Tom Tomorrow explains it all

Deep Undercover
The Plot Thickens!

2010 midterm elections

Sayeth the prophet:

Because [Republicans] aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

Did I call it or did I call it?

The Democrats will probably take the White House and Congress in 2008 no matter what they do, but they've handed the Republican party enough ammunition and control over the political narrative that the 2008 administration and Congress will be completely ineffectual. The Republicans will take Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012.

I made a number of other predictions in that post. Let's see how I'm doing so far (remember, the original was written before the current depression).

Specifically we will see from the 2008 Democratic government:

Continued occupation of Iraq: Check
Military hostilities against Iran: Not yet
Corporatist control of the mass media: Check
Loss of more primary manufacturing capacity: Check
Erosion of the middle class: Check
Collapsing housing prices: Big Check
Devaluation of the currency: Not yet, but inevitable
No substantial change to the employer-insurance health care system: See below
More working Americans without health insurance or adequate health care: Missed this one; see below
More concentration of wealth in the top 1% and even more in the top 0.1%: Check
More erosion of basic constitutional civil liberties: Check
Update: more erosion of abortion rights: Check

We will not see:

Repeal of FISA or its amendments: Check
Repeal of the Military Commissions Act: See below
Restoration of habeus corpus: Check
Universal or even near-universal health care: See below
Cessation of torture as military and police policy: Maybe; See below
Any substantial action on global warming: Check (so far)
Ratification of the Kyoto treaty or any comparable international action: Check
Any high-level member of the Bush administration being held to criminal account: Check (with the possible exception of Scooter Libby, which was pure tokenism)

Health Care: It looks like some form of "universal" health care may pass; I really didn't think the Democrats would get even this far. On the other hand, it's about the weakest, half-assed "universal" health care imaginable, and women's reproductive rights have not only been ignored but actively rolled back. Krugman is cautiously optimistic but only because he believes something is better than nothing; and the most one can say about this plan is that it's better than nothing.

Military Commissions Act: The MCA was found unconstitutional. Technically it was not "repealed", but I did expect the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Torture: While there's no evidence that the military under the Obama administration is actually torturing people, Obama has gone out of his way not to abjure torture as at least a policy option.

Still and all, not too shabby a predictive effort for a guy without access to Lexis/Nexis.

Obama is a Republican

Cynicism and the electorate
Cynicism part II- "How's that 'change' working out?"
The Audacity of Hypocrisy
Obama Reaches Out for McCain’s Counsel

What a surprise.

Too bad nobody saw it coming.

The Democratic party grows a spine

Psych! Reid refuses to seat Franken.

Here's a perfect opportunity to get a thumb in the eye of the Republican party, seating a Democrat senator who has clearly won the race, instead of waiting for the outcome of legal challenges that are likely to fail.

But no: even when they're clearly right, the majority Democratic party yet again cowers in fear before the disgraced, repudiated Republican minority. If there were just one Republican holding elective office, every Democratic politician would be frantically clawing their way to the head of the line to lick his ass.

The Democratic party has clearly resigned its membership in phylum chordata; how soon will they depart the community of multicellular organisms?

Is it any wonder I've gone communist?

The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History

The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History:

What was evident from even a cursory analysis of his key campaign advisers and public commitments to Wall Street speculators, civilian militarists, zealous Zionists and corporate lawyers was hidden from the electorate, by Obama’s people friendly imagery and smooth, eloquent deliverance of a message of ‘hope’. He effectively gained the confidence, dollars and votes of tens of millions of voters by promising ‘change’ (implying higher taxes for the rich, ending the Iraq war and national health care reform) when in fact his campaign advisers (and subsequent strategic appointments) pointed to a continuation of the economic and military policies of the Bush Administration.

[h/t to Skeptical Eye]

Obama and FDR

Some people have compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The hope is that Obama, like Roosevelt, will take strong, positive action to correct and recover from the current economic depression. While there are some similarities — both campaigned as "centrists" — the differences outweigh the similarities.

There are substantial differences in the political climate. Roosevelt took office in 1933, more than three years after the trigger of the Great Depression. Obama, on the other hand, will take office only months after the trigger of this depression. Roosevelt thus did not have to take the blame for the half-measures and incompetent management that inevitably follow a true catastrophe. Obama, on the other hand, does not have someone like Hoover to point to and say, "Whatever we do, we know we can't do that." (Bush doesn't count; Bush has done nothing to try to fix the depression, and it's trivially obvious that Obama cannot cause another depression.)

