THE BP ECONOMY

Sam Smith

There is no reason not to be angry with BP and its CEO Tony Hayward, but contrary to most news reports, the oil spill is far from the greatest catastrophe of the moment. It is vastly outweighed by an economic spill that will kill far more people, destroy far more of their jobs, and leave far more businesses in a desperate condition.

Yet, unlike the oil spill, we have few villains for the economic collapse, little talk of criminal investigation, and little sense that it was instigated by the same sort of greed, carelessness and arrogance that is now ruining the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, the same media that helped enable the fiscal crisis through its sycophantic coverage of a rightwing economic revolution is now treating the problem almost as if it were an act of God, rather than of its advertisers and most favored sources. The Financial Times recently even ran a headline – “Praise for tough and austere measures” – as if making ordinary folk suffer for the rapacious indulgences of the rich was a noble cause.

While there is no single figure as prominent as Tony Hayward, there is a long list of economists, politicians, columnists, business schools and other powerful voices whose advice and encouragement directly led us to this disaster. You won’t read about it, however, because the very media that helped cause the problem is now directing your attention away from its causes.

With a few exceptions like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman, the major media has been devoid of voices saying the obvious: an economic policy that increasingly feeds the rich at the expense of everyone else can lead to nothing but trouble. Call it the free market or whatever other cute name you want, but at its heart it was a vicious con perpetrated against the majority of America.

The evidence is endless and endlessly ignored but here are a few examples:

- Percent of workers with defined benefits pension plan down 50% since mid 1980s

- According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the gap in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and Taken together with prior research, the new data suggest greater income concentration at the top of the income scale than at any time since 1928. Here’s what the change looks like:

- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.

- According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of society, a higher share of income than at any time since 1928.

This is not economic theory put into practice but state sponsored robbery. So when you complain about Tony Hayward, save a little time for all those economists, columnists and politicians who told you to just let the free market be and it would all work out fine.

LIBERALS IN DENIAL

Sam Smith - The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote a column in the Washington Post that would have made her a prime candidate for psychotherapy had she been talking about alcohol or sexual problems. Fortunately, she was just writing about Obama and how "progressives" were not really opposed to him: "What's happening on the left isn't the equivalent of the anti-incumbent anger on the right. Most progressives support Obama and want his agenda to succeed."

Leaving aside the distortion of the term progressives - properly applied to those tired of liberals in denial - the claim raises some precise questions that vanden Heuvel never addressed. For example, do her "progressives" support:

- The war in Afghanistan?

- The continued use of Gitmo and similar facilities?

- The continuation of unconstitutional practices in wiretapping?

- The harassment of government whistleblowers?

- The corporate-driven war against public education?

- The bailout of huge banks while foreclosure-threatened homeowners are left to fester?

- Increased funding for war on drugs?

- Obama's plans offshore drilling?

- His handling of BP crisis?

- The support Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestine?

- Obama's plans to undermine the Miranda ruling?

- The extension of the Patriot Act?

- Obama's attempt to wrest more budgetary control from Congress?

- A commission designed to cut Social Security and Medicare?

- Plans to turn public housing over to corporate slumlords?

In fact, true progressives oppose all the above and as a result do not want Obama's agenda on these points to succeed. Vanden Heuvel best go back to calling herself a liberal, because for them, it’s an agenda, sadly, they can live with.

THE METAPHOR SPILL

Sam Smith - The establishment is struggling to gain metaphorical control over the BP oil spill. It feels entitled to control metaphors just as much as it does oil drilling policy and doesn't it like when the non-establishment comes up with its own. Thus Chris Matthews goes berserk when anyone refers to the present government as a "regime" and others get hysterical when someone calls something 'fascistic" or "Nazi-like." Curiously, these are the same establishment people who regularly refer to critics as "conspiracy theorists" or "wing nuts."

As a writer, I like metaphors even if I'm never quite sure when they stop and similes pick up. I don't even mind people who dislike metaphors, such as Jack Nicholson, who said once, "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."

But what I don't like is the elite using bad metaphors. For example, even Eugene Robinson, in an otherwise fine column on the oil crisis, fell for the "war" image, arguing, along with Obama and many others, that we need to treat the BP spill as we would a military battle.

In fact, wars are carried out in the name of virtue but almost inevitably leave both sides in worst shape than when they started. Wars destroy the environment, kill large numbers of people, and take decades to recover from. The last thing we need in the Gulf right now is a war.

A happier allusion would be to a serious medical operation. The first task is to get the patient in good enough shape so that long term recovery can take place. And, along the way, you want to avoid something called iatrogenic medicine, where the cure does the patient harm.

This is, in many ways, the opposite of a war, and a far better way to think about the oil spill.

Unfortunately, our political and media elite are infatuated with the military - even if they were never part of it. And for men in power, the metaphor has a comforting masculine ring to it. (Having you ever wondered why there is not a psychiatric term for those who become sexually aroused at the thought of sending others to their death in battle?)

If, in fact, we were to send our military into the Gulf like we sent it into Iraq, things would soon be ten times worse than they are right now.

And you may not need a metaphor at all. After all, the BP disaster is what we will be using as a metaphor in endless commentaries and political campaigns well into the future.

As for me, when I see stories about the disaster, it reminds me of that great oil spill back in April 2010. Remember that one? Sadly, it looks like there's a metaphor that will hold up for some time yet.

WHY PEOPLE CALL OBAMA A SOCIALIST. .. AND WHY IT MATTERS

Sam Smith

In trying to figure out why so many people think Barack Obama is a socialist, it finally occurred to me that it wasn't a matter of politics or ideology at all, but one of class and culture.

Because of the way Americans have been raised - in school, in the media and in the barroom - they have come to think that there is only one type of governmental cloud that can descend and ruin their day. To them, Hitler was the only fascist ever made, communists are so 1950s, the excesses of conservatism are hardly noticed, and no one’s ever heard of corporatism. What’s left is socialism.

By any logical standard, Obama has hardly a socialist bone in his body but we don’t live in a time when logic owns definitions. Still, if one accepts that many feel something is going on that is intrusive, indecipherable, and uncomfortable, then it is the discomfort rather than the misnomer that should be examined. And politics may have surprisingly little to do with it.

For example, we live in a time of class disparity unlike any in recent history. A few examples:

- Income inequality is at an all time high

- Since 1980, the richest Americans have seen their incomes quadruple, while for the "lowest" 90% of America, incomes fell.

- The average real wage is lower today than it was in the 1970s.

- In 1950 the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's was about 30 to 1. Since 2000 that average has ranged from 300 to 500 to one.

