Kemstone's Journal

We tend to take the conditions of the world during our short life-spans for granted. Unless we live through some kind of earth-shattering, world-changing event, we fall into the trap of believing—if only subconsciously—that things were always more or less the same as they are now.

I love the end of the year, as it’s a time when writers and journalists take a step back and try to put the year in a broader historical context. This year there will undoubtedly be a lot of talk about Obama’s fall from grace, the worsening conditions of the middle class, and the triumph of corporations and financial institutions over the threat of increased regulation. To really understand the significance of these things, one must look back not merely to the beginning of the current administration or even the last decade, but all the way back to the start of the previous century.

I’m about half-way through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (which ought to be required reading for every high school student in America), and I’m struck by the parallels between the conditions of the working class at the turn of the 20^th century and the direction things are heading in now. Back then, and indeed for the vast majority of American history, there was no ‘middle class’ to speak of. Everything was controlled by a handful of powerful business interests who had more wealth than the bottom 80% of Americans combined, and that bottom 80% worked for slave wages if they were lucky enough to even have a job.

The ‘middle class’ as we know it has really only existed for a brief shining moment following the New Deal and subsequent economic boom resulting from our making it through WWII without a scratch. Nearly everyone alive today has experienced what life in America was like with a relatively equitable distribution of wealth, and it seems unthinkable that the middle class could ever disappear. Our complacency is slowly allowing the same handful of powerful business interests who had a chokehold over the country for most of its history to regain their former position. The middle class is in its death pangs, and unless the people act it won’t be long before we slide back into what seems to be the natural state of affairs in a civilized society: a few enormously wealthy and powerful people at the top, a small class of moderately wealthy bankers, lawyers, and politicians who preserve the status quo, and the masses at the bottom suffering and toiling through their nasty, brutish and short lives.

But aside from the parallels between then and where we’re heading now, there are two important differences:

1- Things were much worse back then. We may think we have it bad now, but at least there is a minimum wage, an 8-hour workday with a 2-day weekend, strict safety regulations for dangerous occupations and legal recourse against negligent employers, and a social safety net for the unemployed (at least those who’ve been unemployed for fewer than 99 weeks). It’s horrifying to read about young women forced to work 16-hour days at a factory for bread-crumbs, only to be burned alive because the owner didn’t want to pay the cost of making the doors open outward. We may lose a handful of workers each year due to negligence (see Massey Energy, BP) but there was once a time when they were dying by the thousands. And while things like out-sourcing may drive our wages down now, at least most of us can still afford to buy things other than food and clothing.

Our taking such things for granted leads to the second major difference between then and now:

2- The people back then were willing to fight for better conditions. Every single major improvement in the lives of the lower classes had to be paid for with strikes, protests, and occasionally even blood. Factory owners didn’t agree to an 8-hour workday out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn’t start paying the extra cost to ensure their workers’ safety out of pure human compassion. Workers had to strike to get just a few of their demands met, and then strike again to get the rest. They had to join forces with workers of other industries and take to the streets to get the ruling class to treat them with basic human dignity. Most of the time, these protests were brutally suppressed and many brave men and women (as well as far too many children) paid the ultimate price for the cause. But gradually, the ruling class was forced to recognize that it could not get away with treating people like cattle, and small victory by small victory our ancestors transformed this country into the one we’ve always known.

It is this country—the country in which just about everyone has an equal shot at a good life, where hard work leads almost invariably to the rewards of a good home and healthy family, where the prosperity of the wealthy is shared with the workers who allow them to generate that wealth—that we were taught to be proud of as children. And it is something to be proud of. Our forefathers fought very hard for it, and many are still struggling to preserve it.

But we have to understand that this America did not always exist and there’s no guarantee that it always will. Things may not be nearly as bad as they were in the year 1900 but there’s nothing to stop us from returning to those conditions other than the sheer force of our combined will.

That means more than just going to the voting booth every 2-4 years. With the exception of FDR, not a single American president has ever used his position to truly fight the upper classes on behalf of the masses, and the current president has demonstrated that he won’t do so either. He is behaving like most presidents, attempting to balance the competing interests of the country’s various powers, his primary concern being the maintenance of the status quo.

Were things not trending so sharply downwards for the middle class, this would be perfectly acceptable. But we’re standing on the precipice of losing the ground that our forefathers fought so hard to gain, and maintaining course now is akin to class suicide.

I worry that current generations are too complacent, that we take our lives of relative comfort and luxury for granted, and that we therefore feel no compulsion to take to the streets the way our forefathers did. We circulate online petitions, call our representatives, make donations to political campaigns and so on, but all of these things are a poor substitute for genuine action.