Roosevelt took office near the bottom of the Great Depression; whatever he did, absent gross incompetence, conditions could not seriously worsen. But even if Obama were to act perfectly — at least within the confines of the capitalist system he unreservedly endorses — just the lag between a Keynesian stimulus and its macroeconomic effects will make conditions during the mid-term elections of 2010 worse than they now are. The Republican party will use these worsening conditions to great effect: I predict in 2010 a narrow Republican majority in at least the House, if not the Senate as well.

Roosevelt took office with a vigorous progressive and socialist movement in the US. He was under serious political pressure to move to the left. Obama takes office with a moribund progressive movement; the only external political pressure he has is to move to the right, to rescue the capitalist class at the expense of labor and the middle class. The only populist pressure he faces is to increase his support for religion and conservative Christianity. The mainstream progressives seem terrified of making even the smallest political demand on Obama: Even criticism of his choosing a misogynist, homophobic, neoconservative, religious fanatic is deprecated and dismissed as irrelevant. "Give Obama a chance!" they say, but WTF? He has his chance: He'll be President of the United States for fuck's sake. The mainstream progressives refuse to pressure him; they'll be so fucking surprised when he doesn't deliver on the tiniest bit of their agenda.

Most importantly, though, Obama faces economic circumstances fundamentally different from those Roosevelt faced. Industry in the 1930's was still incredibly labor-intensive, and the labor pool was national, not global. There was enormous room for economic growth, and economic growth then caused a labor shortage. A Keynesian stimulus (especially the enormous stimulus provided by the war of American Imperialism) paid off almost immediately, both for capitalists and for labor.

Modern economic circumstances are very different. Globalization dilutes the local effect of a Keynsian stimulus; as the French discovered in the 1980s, a stimulus at home will be spent abroad.

Furthermore, our current industrial production is extremely thorough and efficient: There is little scope to produce more goods, and there is little scope to produce goods will less labor. The only place the economy is actually expanding is in very highly skilled labor — which leaves little room for short-term benefit for the hundreds of millions of people who do not already have an advanced college degree or specialized training. And even in highly skilled labor we're reaching the point of diminishing economic returns. A Keynesian stimulus is debt, without enormous economic expansion, the debt just moves the problem to tomorrow. Both the dot-com and housing bubbles were debt-driven stimuli, and look where we are now.

Hoping that Obama will follow the mold of FDR, hoping that the capitalist class will have the wisdom and foresight to actually keep the system running requires a degree of blind faith, magical thinking and willful ignorance that would shame a cretinist.

Revolution and Reform

The other night I attended a debate between Larry Everest, revolutionary communist and author of Oil, Power and Empire, and Norman Solomon, progressive Democrat and author of Made Love, Got War.

The debate crystallized some of my own ideas regarding revolution and reform.

Norman Solomon made a good point: Revolution is years away at best, and might be impossible — we won't know for sure until a revolution is successful. Until we have an actual revolution, it is better to do what we can to work within the system for progressive change. In theory, I agree: you don't refuse to rescue a drowning person just because your efforts to have a dangerous beach closed have not yet succeeded.

But in practice, I find Solomon's position hollow. For forty years, I've watched the Democratic party cave time and again to the conservative, pro-business, anti-populist, pro-religion and sometimes explicitly fascist agenda. And this blatant appeasement has become progressively worse, culminating in the Democratic party's utter inability to thwart the agenda of the Bush administration between 2006-2008 — despite the fact that Bush is the weakest, least popular president ever; arguably the worst president in American history. Choosing the Democratic party as a vehicle to fight against the Republican conservative agenda is as moronic as betting on the Washington Generals to defeat the Harlem Globetrotters.

Worse yet, progressive Democrats have shown nothing but blatant appeasement to the conservative wing of the Democratic party — and its blatantly clear that Barack Obama represents this wing. Many progressive democrats object to criticism of the Obama administration — not because it's wrong, but because somehow Obama is so fragile that criticism might convince Obama to back away from the minuscule progressive agenda he might support on his own.

It's a fundamental rule of negotiation that you do not get what you do not demand. If you want something, you not only have to ask for it, you have to fight for it. Coming to the table ready to "compromise" is nothing but appeasement. You have to fight for your adversary to compromise, and you have to make your adversary fight for your own concessions.

