Susan Trevelyan-Syke HAPPY NEW YEAR!Right, Left and Center (Independents) vs Our Corporatist Ruling Class
Talk to ordinary citizens of the USA and they will tell you how unhappy they are with the way national decisions are made in America and with policies they do not nor have ever supported.
It does not matter if the unhappy are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Centrists, whatever. They may not like policies of the opposition, but America has reached a point when many are deeply unhappy with their own choices of elected officials.
We elect Presidents, Senators and Representatives based on the policies they put forward in their election campaigns not just for their party label.
The largest percentage of Americans are Independents if we can believe the polls: about 45% depending on the variable 22-28% tending Republican and the variable 33-38% tending Democratic. Today, both parties are at their lowest levels.
True Independents tend toward one of the two main parties, but vote for policies and individuals who are more likely to represent their views.
Americans share the same fate with every country: often voting for the lesser of two or more evils.
The elected win, because the majority of voters trust or, at least, take a chance that the elected will carry out their preferences and will or do the right thing for the country. They don't.
The elected always have many excuses for not supporting what the American people, especially their own supporters, want.
What most Americans want is a properly managed, safe and fiscally sound country with equal opportunities, jobs, homes, food, education, health care and some sort of security for their current lifestyles and future.
The most powerful country in history should be able to provide for every American with so much left over that they can help other less fortunate countries.
Yet we have record numbers of Americans with no jobs, losing their homes, living rough, not enough food or heat, children and animals abandoned and no hope that things will get better.
We are in a Depression or Recession or what ever you want to call it with a record deficit.
How did we get there? Why are we there? Why have our elected representatives and officials done so little for ordinary people when they (actually the taxpayers) can bail out the very rich companies which caused the crash? Why do they refuse to write new, stiffer regulations or enforce current law to prevent further crashes?
Why are we running wars all over the planet? Why do we need over 800 military installations throughout the world? Why are we the policemen of the world?
Why do the terrorists hate us so much?
The health-care-bill battle has exposed more than our Establishment realizes. Senators especially showed us why nothing gets done that We the People want.
Senators are members of a privileged club constantly raising money for their next elections and cutting deals with each other to satisfy their contributors. They are even too indebted to lobbyists to hire independent researchers; they hire specialists from the lobbies and spout lobbyist-prepared policy statements without attribution.
So who are the real deciders of policy? With such a setup, how could independent thinking survive? And how could we get decisions that benefit ordinary citizens or the country?
In the end, the taxpayers (otherwise known as suckers) will pay the bills.
Only citizen taxpayers could be on the verge of a grand revolt and they could succeed in time if they unite--unite and fight.
Republicans already are in the process of redefining their party to reflect its more Conservative base. They claim they will choose candidates who reflect the views of its base and will purge the party of those who do not--even currently elected officials.
This is their response to the Bush years of disillusionment ending in false Conservatism, wars, corporate bailouts, a record deficit, loss of power and fractured policies. Bush just opened the kitty jar and let the neocons and corporates plunder.
Tea Parties and FreedomWorks, i.e., have grown from Conservatives' disillusionment with Bush's big government in an attempt to take the country back to basic values.
Democrats, on the other hand, thought they had taken the country and its government back to democratic, liberal and progressive principles and policies in the 2008 election.
Instead they got the brushoff from the President who prefers a new breed of politician--the New Dems (corporatists, neo-liberals and Democratic Leadership Council followers who were thought to have been defeated with Hillary Clinton). He also likes Joe Lieberman (Independent) more than he likes regular Democrats, Progressives and Liberals.
The health-care bill debacle in the Senate has shown that the President is only interested in pleasing these few New Dems like Senators Bayh, Landrieu, Nelson along with Lieberman who claim to be moderate centrists.
He has given up working with Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
If the President had wanted a public option or a Medicare buy in, he would have put the bill through Congress by reconciliation when a simple majority of Democrats would pass the legislation.
What the President wants is a deal, any deal.
Though there are some benefits for the public in the Senate health-care bill which will probably pass, it is a massive giveaway to the health care industry corporations (20-30 million new, mandated customers and no cost controls).
Republicans are not the only ones furious about this bill.
The President himself has received almost $40 million in contributions from the health care industry as have all the New Dems and most of Congress.
They are voting their pockets and not for the common good.
We are not getting strong banking controls, because 14 freshman New Dems have been given unheard of privileged membership on the powerful House Finance Committee. Why? They vote with the Republicans to defeat every effort to control the wayward finance industry.
These New Dems are reaping the corporate contribution harvest that has been the preserve of corporatist Republicans. The DNC under Obama's leadership prefers them.
As far as raising campaign money, the New Dems and Obama have it made. Since they are in power, they will outstrip the Republicans and drown the regular Democrats whom they see as useless wimps except when it comes to voting.
Progressives, Liberals, unions among a few are furious and could find the guts to revolt on the health care bill.
Many of the great centrist moderates like Michael M Daley, Chairman of the Midwest Board of J P Morgan Chase/Bank One, have accused the "balky" of wrecking the Democratic party, splitting its majority (no mention of Bayh, Landrieu, Nelson or Lieberman of doing the same to benefit corporations), undermining the President and undermining his health care bill.
Daley is the brother of Chicago's mayor Richard J Daley, a member of the boards of Boeing (defense), Merck (drugs) and Boston Properties. He served as Secretary of Commerce under Clinton, managed Albert Gore's unsuccessful Presidential campaign and was Special Counsel in the formation of NAFTA (dear to union hearts).
