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For decades, residents of "America's last colony" have clamored for the same irrevocable rights as other citizens of the United States.
The movement to bring democracy to the District of Columbia took a step forward on Monday, September 15, when local political leaders and representatives of pro-democracy groups testified in favor of statehood for the nation's capital city before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
The subject of the committee hearing, which was led by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), was the "New Columbia Admissions Act" (S. 132; with counterpart bill H.R. 292 in the U.S. House).
Among those testifying were D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who holds a nonvoting seat in the House, and Mayor Vince Gray. The hearing is unlikely to lead to passage of the two bills any time soon, given Congress's ongoing gridlock and Republican hostility to D.C. statehood.
But the hearing represents an advance for the statehood movement because a new unity behind the goal of statehood was on display.
Until recently, many of the same officials who now seek statehood preferred another goal, "D.C. voting rights," which meant a single voting seat for the District in the House of Representatives. Ten years ago, Del. Norton and other Democratic leaders who favored D.C. voting rights tried to discourage D.C. democracy advocates from demanding statehood. Endorsement of statehood was removed from the Democratic Party's national platform in 2004 and still hasn't been restored. The promotion of D.C. voting rights legislation led many people to confuse voting representation in Congress with statehood.
This was a mistake. Self-determination and self-government, not representation in a legislature, are the true measures of democracy. Colonies in Africa and Asia and conquered European nations like Ireland held voting seats in the legislatures of nations that ruled over them, even while they suffered exploitation and oppression. Many of these colonies, like Algeria, a French possession until 1962, became free only after violent revolutions.
Our own Founding Fathers and Mothers in the thirteen colonies fought for independence, not voting rights. Patrick Henry never said "Give me a vote in Parliament or give me death."
The D.C. voting rights legislation went nowhere, and not only because of Republican contempt for the rights of D.C. residents. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, most recently in 2009 and 2010, no meaningful expansion of the rights of D.C. residents has taken place after limited Home Rule was granted in 1973. Legislation to grant statehood to D.C. was defeated in the U.S. House in 1993 by a vote of 277 to 153.
Statehood advocates (those not distracted by D.C. voting rights) have always understood that the lack of voting representation in Congress is just one of several reasons for statehood, and that self-government and full equality under the U.S. Constitution for the District with its black majority remain part of the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement. (For a more thorough history of the D.C. democracy movement, see "The D.C. Statehood Papers: Writings on D.C. Statehood & Self-government" by Sam Smith.)
Until D.C. becomes a state, Congress holds the power to veto locally passed decisions and impose unwanted laws, policies, and budgets on D.C. residents. Congress threatens to nullify a local marijuana legalization measure: in July, 2014, a Maryland Republican Representative inserted an amendment into the District's 2015 Appropriation Bill that would stop decriminalization of marijuana from taking effect and remove the initiative from the D.C. ballot in November. In June, House Republicans blocked funding for a law passed by D.C. Council that would eliminate the threat of jail time for marijuana possession. In 1998, Congress overturned a ballot measure for medical marijuana (Initiative 59) that had passed with a 69% majority.
Congress has imposed zero-tolerance laws and a charter-school program; outlawed needle exchange in D.C. to prevent HIV transmission; and prohibited District government from taxing commuters, a source of revenue for all other cities. Congress members have tried to enact the death penalty, impose a school voucher program, and deny benefits for same-sex couples. In 2001, Congress, through an appointed Financial Control Board, ordered Mayor Anthony Williams to dismantle D.C. General Hospital, the District's sole full-service public health facility.
In the only public referendum on the issue, over 60% of D.C. residents voted in favor of statehood in 1980.
Groups that have consistently advocated statehood, like the Stand Up! for Democracy in D.C. Coalition, the D.C. Statehood Green Party, D.C. Statehood — Yes We Can, and Neighbors United For D.C. Statehood are encouraged that Democratic leaders have seen the light and embraced the call for genuine democracy in the form of statehood.
Weaving a New Star
The New Columbia Admissions Act is consistent with arguments by statehood advocates that statehood for the District can be achieved by an Act of Congress (requiring a 51% simple majority), without a constitutional amendment (requiring ratification by 2/3 of states). In 1846, an Act of Congress removed Arlington from D.C. and ceded it to Virginia, proving that Congress can legally alter the District's borders.
Congress may therefore reduce the constitutionally mandated federal enclave to encompass only the federal properties (White House, Capitol, Mall, etc.), after which D.C. would be admitted to the union as a state, just as all other states were admitted after the initial thirteen colonies. Along with freedom from Congress's control, D.C. residents will enjoy the same voting representation in Congress as all other Americans: one Representative and two Senators.
For many D.C. activists, the goals of statehood and economic, social, and racial justice are inseparable.
"Within the constraints of colonial Home Rule, we must be determined to push its limits by putting in place a progressive D.C. tax structure, expanding funding of our low-income budget, and establishing a D.C. public bank holding our revenue instead of Wall Street. These measures would help energize our local movement for D.C. statehood," said David Schwartzman, D.C. Statehood Green Party activist and candidate for "Shadow" U.S. Senator.
"The opportunity to become a state and enjoy full constitutional rights and citizenship will also be an opportunity to further reduce income inequality and better the quality of life for all D.C. residents. We won't suffer Congress's veto power over our laws and budgets. We can assert control over our own school system, rather than tolerate the imposition of charter schools by Congress."
D.C. statehood has been the D.C. Statehood Green Party's most conspicuous plank since its founding as the D.C. Statehood Party in 1970 by Julius Hobson and other local civil rights leaders. The D.C. Statehood Green Party is an affiliate of the Green Party, which has endorsed D.C. statehood in its national platform since the party was founded.
Ten years ago, the D.C. Statehood Green Party and Stand Up! for Democracy in D.C. Coalition helped draft a petition that was sent to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights and the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which monitor compliance with treaties that the U.S. has signed and ratified. In 2006, the Human Rights Committee found that the District's lack of voting representation in Congress violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The ruling was the result of a decade of work by democracy advocate Tim Cooper.
The achievement of statehood ultimately depends on two things. First, the current enthusiasm among D.C. leaders for statehood must be sustained. Any dilution of the New Columbia Admissions Act, in the name of negotiation and compromise, must be resisted.
Second, statehood will require vociferous support from Americans who live outside the District. People who live in cities across the U.S. have good reason to join the demand. City populations are underrepresented in Congress, especially in the U.S. Senate, where sparsely populated states have the same representation as states with dense urban centers. (D.C.'s population is larger than Wyoming's and Vermont's.) The District's new Reps and Senators would thus speak for city-dwellers in other states, whose interests are often similar to those of D.C. residents.
The admission of a state whose population is slightly more than half black (50.1% in 2012) would incrementally help correct another severe form of underrepresentation in Congress.
President Obama, when asked recently about D.C. statehood, said "I'm for it." But the White House declined to send a representative to the September 15 hearing. As the November 4 midterm election approaches, the movement to weave a 51st star into the flag will benefit from speakouts and rallies in Washington, D.C., as well as challenges from people living in states across the country directed at their Congress members and the Obama Administration: "If you support democracy and human rights for all Americans, help enact D.C. statehood."
Photo by Mr.TinDC released under a Creative Commons No Derivatives license.
]]>In early April, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim issued a dire warning about the consequences of global climate change and increasing economic inequality. The combination of the two, he said, are likely to result in violent clashes around the world: "Fights over water and food are going to be the most significant direct impacts of climate change in the next five to 10 years. There's just no question about it."
Mr. Kim urged scientists and environmental activists to produce a coherent plan and challenged the World Bank and world leaders to take immediate action:
Is there enough basic science research going into renewable energy? Not even close. Are there ways of taking discoveries made in universities and quickly moving them into industry? No. Are there ways of testing those innovations? Are there people thinking about scaling [up] those innovations?… [The climate change community] kept saying, 'What do you mean a plan?' I said a plan that's equal to the challenge. A plan that will convince anyone who asks us that we're really serious about climate change, and that we have a plan that can actually keep us at less than 2C warming. We still don't have one.
Around the same time, Thomas Piketty's new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century began to draw public attention. The French economist compares the increasing concentration of wealth and power among the super-rich to the revival of a new Gilded Age comparable to the Gilded Age, also called the Robber Baron Era, of a hundred years ago.
For the U.S., it means that the prosperity that Americans enjoyed between 1945 and 1980, spawning a huge and affluent middle class, was temporary and has been replaced by a massive redistribution of wealth to the top One Percent. Mr. Piketty's conclusions aren't new — Occupy Wall Street activists, progressives, and others have been warning of the collapse of democracy and economic fairness for years — but his book, according to reviews, tracks the evolution of capitalism over the past two centuries in unprecedented detail.
A pair by professors from Northwestern and Princeton universities made news a few days ago when they published a study confirming our suspicions that oligarchy has replaced democracy. The profs found that "policies supported by economic elites and business interest groups were far more likely to become law than those they opposed…. [T]he preferences of the middle class made essentially no difference to a bill's fate."
Let's state the obvious: the combination of climate change and neo-Gilded plutocracy is the defining crisis of the 21st century and it is a political crisis that requires political solutions.
The "Global Climate Convergence: Earth Day to May Day 2014," subtitled "People Planet Peace Over Profit," is designed to address this dual crisis with a worldwide "education and direct action campaign." Running from April 22 to May 1, it will be the first in a series of yearly actions to effect an "emergency green economic transformation."
Many environmentalists and progressives fail to grasp that the crisis can't be fixed under the status quo. It's not reasonable to believe that systemic changes will occur without profound changes in the American political landscape.
By status quo, I mean the exclusive control over government and policy by two parties that swim in corporate money and influence. The GOP denies that climate change is a problem and clings shamelessly to the libertarian capitalist ideology that's at the root of inequality. Dems only accept ideas that accommodate corporate special interests: emissions trading schemes that allow businesses to trade licenses to pollute; health-care legislation that imposes a direct public subsidy to sustain insurance industry profits; a proposed minimum-wage hike that falls short of a livable-wage standard; modest Dodd-Frank reforms that don't restore the Glass-Steagall Act and impunity for banksters whose criminal greed triggered the 2008 financial meltdown.
