Congress At Work

Since food prices have risen so high and farmers’ income is at its highest level ever, Congress is working feverishly on passage of the Farm Bill. Yes, that’s the bill that will provide billions in federal money to farmers, whose products are selling at all-time high prices, and whose profits are the highest they’ve been in many decades.

Home builders, construction workers, and retailers of products related to the building industry are at the lowest they’ve been in memory and are going bankrupt in droves, but Congress has not even conceived a bill to assist any of these groups at this point.

According to McClatchey News yesterday,

The specialty crop funding includes $499 million for a block grant program. The money will be distributed among all 50 states for help with marketing, promotion and food safety, among other efforts. In a separate research chapter, negotiators included $230 million for specialty crop research.

Why do our tax dollars fund “marketing and promotion” of any product at all? Let alone the product of an industry that is currently operating at record profit levels?

Congress is contributing long hours and great effort to this bill,

Congressional negotiators anticipated working into the night Thursday, though final approvals won't come until budget numbers are firmed up next week.

A bill which “will easily exceed 1,000 pages when all is said and done.”

No apparent progress on a housing relief bill, or on any kind of sensible energy policy bill, or on a bill to end a multi-dimensionally costly war which is not accomplishing its stated purpose (a purpose which changes frequently), nor on any kind of bill to reasonably re-regulate our financial sector, or on a bill to restore privacy to communication

No effort to even start a bill to end torture, or to restore the integrity of habeas corpus, or to prevent detention without charge or representation, or a bill to restore integrity to the Department of Justice.

None of those bills is important. The Farm Bill, which gives away money to people (currently wealthy people) who a) vote and b) provide campaign contributions is important.

That’s the Democratic Congress, which we elected to solve all of the problems that were being caused by having the Republicans in control. Remember that the next time you think that the problems this country faces will be solved simply by electing a Democrat, any Democrat, to the office of President.

Party of Change?

Watching the debate Monday night put the last nail in the coffin of the idea that electing Democrats to office was going to change anything about the way this country is governed. Watching these adolescent self-centered, self-aggrandizing, power hungry, egomaniacs squabbling, arguing, name calling and talking over each other like unrestrained high schoolers was beyond disgusting.

Keith Olbermann asked how far they can go with this behavior without destroying the party itself. For me, the answer is that they have already crossed that line.

Certainly it is true that placing the Democratic Party in charge of both houses of Congress has changed nothing. Not only has nothing changed in the results of governing, but nothing has changed in the way it is done either. The process is still about the best advantage of the legislators and their corporate sponsors and no real effort is even made to hide the graft and corruption. Investigation after investigation has proven to be nothing more than political posturing.

As Glenn Greenwald points out today, in a column regarding a Congressional announcement that a full vote on criminal contempt citations against White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers will be postponed indefinitely,

Consider the entire panoply of Bush abuses over the last seven years -- from illegal domestic spying to torture and rendition and black CIA sites and the FBI's illegal use of National Security Letters (remember those?) -- and there have been virtually no investigation of anything. And the few times Congress has purported to do so, they have made matters worse, not better, by making clear that they will do nothing if their subpoenas are ignored, thereby affirmatively creating the incentive for any rational executive official with something to hide to ignore them.

Our government has sunk into a morass of self interest, greed and corruption and the Pollyanna concept that electing Democrats is going to change anything is rapidly being dispelled by the Democrats themselves. Monday night’s debate was just another step in that direction.

I might vote for Senator Obama if he drops this dirty crap now and cleans up his act. I will never vote for Hillary Clinton and her husband. And, make no mistake, you will not be voting merely for her.

The party leadership and the party faithful choose Clinton and her husband because of electability. Not because the Clintons offer policies that are best for the country. They might or might not, that is not the point, the point is perceived electability. Win at all costs.

Only one candidate (and her husband) use the terrorist fear card in the campaign, “Al Queda is watching our elections very carefully.” No one in the party leaderships chides her and her husband for this blatantly Republican campaign fear tactic, and in the primary following that statement she won the most votes from the party faithful.

One campaigner and her husband are using the Republican method of campaigning by slashing and hacking at your opponent with half truths and innuendo, often using surrogates to do so and surprisedly claiming innocence. No one in the party leaderships chides her and her husband for these blatantly Republican campaign tactics, and after those tactics she polls the highest among the party faithful.

The Clintons will not change their campaign because this is who they are, this is what they do. Rather than elevate themselves, they are determined to drag Obama down to their level; not to show the country how good they are, but to win the nomination by illustrating that he is just as dirty and slimy as they are.

Which, unfortunately, I’m beginning to believe he actually may be.

Is The System Working?

Andrew Sullivan had a piece at his blog The Daily Dish the other day titled The System is Working. I would love to be able to say that I agree with his piece in it’s entirety, and I can say that I don’t entirely disagree with it. But I don’t think that the final chapter in this saga has been written yet.

The Democrats may not have stopped the war, but they helped shift its course. That, in turn, saved the war in Iraq from becoming a complete disaster. Now it's merely a rescuable disaster.

I’m not sure in what way the Democrats helped shift the course of the war and to say at this point that it is rescuable is certainly hopeful but is, I think, far from certain at this point. We may safely say that it may be rescuable and that absolutely is a turn for the better, but Sullivan doesn’t say precisely how the Democrats helped get us to that point and he has very little company in his certainty on the rescuability issue. As much as I would like to be, I am not in that company.

But my roster of those who helped get us back toward a rational war-policy would put Bob Gates and David Petraeus at the top of the list.

Bob Gates certainly. David Petraeus has always been a Bush mouthpiece and it is far too early to tell whether his current strategies, such as enlisting and arming former enemies, will prove successful in the long run. Certainly his first two assignments in Iraq were short term successes and long term disasters, and we can only hope at this point that his third one will turn out any better than the first two did.

Mukasey has a chance to do the same kind of thing at Justice.

