Marty's Blog

By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus

The Obama referendum came in and he got what he deserved. When you run on change and leave the same criminals in positions of power and don’t hold anyone accountable for obvious crimes, and allow them to continue to commit those crimes, you deserve to lose your power. This is what happens when you put Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy, and support Ben Bernanke for reconfirmation as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is what happens when you keep Robert Gates as your Secretary of Defense and General Petraeus in charge of your wars. This is what happens when you lie to protect the interests of BP over the American people. This is what happens when you bailout Wall Street and the health care industry and sell out everyone else. This is what happens when your rhetoric is the opposite of your actions. The past two years have clearly exposed Obama as a spineless corporate puppet and he deserves to be voted out in 2012.

Now, don’t get me wrong, most of the people who were just voted into office are just as bad, if not worse, as hard as that is to believe. This election marks the third straight time that the American public dramatically voted out the people who were in power. The fact of the matter is that these people are not voting for politicians that they like as much as they are voting against politicians they hate. Hopefully by 2012 the American public will finally understand that they must support Independent candidates and alternative political structures, and cannot vote for Democrats or Republicans, if they ever want to achieve the needed change. Both parties serve the same corporate masters. Yes, there are some differences between the two. The Democrats serve half of the top economic one percent, and the Republicans serve the other half. We have Neo-liberals to the left and Neo-cons to the right, leaving 99% of us without representation.

And the saddest part of all, the system is now so rigged via campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door that it is almost impossible for people who represent us to even get into office, let alone stay in office and enact policies that will bring change. Two politicians in Congress who actually fought for us against the Economic Elite just lost their reelection bids. Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold lost because record amounts of cash went to funding the candidates who ran against them. Even their own party’s leadership didn’t support their reelection efforts. The bottom line in this money rigged system is that you cannot run against the most powerful corporations and win. They will just pour unlimited funds into defeating you, and your own party will desert you.

The truth that many so called “Independent” news outlets will not tell you is that this government is now beyond repair. You won’t hear many calls for Revolution because even the more “Independent” news outlets are dependent on the two-party system. It is absurd that these outlets still play into the obsolete Republican versus Democrat dynamic. The only reason why they do it is because they are dependent on grants from foundations and political organizations that will not fund them unless they bow to Democrats and bash Republicans, or vice versa.

I can speak from personal experience. I’ve lost a vital grant to fund my work because I wasn’t willing to focus my attention on blaming Republicans for our problems. Our problems are a result of the two-party system. When you engage in bashing one party in favor of the other, you become a pivotal cog in the machine that is killing our country. I will not be part of the disease. The stakes are too high now. America is burning and both parties are pouring gasoline all over it.

Most Americans have only a vague understanding of the collapse that we have been set up for. If you think the past two years were bad, they were just a warm up to what is coming our way. After analyzing the policies in place and the current political environment, I can assure you that the next two years will be worse that the previous two. 52 million Americans have already been driven into poverty, 30 million are in need of work, millions of American families have been foreclosed upon and the inequality of wealth is the most severe it has ever been in the history of the United States. And this is just the beginning phase of the decline. Millions more will be added to these totals and the social safety-nets that have held our society together are breaking down. Cuts to vital social programs are going to be severe across the board.

Our paid-off government is not going to fix our problems, they are making them worse. Don’t you think it’s time for you to start representing yourself? Don’t you think it’s time for you to start defending your family’s interests?

These are questions that I’ve already asked myself and deeply considered. I made my decision and have dedicated myself to building a wide-ranging network of alliances across the political spectrum and have drafted a common ground platform that we are building off of. I’ve analyzed power politics very closely over the years. I know how the game is played and I know who our enemies are. I’m going to do everything I can to end the two-party oligopoly.

I’m not saying that you should follow me. I’m saying that it’s time for YOU to lead. It’s time for YOU to get involved. Build your own army. Once you start paying attention and put in some time to do the research, you will clearly see for yourself that both parties are working against your interests. You will also see how critical the situation is and realize that you can no longer be passive and expect to keep living a healthy and secure lifestyle. We are going to be tested in ways we have never been tested before. We cannot get away with being apolitical anymore. It’s time for us to pay attention, to become directly involved in the decision-making processes that guide our life. I know this is something that most people don’t enjoy and don’t want to do, but the consequences of our inaction will be much worse than anything we have ever experienced.

