Democratic Congressman To Save Cancer Victim’s Home From Foreclosure by Union Bank

Despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, not every Democratic member of Congress is a spineless quivering blob. Note to Bluedogs worried about getting reelected: this is how to do it. Fight like a pit bull for your constituents instead shivering like a fear-maddened cur at the feet of your corporate overlords.
[The] progressive vision was on full display yesterday during a vigil led by Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) that halted, for now, the foreclosure of a cancer victim’s home. For months, Bonita, California resident Luz Maria Villanueva had been facing impending foreclosure on her home by Union Bank. Villanueva’s situation was especially dire due to the fact that her son has a kidney disease as well as cancer. As medical bills began to pile up, Villanueva had to choose between the life of her son and her home, and she chose her son....Comparing the struggle of families trying to keep their homes to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s which landed him in a Mississippi jail for two months, Filner announced that he’d be holding a community vigil on the steps of Villanueva’s house on the day a local sheriff was scheduled to come foreclose on her. He warned that doing so “may result” in his arrest, but that he was willing to risk it to help her save her home. Thanks to the publicity Filner and the surrounding community brought to the case, Union Bank decided to call off the foreclosure, for now.

The rest of the story: Bob Filner Risks Arrest To Save Cancer Victim’s Home From Foreclosure By Zaid Jilani on Sep 14th, 2010 at 2:09 p

Change Watch: In 2008, the Left sized up Barack Obama with all the critical acumen of prepubescent girls at a Justin Bieber concert

Is this the end of the affair?

During the late presidential campaign, if you asked progressive promoters of Barack Obama's ambitions did they favor maintaining the occupation of Iraq or expanding the war in Afghanistan or tossing missiles at Iran, the invariable answer was no. When it was pointed out that these positions were those of their candidate, the reply was always the same: some variation of, he's just saying that to get elected.

Do you support the death penalty? No. Your candidate does. He's just saying that to get elected. Do you think the wording of the second amendment invites everyone to pack a gun? No. Your candidate does. He's just saying that to get elected. Do you believe that affordable, universal health care -- single payer, Medicare For All, whatever you want to call it -- should be "off the table?" No. Your candidate does. Nah. He's just saying that to get elected.

The Obama campaign was remarkably light on specifics; instead empty slogans about "hope" and "change" offered thin soup to a populace that was starving for real change after enduring four decades of national decline. But Obama needed to keep things vague if he had a prayer of getting elected. Or so said progressive converts to the Church of Hope.

Having made an act of faith in Obama, the Left demanded nothing of Him in return, no firm plans to demilitarize, no programs advancing social and economic justice, no specifics about affordable universal health care, no loaves, no fishes. Missing was even a shred of the agnosticism that in 1964 prevented the New Left from going more than "Part of the Way with LBJ." In 2008, disorganized, demoralized, powerless, progressives fell on their knees before what they hoped was the messiah, really only a political televangelist with a promise we would all ride to Washington in a gold Cadillac if we'd just send him our money and take communion on election day.

Though some on the left are still ready to drink the KoolAid, a growing number of liberals have come to understand that the Obama administration is not the Second Coming of the New Deal. Shock and disappointment over Obama's performance as president has begun to give way to a realization that Obama is no more nor less than a professional politician, a breed that will dance to the playlist of whoever hires the dj. It's our job to turn the hoses on Obama just as we would on any errant politician (imagine the hoo-ha if it were President McCain destroying Afghanistan or giving away the store to Wall Street). "People," Ian Welsh wrote heatedly the other day (so heatedly, I felt obliged to clean up a few typos),
Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican; that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead he is a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly.

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left, and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through.

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover, he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance, and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?).

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House, he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise," this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood commission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody (Obama isn’t about compromise by Ian Welsh 2010-12-03).
It hardly matters, though, whether Obama is a good man or not. In politics, results are the bottom line; actions matter more than professed intentions. The president can get away with pursuing policies that are good for the oligarchs and bad for the majority, that hurt average Americans, that jeopardize the future of the country, because there are no effective counterweights to the power of the militarists and the corporations. The end of Don't Ask Don't Tell showed that organized action still can be effective, especially if the monetary stakes aren't high, but taking on the security state and the corporations is going to require a revolutionary change in our politics. Where possible, this will involve taking control of state and local Democratic Party structures. It will require adding muscle to existing organizations, like unions and progressive research and action groups, and building new ones, including a progressive political party unbeholden to corporate power. Coalition-building on a grand scale will be needed to maximize the strength of a very fragmented opposition. Small-scale, local political reforms -- publicly financed campaigns, instant runoffs, weekend voting, proportional representation -- will be essential to making political institutions more responsive.