Some Democratic ideas and policies are nearly indistinguishable from Republican: a proposal to slash Social Security; privatization of education (through the charter-school movement) and other public resources and services; a "NAFTA on steroids" trade pact (the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated in secret by the Obama Administration) that threatens labor and environmental protections.
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party's candidate for Governor of New York, sums it up: "The Democrats want to repeal the New Deal and the Republicans seem to want to repeal the Enlightenment."
President Obama wants us to believe he takes global warming seriously, but the legacy of his administration will include fracking, mountaintop detonation mining, pipelines, "clean coal," no steps to reduce car traffic, and an emphasis on domestic energy independence instead ending fossil-fuel addiction.
The corporate stranglehold over both parties tightened after two Supreme Court rulings, Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), removed important limits on the flow of money into election campaigns. The result is a bipartisan slide, a few miles per hour faster or slower depending on which party controls the White House and Congress, into the abyss.
What's Left?
Progressives of various stripes have lamented the retreat of the Democratic Party from its traditional values and alleged concern for working-class Americans. An essay by Adolph Reed Jr. titled "Nothing Left: The long, slow surrender of American liberals" (Harper's Magazine, March 2014) provoked a small storm of outrage with its detailed account of Democratic Party betrayals since the mid 20th century.
Unfortunately, the usual progressive response to said retreats and betrayals is "We must keep voting Democrat in every election, because Republicans are worse." Don't bother to look beyond the two parties.
Mr. Reed agreed with this dismissal when he responded to a critic of his essay in The Nation: "For the record, I don't argue for backing third party candidacies, which as a rule are quixotic by definition, and I agree with Goldberg that in any given election it's overwhelmingly likely to be true that the only realistic choice is to vote for whichever Dem is running."
Democratic Party politicians hear this message very clearly: "It doesn't matter what you do in office, you can count on progressives to keep voting for you."
As long as no other competition exists, Democrats, while competing with Republicans for fat campaign checks from corporate PACS and the One Percent, can take the support of voters who care about economic justice and the health of the planet for granted.
That's why the "lesser of two evils" justification for remaining loyal to the Democratic Party amounts to a capitulation. When challenged on this point, many progressives shrug and assert that electoral politics doesn't change anything, sometimes adding "We have to build a movement first."
This is a dangerous attitude. If little or nothing can be accomplished by voting, then it's hardly worth making the effort to do so. In fact, the lack of motivation to vote and resulting low turnout in U.S. elections reinforce the status quo in every election cycle more than any other factor.
Dissidents of a century ago weren't so short-sighted. Eugene Debs and his fellow Socialists understood that movements don't survive long unless there's an institutional structure to sustain them. They organized political parties and ran for public office.
Nor were historical alternative parties as quixotic as Mr. Reed claims. The history of third parties is also a history of the urgent ideas they introduced, which were later adopted by one or both of the ruling parties: abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, break-up of monopolies and trusts, the eight-hour day and 40-hour week, workplace safety and organizing rights, even the balanced budget.
Many of these reforms began to erode in the late 20th century, when such parties were at low ebb. The assault on workers' rights and emergence of big-business cartels and conglomerates with the competition-killing power of monopolies are consequences of exclusive D and R rule.
The Future Will Be Green Or It Won't Be At All
The major crises of the 21st century won't be solved by ideas that come out of the established parties.
Despite their differences, the mainstream of both parties remain loyal to unregulated markets, privatization, corporate consolidation, and variations on President Reagan's discredited trickle-down formula. Ds and Rs will continue to compete for fat checks from corporate PACs. Democrats in the White House will, like Mr. Obama, continue to stack their administrations with Wall Street operatives. Dems in Congress will always squander their power to enact genuine progressive and environmental legislation, as they did in 2009 and 2010 when they held a majority of seats in both houses.
The convergence that needs to happen now must be independent and it must include an electoral component.
The political party that best represents the ideals of the Global Climate Convergence is the Green Party. It's no coincidence that Greens, especially 2012 presidential nominee Jill Stein and running mate Cheri Honkala, have been the main organizers and promoters of the Convergence.
Many progressives, labor activists, and environmentalists remain skeptical of independent parties and movements, either because they can't think beyond the Democratic Party, because they're squeamish about electoral politics in general, or because they cling to the canard that Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader "spoiled" in 2000 and enabled George W. Bush to take the White House. (Adolph Reed Jr. debunks this myth in his Harper's essay.)
The Green Party or something like it has become an imperative for the 21st century, analogous to the Republican, Populist, Socialist, and other historical third parties. Greens seek to wed a politics of class and ecology, and the best Green activists and elected officials like Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, Calif., who stood up to the power of Chevron and foreclosing banks on behalf of her city's residents, are doing exactly that.
The impending climate catastrophe and rise of economic inequality won't be solved with a few pieces of legislation in Congress. These crises are the reality we'll live with for decades to come. They demand new kinds of political thinking.
Events like the Global Climate Convergence must become permanent fixtures. They can't be a temporary set of protests, rallies, and encampments like the antiglobalization movement of 1999 to 2003, antiwar movement (2003 to 2008, ending when Barack Obama moved into the White House — just when we needed it most), or Occupy Wall Street (2011 to 2012). The Occupy movement lasted less than a year, although lingering versions still exist.
A political party can maintain the goals of activists long after initial enthusiasm has faded. The global democracy and fair-trade demands of those who demonstrated against international trade cabals 15 years ago remain the agenda of the Green Party.
Movements, actions, and convergences must remain defiantly separate from the two corporate-money parties if we want them to have a lasting effect. In an essay titled "Social Movement and Electoral Movements, Not One or the Other," Michael Trudeau writes
"Social-movement-only activists are correct that [social] movements have a tendency to fizzle out when they reach electoral politics, but that is because in recent history most of these movements have ultimately been funneled into the Democratic Party, by electing or appealing to Democrats. What else should we expect when we allow a corporate party to become the umbrella organization for noncorporate, grassroots activism?… Social movements die in the Democratic Party, but they grow in independent, alternative parties."
Without an independent movement, independent electoral politics, and actions like the Global Climate Convergence, the One Percent's power will continue to grow into a 21st-century version of fascism or feudalism and the two-party establishment's response to the effects of climate instability will be fatal to democracy, basic human rights and freedoms, and the well-being of most of the world's population.
It's time to stop capitulating and start converging. We're in this for the long haul.
]]>Should Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) run for president?
The creeping realization that the next Democratic nominee may be Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has already picked up $400,000 in speaking fees (i.e., unofficial campaign contributions, i.e., bribes) from Goldman Sachs, is making a progressive alternative increasingly attractive for 2016. Sen. Sanders is mulling the idea and a few Draft Sanders efforts are underway.
By progressive, I mean favoring an immediate shutdown of Guantanamo and the NSA surveillance dragnet, Medicare For All to replace Obamacare, a ban on fracking, cancellation of the tar-sands pipelines and Trans-Pacific Partnership, prosecution of banksters responsible for the fraud that triggered the 2008 economic crisis, a livable wage for working Americans, a reversal of the redistribution of wealth to the One Percent, and an end to military adventures and drone warfare, among other things.
Despite campaign promises and occasional rhetoric, President Obama has proved himself on the wrong side (or inadequate side, in the case of wages) of all of the above. The ferocious partisan hostility between Dems and a Republican Party determined to march off the cliff of extremism shouldn't blind us to the retreat of the Democratic Party's mainstream from FDR-era progressivism. We have two parties of war and Wall Street.
Ms. Clinton is likely to be even friendlier than Mr. Obama to the plutocrat sector. She'll enjoy a progressive makeover to disguise her record and appeal to the amnesiac voting bloc. She'll win the support of Dem voters who place hope in the illusion of her incremental progressivism ("Her heart's in the right place!") and those for whom Dems are the eternal lesser of two evils ("We have nowhere else to turn!").
Some of those with more realistic expectations about a Clinton presidency have appealed to Sen. Sanders, who acknowledges the need for a "political revolution" to change the country's direction, to consider running.
There are two questions regarding a Sanders candidacy, the second contingent on the first: whether he should run, and how he should run. I'll leave aside "whether" for now and skip over to "how."
Here's the problem with independent campaigns: they leave no legacy. An independent might call public attention to a few big issues ignored by the D and R candidates, but there exists no institutional means to carry the independent's ideas forward after Election Day.
John Anderson's independent campaign drew nearly 7% of the vote in 1980, above the FEC's 5% threshold for partial public funding in the following presidential election, if Rep. Anderson had established an alternative party or run on an existing alternative party's ballot line.
In some cases, candidates create party labels for their ballot lines, such as Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's Justice Party in 2012, but such campaigns are in effect independent, with the ad hoc party folding when Election Day is over. Independent campaigns are historical footnotes, with nothing to show for the candidates' efforts.
We know what happens to progressive Democratic contenders for the White House. Just ask Dennis Kucinich. Or Rev. Jesse Jackson. Their campaigns serve mainly to keep progressives within the Democratic fold during the pre-primary period, ensuring that most of the latter will vote for the party's corporate-money nominee in the general election.
Progressive Dems have tried for decades to steer their party back towards its alleged principles. Despite their best efforts, the Democratic Party continues to slide to the right. The party's leaders assume they can take progressive votes for granted, while adapting to compete with the GOP for corporate campaign checks.
Much of President Obama's agenda and accomplishments would have been recognized as Republican ten years ago. The long list of examples includes the individual mandate, an idea that was introduced by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Republicans until Dems made it the basis of Obamacare in 2009.
The fact that groups like MoveOn.org have defended or acquiesced to the Dems' embrace of conservative agenda proves that instead of pulling the Democratic Party to the left, progressives have been pulled to the right.
When a Democratic president proposes cuts in Social Security and secretly negotiates an anti-labor trade pact (the Trans-Pacific Partnership) while publicly bemoaning income equality, when Democrats from the party's left flank defend the kind of military strikes and surveillance that they protested under a GOP president, it's a sign that the party is beyond rehabilitation.