Yes, I sound extreme, but these are extreme times. I’m not going to sit quietly as our future is ripped out from under us. I will not let my family’s well being and our country’s fate be decided by short-sighted greed addicted forces that have looted the global economy and brought poverty, death and destruction throughout the world.

I see the path we are on and I intend to change it!

It is evident that the overwhelming majority of the population has become cynical and feels that it is useless to try to change things. If these people would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority and take action, we can change things. We have power in numbers. We are 99% of the population. If we organize on common ground and fight back, we will win!

Posted on Nov 3, 2010

Posted on Nov 2, 2010

So what would an apocalyptic far-right government do if the Republicans gain the balance of power in the nearing midterm elections? Let’s assume the worst, since this is always the terrible possibility conjured up by their Democratic opponents.
Here is the truly apocalyptic Republican program in one paragraph (and we will revisit these issues when we examine how Democrats deal with them): Any moves to tax the rich fairly would be scrapped as the social engineering of socialists. The recent health care reform, though deeply compromised, would be dismantled. The unemployed would remain abandoned, and courts would drop the hammer on immigrant workers. Aid to the poor and homeless would be slashed. Women would be disabused of the notion that they have the freedom to choose abortion. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people would become political pariahs. Corporate overlords, imperial militarists and Christian fundamentalists would take power.
Why is this apocalypse so familiar? Because rage and fear from below were once married to calculated class politics from above. That was the reactionary coalition that swept to power in 1980, and we now call it the Reagan Revolution. Thirty years have passed, and what do we witness now? The same kind of class resentment from below, but all the more raw and volatile now because so many workers have no living memory of working-class power. Labor union local meetings are indispensable schools of class consciousness, but whole sectors of industry have been shipped offshore to cheaper labor markets.
The historical lesson here is that workers cannot rely on the hope of being shareholders in corporations when their share of capital was never great, much less their power in corporate offices. If workers are to become real stakeholders in the national economy, they will also need to create workplaces in open class conflict with the corporate state. This is still possible through direct action in some sectors of manufacture and of service industries. But even in cities and regions strip-mined and abandoned by capitalists in full flight across national borders, workers may still form new cells of mutual aid. Where two or three are gathered together, a new world comes into being.
Organized labor is not yet taking a truly independent path through this political wilderness. All too often the labor union leaders are simply arms of management, and tools of the corporate state. But all is not dark, all is not lost. The California Nurses Association proved to be a voice of reason against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it went on to join the Massachusetts Nurses Association in founding National Nurses United. Here is real hope for the sick and medical workers alike. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital bed knows that patients often trust nurses more than doctors, because nurses visit more often and can be the real lifelines during a crisis.
Another example of union strength was the recent shutdown of the ports in the Bay Area by longshore workers in solidarity with the late Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American young man shot in the back by a police officer on New Year’s Day of 2009. Their common cause gives real meaning to that old, worn phrase the dignity of labor. For the cause here was not simply better wages and work conditions but a defense of all citizens against the armed power of the state. Any constitution is an empty contract unless we, the people, step up to public responsibilities. The longshore workers of ILWU Local 10 did so Oct. 23 and joined members of Grant’s family in public protest. “An injury to one is an injury to all”—that is the motto of ILWU Local 10, and it should be the Golden Rule for any decent republic. Anyone who claims working people have no heart left for public life and struggle has just not been paying attention.
The ruling class remains fiercely class-conscious, and it commands the heights of political power. Whenever the Republicans claim that the Democrats are preaching class war, this is a classic case of political projection. Class divisions have deepened over the past 30 years, but only the most zealous Democrat would pretend that all blame lies with the Republicans. That is a “progressive” fiction that has regressive consequences in every major election, since it carries the hypnotic suggestion that voters can choose only between two corporate parties.
No one seriously claims that political parties alone determine economic surges and crashes. The causal order is rather the reverse: Objective economic forces bear down upon political systems, and then all kinds of ideological fractures come to the surface, and all kinds of ad hoc coalitions are formed across party lines. That means every election guarantees the relative stability of corporate rule, so long as the two big corporate parties maintain their lockdown on the electoral system. The very rich still remain much better represented in Congress than the working and middle classes.
What do we find on the ideological fever charts of this nation all through the previous century, and now into the first decade of the 21st as well? A perennial holy war not only against avowed red-blooded socialists, whether domestic or foreign, but also an attempt to paint the most panic-stricken liberals in shades of deepest pink. Republicans once crusaded against actually existing communism, whereas now they crusade against the utterly nonexistent “socialism” of the Democratic Party.
And how does the Democratic Party fight the charge of socialism?
The Democrats refuse to fight fair and square for a graduated income tax, proportionate to real wages and our actually existing class system. They maintain the pretense of defending “the middle class,” an ideological middle ground in which labor unions are strictly for losers and philanthropy is the hobby of the rich.
The Democrats bungled health care reform very badly under the Clinton administration, and still worse under the Obama administration. None of the necessary lessons were learned the second time around, and indeed the insurance companies are already busy gaming the new system. This was predicted by the good doctors who founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). Home foreclosures are still a high-profile story; but the health care bills that are not covered by private insurance plans are what really force so many people into bankruptcy.
The Democrats have not given comprehensive aid to the unemployed, which would indeed require social democratic public programs. A public works program would do much good in repairing roads, tunnels and bridges, but the Democrats have their own interests in privatizing public services and public infrastructure.