- Between 1978 and 2008, almost 35% of America's total income growth went to the top one-tenth of one percent.

- From 1990 to 2008, middle class incomes rose just 20%, and most of that happened in the 1990s. Since then, income has stagnated for people in the middle, yet home prices shot up 56%, college costs 60%. As for health care, it's up 155%.

- Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.

- Percent of workers with defined benefits pension plan is down 50% since mid 1980s

- Long term unemployment rate is the highest since 1948.

- In 1983 middle class debt held at 67% of income. By 2007, middle class debt had gone over the falls to 157% of income.

-Personal bankruptcies are up 400% since the 1980s

Bad as these conditions are, they are exacerbated by ineffective action to deal with them by our elected leaders and seemingly only a passing interest by these leaders and the media.

To them an oil spill or a war is just far more interesting to worry about. But terrible as either may be, they don’t immediately and directly affect the average American the way economic factors do.

Imagine, if all the cable coverage we've had of the oil spill had been given to the mile deep, hidden malfunctions of our economy.

But this won't happen because the top controls the media as well as our politics.

And it's not just about economics. For example, only about nine percent of our population has been to graduate school, yet it is this segment of the population that is increasingly controlling our policy choices. Similarly nearly half of Congress is composed of lawyers, which these days means, among other things, people who do legal work for corporations.

And both these groups are bipartisan. Just look at the contributors to Barack Obama's election and you'll find that every thing you were taught about the political views of big business is just about as wrong as, say, what an average Tea Party member thinks about socialism.

Or consider the lack of small business people, labor leaders, teachers, or social workers in Congress other political bodies.

It helps, therefore, to jettison - at least temporarily - the ideological and political divisions and look at the matter more anthropologically. Because what really divides the leadership of the country from ordinary citizens is class and culture.

And not necessarily the sort of culture we like to talk about. For example, the election of Obama was buried in an influx of commentary on the ethnic implications. But have you noticed how little this has actually mattered?

Obama has done practically nothing that can be attributed positively or negatively to his ethnicity. It turns out that it was not that he was black that mattered; it was that he was a Harvard Law School graduate steeped in the perspective, biases, arrogance and assumptions of an elite subculture that has an increasingly difficult time relating to those not of their class.

This is not to say it has to be like that. FDR and JFK showed otherwise. Of course, FDR lived in a smaller, less economically segregated America and JFK was a war hero.

Even Bill Clinton, who went to Yale and Oxford, was save by an Arkansas accent, which helped him until he lied and got laid once too often. It may also be one reason no one noticed that 77% of Clinton’s initial cabinet were millionaires, beating out both Reagan and Bush in this category. And that one third of his top appointments came from Harvard and Yale.

Obama has continued this strange new Democratic Party tradition. The Washington Post reported that 22 of his first 35 appointments had "a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge. Since then, Obama has appointed a Harvard alumnus as education secretary, a Nobel-prize winning Stanford physicist as energy secretary, and a handful of Harvard law school classmates."
Further, his appointment of Elena Kagan insures that Harvard will retain a super majority on the Supreme Court.

Increasingly, the people running our country act as though they belong to a private club. The Washington media, of course, doesn't mention this, because it belongs to the same club (albeit on probation depending on what it writes) So only occasionally is there a true glimpse of what is going on.

For example, Lorraine Adams, a onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post, left the paper and became a novelist. In her latest book she has a character modeled on Bob Woodward. Asked on a PBS program to elaborate, Adams said:

"I think if you're a student of American journalism, Bob Woodward is an undeniably potent figure. . . . I think he practices access journalism, which is different from what I did at the Post.

"[I] would talk to the people who have no power and who are affected by the people in power, and that gives a much more useful picture of the way policy affects the human soul. Woodward, who started as a reporter who did that, who knocked on doors and talked to people on the ground, became a celebrity. In becoming a celebrity, he invariably saw it as a much better deal for him, in terms of making money, to talk to other celebrities inside Washington: presidents, their chiefs of staff, vice presidents, their chiefs of staff.

"We have learned that Deep Throat was an FBI official, not an agent, an official. He was on, what we call the 7th Floor. I think Woodward's capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives."

The assumption of the capital club class is that ordinary Americans will buy into limousine politics and limousine reporting. But they don't. They may not understand it, they may mistakenly call it socialism, and they may not have the slightest idea what to do about it, but they recognize the gap between their lives and what is going on in Washington. And it makes them mad.

In another era, a populist progressive movement might have gathered up that anger and put it to good use for a social revolution or two. But the potential for such a movement these days has been emasculated by a horde of indentured liberals willing to line up behind anyone who calls themselves a Democrat. And as they do so, their beloved president of the moment - a Clinton or Obama - moves the country further to the right with impunity, even as an increasingly angry populace becomes an ever greater market for the real right.

All of which is not helped in the slightest when a president - hailed as eloquent - can't even get the public to feel his pain over the oil spill. Imagine a White House news briefing exchange like the following - only with a FDR, Harry Truman, JFK or LBJ - and you can sense the problem:

Chip Reid, CBS: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he enraged at BP specifically?

Press secretary Robert Gibbs: I think he's enraged at the time that it's taken, yes. I think he's been enraged over the course of this, as I've discussed, about the fact that when you're told something is fail-safe and it clearly isn't, that that's the cause for quite a bit of frustration. . . Which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory framework that ensures something like this doesn't happen again.

Reid: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. . . . Have we really seen rage from the President on this? I think most people would say no.

Gibbs: I've seen rage from him, Chip. I have.

Reid: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do? (Laughter.)

Gibbs: He said. . . he has been in a whole bunch of different meetings. . . clenched jaw. . . even in the midst of these briefings, saying everything has to be done. I think this was an anecdote shared last week, to plug the damn hole.

Again, what we face is not an ideological problem, but a class and cultural one; a president so practiced at self-protective reserve that he can't get cross when he needs to. By trying so hard to act intelligent and measured, he ends up seeming distant and a bit dumb.

But the problem extends far beyond speech and manners. For example, the techniques of traditional politics are fading, largely replaced by what is presumed to be good public relations, although often seeming like just one more bad cable TV news clip.

I was reminded of this when Obama recently went to Capitol Hill to meet with Senate Republicans. My first reaction - thinking politics rather than PR - was, "Uh oh, this isn't going to go well."

Turns out, I guessed right, as the Chicago Tribune explained later:

"One angry Republican accused Obama of treating members of the opposition like political props, saying the president's bipartisan words have repeatedly been followed by partisan deeds on such issues as regulation of Wall Street, healthcare and economic stimulus.