Why Not Green?
Several articles and one online poll limit Bernie Sanders' options to running Dem and running Independent, if he decides to run at all. They seem to go out of their way to ignore a third option staring them in the face: running Green.
A quick comparison of Sen. Sanders' positions with the Green Party's platform and principles shows a close match.
Like Sen. Sanders, the Green Party measures the health of the nation's economy according to the level of financial security enjoyed by working Americans and the number of people lifted out of poverty — in contrast to the Ds and Rs, who judge the economy by the Dow, GDP, and corporate profit margins. Democrats cite economic gains since 2009 as evidence of a recovery, while Sen. Sanders and the Green Party advocate deep changes to a system that has allowed the top One Percent to enjoy 95% of these gains.
It's very possible that Sen. Sanders would win the Green nomination if he competed for it. Instead of disappearing after the primaries, he'd compete as nominee in the race until the November election. The ideas and positions he expressed would remain in the public debate as an alternative to the narrow spectrum represented by Ms. Clinton and the GOP nominee. With the Green Party already on the ballot in most states, he wouldn't have to start from scratch in collecting ballot lines as an independent.
The two main objections to a Green Sanders campaign are (1) he'd siphon votes away from the Democrat, and (2) he'd have no chance of winning the White House, so why bother running?
The first objection is an excuse for progressives to fall back into a voting pattern that has allowed Dem politicians to take their votes for granted. If we're serious about reversing the country's direction, the risk of another GOP presidency has to be weighed against the risk posed by the dangerous bipartisan march to the right, which is likely to continue in the coming decades unless interrupted. It's clear by now that the interruption won't come from within the Democratic Party but from insurgencies like Occupy Wall Street and the Green Party.
The "winnability" objection often comes from Dem apologists who prefer that Sen. Sanders run as a Democrat. The problem with this argument is that his chance of winning the nomination in today's Democratic Party is nearly as remote as his chance of winning the White House as a Green.
Greens face this question all the time: Why run or vote for a third-party presidential candidate at all, if he or she has nearly zero chance of winning?
There are lots of reasons to run and support an alternative party candidate. We all deserve the right to vote for candidates who best represents our own interests and ideals. Insisting that the only valid candidates are the two who are competing to serve Wall Street turns democratic elections into a sham, making it hardly worth our energy to fill out a ballot. (It's one reason why most Americans don't vote.) A movement that, on the basis of lesser-evilism, supports a party or candidate whose program is contary to its own participates in its own self-defeat. Barack Obama's 2008 victory killed the antiwar movement when most of its participants ignored his actual positions and imagined he was the antiwar candidate.
Voting for an alternative party's candidates helps the party grow beyond Election Day. In some states, ballot access and major party status are based on formulas that include the number of votes for the party's presidential candidate. As noted above, receiving 5% in a presidential race qualifies a party for partial public funding in the next election.
National candidates help focus public attention on their party's local candidates. Green nominees have consistently used their campaigns to promote Greens running in winnable local races. Greens like to talk about the presidential campaign spectacle, but they know that the party's real growth is taking place at the grassroots level. Still, local Green candidates benefit immensely from presidential campaigns that carry the banner for the party.
Green nominees bring public attention to Green ideas and local organizing efforts: saving public education, water, and other services and resources from privatization; enacting livable (not just minimum) wage laws; promoting conservation, new energy technologies, bike lanes, reduced bus fares, and other ways to end fossil-fuel dependence and stem the advance of climate change; opposing runaway police and prosecutorial power and the private prison-industrial complex, which continue to drive mass incarceration of young black, brown, and poor people and the drug war; urging cities and states to establish public banks that would end Wall Street's bond-market tyranny; helping homeowners threatened with foreclosure.
In 2012, Green presidential nominee Jill Stein and running mate Cheri Honkala ran on the "Green New Deal", an economic and ecological program introduced by New York Green gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins in 2010 and endorsed by over 60 other Green candidates. Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala joined Philadelphia activists in getting arrested for protesting foreclosures. A year later, Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin of Richmond, California, led her city in using eminent domain to help underwater homeowners.
In other words, there are more ways to win than qualifying for the front-door key to the White House.
If you want a revolution, you have to do something revolutionary. The political revolution that Sen. Sanders advocates requires a sustained movement that's represented by a party in the electoral arena. The party must be permanent, serious about electoral participation, independent of the bipartisan establishment, and beyond the reach of corporate PACs, lobbyists, and campaign checks.
One party fits that description. If Sen. Sanders decides not to run as a Green, he should be encouraged to endorse the Green nominee, promote Green candidates running locally, and help build the Green Party.
Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.
]]>The press conference in the Cannon House Office Building demanded that Congress make deep cuts in the nation's military budget, reject reductions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and redirect funds into sorely needed social safety-net programs. Along with other political and community leaders, members of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign talked about how joblessness, hunger, foreclosures, and economic distress were hurting their families.
After the press conference, they walked in the snow to the office of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), co-chair of the Budgetary Committee, to present a "People's Budget" and supporting petitions (see the video).
Unfortunately, the austerity agenda, premised on the idea that working Americans should shoulder economic losses caused by Wall Street's criminal recklessness, required that Congress decree otherwise. The bipartisan budget deal reached later on Tuesday exempted the Pentagon from sequestration, while allowing proposed food-stamp cuts to move forward and blocking unemployment extensions.
For Republicans, austerity represents a step towards economic freedom and ending the tyranny of Big Government. For Democrats, austerity means responsible fiscal policy and deficit reduction. Or so the usual media narrative tells us. Don't believe it.
Conservative politicians don't want smaller government. They adore Big Government. For Republicans, moderate Democrats, and the lobbyists who sustain them with fat campaign checks, the ideal is powerful government that serves the One Percent more efficiently, generously, and exclusively.
They favor massive government intervention that feeds the corporate sector through taxpayer-funded subsidies, handouts, bailouts, insurance to cover losses in the stock market, boondoggle contracts (manna for the defense industries), privatization of public resources and services, and international trade deals that privilege big business at the expense of democratically enacted labor, environmental, and public-health protections. In short, a massive redistribution of wealth and power to the top.
We can discard the idea of an eternal struggle between government intervention and freedom. The real choice is intervention for the benefit of most of the population or for wealthy elites. The pure no-government libertarian ideal is a pipedream, existing only in places like Somalia. The U.S. came close during the Gilded Age, a time of endless sweatshop drudgery, poverty, and destitution for tens of millions of Americans before the corrections of the Progressive Era. That's what conservativism means now, a return to the Gilded Age and the reign of the Robber Barons.
Food-stamp cuts represent a propaganda victory for this ideal. Millions of Americans complain that the lady at the supermarket who pays for groceries with food stamps is a drain on our tax dollars, probably living in the lap of taxpayer-funded luxury. Meanwhile, arms manufacturers, banks, oil companies, and other industries suck up billions from the public coffers with hardly a peep.
The era of deregulation, globalization, privatization, slashed safety nets, and bloated military budgets commenced with the Reagan Era, with some precursors under President Carter, such as the relax of airline industry regulations. It persists whether Democrats or Republicans control the White House and Congress.
Ronald Reagan's administration made a special effort to enact the anti-regulation economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, even after the deregulation of the savings and loan industry, inspired by these theories, inflicted a catastrophe that ultimately cost the public over $370 billion. For all his rhetoric about shrinking government, President Reagan expanded the federal government's size and power and tripled the national debt.
The libertarian dogmas of Messrs. Hayek and Friedman don't supply freedom as most of us understand the word — the capacity of all people to act and determine the course of their own lives, without coercion. Instead, they provide a license for wealthy elites to exploit, plunder, pollute, and commit crimes with impunity.
Of course, corporations themselves don't care much about academic theories and political ideologies. Their sole interest is profit and power.
The State-Cartel Ideal
The capitalist libertarian model has two effects. First, it allows big business to consolidate into a small number of corporations (cartels) with the monopolistic power to control the market, killing competition and turning the "free market" into an illusion.
Second, it enables a merger of corporate boardroom and government bureau, in which the main purpose of the state is to serve the interests of wealthy business elites.
There are lots of names for this condition: plutocracy, plutonomy, neoliberalism, neo-feudalism, the One Percent, corporate royalism, robber-baron economics, even fascism. Let me propose a more precise term: state-cartel capitalism. (The similarity to state-monopoly capitalism that has taken hold in China isn't accidental.)
State-cartel capitalism measures the health of the economy according to corporate bottom lines and "competitiveness" (even when business competition has been effectively eliminated), Dow Jones, and the GDP, with little regard for the financial security of working people or the well-being of society's most helpless. Thus the top 1% enjoyed 95% of all income growth from 2009 to 2012.
The state-cartel ideology abolishes the principle that people who work full-time jobs deserve the security of a livable wage and benefits. It turns "No one owes you anything if you don't work" into "No one owes you anything even if you work." It admits that the U.S. economic system not only doesn't work for everyone, it shouldn't work for everyone. It buttresses this admission with the propaganda myth that poor people are lazy unemployed parasites, despite the fact that most of the poor work.
The most notorious purveyors of the state-cartel ideal include the Koch Brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and Walmart. Walmart is a company whose idea of free-market competition involves a mass extinction of locally owned businesses and wages so low that employees can only afford to shop at Walmart.
ALEC's hatred of regulation doesn't extend to homeowners who install solar panels. ALEC is currently lobbying Big Government to penalize homeowners who bypass the corporate grid in a quest for clean renewable energy.
For a shining example of state-cartel ruthlessness, there's Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's equity firm, which has reaped millions by purchasing small and medium-sized businesses and then dismantling them, destroying thousands of jobs. Mr. Romney's election to the White House in 2012 would have surpassed his tenure as governor of Massachusetts in sealing the state-cartel deal.