The party line on abortion under the Clinton administration was that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” but that ideal can be secured only through real social democracy in health care, housing and education—namely, in all the public goods that advance the material and social well-being of women. The same administration, however, advanced a punitive program of “welfare reform,” dismantling some remnants of the New Deal welfare state that gave shelter to the most exposed women and children.
Two of the signal concessions President Clinton made to the far right concerned the rights of gay people, namely, signing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) into federal law. Both laws have thrown long shadows over the political landscape at the state and local levels. Obama campaigned on a vague program of hope and change, and promised whatever he thought was necessary to any group of likely voters, including gay people. As a self-proclaimed “community organizer,” he might have drafted genuine organizers from all the communities hoping for change. Instead, he hired Wall Street insiders and the usual partisan hacks of all races, religions and sexual persuasions.
Clinton had once been described as “the first black president,” itself a projection of hope upon a Southern white career politician. An honest wish to transcend racist history is just not good enough. But Obama was, in fact, the first black president, and the same wishes and projections are shipwrecked once again on the rocks and reefs of class politics. The very idea of economic class is a poor abstraction unless it is grounded in social relations that are also racial, sexual and cultural. How does a class-divided culture really come to light? Only through the very social system that is saturated with the ruling ideas of a ruling class. The manifold reality of class is tested and proved in real time, and in searing events such as wars and epidemics. Before there is enlightenment there is heartbreak.
The epidemic of AIDS tracked heavily, though not exclusively, along lines of race, sex and class. Clinton discovered AIDS in earnest only when he left public office and began campaigning for the Nobel Prize. Nowadays Clinton would much rather deal with AIDS in Haiti (certainly a worthy cause) than with the class system that still burdens so many African-Americans with chronic illnesses, including AIDS.
Irony? But there can be no irony if we do not even remember history. Each president graduates from the White House into a kind of Ivy League of philanthropy, and into an alternate universe in which buildings, libraries and foundations bear their names. Besides being tasteless, such people have no sense of shame. There is an inconvenient truth buried in the foundation of all their well-publicized philanthropy. In the words of William Blake: “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor, / And Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we.”
Likewise, the only lesson Clinton learned from the economic counterrevolution led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was to make a hard-right U-turn toward deregulation, a kind of Keynesianism in reverse. In this realm, too, certain New Deal restraints on banks and the “free market” were abandoned. (I recommend a 1998 book by the economist Michael Meeropol, “Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution,” and the recently published “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” by Robert Scheer.)
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has used the courts as blunt instruments against the candidates of the Green Party. Using the “independent judiciary” as partisan brass knuckles may seem thuggish, but the bipartisan lockdown of elections can also be achieved by selling voters a false bargain. This is what happened when Proposition 14 was sold to Californians as a great electoral reform. It was nothing of the kind; it was designed to bump independent and insurgent parties off the ballot, and it may yet succeed. Recently, the Green gubernatorial candidate in California, Laura Wells, was denied the chance to debate the two corporate candidates at a public forum. When she tried to attend the event as a member of the audience, she was arrested. That story was then broadcast online and went over, under and around much of the traditional news media. Every such attack on basic democracy also speeds the day when career politicians hang themselves with their own rope.
War is more truly our national religion than the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, so making a class-conscious case for peace is rank heresy in many houses of worship and in both houses of Congress. Protestantism has largely devolved into the gospel of prosperity, and God has become the gatekeeper of a gated community— for in my Father’s house there are many mansions.
The First Amendment to our Constitution forbids the establishment of any state religion, but the deism of Jefferson and other Founding Fathers is no better than atheism to Christian crusaders. For that matter, if the Bill of Rights can be neatly reduced to the right to own guns and form far-right militias, then the rest of the text is a damn nuisance. Much of our national history has not even been forgotten, since it was never learned or taught in the first place. This is why right-wing candidates for public office can invent any original intent they please for the Founding Fathers and not have any idea of the original text of our country’s Constitution. The First Amendment was breaking news to Christine O’Donnell, a conservative Christian and a Republican candidate from Delaware for the U.S. Senate, during an Oct. 19 televised debate with her Democratic opponent .
If Abraham Lincoln were to rise from the grave and talk as plainly about labor and capital as he once did in Congress, many Democrats and Republicans would think he sounded like a socialist. That’s not far wrong, since Lincoln was (within the limits of his time and place) a social democrat within the republican tradition. In other words, our devolved Democrats have long since abandoned plain talk about social democracy, even as our devolved Republicans have abandoned the constitutional ground of the republic.

