Cynical and Consistent

Charles Krauthammer has favored us with his miraculous two step Republican rehab program.  It is of a piece with the same old prescriptive cynicism we're accustomed to hearing from him and his ilk.  Krauthammer offers up a wondrously instantaneous and pain free way to remove what he apparently sees as the only obstacle to resurgent Republican electoral dominance, i.e., the pissed off Latino vote. 

Are you ready?  Grant amnesty to those already here illegally, thereby allowing them to remain as guest workers, and ending the ominous threat of economic desperation leading to self-deportation.  Combine that with a rock solid seal of the border, slowing any future illegal crossing to a trickle or drying it up altogether.  This is the cynical equivalent of saying, "Welcome aboard, enjoy the rest of your cruise through life, but pay no attention to those left drowning in the deep and putrid economic and civil swamps of your homelands." 

Notice there is no commitment to any sure and relatively short path to full citizenship, which would make them less susceptible to abuse by their employers and situate them to maturely and confidently choose the option to join or form unions.  Absent that guarantee, even those selfish enough to turn their backs on their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, or generally desperate and suffering brethren, would themselves actually be punching their own ticket to continue on cruising for an ultimate bruising. 

This prescription is nothing short of a crass and unprincipled copy of the equally ugly and bogus bribe offered to seniors regarding Social Security and Medicare.  The Republican pitch to them is, "If you're already old, you can keep Medicare and Social Security, but only if you let us cut your kids out.  Don't worry, they're young and can make other plans, meanwhile you'll be protected."

If seniors in general are either scared or selfish enough to make such a deal with the devil, they too will utltimately wind up with a pitchfork run right through the heart and meat of the benefits they so desperately want to preserve.  And they forever will be remembered for having made a bad deal for themselves and a hell of a future for their kids.

I think American seniors and illegal immigrant workers alike are better than the cynical Republican strategists think.  But I worry about zerObama.

A Smooth Ride and A Safe Landing?

Well, at least we didn't crash and burn, as I feared we might.  I really expected and was prepared for a long election night, followed by a drawn out legal donnybrook of court filings in several critical, closely contested states.   I said as much in the last two posts.  But it didn't happen, so I was happily wrong.

I also explicitly indicated that this opinion was not reflective of any disagreement with statistician par excellance, Nate Silver, who called the outcome more or less on the nose.  Quite the contrary, I have no quarrel whatsoever with empirical evidence, or the proven methods of uncovering it.  Rather, my expressed concern was that experience had shown there is decidedly more to determining election results in our system than a straight counting of the votes cast and/or the votes which were meant to be cast.  In other words, there is a whole hell of a lot of cheating and illusion that goes on in this, the beacon of liberty and freedom, and gold standard of democracy.  A whole hell of a lot. 

I won't tediously rehearse, but will at least briefly refresh memories of relevant instances, to wit: the blatantly stolen, Supreme Court determined 2000 presidential election, along with the still mysteriously "wrong" exit polls in the 2004 presidential contest, which had Kerry besting Bush all day long.  So, go figure.

And that is indeed the point.  Elections here are not a numbers game alone; they are a numbers, people, and power contrivance.  This is the ground upon which I stand, and have not one inch been pushed from.  In fact, the outcome of this race ironically solidifies the foundation of that view. 

The internal plutocrat machine apparently suffered from a raft of  Karl Rove/Ralph Reed  OZ-like conclusions, manufactured exclusively in the interest of the producers at the expense of the consumers of the information.  In the end, Romney was more the victim of his own PR than the Obama campaign.

Certainly this was reflected in the last Romney/Obama debate, wherein Romney behaved as though he had the lead and didn't want to blow it, as opposed to the aggressive, lying, brute he had demonstrated a talent for being in previous meetings.  He really thought it would be an outright decision in his favor, or at least close enough to steal.  The Romney campaign was all lawyered-up and ready to go into at least four of the most important battle-ground states to take a close race.  In the end, it was caught off guard and mistakenly at ease.