"'I told him I thought there was a degree of audacity in him showing up today,' said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who accused the administration of sabotaging efforts to write a bipartisan Wall Street bill. 'I asked him how he was able to reconcile that duplicity.'

"Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Obama's response to the GOP criticism showed he was so 'thin-skinned' that he should 'take a Valium' before he comes to talk to Republicans again."

Real politicians would have seen it coming. But because the PR ethos has so overwhelmed politics, real politics is pushed aside in favor of easy to puncture performances.

Lyndon Johnson would have had Bob Corker and Pat Roberts over for drinks, given them the pork they were looking for, and you wouldn't have even read about it until the next volume of Robert Caro's biography came out.

But the public relationists of today's politics get so wrapped up in sending a clever message that they completely forget the other side gets to speak into the microphone as well.

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The capital club class also works on a restricted set of assumptions on how to best get something done, assumptions that involve an overwhelming reliance on centralized decision-making, endless review, public messages, and data that spews itself over the capital as from an uncapped well head.

Thus the sense you often get is that people who should be leading are behaving more in the manner of someone writing a college thesis or appearing on a CPAN panel; they explain, analyze and calculate; they just don't know quite what to do.

And here is where socialism raises its head again. It is part of the popular belief that socialism is, if not a dictatorship, a system run tightly from the top. There is no sharing of power, no decentralization of authority, no letting difference places do things their own way.

This is not an accurate description of socialism, but it is, I think, a fair description of much popular thought on the subject.

Thus the irony of a small group of corporate-sponsored politicians, devoid of any real ideology other than the maintenance of their own power, becoming regarded in popular culture as mean and nasty Marxists.

Obama has produced a series of overly complex, almost indecipherable pieces of legislation that share an additional common trait: extraordinary centralized control by his administration. Worse, perhaps, some of this legislation will clearly result in ordinary citizens having to fill out more forms, go through more procedures, and feel rationally confused about this or that.

Right now, for example, small businesses and small non-profits are facing significant additional tax reporting requirements.

The health bill includes an ungodly aggregation of uncertainties and new obstacles to doing things simply.

The stimulus package had so many restrictions that the paperwork alone would have prevented a reiteration of New Deal public works efforts.

Further, the Obama administration has been clearly unwilling to share power on these matters. It even wants to restrict Congress' budget power by a back door approach to the line item veto.

But perhaps more importantly, there is no sense that Obama and his staff have any feel for the fact that governors and mayors are part of our government as well and that if he wants to look good, they have to look good, which means sharing power. This doesn't even have to be a matter of honor, just good politics.

In public education, he is working to eliminate the whole two century tradition of local control over public schools. Underlying a lot of this is the assumption that people like the Obamites know best how to do things. After all, they have fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities.

And so we find FEMA coming close to causing a disaster on the Portland Maine waterfront by declaring it a flood zone on which no further major construction could ever take place. It wasn't true, but it took not only the Maine congressional delegation but the Portland fire chief coming down to Washington to explain to FEMA that they didn't now what the hell they were talking about.

And while Obama represents these values, he is far from alone. The Supreme Court recently decided a case desribed by Time's Adam Cohen:

"Van Thompkins, a criminal suspect, was not interested in talking to the police, and he never affirmatively waived his right to remain silent. But the court ruled that by not saying clearly that he was exercising his right to remain silent, he in fact forfeited the right - and that a one-word answer he gave late in the questioning could be used against him.

"The ruling flies in the face of the court's long-standing insistence that a suspect can waive his rights only by affirmatively doing so."

Now, mind you, this was a 5-4 decision of the court. This means that the average purported perp without even a GED has to know a bizarre ruling that silence only matters if you first say you're being silent and also has to choose which of the Harvard Law grads on the court to believe on the topic. You don't get more culturally out of touch than that.

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Finally, the oil spill story still has too many loose ends to analyze fairly, but what we do know is that local talent and judgment, and alternative approaches, have been squashed in favor of a one big solution (actually a series of one big solution) which has yet to come

A problem with people with fine law degrees and MBAs from some of the best universities is that they are unlikely to know squat about oil spills.

Of course, there's at least a partial solution to this: find out who does. This might be called the reporter's approach to life. A good reporter wakes up in the morning not knowing a thing about Topic X, but by the end of the day or week will have found a whole bunch of people who do. Essential to this, however, is first admitting that you don't know a thing about Topic X.

The problem is that those in the capital club class don't think like this. They see themselves and their friends as the best source of knowledge.

Which may be why you heard so much of late about the "Nobel Prize winning Energy Secretary," Mr. Chu.

If you've got a Nobel Prize winner, what more do you need? But as Eugene Robinson pointed out the other evening on MSNBC, Chu didn't get his prize in ending oil spills but in the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."

Much of the public sees the Obama administration as arrogant, power-hoggng and indifferent ot the concerns of the ordinary citizen. A strong case can be made that this is true. This, of course, doesn't make Obama a socialist, but the misappropriation and misuse of power is a far great offense than a mundane misnomer. Besides, whatever you call it, it's not helping the Democrats or the country one bit.

WHEN THE TOP CAVES IN

What corporate America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled. Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate.

We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss. Worse, underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, the American establishment -- from corporate executive to media to politician -- reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own.

There is a phrase for this in some Latin American countries: the culture of impunity. In such places it has led to death squads, to the live bodies of dissidents being thrown out of military helicopters, to routine false imprisonment and baroque financial fraud. We are not there yet but are certainly moving in the same direction. In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition.

The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, at best practices only titular democracy, and puts itself at the service of what Hong Kong, borrowing from fascist Germany and Italy, refers to as "functional constituencies," which is mainly to say major corporations. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism.

The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics, and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed and power. As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."

Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in America's political and economic system. But a number of things have changed. As activist attorney George LaRoche points out, "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe ‘old Joe' was a crook but he was also a ‘pillar of the business community' or ‘a member of the Lodge' or a ‘good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification." The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. - Sam Smith, Why Bother?, 2001

Sam Smith - When I wrote that, I assumed that, having ditched the First American Republic, we might well move towards some form of ordered and unpleasant tyranny. I assumed that the establishment would stick to its agenda that we would be expected to understand and obey.

After all, as I wrote at the time, "we all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." And a big part of living in a Mafia neighborhood is that you know what the rules are. But what I missed was the possibility that the forces driving the elite would not only destroy our America, but their America as well. And it wasn't until the chaos, confusion, crises, conflicts and controversies of the last year and a half that it became apparent that both victim and tyrant had lost this battle.

