After giving a speech this week in which he sounded surprisingly progressive, Obama was caught off-microphone in Chicago saying

“I said, ‘You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We’ll have that debate. You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we’re stupid?’ … Put it in a separate bill. We’ll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don’t try to sneak this through.” … “When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill — but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level.”

Taken as a whole, the two events – the speech, and then the “candid” comments “accidentally” picked up at a stump speech, and it is plain to see that Obama needs progressives to get elected. The question is, are they dumb enough to fall for words when there have been no actions in over two years?

Of course they are. Of course they are.

From Sahil Kapur at Raw Story

‘Budget cuts’ may even amount to $3.3 billion increase

WASHINGTON – The budget deal struck last Friday to avert a government shutdown cuts the fiscal 2011 deficit by just $352 million, not the $38 billion touted by both parties, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

A CBO analysis found Wednesday that the measure negotiated by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to fund the government through September would yield less than one-100th of the deficit savings touted.

The study confirms that the resolution cuts federal spending authority by $38 billion, but concludes that most of the money was unlikely to be spent anyway.

The CBO figure was achieved after clearing the smoke and mirrors, by adjusting for savings that are likely to occur in a future year, spending increases elsewhere in the budget, and the hike in the military budget.

When factoring in war funding, the analysis found that the legislation could even increase total federal outlays by $3.3 billion from 2010 levels.

The trimmed-down figure reflects the harsh realities of cutting spending at a time when dozens of lawmakers were recently ushered into Congress on a mandate to attack the federal budget.

The House is expected to vote on the measure Thursday.

If one were to remove the smoke and mirrors and be really cynical, one might say that $38 billion in social spending was replaced by $41 billion in military spending. Nice job, Obama!

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which. (George Orwell, closing passage from Animal Farm)

It would be so refreshing to be wrong about this guy, but Obama is giving a talk today on the deficit. I’m hiding my wallet. It’s me he’s after.

Food for thought:

1. The deficit only becomes a “crisis” when the two parties decide it is a crisis. We didn’t have serious deficits until World War II, when they consumed more than half of the economy. Then they got paid back. After that, we were pretty much deficit-free until 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office. Through Reagan, Bush and Bush again, we’ve been on a merry spending spree. Now they decide it’s a problem. Hmmmmm ….

2. Since he took office, Obama has expanded the Central Asian war global war on Islam, extended the Bush tax cuts, and has now started a war in Libya. But when it comes to social programs, man, we are fresh out of cash!

3. He’s going after Medicare and Medicaid. That’s been the whole point of the Kabuki Theater of the threatened shut down of government … a three act play, and today is the third act.

Hope to be wrong. I hope he talks about how Social Security is not part of the General Fund and is not running in the red. I hope he talks about how private sector health care costs (run up by the private insurance cartel) and not just Medicare and Medicaid, are bleeding us dry. I hope he talks about how there is no known connection between economic vitality and tax rates. I hope he distinguishes himself in some manner from the two parties, and acts like a leader.

Hope to be wrong.
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Follow-up: I heard parts of his speech but the phone at that moment started ringing. What I heard is somewhat encouraging – although he acts as if our whole political debate is contained in the short walk between the two parties, he did say some things that are encouraging: One, he acknowledged that the health insurance companies are not good “persons” (Citizens United variety), and so refuses to voucher out senior health care and expose our seniors more to those persons than has already been done via Medicare supplements and Medicare Advantage; two, he acknowledged that Social Security is not causing any part of the deficit (music to my ears); three, he acknowledged that the tax code needs to be simplified (I just did a return that is 159 pages long for a guy who has some oil and gas and some rental properties – that’s absurd!); and he said again that he will not extend the Bush tax cuts (he already backed down from that fight once, so I’m not trusting here).

All in all, his message was tailored for his liberal base, and so resonates. Devil will turn up in details.

Election fraud in Wisconsin: The discovery of enough votes in Wisconsin to assure victory for David Prosser, and further to give him just enough votes to be outside the range that would yield a mandatory recount, is nothing short of a goddammed miracle! The question is, will anyone do anything about it? I doubt the Wisconsin Attorney General is going to turn on Scott Walker, and the Obama Administration will stay out of it for some sniveling reason. The only hope for redress of that grievance will be the courts. Good luck, Wisconsinites.

It reminds me of something that troubled me when I heard that petitions were being circulated to do recall elections in that state. Our election system in this country is not secure, and in all the years since 2004, nothing has been done to fix any of the deficiencies. The precincts are still using easily hackable computer systems. When it appeared that Bush had stolen (yet another) election in 2004, I was curious why the Democrats were not concerned. In the succeeding years, I’ve come to appreciate that they are essentailly the same party, and though there may be inter-party squabbling for seats now and then, when the leadership of each party is in cahoots with the other, then the ability to turn an election can be useful at times to “both” parties against outsiders.

The failure to address election fraud in 2000, 2002 and 2004 essentially set the precedent, and the system is now open to hackery whenever needed. Machines that cannot be audited or kept secure are deemed to be reliable, per se, because the “other” party refused to do anything. Our elections, never anything to brag about, are not secure. It would be nice when they do they recall elections in Wisconsin, if they would call in international observers from say, Haiti or Libya, to assure that we are up to their standards.

So when 2008 came up clean (and I was surprised how the exit polls showed it to be clean it was throughout the fifty states), I was not reassured that we were having clean elections again. It just told me (and this is wisdom after the fact), that Obama did not challenge the leadership of either party.
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Government Shutdown:And now they are going to shut down the government. It’s really hard to know what this is all about or what is in store for us. Some think that this is the beginning of a bipartisan assault on Medicare and Social Security, which will take place in the next two months. Some say that one or the other party will be “hurt” by a shutdown, but if there is only one party, that hardly matters.

This I know today, and not much else: It’s not about Planned Parenthood. Neither party gives a rat’s ass about the abortion issue. It’s pure wedge. Harry Reid has said that there is agreement on everything that will be cut, and that should be the focus of attention – that the Democrats have capitulated in this latest rollicking round of Kabuki Theater. But it’s not really capitulation if all they were looking for was a cover story for helping the Republicans cut or shut down a host of popular social programs.

It’s just business as usual here in our one-party state, and note well that there is no disagreement between them that the biggest discretionary spending program of all – the war budget, which is sacrosanct.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a bit on the “two-party” system, saying

I spoke yesterday at Harvard’s Kennedy School and was asked whether I’ve ever been told by MSNBC or any other television program on which I’ve appeared not to speak about a certain issue. I replied that the media’s narrowing of political debate doesn’t generally operate in such an explicit way (though sometimes it does); rather, by confining themselves only to those issues relating to the partisan conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, anything that exists outside of that sphere is simply ignored. Any positions that enjoy bipartisan consensus — or issues that the two parties jointly ignore — are rarely examined in establishment media venues.

So the media essentially freezes debate on issues to those issues raised by either party, and since so many crucial issues are not disputed between them, the media does not cover them either.

Ah, the wonders of our two-party system that is really one.

I am reading Obama and the Empire, by Fidel Castro. It’s a collection of short essays, maybe even reprinted op-ed pieces from Granma.

He is a smart man, or would not still be defying the empire fifty years after taking power. On this side of the pond we have only been allowed to see the Cuban response to American aggression. Without the other half of the story what they do indeed seems like aggression, repression and tyranny. Taken as a whole, it is a story of a large and powerful country trying to retake a happenstance breakaway republic. There have been crimes, high and low. Castro is no saint. But most of those crimes originated in Langley. When others do those same crimes to us, we call it “terrorism.”

But I’m not going to spend a great deal of time with this book. Castro is interesting and well-versed, but not deep. The following snippet, slightly poignant, jumped out at me this morning, however.