This is such a fundamental point of negotiation that it becomes difficult to attribute the persistent strain of appeasement in the Democratic party and the so-called "progressive" wing of the Democratic to anything other than gross stupidity or rank hypocrisy. The Democrats are demanding nothing of the Republicans, and the progressive Democrats are demanding nothing of the party as a whole.

I was watching some political documentary a while ago, and Barney Frank (D-MA) made a perspicacious comment (which I'll have to paraphrase from memory): "Do you vote? No? Then what do I care what you think?" Left unsaid, though, is the corollary: "Will you vote for me no matter what I do? Yes? Then what do I care what you think?"

There's an important sense in which Barack Obama is actually worse than John McCain. Obviously, Obama is not an explicitly theocratic fucktard like McCain; Obama is a bright guy, and I'm sure he means well, but he knows precisely what the capitalist imperialist system demands of him, and he was supported by capitalist elite because they know he will deliver. Obama is a palliative, not a cure. A palliative is just fine when it relieves suffering while one is curing the underlying disease. But a palliative is actively bad when it removes the motivation of pain for curing the underlying condition while it worsens. And that is precisely what the Obama administration aims to do.

A McCain administration would have given tremendous impetus for progressives to actually organize. "Let's make the patient sicker," says Dr. House, "so we can diagnose the disease and cure it before it kills the patient." An Obama administration just masks the symptoms and has visibly and provably sucked the oxygen from the mainstream progressive movement.

Obama will not end the occupation of Iraq: he's said so. Worse yet, a half-assed withdrawal will be seen by the Iraqi people as a weakness to be exploited, not a victory to be consolidated. One must grasp the nettle firmly: we'll see an escalation of the war in Iraq as Obama tries to tiptoe out.

Obama will not end the occupation of Afghanistan; indeed he aims to expand it. He is no friend of women or abortion rights. He is no friend of gays. He is no friend of secularists. He is no friend of labor.

He cannot, even if he has good intentions, fix the economy. It is beyond repair. He cannot deliver universal health care: the Republican party is viscerally and fundamentally opposed, and Obama's willingness to compromise will again be seen a weakness to be exploited, which it is indeed.

Obama is no friend, no friend at all, of true progressivism, a progressivism that seeks any sort of substantive change, and not just the rhetorical window-dressing of vacuous slogans on the same old oppressive bullshit.

I'd love to work within the system for progressive change, substantive change. But it's the plain truth that even the most mild progressivism has been not just locked out of actual participation in politics, but anesthetized into a coma by vapid sloganeering. Reform is completely off the table, at least any reform more substantive than, "Hey, let's be more discreet about demolishing the underpinnings of liberal capitalist democracy."

There's just no choice but to do what we can, however ineffective, for a revolution.

Lieberman & Palin

Brian63, I owe you $100.

I was damn close though.

All else Pales in the Face of Palin

Reader Kelly Kilpatrick contributes the following analysis of Sarah Palin and the Republican Party.

It’s an American election like no other – first we had the undignified spats between senators Obama and Clinton. And now that Obama has emerged the clear winner (but not by too much of a distance) of that race, the focus has shifted to the three-ring circus run by McCain where Sarah Palin is the star attraction. From virtual nobodies, the Republicans have pulled out of nowhere to take centre stage in the media circus that was dominated by the Democrats throughout the primaries.

For now, the spotlight is on Palin and her remarkable (and frightening) similarity to George W Bush, mostly in the way they both seem to spout incomprehensible inanities and end up with their foot in their mouth so often that you’d think they would have gotten tired of the taste of old leather and sweaty socks. It’s like the nation has forgotten that it’s Senator McCain who’s running for president, and that Palin is just his running mate. Probably what the Republican think tank was looking for in the first place – to divert all the attention to their camp after Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama stole it during the primaries by virtue of being the first woman and black respectively to vie for the highest office in the country.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and so Palin was sprung on an unsuspecting nation. With her “folksy” appeal and supposedly down-to-earth hockey mom attitude, she was supposed to charm a nation of working class people and have them eating out of her hands, something that McCain could not do even if he were to stand upside down for hours. Much has been said about her expensive makeover, her dictatorial attitude towards those who oppose her or those close to her, her regressive outlook, and, well, the list could go on and on.