What has happened is that atomized ambition has created aggregated anarchy. No one controls the country any more. Yes, they are in charge of the buttons, but the buttons no longer work. The housing and stock markets have collapsed. Academics act as though they haven't gotten their GED yet. Intellectuals grasp at adjectives and metaphors that bear no contact with reality. Corporate executives speak of markets long gone. We are in wars no one can defend reasonably yet against which there is no major protest. Reporters prefer adjectives over facts and have come to think of skepticism as a form of extremism. Sanctified, sanctimonious figures in the church and the GOP are caught in gay trysts. And a hustler named Madoff easily rips off the very high society of which he was a part.

Among the most striking developments has been the impermeable inconsistency of the Obama administration. Although it has spoken repeatedly of transparency, seldom has there been an administration whose true purpose was more difficult to perceive.

Of course, it has been aided mightily by a Democratic Senate that created months of trouble for itself simply by choosing not to revert to traditional rules that could have made it the most, rather than the least, effective upper body in years. Instead, all you needed for a filibuster was to hand in a slip of paper.

The results have been unlike anything that has ever been seen on Capitol Hill. Put together the stimulus package, the health care bill and banking reform and you have a triptych of laws of uncertain purpose, volcanic confusion and concealed contradiction - one to two thousand pages making the future impenetrable until it will be too late to do much about it.

Congress used to pass legislation in order to accomplish something, whether for good or evil. Now we have major bills no one can accurately explain, no one can predict their consequences and no one can convincingly argue on their behalf save for a series of abstractions easily balanced by similar vagaries of the opposition.

We do know that the stimulus bill has so far done little worthwhile, unless you work on Wall Street. Unemployment remains high, foreclosures have not been significantly limited and public works are pathetic.

What the score will be for the health care measure is far harder to guess, for the legislators and Obama have simply hid some of its most important elements for years in the future.

As for the so-called bank reform measure, it was clearly a gift to Wall Street. Yet the LA Times, among others, called it "the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since the Great Depression."

In fact, the bill didn't even bring back the Glass-Steagall Act which would have been the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules since, well since 1999, when Bill Clinton and Congress buried it.

Eric Alterman came closer to the truth: "When was the last time Congress passed a bill so large that even its significant provisions resisted summarization, both for reasons of complexity and enormity? If you said 'health care,' well, perhaps you're noticing a pattern. Once again, Democrats spent the better part of a year playing three-dimensional chess with themselves, lobbyists, and Republicans to pass. . . The actual provisions of this bill are beyond the capacity of most of us to understand"

Add to all this the BP disaster, in which our leaders desperately try to spin the oil away by endless news conferences in front of a gulf they never cared about before. And the attempt to dismantle a system of public education that for a couple of centuries helped make America a place to admire.

How does one define politics in times like this? In truth, the only parties that still have a whit of purpose are the Greens, Libertarians and Socialists and they can't hardly make it on the ballot. The rest has been reduced to office politics.

We have now gone through a year and a half when either nothing has happened or nobody can tell what has happened. Yet the elite still acts like they know what they are up to and their indentured media loyally spreads the myth.

For example, Obama appoints a Supreme Court justice whom none of her social ilk can describe much except to say how smart she is. These same figures, however, then proceed to admit that her views are a "blank page."

Is the only purpose of intelligence to go through life filling out crossword puzzles correctly? Might it not help to do or say something worthwhile that someone might remember? Apparently, by today's elite standards, that is not smart.

Obama himself warned us in his memoirs that he was merely a mirror, that people would see what they wanted in him. Only now are many who voted for him beginning to realize that Barack Obama never really existed; he was only a transient reaction to things that really existed - a reaction based on what seemed to be most beneficial or safest for himself at the moment.

One leader of this kind would be a problem in any period, but when a whole elite has given up shared values, community and conscience in order to play the game solo, you have a problem that can destroy your entire culture.

And that's where we find ourselves. Vicky Ward gets close to the nub in her book on the desperate housewives of Lehman Brothers. The illusion of common purpose - taken to the extreme of precisely defined clothing, rigorously shared charities and climbing mountains together - is finally shattered by the reality that the men who were supposed to be partners in a common endeavor actually viewed each other as one more market to manipulate and beat.

Lately a strange image has been bouncing about in my head. It is a scene of urban riots, flames in the street, of aimed guns and aimless bodies. But the people in the image aren't the poor and the helpless, and they are not in Athens or Bangkok. Rather they are in Washington and they are judges and CEOs and lawyers and MBAs and cabinet officials and TV news hosts. They are looting stores, smashing statues, and lighting gasoline in a desperate last act of the greed that got them so far yet now has so little to offer. Their memories can no longer recall conscience, causes, or community. They have no friends, allies or movements. They are on their own just like the Lehman Brothers housewife to whom former friends would longer speak after the firm had died.

We have, from a young age, been trained to respect, admire and follow our leaders. Even now, you can hardly find a major op ed writer or a TV commentator who will admit that those who are supposed to show us the way have disintegrated like, say, a malfunctioning deep water well or a high rolling hedge fund.

But we're on our own now. Which was never a bad idea; it was just that we weren't meant to think about it.

If Obama has done us one favor, perhaps it is this: we now know there is no one waiting behind the curtain to save us.

But there still is an America and a good one. You just won't find it on the front pages or on the evening news. It is in our communities, our towns and our states and we have to rediscover and build this America from the bottom up.

It can happen, but the first step is to stop listening to an elite that has destroyed our land and disgraced itself, an elite that has rolled into one great cultural tar ball.

So move on, folks, nothing to see here.

From here on out, it's up to us.

WHAT'S REALLY IN THE HEALTHCARE BILLL

Sam Smith

As noted here before, the healthcare bill is a horrible mixture of the good and the bad. Because, in the end, it will improve healthcare for many people, it is probably best to pass it and deal with its problems later, but it still remains in large part a god awful measure. Here's a rundown on some of the good and the bad:

HOW MANY ARE BEING HELPED?

The Obamites brag about the bill providing new healthcare for 32 million people:

- In addition, nine million of these, according to the CBO study, are presumed to be people moving to a another form of healthcare - i.e. from their employer based insurance (4 million) or presently non-group insured (5 million) moving to exchanges.

- Half of the improvement (16 million) would be due to improvements in Medicaid and CHIP. You don't need a 2000 page bill to do that.

- Subtract the Medicaid and policy shifters from the calculation and you end up with only about 16 million new people getting insurance. And this is not, for the most part, because the Democrats are providing it (although there will be tax credits to help some). A big reason will be a hidden tax known as the individual mandate. Thus Obama and the Democrats are claiming credit for giving people something when they are instead requiring them to do it with their own funds. This would be like claiming credit for increasing millions of people's incomes by reinstituting the draft.