But will he? The fact that he has a chance to do so is not evidence, to me, that the system is working. In fact, he went to very nearly the same lengths to cover Bush’s backside in his confirmation hearings that Gonzales did in his hearings, so I’m somewhat less than sanguine.

The system that looked rather fragile for a couple of years has begun to assert itself again. It works.

Congressional oversight is, so far, little more than a farce. I take that back: it is nothing more than a farce. Hearing after hearing with not one person held to account, removed from office or convicted of wrongdoing. Just enough to serve the political purposes of the party in power without triggering revenge from the party which is currently in the minority.

The Democratic Congress has made no attempt to restore any of the civil liberties abrogated by this administration, or to restore any of its own power usurped by this president.

And if the president is wise, he'll allow all this to shift, and take some of the credit.

You just have to laugh at that pipe dream. The one thing this president has never been accused of is wisdom. He has always been and will always be an ideologue and will pursue his personal goals monomaniacally.

And if the country is wise, they'll pick a successor who can unite the country around a prudent path forward.

Has Sullivan read or listened to any part of the presidential primaries? Uniting the country is the very last thing on the mind of any of the major candidates, and prudent paths forward have not been proposed by any one of them. They are without exception fearmongering in the mold of the current president and preaching about leaving “no options off the table” in the name of keeping us safe from something that has not harmed us in the last six years.

Statements beginning "if the president is wise","if the country is wise" and "Mukasey has a chance" are not probative of one's cause in writing an article titled The System is Working. They are nothing more or less than wishful thinking.

The system may yet work and, yes, there are a few signs that it is beginning to stir into life. I want it to do so, and I certainly have hope that it will. But this administration still has a full year left in office, and this Congress is still behaving in a manner more self serving than constructive.

The lawyers have finished, and the jury is still out.

Repudiating Evil

Last night in an interview with Keith Olbermann on Countdown Rachel Madow made the, to me, rather odd comment that “the purpose of impeachment is to save the office.” Ms. Madow is a charming person and an outstandingly clear speaker. I’m on the same point of view as she is pretty much most of the time.

I had to ponder that for a while, though, to figure out what “saving the office” might mean. I imagine that what she meant but didn’t have time to say was that impeachment is the proper response to a person tarnishing the office and that such action would restore the honor and dignity of that office.

Fair enough, but to me a higher purpose of impeachment is to repudiate the action upon which the impeachment is based; to announce to the world and to our own population that “this country does not countenance that behavior by our government.”

I believe it to be supremely important the we as a nation tell the world that George W. Bush does not represent who we are. And, to our everlasting shame and detriment, we are not going to do that. We can no longer vote him out of office and, thanks to a supine Congress, we will not impeach him as our founding fathers designed for us to do when a president disgraced his office.

Nancy Pelosi swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution and then she announced to the world, and more importantly to the president, that her oath was meaningless when she said that one clause of the constitution she would not uphold; that “impeachment is off the table.”

That statement, a violation of her oath of office, was a political calculation to secure her rise to power. Rather than raising her to greater power, it should have been just cause to remove her from the office she held at the time. But such is the degree of corruption that our government has descended to that it achieved its calculated effect.

It also turned an abusive president loose to engage in even more blatantly open dishonesty, abuse of “executive privilege” and secrecy, and thuggish foreign policy, secure in the knowledge that he could not, would not be called to account.

And so George W. Bush will complete his term and retire to his sybaritic life of retirement, building a library as a monument to his own self image. And a country will be forever tarnished and shamed by his term in office, having failed to stop his crimes.

Congress didn’t have the will, and we were just too busy shopping.

Political Parties

The following is a comment to a post at The Belgravia Dispatch about the Mukasey nomination. Bruce Moomaw commented in response to an exchange between two other commenters which a) said that the constitution was formed with the impression that political parties would not exist, followed by a comment that asked b) did such parties not form in any case almost immediately?

Emphasis, where it exists below, has been added by me.

Posted by: Bruce Moomaw, November 3, 2007

Yes indeed [political parties did form] -- about a week after the new government was up and running. It startled and alarmed the hell out of them, but they quickly realized there was little they could do about it -- despite the fact that they had previously written interminably about how the formation of political parties was an extremely dangerous and destructive trend in any democracy.

And, unfortunately, a great many of the "defenses against tyranny" that they wrote into the Constitution were based entirely on the assumption that political parties would not exist -- and became partially or wholly useless when they did. For instance, the Framers assumed that it would be very easy to get 2/3 of the Senate together to impeach and remove an overbearing President from office -- because he would have no party allies in the Senate to block such a move. When George Mason objected to giving the President unlimited pardoning power on the grounds that he might use it to cover up his own crimes by pardoning crooked underlings, Madison replied that the Senate would surely immediately impeach and remove any President who acted in such a suspicious manner. Surprise, James!

In fact, that mistake of theirs came within a hair of destroying the US twice in its first two decades -- once when the Presidential election system jammed up in 1800 because it had been designed on the assumption that parties would not exist (we were within three days of Inauguration Day, and a civil war, when Adams finally decided to compromise and allow Jefferson) to be officially selected); and once because the Framers had actually assumed that the Nonpartisan Congress would be the final arbiter of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of laws -- they created the Supreme Court literally as a minor afterthought during the last few days of the Convention. Naturally, after the partisanship of Congress threatened disaster on this front, the acceptance of the "Marbury vs. Madison" decision making the Court the final arbiter of constitutionality instead was necessary, as the final emergency software patch to make the US system of government work (sort of) until now.

But a great deal of our supposed Success Due To The Brilliance of Our Constitution has really just been due to long-time non-legal, informal consensus by the political parties on the limits of their behavior -- and since Bush's entry into the White House, that consensus has been starting to unravel. (I've always suspected that a lot of this was due to the advice of Newt Gingrich -- who, as a political scientist, must know all the weak points in the Constitution that can allow one party to seize semi-dictatorial power -- but I admit that I have no direct evidence of this.) Consider, for instance, the possible ultimate consequences of allowing the Attorney General to be the President's wholly controllable poodle dog (especially when the majority in Congress is also on his side). Or that sinister little clause in Article 3, Section 2 allowing Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its power to review the constitutionality of any law (with a few specialized exceptions) whenever it chooses -- a potential stick of dynamite planted right in the foundations of American democracy, which I believe no one had ever utilized in US history UNTIL the GOP Congress used it to strip detainees of their right to launch civil suits.