Yes, the Establishment is worried that the majority of the Democratic Party will stop being toadies. They could even defeat the health care bill and make Obama's term even more difficult than the Republicans are.
And one of these days, the 99.99% of Americans who are not part of the Establishment or Ruling Class will realize that they are getting nothing back from the politicians they elect except more grief, death and taxes.
The country is almost completely socialized now to benefit big corporations at taxpayer expense.
What happened to the common good?
Political activists who are Republicans, Democrats, Centrists and Independents have decided that it is time to talk and perhaps pool resources to get power back to the people. A good example is below:
|
Libertarians on Establishment Demonization By: Jane Hamsher Tuesday December 29, 2009 1:14 pm, www.firedoglake.com |
LibeLibertarian Michael Ostralenk of the Campaign for Liberty helped put together the coalition
that signed the December 2 CAF letter opposing the Bernanke reappointment until the Federal Reserve had been audited. It was signed by myself, Robert Borosage, Dean Baker, Chris Bowers, Adam Green, James Galbraith, Tyler Durden and Tiffiniy Cheng (who blogs over at the Seminal today).
It was also signed by Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, Duane Parde of the National Taxpayers Union, Larry Greenley of the The John Birch Society and yes, Grover Norquist.
He writes today of the hostility that greeted my letter with Norquist that called for an investigation before more funds were allocated to Freddie Mac (which happened the following day), and compares it to the response on the right that greeted anti-war libertarians:
At least the attacks on Jane from the left, which I will call the Establishment left are for the most part not as bad (yet) as the attacks by the establishment right against the libertarian and paleo-conservative right during the second gulf war. I have not seen her called a traitor or unpatriotic but its interesting to note that the establishment on both sides of the aisle share mostly the same perspectives on the ‘how’ of politics and they both have similar means of either dismissing voices outside of their mainstream or of attempting to co-op them.
>
The Obama Administration and their allies in Congress are not socialists as they are commonly derided as being by the right wing press. At least not in terms of the policies they have been promoting to date. If the medical reform bill that just passed the Senate is any indication of their political preferences, I would have to use the word ‘corporatists’ with a liberal bent to better describe them. They don’t call for State control of the means of production, and they obviously do not take kindly to a free market or even a freer market, but they support establishing significant government control over business and labor in collusion with labor and big business interests. It’s nothing new, it’s pretty much a continuation and expansion of the policies under Bush the Younger.
He’s right that the corporatist politicians who dominate both parties are equally hostile to grassroots activists on both sides who challenge the money train. But I would argue that Robert Cruickshank’s response to Glenn Greenwald was correct: the right, whose numbers are relatively small and whose views are generally far outside of the main stream, has dominated politics for the past 30 years because they made an alliance with the corporations. It’s only natural that Democrats have sought power by replicating that model, even at the price of destroying the illusion that they’re the “party of the people” and fracturing the support that put Obama in office.
The Democrats are trying to secure their political ascendance by tying up the money, no different than Tom DeLay did. But whereas the Democratic Party represented a net to collect and unite those disaffected with the kleptocracy of George Bush, the actions of the Democrats since securing the White House this time around have dimmed the hopes that the Democrats present a real alternative.
The Bush Republicans flogged social issues in order to obviate the need for populist economic measures. They satisfied the base by treating them to a banquet of God, guns and gays while they looted the taxpayer trough. The Democrats, however, are making a sacrifice play on social issues and enabling corporatism by triangulating against their own base. Thus, so-called “fiscally conservative” Blue Dogs can justify a radical vote forcing people to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do in federal taxes because it strikes a blow against pro-choice women. Likewise, the White House positioned themselves as “centrist” after the widely popular public option was dispensed with, simply because it was something “liberals” seemed to want too.
What they’re forcing, however, is a situation where there is no place for populist liberal discontent to rationally go. The Democrats assume that the “base” will stay with them because the President is popular and the GOP is worse, but the GOP was never able to achieve the kind of raid on the public sphere that the Democrats are enabling in the health care bill. Social Security privatization was defeated because the Democrats joined with unions, blogs and other liberal institutions to oppose it. The Republicans were never successful in channeling Social Security taxes into the coffers of Wall Street.
The annual individual contribution to Social Security is 6.2%, to a maximum of $6,621 per year for someone making $106,800. But the health care bill passed by the Senate mandates that 8% of your annual income be channeled to private insurance companies, and the cap is the cost someone is willing to pay for a policy. Thus, as Marcy notes, a family of 4 making $66,800 per year will be mandated to pay $5,243 for a policy that only covers 70% of their medical expenses. But the average cost of an insurance policy for a family of four right now is $13,375 per year.
The cost of that plan is not going to go down if the Senate bill passes — in fact, it will continue to increase at an average rate of $1,000 per year. The only difference this bill will make is that people from 130% to 400% of poverty level on the individual market (12% of the population) will get some assistance from the government in buying those policies in the form of subsidies. But that money will still go straight to insurance companies.
I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don’t understand is the nonchalance with which we’re about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.
George Bush couldn’t pull off the great Social Security robbery because of opposition from the left. But Obama has neutralized liberal institutional pushback by locking them in the veal pen, holding EFCA hostage to sideline the unions and relying on his own personal magnetism to keep member organizations like MoveOn or the Sierra Club from making a strong move without fracturing their own ranks.
With no place to go for refuge from corporatist entrenchment, populist opposition from the left and right will continue to have no choice but to work together in order to oppose it.
No doubt the demonization for doing so from party loyalists on both sides who don’t want their control of the kleptocracy to be challenged will only get more fierce.
