Vote No on President

Matt Taibbi in the January 4, 2012 Anderson Valley Advertiser, a small Mendocino leftwing paper, writes the following:

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman, Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, as his new chief of staff.

What indeed is left to say? Excuses flood the arena—excuses from Obama himself and his staff, berating his supporters. Meanwhile, his loyal base offers speculation that, as the nation’s first black president, Obama has been hamstrung by the stereotype of angry black men, a stereotype his every word has been crafted to refute. Yet every parent knows it’s possible to say no without getting angry. It’s possible to have a backbone with appearing vindictive.

Meanwhile, we flock to our television sets on Sunday night to watch Downton Abbey. What explains the phenomenal success of this early twentieth century soap opera? Among the characters who populate the plot are several whose ethics are above reproach. They expose (unnecessarily at times) past bad behavior, even though to do so risks their position. They spurn advantages tied to moral lapses. The poorest among them either regard money as something to scheme to obtain (evil) or as not worth lowering themselves (good). One character seems to be transitioning from the evil side of the spectrum to the good. We have to wait and see how that plays out.

Dickens’ Manichean view of good and evil serves as the infrastructure for Downton Abbey—not that its characters have been taken from Dickens but that its condemnation of moral lapses and celebration of self-abnegation emulate that Victorian author’s novelistic philosophy.

In the 21^st century, we live, on the other hand, in a world where Supreme Court justices have no allegiance to Eisenhower’s advice to reject “even the appearance of impropriety.” Because of Citizens United, corporations now secretly flood their candidate of choice with enough cash to turn his head. And heads have turned, whether on the Court, in the Administration, or sitting in the hallowed halls of Congress—all playgrounds for the moneyed class. We are in an unprecedented period of obscene levels of campaign spending.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the source of only 51 percent of non-party outside spending was disclosed to the public in 2010.

 . . . . Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the Citizens United ruling, offering the main argument underlying the decision. "Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption [italics added]," he wrote.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/super-pacs-secret-money-campaign-finance_n_977699.html

Mindful of the “appearance of corruption,” justices merely dismiss it. Chief Justice Roberts assures the American people in emphatic language that the justices are ethical people.

[Chief Justice] Roberts rebuffed calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt the Code of Conduct for United States Judges -- which binds lower courts but not the high court -- and pushed back against partisan demands that Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan recuse themselves from what may be the term's most controversial conflict, the health care cases slated for oral argument in March.

"I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted," Roberts wrote. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/chief-justice-john-roberts-supreme-court-ethics_n_1184780.html

So our politicians are drowning in corporate funding and our justices are sunning themselves on Koch Brothers’ chaise lounges, sipping Koch Brothers’ liquor, eating Koch Brothers’ food, and sleeping in Koch Brothers’ beds. But they know best when it’s time to recuse themselves.

This is the landscape against which television viewers flock to watch Downton Abbey, a melodrama about ethics and lapses in ethics. Criminal behavior, apart from the behavior of our politicians and judges, has escalated. I believe it does so in response to two pressures: the downward spiral of the economy that moves the fantasy of “wealth management for the masses” into its proper spot, namely romance novels; and the sewage spilling from government and large corporations into public life, reminding us all that ethics are for the poor.

You can’t blame the poor if they reject that bit of propaganda in favor of low-level thievery. Trouble is, that’s the only thievery in this democracy that ever gets punished.

I say vote no on all of them, and be done with it. They may be our “democratically elected” leaders but they do not believe in democracy. If you ask them, “Which side are you on, boy?” they will never recuse themselves. They have shifted the appearance of wrongdoing to the eye of the beholder. That’s you. They wash their hands of your evil thoughts.

The Human Hovel Behind the Facade

Why are the Republican candidates for president dull, stupid, nuts, or all three? At one time in American history, candidates for president created some interest, if also some trepidation. Conventions at that time, for example, were not boring, because candidates vied for the nomination—they didn’t come in pre-anointed. Nowadays conventions, like everything else in politics, are nothing but a sleep aid. Only the most devout can sit through them.

History records a bizarre circumstance involving Catherine the Great of Russia. Because the sight of hovels might offend her royal eyes, members of her entourage ran ahead of her caravan, through the villages, installing facades in front of each crumbling hut. Catherine, apparently not particularly observant, seems not to have noticed the similarity of the houses she passed. We, as voters, often resemble Catherine in failing to notice the similarities of the facades worn by our aspiring office holders. Here there’s a bell and, over there, a whistle, but we have not seen any meaningful differences until recently.