- In sum, about 16 million people are being substantially helped and about the same number are being manipulated into thinking they are getting more than they are.

THE MANDATE

The individual mandate is unconstitutional. As constitutional attorney David Rivkin has explained, it goes far beyond the standard judicial excuse of regulating interstate commerce: "What's unique is the mandate [is] imposed on individuals merely because they live - not connected with any economic activity, not because they grow something, make something, compose something. Merely because they live. And this is absolutely unprecedented." Even when the government decided to ban drinking during Prohibition, it at least had the decency to pass a constitutional amendment.

Although the Democrats and the media don't want to talk about it, it's worth noting that even the Congressional Research Service would only go as far as to say that Congress "may have" the power to impose mandates but also called it the "most challenging question" of the measure.

If this provision is upheld in the courts, nothing would prevent the government from, for example, ordering people above a cetain BMI to buy memberships in private health clubs and to attend them at least three times a week.

THE INDUSTRY SUBSIDY

By requiring new insurance from inefficient private providers instead of through a government program, the administration is subsidizing the insurance cabal by billions of dollars. Further, even though the public option provision fell far short of what it should have been, Obama's back room deal with the industry to knife it is one of the strongest reasons why he should not be encouraged to run again for president.

THE STALL

An amazing number of provisions won't go into effect for four to nine years. One of the problems with this is that if, during this period, the GOP gains control of the Congress, there is nothing to stop them from stalling these programs further. In addition, the Democrats are playing an extraordinarily dangerous political game - taking immediate credit for things that may not happen for years to come. In fact, the first significant benefits to anyone will not occur for four years according to the CBO calculations.

For example, not until 2014 would employers be banned from denying coverage or providing higher premiums for women or older people. What if our civil rights laws had been written that way, say, giving restaurants four more years to ban blacks?

MEDICARE DRUG FUNDING

The reconciliation bill includes additional Medicare drug funding, closing the so-called doughnut hole in coverage.

NEW MEDICARE TAX

Business Week: "Already in the Senate bill, a higher Medicare payroll tax will be assessed on individuals who make more than $200,000 a year or families with income of more than $250,000. The reconciliation bill includes an additional 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income such as dividends on these high earners."

EMPLOYER MANDATE

Business Week: "Under the Senate bill, if an employer with more than 50 employees doesn't offer coverage and has just one employee who qualifies for a new tax credit, the company must pay a fee for every full-time employee on its roster. The reconciliation bill raises the penalty to $2,000 from $750, though it subtracts the first 30 employees from the calculation.

ABORTION FUNDING

Not currently addressed in the bill.

THE MEDICARE-MEDICAID METAPHOR

The liberal Center for Budget Policy & Priorities claims that "this legislation [will] produce the greatest gains in health coverage since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid 45 years ago." This is an insult to Medicare and Medicaid, which were, after all, public programs and not regulations. There is a huge difference between providing someone with something and ordering them to buy it.

WHO NEEDS A CONSTITUTION IF THE BUDGET IS BALANCED?

The legislation includes a flagrantly anti-constitutional provision, as described by the CBPP:

[] The legislation would establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board to develop and submit proposals to slow the growth of Medicare and private health care spending and improve the quality of care. The President would nominate the board's 15 members, who would require Senate confirmation, for staggered six-year terms.

If the projected growth in Medicare costs per beneficiary in 2015 and thereafter exceeded a specified target level which it almost certainly would do in many years the board would be required to produce a proposal to eliminate the difference. The board could not propose increases in Medicare premiums or cost-sharing or cuts in Medicare benefits or eligibility criteria; it would focus on proposals for savings in the payment and delivery of health care services.

The board's recommendations would go into effect automatically unless both houses of Congress passed, and the President signed, legislation to modify or overturn them. If the board recommended changes that the President supported, the President could veto any congressional attempt to block them, and a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate would be required to override the veto.[]

This provision is contemptuous of the basic concept of our constitutional government.

CUTTING MEDICARE COSTS

One of the big sleepers in the bill is the plan to "institute efficiencies" in Medicare programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than any private insurance plan in the country.

Consider this snippet from CBPP: "The legislation would reduce annual payment updates to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, hospices, ambulatory surgical centers, and certain other providers to account for improvements in economy-wide productivity. It would also reduce payments to home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, and inpatient rehabilitation facilities." And just what will happen to service and its availability?

Remember: one person's efficiency is another's lack of service.

OTHER PROVISIONS

CBPP - Within months, insurers that offer coverage of policyholders' children (including in existing plans) would be required to allow adult dependents younger than 26 to be added to such coverage. In addition, new insurance plans would be barred from excluding children's pre-existing conditions from coverage and would have to cover certain preventive services at no charge to enrollees.

EXPANDED MEDICAID ELIGIBILITY

Saving the best until last. As the CBPP puts it:

"The plan would expand Medicaid up to 133 percent of the poverty line for all children and adults younger than 65 who are lawfully residing in the United States and not eligible for Medicare. This would mean that millions of low-income parents, as well non-disabled low-income adults who do not have dependent children (and who are generally ineligible for Medicaid today except in a small number of states with waivers), would become newly eligible for health coverage through Medicaid. Medicaid is the most cost-effective way to provide comprehensive and affordable coverage to people with very low incomes and thereby ensure that the low-income uninsured gain coverage. "

IN SUM

The bill will provide about 16 million poor people with significantly better health care. It will force another nine million or so to buy health insurance, softened by tax credits.

It will put some restrictions on the insurance companies in return for providing them a multi-billion dollar annual subsidy.

It will declare the right of the government to order you to buy something whether you want it or not, and will it establish a budget commission with supra-constitutional powers. Both these provisions would be struck down by a rational Supreme Court (such as we haven't seen in some time) or the Constitutional shall have to be "deemed" substantially amended.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE REAL OBAMA NOW?

Sam Smith

Over the past few weeks I've been a good boy. I've placed everything having to do with the real Barack Obama into a futures file and spent my time on the far grimmer matter of the real John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Now the party is over and it's time for people to put away their Barack and Michelle dolls and start dealing with what has truly happened.

This, I admit, is difficult because the real Obama doesn't exist yet. He follows in the footsteps of our first postmodern president, Bill Clinton, who observed the principles outlined by scholar Pauline Marie Rosenau:

Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations . . . of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable.. . . Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic.

As James Krichick wrote in the New Republic, "Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, 'I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.' "

This is remarkably similar to Ted Koppel's description of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune: "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."

