Kemstone's Journal

My political blog entries generally fall into three broad categories. I mostly argue against other opinions and points of view with varying degrees of snark, but I also like to highlight what I see as the most important underlying problems facing America and the rest of the world today. Finally, I occasionally offer possible solutions to some of these problems.

Today I’m going to make a serious argument for dismantling the U.S. Senate. Yes, I know—it can’t be done. But I’ll explain at the end why even just talking about it could be useful.

The primary flaw of the Senate is the reason it was created in the first place. The framers of the Constitution who represented states with lower populations were reluctant to join a union in which larger states had most of the power. If representation were determined by population alone, high-population states could have too much power over low-population states. For instance, even if every representative of every southern state were in favor of slavery, a simple majority of representatives of northern states could vote to abolish it and the southern states would be powerless to stop them (unless they were to secede).

So they created a bicameral legislature in which one body would distribute representation based on population and the other would evenly distribute representation among each state. Regardless of whether your state’s population was a thousand or a million, you’d get exactly two senators.

Today, Wyoming has just as much representation in the Senate as California, even though Wyoming has only about 500,000 residents while California has about 36.5 million. This means Wyoming residents have roughly 73 times as much political power as California residents when it comes to senatorial representation—completely undermining the principle of one man, one vote.

So even if the majority of Americans are liberal or center-left, as long as the smaller states are mostly conservative the Senate will ensure that Washington governs from the center-right. The government does not accurately reflect the will of the people.

Furthermore, when you have one political party hell-bent on obstructing everything the other party wants to do, the Senate makes it incredibly easy to do so. The whole thing was designed to prevent one politician or party from making too many drastic changes to the law too quickly, and while some mechanism to slow things down is certainly useful, occasionally desperate times call for desperate measures (I’d argue that we’re currently in one of those times) and senatorial gridlock can kill the most essential pieces of legislation.

The biggest culprit is a guy I like to call Philip Uster. Thanks to the filibuster, any party that wishes to obstruct a bill can force the other to obtain 60 votes rather than a simple majority. Even in a body of disproportionate representation, a majority isn’t always enough. 77% of Americans can support something along with 57 out of 100 senators, but it can still fail to pass.

If you don’t think the problem is that serious, consider the fact that 290—yes, two hundred and ninety—bills that were passed in the House of Representatives got stalled in the Senate (and that statistic is from an article written back in February). If we didn’t have a Senate, we would have passed Health Care reform with a public option, along with Climate Change legislation, stronger Financial Reform, and on and on and on.

Now, to get rid of the Senate you’d have to change the Constitution, and that would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Obviously, you’ll never get 67 senators to vote themselves out of a job.

However, if the health care debate taught us anything it’s that we should start with a huge demand and then compromise our way down from there. Had we begun by demanding single-payer we might have traded that away for a public option, but instead we began by demanding a public option and traded that away for…Joe Lieberman’s vote.

If there were some kind of organized “Dismantle the Senate” movement out there consistently beating the drum and highlighting what a huge detriment this body is to the country, we might eventually be able to negotiate some real reforms such as the elimination of the filibuster (or at least lowering the bar), term-limits (because 12 years should be enough time for any one person to serve in Congress), and stricter regulations on lobbying your former colleagues after leaving the Senate (i.e. closing the revolving door).

Of course if none of this happens and the American government ends up collapsing under the weight of its own inflexibility, I’d recommend that when we draw up the next Constitution we leave the Senate out altogether.

I can’t tell you how many columns and blog entries I’ve read about the problems of the Obama administration and why we’re not getting the Change he said he would deliver, but the one I read on the Huffington Post yesterday by Steven G. Brant really stood out as one of the most all-encompassing and insightful.

It’s a bit lengthy for an online column but if you have 10-15 minutes to spare I’d highly recommend reading the entire essay.

