Covert Action Quarterly was a magazine founded in 1978 by Philip Agee. Its original purpose was to monitor CIA activities. It named names, and annoyed the powerful. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 probably owes its existence to that magazine. It is now reduced to a web site. But while it was running, it was fun.

This is from the summer of 1997 Issue, “Playing by the Rules”:

Washington Rules — the unspoken handbook of rules for survival in the capital city:

• If it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for.
• Don’t lie, cheat or steal unnecessarily.
• There’s always one more son of a bitch than you counted on.
• An honest answer could get you in a whole lot of trouble.
• The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.
• Chicken Little only has to be right once.
• “No” is only an interim response
• You can’t kill a bad idea.
• If at first you don’t succeed, kill all the evidence that you ever tried.
• The truth is variable.
• A porcupine with his quills down is just another fat rodent.
• You can agree with any concept or notional future option in principle, but fight implementation every step of the way.
• A promise is not a guarantee.
• If you can’t counter the argument, leave the meeting.

I’ve run these words before, and keep coming back to them because they turn out so often to ne prophetic of official behaviors.

In Obama’s SOTU last night, one line (among others) struck me as disingenuous:

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests- including foreign corporations- to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”

So … what does he want them to do? Write a nasty letter? Is he not aware that our campaigns, including his own, are already bankrolled by our most powerful interests? Why does he urge both parties to “pass a bill” when it only takes one party, his own? Surely he knows that one of those parties likely supports the ruling. Are these just words?

We have seen Obama mouth good words before. The man gives heady speech. With health care and banking reform, he has spoken mightily and undercut his own words behind the scenes. He leads a party that in public comes off as a porcupine with its quills down – a fat rodent.

Citizens United is more than just a bad ruling. It is an organizational opportunity. If my theory that the Democrats exist to prevent organizing, they will gather up all of the steam that is forming around this ruling, all of the energy, and see that it dissipates into air. People will come to them for leadership, and they will gather it up, introduce bills that go nowhere, and in the end throw up their hands, as if powerless. That’s their job, and contrary to belief, they are not weak, not wimps, and are in fact very good at their job.

“Whenever they talk about bipartisanship, I know that we are in for a royal screwing.”
(Someone really smart said this back a while ago, but I don’t remember who it was.)

From Obama’s SOTU Address:

Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we will still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That’s why I’ve called for a bipartisan, Fiscal Commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can’t be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The Commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline. Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward, because I refuse to pass this problem on to another generation of Americans. And when the vote comes tomorrow, the Senate should restore the pay-as-you-go law that was a big reason why we had record surpluses in the 1990s.

Do you want to know the real reason why we had a surplus in the late 1990’s? It was a total fricking accident. No one saw it coming – a bubble that yielded a huge tax windfall. Surpluses are considered dangerous by our ruling elite, as they create the perception that money is avialable for things like education, health care, infrastructure. Bush’s first action as president was to eliminate the surpluses for the foreseeable future. No doubt a term-three Clinton would have done the same.

Here’s how absurd this president is – here’s what’s causing the “problem”:

President Obama is carrying forward the right wing strategy of running up massive deficits by means of tax cuts, military spending, and his particular charm, subsidies to Wall Street, and then turning to the American public and pleading for cuts in social programs to ease those deficits. It’s called bipartisanship. On the on the Republican right wing, courtesy of Grover Norquist, we know it is a conscious strategy. On the Democratic right wing, they are usually a bit more subtle – that is, Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” and had in place a real and dangerous plan to privatize Social Security, only to be thwarted by a need to bolster his public standing during the Monica scandal. (In one of the most cynical maneuvers that vile and ugly man ever engaged in, he became Social Security’s most stalwart defender to save his worthless political ass.)

No doubt the presidential commission that Obama advocates will call for privatization of Social Security (which actually runs a surplus) and huge cutbacks in the Medicas, while ignoring the effect of military spending and tax cuts. It’s a right wing wet dream, and if anything is clear to me after one year of this clown, it is that he is a closet right winger.

Scratch that. Scratch the word “closet.” He’s not even trying. He is openly taunting us with his right wing agenda, deliberately rubbing Democratic faces in it, knowing they will follow him to hell and back.

President Obama has announced a spending freeze on that portion of the budget that the business sector (Wall Street) does not like – social programs that in total are contributing about 6% in total to the budget deficit. The deficits themselves are probably not a great concern, as putting people back to work will ease future burdens. But this is the ethos of Washington DC.

Obama, it seems, has changed nothing, and is now acting out the Grover Norquist scenario. The dishonesty is so revealing – there not one hint of the supposed man of progressive leanings who ran for office in 2008. He has completely turned his back on us.