Republicans who support her stand against abortion would elevate her to sainthood if they could, for her “moral” decision to give birth to a child she knew had Down’s Syndrome. Yes, Palin is a saint – who else would be so adamantly against sex education in schools even though her teenage daughter is pregnant by her equally teenage boyfriend? It’s all well and good for Palin to take strong stands on such issues – she’s not as unlucky as the single mother who has to give up her sole means of making a living to stay at home and raise a baby with a lifelong disability; her daughter’s not as unfortunate as the teen who has to quit school to raise a baby that she didn’t want in the first place; and her child and grandchild are not as unlucky as the babies that are born to parents who have neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to care for them.

Yes, under the circumstances, Sarah Palin is definitely a saint, one that this country needs as much as it needs another George W Bush. But aren’t we the folks who wanted another four years of the man even though the first four were markedly torturous? So who knows? Maybe we’re masochistic enough to wish this woman and her ilk on us for the next four years, and the four after too. God save America!

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of a masters program for criminal justice. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

[Note: the article was written before the November 4 election. I think it still has relevance both as a commentary on the election and concerning Palin's interest in the 2012 election. -- Ed.]

Generalissimo Obama

The Cuteocracy is dead. Long live Cuteocracy!

Proposition 8 and universal human rights

Let's say that there's a controversy over whether people should be required to eat Brussels sprouts or whether they should be prohibited from eating Brussels sprouts. (I know it's a false dichotomy, but run with me here.) Obviously, we'd have a big fight on our hands. People (such as myself) who find Brussels sprouts disgusting would strongly resist any attempt to force us to eat the damn things. Likewise, those who (inexplicably) find them delicious would strongly resist any attempt to force them to go without Brussels sprouts.

Sometimes, there are issues we just have to fight about. Should, for example, husbands be permitted to rape their wives? It is only recently that the law has answered this question in the negative. There are some who disagree, and we fight them: we put them in jail if they disobey, and any philosophical argument they might raise in their defense to justify their behavior is simply irrelevant.

If we look at the Brussels sprouts issue, we realize that the same issue applied to every kind of food: spinach, broccoli, ice cream (which a lot of people find vile), and on and on. If we simply let the majority rule on each individual food item, we find that the majority of people (indeed almost everyone) will be denied one food or another, with no compensation. Majority rule leads in this case to majority dissatisfaction. We must look at this issue more deeply.

(We don't have to find that majority rule leads to majority dissatisfaction to look more deeply; just the fact of a strong, deep controversy is sufficient grounds to look. But that there are occasions where majority rule leads to majority dissatisfaction justifies looking more deeply in general in powerful way.)

One way of looking at an ethical issue more deeply is to ask a more general, abstract question: how do we feel about food in general, without naming the specific foods? Can we come to a broad, relatively non-controversial agreement on general principles, and apply them in such a way that the majority is satisfied? And of course we can: we eat what we like; we are prohibited from eating (or more precisely selling) only food that will kill us quickly.

The same analysis also applies to speech.

Let me be frank: I wish the Nazis, the racists, Fred Phelps, etc. ad nauseam would just shut the fuck up, and if they did, I would be unabashedly happy. If you asked me the question in isolation — Should we force these assholes to remain silent? — I'd probably say yes.

But of course everyone has some sort of minority opinion, so answering each question of speech in the particular would lead to most everyone forced to be silent about something. (There are, as John Stuart Mill explained, additional arguments against silencing minority opinions.) So we have to ask the general question: What in general should people be permitted or prohibited from speaking? And the answer we've come up with is to permit everything except provable libel, slander, incitement to riot, treason and conspiracy.

We can ask an even more general question: what activities should be tolerated in general for everyone. More specifically, what comprises the set of universal human rights?

What California Proposition 8 has done is remove the right to marry from the set of universal human rights. It is now acceptable for the government to arbitrarily determine, subject only to the will of the majority, who may marry and who may not. And far from "protecting" marriage, they have made marriage more vulnerable.

I am married. I'm in an interracial, atheist, intentionally childless marriage. All of those are minority positions. Now that Proposition 8 has passed, now that marriage is not a universal human right, it is legitimate for the government or the majority of people to deny me the freedom to marry on the basis of any of those factors. Traditionally people marry others of their own race: I did not. Traditionally people are married by a member of the clergy: I was not. Traditionally people are married to provide for their children: My wife and I will not have children (indeed we cannot; I've had a vasectomy). (And traditionally people marry others of approximately the same age: My wife is 20 years younger than me.)