The piece is essentially about the mind-set within the White House today, which became visible last week when Robert Gibbs insulted the “professional left”, basically saying that they want too much change and should be happy with what they get. Weber outlines the major problems facing the country, explains that their extraordinary magnitude requires far more than what is being done to address them, and asserts that the current media environment stands in the way of real progress.

With that set of problems and in that kind of media environment, what I see is an Obama Administration devoted to making things look and sound good rather than actually making them good.

The biggest danger of this kind of thinking (of, essentially, believing your own PR) is that you stop being willing to learn anything new that doesn’t fit your existing mindset. You take in new data that agrees with your mental model and eliminate the rest.

The problem in the Obama White House is that he’s surrounded himself with Washington insiders and establishment folks. Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, et al are not progressives and are not interested in implementing the kinds of real, fundamental changes we need. Obama himself may be a liberal at heart but he hasn’t been governing like a liberal, and the contempt that those in his inner circle have openly showed for liberals may have rubbed off on Obama.

And he also doesn’t seem to realize that what would have finished the job of healing the nation would have been to truly institute the course correction the American people knew was needed when they elected him. That would have been the Change that We Believed We Were Going To Get… change that produced real results. Attempting to negotiate with Republicans and failing time after time didn’t make anyone feel better, except those who want to keep the nation divided for purely political reasons.

Weber offers this excellent analogy for the current situation:

Put in more graphic terms, America is a patient that was wheeled into the Emergency Room in January of 2009, desperately in need of a team of skilled doctors to save its life. America’s life’s blood – a true accounting of its condition and required remedies – had been draining away at least since President Bush convinced the country to attack Iraq by using the 9/11 attack as justification for doing so.

I’d say that the bleeding began long before Bush, but it’s still an apt metaphor. The people who say we should just accept slow, incremental change don’t seem to recognize just how dire the situation is. America is a dying patient in need of drastic surgery by skilled professionals, but is instead merely being wrapped in bandages by a group of hospital orderlies.

Weber cites Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason, to make the case that the underlying problem is a media culture in which perception is more important than fact, and political power is not gained through skill or merit but by manipulating the American people.

Power gained through lies promulgated through disinformation campaigns is not power the Founding Fathers would say had been earned. The Founding Fathers were on the side of the angels. Those who would gain power through lies and celebrating ignorance and playing the victim as a virtue come from a very different place.

And if our civic culture dies, then America will disintegrate into a collection of warring tribes, each held together by their fear of “the other”… their fear of those who are different than they are… all operating under the grand, false belief that competition (not cooperation) is the natural order of things… the grand, false belief that “survival of the fittest” rules humanity as completely as it does the lowliest of creatures on Earth.

Regarding the steps that have been taken to address the enormous systemic problems facing us, Weber offers another spot-on analogy:

The quality of the legislation passed so far (health care, financial reform, stimulus package) is like the home built of straw in the story of The Three Little Pigs. It looks okay, but when the Big Bad Wolf comes along he has no trouble blowing it over. Two tries later (and with the pigs fortunately still alive), they finally build a house made of brick. And that house is able to withstand the wolf’s best efforts to blow it down.

America needs the truth. It needs logic and reason. America must solve the challenges it faces in ways that stand the test of time. We can’t afford to build houses of straw when brick is what the objective facts demand.

He closes by pointing out that in America, the business of governing is treated more like a sport than as a responsibility which demands serious work by experts and professionals.

President Obama’s skills on the basketball court get talked about a lot. He is also likened to a Zen master chess champion. Both are admirable, and neither are what America needs.

[sic]

America can be a land where political calculus is based on the truth. And given how sick the patient is, if President Obama doesn’t decide to cure this virus, his legacy will be that when America was on life support he thought he and the virus that is killing us were playing a championship game of basketball.

Put simply—America needs a government of doctors, not athletes.

I was so impressed by this piece that I left a very complimentary comment which also asked Mr. Weber what he thought we could do to make the president wake up and recognize the truth of what he was saying. Mr. Weber replied to me directly saying that he would send his essay to the White House, and updated his original post with the same suggestion:

A hand written letter physically mailed makes a HUGE difference compared to emails sent in using those automatic opinion generating web sites.

