Democratic (in)action – Page 9

” Mr. Blackadder assures me that this will be the first honest vote ever in a rotten borough”

Published on May 1, 2007

The 18th century is alive and kicking down in the West Country, due to the lethargy of the electorate:

Voteless politician to win nine seats

An estate manager will this week win a place on nine different councils without receiving a single vote.

Chris Byrne, 40, will be automatically elected because he is the only candidate.

It means he will win seats on Axbridge town council, Cheddar, Rooksbridge, Compton Bishop, Weare, Banwell and Draycott parish councils and two on Sedgemoor district council, reports the Daily Mirror.

But Chris, who nursed comic legend Frankie Howerd in his last years and still lives in Frankie’s old home in Axbridge, Somerset, faces a contest for two more on North Somerset council.

An Independent, Chris insisted he will not be overstretched: “I’m very organised and even if I can’t make all the meetings I’ll always be available to do my duties. It’s scandalous that more people don’t care about politics.”

I’m sure he’s a very nice and able man, but that’s not democracy.

Comment of The Day – Several Days Late and Several Dollars Short

Published on April 26, 2007

Naomi Wolf’s Guardian article “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” has been riding high at the top of the paper’s most-read list and has been being feverishly linked to and discussed widely on US liberal blogs. Unsurprisingly so, as it ticks all the boxes and provides the perfect predigested narrative for what Bushco has been up to since ‘elected’. Simple, they’ve been putting in place planned fascism.

Wolf is not exactly what you’d call left-wing; rather she’s in the van of the soft liberal Democrat-ism that enabled Bush in the first place. So why the cries of fascism now? She took her time noticing. and is she actually sincere, or is it more Dem triangulation?

Leninology:

If you ask me, it’s part of this ‘Anyone But Bush’ politics that is destroying the American left and drawing the antiwar movement into the frigid Democratic Party graveyard. The politics of MoveOn.org, Howard Dean’s fan club, and such alignments, are to divert mass disaffection with Bush’s wars into the mainstream of the Democratic Party

Commenter Spartan Weakling takes that view further:

Playing the Fascist Card is calling for the disastrous Popular Front against it: working class organisations will HAVE TO “ally” themselves (read: support without question) with all “progressive” political forces, that is, who seek to return to the “previous” state of political status quo, being oh so much better than the current one (now christened “fascism”).

Therefore, the peace movement, the veterans, the families of the soldiers, the workers who pay for the war MUST come under the leadership of the Democrats (that progressive force in US politics), or else… FASCISM!!! And you don’t want to support FASCISM do you? Then shut up and come under the leadership of the radical (lol) bourgeoisie, because FASCISM!, and otherwise FASCISM!, and if you don’t then FASCISM! and anything else (read: the current state of affairs with no substantial change) is so much better than FASCISM! what’s the matter with you people.

So for me, it’s once again the question of the Popular Front vs the United Front, on which Trotsky had rather A LOT to say…

Now I don’t disagree with Wolf that the framework for fascism is in place and ready to roll, when it so patently is. I don’t disagree on the facts; indeed it’s us left-wing bloggers that have made sure those facts came to light. We’ve been warning of creeping US fascism on this blog since we started in 2001, and before, and there’s thousands of others just like us who’ve been doing the same.

The current US political situation didn’t just happen. Extremists need passive collaborators, or at the very least people too self-absorbed to notice anything that does not directly affect them, to do their nefarious work and Wolf was one, part of the charmed circle of the ‘feminist’ political media establishment, the one that trumpets free markets and the corporate state as empowering for all women despite the empirical evidence. She’s as much a Democratic political operative as she is a writer:

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach “soccer moms” and other female voters.

During Al Gore’s unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf’s ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, “Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations.” This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore’s “three-buttoned, earth-toned look.” The Duffy article did not mention “earth tones.” The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is “a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office”.

In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term “alpha male” only once in passing and that “[it] was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role…I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions.”

It’s all very well Wolf standing up at this too-late stage in a foreign newspaper and saying this, but where was she when it really mattered, when this could have been nipped in the bud? When Alito was up for confirmation, for example? Too busy pushing her career of telling us ordinary women what failures we are compared to her and her privileged sisters, that’s where.

Did it never once occur to Wolf that the reason she made so much money and did so well pushing her personal empowerment agenda through her books is because it suits the long-term propaganda purposes of the very institutions, individuals and organisations she now accuses of enabling fascism?

Oh, how I loathe accommodationist women.

Whither the Democrats?

Published on February 12, 2007

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words)

It’s hard to decide what to quote from this excellent Mike Davis article about what the left can expect from the Democrats after their November victory, but I think the following two paragraphs are best at showing the juxtaposition between expectations and reality:

The fate of New Orleans, of course, is one of the great moral watersheds in modern American history, but most Democrats shamelessly refused to make federal responses to Hurricane Katrina or the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the Gulf Coast central issues in the campaign. Although President Bush himself had declared in his Jackson Square speech that ‘we have a duty to confront this poverty [revealed by Katrina] with bold action’, the Democrats have shown no greater sense of ‘duty’ or capacity for ‘bold action’ than a notoriously hypocritical and incompetent White House. Their priorities were exemplified by the six-plank national platform in November that stressed deficits and troop buildups but failed to mention either Katrina or poverty.