True, Barack Obama wooed progressive voters with his call for “change.” The change his handlers seem to have had in mind involved intensifying Dubya’s stripping of constitutional rights. Far from repealing the extra-judicial powers Bush took unto his presidency, Obama has expanded those. Instead of closing the torture chamber, Gitmo, the Administration continues to house 171 men there, of which 89 have long been cleared, yet not released. Instead of keeping his promise to close Guantanamo, Obama has signed a bill broadening the powers of the military there.

(Aside: The youngest detainee was 13 years old, a child soldier who claimed he was tortured, a claim that invites belief in view of the adults released who have testified repeatedly to the same treatment: stress positions, extreme temperature exposure, induced sleeplessness, etc.)

But Obama never mentions Gitmo now that he is President Obama. Perhaps it will come back as a renewed promise as he intensifies his Candidate Obama presence.

But back to the Republican side of the race: Mitt has worked diligently on his mediocrity (the most interesting thing about him as a candidate being the majority of Americans think his first name is Mittens)—although he will have to, at least temporarily, jettison mediocrity and join the lunatic fringe to mollify the South Carolina Tea Party. They crave a crazy ignoramus president, a blowhard they would like to share a beer with. (Too bad, Michelle. You should’ve realized beer’s a man’s brew.) In terms of somnolence, Romney outpaces Rick Perry and Ron Paul, two candidates with a penchant for circumventing the advice of their handlers to shut up.

Before they had handlers, candidates for president spoke reasonably well. Think of Honest Abe scribbling on the back of that envelope, a piece of rhetoric that resounds poetically to this day. Barack Obama spoke well enough when he wrote his own speeches, although he was no Lincoln. But Obama spoke rarely—just often enough to seduce a lot of discouraged voters—and, as his campaign began to take on steam, the man Obama receded while the handlers and their candidate swelled into prominence. Eventually the speeches were all “blah blah blah,” with instructions to fill in the blahs with whatever you wanted to hear.

(Aside: If you haven’t watched Rick Perry say he didn’t want to make the lives of “blah people” better, check it out: http://www.blackyouthproject.com/2012/01/rick-santorum-blah-people/)

Handlers are the fruit of the poisonous PR tree, their key job being to put together words that appear to make sense but say nothing. Translated, all previous candidate speeches written by PR hacks would sound like this: “God, motherhood, and apple pie.” We have no idea who the man behind the handlers might be. He could be Hitler or Jesus Christ, but we’ll never know, because the handlers will follow him into office and cling to him like white on rice. Once successful in the election, the PR flaks have a dual role to play: keep the President well hidden behind the facade and ensure that the President defers to whatever the 1% wants.

So why are the Republicans such a group of losers, especially given the weakness of their Democratic opponent at the moment? Where are all the vanilla handlers making them sound plausible? Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian put it this way in December 2011, when the flakiest Repugs were dominating the polls:

By any normal standards, Obama should be extremely vulnerable. Not only is the economy in bad shape, he has proved to be a much more hesitant, less commanding White House presence than his supporters longed for. And yet, most surveys put him comfortably ahead of his would-be rivals. That's not a positive judgment on the president – whose approval rating stands at a meagre 44% – but an indictment of the dire quality of a Republican field almost comically packed with the scandal-plagued, gaffe-prone and downright flaky. And the finger of blame for this state of affairs points squarely at the studios of Fox News.

It's not just usual-suspect lefties and professional Murdoch-haters who say it, mischievously exaggerating the cable TV network's influence. Dick Morris, veteran political operative and Fox regular, noted the phenomenon himself the other day while sitting on the Fox sofa. "This is a phenomenon of this year's election," he said. "You don't win Iowa in Iowa. You win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News." In other words, it is Fox – with the largest cable news audience, representing a huge chunk of the Republican base – that is, in effect, picking the party's nominee to face Obama next November. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/13/fox-news-frighten-america-conservatives

Whenever Fox News intensified coverage of one of the idiot candidates (Fox’s slogan being “Anybody But Romney”), that candidate picked up in the polls. Of course, subsequently, each one of them shot him/herself in the foot, because they weren’t capable of not shooting themselves in the foot.

But conservative Americans only toy with installing a crazy in the White House. In general, they seem most content to install morons. In the end they pick the least visible candidate, the one who, while downing his beer, will keep his mouth shut and listen to them.

The Sun Also Sets

Conservatives are most assuredly not conservative. As the media increasingly clogs the conduit between language and meaning, right-wing revolutionaries are represented, and are permitted to represent themselves, with a word that used to signify "disposed to preserve existing conditions".

The disjunction between the word "conservative" and its referent also allows such individuals to claim a hankering for "small government," one that doesn't intrude on the individual.