Since almost no one really sends letters any more (one reason the Post Office is having huge financial difficulties), when a real, honest to God letter actually arrives, your elected representative takes notice.

Now, of course, in the case of the President of the United States it’s a bit more work. By that I mean, it would take many hand written letters for he and his staff to take notice. But what I do know (from the Washington Post) is that Pres. Obama’s team goes through all the letters he receives and delivers 10 of them to him each day. He has this fixed routine of reading these 10 letters every day. Therefore, if he gets enough hand written letters from people (with a copy of this essay attached), I think at least one copy will get through to him.

This won’t take much time. Figuring out what to say in my cover letter will be the most difficult part, but the rest of it is just a matter of printing the pages, putting them in an envelope, and getting it in the mail. As I’ve said before, fighting for change can actually be quite easy.

Why am I bothering to do this? Doesn’t it seem hopeless already, that Obama has proved himself nothing more than a politician only interested in the perception rather than the reality of Change?

Maybe so, maybe not. There was a time when I believed that he believed in the ideals he expressed during his campaign, and those ideals were inspiring. Buried within Obama the politician may still be Obama the Human Being, a man who recognizes just how critical this moment in history is and who wants to do what’s necessary to pull the country back from the brink.

One things is for sure—voting is not enough. In the upcoming mid-term elections, progressives have nowhere to turn. Voting republican is out of the question, but voting democrat would be a tacit approval of Obama’s politics-as-usual governing strategy.

Trying to change the system from the outside is probably the only viable option, but it’s also the most difficult and potentially disastrous option available to us.

A strong leader with a clear vision in a position of power is the best hope for achieving real change, and while Obama has that position he seems to lack the strength and the clarity of vision. If he were to decide to change course and stand up to the powerful interests rather than capitulate to them, he’d have the strong support of the majority of Americans behind him—the idealists who fought so hard to put him in office and who were willing to fight with him once he got there. He decided to ignore those people, to seal himself in the Washington bubble and play for political points rather than fix the broken system.

Convincing Obama to have a change of heart may be a long-shot, perhaps even impossible, but it does no harm to try. The risk is nothing, but the potential reward is incalculable. I’m going to write to the offices of Barack Obama and Joe Biden (who is more likely to read it) and attach Steven Weber’s essay to my letter. I urge everyone to do the same.

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington D.C. 20500

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.

Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.

At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.

They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.

But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.

Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.

Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.

Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.

And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.

But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.

Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?

What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”

News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.

So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.

Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.

The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.

The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.

The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.

It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.

Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.

Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.

Among the many pundits and news organizations that peddle vague and shallow observations as ‘conventional wisdom’, Politico is near the top of the heap. This week they published a piece called “Why Obama loses by winning” which is the epitome of the kind of garbage that Washington insiders consider brilliant analysis.

When Obama came into office, the assumption even among some Democrats was that he was a dazzling politician and communicator who might prove too unseasoned at governance to win substantive achievements.

The reality is the opposite. You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But, especially after Thursday’s vote, you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done.

Um…yes we can. And we are. Obama may be pushing lots of legislation through that address big issues like health care and financial reform, but when you scratch the surface you don’t see much actually getting done. Other than an individual mandate and some extra subsidies for poor people, not much has changed about this country’s health care system. And other than the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a one-time-only audit of the Federal Reserve, financial reform hasn’t changed a thing about the way Wall Street operates.

Obama’s strategy is to make it look like he’s achieving all kinds of great, historic accomplishments, and it would seem that the Washington punditry has taken the bait.

But the truly egregious thing about this article is this tired old nugget:

But on the issues voters care most about — the economy, jobs and spending — Obama has shown himself to be a Big Government liberal. This reality is killing him with independent-minded voters — a trend that started one year ago and has gotten much worse of late.