[…]

But Nancy, Harry and Hillary do have one domestic crusade whose importance transcends other dogmas and constraints: the promotion of the ‘innovation agenda’ that the Democrats hope will dramatically solidify their support among hi-tech corporations and science-based firms across the country. If you wanted to find the missing urgency and passion that the Democrats should have focused on Katrina and urban poverty, it was evident last year in the rousing speeches that Pelosi and other leading Democrats delivered in tech hubs like Emeryville, Mountain View, Raleigh and Redmond.

It seems to me that what happened in November is that the grassroots groundswell of anger and frustration aimed at the Republicans has been co-opted by the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment. While the party’s base has always been strongely opposed to the Patriot Act, the War against Terror and the War on Iraq, it’s leadership has largely prefered to go along with Republican plans, either out of calculation or fear. According to the netroots (including myself) this attitude was the reason for the Democratic defeats in 2002 and 2004, with the gains in November last year as a vindication of the netroots’ vision. In reality however, the Democratic leadership hasn’t changed its stance on these issues; it’s still largely supportive of the War on Iraq and only willing to offer symbolic opposition rather than real opposition. From their point of view, their strategy of triangulation, of playing to the supposed centre worked. They didn’t need to radicalise
themselves in order to win Congress back form the Republicans, they just needed to wait and let the Republicans destroy themselves. In other words, the netroots have largely failed to move the party to the left, or even to get them to be more aggressive in opposition.

Instead, as Ilya suspected last Tuesday, the Democrats have courted those segments of business who’ve become unhappy with the Republican focus on war and the accompanying corruption. The war may have been kind to Halliburton and Exxon, but has it for companies like Microsoft? The credit for this split in elite opinion lies mostly with the Iraqi resistance who’ve managed to shatter the dream of a obedient Iraqi client state, but also with the anti-war movement, which for the moment has made it harder for politicians to be openly pro-war…

What we’ll probably see in the next few years then is a tug of war between the Bushites and the corporate elites that profit from them and the Democrats, with the former trying to keep the full war going while the latter will argue for a withdrawal with residual force. In both cases, expect more use of airpower to keep American casualties down at the expense of Iraqi civilians.

Read more about:
War on Iraq, Mike Davis, Democratic Party, US politics

My Coup-Ca-Choo

Published on February 10, 2007

Digby:

When I asked if Cheney had “found” a fourth branch of government in position that until a decade or so ago was considered a seat warmer for a presidential run and the designated state funeral stand-in for the president, I didn’t realize they were actually setting this forth as a legal argument. Dear God.

This means that he considers himself even more “unitary” than he considers the president, beyond all reach of either branch, answerable to no one.

Cheney is refusing to comply with a presidential executive order. What do you suppose the Empty Codpiece feels about this? Does he know that his Vice president believes he has an independent office that doesn’t answer to him or anyone else?

Digby has been writing for some time about Dick Cheney’s manipulation of US constitutional law to put himself beyond the scrutiny or oversight of any branch of government, including the judiciary. In effect Cheney and his lawyer accomplices have created a virtual dictatorship with unlimited and unaccountable powers that even usurps the presidency. That he planned to do this is something that has been obvious from the outset, as many law-bloggers have pointed out.

But some of Digby’s commenters seem taken aback. Have they been walking around with their eyes shut? Why are people so damned surprised at this? Juan Cole was warning of this explicitly in 2004:

In short, has there been a Cheney coup-by-default? Is W. so disengaged that he is taking dictation from the former CEO of Halliburton? And, we now know that LBJ used to spend his mornings on the phone to business cronies doing private business. How much of Cheney’s time is spent on the phone to old business associates in the corporate world (seeking to know what legislation they would like to have)? Who pushed Bush into the second, disastrous round of tax-slashing, which was a way of selling our children into indentured servitude?

It may well be that the US has not a presidency but a Duumvirate a la ancient Rome.

As they started so they’ll finish. Immediately post-election the White House promised “a cataclysmic fight to the death” with Democratic opponents. Well, they’re just doing exactly what they said. They may be evil bastards but at least they’re consistent evil bastards.

I’m not expecting anything at all from the Democrats: they are bought and sold and it’s all about the Presidential race now anyhow (which will be horribly ironic when Cheney cancels the election under the special emergency powers that he issued to himself in secret). From what I’ve seen of the Democrats in Congress so far it appears that, with honourable exceptions like Feingold, the leadership’ve already given up this fight – unless they’re playing a particularly abstruse long game that us mere mortals are unable to see. I know I can’t see it and I’ve been watching American politics for decades. But if there is no plan and Democrats don’t act, we’re all screwed. So why don’t they?