Playing chess with the Chutes and Ladders crowd

The Senate election in Massachusetts goes down today. I don’t know the outcome, and don’t much care. One of the candidates is interesting, the other as boring as Wonderbread. One is a radical right winger, the other a nothing. One will fight for the things he believes in, the other not. Massachusetts won’t long tolerate a right wing nutjob in office, and so if Scott Brown wins, he’ll he ousted in 2012. He’ll probably be replaced by another good-for-nothing Democrat. Where’s the upside here?

For a brief while I hoped that a Brown win would help defeat the corporate-written Senate “Health Care Reform” bill, which is meant to be the final version. But word has leaked out that if Brown indeed carries the state, as I hope he does, that the Democrats will abandon reconciliation of the House and Senate bills, and push the Senate bill through the House. This would negate the need for another vote in the Senate.

They can be clever. Democratic leadership, so often seen as weak and ineffective in fighting for progressive reform in health care, can make things happen. They can bring pressure on members of the House, they can force a majority, they do know how to make deals, they do know how to threaten and intimidate members. Obama will weigh in, he will use the hammer. Our last hope, the “Progressive Caucus”, will shrivel under the heat when it comes down to passage of that awful bill. The Democratic leadership is strong and resourceful, and effective. It is simply misunderstood. People think these people to be …liberals? Whatever. They are corporate, and that phrase encompasses hacks and poseurs of both parties.

Democratic hacks and poseurs are a little more dangerous, as they are supported by the rank and file of the party, who simply don’t understand corporate politics.

There are differences between Democrats and Republicans. Russ Feingold and Pat Leahy are different animals than Jim Inhofe and Jim DeMint. But the players in the health care debate, the appointed spearchuckers, have been people like Max Baucus, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. These men have played a skilled game of chess, and are not only effective, but managed to undermine reform efforts before they got off the ground. Each played a critical role in carrying forward the “reforms” sought by AHIP and PhRMA.

The reason we will have a bad bill signed into law, why it will be shoved down our throats despite protestations of Massachusetts voters, is not because of Democrat weakness. It is because Democratic leadership knows how to manage its left wing, just as Republicans know how to manage their Christians. Progressives and liberal reformers, who thought they had a voice in the process, were actually steered to a predetermined outcome by some very cagey politicians.

Democratic leadership plays chess, and plays it well, while the Democratic followship is mired down in Chutes and Ladders.

There can be no reform of this system from within this system. Those who say we must join the Democratic Party to change it do not understand how the Democratic Party works. Non-corporate Democrats do not gain leadership positions, while progressives are routinely marginalized. Since Obama’s election, new Senators have been appointed in Colorado, Illinois, Delaware and New York. Rahm Emmanuel has worked hard behind the scenes to make sure that each new appointee had appropriate corporate credentials. No liberals were allowed. Only Roland Burris managed to sneak through in a comical in-your-face maneuver by then-Governor Blagojevich. But Burris has been given his walking papers, and the heir apparent, the corporate hack who was meant to fill that seat, Tammy Duckworth, will ascend.

How do you change so corrupt an organization from within? You don’t. Corporate paymasters own that party, and its leadership works closely with Republican leadership to orchestrate events – that’s how we get this bizarre phenomenon we now witness where legislation so extreme that Republicans could not possibly pass it will be rammed through by Democrats.

The problem is money. The rest is all show. Deal with the problem, and we might have progress. For so long as the parties are corporate, reform is impossible. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were each seen as dependable, and were consequently touted as the “front runners” by corporate media, all others ignored. There cannot be reform when corporate media effectively performs a coronation of the eventual winners before the vote. Think back to 2006 when Howard Dean had his character assassinated, his candidacy destroyed – not by his own actions, as his “I have a scream” speech was not in the slightest significant. The media torpedoed him. That told me that he was a worthwhile candidate, and he has since proven to be a good man. But he could not succeed as a Democrat.

It’s a long hard road, things have to get much worse. We need popular movements, dynamics that spring up by groundswell and lead to popular explosions. That is how it has worked throughout history.

If there is a groundswell, if popular movements do indeed form, they must by all means avoid the Democrats, who only mean to destroy them. That’s their role in our “two party” system.