At a time when Massachusetts told him quite bluntly that he was singing the wrong song, he has moved right on to the second verse. This is not Clinton2. It is Bush3.

This has been percolating for a while now: A treatise on “free market” economics. If it takes more than 700 words, I have over-thought it.

Having read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is hard to dispute the things he says. It is all sensible. He tried to objectively describe the interactions of people in advanced pre-industrial societies where labor was specialized and people produced more goods than they needed. He extrapolated from this his theories on the origins of the wealth. His mind was pure, his reasoning rigorous. He lacked an agenda and was unprejudiced. His work is rightly considered a classic. Reagan and Bush should have read it. All conservatives should read it some time.

Agendas and prejudices are the modern failings of “free market” economics. Its advocates are the financiers and predators, its best proponents the intellectual class – those think-tankers and professors of economics at our finest universities, aka the “bought priesthood.””

The world that Smith described underlies all that we do. We engage in commerce, some more perceptive than others, some more diligent, most of us just plodding along selling our wares while unknowingly making more money for others than for ourselves. The priesthood says that we must allow this system to flourish on its own, that attempts to regulate it always end badly. Attempts to fine-tune the engine usually end up hindering its performance.

They’re wrong. It’s not an engine – it’s a fire. It can be our servant, it can rage out of control, and usually does if not strictly regulated. Witness … the present. Markets are wonderful and adaptable. If we regulate them, if we redirect their outcomes to better serve the whole of society, they continue to work well, and we have more equality of outcomes, happier people, and fewer predatrors and priests telling us to toughen up as they steal our earnings.

The class that the intellectuals serve are those whose sole purpose in life is to accumulate wealth. It’s a game, well-portrayed and pilloried in the Ellis book-made-movie “American Psycho.” (“Mergers and acquisitions” = “murders and executions.”) These people, these predators, are not the capitalists, the investors, the bankers of old who redirected our largess to its best use. They are rather thieves of the highest order, more like feudal lords or aristocrats than public servants. They are risk-averse, and seek security in collecting the wealth produced by others by whatever means currently available.

In Harlem, police routinely swoop down and make mass arrests of drug dealers in the black neighborhoods. Such a fell swoop is needed on Wall Street – so many of that Italian loafer set should be serving time with Bernie Madoff (whose only real crime was stealing money from the wrong people).

The mass of humanity are not go-getters – they are mere survivors. All those wonderful kids, so ill-served by our schools, will grow up to be very ordinary people who find slots to fill, some fulfilled, most not. Our society is a bushel basket under which many lights are hidden. People are trained to “get a job.” Later on those big mortgages and health insurance and student loans will keep them in place. They will work fifty weeks for two weeks of freedom, see their life’s work be devastated in the latest market scandal, and end up depending on Social Security, that dreaded and awful program, for a decent retirement.

This from a recent article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Sure Thing“: (behind a subscription wall at present). It’s an article about the predator class.

…one of the undisputed finding[s] in all the research on entrepreneurs: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. [Economist Scott] Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.

That hits home. Why do I start each day with so much vigor and joy? I do not serve the predators, I bide my own time, I live free. If that is the free market, count me in. But what most people do in this country … well, they are many things. But they are not free.

(705 words with these five.)

Word is out that Obama is furious about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding campaign financing. He, along with the Congress, will be taking strong action.

In other news, Long Island four-year old Cory is reported to be furious at his parents’ refusal to allow him to have a TV in his room, and has vowed to take strong action.

I don’t know the fallout from the decision, nor can I predict unintended consequences. I do know that the intended consequences are that those who have larges sums of cash on hand will engage in propaganda to elect people they like to office. There will be little ability to counter it. But that’s the way we’ve been headed for years now, and the Federalist Society that dominates the court merely shut the gate behind them. They are firmly in power, and have been for years. We are no longer a constitutional republic in anything other than name. We are a plutonomy.

But I’m curious – corporate support of candidates is the air we breathe. Most of our office holders are corporate, few of them have the balls to challenge these people who own the networks and finance their campaigns. Is it different now that UnitedHealth and Wellpoint can openly proclaim their support of Obama? If they come out in the open and say “Hey – we are a large corporation that leaches on the health care system, and we want Barack Obama elected president”, is that better than Obama merely taking $20 million from them and running his own ads?

Only one thing is different: The open advertising is more honest. Obama never once mentioned all the support he was getting from Wall Street and AHIP.

