these "Tenther" types get their way, Social Security, like all other social services, will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest-possible-cost services to only the oldest of survivors. See? Through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred; and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. That's the power of the market for you. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless."
Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," swelling the population third world country style, further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have tried to do every since the invention of money whenever a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods. Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.
And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.
Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.
On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then that would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, FEMA camps, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.
I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built in those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.
So none of that stuff will ever happen.
That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror.
In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is more than $660,000, with an average of well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In Boehner's speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.
As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY ARE the rich. It all makes sense now.
Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new "record bonuses," "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks at still more interest. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.
The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. There is some suggestion the future of American values may continue to evolve for the better.
Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls this go-round, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.
Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones do not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got to bear enough Wall Street bull for that as it is.
There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round, the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.
Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" were less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?
These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years.
Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys that briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it vacuumed itself off the pages of our American Heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers than to pay its own bills.
Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government was supposed to be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them. And best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.
A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.
The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in their statehouses all across the land. Claiming outrageous taxes, state governments stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.
Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.
But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.
Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren beneath tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies; all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?
And those righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses. Racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.
I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their forbearers equally small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.
I prefer a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call ideas like the Articles of Confederation "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose a form of more perfect union.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Current Comedy 11/15/10: "The People's Work" (Welcome to the Occupation, Part 2)
"Listen to the Congress where we propagate confusion primitive and wild"
--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe
UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."
Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.
While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.
Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.
Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They merely pissed Americans off. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.
Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole-ing every news item till it is distorted beyond any actual humans' actual recognition. All the GOP won is name recognition and some ill-timed brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government is going to become over the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.
This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference, is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.
For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually win their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.
You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free;"but the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.
Then there's the "Reconstructionist" and the "Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.
Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.
As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"
Well, excuse us the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans who now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul and all of the folks who simply are or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?
Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion doctor murderers and their fan club who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be, as if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.
Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]." For those folks this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but the religious right, it's their daily bread. And for the unraptured rest of us, the fabled lake of fire, while they get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity and ever and ever, amen.
Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" the Libertarian voices of Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.
And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.
If the "Tenthers" get their way, like all other social services, Social Security will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest possible cost services to only the oldest of survivors. Yet, through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless." Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.
Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have every since the invention of money when a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods.
And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.
Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.
On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then it would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing an impact of a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--the rightness of getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.
I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.
So none of that stuff will ever happen.
That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror. In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is over $660,000 and well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In his speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.
No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY'RE the rich. As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. It all makes sense now.
Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new record bonuses, "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.
The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.
Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones does not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got Wall Street for that.
There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.
Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs and think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" was less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?
These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years. Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys who briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it's vacuumed itself off the pages of our American heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers then to pay its own bills.
Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government would be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them, and best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.
A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.
The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in the statehouses across the land. Governments which stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.
Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.
But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.
Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren with tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies and all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?
And the righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses--racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.
I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.
I'm actually part of a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call these Articles of Confederation ideas "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose to form of more perfect union.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
--Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe
UPDATE: In our last post, i quoted our soon-to-be former attorney general, outgoing AZ Democrat darling, and then-gubernatorial hopeful Terry Goddard, as laughing at the suggestion that, unlike the GOP's blatant support of its Tea Partiers, the Democratic Party appeared to distance itself from the agendas of its liberal base. When asked for an example, i pointed out the wide-ranging support for Prop 203, which he flippantly dismissed as a "pet issue." Prop 203, you may recall, aimed to regiment the legalization of highly regulated medical marijuana to cancer and glaucoma patients and the like. Goddard was afraid the image of supporting medical care for sick people would cost him votes and earn a label as "being out of touch with the mainstream."
Turns out that's exactly what he was. Eleven days after Goddard's concession speech, after nearly two weeks of vote counting, Prop 203 passed and became Arizona law by just over 4,000 votes. Goddard had lost by well over 200,000.
While it must be admitted that the national races offered an even wider range of embarrassments of Dems selling-out their most motivated supporters, liberal/progressives, and then getting their just due "shellacking," as the President so glumly put it, it is fun to note that in this reddest of states, health care for sick people, a liberal idea that most life-long politicians, such as Goddard himself, had scoffed at and condescended over, over the years, as "hippie crap," just got more votes than Goddard did. In fact, even in an election year with a supposed tidal wave of Right-wing tsunamis in their respective tea pots, "weirdo weed" had the audacity to get itself elected, timid Terry did not.
Democrats didn't get the vote because they didn't earn it. I mean, if Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are any measure of how messed up an opposition candidate has to be to not be able to defeat a Democrat, the brand has appallingly tainted itself. Thankfully the demographic that gets its news from Jon Stewart, knows a joke when they hear one brag about being a Constitutional scholar and then not recognize the first clause of the First Amendment.