Obama has left the same kind of vacuum. His magic, or con, was that voters could imagine whatever they wanted and he would do nothing to spoil their reverie. He was a handsome actor playing the part of the first black president-to-be and, as in films, he was careful not to muck up the role with real facts or issues that might harm the fantasy. Hence the enormous emphasis on meaningless phrases like hope and change.

Of course, in Obama's postmodern society -- one that rises above the purported false teachings of partisanship -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.

The Obama campaign was driven in no small part by a younger generation trained to accept brands as a substitute for policies. If the 1960s had happened like this, the activists would have spent all their time trying to get Martin Luther King or Joan Baez elected president rather than pursing ancillary issues like ending segregation and the war in Vietnam.

Obama himself took his vaunted experience in community organizing and turned its principles on its head. Instead of empowering the many at the bottom, he used the techniques to empower one at the top: himself.

It is historic that a black has been elected president, but we should remember that Obama was not running against Bull Connor, George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. Putting Obama in the same class as earlier black activists discredits the honor of those who died, suffered physical harm or were repeatedly jailed to achieve equality. Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its belated beneficiary. The delay, to be sure, is striking; after all, the two white elite sports of tennis and golf were integrated long before presidential politics, but Washington - as Phil Hart said of the Senate - has always been a place that always does things twenty years after it should have.

There is an informative precedent to Obama's rise. Forty-two years ago Edward Brooke became the first black senator to be elected with a majority of white votes. Brooke was chosen from Massachusetts as a Republican in a state that was 97% white.

Jason Sokol, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in History News Network:

|||| On Election Day, Brooke triumphed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Newspapers and magazines hummed with approval. The Boston Globe invoked a legacy that included the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, offering the Bay State as the nation's racial and political pioneer.

Journalist Carl Rowan was among the unconvinced. For whites, voting for Brooke became "a much easier way to wipe out guilt feelings about race than letting a Negro family into the neighborhood or shaking up a Jim Crow school setup." Polling numbers lent credence to Rowan's unease. They showed that only 23 percent of Massachusetts residents approved of a statewide school integration law; just 17 percent supported open housing. ||||

That's the problem with change coming from the top, as Obama might have heard when he was involved in real community organizing. It also helps to explain why there have been no more Catholic presidents since John Kennedy. Symbolism is not the change we need.

Getting at the reality of Obama is difficult. He performs as the great black liberal, but since he is one half white and one half conservative, that doesn't leave him a lot of wiggle room.

To be sure, in the Senate he got good ratings from various liberal groups, but two things need to be remembered:

First, liberals aren't that liberal any more. Thus getting a 90% score merely means that you went along with the best that an extremely conservative Democratic Party was willing to risk. This is not a party that would, in these times, have passed Social Security, Medicare or minimum wage. In fact, many liberals aren't much interested in economic issues at all - especially that portion of the constituency that controls the money, the media and the message.

Second, politicians reflect their constituency. Obama's constituency is no longer Illinois. He has a whole new set of folks to pander to.

There is one story from Chicago, however, that remains relevant. A citizen walks into his alderman's office looking for a job. "Who sent you?" he asks. "Nobody," he replies. Says the staffer: "We don't want nobody nobody sent."

Who sent Barack Obama remains a mystery. He has risen from an unknown state senator to president in exactly four years and that only happens when somebody sends for you.

The black liberal image falters on a number of other scores including Obama's affection for extreme right wingers like Chuck Hagel and an obvious indifference to anybody who votes like, say, a state senator from Hyde Park. Think back over the campaign and try to recall a single instance when Obama reached out to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or to the better angels of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead his ads attacked as 'extreme' the single payer health insurance backed by many of his own supporters, he dissed ACORN and Colin Powell was as radical a black as he wanted to be seen palling around with.

The key issue that has driven Obama throughout his career has been Obama. He has achieved virtually nothing for any other cause. His politics reflects whatever elite consensus he gathers around himself. This is why his "post partisanship" needs to be watched so carefully. If Bernie Sanders and John Conyers don't get to White House meetings as often as Chuck Hagel, Obama will glide easily to the right, as every president has done over the past thirty years. If liberals, as they did with Clinton, watch without a murmur as their president redesigns their party to fit his personal ambitions, then the whole country will continue to move to the right as well.

Since the real Obama doesn't exist yet, it is impossible to predict with any precision what he will do. But here is some of the evidence gathered over the past months that should serve both as a warning and as a prod to progressives not to take today's dreams as a reasonable facsimile of reality:

Business interests

Advisor Cass Sunstein told Jeffrey Rosen of the NY Times: "I would be stunned to find an anti-business [Supreme Court] appointee from either [Clinton or Obama]. There's not a strong interest on the part of Obama or Clinton in demonizing business, and you wouldn't expect to see that in their Supreme Court nominees."

Obama supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts. David Sirota in the Nation wrote, "Opposed by most major civil rights and consumer watchdog groups, this big business-backed legislation was sold to the public as a way to stop 'frivolous' lawsuits. But everyone in Washington knew the bill's real objective was to protect corporate abusers."

He voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill

He voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards

He had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries

He was even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain

He was most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists

In 2003, rightwing Democratic Leadership Council named Obama as one of its "100 to Watch." After he was criticized in the black media, Obama disassociated himself with the DLC. But his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is also chief economist of the conservative organization. Writes Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, "Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures."

Added Henwood, "Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."

Civil liberties

He supports the war on drugs

He supports the crack-cocaine sentence disparity

He supports Real ID

He supports the PATRIOT Act

He supports the death penalty

He opposes lowering the drinking age to 18

He supported amnesty for telecoms engaged in illegal spying on Americans

Conservatives

He went to Connecticut to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against Ned Lamont

Wrote Paul Street in Z Magazine, "Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neo-liberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS."

Writes the London Times, "Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee. Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain's closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defense secretary.

Richard Lugar was rated 0% by SANE. . . rated 0% by AFL-CIO. . . rated 0% BY NARAL. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 27% by the National Education Association. . . rated 5% by League of Conservation Voters. . . He voted no on implementing the 9/11 Commission report. . . Vote against providing habeas corpus for Gitmo prisoners. . .voted no on comprehensive test ban treaty. . .voted against same sex marriage. . . strongly anti-abortion. . . opposed to more federal funding for healthcare. . .voted for unconstitutional wiretapping. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations

Chuck Hagel was rated 0% by NARAL. . . rated 11% by NAACP. . . rated 0% by Human Rights Coalition. . . rated 100% by Christian Coalition. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 22% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 36% by the National Education Association. . . rated 0% by League of Conservation Voters. . . rated 8% by AFL-CIO. . . He is strongly anti-abortion. . .voted for anti-flag desecration amendment. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations. . . favors privatizing Social Security

Ecology

Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.