Yes, the left must stand against Obama and "primary him" (there's a coinage for you). Someone with stature and credibility will have to make a career sacrifice in the primaries if the president is to be forced into issuing firm promises in exchange for votes (Howard Dean probably won't do it, though he has to be outraged by the administration's conservatism; Russ Feingold's idealism seems highly selective; but Dennis Kucinich might be willing to take on the apostate's role, especially if he is redistricted out of his seat in Congress -- it's not as though there'll be a job waiting for him in this administration's apolitical and corporatist cabinet).

But a primary challenge, though politically vital, is a loser (think Ted Kennedy vs  Jimmy Carter). The really difficult and really crucial challenge will come in the general election. The progressive majority in this country has to stop looking to the Democratic Party to get the country back on the track -- stretching from the Bill of Rights to the Great Society -- to expanding freedom, equality and economic justice. This is not your grandfather's Democratic Party, or your father's; it is fatally compromised, in the thrall of  a moneyed class that cares only to increase its dominion. To succeed, a progressive party would require sacrifice, dedication and long-term thinking. It might not win tomorrow (think John Fremont, although he did come in second*), but it is not hard to imagine that in crisis, and we are in crisis, it could transform our political landscape (think Abraham Lincoln). Even in the short run, as is demonstrated by the history of political organizations as diverse as the Socialist Party and New York's Liberals, the existence of a progressive alternative to business-as-usual would have a positive effect on our politics.  Barring a third party run by moneybags Michael Bloomberg, a candidate fronting a new progressive party would be a loser, too; but in the longer term, if our politics don't get more ideological (as distinct from partisan), our slow decline as a nation will not be reversed.

* And picture this: During the 1856 presidential campaign, Republican Fremont refused to answer charges that he was a Roman Catholic -- he wasn't -- because he did not wish to advance the cause of prejudice.

See, also:
Where Do Obama and Progressives Go From Here: Year-End Report by Mike Lux (Open Left 2010-12-22)
Barack Obama is NOT your boyfriend. Ergo, he didn't dump you. by Paul Rosenberg (Open Left 2010-12-06)
The Great Success of Partisan “Overreach” by Jon Walker (Fire Dog Lake 2010-12-24)
Real Family Values: Nine Progressive Policies to Support Our Families by Sarah van Gelder (YES! Magazine 2010-11-25)
Action, Hope, 2011 by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation 2010-12-23)

Change Watch: The lame-duck session is about as good as it's going to get

With all appreciation due for the passage of START (thanks Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lugar),  the end of the cruel and ridiculous DADT policy (you, too, Sen. Reid and Sen. Lieberman), improved food safety, and watered-down health care for 9/11 responders, the extension of the Bush tax cuts makes clear that Congress is not ready to make the really tough decisions that would get the country moving again. As Kevin Drum wrote last month in Mother Jones (Willful Self Destruction 2010-11-30), "We need:
A big stimulus now aimed at infrastructure development. A credible plan to close the long-term deficit that acknowledges the need for tax increases to be part of the solution. A serious and sustained effort at reining in healthcare costs and broadening access. A collective decision to cut out the culture war nonsense and figure out how to improve our educational system with no more than modest spending increases. Real financial reform, not the weak tea of Dodd-Frank. Less spending on empire building and much, much more spending on real sustainable energy development and engineering.
Little to none of this will happen -- we'll be lucky to emerge from the next congress with Social Security and Medicare intact -- unless there is a revolutionary change in the way we conduct our political business. With Nancy Pelosi reduced to minority leader and the White House and the Senate dominated by conservatives and bogus pragmatists standing in the way of change, there is little hope of reversing our long, slow economic decline.

Decline of the Empire: Bemused, bothered and bewildered by the American security state

A Canadian writer's take on the U.S.'s current level of dysfunction:
The tech sector is the only thing America has going for it these days. (Unless you count crumbling infrastructure, runaway debt, paralyzed government, or a trillion-dollar military bogged down in pointless faraway non-wars.) Unfortunately, the American government seems too dumb to realize this: so they maintain stupid visa laws, while ignoring smart alternatives; keep playing fast-and-loose, at best, with net neutrality; and, oh yes, plan to wiretap (and—thanks to Wikileaks—censor) the entire Internet, at great cost, apparently in the hope that bad guys will never discover the magic of public-key encryption.
The rest of the story: Letter From Canada: Why Is America So Furious About Wikileaks? by Jon Evans (TechCrunch 2010-12-11).

