Joy At Republican Humiliation Shouldn't Make Us Forget The Choices Sucked

I was in a bar/restaurant near my house on election night, trying to get some work done and watching the results come in. At first it seemed like a nail-biter (though I was convinced that it would be a fairly easy sweep for Obama) and people were texting and Facebooking their fear that Romney the snake might win. Of course, he didn't.

I must say that there was a palpable sense of relief. Like the whole city of Toronto let out a collective sigh. (Except for the Ariel Sharon supporting Israeli dude who kept shaking my hand and kissing me on the top of my head - but that's another story). And, I cannot lie, I was one of them. Romney and Ryan were such an odiously diabolical duo that one can hardly NOT be relieved and filled with joy that they were defeated. Here we had a reactionary plutocrat in alliance with a running mate who represented the most profoundly racist and paranoid lashing out of white, middle class (as in petty bourgeois) America. Hell, just the pleasure of reading Donald Trump's shrieking twitter feed was worth the price of admission.

They were defeated and now will commence a process of Republican auto-destruction that ought to be entertaining to watch. Hopefully it will lead to a split between the (cough, cough) moderates and the Tea Party radicals. Likely there will be a shabby compromise that keeps the two demented siblings in the same party.

In the meantime, their defeat will have given hope to tens of millions that America won't be taken over by Christian fundamentalists and free-marketeers who will dismantle what little social safety net exists (and shut down Sesame Street!). Tens of millions will feel that they have beaten back the right and won some space for more social change - an impression that will be strengthened by the victory for state ballot initiatives that won same sex marriage rights in several states and the legalization/decriminalization of marijuana in two states.

All that is worth celebrating.

But we can't stop there because we need to be honest that Obama isn't the answer either. Things have gotten worse under Obama, not better. America has become more unequal and there is more racism than before his election. Of course, the racist backlash of the Tea Party lunatics can't be blamed on Obama but there are plenty of ways to reduce racial inequality in America through government policy and public statements & campaigns; initiatives that were never taken. America's policy of drone strikes inside Pakistan continues, as well as continuing support for repressive regimes in the Middle East - like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Obamacare was a sop to the health insurance industry and not a cure for an unaffordable, inaccessible healthcare system. These betrayals are surely a part of the reason by the biggest bloc of votes for any candidate were the 80+ million abstentions (vs 62 million votes for Obama). Those who abstained are more than twice as likely to support Obama and the Democrats as they are to support Republicans.

The victory for progressive politics that Obama's re-election represents is an almost purely symbolic victory. And, to steal a phrase: symbolism don't pay the bills.

To turn Obama's victory into a real one will require mobilizations that don't depend on the magnanimity of Democrats or Obama. The successful maneuver by trade union leaders in Madison, Wisc. to deflect a mass movement against the GOP governor's vicious union busting into a recall movement to get a Democrat elected was an abysmal failure. The movement was derailed and defeated and Wisconsin is still a red state, run by a Republican governor - and just re-elected Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, to the House of Representatives.

On the other hand, Obama's early failure to support gay rights in anything more than a timid, prevaricating way led to mass mobilizations by the LGBT community, including a mass protest in Washington that had hundreds of thousands of people. I am convinced that a key reason for the ballot victories backing the right to same sex marriage (and the election of the first lesbian senator in Wisconsin) was that the LGBT movement didn't wait for Obama to come around and maintained their independence. Hopefully that lesson has been learned.

Ultimately, workers and the oppressed in America will need to create their own party to represent their interests, rather than a corporate dominated lash-up like the Democrats. That's not likely to occur in the short term but that shouldn't make us depressed or fatalistic - after all the Republicans just got their asses handed to them and gay rights scored some big victories. It is possible to win. But it should inject an element of sobriety.

Obama's Betrayals Made Romney Credible

Everybody's biting their nails and holding their breath. What's going to happen? Who's going to win? The "Hollywood liberal" machine is out in full force with clever ads by luminaries like Joss Whedon of Avengers, Buffy and Firefly fame and hipster filmmaker Lena Dunham chiming in. There's no doubt that this is a dramatic finish and I've been reading coverage and watching the videos as avidly as the next person.

But this dramatic finish begs a question: how is Mitt Romney, a bigoted snobby billionaire with a lunatic Tea Party running mate, even a contender? I mean the stuff coming out of the mouths of Republican candidates about rape alone ought to make them little more than laughing stocks. That they are the candidates of one of the two main American political parties is a testament to how backwards and steeped in anti-intellectual superstition America has become. But it also tells us something about the failure of the Obama presidency.

Who doesn't remember the Obama rallies last time around - tens of thousands of people chanting "Yes, we can!", a slogan taken from the mass mobilizations of the immigrants rights movement. It seemed like everybody from every progressive social movement back then - from unions to gay rights to anti-war activists - was pouring into the campaign. Here was an opportunity to change America to a kinder, gentler nation after years of George W. Bush, proud ignoramus and spoiled brat.

What happened was the record of Obama. The bailouts went to the banks and the car companies - not to the ordinary people losing their homes in their millions. Gay rights, in particular gay marriage, was immediately shelved, leading to the first mass mobilizations demanding Obama do something. He didn't. Obama eventually drew down US troop presence in Iraqi cities - but he ramped it up in Afghanistan and increased the use of illegal, civilian killing drone strikes inside of Pakistan's borders. He promised comprehensive health care and instead came up with a plan that is a gift to the health insurance corporations. He has supported Israel's ongoing torment of the Palestinian people pretty much blindly and refuses to even smackdown the compulsive warmongering of the Middle East's colonial-settler state viz Iran. The list goes on.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Romney is an odious human being who lives on another planet. And were I in the USA I'd take the thirty seconds of democracy you get every few years and I'd put an "X" next to Obama's name. But I have no illusions that he behaves fundamentally any different in office than the Republicans with whom he has been more than happy to compromise over the last four years. He will do the same next time around. It is exactly for that reason that Romney is in the running and that the focus of the election has become not the issues but the maneuvering and marketing of the election campaign - who spends the most money, who has the most volunteers, etc. Until America produces a credible third party that is built out of the struggles of working people and the oppressed - rather than the crackpot pet projects of lunatics like Ross Perot - America will continue to be a two-party dictatorship (or, rather, one party with two wings).

Psst...Torture's OK. Pass It On.

Vic Toews, Minister of Torture and Morality

We've always known that the Tories mission is to makeover Canada into a far-right Republican spa resort by stealth, since most Canadians hold values to the left of their lunacy. So, they change tax rules for film financing here and chip into same sex marriage by removing it as a right for foreigners there. Bit by bit until next thing you know we're a vacation paradise for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum after they lose the Republican nomination.

Well, here's another tasty treat of Tory hypocritical fuckery to enjoy. Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews, quietly told CSIS that it was OK to use "information" obtained under torture to "make the protection of life and property its overriding priority."

Will this be effective? Of course it will. Why, if some Tory banker sticks bamboo under my nails and attaches electrodes to my genitals I'll confess to keying his or her Rolls Royce - even if I didn't do it. In fact, I'll tell you anything you want to hear. Isn't that great? It's like a way to get information from anyone on anything. In fact, to really protect life and property we ought to find volunteers to be like those bald people in the jacuzzi in Minority Report's department of pre-crime. It could be an internship opportunity to serve their country for budding young conservatives - like Ezra Levant - to help us find out wherever in the world evil is being done and to stomp it out with our now highly funded Armed Forces.

Or maybe that information extraction technique only works on brown people of the Muslim persuasion. Unfortunate for them that they have to save Canadian lives and property by surrendering their um... lives and property.

No matter, what's important is that this stuff is an excellent opportunity to protect our way of life. While we're at it maybe we could use torture to defend the traditional definition of marriage by discovering those who are about to threaten it - a cause dear to Vic's heart. And maybe through the creative use of torture we could find out exactly when an embryo becomes a human so we know when to ban abortion and imprison women who seek it out - maybe even before they seek it out. Or is it hypocritical and unChristian to degrade the sanctity of human life in order to protect the sanctity of human life? Perhaps we can torture someone to find out. Or, better yet, ignore the problem and just head on to the gay bathhouse with Vic "Minister of Family Values" Toews for a little two on one fun.