If you depart from this outlook, fair enough.  But just consider that the treasure trove of electoral votes, known as Florida, has not been officially awarded as this is written, on the Saturday following the Tuesday election.  If the margins had been almost infinitesimally closer in at least two of the other seven or so battle-ground states, this contest would be undecided today.

Speaking of today, it is the first day of another too brief, chore filled weekend during which I am tasked by sundry calls other than blog posting.  So, enough for now.  But there are several subjects waiting and needing address.  They include the signals of continuing Republican reactionary policy essayed by customary suspects such as Charles Krauthammer, and signs of more limp-wristed, hand-wringing capitulation from zerObama.  Hope to get to it this evening.

Stay tuned. 

Hanging Fire

Really hope I'm wrong, but I think you can forget Tuesday.  It won't be over.  Not for a long time.

A big part of me wants to say it could have been decided then, had ZerO at least shown up for the first debate; but probably not.  The fascist machine was going to have to pull out all the stops to try to steal this election, no matter what.  How come?

It's their last chance under even the slimmest imitation of a democratic process, that's how come.  Their racist reactionary base, both in absolute and proportional terms, is shrinking, thank God.  This is, in raw demographic terms, their last stand.  It literally is now or never.  Lose now, and next time it's brass knuckles.

But the brain dead 2000 Bush versus Gore  experience alone demonstrated this electoral system is sufficiently screwy that even a home grown, three county, country bumpkin itinerant  legal mouthpiece could tangle it up indefinitely, if asked.

So, you can laugh, go ahead. I hope this call is wildly wide of the mark, but be forewarned that you should keep the seat belt fastened, and hunker down for a rough ride.

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Out On A Pretty Fat Limb

Nate Silver is not wrong, he is insufficient.  So are his smug, genotronic acolytes.

Data don't vote.  Data are not grains of sand on the beach, nor levees - the water's edge.  Data don't steal elections. 

And in recent times, the last 50 or 60 years anyway, it has been the plutocratic/crypto-fascist interests which have stolen both national and local elections.  As a convenient, down-and-dirty shorthand explanation and support for this claim, I'd simply reference the relative decline and disappearance of urban, populist accented political machines, and their replacement by the wall-to-wall, blinding white noise dominance of money.  I won't bore you with a recitation of specifics.  Readers of this blog know what I'm talking about.

This is not to say that I think ZerObama will lose.  God forbid he does.  But he well may.  By now, those of us paying attention should all understand that God gets the hell out of the way, and demurs acting to forbid things we should.  He is painfully patient.

In 2000, the Supreme Court blatantly stole the presidential election for Bush, and there was no price. No price other than human loss and suffering.  No price for the plutocrats.  No loud declamations. No demonstrations.  No civil unrest.  Nothing but slavish acquiescence.  No opposition to the slaughter of countless innocents, civilian men, women and children, victims of warrant less war in far off lands.  God did not intervene.

The plutocrats got what they wanted.  The thinnest margin of privileged Americans have been made extravagantly wealthier.  99.9% of Americans have been punished with cheaper and cheapening employment, and the threat of hopeless demotion to membership among the  ranks of the utterly discarded.

 Of course, you can also absolutely forget the survival of  public education - even on the grade school level- and the  overarching reach of a meaningful social safety net.  This is a rich irony given the line of rhetoric that many working class - white, black and brown - people have swallowed regarding even the price of being a union member.

The dollar cost of union dues is tiny, especially compared to almost any regular voluntary expense that can be brought to mind.  I mean, com'on, let's get real.  Think cell phone, cable, or almost any other superfluous splurge spending by knuckle headed, genotronic age, pseudo-gastronome, with-it twitter-ite smart asses.  Utterly clueless.

More to the point, union dues today are social.  Completely.  In the past few decades, when a relatively ascendant liberal outlook reigned as a result of hard won, street fought battles, the burden of being a union member was regarded as more or less a gratuity-styled financial chipping-in.

