Haiku Politics

An article in the Sunday New York Times pointed out that the convictions of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling did not signal an end to the kind of unbridled free market capitalism that led to their downfall. On the contrary:

For better or worse, the trend toward deregulation and freer markets is not likely to reverse anytime soon in the United States.

"Enron did pioneer a lot of concepts that will be here with us for a long time to come--the trading of commodities that had never been traded before," said James Chanos, a hedge-fund manager. Mr. Chanos was among the first investors to say publicly that Enron was a house of cards propped up by fraudulent accounting. "There won't be any going back to saying we won't trade electricity."

Enron's accounting methods may have been fraudulent, but otherwise there is little to distinguish its corporate culture of unbridled greed from much of contemporary capitalism.

Posted by The Haikuist at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

An interesting article about the recent California Democratic Party convention, from LA Weekly, brilliantly captures the essence of what is wrong with the Democratic Party, as well as the naivete of its legions of liberal activists.

The article describes the huge disconnect between the reformist impulses of liberal delegates within the party and the reality of a stage-managed convention, run by and for pro-corporate politicians. For example:

As the convention was breaking up on Sunday, I couldn'’t help but chuckle--partly in sympathy but partly in amazement --at the loud laments from some of the self-proclaimed liberals (like the Progressive Democrats of America) who just couldn'’t believe that the party voted down most of its last-minute proposals. The PDAers were walking around shell-shocked because the party and organized labor had endorsed the re-election of the rather conservative South Bay Congresswoman Jane Harman over her lefty challenger Marcy Winograd. The latter'’s supporters had diligently gathered up the hundreds of signatures necessary to re-float an agenda item before the convention, and were seeking to overturn the Harman endorsement. What they got was an express railroad ticket, the convention chair rushing the measure through an unaccountable 'nay'” voice-vote.

These progressive folks seem to forget that in party conventions, the delegates are there strictly as unpaid extras in what is otherwise a tightly scripted, totally predetermined political reality show. In my experience, Republican delegates to both national and state party conventions seem to know and readily accept this uncomfortable fact about American party politics. The Republican delegates just don'’t care, and seem more than happy to just sit there with their plastic boaters and rubber elephant ears, clapping on cue in exchange for the parties, free buffets and open bars.

But Democratic delegates--often earnest teachers and oh-so-serious community activists--—seem permanently embarked on a crusade to convince themselves that this is really their party, hence the nonstop yammering about taking it back, turning it around, taking it over, etc., etc., etc. I'’ve been watching this now-ritual kabuki for my entire adulthood (stretching back to McGovern '72) and nothing, really, seems to change. I actually met shaking and weeping delegates who were outraged--—outraged, I tell you--after the move to endorse Winograd was gaveled down on Sunday morning. Ah.

The article then discusses in detail some of the key players in the corporate sponsored convention, starting with one who wasn't able to attend: Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez, who was a big supporter of AT&T's telecommunications interests, couldn't attend because he was at Pebble Beach being "feted" by--you guessed it, AT&T. And because the Party Chairman couldn't be there, they gave the party podium to corporate lobbyist Willie Brown, who had been paid by the pharmaceutical industry to oppose a pro-consumer ballot measure last year.

This is all interesting reading--and par for the course in understanding not just how corrupt and morally bankrupt the Democratic Party is, but how self-destructive progressives are when they bury themselves inside the Democratic Party--which many on the left correctly identify as the graveyard of progressive social movements.

What is particularly ironic about all of this is that the author of this article, who embraced the ABB argument in supporting Kerry in 2004, has thus exemplified many of the same qualities that he criticizes among the liberal activists at the convention. Amazingly, the same person who complains about those "embarked on a crusade to convince themselves that this is really their party" has himself embraced that same party. Which perhaps illustrates how entrenched the duopoly mentality is--even many of those who sharply critique it nevertheless, when all is said and done, embrace it themselves anyway.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments

Yesterday's New York Times included an article that suggested that it might be strategically more beneficial for the Democrats not to win a Congressional majority in the 2006 elections. According to this argument, it actually benefits the Democrats not to be a position of sharing power, because the Republican monopoly on power will allow them to continue to hang themselves and further damage their popularity on up to the 2008 Presidential elections.

There is an amazing core of cynical truth that lies behind that proposition. Hope springs eternal, but a hard dose of reality can always shatter that hope. What we see in our current political system is that, as long as a party is out of power, it can rely on the "grass is always greener" sentiment that begins to blossom among many voters with respect to the party that governs. The longer that a party stays out of power, the better it starts to look. By contrast, the longer a party stays in power, the worse it starts to look. The reality of a party being in power has a way of making a party lose its luster; this in part why no single party maintains a monopoly on power in Western parliamentary democracies, and that is why this process is often described as a kind of pendulum swing.