Despite the roar of elephant trunks trumpeting their triumphs, this year's vote was not a powerful testimonial to Republican ideas. It was merely proof, again, that corporate sponsored advertising works with some consumers some of the time, but it can't make a wing-nut smell like a silk purse and won't mold an elder statesman out of a political jackass. Republicans did not win the hearts and minds of the American public. They merely pissed Americans off. They may have rented a few votes; but i doubt they'll be able to keep them.
Don't be deluded by the Fox-megaphone right-sliding sound effect of hyperbole-ing every news item till it is distorted beyond any actual humans' actual recognition. All the GOP won is name recognition and some ill-timed brand identification with the upcoming CF certified FUBAR SNAFU our government is going to become over the next two years. The stalemate on the left is still the stalemate on the right. And yep, the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss because it's going to be the exact same bunch of bossy bastards from just two years back, except now in Tea Party-monster mode.
This may be a bit unpleasant for the rest of us, but it's the prices we have to pay for the stalemate that profits our paymasters so. The only way our corporate criminals can possibly control their economy, maximize their profits, and minimize our interference, is to make sure neither side gets ahead by too much in the tug-of-war tape-loop we call our political process. You know the old drill: you can move to the left, or you can move to the right, either one, as long as you don't move forward. If we did, it would ruin their whole delicate balance of expensive ineffectiveness.
For example, if the crazed religious right were to actually win their fantasy level of control of our government to reek their vengeance, since vengeance is the main product they sell, it would make Rwanda look like a Disney-ride.
You could start with all the mass deportations they've been begging for, praying for, for decades. Ejecting whole families, anchor and all, on such a scale can only lead to inevitable mass miseries, martial law and more crime and, of course, higher prices. You are going to break a few eggs with that omelet. We're talking forcibly removing twelve million people from their homes all across the country, containing them for transport, then shipping them to parts unknown. When the Nazis tried this sort of thing we branded it a "Holocaust." The right may want to label their final solution, "Keeping America Free;"but the rich will simply call it "screwing with my #1 source of cheap docile labor" and just say no.
Then there's the "Reconstructionist" and the "Wall Builder" crowds' wet dream of a theocratic fundamentalist "Christian" nation, and its unavoidable holy war against all infidels-- both foreign and domestic--who won't bow before their blood-god Yaweh.
Yeh-NO. Corporations have no souls and thus they need no saving. Besides, everybody knows the Religious Right don't want peace on earth and good will to all men. They want just what they've always wanted: a heavenly rapture for a select few of them, fire, brimstone and the gnashing of teeth for the rest of us.
As former evangelist, now skeptic, Frank Schaeffer details in his latest expose of the religious right, "How Republicans and Their Big Business Allies Duped Tens of Millions of Evangelicals into Voting for a Corporate Agenda," the hard line Christian right GOP base is as zealous about eliminating heretics and infidels as any "Talibani" burqua merchant they might want to waterboard. Here's a telling quote Schaeffer cops from leading conservative theologian David Chilton's manifesto, PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion, “Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else?"
Well, excuse us the other four billion people on the planet, but that sounds like a cue for an exit. Talk about mobilizing the world of enemies who already thought we hated Islam. And every other religion in every other country on earth. And what of the terror such an edict would elicit right here at home? Though Christianity is still the number one self-identified religion by Americans, including untold millions who are actually too lazy to admit they don't believe in anything including the need to believe. Which may be all well and good if that's the crowd one wants to get loud with. But about a quarter of Americans who now claim to not be Christian. Including folks who are not Jewish or Muslim, fish, nor foul and all of the folks who simply are or simply are not. What are they going to do with all of us in our US?
Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion doctor murderers and their fan club who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be, as if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.
Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]." For those folks this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but the religious right, it's their daily bread. And for the unraptured rest of us, the fabled lake of fire, while they get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity and ever and ever, amen.
Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" the Libertarian voices of Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.
And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.
If the "Tenthers" get their way, like all other social services, Social Security will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest possible cost services to only the oldest of survivors. Yet, through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless." Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.
Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have every since the invention of money when a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods.
And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.
Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.
On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then it would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing an impact of a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--the rightness of getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.
I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.
So none of that stuff will ever happen.
That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror. In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is over $660,000 and well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In his speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.
No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY'RE the rich. As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. It all makes sense now.
Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new record bonuses, "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.
The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. Even though the vast majority of younger voters of America (age 19-29) didn't even go to the polls, and the ones that did may not have treated the Dems like their BFFs at the polls, they did see right through Tea party trickery. Despite GOP braggartry about capturing younger minds, national exit polls show Dems outpolled Republicans by from as much as16%. Nineteen percent if you include third party voting as voting against GOP candidates.
Tea Party Republicans also did not engage well with women or minorities either. Palin propaganda to the contrary, this year will be the first year since 1978 fewer women will be in the newer session of Congress than in the one just past. I guess, being a bit bearish herself, Sarah Palin and her clones does not realize the majority of Americans don't actually want a "mama grizzly" waiting around to maul them when their back is turned. We've already got Wall Street for that.