To be fair, our ancestors did not have 24-hour cable news channels to compete with—entities that either serve to distract the American people from what’s most important, or (in the case of Fox News) actually hoodwink them into siding with the upper classes against their fellow citizens. But we still have the advantage of a free and open internet, at least for the time being.

Our ancestors also had the advantage of necessity. They had no choice—either take to the streets or starve. Demand more consideration from their employers or risk being burned alive.

We’ve heard of pre-emptive war. Can we have a pre-emptive revolution? Can we get enough Americans to recognize the danger of what might lie ahead for us to draw the proper lines in the sand and threaten to put the entire system in jeopardy unless pledges are made to preserve what our ancestors fought for? Hands off the minimum wage! Hands off Social Security! Hands off the inflation of financial bubbles! Hands off affordable housing! Hands off affordable education! Hands off patients’ rights! Hands off workers’ rights!

Perhaps we have to wait until we completely lose these things before the people stand up and fight for them again. Perhaps the pendulum needs to complete a full swing back in the other direction before it can start swinging back. We have the misfortune of living during the back-end of the swing. But we do have the power to stop it and drive it back the other way if we take a lesson from our ancestors and fight now before it’s too late. We have an obligation to them to preserve what they fought for. We have a responsibility to the next generations to prevent them from being worse off than we are.

I just hope we can recognize that before it’s too late.

I will try to make this as brief as possible because I want to increase the likelihood that people will read it. If you agree with my assessment, I hope you’ll spread this around the internet far and wide, because this is a conversation that needs to happen NOW if it happens at all. Running a progressive candidate against Barack Obama will require a year of fund-raising, and the Iowa caucus is a year away.

I never thought I’d advocate challenging Obama in the 2012 election, but I also never thought that after two years of a Democratic president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, things would still be this bad.

Foreign policy-wise, the troops are still in Iraq and our presence in Afghanistan has escalated. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base are still open. The torturers have not been punished nor even investigated, and the president has now claimed the power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process of law.

Domestically, our government is still illegally spying on its citizens. Private health insurance companies still have no competition to prevent them from profiting by letting people die. Wall Street is continuing the practices that crashed the economy and unless more measures are taken it’s only a matter of time before the second crash comes. The climate change issue has gone completely unaddressed and Big Oil and Coal can continue to rake in record profits. And now, the national debt and deficit will continue to sky-rocket for a minimum of two years as the completely un-necessary and un-stimulative tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans are extended. Presumably, this decrease in revenue will be balanced by decreases in spending, and it looks like Social Security is first on the chopping block.

“But wait,” you might say, “didn’t he sign a measure strengthening registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists?” Yes, you can easily rattle off a long list of small-ball accomplishments that we could never have expected from a Republican president, but most of these things can be done or un-done with the stroke of a pen. When it comes to the fights that really count, the things that go to the heart of the broken system, this president has consistently maintained the status quo.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Obama’s advisors started talking about how the tax-cut deal he struck with Republicans would actually be good for the country. Fox News commentators are actually praising Obama for finally “admitting” that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs, and because Obama has now made Bush’s economic policy his own, he has no choice but to defend it. It’s absurd to think he’ll fight to let them expire in two years if he wasn’t willing to do that when he still had wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democratic president will now be pushing for Republican policies and defending them with Republican talking points. Presumably, we’re going to start hearing him agree with his deficit commission that cuts need to be made to Social Security.

At this point, it has to be acknowledged that unless we issue a primary challenge to Obama, we will essentially have two Republican candidates in 2012.

The objection to this strategy is clear: A primary challenge is likely to fail and it will only weaken Obama and hurt his chances to win the general election. And wouldn’t a Republican president be worse?

Until last week I would have agreed with you. But then I asked myself this question, and I hope you’ll ask yourselves the same:

Which is worse for America? A Republican president who tries to implement Republican policies which progressives and the majority of Americans can rally against to stop those policies from going through? Or a Democratic president who acts as though he has no choice but to implement Republican policies, in which case the progressive movement is fractured and there is not enough unified opposition to prevent them from going through?

Ideally, a primary challenge would result in a true progressive in the White House who will finally draw lines in the sand and be willing to take sides with the American people and against the upper class. But if not, it’s beginning to look like a second Obama term would actually be worse for America than a Republican.

I keep waiting for someone other than a left-wing blogger or commentator (perhaps some kind of Democratic politician, perhaps some kind of president of some kind of united body of states) to throw the wrench into the argument that the unemployment crisis in this country is a result of the wealthiest Americans and corporations not having enough money.

According to the New York Times, corporations earned a record $1.66 trillion in profits in the third quarter of 2010.

Well that’s good news. I guess now they can finally start using all those obscene profits to create jobs, no?

No?