Corporate personhood? Of course it’s absurd. Of course it is judicial activism at its worst. But I’m so used to this crazy country that it takes a whole lot more than that to surprise me or turn me cynical. We’re corporate now, and we’re finally open about it. If they just call off the elections, eliminating the formality of putting democratic lipstick on the corporate pig, we can all get on with our business.

I have to remind myself from time to time that things don’t really change except for the better over the long haul. For instance, in an interview I was reading this morning of Gilbert Achbar and Noam Chomsky by Stephen Shalom, they made the point that antisemitism in the United States, so prevalent up until the 1950’s, is virtually non-existent. Barack Obama is a pseudo-liberal and de facto right winger, but he is also a half-black president. That would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yes, we have many problems, but we have always had many problems. Each generation has to deal with a complicated world, and what I have come to realize is the problem of the sociopath in public life. Sociopaths are always with us, and they generally manage to work themselves into positions of power, usually within the business world, but often enough too in politics and the military. The dumb ones go into crime. The solution to that problem is not to do away with them, as we cannot do that, but rather to contain them. In the wake of the Great Depression, by means of high marginal tax rates and progressive welfare policies, we did just that. But lessons don’t last forever, generations pass, and we have to re-learn them. It is painful, it takes time. We are a long way from out of this.

Sociopaths in power aside, our first and biggest problem is the Democratic Party, and what Harry Truman referred to as “Trojan Horse Democrats”. Listening to talk radio, as I so often do, I see there is an attitude out there that simply says that President Obama needs to get with the program, to bypass his advisers or replace them, to come out of his shell, to be himself. They don’t get it. This is him. He is a DLC Democrat, or a corporatist. He said what he had to say to get elected, but he did not mean a word of it. He lied. He had corporate and corporate media support throughout the campaign, and that is why. They allowed him a long leash to say progressive things knowing full well he would not implement anything.

Hillary Clinton would behave in exactly the same way. That’s why the two of them were considered the “viable” candidates, and why they were allowed to fight it out. The outcome didn’t matter to the power brokers. The game was rigged.

Both Clinton(s) and Obama are very smart people who intuitively understand the system. There’s no back room dealing necessary, though the campaigns they ran were plainly and painfully dishonest, manipulative and propagandistic. They are Trojan Horses. As Harry Truman reminded us below, we can always count on Republicans to be themselves and to self-destruct. Let them be. What we need are Democrats who are real progressives and liberals, who mean what they say, who fight for what they believe in.

Such Democrats exist. They are not many in number. In realistically assessing our position, progressives need to do an honest tally of how many are on their side in Congress. Eighty House members? Twenty senators? Fifteen? Not enough to filibuster, unfortunately. That’s why Democrats don’t use the filibuster. There are more than sixty votes available to push forward the right wing agenda. All that is going on right now is perception management, to make the right wing agenda look like a liberal agenda. That was done with health care, war, and Wall Street. Bill Clinton was good, and Obama apparently sucks.

That works in our favor. Massachusetts figured it out. Unfortunately, they were offered a Trojan Horse Democratic candidate in Coakely, a recipient of AHIP and PhRMA money, and so opted for the only reasonable alternative. I would have done the same.

Our two political options at this time, politically, are real Democrats and third party candidates. It is hard to know who the real Democrats are, as so many of them lie about their positions when running for office. So it’s a matter of character judgment. For instance, Montana’s Max Baucus is obviously a man of low worth, and Jon Tester apparently so too. In Colorado, it is Michael Bennett who is the Trojan Horse. He will be replaced by Gale Norton this year.

Fair enough. Vote them out. There’s nothing to be gained by keeping them in. In fact, Trojan Horses impede progress. The “lesser evil” is in truth the greater evil.

But politics and organization are two different things. Too much energy goes in to politics, and not enough in organization. Far more than good Democrats, right now we need community organizers. If we get back to basics,and build from the ground up, and watch out for lying Trojan Horse Democrats, over the long run, things will improve, as they have in the past.

By the way, I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this, but Democrats are the problem. They don’t give us real alternatives, and absorb all of our organizational energy in the process. Have I said that before?

Anyway, here’s Harry Truman, and good day to you.

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are — when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people — then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party.

More than that, I don’t believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart. There is something more important involved in our program than simply the success of a political party.

The rights and the welfare of millions of Americans are involved in the pledges made in the Democratic platform…. And those rights and interests must not be betrayed.

These are some of the principles for which the Democratic Party stands…. We stand for better education, better health, greater opportunities for all. We stand for fair play and decency, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the cherished principle that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.

Taken together, these principles are the articles of the liberal faith. I am sure that the liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans. It sometimes happens that circumstances of time and place combine to deny its expression. But the faith is there, and the reactionaries can never hope to have any but temporary advantage in this country.