Now the Minister of Family Values has struck again, this time making an appearance a couple weeks ago on "Co-ed night" with another young lady at a Winnipeg Gay Bathhouse called "Aquarius" . Toews arrived with the woman while wearing a hat and sunglasses and the couple rented a room where Toews stayed in the entire evening while his young lady friend cruised the bathhouse looking for playmates. We are told a husband and wife couple joined Vic and his friend in their room for over an hour before Toews left on his own a couple hours later. We don't know the details of what went on in that room......we will leave that to your imagination.

Ottawa tells spies to use possible torture info in ‘exceptional’ cases - The Globe and Mail:

'via Blog this'

The Many Betrayals of Barack Obama: Part 1

What happened to change we could believe in?

With mid-term elections looming this fall, there are a flurry of articles assessing the results and prospects of Barack Obama’s first term as president. Not surprisingly, given how high were the expectations of an Obama presidency. Who can forget those massive election rallies? “Yes, we can”, he boomed and hundreds of thousands repeated the words. These were words that came from the Spanish “Si, se puede” of the immigrants’ rights movement that mobilized millions the year before the election. And as a black man running for and winning the presidency in a land built by African slaves, he seemed to represent America turning a corner.
Obama said that he was against the torture and imprisonment without end that was most starkly represented by Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-ray. He would shut it down within a year, he said. He opposed the “Defense of Marriages Act” that was signed into law by his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton in 1996, enshrining discrimination against gays and lesbians into law. He would end the war in Iraq (ahem, to divert resources to Afghanistan). He would finally bring public healthcare to the American people, 50 million of whom were without any insurance whatsoever, in an “industry” whose costs were ballooning every year because of the “market.” And, of course, he would turn around America’s economy, which was on the fast track to disasterville with the worst recession in the post-war era destroying jobs faster than a fire in a field of autumn corn.
At least that’s what he told us.

The First Betrayal
On election night, November 2008, not only did voters elect America’s first black president on a platform of change. California voters also voted on Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, which had previously been permitted and had led to a flurry of marriages, particularly in San Franciso. This immediately provoked a sense of outrage. And a sense of betrayal as it became clear that Obama would spare no effort to spare no effort to demonstrate his support for equality. In the lead-up to the vote in Maine, that was lost, Obama said not a single word in support of equal rights for gays and lesbians. And the Democrats didn’t use any of their electoral networks – there was a state election, along with the ballot on gay marriage – to promote equality. When Equality Across America was mobilizing a march of a quarter of a million people in Washington in support of gay rights, Obama advisors and Democrats not only did nothing to support the march, many of them derided it.
And now, the Obama Justice Department continues to aggressively defend the very Defense of Marriages Act about which Obama once stated: “Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does.” Even after a US District Court Judge ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional, it is expected that the Justice Department will appeal the ruling.

The Second Betrayal – Guantanamo

“As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

So said Obama during the presidential election campaign. Yet, the prison at Gitmo is still up and running. And, as an article in the New York Times argued:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantanamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013...
"...the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat....
[According to one senior official] “Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”

The priorities of the Obama White House on this issue, in other words, are governed by cynicism and spin.

The Third Betrayal – Healthcare
Obama’s betrayal on winning a public healthcare system is really several betrayals rolled into one. For certain women’s right to have unhindered access to abortion has fared no better under Obama and he has, if anything given encouragement to the anti-choice by implementing an executive order excluding abortion services from the health reform. He did rescind Bush’s global gag order denying funding to international aid organizations that supported abortion services but he has done nothing to rescind Bush’s provider-conscience law in the US, which permits medical providers to discourage and deny women from access.
And the “reforms” as a whole are an unmitigated disaster for most Americans and a giant cash prize to the health insurance industry that has helped to make America’s healthcare system simultaneously the world’s most expensive and the world’s worst. This excellent article by Chris Hedges on countercurrents.org details some of the betrayals of Obama’s “reform” package:

The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses. Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage. And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We will be forced by law to buy their defective products. There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates. The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill-written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists-means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Note To The Left From The Right