The corporations of America are not only doing just fine—they’re better than ever. And yet the titans of industry are still making the absurd claim that Obama is anti-business, and if he would just cozy up to the Wall Street fat-cats a little more, just crawl a little deeper into their proverbial assholes, the rest of America will start to see some real job creation.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I’d suggest that when the super-wealthy people who work for Wall Street banks, private health insurance companies, the oil and coal industries, and any business that makes up the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are gathered around the dinner table, they say how thankful they are that we don’t have a real Democratic president who actually wants to reform anything.

I’ll just be thankful that these rich people have so much stinking money that they can afford to keep buying politicians and media hacks to continue to rattle off the absurd talking-point that Obama is a radical anti-business leftist who just hates hates HATES it when corporations make a profit.

Assuming anyone actually reads this before sitting across from their conservative family members this Thanksgiving dinner, when you hear them parrot that propaganda about how the rich need more tax cuts so they can create jobs, point out to them that corporations are making record-breaking profits, the rich are better off than they ever were before, and they’re still laying off workers to save even more money.

But maybe once they’ve saved up so much money that they can buy every politician in the country three times over, they’ll use some of what’s left over to create jobs for Americans. No?

We demand smaller government (except for the defense department).

The government needs to balance the budget (as long as it doesn’t involve raising taxes).

The government better not mess with the free market (so it should let giant corporations merge and monopolize every industry).

The government needs to look out for the interests of the middle class (by letting the richest people take as large a share of the nation’s wealth as possible).

The government has to drastically cut spending (but continue to pay billions for military equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union).

The government’s primary responsibility is to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism (which it can do by invading Muslim countries, killing loads of civilians, and imprisoning and torturing their friends and neighbors).

The government needs to stay the hell away from religion (unless it’s to impose Biblical law on all citizens).

The government better not step between us and our doctors (unless it’s to deny us the choice to have an abortion).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us who we can and can not marry).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when it comes to tapping our phones or groping us at the airport).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us which chemicals we’re forbidden to put in our bodies).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (except hire people directly).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (by cutting tax-rates for giant corporations that don’t pay any taxes anyway).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (as long as it doesn’t force companies to create those jobs in America instead of overseas).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean eliminating oversight of Wall Street so that they can continue to get rich by putting the entire economy in jeopardy).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting corporations maximize profits by deceiving and screwing over consumers at every opportunity).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting the coal and oil industries cut whatever corners in terms of worker and environmental safety that they see fit).

Our biggest concern is for the well-being of our grandchildren (but it’s not even worth considering whether scientists are right about climate change).

We firmly believe in living by Christian values (except for loving thy neighbor and caring for the less fortunate).

We believe in abiding by the constitution (except for the parts about equal rights and the separation of church and state).

Our ideology is superior to all other political ideologies (because it’s based on our gut feeling that it is).

I follow U.S. politics because I think it’s important to know who’s pulling the levers of power in the world’s most powerful country, but it often feels like watching a game of football. The Democrats had possession of the ball for two years, and during that time they pushed legislation while the Republicans mounted a strong defense, limiting them to a field goal at best. The Democrats’ recent loss of the House of Representatives prompted them to punt the ball and gear up to spend the next two years on defense, defending themselves against relentless investigations as well as the inevitable push to undo the good parts of health care and financial reform.

But something about this match doesn’t seem right. All of the moves seem choreographed, the outcome pre-determined. It feels less like a sporting event and more like a scripted reality TV series in which the actors already know what’s coming but they try to act surprised when it does.

I’m not the only one who had the idea that the Democrats were trying to throw the 2010 election. Some were making that claim as early as March, when the Democrats’ refusal to put the public option for health insurance up for a vote revealed to everyone with a shred of intelligence that they never actually wanted it in the first place. The public option would have been a touchdown for the Democrats, exactly the kind of genuine systemic change that the voters were hoping for when they went to the polls in 2008, but they never even made a serious push for the end-zone.

Clearly there were other forces at work—forces more powerful than either of the teams on the field—who had determined from the beginning that there would be no government-run health insurance option to compete with the profit-driven corporations. All the Democrats needed was a good excuse to give it up. Republican filibusters worked perfectly when the Democrats had 60 seats, as all they needed were one or two conservative Democrats to play the villain and join the Republican filibuster until the public option was removed. But when Scott Brown was elected and the Democrats had no choice but to push the legislation through under a process that required a simple majority, the Democrats were caught with their pants down. That wasn’t part of the script.

It should have been obvious to everyone then and there that the public option’s failure had been planned all along. But the corporate media did its job by brushing it off and diverting peoples’ attention long enough for the Democrats to pick their pants back up and go on pretending that they were actually trying to get real reform done.

That was a deeply significant moment. The fact that politicians from both parties are working to serve the corporations and not ordinary Americans has seldom been more obvious.