But not now.  The flame throwing, lying right wing would have us believe that union membership is economically onerous.  However, every serious study continues to report that union workers are far better compensated than their unorganized counterparts.  Moreover, unionized workers enjoy a rights protected working relationship with their employer completely absent in the naked "at will" employment regime inscribed in state law.   Into the bargain, being fired from a  job for union organizing activity today is, financially, as likely a blessing as a hardship.

But the genotronics are better than us.  They think.  They are tragically wrong.  I would spare them unintentional ignorance, but theirs is disreputably willful.
 
So, we come to the only question that matters:  Is this thing close enough to steal?  Yes.

Why?  Well, 3 or 4 things: Money and power - those can be counted 1 & 2 or just the same thing, next comes bigotry, and then simple vanilla ignorance and genotronic smugness.

So, if it happens, don't tell me, "we was robbed."  You done throwed it all away, smart guys.









 

Lincoln Addendum ... And A Wrinkle

We're all familiar with Lincoln's "You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  Doubtless, its universal currency arises both from its rhetorical appeal as well as its reach.  I mean, it seems so comprehensive.  But is it?

Actually, no.  Turns out, that with every turn of the electoral wheel, which is to say whenever a plebiscite is on order, most of us more or less default to a rather fervently - if unconsciously - clutched belief that you can't even fool most of the people some of the time.  That is precisely the basis of our faith in democracy.  But we have learned over time, like the Church since Copernicus and Galileo through Darwin to an ever newer - if not braver- world, it pays to be flexible.  We seem to have made peace with the fact that sometimes most of the people are willing to fool themselves.

They kid themselves that they can satisfy their bigotry without sacrificing their own economic and social standing.  They have been doing this now ever since LBJ signed the historic Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's.  That is what provided the modern Republican Party with the racist foundation for arguing that anything so powerful that is can insure equal status under the law for all, regardless of race, is too damn powerful to be trusted to do anything right. 

Hence, white working class people have participated in and fueled the suicidal dismantlement of every institutional (Federal government) underpinning of the modern American middle class and the degradation of societal norms in general:  Social Security and Medicare, labor rights, public education , safe food and drugs (case in point: the current unregulated drug related national meningitis outbreak), environmental protection, Banking/Wall Street regulation, and even restraint over the out and out buying of the electoral process itself by home grown and foreign plutocrats and fascists.  What's next, the buying and selling of body parts?  Oh, wait, pretty sure that already goes on.  How long before we're back to buying and selling whole living bodies again? 

So, whereas even a rather shopworn Lincoln quotation can still provide a jumping off point for a current political observation, nothing seems more spiritually wanting than a miraculous Lincoln resurrection.

Plutocrat's Pain

Chrystia Freeland is in pretty tight with the Plutocrats.  That doesn't mean she is simpatico with their world view or politics, but she has a lot of empathy for them.  She feels their pain.   She should, she has been making her living off of them as a professional financial reporter/editor for some time now.  She knows many, many of them personally.  And they often confess their personal feelings to her.  That tawdry, little gossipy fact, indeed appears to be the entire excuse for her most recent publication.

I have not yet read her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, but I've been in the audience when she has held forth at length on NPR,  Bill Moyers Journal,  and Real Time with Bill Maher.  She argues that our super-rich - richest ever on the planet - class of pampered scumbags have real feelings, which have been injured by Obama's constant insistence that they lack a sense of social responsibility.  Apparently they think Obama is either insensitive or insolent or something like it  for relentlessly reminding them and us that they are now paying the absolute lowest effective tax rate the rich have paid since the Great Depression. 

All the while, they cry and wail about budget deficits, begrudge the poor even the slimmest of life support sustenance, and rail against the aspirations of the majority for some semblance of a bourgeois middle-class life style.  They - the plutocrats - really think that their rigging the system and scamming it to pile up the biggest haul of loot in the history of class thievery is an act of civic duty.  They really believe that their obligation to the country lies in exploiting whatever strategy - however evil and dirty - may be available to enrich themselves.