The biggest mistake is to believe that the Democratic Party represents the opposition to the state-cartel ideal. The discredit that Obama-hating Tea Partiers and uncompromising GOP extremists in the U.S. House brought on themselves during the recent government shutdown shouldn't lull us into forgetting that the most effective agents of state-cartel power are moderate Republicans and the Democratic Party's centrist leadership.
Although Dems have opposed some of the grosser excesses, such as the Republican legislative proposal to have Wall Street losses incurred through high-risk derivatives trading insured with public funds, the Obama Administration's agenda and accomplishments adhere closely to the state-cartel ideal. Obamacare's individual mandate (originally a Republican idea) requires every American to subsidize the health-insurance industry and fails to rein in skyrocketing medical costs.
The proposal to slash Social Security and delay eligibility for benefits, promoted by President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform ("Catfood Commission"), will push more of our retirement money into the risky Wall Street casino. His "Race to the Top" enriches testing companies and other private school contractors, rewarding municipalities that privatize public education by funding charter schools.
And then there's the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), President Obama's secretly negotiated trade pact that has been described as NAFTA on speed. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney didn't bother to debate the TPP during their 2012 contest, because they both support it. Congress is now mulling fast-track status to conceal the TPP's intense assault on workers' rights, public health, the environment, Internet freedom, and democratic sovereignty from public scrutiny until it's too late.
The Obama Administration follows the pattern set by President Clinton in enacting the Reagan state-capital agenda: expansion of the for-profit prison-industrial complex, NAFTA, the Welfare Reform Act, the Telecommunications Act (allowing consolidation of media ownership), and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, both of which set the stage for the Wall Street fraud that caused the 2008 economic crisis.
If the state-cartel trend continues, as it will whether we elect Republicans or Democrats, the prosperity most Americans enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century will be a distant memory in a few years. And so will our rights and freedoms.
Another World is Possible
Freedom for all of us can't co-exist with the "corporate freedom" paradigm of the state-cartel ideologues. Along with the four that Franklin Roosevelt articulated (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear), we can add freedom from destruction of our environment.
Genuine freedom embraces a list of rights that the state-cartel gang generally doesn't care about, such as the right to live one's private life without surveillance, without going broke because of a medical emergency, without being told what kind of love life or family is acceptable, without getting busted for smoking a certain kind of cigarette, without being targeted for police harassment and arrest for no other reason than one's ethnicity.
Three big threats to the American republic have emerged in the 21st century: social instability as the global climate grows less stable, war without end (euphemized as the War on Terror), and the theft of our democracy, rights, and freedoms by a plutocracy that wants to restore a Gilded Age economy.
These threats are closely related. The wars without end are fought for control over the fossil fuels that are causing climate havoc, while feeding arms manufacturers, private security firms, and other military contractors. Food-stamp and other safety-net cuts enable Washington's state-cartel establishment to render Americans helpless, in permanent debt, and focused on personal survival, deflecting attention from the redirection of the nation's treasury into the perpetual war machine.
There's a political opposition to the state-cartel paradigm, but you have to look hard to find it, at least in mainstream news media coverage. It reared its head for several months during the Occupy Wall Street protests and encampments. Some of its representatives were present at the Dec. 10 press conference and delivery of the "People's Budget" to Sen. Ryan's office: the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign; the Green Shadow Cabinet, which emerged from Green Party nominee Jill Stein's 2012 presidential run (Dr. Stein was a featured speaker); genuine Democratic progressives who've been marginalized in their refusal to go along with the Obama program.
There are many more small-d democrats around the U.S., but they remain isolated and often focused on local or regional challenges and single issues. Many of them continue to hope unrealistically for a rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, or they resign themselves to supporting Dems as a lesser evil without illusions that doing so will hinder the country's slide into the rightwing abyss.
It's clear now that the crises of the new Gilded Age won't be solved under the two-party political status quo. The first step in solving them is envisioning a Congress in which sponsors of the "People's Budget" outnumber the state-cartel errand boys.
]]>While it's true that Ms. Clinton endorsed the individual mandate during her 2008 presidential campaign, the ACA's pedigree isn't Democratic at all. It's Republican — which raises questions not only about GOP accusations like the one from Mr. Hewitt, but also about progressive support for President Obama's health-care reform legislation and abandonment of universal health care, i.e., Single-Payer national health care ("Medicare For All").
The individual mandate is the foundation and most controversial part of the ACA, requiring all of us to purchase health coverage from private insurance companies. It was introduced in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing pro-business think tank allied with the GOP.
Mr. Hewitt wishes to associate the individual mandate with the managed-care proposal that was crafted by the Jackson Hole Summit convened by Ms. Clinton and offered by President Clinton in 1993. In reality, the individual mandate was the basis for two GOP alternatives to the Clinton plan: the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act ("HEART Act"), sponsored by 20 Republican Senators, and the Consumer Choice Health Security Act sponsored by Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.).
The half-dozen largest insurance companies favored the Clinton plan, which they helped write (consumer advocates were excluded), while smaller firms represented by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) favored GOP proposals. HIAA ran the famous "Harry and Louise" ads against the Clinton plan.
Gov. Mitt Romney signed the individual mandate into law in Massachusetts in 2006, drawing praise from Senators Jim DeMint and Orrin Hatch and other Republican leaders because of the mandate's boost for private business. It was even part of a bipartisan bill co-written by Senators Bob Bennett (R-Ut.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.) in 2007.
Some Republicans and the Cato Institute opposed it, but there's no doubt that the individual mandate was a Republican scheme, until Democrats grabbed hold of it in 2009. After that, Republicans denounced the mandate and called it socialism.
Insurance companies, whose reps attended the health-care reform panels hosted by Dems in 2009 and helped draft the ACA, knew that the new legislation was designed to provide them a massive windfall. Whether the ACA was passed or defeated in Congress, they'd be the real winners. The ACA debate was rigged from the beginning by insurance and other corporate lobbies whose profits and high overhead, burdening the US with the highest medical costs of any nation on earth, would be maintained.
In the real world, no genuine socialist would ever jump on board a bill that imposes a direct public subsidy for the financial sector. Neither can the ACA be compared with Social Security or Medicare, which are administered efficiently by government agencies with minimal overhead costs.
The ACA is far more comparable to the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act ("Medicare Modernization Act"), a Republican "reform" bill signed into law by President Bush in 2003. This legislation turned Medicare into a corporate cash cow and imposed a complex semi-privatized Medicare system that funnels over $500 billion to Big Pharma and Big Insurance.
The Medicare Modernization Act accomplishes this giveaway through increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans, which converts Medicare funds into insurance company profits, and through Part D, which provides drug benefits for seniors. Part D is only available under a private drug plan provided by (what else?) an insurance company.
Partisan Loyalty vs. Substance
If Obamacare is the rejected grandchild of the Heritage Foundation and betrayed love child of the pre-2009 GOP, then we should also ask: Why did so many progressives, unions, and liberal advocacy groups suddenly endorse legislation that they had recognized earlier as a handout to the insurance industry?
Why did progressives abandon the demand for Single-Payer and the idea that the right to enjoy good medical care should trump the right of private insurance firms to make a profit? (Not all progressives went along with the ACA. Physicians for a National Health Program, the California Nurses Association, the Green Party, and some other groups criticized Obamacare and continued to insist on Single-Payer.)
The obvious answer is post-inauguration loyalty to President Obama. By electing a new Democratic (and first black) president and Democratic Congress, we took back our country from the Bush-Cheney Gang. The health care crisis and other problems would be solved by Change We Can Believe In.
The Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate (National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 2012), but I can't help wondering how the liberal justices would have ruled on it if the new health care law had been promoted and signed by a Republican president, a plausible scenario given the mandate's history. Would progressive Dems in Congress, all of whom voted for the ACA, have voted yea on a Republican bill with all the same planks?
Such loyalty implicates progressive apologists for the ACA in the rollout mess, including the web-site fiasco, the broken promise that everyone can keep their existing insurance plans, the sorely inadequate and prohibitively expensive policies offered in the insurance exchanges that will leave millions of Americans vulnerable to financial ruin if they face a medical emergency, the looming penalty for those who fail to purchase coverage that they can't afford, and the estimated 31 million who'll still lack insurance.
The history of the individual mandate should lead us to two conclusions:
(1) The debates over health care and other big issues are very often less about substance and more about partisan allegiances. The main criterion for judging any policy or piece of legislation is which side of the aisle introduced it. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars and other military ventures, answered with vociferous protest when George W. Bush occupied the White House, provoked little outrage after Barack Obama moved in, even after the expansion of civilian-slaughtering drone warfare.
(2) While the GOP wallows in extremism and partisan obstruction, Democrats are embracing traditional Republican agenda.
Like the individual mandate, most of the Obama Administration's major proposals and accomplishments would have been recognized as Republican ten years ago: the plan to slash Social Security, the Wall Street bailouts, refusal to prosecute bankster crimes that triggered the economic crisis, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, school privatization, the NSA's massive surveillance dragnet, unprovoked military attacks on other countries, "clean coal," permission for continued mountaintop removal mining and fracking, even greenhouse-gas emissions trading (introduced by the George H.W. Bush Administration and supported by Newt Gingrich and John McCain before the 2008 presidential race).
This tendency was already at work in the two Clinton terms. Bill Clinton's legacy would make any Republican president proud: NAFTA, the Welfare Reform Act, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the antigay Defense of Marriage Act, consolidation of media ownership under the Telecommunications Act, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, expansion of the private prison-industrial complex and war on drugs, training of civilian police in military tactics, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. (The last two set the stage for the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and 2008 economic meltdown.)
A pattern emerges: Democrats enact Republican policies that Republicans can't enact by themselves. This doesn't mean there's no difference between the two, but it demonstrates that the parties are in a symbiotic dance that's drifting steadily to the right, with the Dems a few steps behind the Repubs. Sometimes they simply flip-flop, as in the case of the mandate, but the bipartisan game keeps profit-driven health insurance — too expensive, low-quality, and inaccessible for millions of Americans — firmly in place.