I believe we’re at another one of those moments of clarity right now. There’s no reason the Democrats should have lost the mid-term elections as badly as they did. Even with their constant caving-in on the most significant aspects of legislation, they still managed to get a lot more positive things done than the Republicans have for as long as I can remember. People may have short attention spans but they still remember the eight disastrous years of the Bush administration and the economic crisis brought to us by Republican policies. The Democrats had a winning narrative if they’d only chosen to aggressively push it, but they didn’t. Rather than constantly remind people of what a miserable failure Republican policies have been for the middle class, many Democrats chose to run against their own party, touting all the ways in which they were unlike the president and more like their Republican opponents.

The fact that the Democrats who most blatantly followed that strategy did poorly in the elections should have made it clear that it’s not compromise and capitulation that voters are after, but real significant change. With a few notable exceptions, strong progressive fighters won and corporatists lost. The message of the elections on the Democratic side should be clear: Democratic voters want their leaders to stand up to the Republicans and fight for real change, and if they don’t see that happening they’re going to stay home.

But that wasn’t the message the Democrats were supposed to get, and they seem to be going to great lengths not to get it.

According to the script they all seem to be following, the Democrats were supposed to lose big in 2010 and thus put a stop to the two-year period of reform that the country’s most powerful interests decided to allow. They got everything they wanted under Bush (short of the privatization of Social Security) and enriched themselves greatly at the expense of the middle class. The demand for reforms were so great in 2008 that they must have decided to toss the people a bone, to let the Democrats take the ball for awhile and give progressives the impression that they were getting what they wanted. Naturally, they wouldn’t let anything too drastic go through, but they’d succeed in getting half of progressives to believe that what they did get was the best they could hope for.

At this point, half of the people still reading this will be rolling their eyes and dismissing me as a conspiracy theorist. Half the people really believe that the Democrats did the best they could for the American people and the reason they lost the election is that independent voters decided they didn’t actually want liberal policies.

But consider how well the theory fits the facts: The Democrats had a chance to vote on the Bush tax-cuts before the election. They could have extended those tax-cuts for 98% of Americans and let the cuts for the wealthiest 2% revert back to pre-Bush levels. Not only would this have taken $700 billion out of the deficit, but it would have been extremely popular. The Democrats could have shown themselves to be true fighters for the middle class, willing to do something that would only benefit them and not the super-rich. They might have even been able to ride the issue to electoral victory.

But they decided not to force a vote, and look what happened. As expected, the Republicans won control of the House (and they would have won the Senate too if it weren’t for unscripted elements like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell) and the peddlers of conventional wisdom in the mainstream media immediately started calling for the president to get “back in the center”, to “show some love for Republican leaders”—essentially to bow his head. Some have even gone so far as to say Obama shouldn’t even run for a second term and instead spend the next two years doing everything the Republicans want him to do.

Suddenly there’s an opening to extend those Bush tax-cuts for the top 2% after all! The president can say he’s doing it in response to the election results, as though the voters’ most resounding message was to cut those poor rich people a break.

There was never any chance that the rich would let their taxes go up in the first place. They just had to dangle that out there, make it seem like a real possibility so that progressives would go on believing that the system can still be potentially changed from within. The script may have its twists and turns, but in the end the rich always get what they want.

The truly ominous thing is what lies on the horizon regarding spending cuts. Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission revealed their proposals this past week, extremely unpopular measures including cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising the retirement age, slashing the federal workforce, and increasing the gas tax, all while cutting taxes for corporations!  (And how convenient that this should come at a time when the president is in Asia and can’t be easily reached for comment?)

From here the narrative should move in a very predictable direction. Obama and the Democrats can play the good guys as they criticize these proposals, but in the end they’ll have to implement some of them. It’ll be mirror-image of the health care fight: rather than being forced to give up on the best elements in order to get the half-decent ones through, we’ll be forced to accept some of the least objectionable proposals in order to prevent the most egregious from going through. And just as those of us who complained about the public option’s failure were told that we were too liberal and shouldn’t complain just because we didn’t get “every last thing” we wanted, we’ll now be told that we shouldn’t complain just because we didn’t block “every last thing” we didn’t want. Some compromise was necessary, they’ll say. Obama and the Democrats did the best they could.

It should be abundantly clear by now that Obama and the Democrats are not doing the best they can. It’s as though they’ve got wide receivers in the end-zone during every play but the quarterback just runs a few yards before allowing himself to be tackled. Whether he ultimately falls short of the first-down and loses re-election remains to be seen, but judging from the direction the script has been going so far I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying there is some organized group of wealthy and powerful individuals who really have planned out the entire political football match ahead of time (though that idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds). It’s enough that the system is rigged in such a way as to ensure the best possible outcome for the already-rich-and-powerful every time. They’ve got enough money to buy enough politicians who will do their bidding. Not every Democrat agrees to follow the script, but enough of them do. And sadly, the president is one of them.

That is what the progressive movement is confronted with right now. They thought they’d finally found someone to change the game when they got Obama elected in 2008, but since then they’ve just been playing the exact same game in which the outcome is predetermined. They think the president should do more passing and less running, but they’re not suggesting he quit the game altogether.

It’s up to us to leave the stadium and go directly to the script-writers themselves. We have to demand that they burn what they’ve written so far and start composing a new story, one in which our team actually tries to win, or perhaps even one in which there are more than just two teams to root for.

We need a script in which the income disparity between the rich and the middle class actually goes down, where the federal deficit is reduced by cutting military spending and not entitlements, where Americans are put back to work through massive investment in infrastructure and research, where we actually do something about climate change and environmental destruction, where Wall Street bankers actually face consequences for crashing the economy, where war criminals are put to justice even if they used to be the president or vice president, where homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else, where billions of dollars a year aren’t flushed down the toilet on a failed war on drugs, and where every child has the same opportunities as every other child regardless of where they come from.

But that script is very difficult to write. The one we’ve got now is much easier: put all our hopes in politicians and lament our helplessness as those hopes are dashed repeatedly. Watch our team get crushed and go home in defeat. Until we acknowledge what’s actually going on—that American politics is just a scripted game of football designed to keep us all in line—that’s all we’re going to be doing.

Well, America, you’ve managed to inflict massive pain upon yourself yet again. After 2006 and 2008 I thought that we might actually be getting on the right track, but clearly this is still the same country that gave George W. Bush two terms as president. I still think the majority knows what’s best for the country, but apparently not enough of them care enough to actually vote.

So now we’ve handed control of the House of Representatives back to the Republican Party, and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate to almost nothing. We’ve let the corporate shills and collaborators keep their seats and let men of principle like Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson be booted out. We’ve allowed the Big Business interests who’ve spent unprecedented amounts of money to buy these elections succeed in their efforts, thus paving the way for even more giant anonymous donations in every election to come. Rather than prompt a media narrative that voters want systemic fixes to our broken system of government, we’ve allowed the corporate-controlled media to go with the story they’ve wanted to tell all along: that the Democrats did too much, fought for too much change, and that they now need lay low and protect the status quo.

Good going, America. I don’t know who I’m more disappointed in—the misguided fools who voted for Republicans thinking they would actually represent the people and not the special interests who fund their campaigns—or the apathetic liberals who didn’t think this election was important enough to get off their asses and vote. Both are responsible for the disaster that’s coming over the next two years and will almost certainly extend well beyond that. When historians look back at this election, the first since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, they may very well write that this was our last chance to pull ourselves back from the brink.

Make no mistake—the winner of the 2010 Election was not the Republican Party. The winner was money. Mega-rich individuals like the Koch Brothers, giant Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs, and big corporations like private health insurance companies have all discovered that buying elections is now easier than ever. They had their list of targets, the few politicians like Feingold and Grayson who refused to play ball with them, and poured massive amounts of money into ads attacking them. The American public was successfully duped, and they went and voted for the candidates spouting the same familiar “smaller government, lower taxes” rhetoric that they fall for time and time again. Apparently they didn’t get the message that when a Republican says “smaller government” he means “less oversight and accountability for giant corporations” and when he says “lower taxes” he’s only talking about billionaires.

The same goes for Prop. 19 in California, the ballot measure that would have finally put in motion an end to this absurd marijuana prohibition that’s enabled so many criminal gangs to flourish, taken up so much time and resources of law-enforcement, put so many non-violent people into overcrowded prisons, and caused numerous deaths due to the fact that alcohol—a far more dangerous drug—is legal and therefore more accessible. The Chamber of Commerce poured their money into an ad campaign full of lies and distortions (just because weed is legal doesn’t mean you’d be allowed to drive or go to work while high) in order to protect the profits of the private prison industry, the alcohol business, and everyone else who benefits from prohibition. The failed war on drugs continues, thanks to Big Money and America’s indifference to actual facts.

So what can we expect from here on out? In the short-term, prepare for an excruciating two years as the 112^th Congress makes the 111^th look like the most successful, progressive Congress in history. There are two lessons Obama could take from the election results, but we already know he’ll take the wrong one. He’s been sealed inside the Washington bubble for so long that he’ll actually believe the false narrative that Democrats lost because they were too liberal and he needs to follow Bill Clinton’s lead and move “towards the center” (as though he hasn’t firmly lodged himself there already). The argument that Democrats lost because they weren’t liberal enough—that they accomplished too little—will be dismissed off-hand. They’ll accept the Fox News narrative, just as they have since the very beginning. Only now, they won’t even try to push back. They’ll propose all kinds of compromises with the Republicans in a desperate attempt to finally convince people how bipartisan they are, but they will continue to fail as the Republicans have no interest whatsoever in letting Obama accomplish anything.