Here's the thing.  There is not and never has been any moral or natural justification for allowing one tiny fraction of the actors in the economy, those at the point of transaction, negotiation, or administration to exercise confiscatory control over the revenue generated by the ensuing activity undertaken and conducted by an additional and indispensable multiplicity of players.  Hence, contrary to the accepted mythology of the system's apologists, like Freeland, this is not at all a question of redistribution.  It is - and always has been - a fight over the basic original distribution of the proceeds which flow from the dynamic of economic activity. 

What is needed, and really all that is needed, is a resurgence of economic democracy.  Strong unions, backed up by a civilized respect for the imperative of appropriate legal oversight of market activity, alone can insure fair labor compensation and a just society.

These are all old lessons, learned the hard way.  They remain as sure as the lift of a wink or the smell of sweat, yet are willfully forgotten by today's elites.  Shame on them.  Really, shame on them.

For we are not now suffering the want to somehow come up with a new or exotic formulation to address today's challenges to progressive political ideals, as Freeland and others of her ilk argue.  That is just so much lame bullshit.  We are suffering from the closing embrace of a lowering darkness and the lack of will.

 

1856*

This debate is going to be a humdinger.**  This is the last chance the Fascist right modern Republican Party has to win under the present presidential electoral system.  Angry white men are dying off, and the number of diverse ethnic young voters is on the rise.  As Bill Clinton might say, it's just arithmetic.

They have no choice, Romney and Co. have to go for the kill shot.  No telling what crazy bullshit will hit the airwaves tonight, but get ready, it will surely be without precedent.  Gonna be ugly and hilarious all at once.

And so I come to the point of this little post.  Just a thought I've not seen floated anywhere else, but I would take a flyer on adventure and speculate that should the plutocrats and their overpowering money falter and fail to win this time, look for a full-court press across the country to return to a presidential electoral system whereby the state electors are chosen by state legislatures, not popular vote within the states.  The last time any state selected its electors in that manner was in 1856 when South Carolina was still that backward.  And the constitution  allows states to adopt that method even today.  Just a thought.  I know, hilarious and ugly. 

*Clarification:  1856 was the last time any state granted its legislature the regular and continuing task of appointing the state's presidential electors.  South Carolina did it that way, just as it always had, up until its act of secession in 1860.  For isolated, nonrecurring reasons, three other states' legislatures last appointed electors in the same historical era:  In 1848, Massachusetts did so because a 50% majority requirement had not been met by any contesting party.  In 1864, Nevada was admitted to the union and did not have time to conduct a popular canvass.  Similarly, in 1868, Florida had only recently been readmitted to the union and had not time for a popular vote.

**Update:   Wow, that was a dud of a debate - at least when thought of as a potential humdinger.  So, it was also a dud of a prediction.  Someone once told me that if you want to make at least a few correct predictions, make a lot of them.  So, I'm not shy or embarrassed on that score.

What is worrying though is that Romney did not swing for the fences last night, and that should tell us he and his campaign are feeling confident enough to be playing "not to lose" rather than going all out for the win.  Obama was the only one who came in with a pre-packaged zinger to launch, the one about horses and bayonets.  His delivery still needs some work, but it was fairly effective.

Anyway, I stand by the warning that the fascist right sees this election, under the usual methodology, as key to implementing its final solution to the legacy of the both the New Deal and Great Society, i.e. total destruction of Social Security and Medicare.  They know that from this point forward the demographics will trump their money and thwart their schemes in anything remotely resembling a popular vote election.  And, by the way, that is all we have now, the semblance of one. 

But they also know that they can pretty easily control state legislatures with their power and influence, regardless of the individual state constituency make-up.  This inside dealing is even more secretive, opaque, and effective than it shows on the national stage.  Just look at Louisiana, for instance.  Perhaps a more extended analysis of this proposition in a future post.

For now we should be aggressively pursuing strategies which will accomplish the opposite goal.  That is to say the dismantlement  or disabling of the so-called electoral college.  Remember, as Scalia said in 2000 when he and the other fascists were busy stealing the presidential election, individual citizens do not have the constitutional right to vote for president.  As long as the electoral college is still functioning, we never will.