Right, we all know how everyone is so upset that Obama is such a Big Government spendaholic liberal. Never mind that the single biggest factor behind this perception is the economic stimulus plan which prevented the current recession from being much worse than it is. It’s Economics 101 that in a recession, you spend more money to get the economy moving again. It’s how we pulled out of the Great Depression. It’s necessary to spend more if we’re going to pull out of the recession we’re in now. Many economists think Obama should do much more stimulus spending—but thanks to right-wing media spin and total ignorance of basic economic principles, many people think that Obama’s excessive spending is responsible for the recession.

Hence the god-awful title of this piece, “Obama loses by winning.” As in, “Even though Obama was swept into office on a message of change and even though he’s addressing every issue he said he would as a candidate, voters would rather he not get all this legislation passed because it costs too much money.” Apparently, voters would like him a lot more if he didn’t do anything on health care, finance, energy, and so on. What Obama should be doing is spending all of his time working on things like Flag Appreciation initiatives and honoring America’s great baseball players.

America is so fucked if this is the conventional wisdom in Washington. Our country is in serious trouble and the only thing that can prevent a monumental fall-of-Rome level catastrophe is radical, fundamental reform. Obama won’t even go near the level of reform we actually need, but the Washington media elite still insist that he’s going too far. He wants to get out the oars and row very softly against the current, but the media wants him to sit back and let the current take us where it will—which in this case is over a waterfall.

On a less important note, the piece also has some fun things to say about liberal bloggers:

The liberal blogosphere grew in response to Bush. But it is still a movement marked by immaturity and impetuousness — unaccustomed to its own side holding power and the responsibilities and choices that come with that.

Ha HAH!!! Yes, it’s we liberal bloggers who have all the power now! We have so much power we literally don’t know what to do with it. Obama, who is totally on our side and listens to everything we say, is driving his presidency into a ditch because he just keeps taking our immature and impetuous advice! Damn, that’s rich.

Regarding our “immaturity and impetuousness” I suppose it’s of little use to compare us to right-wing bloggers, whom we all know are the pinnacle of sophistication. It’s not like they’re saying things like Obama’s birth certificate is fake and he was actually born in Kenya, that his health care reform bill was a plot to set up death panels to ration care, that he purposefully caused the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in order to get climate legislation passed, that he’s a secret Muslim who sympathizes with terrorists, or that he’s an angry black radical who is redistributing the wealth to his black friends as back-door reparations for slavery. No, right-wing bloggers would never be so immature.

So many liberals seem shocked and dismayed that Obama is governing as a self-protective politician first and a liberal second, even though that is what he campaigned as. The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s scalp has been replaced with that of Gen. David Petraeus, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely applauded the passage of health care reform. They treat the firing of a blogger from The Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation during the next couple of years.

Seriously, have these guys ever actually read a liberal blog? 1- There’s nothing shocking about the fact that Obama cares more about self-preservation than liberal principles—we’re just pissed off that he pretended otherwise. 2- Just because we’re happier with Petraeus than McChrystal doesn’t mean we support the war in Afghanistan. Personally, I only applauded the change because with Petraeus in command it will be politically easier to end the war and bring troops home. 3- Damn right we barely applauded the passage of health care reform. It wasn’t worth applauding. 4- How many people characterized Dave Weigel’s firing from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance? I never mentioned Dave Weigel, but I highly doubt that those who did lost focus on 5- the prospect of major losses for Democrats in the fall, making it even more impossible to get progressive legislation passed.

Regarding this final point, nothing pisses me off more than the argument that progressives are shooting themselves in the foot by being too progressive. Apparently, if we want progressive legislation, what he have to do is let them water-down the legislation until it’s not progressive at all. Only then can it pass, thus securing a political victory for democrats, thus allowing them to win their re-election campaigns and thus return to Washington where they can…what? Are they suddenly going to start passing progressive legislation after the mid-terms?

What these media elites never recognize—either deliberately or out of ignorance—is that America needs big reforms. We tried things the conservative way for the last thirty years and it’s led to economic stagnation, the destruction of America’s reputation abroad, the slow death of the middle class and the catastrophic redistribution of power from sovereign nation-states to multi-national corporations. Progressives aren’t advocating progressive legislation as some kind of culture war battle—most of us spend little or no time at all talking about things like abortion or gay marriage. We’re advocating for progressive legislation because that’s what this country needs, because it’s what the world needs, because it will help everyone, including people who treat the word ‘progressive’ as if it’s worse than ‘nazi’.

We will continue to push our ideology in spite of the political consequences for those in Washington because short-term political interests should never trump long-term national interests. It may take a few election cycles, but hopefully our influence will grow, we’ll sway more independents through the force of our arguments (which have the virtue of being supported by facts and by history). The goal is not to help the Democratic Party, but to make the Democratic Party help us, and thus help everyone. If they have to lose a few elections before they finally get the message, so be it.

Last week, Dylan Ratigan held a “Fix-It” week on his MSNBC show in which he focused not only on the biggest problems our country is facing but also the possible solutions.

One of the biggest problems we have is the influence of money on electoral politics. A congressperson in the House of Representatives serves only a two-year term, which means that as soon as they get elected they have to start campaigning for re-election. They have to spend more time fund-raising than actually governing.

To make matters worse, money really does seem to be the most important thing. In 2008, 9 out of every 10 House races were won by the candidate who spent the most money.

Two possible approaches to a solution were put forward:

Democratic strategist Jimmy Williams advocated for public financing of elections, and gave an interesting fact. There were 130 million tax-returns filed last year, and if everyone had checked a box giving $4 to fund elections, that would have provided all 535 House and Senate members with $1 million for their campaigns. If the public provided all campaign financing, there would be no need to cater to corporate special interests, and you’d have more of a level playing field.

The second good idea, strangely enough, came from a Republican, California representative Darrell Issa, who wanted TV and radio stations to provide air-time for candidates to hold debates on the issues. Equal air-time to all candidates including third-parties would obviously be an enormous improvement to our current system of he-who-can-bombard-us-with-the-most-30-second-campaign-ads-wins. The 30-second campaign ad is the worst possible way to inform voters, but sadly it’s how most voters get their information.

If they gave me carte blanche to change the whole electoral system, I’d make campaigns funded exclusively by the public (corporations can still make ads if they want) and force TV and radio stations to allocate certain portions of time, maybe even just one hour a week, to give equal time to candidates to state their positions on the issues and make their case to the American people. Politics should be driven by arguments again—not just sound-bytes.

These fixes wouldn’t solve everything, of course, but they’d be a good start.

I’ve written a lot about the corporate-controlled cronies in Washington want to cut all kinds of domestic spending like unemployment insurance and Social Security while they refuse to cut spending on the war in Afghanistan, but I haven’t yet addressed their purported reason for doing so.

If you spend enough time here in Washington, watching cable news, or reading the opinion (and sometimes the news) pages of major newspapers, you’re likely to be told that budget deficits are a top tier or even number one concern to the American people. Furthermore, moderates (the people, who, according to conventional mythology, decide all elections) REALLY care about these budget deficits. Therefore, it’s good politics to be a deficit hawk.

Polls that suggest Americans are really concerned about the deficit are probably conducted by calling up people and asking, “Are you concerned about the deficit?” Most people would, of course, say yes. But if you don’t just ask a yes/no question and instead give them a list of options and ask, “Which of these is most important to you?” you get results far more reflective of reality:

Obviously, it’s in the best interests of the powerful (or so they think) to spend as little money as possible on the middle-class. More money for them, the thinking goes. So they have their propaganda machines at Fox News and the Tea Party groups howl and scream about the national deficit and how it’s going to be disastrous for everyone’s grandchildren, whom we’re saddling with so much debt they’ll never be able to repay.