The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has already stated quite plainly that limiting Obama to one-term is their top priority. There are some deluded folks in the media and in the White House who think that because Republicans now control the House they’ll have to take some responsibility and actually work with Democrats to take steps to improve the economy. This is utter nonsense. The Republicans know they won big in this election mainly because the economy is still terrible. Why on earth would they want to lift a finger to improve it before 2012? Their best chance of taking the White House in 2012 is to make sure the economy remains just as terrible as it is now, and that means obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.

You should expect to see many-a-subpoena handed down to Democrats and members of the administration. Bogus charges will be trumped up and investigated relentlessly, taking up all of the time in the House and dragging the media narrative with it. Don’t be surprised if they invent some preposterous reason to impeach Obama. Even if they fail, it will be a very politically useful distraction for them, and it will undoubtedly please their base. Because honestly, how many of these Tea Party people really care about the federal deficit? I’d bet that most of them are only out there marching because they personally loathe Obama, and as long as the Republicans are attacking him they won’t give a damn about fiscal policy.

And let’s not even mention the likelihood of a government shut-down. The Republicans have been itching to try that stunt again, and they have reason to believe that the results will be different this time.

But that’s just the next two years. Long-term, things look even more dismal thanks to Citizens United. As I said, the powerful interests who can buy the government have now discovered that buying the government is even easier, and because of their monumental success this time around it’s going to be even easier next time. Not only will they be far less hesitant to throw money at their preferred candidates (nobody who did this time around suffered any negative consequences), but the politicians themselves will be far more likely to approach fund-raising by soliciting the donations of just a few major corporations they can do favors for, and ignore the millions of people who might give them small donations that are now no longer needed.

It won’t be long before instead of a Senator from Wisconsin or a Representative from Florida’s First district we’ll have a Senator from Exxon or a Representative from Goldman Sachs. The politicians already care more about pleasing their big donors than delivering on reforms that would help average citizens. Now they’ll have almost no reason whatsoever to do anything for average citizens. As long as they do the bidding of their corporate masters, those corporate masters will ensure that they remain in power.

Democracy may have breathed its last gasps in the United States of America. From here on out, it’s plutocracy. The rich will make all the decisions, and they’ll do so based purely on their own selfish interests. The gap between the super-wealthy and everybody else will continue to expand until there’s no more “middle-class” to speak of, and the power and influence the United States once held on the international stage will slowly wane away as foreign interests find that they too can buy a piece of the American government.

Sadly, most of the people who made the mistake of voting Republican in this election will never understand the harm they’ve done. Fox News will make sure of that. They’ll continue to insist that it’s the liberals—the people who’ve been desperately trying to make America work for average people again—who destroyed America. The poor fools will never know that it was them all along, that they are to blame for their struggles, and that when they could have prevented the death of their beloved democracy by simply taking an objective look at the facts and voting accordingly, they were too busy marching on behalf of the very people responsible for their suffering.

I sincerely hope I’m being overly pessimistic, but hope is in short supply right now.

I usually don’t do this, but I want to revisit the point I made in yesterday’s post by laying it out as clearly and succinctly as I can. I think some of my message got lost in the verbosity, and I want this to be an argument that people can use on their friends or neighbors to get them to vote, whether they’re reasonable Republicans or frustrated Democrats.

This argument has three basic premises from which I draw the conclusion that the 2010 mid-terms have the potential to be the most important mid-term elections of all time.

1- Campaign finance is the most important issue in politics. The outcome of every policy debate in Washington is determined by whom the politicians are aiming to serve, and they typically serve the people who fund their campaigns.

2- The Citizens United decision made it possible for politicians to fund their entire campaigns by only soliciting donations from a handful of corporations or wealthy individuals. Because the Republican Party has a better track-record for serving corporations and the super-wealthy, most of the money is going to them.

3- President Obama made campaign finance the #1 issue for Democrats in this election. Presumably, the Democratic Party is worried enough about the prospect of becoming a permanent minority that they’ll have no choice but to push for campaign finance reform if they maintain enough political power to do so.

Conclusion: If the Democrats have a strong enough showing at the polls on November 2, the media-narrative is all set to go: Democrats were spared an electoral blowout due to widespread concern about powerful interests drowning out the voices of average citizens. They will not only have to act on campaign finance reform out of political necessity, but because they’ll have a mandate from the American people to do so.

Of course if the Democrats lose their majorities they won’t be able to do anything and the Republican Party will continue to greatly out-fundraise Democrats thanks to their rich friends, whose grip on the government will very quickly solidify.