Given this process, the Democrats know that the moment they begin to share or attain power, the clock on their pendulum starts ticking. The longer they stay out of power, the more rose colored the glasses that some voters start to see them through. This phenomenon exists despite the continued inability of the Democrats to offer a real opposition to the Republicans on a host of issues. In fact, it is really the tweedledee and tweedledum nature of our two-party system that contributes to this pendulum process. Many swing and independent voters keep hoping that they will see a real difference when they change the parties in power; but because it is business as usual, they then become disillusioned, and over time they turn their sights back to the party they had voted out of power. Eventually, this other party switches roles from opposition to governing party, and the cycle of disillusionment begins all over again.

The hope of some Democrats that they will need to time very carefully the pendulum swing says much of the cynical nature of politics as being more about a contest for power between two opportunistic factions of the ruling class and less about the battle of ideas. And herein lies a fundamental problem with our political system, which is all about the trappings of democracy rather than the reality.

There are some interesting corollaries to the pendulum understanding of elections in the quasi-democracy of American politics. For example, although Democratic Party apologists in 2004 argued for the ABB philosophy to justify supporting Kerry that year, the loss of the Democrats in that election actually helped them in 2006 or 2008 by giving more momentum to a reversal of the pendulum swing. Bush's poll numbers are, unlike in 2004, at rock bottom, and, his legislative agenda has faltered as his "political capital" withered to nothing. The Democrats are probably better poised to win back Congress in 2006 than they otherwise would have been. The worse Bush looks, the greener the Democratic grass looks to some voters--and Bush just keeps looking worse, the longer he and his party maintain a monopoly on power. A Kerry presidency would have introduced a cold splash of reality to the whole process. This is something that some Democratic Party strategists seem to realize at some level even if they would never articulate it, which is why they want to delay the pendulum swing another two years.

Another interesting consequence that emerges from this pendulum understanding is that even if Gore had won in 2000, or Kerry would have won in 2004, eventually, at some point in the future, a Republican would win the Presidency. If we don't have Bush in 2004, we simply have a Bush clone from his party at some point in the future. Without any real alternative movement from the Left to challenge the Bush and Democratic agendas and thus push the political center leftward, without countervailing pressure from the Left against both parties of the duopoly, and without a vision of how to challenge the lack of genuine democracy in our electoral, political, and economic system, the political agenda of the Bushites is simply bound to win back the White House--if not in 2004, then at some future election. The ABB strategy was a failure because it focused on this election--at all costs--rather than proposing a long term strategy of looking beyond the narrow swings of the duopoly pendulum. The ABB strategy was caught up in the pendulum paradigm and never looked beyond it.

The political pendulum of American politics is dependent on the realities of a political system that is only a shadow of the democracy that it claims to be. Until we introduce real democracy into the American political system--radical democracy that is founded on the self-organized people taking power from the corporate ruling class--we will never have real political change. This means creating new political institutions from the bottom up. Until that happens, tweedledee and tweedledum will do their tango on the dance floor of American politics, back and forth, back and forth--with all the attendant voter disillusionment and apathy, as well as desperate hopes for real and meaningful change that never come to fruition.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments

Michael J. Smith has written an excellent post on the bizarre but common media characterization of a so-called "polarization" in American politics between two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, that are in so many ways so much alike.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments

The New York Times reports that Rupert Murdoch will be giving a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton.

'Nuff said.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Today's column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle issues a fairly typical liberal criticism of Bush's foreign policy. In his column, Carroll contrasts contemporary US actions with the supposedly halcyon days of yore. He writes:

...once upon a time, we were the leading internationalist nation in the world. We strongly supported the formation of the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We were serious about promoting humane behavior around the world. We preferred peace to war. We did not automatically assume that all foreigners were out to get us.

Now what we care about is "defending America's interests."

One has to wonder what time in history Carroll thinks he is referring to. While it is true that the US has often promoted various international organizations when it served US imperial interests, it is also true that the US has always acted unilaterally against other nations whenever it felt like it, in order to promote "America's interests" (which, of course, meant the interests of US capitalism). From coups that overthrew foreign democracies and replaced them with dictatorships (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, and Chile 1973), to military invasions (Dominican Republic 1964, Grenada 1983), to unilateral assertions of supremacy over other sovereign nations (the Platt Amendment), to wars of aggression (Vietnam, Iraq), the story has been the same.

Like many liberals, Carroll focuses on the crimes of the Bush administration and then turns a blind eye to the reality that imperial foreign policy has always been a bipartisan reality. Bush may be more brazen about it than some, but there is no qualitative change in foreign policy. In fact, the Democrats have always been keen to support imperialism themselves. Kerry's foreign policy, for example, is little different from Bush's, and in fact Kerry was labeled "the newest neocon" by columnist William Safire for precisely that reason. In 2002, Democrats were eager to line up behind Bush's war threats against Iraq, and they are now doing the same thing against Iran.