So Tea Party people really think they care a whole hell of a lot about the deficit, so we definitely shouldn’t extend unemployment benefits or pay for people’s health care or improve our national infrastructure or basically do anything other than dropping bombs on people who worship a different God.

This concern for future generations seems surprisingly noble of them. Especially because these are the “Drill, Baby, Drill” people—the same people who decry global warming as a hoax, who refuse to acknowledge the oncoming worldwide energy crisis, and who dismiss all environmental groups as fringe wackaloons who have no idea what they’re talking about.

If they really cared so much about future generations, you’d think they’d at least give environmentalists some benefit of the doubt and be open to hearing their case. If they really feel that they have a personal responsibility to make this the best world possible for their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, they’d want to get all the facts about energy, the environment, and global warming, and they’d be out there demanding that we do something about these problems.

But they don’t really give a shit about future generations. They know the word “deficit” because Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are always screeching about it, and it’s the easiest way for them to pretend they’re making an intelligent critique of Obama’s policies.

Believe me, if Obama wanted to freeze all government spending they’d be crying that he wasn’t spending enough. They just know the economy sucks and that the deficit has something to with economy. One plus one equals “I want my country back!”

Democrats should be trying to educate these people rather than pander to them. If they took that approach on every issue, we might actually get somewhere.

I came across a must-read piece by R.J. Eskow on the Huffington Post this morning, essentially claiming that in the battle between corporate and public interests, the Democratic Party has given up the fight.

There’s a new conventional wisdom forming in Washington, DC this July 4th, one that transcends party lines and the usual classifications of “left” and “right” as they’re understood in that city. It’s only being recognized now, because it deals with a number of different economic issues, but the underlying theme is the same: The American dream of financial independence and security is gone. The sooner you accept that and raise the white flag the easier it will be, so stop struggling.

Certainly most democrats gave up that fight a long time ago, but the few honest politicians who remain committed to fighting on behalf of the average person now seem to be folding in the face of too much opposition. The Republican Party is completely owned by corporate America and has no interest in governing–merely blocking everything. The Supreme Court just decided that corporations can spend as much as they want on political ads. Lobbyists made financial reform so weak that Wall Street will barely notice it. And they can’t seem to overcome a filibuster to extend unemployment benefits to those who desperately need them because of the recession.

Due to all of these factors, things that were once believed by only a handful of lawmakers have now become conventional wisdom all throughout Washington:

Here’s what they “know” now: The United States is doomed to a future of staggeringly high unemployment. Social Security is part of our national deficit and, like that notorious village in Vietnam, we need to destroy it in order to save it. And we must face an open-ended future where the public treasury and personal security are held hostage to the whims of a few “too big to fail” banks.

It seems that the entire Democratic Party is following Obama’s example of surrendering to Big Industry right from the get-go and just doing the bare minimum they can do to make it look like they’re doing something. Like Obama, they seem to genuinely believe that they don’t have any real power.

That, I believe, is because sealed inside their Washington bubble the only power they can see and feel is the power of Big Industry. Yet there’s an entire country of people out there willing to fight for the common good, and if that energy could be harnessed they could easily stand up to the giant corporations and win back some of the “American Dream”. If their governing strategy was to go out there and forcefully make their case for things like the public option, re-instating Glass Steagall, moving aggressively on clean energy and so on, they’d find themselves leading a movement with unstoppable momentum.

Instead their strategy is to start from a position of compromise and then engage in back-room negotiations until they’ve got something watered-down and ineffectual enought to muster the 60 votes needed to do anything. Because thanks to Big Industry’s grip on Washington, you now need 60 votes to do anything.

Come on, democrats. All you have to do is grow some fucking spine. Most Americans agree with your policy positions if you just explain it to them. But you don’t bother explaining or trying to influence public opinion. You just accept the conventional bullshit wisdom that Americans are stupid, lazy, or conservative, and you can’t expect them to rally behind a cause.