Advise and Consent

The presidential election has become much more important. In confirming the latest nominee for Attorney General, the Senate is rendering itself irrelevant and the election amounts now to electing a monarch to rule this country for the next four years.

I was going to wait until Mukasey was actually confirmed before writing about this confirmation, as I had some small hope that it might not happen. But I really knew that it was just wishful thinking.

I’m actually disappointed that the issue which nearly derailed the nomination was his refusal to define waterboarding as illegal. While that issue richly deserved disqualification, to me there were two other issues, even larger, that should have thrown the nomination not only off of the tracks but completely into a ditch.

At some point this Congress simply must stand up to this president’s bullying and browbeating and do it’s damned job, which is oversight. The constitution does not merely allow Congress to act as a check on the Executive, it requires Congress to do so and Congress is failing utterly to fulfill that responsibility. Part of the “advise and consent” clause is the ability not only to say “No” but to say, “Oh, hell no.”

The other issue is a statement made earlier by Mukasey in the confirmation hearings. I cannot find the quote now because the fulmination over his stand on waterboarding has drowned the earlier hearings, but it went something like this in response to being asked if it was okay for the president to violate the law,

“That would depend,” he responded, “on whether or not the act which was outside the law fell within the president’s authority to defend the United States.”

In other words, “Yes.”

What presidential candidate is making any kind of pledge to respect the role of Congress once they are elected to this nation’s highest office? Forget having Congress retake that role on its own initiave; regardless of the party holding the majority, it has clearly demonstrated that it does not have what it will take to do that. Restoring the balance of power that is written into our constitution is going to have to be done by a future president, and no leading candidate of either party is even talking about doing that.

Chris Dodd speaks of restoring the constitution, but he’s got about as much change of becoming president as I do.

There is little hope that we can escape the corrupt form of government into which this country has devolved. What I will do is try with all of the pathetically limited means that are at my disposal. I will protest in posts on my blog, and I will vote against every incumbent in every election regardless of party.

Light in the Darkness (updated)

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) has placed a "hold" on the FISA bill in the Senate that would immunize the telecoms in accordance with the wishes of President Bush. That should mean that the bill will be dead until Sen. Dodd releases his hold, which he says he won't.

Out of 100 senators, precisely one has the courage and the leadership to stand up for the constitution. There is hope, after all, however little. This man is running for president. Could he, maybe...? Nah. Hillary Clinton is our next president, already anointed by the media. Too bad.

Sen. Chris Dodd, "a still small voice crying in the wilderness." Sen. Dodd cares about the constitution. This is a quote from him in an interview with Glenn Greenwald,

"I carry every day, and have for 26 years, a copy of the U.S. Constitution given to me by Robert Byrd. And to me, what could be more fundamental? With all due respect, I care about health care, education, global warming. But if you get this wrong -- what do you got? A trade association. Who wants to be president of a trade association?"

But wait, Harry Reid is threatening to bring the bill up for a vote over his fellow Senator's hold, in a particularly heinous display of, of, of...
Hell, I don't even know what it's a display of.

Update: 9:50 AM

Senator Dodd is now saying that if Reid overrides his hold he will go to the floor and filibuster this bill. The longer he rides this horse, the more he gains my support. Call, write, email. Support Dodd.

Update 2: 10/20/07 5:30 PM

So far all I can find regarding Hillary Clinton is from Daily Kos:

And Hillary? Well, apparently her position on retroactive immunity for law-breaking phone companies is still being focus group tested, so it'll be a while before we know where she stands on the issue.

So where Dodd leads, she does not have the courage to follow.

The Power of Money

In another dazzling display of the power of money over proper governance, the Democratic-controlled Congress has reached agreement on immunizing the telecoms against their role in assisting Bush in spying on America. This means that lawsuits against the telecoms, some of which have already been won and which are in under appeal by the telecoms, will now be halted and found in favor of the guilty, as the law is being changed to retroactively legalize their actions.

This is bribery in action. The players have been given huge sums of money in the form of campaign contributions by the telecoms, and that money has purchased the telecoms their immunity retroactively, from improprieties of which they have already been convicted.

This bribery also protects Bush, who has tried claims of executive privilege and states secrets to protect himself from the exposure of his illegalities, in this case without success, and now has resorted to the frantic protection of his co-conspirators.

This is not what we put Democrats in control of Congress to do.

But we should not be surprised. Our system of government is broken, perhaps beyond repair, but certainly broken. It is corrupted by money, utterly lawless and rotten to its core. Its members are a moneyed and elite group who serve themselves and their moneyed financiers. They mouth platitudes and lies to the voting public to get themselves elected and then retire to their offices and enact laws that serve themselves and big money and ignore the concerns of the voting public until the next election.

The problem isn’t the party, it’s the process.

Complicity

A fellow blogger yesterday, posting about the latest discovery of presidential authorizations of torture, made a statement to the effect of “We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?” I replied that we would do, “Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

White House criminality has been out in the open for almost two years now, and the only method of dealing with it has been to say that we should wait it out, that in less than two years Bush will be out of office and the corruption, violations of the law and raping of our constitution will come to an end.

Perhaps they will, but only perhaps, and that is not the point.

By discovering these crimes, by being made aware of them, and taking no action to punish the wrongdoer we have become complicit. Over the past two years we, the American people, have said in masse that we do not really care what the holder of our highest office does. While some people have spoken out, the nation as a whole has stood mute and Congress, whose responsibility it is under our constitution to prevent these wrongs, has been at best ineffective and at worst actively complicit.

Glenn Greenwald has an outstanding post on the subject here. He writes with great passion, and clarity. This post is in no small part about the responsibility of citizenship in addition to that of Congress, and should be required reading for every citizen of this country.