He supports federally funded ethanol and is unusually close to the ethanol industry.

He led his party's reversal of a 25-year ban on off-shore oil drilling

Education

Obama has promised to double funding for private charter schools, part of a national effort undermining public education.

He supports the No Child Left Behind Act albeit expressing reservations about its emphasis on testing. Writes Cory Mattson, "Despite NCLB''s loss of credibility among educators and the deadlock surrounding its attempted reauthorization in 2007, Barack Obama still offers his support. Even the two unions representing teachers, both which for years supported reform of the policy to avoid embarrassing their Democratic Party 'friends,' declared in 2008 that the policy is too fundamentally flawed to be reformed and should be eliminated."

Fiscal policy

Obama rejected moratoriums on foreclosures and a freeze on rates, measures supported by his primary opponents John Edwards and Hillary Clinton

He was a strong supporter of the $700 billion cash-for-trash banker bailout plan.

Two of his top advisors are former Goldman Sachs chair Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Noted Glen Ford of black Agenda Report, "In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, 'The Committee to Save the World.' Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard derivatives, the exotic 'ticking time bomb' financial instruments, from federal regulation."

Robert Scheer notes that "Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale."

Obama's fund-raising machine has been headed by Penny Prtizker former chair of the Superior Bank, one of the first to get into subprime mortgages. While she resigned as chair of the family business in 1994, as late as 2001 she was still on the board and wrote a letter saying that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledging to "once again restore Superior's leadership position in subprime lending." The bank shut down two months later and the Pritzker family would pay $460 million in a settlement with the government.

Foreign policy

Obama endorsed US involvement in the failed drug war in Colombia: "When I am president, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program."

He has expressed a willingness to bomb Iran and won't rule out a first strike nuclear attack.

He has endorsed bombing or invading Pakistan to go after Al Qaeda in violation of international law. He has called Pakistan "the right battlefield ... in the war on terrorism."

He supports Israeli aggression and apartheid. Obama has deserted previous support for two-state solution to Mid East situation and refuses to negotiate with Hamas.

He has supported Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, saying "it must remain undivided."

He favors expanding the war in Afghanistan.

Although he claims to want to get out of Iraq, his top Iraq advisor wrote that America should keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq. Obama, in his appearances, blurred the difference between combat soldiers and other troops.

He indicated to Amy Goodman that he would leave 140,000 private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq because "we don't have the troops to replace them."

He has called Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez an enemy of the United States and urged sanctions against him.

He claimed "one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn't get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That's all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people."

He has hawkish foreign policy advisors who have been involved in past US misdeeds and failures. These include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, General Merrill McPeak, and Dennis Ross.

It has been reported that he might well retain as secretary of defense Robert Gates who supports actions in violation of international law against countries merely suspected of being unwilling or unable to halt threats by militant groups.

Gays

Obama opposes gay marriage. He wouldn't have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage

Health

Obama opposes single payer healthcare or Medicare for all.

Military

Obama would expand the size of the military.

National Service

Obama favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and with a bill requiring such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.

He announced in Colorado Springs last July, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

On another occasion he said, "It's also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it's important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some." Some have seen this as a call for reviving the draft.

He has attacked the exclusion of ROTC on some college campuses

Presidential crimes

Obama aggressively opposed impeachment actions against Bush. One of his key advisors, Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service.

Progressives

Unlike his deferential treatment of right wing conservatives, Obama's treatment of the left has been dismissive to insulting. He dissed Nader for daring to run for president again. And he called the late Paul Wellstone "something of a gadfly"

Public Campaign Financing

Obama's retreat from public campaign financing has endangered the whole concept.

Social welfare

Obama wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare,

Social Security

Early in the campaign, Obama said, "everything is on the table" with Social Security.

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As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist right. We have moved from the prospect of disasters to the relative comfort of mere crises.

Using the word 'extreme' alongside the term 'center' is no exaggeration. Nearly all major damage to the United States in recent years - a rare exception being 9/11 - has been the result of decisions made not by right or left but by the post partisan middle: Vietnam, Iraq, the assault on constitutional liberties, the huge damage to the environment, and the collapse of the economy - to name a few. Go back further in history and you'll find, for example, the KKK riddled with members of the establishment including - in Colorado - a future governor, senator and mayor after whom Denver's airport is named. The center, to which Obama pays such homage, has always been where most of the trouble lies.

The only thing that will make Obama the president pictured in the campaign fantasy is unapologetic, unswerving and unendingly pressure on him in a progressive and moral direction, for he will not go there on his own. But what, say, gave the New Deal its progressive nature was pressure from the left of a sort that simply doesn't exist today.

Above are listed nearly three dozen things that Obama supports or opposes with which no good liberal or progressive would agree. Unfortunately, what's out there now, however, looks more like a rock concert crowd or evangelical tent meeting than a determined and directed political constituency. Which isn't so surprising given how successful our system have been at getting people to accept sights, sounds, symbols and semiotics as substitutes for reality. Once again, it looks like we'll have to learn the hard way.

MADE FOR TV POLITICS

Sam Smith

The confluence of Barack Obama's stadium acceptance extravaganza and John McCain's pick for vice president offers superfluous but final proof that Americans have been consigned to spend their lives as part of a crowd scene in an HBO special. Both Obama and Palin have come out of nowhere, rising to preeminence not on the basis of achievements, politics or service but by having all the qualities an ad executive looks for when trying to market a new product. What the Mad Men of the 1960s sought in cigarettes and cars, their 21st century equivalents now apply to candidates.

Of course, at some point reality enters and we find that the cigarettes bringing us springtime on one puff and the cars taking us to heaven weren't what they seemed. Or, as ad executive Jerry Della Famina once put it, "There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster." Which is one reason why, as our marketing skills have improved, both our economy and politics have declined.

If you step way from the politics and reality, the marketing of Obama has been remarkable if not necessarily all productive. Dana Milbank gave the feel:

|||| Obama's everyman efforts are unlikely to be aided by accepting the nomination in front of Greek-style columns in the middle of a football stadium. Privately, Democrats cringed. . . Luckily, Democrats had the foresight to remove the Air Force One model, the presidential limousine, the full-size replica of the Oval Office and the inauguration gowns that had been on exhibit earlier in the week. . .

Instead of savoring the history-making, Obama aides found themselves answering questions about the columns and the stadium from anxious Democrats and from journalists . . .

After nightfall, the nominee emerged between the columns, walked out to the wedding cake and waved skyward. He delivered a speech that soared to the heights of Mount Olympus. . .