Thus Democrats in Congress fell into line behind the ACA, which offers some limited positive reforms but maintains the insurance industry's bureaucratic control over medical care, imposing modest regulations that are offset by the individual mandate's profit pipeline. The ACA isn't a government takeover of health care, it's a financial-sector takeover of government.
Single-Payer doesn't sustain the private insurance industry, so Dems declared it "off the table." It doesn't have to stay off the table. The current mood of consternation and frustration with the rollout gives us a perfect opportunity to campaign vigorously for Single-Payer as the solution to Obamacare.
]]>It's needlessly complex. It preserves medical treatment as a commodity rather than a right: low-cost policies will provide low-quality insurance. It imposes a direct public subsidy to feed the insurance industry, which helped write the legislation. It isn't universal.
Millions of people who lacked it will now have health insurance, but the coverage they get won't approach the level of health-care access guaranteed to every citizen in every other democratic nation.
Obamacare is a Republican idea. It's based on the individual mandate, an idea introduced by the conservative pro-business Heritage Foundation, promoted by Republican leaders, and enacted in Massachusetts by Gov. Romney. Republicans only began to detest it circa 2009 when President Obama and Democrats made it part of Obamacare.
Conversely, progressives only began to support it when the ACA was introduced. Barack Obama opposed it during his first presidential campaign but changed his mind in 2009.
Is it obnoxious to suggest that the dispute over Obamacare was always more about partisan loyalties than substance?
The shutdown will probably end when establishment Republicans convince Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his fellow Tea Partiers that they've had their fun and now it's time to let adults run the show again. The main GOP objection to Obamacare is the "Obama" part. The legislation's real defects aren't important to the GOP.
GOP Agenda and Obamacare
Republicans are expert at aggravating crises and using instability to ram through their agenda: destroying social programs, privatizing resources and services, deregulating big business, recreating the dismal economic conditions of the Robber Baron Era. (Naomi Klein described this in her book Shock Doctrine.)
Republicans can usually count on Democratic presidents and congressional leaders (who are subject to the same lobby and campaign-contribution influences as the GOP) to capitulate or compromise, sometimes without a fight, as President Obama did during the summer 2011 budget talks that resulted in sequestration.
They often rely on Dems to pursue GOP agenda without GOP help. President Obama's secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, proposed Social Security reductions, and debt-expanding military actions would have been recognized as Republican ten years ago — as would the ACA.
The ACA became a capitulation from the moment Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, declared single-payer national health care "off the table" during health-care reform panels in 2009. Single-payer advocates were barred from the panels, while insurance and other health-care industry representatives were invited to make sure their own interests were protected in the new legislation. Even the public option was dropped.
The capitulation has serious consequences, a few of which I mentioned above. One consequence was reported in the New York Times on October 2: "A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help…. Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help."
By sacrificing universal health care, the new law accommodated Republican disregard for the poor in the 26 states that have rejected Medicaid expansion. The ACA isn't a victory for the millions, maybe tens of millions of Americans for whom insurance and medical costs will remain beyond reach or require a hefty percentage of their income. Or for those who will still face financial ruin over a medical emergency. (For a more detailed critique, see Scott Tucker's interview with Dr. Don McCanne of Physicians for a National Health Program.)
These consequences won't be disturbed when the shutdown ends and immediate funding for the ACA prevails. The ACA was designed to be partial solution to the crisis of skyrocketing medical costs that bankrupt working Americans, even those with insurance, and the lack of insurance for millions more.
Useful Idiots
The context of the government shutdown is a dispute within the GOP between traditional types and "kill the government" fundamentalists associated with the Tea Party.
Are we witnessing an implosion of the GOP? We can only hope so, but it's more likely we'll see a return to bipartisan business as usual: two factions of a corporate-money party arguing over the best way to satisfy the country's One-Percenters. (See "The Shutdown Game" by Glen Ford in Black Agenda Report, Oct. 2.)
The One Percent aren't really interested in shrinking government. They prefer laws and government that more efficiently and generously serve their interests. They want Washington to remove barriers to markets, profits, and consolidation into monopolies and cartels, even when it means destroying the middle class and plunging working Americans into helplessness.
Plutocracy's sole interests are money and power. Ideologies and economic theories are for little people, endowed academic seats, bow-tie wearing newspaper columnists, and other suckers.
To the plutocrat, the Tea Party libertarian is a useful idiot. The plutocrat is grateful that the libertarian supports Walmart as a beacon of free-market competition and prosperity, while Walmart crushes small-business competitors and hires employees at wages that force them to rely on social services.
The plutocrat thanks the libertarian for demanding deregulation of Wall Street derivatives in the name of free movement of capital, while ordering pet politicians to insure derivatives trading with taxpayers' money against multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar losses.
Plutocrats (with some exceptions, like the Koch brothers) transcend party and can live with any law or policy that allows them to boost the bottom line. The health-care debate between Dems and Repubs was rigged from the beginning by the One Percent, which made sure that insurance companies would continue to make a killing whether the ACA was passed or defeated.
What About Medicare For All?
Let's imagine another scenario. A bloc of Democratic Congress members is willing to shut down government rather than vote yea on a budget with funding for another war like the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Good or bad?
What if several Congress members had risked a shutdown in 2009 over the declaration that Medicare For All was "off the table" and that pro-single-payer physicians and consumer advocates would be banned from the health-care reform panels?
These are fantasies. Anti-war and progressive Democrats in Congress are too timid to consider such actions.
In contrast, Tea Partiers in Congress, fueled by the generosity of billionaire plutocrats (http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19199-there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-tea-party-there-is-only-a-collection-of-billionaires), have no reservations about how they accomplish their goals.
The only solution for America's dismal health-care delivery system is Medicare For All — a single-payer plan that guarantees universal care. We'll only win Medicare For All with a movement that goes beyond polite lobbying, with street protest as vigorous as Occupy Wall Street and a concerted effort to replace politicians in office.
The latter requires a voter rebellion and campaigns that are independent of the two corporate-money parties.
It means resisting the predictable claim of Democratic leaders, after the shutdown ends, that the GOP's retreat on the ACA is a victory for everyone who opposes the Tea Party and we shouldn't complicate that victory by demanding Medicare For All.
If we lose sleep during the government shutdown, I hope it's because we're pondering ways to surpass the Tea Party in asserting our own political power.
Photo by eliassss under Creative Commons license
]]>Those of us who participated in the #ForwardOnClimate Rally against the tar-sands pipelines in Washington, DC, on Feb. 17 witnessed the environmental movement at its best and worst.
It was at it best because tens of thousands turned out in freezing weather to demand that President Obama kill the proposal for the Keystone XL and Enbridge pipelines that, if approved, will route highly polluting crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through the US. The PR justification is that the oil will help meet domestic energy needs, but it's evident, given the pipelines' destination (Gulf and Maine coasts), that the oil is meant for export to enrich the fossil-fuel cartel. The State Department's environmental review of the pipeline is being handled by the same experts who were earlier hired as consultants by TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline.
The movement was at it's worst because speaker after speaker at the rally confirmed his and her allegiance to President Obama, to cheers from the crowd.
The message that the President and Democratic leaders heard on Feb. 17 was "We hope you'll say no to the pipelines, but if you don't we still support you." Which tells them that they risk nothing by greenlighting the pipeline.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and perhaps the most prominent writer on the global climate threat, agrees with a Time Magazine soundbyte that the pipeline question might be the "Selma and Stonewall" of the movement to curb climate change and writes of his frustration with the Democratic Party in his essay "Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the 'Stonewall' of the Climate Movement?" (TomDispatch, April 7, 2013)
President Obama has made it clear, despite assurances to the contrary, that global climate disruption is a backburner issue. He identifies "energy independence" as a top goal and promises to tap all available domestic (or at least North American) sources, which is why offshore drilling in US coastal waters, hydrofracking, and mountaintop detonation mining continue despite the damage they cause.
The President has also insisted on deletion of the 2C goal for keeping the world's average temperature from rising more than two degrees Centigrade from international climate-change negotiations and has secretly negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade pact designed to serve corporate lobbies by overrriding environmental and labor protections. The climate crisis (like the TransPacific Partnership) was never mentioned during the Obama-Romney debates during the 2012 presidential race. It's no secret that Dems covet those generous Big Oil campaign checks.
The Democratic Party will not provide leadership against climate disruption. Democrats are continuing to slide to the right on most issues, tailoring their positions to satisfy corporate lobbies and donors. The same tendency explains the Obama Administration's plans to cut Social Security and Medicare, failure to prosecute too-big-to-fail banks for their criminal recklessness, and the individual mandate on which Obamacare is based — a Republican scheme introduced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation.
Mr. McKibben wants to believe that "taken as a whole, [Democrats are] better than the Republicans," as if being not quite as awful as Mitt Romney or John Boehner is a virtue.
"Republicans are worse." That's the mantra of progressive and pro-environmental Dems while their party marches the US into the climate abyss a few steps behind the GOP. Republican climate-change denial and contempt for science enable Democratic politicians to claim they're taking the lead on the crisis. In multi-party countries, such leadership would be recognized as an impediment to action just a few degrees removed from denial.
Progressives have fantasized for decades that they'll pull the Democratic Party to the left some day. Instead, the Democratic Party has pulled progressives to the right. Barack Obama's 2008 victory ended the antiwar movement, as anti-Bush peace activists acquiesced to an Obama foreign policy that incorporated the belligerent neocon postures of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Progressives cheered a Supreme Court decision upholding the individual mandate, which blesses the health insurance industry with a direct public subsidy.
Where are the massive public demonstrations against proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts, civilian-slaughtering drone warfare, erosion of civil liberties, prosecution of whistleblowers, Guantánamo, record-high incarceration rates in the prison-industrial complex, the TransPacific Partnership, privatization of the TVA, the corporate takeover of public education, continuing multi-billion-dollar taxpayer subsidies to Wall Street banks… all of which might be happening right now if a Republican were in the White House?
By refusing to consider an alternative to the corporate-money two-party choice, progressives have participated in the consolidation of capitalist oligarchy.
