[Peace-discuss] Opposing co-option

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Of course the first step is to stop refusing to admit it's occurred. --CGE]

	August 20, 2009
	The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen
	to the Democratic Party in Years
	By DAVE LINDORFF

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party and to
progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the presidency and
dragged the US into the First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and ultimately
betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party, shattering what was left of
the New Deal coalition and leaving the American left adrift and riven by the
conflict between those who thought the Democratic Party was the only viable
vehicle for progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the
grip of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to
an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because he has taken
the concept of selling out to corporate interests and compromising with
Republicans to such remarkable heights that progressives hopefully can no longer
be confused about the irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate
interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the military-industrial
complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of Iraq and endless war in
Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of the country’s colossal armory of
death, from strategic missiles and submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas
to high-tech fighter squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting continuation
of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National Security Agency spying
program, defended military spying within the US, and refused to prosecute
obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment and torture
of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world at Bagram Air Base
and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of closing Guantanamo as
promised, is looking into transferring that hellhole of torture and abuse to one
or several sites in the mainland US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging “reform” bill
looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation of the Clinton era
that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking on the insurance industry,
the hospital companies and the pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the
profit-making medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them
behind closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the offices of
bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.  Obama and his
congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the single-payer
idea -- essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that even Obama himself
admits would be cheaper and more universal -- out of sight and off the table.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even make a
pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus program, but half
of it was in the form of tax cuts -- token for the poor and middle class and
significant for the rich and for businesses, and half in the form of federal
grants, often for unneeded projects like roads and road repair which go to some
of the higher paid members of the working class, leaving the poor and the
ununionized with no job help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of
trillions of dollars in bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up
the huge mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and bank
regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz
and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration, and
Wall Street shills like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not because we
thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his background -- 
community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience living in a third 
world country (Indonesia), multi-racial -- would lead him to make at least some 
right decisions.

We, or certainly I, hoped too that the energized young and working class
electorate that came out for him in the fall would continue to press him
aggressively to do the right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the
economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist through and through
on all the major issues that matter. And I was wrong on the second. Most of the
left in the US, from the labor movement to the environmentalist movement to the
anti-war movement, has to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them
out on each of their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much more blatant,
and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and for all the talk about
Obama’s ability to string words together, he is so much less of a charismatic
figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton, that he is unlikely to hang on to the
ardent support that propelled him to his victory last November. The
disappointment and sense of betrayal among progressives this time is palpable,
especially because, while Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working
with a Republican, or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of
both houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues to
deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I predict,
health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, and if, as I am
equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in Afghanistan continue to worsen,
the left is going to see Obama and the Democrats in Congress as the failures and
corrupt frauds they are, and will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives
will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement needs to
recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party has been and will
continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all its political money back
and only support those who are 100  per cent  allies in the struggle for the
rights of workers. No money for the party as a whole. It should also go back to
the pioneering work of people like the late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and
Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, who before his death was tirelessly working
to establish an American labor party.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement, cannot come
together as one, there is little hope of political change in America. At that
point the alternative would be an increasing militancy over these critical
issues, outside of the electoral arena —- something that has to happen anyhow,
regardless of whether a real third party force can be put together.  We know
that simply organizing occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key
cities, accomplishes nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge
members of Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the White
House will not do the right thing just because it is the right thing, or because
we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear that they will actually lose
our votes in the next election. For the most part, incumbent Democrats know that
the people who peacefully march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote
for them come the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people
who are being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in
paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff at mindspring.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08202009.html