THE BLOSSOMING POPULARITY OF THE WILDROSE ALLIANCE PARTY IN ALBERTA proves my personal adage that you’re never so bonkers that there isn’t somebody more bonkers than you. In this case, it’s the Alberta Tories who are being out-bonkered.
On Sunday, at their convention, the WAP elected as their leader media commentator and fiscal conservative, Danielle Smith. She had been running against a former Reform Party organizer and noted social conservative, Mark Dyrholm, who dropped out when it was clear that she was going to whoop his ass.
The WAP is gaining fast on the Tories who have maintained a nearly 40-year dynasty in that province – following on from the Social Credit, which ran the province from the Depression. The reason: the Tories are too left-wing.
Sorry, let me say that again: The Alberta Tories are too left wing.

“[Smith] criticizes the royalty rate the province is charging oil companies, and finally abandoned the Tories in April after the government tabled a budget that projected a historic $4.7-billion deficit while still green-lighting double-digit spending”

The Tories, knowing that the Alberta oil boom would come to a halt sooner or later, in the way that all resource-based booms do, imposed a higher royalty rate on the oil companies during the high times, in order to save for the low times. Like now. Even with that surplus cash the Tories are still forced to run a deficit – that’s how hard things have crashed.
But the Wildrose yahoos can’t stand that the Tories didn’t just pull a Herbert Hoover, let the economy tank and then send out the police to beat the hell out of all the people starving in the streets. That makes WAP beyond-the-bonkers-pale.
One of two things is going to happen to WAP. The first and most likely one is that they will whack the Tories in the next provincial election – they’re now running second at 21 percent, behind the Tories at 38.4. They’ve only been in existence since January, 2008. Either WAP’ll win or they’ll force a Tory minority government.
If they win they’ll screw things up right quick. Remember when the Alliance was formed and Stockwell Day was the leader? Think jet ski. Enough said. WAP’ll inherit a deficit and perhaps even a stagnant economy. Their front benches will be filled with a bunch of yahoos and soon they’ll be tripping over their own feet, destroying the economy, saying dumb shit. The usual.
The other possibility is that they’ll do that before the next election.

IN ANY CASE, BY NOW YOU’RE WONDERING THE MEANING OF THE TITLE ABOVE. Well, it’s two things. The first is that the right wing consensus in Alberta has been shattered by the economic crisis. The Tory dynasty is coming apart. The WAP is not a “new” party – it is a split from the Tory party. That means that there is a space in Alberta for the left to take advantage of the growing disarray on the right.
The second note is an important point that Ms. Smith made during her campaign to become WAP leader.

“Ms. Smith herself argues that the party will remain at the province's political fringes if it focuses too much on issues such as abortion. ‘The ‘single issues' aren't top-of-mind for most Albertans,’ she says. ‘If we go into an election talking about things that are going to cause division, we aren't going to be successful in building that big tent.’”

The point here is that key arguments have been won on social questions, such that any right wing party that wants to succeed must not attack those things outright without risking fracturing and losing. And neither the abortion nor gay rights were won as a result of enlightened politicians like Smith (god help us) – they have been won in the streets, workplaces and in the homes of the country.
I’m old enough to remember the end game of the pro-choice struggle to decriminalize abortion. It involved campaigning in the union movement, protests and pickets, the courage of doctors like Henry Morgentaler to provide illegal abortions, etc. The parliamentary success was the result of the latter.
Gay rights is a similar story, starting with the explosion onto the streets that happened around the Stonewall riots 40 years ago. This led into the creation of the Gay Liberation Movement, then, with the AIDS crisis, there were big mobilizations organized by ACT UP. This was followed by the militant in-your-face actions of Queer Nation and big demonstrations and campaigns around same sex spousal benefits in Ontario (which the NDP sold out). All this pressure in and out of the public eye, led to a growing acceptance and creeping legal gains that, most recently, led to full legal equality in marriage.
The lesson from both of these is that it is through ostentatious struggle that the terrain can be shifted. That applies as much to economic questions as it does to social ones. So, to the left in Alberta – and elsewhere – have hope. Victories have already been won and more can be. Especially when the right wing has a nice big split. I look forward to watching them tear each other apart.