 
Congress has become the front office of the ruling class, but the corporate-funded big media broadcast the official faction fights with all the frenzy of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum. Those who truly fight and die do so in wars beyond our borders; but the American empire is justified as a horn of plenty, pouring forth democracy and all good things upon the world. If we happen to build our military bases near oil and mineral deposits, then any question raised about American morals and motives must be an outright slander against the soldiers who sacrifice limbs and lives. Career politicians do not just wrap themselves in the flag; they wrap themselves in the flags draped on the coffins of dead soldiers. For every John McCain or John Kerry who showed real courage in battle, however misguided the war, there are scores of politicians who never served in uniform and yet campaign for votes as professional militarists.
The bloody sacrifice of the young is enshrined in national rites and monuments, so the roots of the next war always extend far back into our immense military cemeteries; and the bloody fruits of empire seem always within reach. The partisan spectacle is a fact of public life, but just as surely a grand distraction. Once in a while the news breaks that criminals exist in executive offices; but the systematic criminality of the corporate state is a subject that never needs to be censored since it would never be raised in a bipartisan debate.
In the 1980s, the triumph of reaction was blamed not only on the Republican Party but also on feminists, gay people and anti-racist activists—namely, on people who were often fighting for our lives and for basic democracy. A whole crew of straight white men cranked out columns deriding “wedge issues” and “identity politics.” Their common complaint was spelled out at greater length in books such as “The Twilight of Common Dreams” by Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky’s “Left for Dead: The Life, Death and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America.” Even Christopher Hitchens (who had not yet become a fellow traveler of the imperial right) was quoted in the February 1997 issue of The Progressive as saying, “I remember the first time I heard the slogan ‘the personal is political.’ I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom.”
In “The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy” (South End Press, 1997) I suggested those writers were defending their own brand of identity politics. The danger of playing any identity as a trump card in a political poker game is real, but any claim to represent “the universal left” must also remain open to question. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize the case for a social democracy founded on social pluralism with a quote from Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew,” written just after World War II:
“What we propose is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean that all persons who through their work collaborate toward the greatness of a country have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract ‘human nature,’ but their active participation in the life of the society. This means, then, that the Jews—and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes—from the moment that they are participants in the national enterprise, have a right to that enterprise; they are citizens. But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, or Arabs—that is, as concrete persons.”
If we are serious about the human dignity of “concrete persons,” we must defend fair wages and all due legal protection for immigrant workers in our country today. There is an abysmal contradiction between exploiting the labor of immigrant workers and putting targets on their backs as alien invaders. But this contradiction also serves the interests of many employers, since a work force that must pass through barbed wire fences and police dogs will have a tougher time forming a labor union. In this way bosses can have their cake and take bread from workers, too.
True, a police raid on a restaurant kitchen or a tomato farm may be a problem for an employer on that very day. But this kind of random social terrorism is also money in the bank, since the long-term suppression of wages and labor organizing is not an accidental side effect. The lords of agribusiness have a working coalition with the local police chiefs. Otherwise we must explain why fruit and vegetables keep appearing so magically in supermarkets and on dinner plates. Or why so many front lawns and golf courses remain so well tended by landscape workers from Mexico or Guatemala. Or why so many hotels, hospitals and office buildings are cleaned by people who do not earn a living wage.
Here in the southwest region of the United States, this contradiction is a Grand Canyon between liberal ideals and actual ruling-class power. In reality, the number of undocumented workers crossing over our southern border has gone down. That is not surprising, given the deep recession and the recent political campaign to give police in Arizona the power to demand identity papers at will. Even so, the fantasy of a bunker state with an Iron Wall is a convenient exit from reality, since capitalism is an essentially porous and diffuse system of profit. Corporations (and politicians of both corporate parties) placed the mobility of capital above all other considerations.

Let’s recall that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pushed by President Clinton and implemented with bipartisan support in 1994, was a bill of rights for big business, but it was a hemispheric hurricane for the working class. Workers in the United States lost high-paying jobs in skilled manufacturing; Mexican workers swiftly lost wages before losing jobs entirely; and the culture of social democracy in Canada was deeply eroded. As Robert E. Scott wrote in his 2003 article “The high price of ‘free’ trade” on the Economic Policy Institute website:
“Further study of NAFTA by researchers in Canada and Mexico has shown that workers in all three countries have been hurt, but for different reasons (Faux et al. 2001). In Mexico, real wages have fallen sharply and there has been a steep decline in the number of people holding regular jobs in paid positions. Many workers have been shifted into subsistence-level work in the ‘informal sector,’ frequently unpaid work in family retail trade or restaurant businesses. Additionally, a flood of subsidized, low-priced corn from the United States has decimated farmers and rural economics. In Canada, a decade of heightened competition with the United States is eroding social investment in public spending on education, health care, unemployment compensation, and a wide range of other public services.”
NAFTA was followed by the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005, which extended “the logic of the market” to five Central American nations and to the Dominican Republic. Jimmy Carter was an enthusiastic promoter of CAFTA, and if a more extensive South American Free Trade Agreement had been possible he would have supported that as well. But Carter did have the decency to state that the Venezuelan people had voted fair and square for an economic populist, Hugo Chavez. The working classes in Mexico, Central America and South America have often defied capitalist and outright fascist rulers in mass protests, but they have also suffered heavy losses through the jailing and killing of their bravest militants and labor leaders. To this day, workers from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego have long memories of political betrayals and outright repression. Generally, they do their best to settle accounts with ballots and not bullets. Anyone who argues that workers have no right to wage the class struggle beyond election days, however, is simply wishing that the working class would reduce itself to a passive production line on every other day of the year.
This is the ground of struggle, and this is the ground of solidarity. If socialists are not internationalists, we might as well join phony populists in the existing big corporate parties. The only internationalism recognized by demagogues such as Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly is the unrestricted mobility of capital over the whole planet. The price of this “free market” is the near feudal servitude of many millions of workers, and the imperial wars in which they die so young.
Patriotism of that kind is the false gospel of the ruling class. The sooner we break those mental chains, the better we are able to love our homeland. And what is any homeland but a wide sense of our neighborhood? If we do not want our streets filled with the tanks of a foreign power or our skies filled with deadly drones, then by what divine right do we inflict them on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan? These wars have long been an exercise of ruling-class power, waged in the domestic political realm by two political parties that serve the same corporate interests even as they play musical chairs in Congress.
“Our two-party system” is an ideological fiction, but this fiction has real political power. On the eve of the midterm elections, the Democratic Party is struggling to hold together the usual unstable coalition of Blue Dog Democrats, labor unions and corporate managers.
Whether the tea party movement is an appendage of the Republican Party or a mutant force that may break party ranks, we cannot yet predict. Tea party activists cover a spectrum of far-right causes, but at present the central and controlling idea seems to be free-market fundamentalism. In its purest form, this ideology is pure nonsense, since the irreducible price of every “free” market is the actual labor of human beings.
Granting “personhood” to corporations was a piece of godlike presumption on the part of Supreme Court justices in 1886, when they ruled in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment made any corporation a natural person under the U.S. Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote 60 years later, “There was no history, logic, or reason to support that view.”

 
That legal precedent of corporate personhood undermined our public life, yet it is consistent with the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case early this year (though it remains indefensible). The latter decision gives corporations a right to make unlimited campaign donations, and Congress has failed to impose disclosure requirements. Obama’s noblest public moment came in his last State of the Union speech when he made a direct criticism of this Supreme Court ruling. But this president does not simply serve at the will of the people; he also serves at the will of the ruling class, and remains a member of that class in good standing so long as he presides loyally over a corporate state and imperial wars.
If every government depends on the consent of the governed, then every neighborhood and workplace is potentially a small republic of persons who are willing to say, “We do not consent.” Do the capitalist parties depend upon your votes and donations? Deprive those parties of your moral and material support. Vote against the parties of war and empire every chance you get, and cast your vote for the parties of peace, economic democracy and ecological sanity. In this election, the Green Party of the United States represents not only our best hope of social democracy, but also our best chance to bring ecological common sense to our global economy.

October 30, 2010

words by Jon Stewart

And now I thought we might have a moment, however brief, for some sincerity. If that’s okay – I know that there are boundaries for a comedian / pundit / talker guy, and I’m sure that I’ll find out tomorrow how I have violated them.
So, uh, what exactly was this? I can’t control what people think this was: I can only tell you my intentions.

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear–they are, and we do.

But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus, and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

The country’s 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the dangerous, unexpected flaming ants epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

There are terrorists, and racists, and Stalinists, and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned! You must have the resume! Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Party-ers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult–not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate. Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more.

The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker–and, perhaps, eczema. And yet… I feel good. Strangely, calmly, good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us, through a funhouse mirror–and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist, and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead, and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin, and one eyeball.

So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle, to a pumpkin-assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable–why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution, and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?

We hear every damned day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. The truth is, we do! We work together to get things done every damned day! The only place we don’t is here (in Washington) or on cable TV!

But Americans don’t live here, or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done–not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.

Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often something they do not want to do! But they do it. Impossible things, every day, that are only made possible through the little, reasonable compromises we all make.

(Points to video screen, showing video of cars in traffic.) Look on the screen. This is where we are, this is who we are. These cars. That’s a schoolteacher who probably think his taxes are too high, he’s going to work. There’s another car, a woman with two small kids, can’t really think about anything else right now… A lady’s in the NRA, loves Oprah. There’s another car, an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter; another car, a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan.

But this is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief, and principles they hold dear–often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers’. And yet, these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze, one by one, into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel, carved underneath a mighty river.

And they do it, concession by concession: you go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. ‘Oh my God–is that an NRA sticker on your car?’ ‘Is that an Obama sticker on your car?’ It’s okay–you go, then I go.

And sure, at some point, there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder, and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare, and he is scorned, and he is not hired as an analyst!

Because we know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land.

Sometimes, it’s just New Jersey.

Posted on Oct 28, 2010

October 27, 2010

by: Tom Friedman

I confess, I find it dispiriting to read the polls and see candidates, mostly Republicans, leading in various midterm races while promoting many of the very same ideas that got us into this mess. Am I hearing right?

Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in the Great Depression. Let’s roll back financial regulation — because we’ve learned from experience that Wall Street can police itself and average Americans will never have to bail it out.

Let’s have no limits on corporate campaign spending so oil and coal companies can more easily and anonymously strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to limit pollution in the air our kids breathe. Let’s discriminate against gays and lesbians who want to join the military and fight for their country. Let’s restrict immigration, because, after all, we don’t live in a world where America’s most important competitive advantage is its ability to attract the world’s best brains. Let’s repeal our limited health care reform rather than see what works and then fix it. Let’s oppose the free-trade system that made us rich.

Let’s kowtow even more to public service unions so they’ll make even more money than private sector workers, so they’ll give even more money to Democrats who will give them even more generous pensions, so not only California and New York will go bankrupt but every other state too. Let’s pay for more tax cuts by uncovering waste I can’t identify, fraud I haven’t found and abuse that I’ll get back to you on later.

All that’s missing is any realistic diagnosis of where we are as a country and what we need to get back to sustainable growth. Actually, such a diagnosis has been done. A nonpartisan group of America’s most distinguished engineers, scientists, educators and industrialists unveiled just such a study in the midst of this campaign.

Here is the story: In 2005 our National Academies responded to a call from a bipartisan group of senators to recommend 10 actions the federal government could take to enhance science and technology so America could successfully compete in the 21st century. Their response was published in a study, spearheaded by the industrialist Norman Augustine, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”

Charles M. Vest, the former M.I.T. president, worked on the study and noted in a speech recently that “Gathering Storm,” together with work by the Council on Competitiveness, led to the America Competes Act of 2007, which increased funding for the basic science research that underlies our industrial economy. Other recommendations, like improving K-12 science education, were not substantively addressed.

So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” “The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,’ says it all,” noted Vest. “The committee’s conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.’ ”

But I thought: “We’re number 1!”

“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today,” says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

“This is not a pretty picture, and it cannot be wished away,” said Vest. The study recommended a series of steps — some that President Obama has already initiated, some that still need Congress’s support — designed to increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education, to reinforce long-term basic research, and to create the right tax and policy incentives so we can develop, recruit and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the world. The goal is to make America the premier place to innovate and invest in innovation to create high-paying jobs.

You’ll have to Google it, though. The report hasn’t received 1/100th of the attention given to Juan Williams’s remarks on Muslims.

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.

October 23, 2010

by Tom Friedman

In the past two weeks, I’ve taken the Amtrak Acela to the Philadelphia and New York stations. In both places there were signs on the train platforms boasting that new construction work there was being paid for by “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” that is, the $787 billion stimulus. And what was that work? New “lighting” — so now you can see even better just how disgustingly decayed, undersized and outdated are the rail platforms and infrastructure in two of our biggest cities.

If we were a serious country, this is what the midterms would be about: How do we generate the jobs needed to sustain our middle class and pay for new infrastructure? It would require a different kind of politics — one that doesn’t conform to either party’s platform. We will have to raise some taxes to generate revenue, like on energy or maybe a value-added tax, and lower others, on payrolls to stimulate work, and on multinational corporations to get them to bring the trillion dollars they have offshore back to the U.S. for investment. We will have to adjust some services, like Social Security, while we invest in new infrastructure, like high-speed rail and Internet bandwidth; the U.S. ranks 22nd in the world in average connection speed. And, most of all, we will have to have an honest discussion about how we got in this rut.

How we got into this rut is no secret. We compensated for years of stagnating middle-class wages the easy way. Just as baseball players in the ’90s injected themselves with steroids to artificially build muscle to hit more home runs — instead of doing real bodybuilding — our two parties injected steroids, cheap credit, into Wall Street so it could go gambling and into Main Street so it could go home-buying. They both started hitting home runs, artificially — until the steroids ran dry. Now we have to rebuild America’s muscles the old-fashioned way.

How? In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.

Sure, more countries can now compete with us. But that’s good. It means they’re also spawning new jobs, customers, ideas and industries where well-trained Americans can also compete. Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search” or “iPhone applications.” Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.

But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan” — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.

For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.

But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,” and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer. “People will always need haircuts and health care,” says Katz, “and you can do that with low-wage labor or with people who acquire a lot of skills and pride and bring their imagination to do creative and customized things.” Their work will be more meaningful and their customers more satisfied.

Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. This election should have been about how.

By FRANK RICH: October 23, 2010

PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.

The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.

A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay’s Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the “toxic” mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation during roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billion taxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.

Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks’ foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. “The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating — it’s shameful,” he wrote.

Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide’s deceptive mortgage practices — $8.4 billion — was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath.

Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.