We’re at a crossroads. Down one road lies plutocracy. Down the other lies a chance at regaining some of our former democracy. As of now, the direction we go is still up to the voters. That might not be the case in the next election.

I never thought I’d say this about a mid-term election, but I think this might be the most important one we’ve ever had.

It could just as easily not have been—it could have been just another boring mid-term where a few seats change hands and no real clear message is sent—but something happened in these last few weeks that changes everything.

It began when the president of the United States started talking about the most important issue in American politics. I’m no big fan of Barack Obama—I usually only mention him to criticize him—but I have to give him credit for forcing this discussion. He could have chosen any issue, any theme, any message for the Democrats to hammer home in the weeks before the election but he chose the most important one: the question of how political campaigns are financed.

Of course, he didn’t really have much choice. With the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, the floodgates have been opened up and corporate money is pouring into the Republican Party’s campaign coffers. Tens of millions of dollars are being raised from a mere handful of donors. A politician used to have to make hundreds of phone calls to potential donors and raise money through small donations from average people, but that’s no longer the case. Now that a single corporation or wealthy individual can basically bankroll an entire campaign, any politician willing to sell-out (that’s the vast majority) can potentially raise all the money he or she needs with a single phone call.

To his credit, Obama saw which way the winds were blowing and decided to take the politically risky move of drawing attention to it. Most people’s eyes glaze over in boredom at the very sound of the words “campaign finance” and the conventional wisdom in Washington was that you couldn’t move voters by talking about that kind of thing. The mainstream media outlets weren’t going to shine the spotlight on it because it’s not exactly ratings-gold and they’re all owned by giant corporations anyway, so the president had to use the bully pulpit to get people talking about it and thereby give the American people a chance to fight back before it’s too late.

After this upcoming election, it might be too late. That’s why I wonder if this could in fact be the most important mid-term election in American history.

If you haven’t already read the New York Times article about how large corporations are able to anonymously fund the Republican Party’s campaign efforts by funneling their money through the Chamber of Commerce, I hope you’ll read it carefully and explain to everyone you know what’s going on. Because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is technically a not-for-profit entity (although it’s made up of the largest for-profit businesses in the country), they don’t have to disclose their donors. We know that companies like Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, Dow Chemical, and Prudential Financial are giving millions to the Chamber, but these donations are not earmarked for specific campaign ads so they don’t have to account for supporting specific candidates. But they know what they’re getting when they donate to the Chamber—93% of the ads they run either support Republican candidates or criticize their Democratic opponents.

The most chilling fact of all is that back in 2008, even before Citizens United, nearly half of the $140 million in donations to the Chamber came from just 45 donors. 45 people virtually bankrolling the Republican Party. Thanks to the Supreme Court, this stands to get even worse.

If you are a Republican, you may simply think “Great! More money for my side!” But unless you’re also one of the wealthiest 2% of Americans, this is bad news for you too. The Republican Party isn’t going to be the party of conservative ideals—it’ll simply be the party of the super-rich and nothing else. You’ll get what you want insofar as their interests are aligned with conservative ideology (if by “conservative ideology” you mean total deregulation of Wall Street, complete privatization of everything, and no consumer protection whatsoever), but good luck getting your Republican representative to even bother opening your e-mails if he or she doesn’t need your support.

To a great degree, this was already the state of affairs in Washington and Citizens United did nothing more than make it worse. The sea change in political fund-raising has been underway for many decades and all the Supreme Court did was speed it up.

But this gives us an opportunity that we didn’t have before, and as reluctant as I am to give Obama credit for anything I have to give him credit for this. Because he decided to make this the #1 issue for Democrats this election and got the rest of the party to follow suit, should they maintain enough seats in the next Congress to be able to push for campaign finance reform, they’ll have a strong mandate to do so.

That’s right—we now have a reason to vote for Democrats. Of course many are already happy enough with the health care and financial legislation that was passed to want to reward Democrats for their efforts anyway, but those of us who are deeply disappointed in how compromised and ineffectual those bills turned out to be were left wondering why we should even bother going to the polls. Yes, the Republican alternative would be far worse, but perhaps the Democrats needed to lose badly in order to shake them out of their complacency and get them to really fight for the middle class the next time they take power.

But if things keep going the way they’re going, the Democrats may never take power again. The wealthiest people in the country have more than enough money to outspend millions of regular citizens, and it’s only going to get worse the longer the economy remains in the ditch. The super-wealthy know that a bad economy works to their advantage, so if the Republican Party takes control you should expect things to remain this way. If 45 people manage to accumulate more wealth and power than the other 300 million of us combined, we will essentially have a one-party system in America. A plutocracy.