As a country, we've known undeniably for almost two years now that we have a lawless government and a President who routinely orders our laws to be violated. His top officials have been repeatedly caught lying outright to Congress on the most critical questions we face. They have argued out in the open that the "constitutional duty" to defend the country means that nothing -- including our "laws" -- can limit what the President does.

It has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new.

And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that. Quite the contrary, with regard to most of the revelations of lawbreaking and abuse, our political elite almost in unison has declared that such behavior is understandable, if not justifiable. And our elected representatives have chosen to remain largely in the dark about what was done and, when forced by court rulings or media revelations to act at all, they have endorsed and legalized this behavior -- not investigated, outlawed or punished it.

And we keep reelecting those Congressional lawmakers.

We as a country are failing our collective responsibility as citizens. We fulminate on the Internet about how horrible Bush is, but it is Congress, the media and we the people who have allowed him to get away with his criminality for the past two years.

Sure, we elected Democrats in 2006, but there were signs even then that we were not really electing any real change. Pelosi had already taken impeachment “off the table” in what amounted to a statement that no real course correction was actually possible. We elected them to not impeach the criminals and they have fully lived up to the pledge of no impeachment.

The moment she pledged not to impeach, we should have voted her and her crowd out of office. Better the criminals themselves than the smoothtalkers who pretend virtue and practice corruption.

Because what are we getting now? Endless “investigations” that hold no one to account, that do not reverse the course of a corrupted White House, and that hold no promise of proper governmental process for the future. Investigations that are “show trials” that serve no purpose other than to gain political points for the party presently in power.

Nick Bicanic had high hopes for the Blackwater investigations, but his post at the Huffington Post reveals how long that illusion lasted.

Rep. Waxman (D) started out promisingly by imploring that "facts -- not ideology -- need to guide us here" yet the hearing quickly degenerated into a political game of brinkmanship. Both sides of the house seemed more interested in scoring points and getting outrageous statements on the record than they were in getting to the truth of the matter.

… the hearing was full of polemic inaccuracies and simplifications.

Yes, Nick, that’s what congressional investigations are. Sounding brass, filled with noise and fury, signifying nothing.

The blogosphere is filled with how all that is going to change when the Democrats are in power. How much changed when we put them in charge of Congress ten months ago? To what degree did Congress become “of and for the people” at that point, and to what degree has it remained a body of self-serving politicians concerned only with their own reelections?

How many fewer troops are there in harm’s way in Iraq?

Electing Democrats is not the solution.

The solution is to elect those who are running against whoever is presently in office regardless of party, and to do so in large enough numbers so as to create a new Congress in actuality and not merely in name. A handful of newcomers cannot survive in the swamp of corruption, cynicism and monetary pollution that is Washington. What is required is a sufficiency of newcomers to actually create a new Washington.

We need a revolution. Preferably a revolution at the polls.

Until then we will continue to be ruled rather than governed. Ruled by an elite wealthy upper class that does not concern itself with our well-being and that is corrupt to the core and utterly lawless.

The Governing Class

Just four days ago in this blog I wrote the following,

"Our country is now governed by an elite and wealthy class that is completely removed from the general population; with income, health care and retirement benefits beyond the fondest dreams of those it governs."

Today Glenn Greenwald, in a lengthy but absolutely must read post, describes our senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, and makes my point precisely. You will have to "click through" an advertisement to get to the post, but it is well worth reading.

A few excerpts to whet your appetite.

Feinstein represents a deep blue state and was just easily re-elected to her third term last year. She won't run for re-election, if she ever does, until 2012, when she will be 80 years old. Her state easily re-elected a Senator, Barbara Boxer, with a much more liberal voting record than Feinstein's. Political fear cannot possibly explain her loyal support for the Bush agenda on the most critical issues decided by the Senate.

Additionally, Feinstein is a 74-year-old divorced Jewish woman currently on her third husband, and it is thus extremely unlikely that she harbors any hopes of running in the future on a national ticket. She has as secure a political position as any politician in the country. Whatever explains what she does, it has nothing to do with "spinelessness" or fear. What would she possibly fear?

And yet, her votes over the last several years, and especially this year after she was safely re-elected, are infinitely closer to the Bush White House and her right-wing Senate colleagues than they are to the base of her party or to the constituents she allegedly represents.

(snip)

Hence, Dianne Feinstein funds Bush's war with no limits while condemning MoveOn. She votes to vest vast new surveillance powers in the President. She defends and vouches for and places blind faith in the whole litany of Bush intelligence officials who have spent the last six years radicalizing this country and breaking the law.

Plainly, Feinstein does not do this out of political fear or "spinelessness," but because it is who she now is and what she believes. She and those like her are the reason why there is such a gaping disconnect between the Beltway political class and the political views of most Americans. ... And in Feinstein's case, it is particularly easy to understand why this is so. Her current husband, Richard Blum, is an extremely rich defense contractor whose companies have endless relationships with the work Feinstein does in the Senate. It is entirely unsurprising that Feinstein's affection is reserved for officials in the intelligence and defense communities because those are her social peers, the individuals with whom her husband interacts professionally and socially and with whom she most identifies.

More than anything else, Feinstein worships at the altar of the Beltway power system and its most revered members. Conversely, she has contempt for the liberal base which elects her and the constituents she represents. She long ago ceased being driven by the political values which serve as props for her campaigns, if she was ever driven by them. And that is the story of so many of the Beltway Democrats.

Greenwald's post provides the details of her activity in the Senate, and reveals specifically just how disconnected she is from the "lower class" which she and her ilk rules. Go read it, and then try and figure out how in the hell you can vote.

Embracing Defeat

”If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That’s an old truism, of course, but my father added one clause to it, ”If you finally do have to admit defeat, for God’s sake don’t whine about it.”

Democrats have a slightly different approach,

”If you think that you might not succeed, start whining without even making the attempt.”

George Bush does not even have to state that he will veto a bill. If the cravens who lead the Democratic Congress think that he might veto a bill they will not even bring it to the floor for a vote. What they will do is whine about ”not having the votes.”

Instead of cowering in your foxholes you sniveling cowards, what you do is you pass the bill and you make him actually veto it. Then you tell the American people that he is the bad guy for vetoing the bill that you passed. You could even send him another bill identical to the one he vetoed and make him veto it again.

When the Republicans controlled Congress they controlled it. If they did not approve of a bill it never reached the floor. They rendered the minority party irrelevant. Now that Democrats are in the majority they allow the minority party to remain in control. As a minority they didn't dare filibuster because it would make them look like they were obstructionists and in the majority at the mere mention of filibuster they turn pale, faint and withdraw bills in the Senate, and they allow the lack of Senate consensus to render the House impotent. Even when in the majority, their lack of courage has allowed the minority Republican party to render them as thoroughly irrelevant as ever.

We elected cowards. You Democrats are acting against the interests of your country and of the people who elected you. You are behaving in a self-serving and cowardly manner. You are not fit to serve and are as big a disgrace to your office as the Republicans who preceded you.

Will I vote against the Democrats? You bet I will. I will vote for anyone who campaigns to replace them regardless of their party affiliation. I will vote to put into office anyone who will replace anyone who is presently in office.

Provided only that her name is not Hillary Clinton, of course.

Walking into the Trap

It seems to me that any Democrat seeking to be in office in 2009 and onward is a complete and utter idiot. Or something. I can understand why Senator Feingold decided not to run for president: he is far too intelligent. Same for Al Gore.

Hillary Clinton is not stupid; she is just so blinded by her lust for power that she cannot see the obvious pitfall. She set her path years ago and is so narrowly focused on the goal, the ultimate power trip, that she has allowed herself to be blinded by the light being reflected from the golden throne of power upon which her gaze is fixed.

The next government is going to preside over a debacle in Iraq. I don’t know what form that debacle is going to take, but it is not going to be pretty. If the next government leaves major forces in that country they will be despised for breaking their promise to end the war. If they reduce the forces to a token then civil war will divide Iraq to a fracture point, Kurdistan will boil over, and the next government will be blamed for losing the war in Iraq.

Nothing is going to prevent the next government from presiding over an economy that is disappointing in the extreme to the American people. We have been excluding food and energy costs from the inflation index for years to disguise it, but increasingly the middle class cannot meet the rising cost of living and as the value of the dollar decreases and the price of oil increases that will get worse. The root cause will be the excesses of the Republican establishment, but it will come to a head on the watch of the next government and they will be blamed for it.

Healthcare in this country is increasingly a criminal conspiracy. Those engaged in the conspiracy decry Canadian healthcare by pointing out that there is a waiting time for procedures, but at the end of the wait everyone does get the procedure. In this country if you cannot pay for it you don’t get it, and millions do not receive needed medical procedures at all because they do not have the money to pay for them or because the insurer denies the procedure. The next government is not going to change this conspiracy and is going to get a lot of heat for it.

Any Democrat with any sense at all is going to maintain a very low profile. There are hard times ahead that cannot be avoided, consequences of the choices our government has made and that we the people have allowed our government to make. They cannot be avoided. They must simply be borne. They will pass. Why any Democrat would choose to put themselves in a position to be blamed for them completely escapes me.

The Iron Law of Institutions

The tragedy in New York happened six years ago today. It is appropriate to remember that day, and to grieve for those who lost their lives, and those who lost loved ones and friends in that awful event. I can still remember standing in front of the television with my wife, I was too filled with horror and sadness to sit, and that memory still evokes feelings six years later that I would prefer to have go away.

It is also appropriate to ask why we, as a nation, have still not recovered from this wound. This was not a killing blow, and yet six years later its effects still pose a threat to the very fabric of our nation, for we have scratched the wound endlessly and raised it to an inflammation that is nearly breaking us.

Colin Powell raised this point in an interview with GQ. He uses a phrase that I would prefer to avoid on this date, but these are his words.

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?” he said. “People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

When I was growing up the threat we faced was hundreds of nuclear missiles pointed at our cities and the possibility that we would lose, not two buildings and 3000 people, but 50 or 60 cities and tens of millions of people in a single act of war. Such an attack would result in this country ceasing to be as a functioning entity. The threat was an existential one since if it happened we, as a nation, would no longer exist.

President Bush refers to “Radical Islam” as an existential threat and in so doing he lies for even his fevered, fearful little mind knows that they are nothing of the sort.

As Colin Powell points out terrorists can take some lives, they can destroy some buildings, they can wound us, but they cannot inflict a wound of the severity that will bring us to the point of extinction. Take even the “worst case” that our radical political panderers posit, the stolen nuclear devices that destroy two of our cities, as absurd as that eventuality may be. Does that cause us, as a nation, as a way of life, to cease to exist? It doesn’t even approach that level of harm.

The existential threat that we face is the Iron Law of Institutions.

The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

Instead of leadership after the events of September 11, 2001 the politicians of both parties have been using that date to enhance their own position of power within government; six long years of demagougery and self interest instead of proper government.

In so doing they have weakened the country as a whole by driving it into a position of fearfulness that supports an endless war based on false premises. A war that increases terrorism worldwide. A war that weakens the country’s political alliances. A war that destroys the country’s economy. They preach terrorism and foment a war that doesn’t fight terrorists in order to preserve their position of power within the government.

Democrats promise that all of this will change when the people throw the Republicans out and put them in power. The people do just that and almost one full year later nothing, absolutely nothing has changed.

It’s the Iron Law of Institutions still at work. Democrats do not want the war to end, not just yet. They want it to keep going long enough that they will have it to use as a campaign issue in the 2008 elections.

The current chief executive led the way on a horrendous erosion of our constitution, on the reduction of guarantees of civil liberties, and the Democratic majority that we installed almost a year ago has uttered not one single word about restoring one iota of that loss. Of all the corruption and theft that has been uncovered, not one single person has been prosecuted or impeached. Not one presidential candidate has even hinted that they would go about restoring the constitutional balance of power in our government if elected.

The existential threat that we face is our own government.

But we will reelect those in office, and elect others, based on lies and we will elect one of these presidential candidates who has done nothing but mouth platitudes. We will believe the empty promises of the Democrats who say they will “drain the swamp” but will only wallow in it up to their necks, and we will be shocked and appalled when the talking head we elect as president declares war on some distant country and embroils us in another war to in order to “spread democracy” in our name.

Because the Iron Law of Institutions is called that for a reason. It has its grip on government, and I fear it has become too late to break its hold.

Far more terrible than any terrorists, our own government.

Football and Democrats

The Colts beat the Saints by 31 points last night in the NFL’s opening night game and it was a pretty pathetic display by the latter team. New Orleans had the most prolific offense in the league last year but it managed to score a paltry one field goal in sixty minutes of whatever that was it was doing, while its defense scored the team’s only touchdown. The Indianapolis offense, led by a matured Peyton Manning, is pretty much as good as the 41 points scored would indicate, but the defense is not quite the juggernaut that New Orleans made it appear to be.

I’m not going to replace anyone as head coach of an NFL team, but I played the game and I’ve been watching it intently for many years with an analytical bent. Many times I have been able to evaluate that if a team doesn’t change its game plan it is going to lose, and lose big. I saw that last night; predicted that the Saints were going to be on the short end of a lopsided score if they did not rethink their plan.

Indianapolis was playing what is called a “cover two” style of defense, one where (to simplify) they play deep to prevent long passes and allow the opponent to complete the short gains. New Orleans was playing conservatively on offense, taking the short gains that were the “low hanging fruit” offered by the Colts in the form of five-yard passes and short runs. Make a few first downs but eventually not make it on third down and have to punt. So conservative were they with this plan that, late in the game, Drew Brees was in danger of setting a record for the shortest average pass completion in the history of the league.

So in the process of “taking what the defense gave them” New Orleans scored only one measly field goal while its opponent scored 41 points against it. To win one has to be winning to challenge the defense, to be bold, to take a risk and throw right into the teeth of the coverage.

New Orleans played it safe. Even so, throwing short to avoid the risk of throwing into the deep coverage, Drew Brees threw two interceptions.

I have seen many a team lose while playing the cover two because they were playing against a team willing to challenge deep. The opponent didn’t settle for the safe, easy short gainers. They threw long into the coverage and, while some long passes were incomplete and a few were intercepted, some were completed for big gains and touchdowns.

New Orleans is trailing by 24 points with 8 minutes left in the 4th quarter, and Drew Brees is flinging the ball a heart-stopping three yards downfield. Why bother?

The lesson is, playing it safe isn’t safe and it doesn’t win.

The Saints might have had a sign on their sidelines that read, “Well, we didn’t have the votes.”

The Republicans have on their version of the cover two defense, and the Democrats are throwing short.

Afraid of looking weak on national defense, the Democratic Party tosses soft underneath the coverage, doesn’t make first down, punts and looks weak on everything.

The Democrats are on the short end of a lopsided score, it’s late in the fourth quarter, and they’re still tossing puffballs.

Okay, I’ll quit. But NFL football is back!

Governing Pakistan

Much is being made of the upheaval of government in Pakistan, of the possible removal of military rule and the return of Benazir Bhutto and democratic government. William Dalrymple casts some light on just what Bhutto’s return might actually mean in A friend of feudalism at
comment is free… in the Guardian today.

…it is often forgotten the degree to which Bhutto is the person who has done more than anything to bring Pakistan's strange variety of democracy - really a form of elective feudalism - into disrepute. During her first 20-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Her reign was marked by massive human rights abuse: Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Bhutto's premiership was also distinguished by epic levels of corruption. In 1995 Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world. Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari - widely known as "Mr 10%" - faced allegations of plundering the country.

...Nor is the distinction between democracy and military rule quite as sharp as Bhutto likes to imply. Behind Pakistan's swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of interests: to some extent, the industrial, military, landowning, and bureaucratic elites are all interrelated and look after one another.

Emphasis added by me to illustrate how much that sounds like the Bush Administration, actually our entire government.

Moneyed interests, the military, and political careerists have changed our government from a representative republic to precisely what is described as being run by Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.

We now, not in the future but now, live under elective feudalism.

Stratification

Stratification is, basically, the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” in our society. Not just the rich and the poor, but the gap between those who have more wealth than they can waste, let alone use, and those who can not even put a well rounded diet on the table for their families on a daily basis without borrowing against the equity in their house, false money which puts them at risk of losing their home merely to feed their children.

This is a problem that America faces today which is far worse than the war in Iraq, or the threat of a terrorist attack, or whether or not Iran is developing a bomb, and it’s even bigger than the healthcare crisis, free trade or taxes. The latter three issues are part of stratification.

The sociologist Doug Masseyhas published a new book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage, 2007), and Eric Alterman quoted an excerpt from it in Altercation today. I’m going to excerpt from his excerpt. I don’t usually do this much quoting in my blog posts, but this is really powerful stuff.

Since the mid-1970s, the United States has become a vastly more stratified society. Among the world's developed nations, it has by far the highest inequalities of income and wealth. The rise in inequality has been attributed to a variety of factors, including globalization, technological change, and market segmentation. Nonetheless, all countries compete in the same global economy and face the same technological and market conditions, yet the United States is unique among advanced nations in the degree to which it allows these large, macro-level forces to generate inequality.

[snip]

The decision by the Democratic Party to embrace civil rights in the 1960s promoted a mass exodus of Southerners from the party and the estrangement of blue collar voters in the North, putting an end to the New Deal coalition.

On the heels of this realignment, the rules of the American political economy were rewritten to favor the rich at the expense of the middle and lower classes. Unions were weakened, entry level wages reduced, access to social protections curtailed, anti-poverty spending cut back, and taxes on lower income families were raised while those on upper income families were reduced, yielding a sharp reduction in the size of the welfare state and a significant decline in the social well-being of most Americans. As millions of Americans resorted to borrowing in a vain attempt to maintain living standards, the real interest on credit card debt was increased and bankruptcy laws tightened.

The new choreography of rising income inequality and increasing political polarization was reinforced by the emergence of a new geography of inequality characterized by greater class segregation and the spatial concentration of both affluence and poverty. Increasingly the poor have come to live apart from the affluent in communities and neighborhoods inhabited primarily by other poor people, while affluent families have come to separate themselves from the poor within communities and neighborhoods inhabited by other affluent people.

That there is nothing inevitable about the high level of inequality prevailing in the United States is suggested by a cross-national comparison of income inequality before and after taxes. Before taxes, U.S. income inequality is by no means exceptional compared with other developed nations. Indeed, it is roughly the same as in Sweden and Germany and considerably less than in Belgium and France.

Taxation works to redistribute income in all countries, but the extent of the redistribution is much less in the United States. After taxes and transfers, income inequality in Belgium, France, Germany, and Sweden drops to low levels. It drops in the United States too -- just not nearly as much. It is only after taxes that America emerges as the most unequal of all developed nations, with a level of income inequality that is 50% greater than in Belgium and 33% greater than in France. Thus inequality in the United States is not an axiomatic result of globalization or technological change. It is a result of specific political choices that we, as a society, have made.

Emphasis was added by me.

I would point out only that “we, as a society,” have not made these choices and, I firmly believe, would not do so. Our government, as a result of the corrupting influence of moneyed interests in our political system, has made these choices for us.

Practicing Democracy

Question: Why are we trying to install democracy in the Middle East at the point of a gun when we are not practicing democracy here at home?

Taking bribes and legislating for the benefit of those who provided you with those bribes is not democracy. That remains true even when you call those who tender the bribes “lobbyists” and the bribes “campaign contributions.”

Why are none of the presidential candidates, Republican or Democrat, talking about a national, universal, single payer healthcare system to put us on a par with the rest of the developed world? Because Hillary Clinton has accepted more money from the health insurance and healthcare provider business in the form of bribes campaign contributions than the average working man or woman will ever see in his/her lifetime.

Why are mine safety reforms and safety enforcement stalled by government while mine workers are dying in the course of providing for the nation’s energy needs? Because George Bush has accepted more money from mine owners in the form of bribes campaign contributions than the average mine worker will earn total in his/her lifetime.

Why can the wage earner no longer find financial relief in bankruptcy when devastated by a medical crisis, while a deliberately mismanaged business can still bail out of their illicit debt? Because Nancy Pelosi has accepted more money from banks and credit card companies in the form of bribes campaign contributions than the average wage earner can imagine.

Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, is objecting to enforcement of laws against hiring of illegal immigrants. She claims that doing so will be harmful to the food and farming industry. Why is she really against enforcement? Because she has accepted huge amounts money from producing farms in the form of bribes campaign contributions and such enforcement would force those producers to pay wages sufficient to make those jobs attractive to legal workers.

The Democratic Congress bloviates about ethics reform, about how it is magnanimously surrendering the free dinners and trips which are worth pennies, while they are keeping the right to continue receiving bribes campaign contributions which amount to millions of dollars.

The Democratic Congress investigates Republican corruption ad nausuem, but calls no one to actual account and mitigates the corruption to no discernible degree. They are careful not to interfere with their ability to feed from the same trough.

To listen to the presidential “debates” is to know for sure that democracy is well and truly dead in this country, that the noble experiment of our founding fathers has failed. A pallid collection of untruthful parrots stands before us and mouths platitudes that are notable only in the degree to which they are unresponsive to the question asked. They lie to us unabashedly, and insult us with their preening, posing and posturing. “I’m your girl.”

Hillary Clinton even has the brass to state that “a presidential candidate ought not to say everything that they think.”  How can we reasonably choose a leader if they have not said what they think?

To say that switching our government from Republican to Democrat is like putting lipstick on a pig is to insult a beast that has far more value than a government gone rotten and corrupt to its core.

When both Democrat and Republican candidates espouse causes that you find repugnant, when both are openly corrupt, bought by moneyed interests, and the two parties of power have forced all others off the ballot, how is one supposed to vote one’s conscience?

Whatever that is, democracy it is not.

Risking the Dynasty

Kevin Drum, always interesting reading, posted Friday about the kind of thinking that led to Congress giving the Bush Administration increased surveillance powers in the FISA update.

Note the way the incentives work here. If you pass the bill, the results are ambiguous. Sure, a lot of people will be angry, but they'll probably get over it eventually (or so the thinking goes). But if you stall the bill and a terrorist strikes, you are firmly and completely screwed. Goodbye political career. So which choice do you think a risk-averse politicians is likely to make?

He doesn’t engage in a lot of discussion regarding what he thinks about this rationale, other than,

Nobody wants to risk being proved wrong in a way that's so crystal clear there's simply no chance of talking your way out of it. It's this fear that gives national security hawks the upper hand in any terror-related debate. Still.

I know I posted about this just a few days ago, but the constitutional crisis we face in this country is not the one that everybody is talking about. There is a far worse crisis than the confrontation between the Bush Administration and Congress, a crisis that is corroding the fabric of democracy in a far worse manner than the criminality of Bush and Company, and that is the effect of moneyed interest on, the control that it has established over, the political process in this country at all levels.

What is the risk to which Kevin Drum refers? It’s the risk to reelection. It’s the risk of prematurely ending a political dynasty.

We are governed now by political dynasties; Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, et al. No doubt Jeb Bush will be the next president after eight years of Hillary Clinton, and after eight years of him it will be time for, perhaps, Chelsea. Congressmen and Senators, short of copulating with a goat on the steps of the capitol building, serve for life and then their children run for office based on name recognition.

One article after another speaks to waste and fraud in government and finishes with the fond hope that in just over a year things will get better when the Democrats take over. If things get better at all, the difference will be marginal, because the waste and fraud are prompted by the moneyed interests who profit from it and they have purchased both parties equally. Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican you cannot perpetuate your dynasty without the large amounts of cash provided by corporate sponsors.

On the rare occasion the someone does “screw the goat” and get replaced, in very short order we find that, rather than installing a fresh viewpoint and different behavior, we have merely started a new dynasty.

Congressional... what?

Before the 2006 elections I warned myself (and my readers) not to be too optimistic about change if the Democrats won one or both houses because, despite their promises of reform and Pelosi’s promise of “draining the swamp” that Washington has become, the Democratic Party has its hand as deep in the pocket of corporate sponsors as does the Republican Party.

Sure enough, not only does Bush continue to rain death and destruction upon Iraq unimpeded, he is still able to issue orders to Congress and have them obeyed.

As the minority party Democrats made no attempt to block passage of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act or the appointment of Alito or Roberts. As the majority party Democrats whine about Republican obstructionism and lie supine under the demands and transgressions of the worst president in the history of this country.

At the end of last week Bush demanded a bill for warrantless spying and Congress saluted smartly and passed the bill that his political hacks had written for them to pass. There are three schools of thought as to why Congress would commit this travesty.

The most common theory is that the Democratic Party has become spineless, weak and utterly without any trace of courage. Glenn Greenwald, one of my very favorite bloggers, is a proponent of this theory, as he writes in his post today on Unclaimed Territory at Salon. His post from Saturday is even more eloquent, Greenwald at his best.

Second is the theory that suggests that the Democrats believe that it is unnecessary to curb Bush or “take on” the Republicans, since the elections of 2008 are going to put them so firmly into control that they can “fix” everything without having to fight for it. A large part of the electorate seems to go along with this theory, not caring much about what government is doing right now in the fond belief that soon Democrats will take over and everything will be okay.

The third theory is that all of the Democratic promises to change things are lies since the parties are but two faces on the same coin. This theory is espoused by Arthur Silber and spelled out in his Saturday post on Once Upon a Time… I actually don’t follow this blog much, as Silber is a little “dark” for my taste and his discussions tend to be a bit convoluted, but he sometimes does make an interesting point.

My thoughts are, as my thoughts tend to be in my old age, a bit divided. One thing stands out though, and that is that all three theories are a bit nonsensical in that they address “Democrats” as one monolithic entity. I suspect that there are about as many reasons why Democrats do things as there are Democrats, so applying a single theory is probably pointless.

At the heart of the matter, though, I believe the problem lies neither with Republicans or Democrats so much as with our basic electoral system of government. It is broken, and perhaps irretrievably so. Politicians of both parties govern not in the interests of the country or its people, but in their own interest, to assure their own reelection. They have sold out to the corporate sponsors and political machine that provide the money to assure their reelection. Correction of the problem will require that the very people who are benefiting from it create and pass legislation to eliminate it, and that is unlikely in the extreme.

I do know that the problem is not magically going to go away just because we elect a Democrat as president and a bigger Democratic majority in Congress. The 2006 election did not change what we looked for it to change, and neither will the 2008 election, because moneyed interests will still be in control of our government.

So what can we, the people, do about it?

Well, to begin with, vote. Vote knowledgeably and in every election. Too many people do not vote, or they vote strictly by party affiliation, or they vote because they recognize the incumbent’s name on the ballot.

Pay attention to how your Representative and your Senators vote in Washington, and if they are not voting in your best interest and in the best interest of your country, vote them out of office. Know where their campaign funds are coming from, and watch to see if their voting record (or their “earmarks”) favors those contributors. If it does, vote them out of office.

One blogger asked rhetorically, “If you’re angry with Democrats, what do you want to do? Give it back to Republicans?” My response would be, “If I find a Republican whose hand isn’t in the pocket of moneyed interests, yes.”

Congress is doing what they are doing because politicians know that they can piss off the people and still get reelected. If they piss off the “political machine” their access to money will get cut off, so they do what is politically expedient. They know that whoever has the most money wins. It isn't about political party, it's about a process that has been corrupted. The most money wins.

So change that. Quit voting for the one with the most money.

The Obligation of Congress

The Huffington Post is one of the places on the internet that I go quite regularly. I’ve never figured out why marrying someone with a lot of money makes one a political savant, and I do not consider her to be such, but I like the turnover of articles; new posts appear with great frequency, although that is diminishing recently and the link may not stay where it is on my list if that continues. There are some really thoughtful items there, and there is some real fluff, so one has to pick and choose.

This post yesterday by Mark Kleiman, to me, fell in the fluff category.

“Why Impeach Bush and Cheney...” it reads, “... when you can cripple them (politically) instead?”

No, I’m not quoting from the article, that is the article. Actually the words “cripple them” are a link to a post of his in another publication which has a lot more words but says pretty much the same thing. It refers to defunding their offices and “cleverly” suggests that without money they wouldn’t be able to do much harm. It refers this as plan B and finishes,

Can anyone think of an advantage — either substantive or political — of impeachment over Plan B? I can't.

I’m hoping that this guy is joking, but I fear he might not be. There is far too much commentary going around about how “inconvenient” impeachment proceedings would be, and how politically risky it would be for Democrats to begin that process. There is too little talk about the risk to our nation and to our form of government if impeachment is not undertaken.

The arrogation of power to the office of President that has occurred in past six years, and the obvious damage to role of oversight by Congress is outrageous and it is not magically going to disappear on Jan 20, 2009.

Have you heard one presidential candidate, of either party, discuss restoring the power of congressional oversight? Have you heard any one of them promise, if elected, to restore the balance of powers that the founding fathers designed into our government?

There has been abuse of power. That abuse must be called to account and punished. Clever gameplaying with peripheral funding does not do that, and the prevention of further abuse is not the point. The point is that Congress must step up and fulfill the role set for it by the writers of the Constitution of The United States of America, and they are not doing that.