Nuclear power plants are among the sources of energy [Obama] promises to hastily develop. These are already opposed by a great many people due to the high risk of accidents with disastrous consequences for life, the environment and human food. Moreover, it is absolutely impossible to prevent some of these accidents [from] occurring. (Essay dated February 4, 2009)

It’s very difficult to understand events as they are playing out, as the people who drive public opinion don’t often tell us anything about the people who drive events. But the attack on Libya is showing a crack in the armor. The military is either forced to act or doing some “shock doctrine” opportunism. The propagandists are caught short, and are ad-libbing.

First, the attack was not planned. There was no demonization campaign, as with Saddam/Milosevic/Noreiga et al. They just went ahead and started bombing, meaning that they had no part in the uprising, and had no time to make up a good cover story. This took them by surprise. (“Them” is ubiquitous – the Pentagon, the White House, Wall Street, London … a very large group of powerful people.)

We don’t know who or what they are bombing. It’s a bit complicated, as with Iraq pre-2003, where they wanted Saddam Hussein in power to keep things in a state of “stability” until they could move in with the muscle. So we’re hearing now that they do not want regime change. They want their stability. They are, however, going after military hardware, which means that they do not want Ghaddafi to completely quell the uprising. And yet, given the anti-American sentiment that exists in Libya and just about every other Arab country, it is safe to assume that they do not want the rebellion to succeed.

Confused? Me too.

The only thing I’ve heard out-of-the ordinary is a radio interview as I was working today, done locally in Denver, and with whom I do not know. But the guy being interviewed said that he thought that the the U.S. Southern Command is making a play to establish military bases in Africa. That has some legs, as bases and power projection behind most of what we are doing elsewhere.

Some are saying that Obama is merely imitating his idol, Ronald Reagan in doing this attack. This presumes that Obama has the power to make such decisions. If there is any power left in that office, there is no resolve to use it, so that it’s highly unlikely that Obama had anything to do with this decision. He’s just the ribbon cutter.

Oh, yeah – and now they are saying this is a NATO operation. That’s a ruse, of course, but there’s a real reason for it: They did not go through the motions of getting that perfunctory joint resolution from Congress authorizing the act. So it’s an illegal war. Hence, it’s “NATO’s idea.” But since NATO is submissive to the U.S., it’s window dressing.

I’ve come to believe two things during Obama’s presidency – one, that Gates at Defense and Geithner at Treasury were used as signals to the world, and Wall Street, respectively, that nothing had changed with his election, and two, that Rod Blagojevich is probably a decent guy, and that’s what cost him.

But who knows. In American politics, if good guys exist, they are like children, seen but not heard. But I can’t get over this feeling that Blagojevich was caught in the path of a steam roller.

… Oh yeah, almost forgot … human rights. Let me think about that … no, they don’t care about that. Must be something else.

One of Bill Maher’s guests last night on Real Time was Dana Loesch, a Teabagger. She’s quite stupid, which is no surprise, but if you have a chance to watch the broadcast, somewhere deep in, maybe at 35 or 40 minutes, the minimum reserve that she had dissolves. It was like one of those horror movies where some guy is kissing a girl and her skin dissolves and she’s really Satan. Her teeth bared and she said what she really thought about the Wisconsin protesters …

This is who ought to be mad. Taxpayers ought to be mad. And this is the thing that does not make sense about public employee unions, because you have people who are over-promised by slimy, skeezy, scazy politicians who all they care about is getting their votes. So they’re gonna promise them the world, and they under-deliver. Everybody knew that the money was not there, Wisconsin was broke, they still over-promised. They over-promised with taxpayers’ money, they didn’t allow the taxpayers to have a seat at the table …

Man that was ugly. She did not hiss, but venom dripped from the corners of her lips. Her contempt for working people, which is part of the unusual puzzle of our country, was on display. Earlier in the Maher complimented Scott Walker on protecting the besieged billionaires from all of these horrible thousandaires who have so much power.

Loesch is, of course, a commenter on CNN. They have competency testing for teachers, football analysts, but apparently not on news and opinion shows.

I am trying to get above all of this, to understand the makeup up people in general. As the old proverb goes, God must love stupid people, as he made so many of them. Richard Dawkins is kinder, noting that our survival as children requires absolute obedience of and faith in our parents or tribal leaders. In emancipated adults this manifests as faith in authority figures.

So by definition, our survival hinged on our ability to submit to the authority of others.

Dana Loesch is a subservient chicken, if I may borrow that Burger King bird. So too are Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, to name just a few. Their only skill is the ability to shoot off rapid-fire talking points and dominate forums. They never have to sit back, listen, think and respond – they are ongoing monologues occasionally interrupted by commercials. Their thought processes are never analyzed in depth. Maybe they all read an Ann Coulter book or two, if they read at all, but they are reactionaries, and not thinkers. They don’t give us their own opinions – they channel the opinions of others.

I doubt very much that in the 1960’s or 1970’s such low caliber people would be given a national stage. We have degraded to such a degree that our public forums are dominated by maroons. Dana Loesch thinks that Michele Bachmann has presidential timbre.

Aye, what a country!

The post below regarding democratic governance in an oligarchy offers some insight, maybe, into the events of the past thirty years (and especially the past nine). We’ve been headed down the path of tyranny … Guantanamo, torture, surveillance and wiretaps, loss of civil liberties and freedom of movement. I’ve been spurred on by curiosity, of course, but that curiosity is coupled with anticipation that a trap is going to be sprung at some point. Chris Hedges commented on the precedent set by Obama when he ordered the murder of an American citizen … “things are relatively quiet now, he said (and I paraphrase), “but that power will be important down the road when there is unrest.”

I say thirty years because the critical act that set all of this in motion was the Reagan tax cuts. The oligarchy is always with us, but high marginal tax rates tend to keep them in a cage. The game “Monopoly” is an amazing source of wisdom from the past because it mimics real life. Wealth is as often accidental as the result of great skill, and more often inherited. In the board game, victory follows shortly after one player attains critical mass – enough wealth to deal severe blows to the other players. Then he knocks them off one by one. If we were to introduce a high marginal tax into the game, rather than just a $75 luxury tax, that boring damned game would go on forever!

That game did not arrive on a flying saucer, by the way. It came form the 1920’s, a time much like now. Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of Monopoly:

Monopoly is a redesign of an earlier game “The Landlord’s Game”, first published by the Quaker and political activist Elizabeth Magie. The purpose of that game was to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the many and giving extraordinary wealth to one or few individuals.

We’ve traveled that road now, and we have a few individuals now who have accumulated extraordinary wealth. Michael Moore claimed in Madison that 400 individual owned more wealth than half of all Americans. I haven’t fact-checked that, and find it a little hard to believe. But I do know that the top 1% owns more than the bottom 95%. (That is less dramatic – MM likes to say shocking things because he is a good publicist.)

Suppose, for sake of argument, that we allow that that top 1% “earned” that money in some fashion. Elizabeth Magie would remind us that this is not how it works … but assume it’s true anyway. Do we have the right to tax that money away?

Yes! Absolutely we do. But that “right” is like all “rights – we created it out of thin air. Only force (or as Black Flag would say, “violence”), keeps that “right” in place. There’s no justice or morality behind it. It’s like war itself – the rich are mere collateral damage. We don’t mean to hurt them, but we must. Perhaps Spock put it best: “The needs of the many, outweighs the needs of the few.” (That phrase is so poorly worded and comma-spliced because Spock was gasping for breath and about to die, OK?)

The mere accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of a few, as we have allowed to happen since 1980, explains much of what we see around us today. Such extremes foster resentment in the lower classes, and there is always the possibility of an uprising. That threat creates the need for surveillance, gated communities, loss of habeas corpus, torture, Guantanamo and indefinite detention, airport screening and long lists of people who are not allowed to fly, draconian drug laws and a massive prison complex.

I’m slow to learn, but have suffered from cognitive dissonance all these years.

I knew there was no real threat posed by Muslims or “terrorists,” and yet our leadership was behaving as if these threats were real. I assumed that the only reason was to keep us in a state of fear to spur us into supporting their wars.

That is indeed part of it. But there’s another part, one even more sinister. There is fear of uprising. The laws we passed, the rights we took away, the prisons we built are all there to keep the rabble in line. Extremes of wealth bring this about – without a draconian state to protect them, wealthy people fear an uprising.

So, as it turns out, the oligarchy is not anti-government after all! They only want a government that works for them. It was never about Muslims or “terrorists.” It was about us.

(By the way, I’m a privileged white guy, middle class and all of that. I’m not threatened by all of this. It’s not about me. It’s about those who have lost their jobs, their health care, pensions, homes, and who will lose their unemployment benefits, Social Security and Medicare. If they manage to organize, we will have violence.)

“

All the ancient and the modern authorities knew that a large middle class is essential. Extremes of wealth in the hands of a few can threaten democratic process, and extremes of poverty remove people from the normal polity and can threaten order.” (Bernard Crick, 1929 – 2008)

We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both. (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1856 -1941)

That’s all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. (Peter Clemenza, The Godfather Part I)

Note that the two of the three men above lived through the Great Depression and the New Deal. The whole situation in Wisconsin (along with many other places) is troubling, but as Clemenza reminds us, it’s gotta happen. Just substitute every thirty years for ten.

This stuff needs to come to the surface. We need to have this fight. It’s been simmering underneath for years. Governor Walker and the radicals who took the reins in so many places in 2010 need to be exposed. They are mere useful idiots for the oligarchy, those wealthy people who hate working people and democratic governance in general.

This is easily seen: This fight started in 1980 with wealthy people setting in motion the reduction of their taxes via Reagan. Extrapolate from there: If they don’t believe that we have a right to tax them, it only follows that we don’t have rights to restrain them in other ways as well, as with unions in general, regulations on campaign spending, use of taxes to help people in any form. Since voting can take away what they regard as sacred privilege, it only follows that democratic rule is their enemy.

The key event in the 1980 movement was 9/11, which released the beast of fascism from his cage. After that day, right wingers of the ugliest nature slowly rose to power. Couple that with the retreat of the Democrats, who were never much good anyway. Radicals and revolutionaries, formerly known as Birchers, Klansmen, militiamen and Randians, have come to power. With Citizens United in place, they are going for broke. Walker is a radical, but is also a puppet on a string held by oligarchs. He’s a true believer, and a fool.

These wild men are always in the wings. We seem to have to deal with them in thirty-year increments. That’s about the time it takes for a generation to pass. Reagan came to power in 1980 due to former Democrats who left the party to vote for him. These are the “Reagan Democrats.” Left behind were the “New Deal Democrats,” the people who had already learned the lessons we are about to learn again. They slowly died off, and we are left now with no wisdom from the past save that preserved in the 5% minority called the “progressives”, or Naderites, as I prefer.

Governor Walker will be voted out, maybe even recalled, as will his fellow travelers. The question is whether the courts will stand to help us, or whether they too are politicized. Certainly if all of this conflict makes its way to the Roberts Court, unions will go down in flames nationally.

Then the battle starts all over again.

I don’t like to speak in terms of violence, but it is going to be violent, one way or the other. Walker now has it in his power to unilaterally take people off Medicaid, and so innocent people will die as a result due to lack of health care. That is violence. His use of unchecked power to spring the great surprise on Wisconsin is a form of overbearing coercion. Each of these moves will engender reaction.

The game is afoot. It’s time again to fight. Do we have it in us? Do we, punks?

Anti-union rhetoric is at a high point, with Fox leading the way. The other networks allow unchallenged remarks about union activities – Fox only differs in that it is the hosts, and not the guests, that participate in the disinformation as they show pictures of palm trees in Wisconsin. I don’t suppose this is anything new – the United States is a fake republic/democracy ruled by an oligarchy, and unions have been one of the most effective counterbalances to that rule in our history. The history books have been sanitized of the strikes, violence and deaths, like that of Frank Little, strung from a railroad trestle in Butte Montana in 1917. (Little was also opposed to U.S. entry into World War I – all things remain constant). The Pinkerton’s were an early version of Blackwater, a private paramilitary force used to break up strikes.

Freedom is never given anyone – it is always won. Union strength was behind FDR – he could never have accomplished the things he did without movement politics. Unions constitute one of the most powerful grassroots organization forces in our history. Union organizing is a basic human right – even the Catholic Church, itself a top-down hierarchy, supports the right of humans to form labor unions. Unions are strong all over the democratic world, and with them goes a strong middle class, relative equality of income, basic human dignity, and education.

That’s why we hate them so here in the land of the free.

Pundits all over our talking screens who say they love our freedom so much that they hate unions are quick to point out that unions dues are mandatory, and are used to finance political activity.

This is true, to a minor degree. First, unions are not hierarchies, but rather democratic organizations. I don’t mean “democratic” in the cosmetic sense that the members are occasionally allowed to choose between two preselected candidates for high office. Union leaders come from the membership. So there is some sense of fulfillment of common purpose when a union engages in political activity.

Unions usually support Democrats. We only have two choices, and Democrats are slightly less repugnant, so that makes some sense.

Unions engage in issue-oriented activities. This is the type of activity permitted all tax-exempt organizations, including churches, charities, and fraternal organizations. Planned Parenthood engages in education activities regarding birth control, and Focus on the Family supports anti-abortion/birth control campaigns. Unions advocate workplace freedoms, worker benefits, and organizational activities. They support specific legislation, like the Employee Free Choice Act, which was dead-on-arrival in Washington in January of 2009. So much for supporting Democrats.

All of this is legal and healthy activity, part of our civil discourse.

Unions do not give money to individual candidates. This activity is done via PAC’s, or Political Action Committees. Contributions to PAC’s by union members are voluntary. Because of the voluntary nature of PAC contributions, they are free to use the money in any way seen feasible, including direct contributions to candidates. People who don’t like what a PAC is doing are free to give money to other candidates. PAC’s, by the way, must disclose all contributions in a timely manner. Contrast this with Citizens United-empowered corporations who are now allowed to engage in political activity in secret. Most of the Koch Brother support fro Governor Scott Walker was secret, and not the paltry $45,000 that was disclosed.

No doubt there is pressure among union member’s to behave in proscribed manners, including PAC contributions. That goes with the territory, just as a corporate executive cannot expect to advance far unless he engages in bundling with others for the right candidate. And crowd behavior is hard to manage, so that there is often violence during strikes, especially when scabs cross the picket line. And, of course, as Governor Walker talked about doing, there is the agent provocateur, an activity so common that it even has a name. This is the enemy-in-our-camp, the guy planted in a crowd to foment violence. I don’t wish to paint too-rosy a picture here. People are as people do, and unions use coercion in many forms to keep their members in line. I am not a Pollyanna.

Democracy – real democracy, and not mere sheep-like voting – is unruly, angry, even violent at times. Power – real power, and not mere fake ballot-box choices – is best attained by organizational activities. Since unions represent real power, even if mostly unrealized here in the land of the free, unions are scorned, and people are grilled and educated in the power of the individual. They are taught that joining a union is a sign of personal weakness. Real men don’t join unions, union workers are lazy, job benefits are welfare, and of course, the most recent, that public employees don’t perform real work, and are really on welfare.

The United States lags far behind other industrial democracies in many ways, with our oligarchy pulling virtually all the strings, hidden in plain sight. Anti-union indoctrination has been standard fare since the 1930’s. It should come as no surprise in the 21st century that unions are still scorned, and that the most basic of facts about unions are hard to find among the obfuscatory clutter that we call news, or in our Texas-spawned history textbooks.