The Green Imperative
The idea of a third-party alternative makes Bill McKibben fidget. He writes:
So what to do? The narrow window of opportunity that physics provides us makes me doubt that a third party will offer a fast enough answer to come to terms with our changing planet. The Green Party certainly offered the soundest platform in our last elections, and in Germany and Australia the Greens have been decisive in nudging coalition governments towards carbon commitments. But those are parliamentary systems. Here, so far, national third parties have been more likely to serve as spoilers than as wedges (though it's been an enlightening pleasure to engage with New York's Working Families Party, or the Progressives in Vermont).
(Confidential to Bill McKibben: The Working Families Party mostly endorses Democrats and gives them its ballot line, as allowed under New York's fusion laws.)
Mr. McKibben believes we don't have time to grow a third party that takes the climate threat seriously. In reality, we don't have time not to.
It's not realistic to expect adequate action against climate disruption under the current two-party status quo.
Climate change is this century's abolition crisis. Slavery couldn't be abolished as long as two parties, Whigs and Democrats, held exclusive power. Just as the Republican Party of Lincoln was an imperative for the mid 1800s, the time is ripe at the beginning of the 21st century for a party that refuses corporate money, challenges corporate power, and dedicates itself to the health of the planet and the well-being, rights, and freedoms of "We the People." The Green Party fills that description.
Can we count on lobbying and street activism to sway Democrats in the right direction? No. The corporate lobbies can always outspend the rest of us in campaign contributions.
Rallies and demonstrations are necessary to express our sentiments publicly, but street activism is difficult to sustain.
The anti-globalization protests that began in Seattle in 1999 lasted a few years and fizzled. The antiwar movement ended with Mr. Obama's inauguration, thanks to the belief by people who didn't bother to read his platform that he'd be our Peace President. The movement ignited by Occupy Wall Street lost steam rapidly after the encampments were cleared, although many Occupiers have continued to advocate on behalf of homeowners facing foreclosure, assist people who lost homes because of Hurricane Sandy, and do other indispensable work.
These movements clarified the issues that they tackled, helping the public understand the damage caused by international trade cabals, military aggression, and deregulation of the financial sector. But they had very little effect on policy and legislation, because such movements too often translate into votes for the very Dems responsible for what the movements are protesting against. The result of this paradox is that the Democratic Party has most unions, liberal advocacy and human rights organizations, environmental groups like the Sierra Club, and non-independent leftist parties like the Working Families Party in its pocket.
The Green Party, in contrast, represents the goals of these movements in a permanent national party that seeks to replace pro-globalization, pro-war, and pro-deregulation officials who hold office. The party has continued to grow incrementally, facing the usual ups and downs that come with national and local organizing.
The Green New Deal, introduced by New York gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins in 2010 and promoted by 2012 Green presidential nominee Jill Stein, encapsulates the Green Party's platform and offers a program for boosting employment and rebuilding the nation's economy by addressing the climate crisis head-on. Millions of new jobs can be created through public-works projects and investment in new technologies, conservation, retrofitting communities, and expanding public transportation, all of which would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Green New Deal includes Medicare For All and would strengthen Social Security.
The models for the Green New Deal are FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and other programs for public employment that put 15 million unemployed people to work during the Great Depression building public infrastructure, restoring soils and forests, and providing services like adult literacy education and cultural projects, including murals, music, theater, and historical documentation.
Greens insist that cutting at least $300 billion per year from military spending would free up funds to reinvest in such jobs and launch a rapid transition to carbon-free energy. They blame the deficit on reckless imperial ventures around the world, costly and unnecessary defense contracts, and tax cuts for the rich.
None of the Green New Deal proposals are possible under the wartime economy and warhawk military policies maintained by Democrats and Republicans, or under the bipartisan chopping-block mentality that's meant to solve the budget deficit but will likely slow the economy even further. The Green New Deal doesn't conform with the conventional wisdom, parroted by politicians and pundits, that shrinking government is the panacea. In reality, dismantling the environmental and social safety net doesn't shrink government so much as enlarge the power of corporate bureaucracies.
The Green New Deal is precisely the kind of political program that Bill McKibben and other Americans concerned about climate change should be talking about. But — as with Medicare For All during the health care reform debate of 2009 — the Democratic and Republican party leadership don't want ideas like the Green New Deal on the table. They want it banished from public debate.
Spoiler Panic
Mr. McKibben invokes the canard that alternative parties "spoil" elections. The spoiler accusation has been used over and over as propaganda to discredit the Green Party and other alternative parties. Exhibit A is the 2000 election, in which Ralph Nader's Green campaign allegedly prevented Al Gore from winning.
The accusation falls apart if you look at what really happened in 2000: State Republican officials worked with a firm called ChoicePoint to invalidate the voting rights of thousands of Floridians (most of them black), far more than the few hundred votes for Mr. Nader that allegedly gave George W. Bush his Florida victory. Mr. Gore and Democratic leaders called for a recount in only three counties and discouraged people from coming to Florida to help investigate election irregularities. A politically biased Supreme Court resolved the standoff by handing the White House to Mr. Bush. Not one Democratic Senator stood up to challenge Mr. Bush's "victory" when the results were confirmed by Congress in January 2001.
Furthermore, the number of Democratic voters who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader.
In order to blame Mr. Nader and the Green Party, you have to believe that it's excusable for a major party to obstruct voters and steal elections, but it's not okay for a smaller party to participate fair and square.
It's like watching a gang of thugs torch your restaurant, then blaming a pretzel stand down the block for taking away your business.
Would Mr. Gore have won if Mr. Nader hadn't entered the race and "siphoned" away votes? It's impossible to say, because participation by alternative parties can change the entire dynamic of an election. (The "siphoning" claim assumes that the Democratic Party has a prior purchase on people's votes and that a voter's decision to vote for another party's candidate represents a case of theft by the other party.)
Bill McKibben wishes for "some way to make a third party truly viable." Those honestly concerned about the spoiler factor should demand reforms like Instant Runoff Voting and Proportional Representation to replace our anti-democratic winner-take-all at-large voting system. They should support public financing for campaigns to end the corruption of elections thanks to the financial clout of powerful corporations and individuals. Greens have sought such reforms for years, but few Dems have shown interest.
Spoiler Panic is a ruse to make people believe that alternatives like the Green Party aren't legitimate. It's meant to fool people into believing that a two-party limit is natural and inevitable and must never be challenged.
There's nothing natural or inevitable about two parties. Patently unfair ballot access rules have been enacted by Democratic and Republican officials in many states to privilege their own candidates and obstruct others. They should be repealed.
Perpetual two-party rule ensures that Democratic politicians can always take progressive and pro-environmental votes for granted.
In this century of global climate disruption, ending two-party rule is an imperative — an emergency, according to Bill McKibben's admonitions about the dwindling time we have left for effective action.
Harper's editor Thomas Frank, in a November 2012 interview in Salon.com, asserts that President Obama has rendered the left impotent and marginalized. He mentions the third-party spoiler factor, but adds that "third-party movements once were not futile in this country. A hundred years ago, there was a sort of vibrant tradition of third-party movements… [Y]ou could bring back a really lively third-party tradition, but it would take the two parties agreeing to end their monopoly. You know what would be awesome? A social movement that called for that. I don't know what you would call it; not representative democracy in the European sense, but something other than the two-party monopoly."
What will it take for Bill McKibben and Thomas Frank to recognize Green Party as an engine for the end of two-party rule and an alternative to more oligarchy, war, erosion of civil liberties and workers' protections, deepening student debt, shredding of the safety net, and disregard for climate change?
What will it take to spark the anti-two-party movement that Mr. Frank hopes for? What will it take for a voters' revolt?
What will Bill McKibben and others who participated in the Feb. 17 rally do if Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline? If it's a watershed like Selma and Stonewall, will a new direction be taken or will they remain in the Democratic pocket? What will they do even if he disapproves the pipeline, in light of other environmental policies and the likelihood of an alternative plan for the pipeline?
Climate change is not just a scientific crisis, it's a political dilemma that threatens to plunge the world into conflict, chaos, and suffering, as Mr. McKibben warns in his TomDispatch essay. We should be disturbed that the corporate sector is concentrating its power, pressing for privatization of resources and deregulation, as the effects of climate change mount. Democratic and Republican party leaders, including President Obama, are cooperating. It's time to change the political landscape.
Photo by Glyn Lowe Photoworks released under a Creative Commons license.
]]>Three debates are planned, the first on October 3. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which controls the debates, is determined that only Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will be allowed in front of the microphones.
That's because the CPD is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties and the two parties' corporate funders. The CPD took over the debates to limit the stage to their own candidates and to make sure that no challenging questions get asked.
The League of Women Voters, which sponsored the debates before the CPD took over, has called this situation "a fraud on the American voter."
But we don't have to remain silent about this affront to democracy and fair elections.
• Challenge the Commission on Presidential Debates!
Visit the 'Occupy the CPD!' web site and sign on to the statement. Tell the CPD that the debates must include every candidate who is on enough ballots to win the White House and who has demonstrated a minimal level of support — either 1% of the vote in a credible national poll or qualification for federal matching funds or both. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson meet all of these criteria.
• Challenge the Media!
Tell TV and radio stations that Americans voters are not stupid, that our heads won't explode if we see more than two candidates or if we hear more than two sides (or even just one side, sometimes) on important issues.
Tell them that media organizations don't have to play by the CPD's rules, that they can schedule their own debates that include the Green and Libertarian candidates. They can also schedule off-site follow-up debates and interviews with Stein and Johnson after the CPD debates.
Tell them that news broadcasts and talk shows should invite alternative party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson who express ideas that are outside of the narrow Democratic-Republican spectrum.
• Challenge Progressive Organizations and Web Sites!
Any progressive, ecological, or antiwar web site, periodical, radio station, or organization or labor union that doesn't demand a real progressive voice — Jill Stein — in the presidential debates is engaging in self-censorship.
Too many of these groups are so married to the Democratic Party that they're willing to silence their own ideals by pretending that only Obama speaks for them.