Traditionally Americans are married in a Christian church. Those who are not Christians do not. Traditionally Americans are married in a Protestant Christian church. Those who are not Protestant Christians do not. Traditionally people marry someone from their local community. Traditionally people marry someone of the same religious faith. Traditionally people marry someone at about the same level of physical attractiveness. Traditionally people marry in their 20s.

Since we have now set a precedent of answering the question of who should marry in the particular, that the majority has a right to judge this question at the specific level, everyone whose marriage is non-traditional in any way could lose their right to marry by the arbitrary will of the majority.

Congratulations

I want to congratulate Barack Obama on his victory, and congratulate the American people on electing a black man as president of the United States, and dealing the forces of evil Republican party a substantial setback. These are both Good Things.

Tomorrow we can get down to the messy business of criticizing our new president and Democratic party rule, but for today, I'm just happy.

Yet another reason

PZ Myers offers yet another reason I'm not a Democrat. (As if I needed more, but, you know.)

Tatsuya on voting

On voting.

Sunsara Taylor on Sarah Palin, Rape Kits, and the Bible

Junkie logic and codependency

driftglass nails the "junkie logic" of the right wing.

Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

But I disagree with him about the some of the details, and the details are important.

Does it all start with Reagan?

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

But I disagree. It's not Ronald Reagan but Ayn "I not only can but should have everything I want and to hell with anyone else" Rand who deserves the credit; Ronnie was just the first guy to market the drug to the masses.

I think his extension of the metaphor to the Clinton administration is more apt than even he intends.

[Clinton] arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else. ...

[The right hated him because] Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

It's important to understand that maintenance isn't treatment. Driftglass calls November 4 "so much more than an election. November 4th is an Intervention." I think he's wrong. I think Obama will be very much like Clinton: he'll offer the right a celebrity's stint in rehab to take the edge of the worst downside of the addition, but he'll do nothing to address the fundamental problem.

Because the problem is not with right itself, and the right has in no way yet "hit bottom". The Democratic party and the American moderate liberals are just acting as codependents. "Tsk, tsk, look at the mess you've made of yourself. We'll clean you up, and get you presentable."

There's a great scene in Trainspotting, "The downside of coming off junk was I knew I would need to mix with my friends again in a state of full consciousness. It was awful. They reminded me so much of myself, I could hardly bear to look at them." I'm also reminded of a scene from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers where they decide to stop doing drugs: the scene slowly transforms over a number of panels from the usual cartoon idealization to a photorealistic depiction of disgusting squalor; the brothers (wisely?) get stoned again and return to their cartoon utopia.

The point is: just cleaning up the worst downside of addiction is a feature of codependency; the codependent is doing neither himself nor the addict any favors. It's true: addiction really "reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull." Just mitigating the effects of the new Prime Directive isn't enough; the addict has to "find Jesus" (or Bill) and create yet another "Prime Directive".

Which is fundamentally why I do not see this election as fundamentally transformative. Sure, McCain will continue the bender, but Obama will just codependently clean up the immediate mess; after four or eight years of tedious sobriety the leaders of the American people will be ready for yet another bender.

The drug is, of course, capitalism, unlimited personal economic power unaccountable to the rest of society. It's not even the exercise of this power that's the drug, its the acquisition. The first hit comes with your first million, when you realize that you can now do anything you want and say, "fuck you" to most anyone who might object, without argument, without justification. And you want more: You want that second million to say "fuck you" to those who have just one million. Even when you have the most money of anyone, you still want more, because that's your prime directive: Get more. And besides, you'll never have more than everyone else put together, and the more you have, the bigger the target you are; what you have taken away from others can be taken away from you.

It is not enough to merely dole out this drug in measured doses. Clinton- and Obama-style "methadone capitalism" won't solve the problem. We have to create a new Prime Directive, one that doesn't lead inevitably to death and destruction.

We have to "find Karl".

Taibbi on the American electorate

Mad Dog Palin

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

[h/t to Tim Kreider]

"Katie Couric" interviews "Sarah Palin"

[h/t to (gag, retch) Andrew Sullivan]

Reform or Revolution

When I started seriously blogging on January 1, 2007, I was a pretty standard liberal Democrat. Disappointed with the Democrats, but still of the opinion that they were merely confused and needed nothing more than a swift kick in the pants to get back on the ball.