Politics: The Obama-McConnell tax plan

"The tax cut deal rewards Republican obstructionism by giving the wealthy the tax breaks they demanded. It throws away precious resources needed for investments in jobs and our economy on upper income tax cuts that will do very little to propel economic growth—setting up excuses for the deficit hypocrites to argue for even more cuts to programs serving working families. It lards the tax cuts for the top 2 percent with an indefensible cut in the estate tax – giving yet another bonus to the super-rich. Taken together, this package locks in the growing income inequality that has plagued our country for at least another two years – and quite possibly much longer.

"It is unconscionable that the price of support for struggling middle class families and workers who have been unable to find jobs for months and months and months is yet more giveaways for our country’s wealthiest families. Millions of jobless workers have lived in fear for months while Senate Republicans had the gall to use their hardships as political leverage for the benefit of the rich.

"The gains for the middle class and jobless workers in the deal come at too high a price." -- AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

Busting the Filibuster: The Democrats should call the GOP's bluff

The Democrats are still letting the minority Republicans control the U.S. Senate.

In two votes this week, a majority of senators -- 53 -- voted to advance the Democratic agenda on revenue. The first would have let expire the so-called Bush tax cuts for individuals with incomes above $200,000 (and for couples filing jointly and earning more than $250,000 a year). The second, even though, ridiculously, it would have extended the middle class tax cuts to those making up to $1 million a year, also fell 7 votes short of 60. Because neither bill achieved the magic number needed to stop a filibuster should there be one, they were considered unpassable.

Apparently, the Senate leadership never even considered forcing the GOP to put up or shut up. Would the Republicans really bring their thermoses and sleeping bags into the upper chamber to fight for tax breaks for the super-rich and against tax relief for the middle class? Maybe. But even if they did, it's hard to envision how it could hurt the Democrats. Anymore than it is hard to see how the Democratic Party would suffer if Pres. Obama were to announce today that he will veto any tax bill that includes extending the giveaways to the rich.

In a better world, the Senate would adopt the House bill providing tax cuts for middle and working class Americans, filibuster be damned.

(Update: Sam Stein thinks "that the president is not only done ceding any more policy turf to the GOP with respect to tax cut negotiations but willing to let rates expire if Republican don't temper their demands" (Obama Tells Dems He'll Oppose Tax Cut Deal Without Unemployment Benefits, Other Relief -- Huffington Post 2010-12-04). Let's hope the president does get tough finally, but I'm glad not to have any money riding on it.)

Decline of The Empire: Wikileaks hounded?

Here's a statement on the vilification of Wikileaks from Reporters Without Borders that one might have liked to have seen -- might once upon a time reasonably have expected to see -- on the editorial page of the New York Times or in a statement from the news networks:
Reporters Without Borders condemns the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure being directed at cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website dedicated to the US diplomatic cables. The organization is also concerned by some of the extreme comments made by American authorities concerning WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Earlier this week, after the publishing several hundred of the 250.000 cables it says it has in its possession, WikiLeaks had to move its site from its servers in Sweden to servers in the United States controlled by online retailer Amazon. Amazon quickly came under pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and its chairman, Sen. Joe Lieberman, in particular.

After being ousted from Amazon, WikiLeaks found a refuge for part of its content with the French Internet company OVH. But French digital economy minister Eric Besson today said the French government was looking at ways to ban hosting of the site. WikiLeaks was also recently dropped by its domain name provider EveryDNS. Meanwhile, several countries well known for for their disregard of freedom of expression and information, including Thailand and China, have blocked access to cablegate.wikileaks.org.

This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency. We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China. We point out that in France and the United States, it is up to the courts, not politicians, to decide whether or not a website should be closed.

Meanwhile, two Republican senators, John Ensign and Scott Brown, and an independent Lieberman, have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to publish the names of U.S. military and intelligence agency informants. This could facilitate future prosecutions against WikiLeaks and its founder. But a criminal investigation is already under way and many U.S. politicians are calling vociferously for Assange’s arrest.

Reporters Without Borders can only condemn this determination to hound Assange and reiterates its conviction that WikiLeaks has a right under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to publish these documents and is even playing a useful role by making them available to journalists and the greater public.

We stress that any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by WikiLeaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication.

Reporters Without Borders would also like to stress that it has always defended online freedom and the principle of “Net neutrality,” according to which Internet Service Providers and hosting companies should play no role in choosing the content that is placed online.
For other aspects of the Wikileaks story:
Full coverage of The US embassy cables on the guardian.co.uk site;
BBC News' Wikileaks revelations;
WikiLeaked: Inside the State Department's Secret CablesCredit MacLeod Cartoons http://macleodcartoons.blogspot.com/ at Foreign Policy's blog;
Wiki Leaks on Democracy Now!;
One Analyst, So Many Documents: How could Bradley Manning alone have leaked so much classified material? by Marc Ambinder;
US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment by Simon Jenkins;
The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange by David Samuels;
Wikileaks Evolves by Raffi Khatchadourian;
WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets, The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics and other Salon posts by Glenn Greenwald;
WikiLeaks vs. The Empire by Tom Hayden;
Hillary Clinton Gets Wiki-Served by Robert Scheer;
The (Not So) Secret (Anymore) US War in Pakistan by Jeremy Scahill;
Greg Mitchell's Blogging the Wikileaks;
WL Central: An unofficial WikiLeaks information resource.