There are also going to be fewer Blacks in Congress and none in the Senate. And, even though this round the American people succumbed to the best costumed mock-patriotism money can buy and their own twin foibles of greed and racism, like some Lee Atwater style "Southern Strategy" on steroids, the GOP now has the Tea Party label to keep up with. And that flavor won't take long to leave a sour taste in most people's mouths.
Funny thing, those Tea Party "patriots" who claim to be such American History buffs and think that it entitles them to wear knee pants in public and toot their own flute as a fashion statement, then censure Jefferson from Texas textbooks as insignificant. Those guys and their legion of propagandists always leave out the fact that Sam Adams and the original "patriot movement" was less a civilized tea party and more of a badass beer bash, a political philosophy based on justifying drunken rowdies rioting at the customs houses while rich smugglers like John Hancock parlayed their personal wealth into the politics of a nation. Sound familiar?
These same Tea Party historians also fail to mention the morning-after disaster the original Tea Party ideals turned out to be, after America emerged from the fog of war, stopped fighting against Britain, and began fighting amongst ourselves. No matter how much fun these rabble rousers had trashing their British tax masters, once the shooting stopped, the Articles of Confederation government these rebels forged for themselves failed so fantastically it had to be scrapped in less than seven years. Sure, that's why we remember so little about the Articles of Confederation government and barely keep record of the twelve different guys who briefly were its president--because it sucked so bad it's vacuumed itself off the pages of our American heritage, the history we try to be proud of. In less time than it takes to say "Shay's Rebellion," America went from international inspiration to international embarrassment, a country that preferred to shoot its own soldiers then to pay its own bills.
Under the Articles of Confederation, by design, to ensure that each man might have his liberty, including the right to do wrong, the central government would be so weak it could never control the states the way England had controlled the colonies. Congress could not regulate trade, no matter what way people wanted to run their business. It could barely create laws, but had no power to enforce them, and best of all, as far as the states' rights crowd was concerned, the new federal government had no power to tax.
A Libertarian's dream, state sovereignty ruled the day. The states all vowed they would treat each other like friends; and friends don't need rules to control the behavior of "friends" right? And friends will always act like friends all the time, right? Wrong.
The businesses of the several states screwed each other over royally, and everyone else for that matter. Citizens labored under petty tyrants in their workplaces and petty tyrannies in the statehouses across the land. Governments which stripped the land and the very homes from returning Revolutionary War heroes to sell it to their real friends, the banks. These were the same Revolutionary War soldiers they had poorly supplied in the war that made our nation and then when that war was over (due to the "no federal taxes" loophole they wrote into the Articles for themselves) they refused to pay the soldiers who had fought for their freedom to own slaves. And these state governments even threw some of our returning soldiers in jail for failing to pay their outlandish state taxes which didn't even meet the interest on the loans we'd taken out to afford to fight our most recent war. And all the while they were claiming to be "Christians" as they did it.
Now if that doesn't have a familiar ring to it, then i'm just beating around the Bush.
But seriously, the chaos goes on. The states didn't treat each other any better either than the soldier who had fought to create them. Intensely independent entities, the states soon fell to throwing tariffs and insults at each other. Most states had had decades to develop sectional hatreds between each other. The roots of later Civil War factionalism were well underway. New England and the Old South depended and despised each other in equal measure. Think of a land where the states weren't at all united, but simply untied, and there is no spell-check that can fix that typo. You have to secure that kind of liberty yourself.
Each state served its own "needs" first, confederates be damned. Speaking of which, the Christian fanatical religious leaders of the time, Tea Partiers one and all, all bullied their own brethren with tales of sinners in the hands of an angry god, meanwhile condoning the accelerating annihilation of Indian societies and all the while condemning whole other states' populations as heretics worthy of excommunication because their brand of "Christianity" landed on the wrong side of the Reformation. See, the several states contended not only with their competing business interests, but also with a welter of contentious state religions. Remember, states like Rhode Island and Connecticut were made from good Christians trying to get away from the fanatical Puritans. And Maryland was the only place a Catholic was safe. So much for all that "god of love" business, huh?
And the righteous "Christian" citizens themselves were no bed of roses--racist, sexist, classist, and violent, their god smiled on as they enslaved Blacks, beat their women like chattel, spent most of their time drunk, and despite declaring that all men are equal, did not even allow their own poor people to vote until 1824. Meanwhile they genocided their way across of a continent.
I don't know about you, but knowing these are the people who brought you the original "Tea Party" makes for a bitter brew. If these are the people Boehner has in mind when he pledges to do "we, the people's" business, it's small wonder their small-minded idea of small government fell apart. Untied things don't hold together very well.
I'm actually part of a different sort of American "we." A "we, the people" who are looking to establish justice, secure some domestic tranquility, and even promote the general welfare. But if our country truly has goals like that, we have to be willing to call these Articles of Confederation ideas "history." I am banking that the more "old-school" today's Tea Party tries to get, the more blatantly they attempt to institute their own brand of liberty and freedom, the quicker we, the people, will finally choose to form of more perfect union.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
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