Don't let them get away with this hypocrisy. Give them a piece of your mind, by writing letters and comments in response to their articles. Give them another piece of your mind when they come around asking for contributions.
• Challenge the Polls!
The CPD has used results from public opinion polls that only ask questions about Democratic and Republican candidates and exclude other parties to justify its arbitrary debate policies. Such polls are misleading.
• Challenge Yourself!
Stop believing the media hype and lies that we only have two choices on Election Day.
Stop believing nasty and dishonest political ads on TV and the radio, a result of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision (2010) that allows wealthy and powerful corporations to advertise without limit for their favored candidates.
Stop believing that American politics is limited to two parties, both of which accept millions in corporate contributions.
Stop believing that we can fix the economy, that we can fight global warming, that we can stop invading other countries by voting for either a pro-Wall Street pro-war Democrat or a pro-war pro-Wall Street Republican.
Start believing that you have the power to change the direction of our country!
"Obama has betrayed our hopes for change, but I'm worried that Romney might win." Many of us fear a Republican victory, but it's time to be afraid of the Democrats too.
Both parties keep moving further to the right. The result is more war, more redistribution of wealth from working people to the One Percent, more erosion of the Constitution, more disregard of global warming and other threats to our planet. This describes Obama as well as Romney.
We can keep rubberstamping the two-party status quo for the rest of history. Or we can build a strong pro-peace pro-environment party that supports working Americans and accepts no corporate money.
We can start by demanding a place in the debates for Green presidential nominee Jill Stein. We can be true to our democratic principles by demanding inclusion of all qualified presidential candidates, like Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, in the debates.
Democracy and fair elections mean the right to know which candidates best represent our ideals and interests — and the right to vote without being told we only have two choices.
• Challenge Your Family, Friends, and Neighbors!
Please forward this message widely so that we can build a movement for opening the debates that the CPD and the media can't ignore!
More information:
]]>"Ryan's a corporatist. Ryan is anything but a conservative. ['Corporatist'] is my word for what they're calling crony capitalists — they expand government in the service of corporate interests. It's the merger of big business with big government where the big government is in the service of big capitalism." — Ralph Nader
"In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy." — Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies
No election year is complete without a parade of politicians telling us that the free market is the panacea for the country's economic woes.
Republicans are more blatant in their promotion of market solutions. Mitt Romney, in his nomination acceptance speech, declared that the White House should be inhabited by a business-oriented president, i.e., one who understands and bows to the market. Democratic Party leaders are more nuanced in their language, until you peel away the rhetoric and consider their actual policies and actions.
It's time we took a look at what Gov. Romney, his fellow Republicans, and their Democratic opponents mean when they talk about the market.
If we examine the legislation that Congress and various presidents have promoted and passed, it's clear that "free market" for politicians of both parties is code for something quite different from what most people believe it means.
For most Americans, the model for market competition is a group of similar businesses, perhaps located on Main Street, that compete for customers. Two shoe stores on the north and south ends of town both want customers, so they compete by adjusting their prices, offering more and better merchandise, and advertising. Why should government interfere, when both shoe shops, the employees they hire, and customers' feet benefit from such competition?
At the level of major corporations — multinational companies, Wall Street, Big Oil, agribusiness, defense contractors, and various conglomerates — the Main Street model is a propaganda tool.
The deregulation that Republicans and Democrats have enacted has little to do with popular conceptions of the free market. On the contrary, deregulation enables corporations to buy up their competition, especially smaller companies. The result of leveraged buyouts and other forms of acquisition is that businesses combine to form monopolies and virtual monopolies, with economic (and political) power concentrated in fewer and fewer boardrooms.
Monopolies are the enemy of competition. When a single company or a tiny number of companies (ExxonMobil and Chevron, for example) possess so much horizontal and vertical control over markets, no real competition takes place.
This is hardly a secret, but politicians of both parties still pretend that such concentration benefits everyone, despite so much counter-evidence. A good example is Comcast's exclusive ownership of cable TV rights in Pittsburgh and other communities, allowing it to get away with high prices and poor customer service. Another example is the 1996 Telecommunications Act, signed by President Clinton, which deregulated ownership of media and allowed a small number of large media firms to buy up several TV, radio, and newspaper companies in single cities, giving them greater control over what news we're allowed to see, hear, or read.
The proliferation of Walmarts in recent decades is classic faux free market: supported by local Democratic and Republican elected officials with tax breaks, subsidies, and taxpayer-funded changes in infrastructure, Walmart undercuts small local businesses with dirt-cheap prices, draining the area economy and turning Main Street into a ghost town, while paying employees sub-liveable wages with no benefits.
What Mitt Romney means by "free market" is unrestrained power for corporate bureaucracies. He has a special affinity for this idea, as co-founder of Bain Capital, a private equity and public market investment firm.
We shouldn't confuse companies like Bain Capital with Main Street businesses like the shoe-store example above. For companies like Bain and execs like Mr. Romney, small businesses exist to become fodder for larger companies. The damaging effect of this kind of predatory capitalism on jobs and local economies in the US has been reported by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone and other journalists.
Sam Smith, in the August 25 edition of Undernews, wrote "Personal to campaign media: Please stop referring to Mitt Romney as a businessman. He's not; he's an investment banker who makes money off of businessmen and through buying and selling their businesses. As any business owner can tell you; this is miles from the same thing."
The "Market" Agenda
Bain Capital, like many financial sector firms, is less a business in the usual sense and more the blunt expression of an idea — the free movement of capital, without regard for its effect on civil society or the environment. Both Republican and Democratic parties serve the doctrine of unrestrained corporate power and it's easy to see why. Browse the web site of the Center for Responsive Politics for a glimpse at the hundreds of thousands of dollars that top corporations contribute to politicians of both parties to maintain their influence.
The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision (2010) affirmed the legal status of corporations as "persons" under the 14th Amendment and allowed them to advertise without restriction for favored candidates, granting corporate elites even greater leverage over major-party politicians. As a result, the differences between the two parties are mostly factional: within a narrow and sometimes nonexistent range of disagreement, they compete over the best way to serve their top benefactors. (See "Closer Than You Think: Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On" by Bruce A. Dixon in Black Agenda Report.)
They render this service with various kinds of legislation and public policy:
• Massive taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax breaks: If we judge by the money they make from heavily subsized energy firms, the Koch brothers are welfare queens par excellence. Citizens for Tax Justice has published lists of major corporations, like Verizon, General Electric, and Pacific Gas & Electric, that pay zero or near-zero taxes despite billions in profits.
• Deregulation: The classic example is President Reagan's loosening of laws governing the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, which led to a crisis that vaporized the life savings of hundreds of thousands of Americans. President Clinton's signature on the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act and repeal of Glass-Steagall eliminated rules that would have prevented the 2008 meltdown, a fact missing from the visionary speech he delivered at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
• Bailouts: Americans are still outraged at the unconditional multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street in 2008, which was supported by both John McCain and Barack Obama. Some of the bailed out firms used the money to buy up smaller companies, further consolidating themselves as "too big to fail." President Obama went on to appoint Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economic advisor Larry Summers, and Chief of Staff Mike Daley — Wall Street operatives and advocates of the policies that triggered the crisis.
• Impunity for corporate crimes: At least the savings and loan execs whose actions caused the crisis in 1980s were investigated and brought to trial. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney intends to hold the Wall Street fraudsters behind the Subprime Mortgage Crisis responsible and ensuing meltdown accountable, nor will they allow anything more than token aid for homeowners who face foreclosures.
• Privatization of public services and resources (often for free, at fire-sale prices, or with no-bid contracts): When Atlanta and Detroit handed their water utilities over to private contractors, the results included brown water and higher bills for consumers. Wall Street firms and their pet politicians, including top members of President Obama's Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility ("Catfood Commission"), seek reductions in Social Security that will force working Americans to invest their retirement savings in the high-risk Wall Street casino. Both Romney and Obama favor cuts in Social Security and Medicare. The privatization of prisons has created a financial incentive to lock up more Americans, to the point where the US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world, with black, brown, and poor communities devastated by the numbers of young people behind bars for nonviolent offenses.
• International trade cabals that favor corporate demands over labor, human rights, and environmental protections and democratic sovereignty: NAFTA (signed by President Clinton after promising to oppose it during his 1992 campaign) is the most famous example. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated in secret and supported by both Romney and Obama, is the most recent.
• Overreaching intellectual property rights that privilege corporations: Think of the war between Monsanto and small farmers over genetically modified seeds and actions by the recording industry to exploit artists and censor the Internet by legal intimidation.
• Offshore accounts that allow wealthy corporations and individuals to escape paying US taxes, while Washington looks the other way.
Plutonomy versus Economic Democracy
There are some names for the ideology that says the chief purpose of government is to serve the demands of top corporations and help them consolidate power. Republicans call it promoting the free market and "ending big government."
Democrats use equally obfuscating language ("win-win situation," "public-private partnership") and try to dress up their actions as compromise or even progressive reform. For phony progressivism, there's no better example than the individual mandate imposed by the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), an idea that was introduced by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, advocated by GOP leaders as a national plan in the 1990s, and enacted by Gov. Romney in Massachusetts.
The ACA (also known as Obamacare, more properly ObamaRomneycare) was crafted by Democrats with the participation of health insurance company reps. Despite the factional debate over health care reform, Obama and Romney and their fellow party leaders agree on the premise that the private insurance bureaucracy must maintain its control over our health care, without disturbing the skyrocketing medical costs that feed their bottom lines.
Occupy Wall Street protesters understand the radical, anti-democratic ideology of government-corporate convergence. Members of the movement who haven't allowed the Occupy grievances to be shoehorned into "Reelect Obama" recognize that the solution lies outside the two-party election paradigm.
We should discard the "free market" claptrap and call it what it really is: corporatism, plutocracy, oligarchy, redistribution of wealth from bottom to top, rule by the One Percent, socialism for the rich, turbo-capitalism, Robber Baron Era redux, neo-feudalism. My favorite term is plutonomy, a word introduced in an infamous leaked Citibank memo on "global equity strategy" that fretted over "society demanding a more equitable share of wealth."