Visit MacLeod Cartoons.

Economy: Does renewing Bush tax breaks for the richest Americans make sense?

Not so much.

Since the 1970s, the rich have gotten vastly richer, the poor have become more numerous, and the middle class has shrunk in size and net worth. At the same time, Americans of all classes, hypnotized by propaganda about the "greatest country in the world," continue to misjudge wildly how inequitably wealth is distributed in this country. And when you ask how wealth should be allocated, Americans come up with something that looks a lot more like western Europe than the United States.
The gap between what we believe and what is
[The top row depicts actual U.S. wealth distribution. The middle row shows what we imagine wealth distribution is. And the bottom row reflects what we think wealth distribution ought properly to be. On the first line, by the way, the .3% of the nation's wealth that is in the hands of the bottom 40% of the population is too insignificant to be represented on the chart. Source: Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely.]

"There Is a War Being Waged Against the Working Families of America"
Absent a realistic understanding of how our nation's wealth is distributed, it isn't entirely surprising that we continue to vote in to office politicians who fail to represent our interests, who in fact for decades have pursued policies that have made the situation worse. How badly most of us are represented was made apparent the other day when Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist from Vermont, rose to address the U.S. Senate:


See, also: Anti-poverty effort good for everybody by David DeWitt (The Athens News 2010-11-11).

Economy: In the middle of the worst economic decline in over 80 years, we need fiscal stimuli, not fiscal austerity

In the political current climate, mainstream Keynesianism, as espoused by economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, has come to seem almost left-wing. Is the Keynesian critique of austerity correct, and is a return to Keynesianism what we need?
Keynesianism only seems left-wing because the center has caved rightward. First, even a Nobel Prize does not protect one from ostracism by the mainstream of the economics profession today if you persist in dispensing Keynesian wisdom and challenge the assumption that unfettered markets always know best. As hard as this may be for non-economists to believe, Stiglitiz and Krugman are now persona non grata within the economics profession. Second, in the 1950s and 60s even Tories and Republicans had to begrudgingly accede to the wisdom of financial regulation and Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies. But that day is long past. Now even Labour and Democrats buy into the myth that markets, including financial markets, can be relied on to self-regulate, and governments must engage in fiscal austerity when recessions create temporary budget deficits. When the center caves right, center left appears to be left.

There are two important lessons to be drawn. (1) While socialists should not have to lead the charge for Keynesian policies to ameliorate capitalist crises, unfortunately that is the position we find ourselves in. Right now we must not only do our own work – explaining why all versions of capitalism are far less desirable than participatory, democratic socialism – but do the work of Keynesian reformers as well who have lost influence in all major political parties. (2) There is no point in trying to explain to Tories and Republicans why their policies are flawed. They have chosen to embrace ill-advised, discredited, nineteenth century economic policies because these policies serve their most important purpose – further pressing the class war they have been winning for more than three decades. Their first instinct when a crisis hits is not to search for policies that would actually solve the crisis. Instead they search their “wish list” for ways to take advantage of the crisis to press for changes that serve their class interests – further cuts in social spending, further concessions regarding wages, benefits, and working conditions, more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and of course more corporate welfare like the bailouts doled out to the financial industry. The fact that every one of these policies will only deepen the current crisis is of no concern to them.

When capitalism proves completely incapable of putting our productive potential to good use what is called for is replacing capitalism with socialism. A return to Keynesianism would be to settle for only part of a loaf, and leave us vulnerable to another counter revolutionary roll back of hard won gains, like the one we have been living through. However, unless I am pleasantly surprised, and leftists can win the loyalty and support of a majority of the population for replacing capitalism with socialism much sooner than I foresee, there is no road to participatory, democratic socialism that does not run through many successful reform campaigns to bring Keynesian policies back in vogue.
The rest of the story: Digging In A Hole -- Robin Hahnel, economics professor at American University and author of Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation and, with Michael Albert, of The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, discusses the continuing mismanagement of the economic crisis in the UK, Ireland and the US with Alex Doherty of New Left Project.

Must read: Freezing Out Hope by Paul Krugman -- After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?
 
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