Much has been said about the “enthusiasm gap” between liberals and conservatives this year, with the conventional wisdom being that all of the energy is on the right. But the left now has a reason to get fired up, perhaps even more of a reason now than in 2008.

If you live in a state or district in which the Democrat is being bombarded with negative ads funded by a handful of billionaires, you should vote for that candidate on that basis alone. Tell the exit-pollsters that campaign financing was your #1 concern, and help shape the narrative that the media needs to tell after this election: that the Democratic Party was spared an electoral blowout due to massive push-back against the flood of money coming into the electoral process to drown out ordinary voices.

If Barack Obama goes into the second half of his first term with a clear mandate to do something about this, we might actually see some real campaign finance reform. Even someone as eager to compromise with the established powers as Barack Obama can see that he can’t afford to placate them on this issue. His political life and the political lives of all his fellow Democrats are in jeopardy if things are allowed to continue down this path.

Campaign finance reform has always been the key issue lurking behind every other issue. The politicians work for those who pay them, and if they get paid by the corporations and not average citizens, they will serve the corporations and not average citizens. Perhaps with Citizen United, the corporations pushed their luck a little too far and prompted a backlash that will finally send the balance of power swinging back in our direction. If that does turn out to be the result—and it’s up to the voters to make sure it does—that would make this the most important mid-term election of all time.

One of the main reasons the system in Washington is so broken is that candidates from both parties are bought by major financial interests, so even when democrats push for reform they don’t push too hard because they don’t want to lose that campaign funding. Giant corporations usually favor republicans, but they pour money into both sides in order to cover their bases. The last thing they’d want is to have an entire political party not beholden to them.

And yet with the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case allowing corporations to anonymously spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads, the game might actually be changing. Republican candidates are out-raising their Democratic opponents by incredibly wide margins this year, thanks almost exclusively to large donations filtered through groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. It seems that the powerful interests are banking not only on a republican takeover but possibly a permanent republican majority. If they only have to buy one party, and the Citizens United decision allows them to pour as much money into that party as they like, why bother covering their bases? Just make sure democrats stop winning elections.

I hope this is their strategy, because I believe it smacks of blind hubris and overconfidence. If they stop buying Democratic candidates, then perhaps Democratic candidates will stop working for them. Why water-down reform if you’re not going to be rewarded financially for doing so? If private industry wants to make an enemy of you, why not make an enemy of them and actually stand up and fight them?

Imagine if Barack Obama had been told before the health care debate that neither he nor a single democrat would receive one penny in campaign donations from private health insurance companies. There would have been no reason for them not to push as hard as possible for a public option, because the only people opposed to it (other than the hordes of grossly misinformed right-wingers) were private insurance companies. Imagine if they’d been told that no money from Wall Street would go to fund Democratic campaigns. There would have been no reason to water-down financial reform to the point of impotence the way they did.

This has the potential to bring about a major sea-change in American politics whereby we have two distinct parties—one of Big Industry and the other of the Little Guy—rather than what we have now which is one party of Big Industry and the other of Big Industry and maybe some unions.

Of course with the economy the way it is, we may already be past the point where a party of the Little Guy can have any power anyway. With such a gross disparity of wealth, we may already be at the point where even millions of small donors wouldn’t be able to match the funds of just a handful of big ones. And as long as they can keep half of the regular people convinced that what’s good for Big Business is good for them (as Fox News does for the Tea Party), they might have free reign to really run the country like the plutocracy they’ve been morphing it into for decades.

That’s probably what they’re counting on. Here’s hoping they’re wrong.

One story not getting too much attention (I wonder why) is that money from foreign donors is making its way into the U.S. electoral process through the Chamber of Commerce. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case earlier this year, corporations and other financially powerful interests can spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads.

The Chamber of Commerce is the largest lobbying organization in the U.S. and the second-largest spender in mid-term elections. They represent the nation’s biggest corporations and financial institutions.

If I’m a country that would benefit from a weakened United States, I can now spend money to help remove effective politicians from office and put in place a bunch of morons who will drive the country into the ground. If I’m a foreign corporation that would benefit from the U.S. continuing to make weak regulation and complete disregard for the environment the order of the day, I can spend as much money as I want to get politicians who will protect the status quo elected.

The Chamber of Commerce of course denies that foreign money is being used to fund campaign ads, but while it may be true that foreign entities don’t directly choose which races to get involved in, their donations go to the same pool of money from which the Chamber pays for the ads it buys. If I’m a foreign country or corporation, I don’t have to be specific about how the Chamber of Commerce spends my money—it’s enough that I know that their interests are aligned with mine.

Everyone should be up in arms about this, including the Tea Party crowd. We’re literally putting our country on sale to the highest bidder. How long before this auction becomes a “Going Out of Business” sale?