The speech ended, the nominee gazed heavenward, and red, white and blue fireworks poured from the tops of the columns. Streamers hung over the Doric frieze. Triumphant orchestral music played, and Obama, his running mate, and his family departed through the still-smoking Pillars of Hercules. ||||

It may seem stunning that an otoh botoh (on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand) unaccomplished centrist whose vaunted eloquence is so elusive that his only words regularly quoted are marketing slogans like "change we can believe in" and "yes we can" has made it so far so quickly. Yet if you study the other work of some of his major backers in Hollywood such as David Geffin it becomes less surprising. For example, as I watched the stadium oration, the trailer for Genghis Khan drifted into my head.

The marketing effort for Obama has been aided immensely by a media that no longer offers the relief of facts but functions as movie critics, applauding the skill or failure of fictions rather than comparing them to reality. Proof of this shift is that candidates have submerged positions or policies in favor of narratives, once the skill of novelists and playwrights rather than those engaged in the real. In the past month alone, the term narrative has been used along with the word campaign over 2200 times in new stories. And the Democratic convention speeches were as stuffed with appealing personal sagas as they were lacking in ideas or arguments.

The media commentary has also been hyperbolic in the extreme. Howard Fineman claimed that "If you know American history, you know that Obama's nomination is the social equivalent of landing a man on the moon." And Radar reported that " Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews kicked things off right with some unabashed rejoicing (replete with comparisons to Alexander the Great and Aaron Sorkin). . . Political analyst Michelle Bernard later tried to keep things in perspective by admitting that she watched the speech alone in the green room so she could weep and declaring that it was 'the greatest day in our nation's history.'"

In fact, the nomination of a bi-ethnic candidate for president was only a matter of time rather than of effort and it insults an entire civil rights era to give it such an overblown status. Obama has been trained, financed and comforted by the white establishment and while this is not his fault, neither does it compare with the pain and suffering of those who paved his way.

Further, in its groupie-like enthusiasm, the media has ignored major matters such as another speech Obama gave in Colorado some weeks before the convention. In it he made the extraordinarily frightening promise that "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

With Google's news search, one comes up with only two media citations of this comment, both by conservative journals.

Besides, before one assigns too much credit to Obama's purported intrinsic qualities, consider that Hillary Clinton came within inches of being successfully recreated as a sturdy defender of the working class as well as having all her past sins, lies and near indictment totally exorcised from public discussion. It's amazing what the Mad Men can do with enough money floating around.

And now, less than 24 hours after Obama departed the Albert Spearian stage in Denver a new product has been introduced: Sarah Palin.

Palin is where Obama was four years ago: overwhelmingly unknown and suddenly selected by powers that be for a leading role in another made for TV special. While Obama was young, bi-ethnic, smart and unthreatening, Palin also has plenty of meat for the Mad Men, witness this from Wikipedia:

|||| Palin was born as Sarah Louise Heath in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Charles and Sally (Sheeran) Heath. Her family moved to Alaska when she was an infant. Charles Heath was a popular science teacher and coached track. The Heaths were avid outdoors enthusiasts; Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family would regularly run 5k and 10k races.

Palin was the point guard and captain for the Wasilla High School Warriors, in Wasilla, Alaska, when they won the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982; she earned the nickname "Sarah Barracuda" because of her intense play. She played the championship game despite a stress fracture in her ankle, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds. Palin, who was also the head of the school Fellowship of Christian Athletes, would lead the team in prayer before games.

In 1984, Palin was second-place in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, winning a scholarship to help pay her way through college. In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality.

Palin holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Idaho where she also minored in politics.

Her husband, Todd, is a Native Yup'ik Eskimo. Outside the fishing season, Todd works for BP at an oil field on the North Slope and is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2000-mile "Iron Dog" race four times. The two eloped shortly after Palin graduated college; when they learned they needed witnesses for the civil ceremony, they recruited two residents from the old-age home down the street.

She briefly worked as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations while also working as a commercial fisherman with her husband, Todd, her high school sweetheart. One summer when she was working on Todd's fishing boat, the boat collided with a tender while she was holding onto the railing; Palin broke several fingers.

On September 11, 2007, the Palins' son Track joined the Army. Eighteen years old at the time, he is the eldest of Palin's five children. Track now serves in an infantry brigade and will be deployed to Iraq in September. She also has three daughters: Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7. On April 18, 2008, Palin gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome. She returned to the office three days after giving birth. Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. "I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection," Palin said. "Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?"

Details of Palin's personal life have contributed to her political image. She hunts, eats moose hamburger, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, and owns a float plane. Palin holds a lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association. She admits that she used marijuana when it was legal in Alaska, but says that she did not like it. ||||

If you were looking for something to replace the Obama special on HBO, this wouldn't be a bad narrative. And just as irrelevant to what we should be talking and thinking about.

Some years ago the Green Party in Germany was divided into two groups known as the fundis and the realos. While the definitions aren't applicable - the fundis held to core Green priniciples while the realos wheeled and dealed with the other parties - the names seem to fit well what has happened to Democratic politics. The liberal fundis - like Christian fundamentalists - are content with an icon with whom to deposit not only their hope but any critical thought about what such a course might produce. Fundi liberals are not new; they first appeared in large numbers with the campaign of Bill Clinton, the most right wing Democratic presidential candidate in over 60 years. These liberals essentially gave up thinking about anything other that which the Clinton regime wanted and Clinton took full advantage of them. The same is going on with Obama, a jettisoning of any serious interest in policies and programs in favor of blind faith in a particular leader. History tells us that little good comes of this.

In fact, you need only check the lack of significant liberal activity in anti-war, anti-torture and efforts to preserve the constitution to see how incapable the fundi libs are of anything beyond adoration.

Realos are those who still believe in working on issues and understand that politicians play a complicated and often contradictory role in achieving their goals. They know Obama will be good about some things and awful about others. They know that his post-partisanship so far only appears to include outreach to conservatives. And while they know that he would be better than Bush or McCain, blind complicity in a phony political "narrative" that relieves him of all pressure to do right is a disaster waiting just a few months to happen.

It is truly scary to be a realo these days, to be told repeatedly that it is enough to have hope and faith and that , implicitly, everything politics is meant to be about really doesn't matter. It is sad to find how little liberal participation there has been in efforts to save the Constitution or to press for sanity in numerous other areas. It is painful to find those whose job description is the description of reality - that is to say, the media - enthralled by endless fictional manipulations.

But it is where we are and those who prefer reality to fiction are badly outnumbered on both the left and the right. In the end, as it always does, reality decides to speak for itself and, when it does, we then wonder why we hadn't thought about it sooner.