Now, Back to Business

I have enjoyed some serious therapy in the psychological category, if not truly psychotherapy, in the last few days via judicious attention to properly-informed and blunt-spoken on-line reporting from the second presidential debate.  As I hope you have, assisted or not.

But time is short and the devil's in the details and there are a lot of other cliches that also apply right now, what with the election less than three weeks away.  In short: This Matters Big Time.  For anyone really paying attention (no credit for time spent on the boob tube or major newspapers), this should in no way be a question of "settling" for the least-bad of Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum or some ever-so-finely-diced calculation.  This election, even more than several other recent ones, really is likely to be consequential on numerous levels.  There is absolutely no excuse, even if, like me, you are quite disappointed in what has (and has not) been accomplished in the last 46 months for being anything less than fully-engaged in this election.  Frankly, even if you never before volunteered for a phone bank or a doorbelling task, this would be an extremely good time to consider it. Particularly for any of you (ahem!) not subject to the dreaded 8-to-5.

For we face some monumental obstacles in attempting to elect the best candidate for America.  The big dollars and the oligarchy, including the richly entitled, large corporate interests, the manufacturers of electronic voting machines, and the largely republican-controlled media are all largely opposed to the interests of an egalitarian election of politicians to represent our interests.

Our local paper carried an article on the topic of Romney's "Women in Binders" issue that failed to even note that willard at least misled if not lied in claiming to have solicited the "binders" - they were more or less thrust on him.  Given that the panel for his cabinet would have naturally been drawn from the team he relied on during the election, the injection of the binders suggests he had little or no distaff participation in his campaign.  Further, I gather there were no woman executives at Bain while Mr. Entitled was in charge.  Oh yes, quite the advocate he has been.

I recently tumbled to Charles Pierce's political blog at Esquire.  He's pretty outspoken and even at times I guess a bit outrageous, but so far, so good.  Several of his posts have really resonated with me on a level that is rare lately.  I love Krugman, and he is always reliable, but (and that is a very-reserved "but") he can be awfully tactful and polite, when events these days sometimes call for more.  I sorely miss Froomkin's White House column, which was always a must-read in the increasingly-disappointing Washington Post, but, again, usually a bit too judicious.

I tried to work out a briefer excerpt, but had to settle for this, hoping you will also be hooked:

The gang on Morning Joe this morning was gassing on about how neither of the presidential candidates — but especially not the incumbent, as was repeatedly pointed out by Mark Halperin, successful pundit and talk-show sycophant — have been "specific enough" about their plans to pull the country out of the ditch in which 32 years of crackpot conservative economics and a decade of deregulated thievery have left it. (Okay, that last part was me.) There was, as you might expect, very little talk about income inequality, or about stagnating wages, or about how so many largely unaccountable centers of power have decided that the country doesn't need a middle class and, to that end, have worked on their own to make the one purportedly accountable center of power — the government, and the electoral politics that power and staff it — as unaccountable as they are, folding them into that impregnable iron bubble in which the other centers of power carve things up for their own benefit.

No, there was not any talking about that.

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It is easy to mock the sheer entitled audacity of these people's talking about the "sacrifices" that "we" all have to make. It is easy to mock the notion of a Grand Bargain which, even in its most benign form, will involve changing the very natures of Social Security and Medicare while closing "loopholes" that will sock the middle class and cost the richest people in the country a little of their pin money, at least until their lawyers and lobbyists close in on Washington and devise new loopholes to replace those old ones. (We've had an endless discussion of the mortgage-interest deduction, which is pretty plainly on life support, but almost none on the preposterous carried-interest deduction. Coincidence? I think not, and neither does my banker in the Caymans.) But the discussion failed to include what I think is the most important factor driving the current drift of support in the general direction of Willard Romney.

Resignation.

There was a moment right there at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 when the nation could have radically reassessed the power of corporations and the power of their money in our politics. The way that American corporations did business was laid bare in all its magnificent avarice and mendacity for all the world to see. The damage that an unaccountable and deregulated corporate elite could do to the rest of the country was just standing there in the open with a huge spotlight on it. It became possible for the country to see how the game had been rigged and for whose benefit, and for the country to see the complicity of the political elites in building the crooked casino that was our national economy.

And then the moment passed.

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So, as we groan on towards the election, it's becoming clear that a lot of people have decided to vote for Willard Romney because he is The Boss, and because we all know that everything in our lives, including the exercise of our freedom, is at the whim of the boss. Those are the habits of oligarchy. The Morning Joe crew speaks their language.

That's pretty chastening stuff.  A great reminder that it is probably wise to minimize contact with this mainstream media crap (M. Joe, Exhibit A).  But on the off-chance this opportunity ever comes again, I have to ponder what I/we failed to do during the transition from the worst president ever to our first minority president.  That electoral victory was for me a first in terms of exhilaration at what we had accomplished and almost equally what we had dodged.  To the limited extent I might be representative, yes, there was a let-down in intensity for a good spell, wanting to see how our guy was going to play it.  And we had all of Congress in our palm there for a spell, too.  But, honestly, Obama was never the man to properly address the sickening corporate avarice and mendacity noted in that last big paragraph above  He's at best just recently gingerly tiptoeing up to the analogous point where FDR cried out that he needed to be "made to do it."

And, yes, I find that very discouraging.  But perhaps not surprising.  The likelihood that we in our sadly still un-evolved state as a nation could have elected as President a black man with the potential to actually be a truly progressive leader, capable of dragging us back to something in the way of even a balance between the political extremes is infinitesimally small.  Of course every little mis-step or even slightly questionable quirk in Obama's history has spawned the equivalent of a full Harry Potter saga for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing creepies on the right and their owned MSM.  The reality is that Obama is probably more squeaky-clean than DDE.  Certainly far freer of any real deviation from absolutely mainstream behavior than anyone the opposition has been able to prop up.

Daniel Ellsberg (yes indeed, that one, and it is rewarding to review his tale) has some pretty specific coaching that feels as if it is at least a partial redress of my feelings of despair, well-signalled by the title Defeat Romney, Without Illusions about Obama:

It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.

The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.

An activist colleague recently said to me: “I hear you’re supporting Obama.”

I was startled, and took offense. “Supporting Obama?  Me?!”

“I lose no opportunity publicly,” I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who’s decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who’s launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. “Would you call that support?”

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. . .a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

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As Noam Chomsky said recently, “The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It’s worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives.”

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The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else.  And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate (because like me they’ve been not just disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That’s not easy.  As I see it, that’s precisely the “effort” Noam is referring to as worth expending right now to prevent the Republicans’ rise to power.  And it will take progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of persuasion effectively.