And then I started actually paying attention to what was going on.

The whole point of partisan politics is to use an adversarial system to effect social change. And just in terms of partisan politics, the Democratic party has failed so massively that Hanlon's razor has become ludicrously implausible. The Democratic party did not fight in 2000. They did not fight in 2004. They did not fight in 2006.

And they're not fighting now. If Obama wins the election it will only be because of McCain's personal ineptitude, which — given the discipline and ruthlessness of the Republican party for the last 40 years — really can be considered an exception.

The Bush regime is not just responsible for a series of administrative "failures", they have not just intentionally dismantled the New Deal, they have perpetrated actual crimes against humanity, crimes for which we have literally hanged people. It's not enough now to just win an election. We ought to crush the Republican party, drive them before us and hear the lamentation of their women. They shouldn't just lose, they should be made objects of ridicule, cast in the dustbin of history.

Ideologically, the situation is even worse. The Republican agenda since Nixon has been crystal clear: destroy root and branch every vestige of "socialism" enacted by Roosevelt and Johnson and return this country to laissez faire third-world capitalism where 1% of the population have everything, 9% serve them, and 90% — if not actually dying, as the Randian fantasy would have it — laboring in abject poverty in circumstances barely distinguishable from chattel slavery. (The only substantive difference between the Republicans and the Randians is that the Republicans realize its better to invoke God and justify slavery than simply kill 90% of the population and abandon hundreds of trillions of dollars in physical infrastructure.)

And what is has been — and continues to be — the Democratic agenda? Do the same thing, just a little more slowly, and with a little extra lube.

If reform were even a remotely realistic possibility, we would have reformed the Republican party out of existence after Reagan. It didn't happen then, it didn't happen later, it's not happening now. Only a Christian-level of willful delusion can offer the hope that it will happen in the next four to eight years, regardless of who wins this election.

Barack Obama will not make the kind of fundamental changes to our financial institutions to prevent yet another $700 billion fuck-up. He will not give debt relief to the millions of Americans impoverished by predatory lending, or just the systematic structure that forces people to pay double in interest to bankers than they would pay in rent to landlords just for the illusion of "owning" one's own home.

Obama will not end the patently immoral war of aggression in Iraq; he will merely run the occupation more efficiently. He will not end the war in Afghanistan; he's going to expand it. He will go to war with Iran. He will not preserve — much less restore — the token social safety net established by Roosevelt; he will at best merely slow down its continued destruction. He will not preserve or restore the right or availability of abortion. He will not restore basic constitutional civil liberties. He will not end the "war on drugs" or the outrageous imprisonment and oppression of black Americans. All his promises to the contrary will turn out to be nothing but lube.

At best, we will see some "improvement" under an Obama administration just because he's not as completely fucking retarded as Bush. He will clean up the mess and continue to carry out the Republican agenda competently instead of stupidly. He will heat the water more slowly so we don't notice as much that we are being boiled alive.

It's not Obama's fault; he doesn't have a choice. It's not even the fault of the Democratic party. The neo-conservatives and the Republican party — "carrying a cross and wrapped in the flag" — have for two generations waged a relentless ideological and propagandistic revolution against the few basic human values we managed to enact in the middle of the 20^th century... and it's working.

How could it not work? In a capitalist economy, it's by definition in each capitalist's self-interest to have everything. And by definition they have the power to acquire it. Even if some individual capitalist has some vestige of humanistic moral sensibility, he knows the next guy doesn't: he has to grab as much as he can just to protect himself. Capitalism is an all-or-nothing game.

Efficiency is the name of the game, and while labor is commoditized, reducing labor cost is the royal road to efficiency. Even if some individual wants to pay his workers a living wage, he knows his competitor will just ship his factory off to the Northern Mariana Islands and enjoy the reduced cost of slave labor.

The rich people — Democrat and Republican alike — know that there are too many rich people than true laissez faire capitalism can support. All they can do is scrabble as hard as they can to break into the top 1% that will survive the collapse of consumer capitalism.

This is the grim economic and political reality of post-industrial society. It wasn't exactly inevitable; we could have fought Reagan, we could have fought Bush, we could have fought the Randians. But we didn't, at least not hard enough. And we will pay dearly for our failure.

Democrats Uber Alles

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, what is this but blatant proto-fascism?

I can see this at the Republican convention, but the Democratic convention. This has never happened before! [better link]