We must develop a new and independent kind of politics to take America in a different direction. The Occupy Movement, joined by unions and community organizations, is doing so in the streets. The Green Party, with 2012 presidential nominee Jill Stein and running mate Cheri Honkala, has made inroads at the ballot box. Progressive Democrats are fighting the good fight in a party that may have drifted beyond rehabilitation.
There are plenty of alternatives to the current corporate-capitalism model: aid and redesign of municipal infrastructure to assist small businesses instead of Walmarts; support for family farms instead of Monsanto; worker-owned and community-owned companies and cooperatives; break-up of too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoths into smaller regionally based firms (which the federal government had every right to undertake, since the 2008 bailout was in essence a government buyout); reversal of privatization of public properties and services like Social Security and public education; punishment for corporate criminals; renegotiation of trade pacts to ensure that local economies, the rights of working people, and the environment will be protected.
One of the best alternatives is Medicare For All. Politicians like to denounce Medicare For All as socialism. If fact, there's more 'free market' with Medicare For All than under our current insurance system (or under ObamaRomneycare), since Medicare For All allows us to choose the physicians and hospitals that serve us, motivating them to compete for our visits — unlike private insurance and HMO policies, which tell us which physician or hospital to go to.
The first step towards winning real economic security for our country will take place when Americans figure out that "market-based solutions" are too often a bipartisan scam that masks a dangerous ideology. The constant repetition of the free-market ideal by politicians and talking heads in the media doesn't make it any less fraudulent or extremist.
]]>For many of those who intend to vote, it means casting a ballot for Democratic candidates, including President Obama. For those who don't plan to vote at all, the outcome of elections is irrelevant, because nothing will change under the current political system. Are these the only two choices?
The US is in a crisis, a political holding pattern in which Democratic presidents and party leaders keep adopting more and more Republican agenda while Republican politicians sink deeper into irrationality and borderline fascism.
The crisis won't be solved by intoning "We must vote to reelect Obama and other Dems because Republicans will be worse" or by denial that voting can have any effect on the future.
Are we locked into a rightward-sliding two-party paradigm for the rest of history? What if millions of voters began to think outside of the two parties?
We'll never interrupt the bipartisan assault on protections for working people and the environment until we change the political landscape. Wall Street banksters have nothing to worry about as long as Ds and Rs keep getting voted into office. The status quo will be validated in 2012, as it is in every election cycle, in three ways:
(1) Non-voting and anti-voting: Nonvoters have no effect on the political landscape. Occupy activists and others who have ruled out voting as a way to effect change ensure that they'll have no collective influence on who gets elected or the policies of the candidates who get elected.
(2) Zombie voting: mindless votes for incumbents and party lines, regardless of a candidate's platform, background, and qualifications. For such voters, Election Day is an empty but necessary ritual undeserving of critical thought.
(3) The mistaken belief among liberals, progressives, antiwar voters, and others that the Democratic Party offers change, that things will get better if we just keep voting to elect Democrats, or that we have to keep voting for Dems because they're not as awful as the GOP.
By justifying votes for a party that long ago abandoned its "party of the people" principles, progressive, antiwar, environmentally-minded, and pro-labor voters have participated in their own political demise. We are long past the point at which lesser-of-two-evils voting has turned into self-defeat.
The position of progressives in the Democratic Party was clarified recently when President Obama scolded the Congressional Black Caucus for daring to complain about the White House's numerous capitulations to the GOP. Rahm Emanuel, when he was White House Chief of Staff, called progressive critics "retards."
The Democratic Party expects progressives to continue voting for a party hostile to their ideals on the assumption that they have no one else to vote for and that a Republican victory would be far worse. When genuine progressives, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich, run for the Democratic nomination, their loss is assured and their campaigns ultimately serve to herd supporters into voting for a nominee that rejects nearly everything they stand for.
As Les Leopold argues ("Don't 'Occupy the Democratic Party' — Four Lessons From the Populist Movement," AlterNet, Dec. 13), there is no hope for a rehabilitation of the Democratic Party. If anything, the Democratic Party is likely to jump even further to the right in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate advertising for favored candidates, increasing the influence of business elites over both major parties.
Republicans are already trying to discredit the Occupy movement. We can predict that pro-GOP ads will slander the Occupy movement, and that, based on their usual tendency to retreat when challenged by the GOP, Obama and Dem leaders will dissociate themselves from the protesters and their demands. (See this.) If the 2012 presidential race is limited to D vs. R, the grievances and demands of the Occupiers will be banished to the margins by late spring 2012.
Beyond Protest
Electoral activism and street activism both have their limits and both are necessary. (Other strategies, like targeted boycotts, are effective too. Why rule out any nonviolent strategy?)
Street protest can be successful at capturing public attention, as demonstrations have proved throughout history. But it can be easy to mistake the vigor of protest movements, numbers of participants, and public sympathy with real success in changing the world.
The protests against the Iraq War during the last decade collapsed after Barack Obama's inauguration, because so many Democrats, believing they had just elected a progressive antiwar president, decided that protest was no longer necessary — just when we needed it most.
What will happen in 2012 when pro-Dem unions and liberal groups and other Obama supporters are forced to decide whether to continue participating in Occupy protests against the Administration's policies or help get President Obama reelected? Organizations like MoveOn.org and Van Jones' American Dream are already trying to coopt the Occupy movement and spin it into "Reelect Obama." These groups will be reluctant to join the angry demonstrations that many of us hope to see outside the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina (as well as the Republican Convention, of course).
Participants in protest movements often espouse a variety of sometimes inconsistent ideals and tend to offer very general complaints and ideas for change. Demanding economic justice or an end to a war isn't a program for systematic change. The Vietnam War protests focused public opposition to the war and may have hastened the pullout of US troops. In the end, however, the protests didn't overturn the military-industrial complex or imperial culture of Washington, DC. Subsequent administrations, beginning with Jimmy Carter, maintained the pattern of US intervention in countries around the world.
In some cases, those in power simply ignore protest. The mass rallies throughout the US against President George W. Bush's order to invade Iraq in 2003 had no effect at all.
The Occupy movement must continue. We should look forward to its survival through the winter and renewed vitality when spring 2012 rolls around. But we must also find ways to make systematic changes and rebuild the political culture of the US so that wars of aggression, capitalist depredation, ecological irresponsibility (exhibited by the Obama Administration in early December during the UN meeting in Durban, South Africa, on climate change), assaults on the US Constitution, and other evils don't keep repeating every few years. In other words, we must replace people who are in power.
Vote For Yourself
The good news is that more and more Occupiers are showing interest in electoral action outside of the two Titanic parties. They've begun to embrace the vote as a strategy for challenging the corporate corruption and the erosion of democracy, in efforts like Occupy the Ballot.
Occupy Cincinnati demonstrators are already working to establish their own party. Carl Mayer, public defender and long-time supporter of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, recently spoke before Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and expressed "his hopes of the OWS movement's becoming a viable third party in the future."
On December 13, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson launched a presidential campaign, via his newly founded Justice Party.
Alternative parties have been responsible for introducing urgent changes, whether the parties themselves have succeeded (the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 1800s) or failed. The list of reforms introduced by third parties and initially rejected by the political establishment includes abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the eight-hour day and other workers' rights and protections, and civil rights for Blacks. If you're worried that the US is drifting into a new Robber Baron Era, remember that the Populist and Progressive parties helped end the last one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Who will represent the important ideas on the electoral stage in the 21st century?
The Green Party holds promise as an established national party, having laid a foundation for willing Occupy candidates to run for public office. In many states, Greens have accomplished the difficult task of achieving ballot status, overcoming prohibitive rules enacted by Democratic and Republican politicians to hinder alternative parties and candidates. Greens have spent more than two decades building party infrastructure and gaining campaign experience. The demands of Occupy protesters are clearly reflected in the Green Party's platform and refusal to accept corporate checks.
In New York, the Green Party achieved major-party status through Howie Hawkins' campaign for governor in 2010, fulfilling the state's stringent requirements and earning Greens their place on the 2012 ballot. New York Greens have been active in Occupy Wall Street since the protests began in September. In the 2011 general election, Cheri Honkala, a long-time housing activist and founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, ran for Sheriff of Philadelphia as a Green on an anti-eviction platform. Ms. Honkala spoke publicly at Occupy events about her pledge not to cooperate, if elected, with banks attempting to foreclose on Philadelphians' homes.
Speaking on the party's hope of emerging as a permanent independent political force in the 21st century, 2008 Green vice-presidential nominee Rosa Clemente said "The Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative." Some Greens have challenged Rocky Anderson to run for the Green nomination, noting that the Green Party already has ballot lines. (Greens will choose their nominee during the party's 2012 national convention in Baltimore, July 12 to 15.)
Whether Occupy activists decide to go Green or some other partisan route, they have the potential to lead a national voters' rebellion against the Titanic parties and trigger a sorely need seismic shift in US politics.
The day a few non-corporate-money Occupy candidates are elected to Congress is the day Democratic and Republican politicians are no longer each others' sole competition. The public debate on any given issue would open up to new ideas outside of the narrow D vs. R spectrum of policies and legislation approved by Wall Street, the oil companies, arms manufacturers, insurance companies, and other corporate interests.
There is no such thing as two-party democracy. Two-party elections are a single step removed from one-party states like the Soviet Union and China. At the heart of the voters' rebellion is the right to choose whichever candidates best represent one's own interests and ideals, without being told our choice is restricted to Big Mac vs. Whopper.
Refusing to vote and insisting on loyalty to Democrats will have the same effect — a future limited to the parties of war and Wall Street. Thanks to the momentum of the Occupy movement, 2012 gives us an opportunity to save the US from the demise of our republic, collapse of the middle class, and descent into terrain that would be familiar to Benito Mussolini in the 1920s.
Given the increasing entrenchment of corporate-money politics in the age of Citizens United and accelerated redistribution of wealth and power to the one percent, this opportunity might be our last.