We understand, if we've been paying attention, that they mean government that intrudes in every arena except the marketplace and the loving relationship between a man and his automatic assault weapons. These ersatz conservatives long to place cameras in your bedroom. They want to frisk your body before you enter any public space. They want to see your state-issued identification card proving your citizenship whenever and wherever they feel like demanding it. And they want the right to arrest you for anything from DWB (driving while black) to sitting on the sidewalk.

So let's tell it as it is. Those whom journalists misrepresent as conservatives, in fact, are right wing extremists. Dwight D. Eisenhower would have broken no bread with them. As that conservative president exited the White House, he warned against a burgeoning alliance between the military and multinational corporations, an alliance right wing wackos celebrate. What Eisenhower didn't foresee was Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.

I do not admire Eisenhower, nor do I respect conservatives. They are heartless, for the most part, which is why the PR hacks launched the original "compassionate conservative" canard, once more taking their unethical sledgehammers to the link between word and meaning. But one way to improve your appearance is to stand next to someone who looks terrible. So these days a real conservative would look fantastic in the field of Republican miscreants seeking the Oval Office.

Mitt Romney, generally regarded as the least squirrely of the bunch, is not conservative. Conservatives are not wet fingers raised to the prevailing winds. They have principles to which they adhere, even though those principles place them in a camp with such luminaries as Scrooge and Squeers of Dickens' hellish Do-The-Boys boarding school.

As the radical right slides down the steep precipice into a moral sewer, benefits to progressives subtly accrue. Conservatives sound almost reasonable, allowing the center to maintain its indifference to the damage done by sustaining systems that impoverish and discriminate. The wacko right brandishes no such fig leaf. The center finds itself forced to choose between obscenely racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist, and elitist ideology, and human decency. Decency, however, by no means, qualifies as a shoo-in in this horse-race.

In pre-WWII Germany, people carting wheelbarrows of cash to the local baker for a loaf of bread chose fascism. We see disturbing, though as yet weak, similarities in the contemporary economic meltdown that's taking no prisoners. Nevertheless, people of color, in the minority still, continue to absorb the bulk of the damage while the white middle class much more slowly erodes. With Europe on the brink of economic disaster, poised to gouge their middle class in an ongoing transfer of wealth, the danger of retreat into fascism escalates.

The Chinese, I've been told, have a character for crisis that breaks in two, signifying "dangerous opportunity." Whether the notion that such a character exists is accurate or not, this phrase precisely describes the situation of flux, that situation conservatives most fear and the nutty right most seeks to exploit.

The absence of an organized left, MIA since about 1973 or so--likely killed by the Civil Rights Act and the exit from Vietnam (events that encouraged reliance on government to solve problems)--presents the greatest opportunity for the fascists among us. They have succeeded better than Joseph McCarthy in making the word "liberal" equivalent to the word "traitorous." Only very recently have progressives begun anew to identify themselves as such. Better yet, the escalating economic pressure on all but the wealthiest Americans has led to highly positive polling numbers on every topic from universal Medicare to Occupy Wall Street. This, of course, hasn't influenced government in the slightest. For example, even though the majority in this country registered approval for the single payer option, consideration of various healthcare initiatives doggedly excluded single payer, not merely from all draft legislation, but additionally from all political speech. Had you read the mainstream press and watched TV as your sole sources of news, you would've failed to realize such an option existed.

The extreme right, unimpeded by the ever-affable Obama, managed to trash the British and Canadian healthcare systems, treasured almost universally by their beneficiaries. In Canada, for example, citizens annually name Tommy Douglas when polled regarding their greatest national hero. Douglas initiated Canadian Medicare. Yet no Democrats publicly refuted the attacks on universal healthcare. They went with tail between legs to the charitable-to-the-insurance-industry version, insisting that "choice" was an American right. An interesting claim, one worthy of joining the word "conservative" in the annals of what has become separation of word and meaning in lieu of our once vaunted separation of church and state. The claim is particularly disgusting given the 50,000,000 Americans who cannot see any doctor because they lack coverage. (Recently, an uninsured acquaintance of mine died from untreated breast cancer. She had hoped to live to 65 when she could get chemotherapy through Medicare. By the time so-called "conservatives" finish "preserving" Medicare by stripping it, she probably couldn't have afforded that either.)

But cheering for death for the uninsured turns a glaring spotlight on the greed and viciousness of right-wing politicians and voters. Decent folks recoil and look with swelling approval at the progressive agenda. From this comes all hope.

But be warned: No help will come from Washington. Just as everything from Social Security to the Civil Rights Act came out of masses gathering in the streets, restoration of the welfare state will require the involvement of every citizen of conscience, everyone who believes that life is enriched not through property, but through brotherhood.