Put us to the test, democrats. Because if you’re just going to wave the white flag and accept that we’re in for decades of economic decline, we can’t afford to join you–especially if you’re going to give up on umemployment benefits and social security. If you won’t fight for us within the system, we’ll have no choice but to fight for ourselves from outside the system. And that could get very ugly.

I’ll finish up my blogging today with a brief thought on Afghanistan and whether the war will be a major factor this year’s mid-term elections.

In short, the answer is no. And that’s really a shame, because considering how much money we’re spending there in the midst of this recession in spite of the hopelessness of success, it really should be at the forefront of current political discourse.

The war got some renewed attention due to the replacement of McChrystal with Petraus in the wake of the Rolling Stone article, but the president made it clear that our strategy has not changed and it looks increasingly doubtful that we’re really going to begin withdrawing troops on the announced deadline of July 2011.

The sad truth is that Americans have become desensitized to ongoing war. This is not like Vietnam when videos of the actual horror found their way onto the news every night. Reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan are embedded with the troops and under strict guidelines as to what they can report and what kind of footage they can show.

The wars were only a major campain issue in 2004 when they were still relatively new and it was just becoming clear to most objective observers that we’d made a massive strategic blunder. Frustration with Iraq might also have been a huge factor in the democrats’ victory in the 2006 mid-terms. But by 2008 we were all focussed on the economy, and that’s where our focus remains. This November, people will go into the polls and vote based on their pocketbook–their feelings on the war will be an afterthought.

And unfortunately nobody is really making the case–with the exception of Alan Grayson and a few others who aren’t taken seriously by the establishment–that Afghanistan is an economic issue. Republicans want Americans to tighten their belts, but they refuse to cut military spending. To dig our way out of the recession they want to cut off unemployment benefits and go after social security, but they refuse to acknowledge the fact that over half of our discretionary spending (money we could spend however we like) is going to fund a war that most serious observers are now admitting is unwinnable.

Democrats, I know you’re afraid of being called “weak” and “anti-war” by the republicans, and its not good politics to stand in opposition to a president from your own party, but you should make Afghanistan an election issue because it’s the right thing to do. Ending the war will go a long way towards ending the recession, but the war is never going to end until we start paying more attention to it.

Obama called the financial reform package that passed this week “the most sweeping reforms since the Great Depression”. Ha fucking ha.

I won’t bore you with the details, but if you want the basic facts just take two minutes to read Dylan Ratigan’s brief but spot-on piece on the Huffington Post.

The few reforms that actually made it through are pretty much window dressing. Banks are still Too Big to Fail, the regulators still have a financial incentive to not do actual regulation, and banks can still make risky bets backed up by taxpayer money. This is no more of a fix to our financial system than the health care bill was a fix to our health care system.

Wall Street owns Washington. Congressmen and senators on both sides of the aisle had to do a song and dance and pretend to fix the problem–and some genuinely tried–but ultimately the goal was to pass something called “financial reform” and score another political victory for Obama and the democrats.

What I can’t figure out is whether or not Obama just doesn’t understand the issues enough to know that these reforms aren’t nearly tough enough to prevent another crisis. He’s surrounded himself with people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner who have Wall Street in their DNA, and they’ve been telling him all along to trust the bankers, don’t be too hard on them, they’ll make sure we won’t have another collapse.

But the structure of the system is such that it is guaranteed to collapse, and when it does our only recourse is still to bail them out with taxpayer money.

If you thought the Tea Party was mad now, just wait until the next crisis. They’ve been blaming Obama for the crisis and the bailouts already, but thus far we’ve at least been able to counter them with the undeniable fact that these things happened during the Bush administration. But when the next financial crisis hits, it really will be Obama’s fault.

I write a lot about America’s problems in my blog, but this time I’ll actually offer a solution. It’s not an original idea—I’m sure we’ve all thought of it at one time or another—but it’s such a simple and obvious measure we can take to get government working on behalf of the people again that it bears repeating as often as possible.

We’ve all heard the term “revolving door congress” which refers to the implicit bribe that public servants have to cater to big industries at the expense of their constituents. Spending time as a congressman or senator may not earn you a great deal of money while you have that job, but it will earn you significant credentials for any future job. Whether it’s a place on the board of directors of a major corporation, or merely a job as a lobbyist, you can earn a lot more money when you move from the public to the private sector.

But the revolving door isn’t only in operation for actual congressmen—it works for their staffers as well. A huge portion of staffers on Capitol Hill, perhaps even the majority, are only in it for their resume. They work in Washington, make connections with the power-players, and put those connections to the service of lobbying firms once they’re done. The staffers are the ones who actually write the legislation, and if their main goal is to be a lobbyist for a big corporation, they’re going to make sure they write that legislation in a way that benefits, to the greatest degree possible, the corporation they intend to work for. That corporation will reward them with a nice fat salary when they’re finished. It’s not bribery per se, but it’s pretty damn close.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gave a perfect example on the show last week. Having just returned from a protest they organized in Washington, he’d had a few conversations with Washington insiders which provided some additional insight into the situation. His source wanted to remain anonymous, so he couldn’t be very specific, but there was a provision in the Financial Reform package that was so transparently helpful to Wall Street and harmful to Main Street that not even the republicans could openly support it and it was removed from the bill. But when a new draft came along, the same provision had miraculously reappeared, and had to be removed again. The same thing happened a third time, and finally they realized that staffers at the Federal Reserve, who had been given the task of actually writing the legislation, had been slipping the provision back into the bill with each new draft.

How can we expect Washington to produce any legislation that works in our favor if the very people writing that legislation have a vested interest in making it work in the corporations’ favor? Public pressure made the financial reform bill much stronger than many of us expected it to be, but once the debate in front of the cameras was over the bill got fatally weaker. When all is said and done, there will be enough fine print and loop-holes so as to make Wall Street feel as though the whole legislative battle had been nothing but a dream and things can continue exactly as before.

The solution is painfully obvious, so obvious that it’s a wonder the public isn’t demanding it so loudly and forcefully that congress has no choice but to act: close the revolving door.

There are already rules that prohibit congressional staffers from lobbying their former colleagues for at least one year after they leave those jobs. But a mandatory year-long waiting period is a joke. Of course they’re just going to wait out the year and go to work for the lobbying firm the minute they can. For a huge portion of them, that’s their exact plan. Help to sabotage financial reform, wait a year, then go to work for a Wall Street bank. Help to sabotage health insurance reform, wait a year, then go to work for a private health insurance company. Now, help to sabotage energy legislation, wait a year, then go to work for an oil company.

Some say we should insist that they expand the waiting period to five or ten years, but we all know what happens when we start from an already-compromised position. We have to insist that they completely prohibit all public servants and their staffers from ever working as lobbyists for as long as they live. Don’t just slow down the revolving door—destroy it completely. If we keep demanding this, we might reach a compromise whereby the waiting period is extended. That will at least improve the situation a little.

But what’s wrong with demanding the life-long ban? Why shouldn’t we insist that if you want to work as a public servant, you must give up the opportunity to be a lobbyist? The government’s job is to work on behalf of the people, to protect our interests from the interests of giant organizations—be it a country or a corporation—whose interests conflict with ours. If you want to work for the government, why shouldn’t we say that you then have to give up your right to lobby the government on behalf of those organizations?

There should be no financial incentive to work for the government. The only incentive any public servant should have is to serve the public. Destroy the revolving door and all those single-minded greed-driven individuals who only use government as a springboard for their future careers will have to find another path to success. The government will once again be composed of principled people whose only desires are to do some good for their communities and their country.

If anyone who reads this knows anyone with the know-how, the skills, and the resources to organize a campaign to demand this badly needed change to our system, I hope you’ll encourage them to take up this fight. This is a cause that Americans from across the political spectrum would support, and if enough of us demand it we can’t possibly be ignored.