The reality is that the crimes of US imperialism can be laid squarely on the shoulder of both parties of the governing duopoly.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here's a headline from an AP article published today: "U.S. Newborn Survival Rate Ranks Low". The opening sentence of the article reads: "America may be the world's superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia."

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments

Today's San Francisco Chronicle features this headline about the Republican governor and the two Democrats who are vying for for their party's nomination to run against him:

"Candidates are strangely quiet as voices of immigrants grow
During the rallies, Schwarzenegger left the state -- and neither Angelides nor Westly issued a statement"

Next to the article, on the front page, are photographs of all three, with these comments: "Arnold Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-born naturalized American", "Steve Westly is married to an immigrant born in China", and "Phil Angelides is the son and grandson of Greek immigrants.

The unwillingness of any of the candidates, especially the Democrats, to take a principled stand on this issue speaks volumes. In a way, there is nothing "strangely" quiet about this--rather than strangely, the more appropriate adverb would be "fittingly."

It is also worth noting that article itself was written by Carla Marinucci, the Chronicle's political reporter who has, over the years, steadfastly served as a shill for the duopoly, and has refused to cover third party candidacies, even when they were polling well enough to merit such attention. For example, during the 2002 gubernatorial election, she repeatedly ignored the candidacy of Peter Camejo in her articles, even though at one point at least one poll was showing support as high as 9% for his candidacy. In September of that year, she began one article about Gray Davis with the words "Under pressure from his political opponent"; the next day, she described the Republican candidate as Gray Davis's "challenger", as if there were only one challenger. The following month, she began one of her stories with a sentence that referred to "the Golden State's candidates for governor", referring only to two of them--the candidates of the duopoly, thus completely ignoring Camejo even though he was also a candidate.

The nature of her shilling for the duopoly was further exposed when the election results came back. In San Francisco, the very city that her newspaper was based in, it turned out that Camejo--a candidate that she pretended didn't even exist--actually got more votes than the Republican candidate did. Camejo got 33, 468 votes, to the Republican's 33,202.

Unfortunately, Marinucci and others in the press will probably continue to shill for the duopoly this year just as she did four years ago, and the headlines of their articles will still use words like "strangely" when describing the behavior of the duopoly's candidates. This year, there are third parties on the ballot, with candidates running for Governor, that have taken strong stands on immigration issues. The Peace and Freedom Party, for example, issued a press release that stated "The Peace and Freedom Party has endorsed the immigrants rights rallies and strike
planned for May 1, 2006". The Green Party's web page states on its web page that "The Green Party of California has officially endorsed - in sharp contrast to the Democratic and Republican parties - the massive rallies planned Monday." Of course, none of gets the slightest attention from Marinucci or anyone else in the mainstream press.

Posted by The Haikuist at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here is an interesting quote from Robert Jensen's recent article in Counterpunch titled "Why Leftists Distrust Liberals":

...In the short-term in this country it is difficult to see possibilities for serious progressive political change. That’s not defeatist but merely realistic. In such a period, when no mass movement is likely to emerge, one important political task is to consolidate a base of activists with common values and deeper commitments. In such a process, making the distinctions between liberal and left is crucial to the project of building a core radical contingent that can be politically effective in the future.

Second, when leftists and liberals form least-common-denominator coalitions, liberal positions dominate. There’s no history of liberals moving to include left political ideas when right-wing forces are chased from power. Think Bill Clinton, here.

That said, we in left/radical movements have made more than our share of mistakes. It’s time for a period of serious critical self-reflection about our analysis and organizing strategies. That process is not going to be advanced by ignoring the differences we have with liberals. We need to be clearer than ever about those differences in thinking about the long term.

Posted by The Haikuist at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments

Michael Donnelly has written an article in Counterpunch about some of the failings of the antiwar movement. One big problem, as he points out, is that the strength of the movement has been sapped by its association with pro-war Democrats. This was true in 2004 when antiwar activists lined up to support the prowar Kerry. It is being replayed again in 2006, with many antiwar liberals once again supporting prowar Democrats who are up for election in Congress or the Senate. Donnelly writes:

And, just as Bush would have the public swallow the very same lies all over again re: Iran; the UFPJ wing of the Peace Movement is gearing up for yet another unquestioning, pro-war Democrat endorsement in 2008. In election year 2006, we have yet to hear any clarion call, or even a peep, from the movement elders (and, yes, "elders" is the correct term) calling for opposition to every one of the Democrat war hawks now up for reelection. (Oh, they'll gladly do it for the Republicans)

Indeed, the peace movement, which should have been actively working against all prowar politicians, including Kerry, instead sapped the momentum of the movement in 2004 just as it should have seen growing. We are seeing this played out again in 2006, another election year.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments