Haiku Politics

Here we find yet another fascinating bit of information about MoveOn's lack of credibility . The site factcheck.org has pointed out an interesting detail about their political ads:

MoveOn.org Political Action attacks three Republican House members in TV ads saying they were "caught red-handed" supporting money spent on Halliburton contracts and wasteful Iraq projects. But a majority of Democrats voted the same way on most of the same measures, usually overwhelmingly. MoveOn endorses one Democratic House member who voted the same way 10 out of 14 times, and two senators who voted for the same measures every time they reached a recorded vote in the Senate. (emphasis added)

Apparently you it's bad if you vote a certain way only when you are a Republican, but it is good when you vote that way and you are a Democrat. This is illustrative of the thinking that lies behind liberal loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

Today's article by Matthew Yi of the San Francisco Chronicle describes in gory detail the process by which AT&T effectively bought the California legislature and got bill AB2987 passed over the objections of local governments and community activists. Yi reports that "phone companies that stand to gain the most from the legislation, especially AT&T, have pulled out all the stops in making their case before lawmakers, spending more than $200,000 a day during a three-month promotional blitz." The legislature in California is dominated by the Democratic party, and this sordid story serves as an object lesson in why the Democrats are a party of corporate interests.

Yi reports that during this three month period, which took place after state Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, a Democrat, held a news conference introducing the legislation,

AT&T and Verizon spent almost $19.7 million to influence the vote on AB2987, an amount that astounds Capitol veterans.

AT&T led the way by spending nearly $18 million on lobbyists; television, radio and newspaper advertising; wining and dining lawmakers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium; and Lakers basketball tickets for the chairwoman of the Senate committee that held hearings on the legislation, records show.

A few weeks after Núñez's news conference, AT&T co-hosted a golf tournament at Pebble Beach that helped the speaker raise $1.7 million for the state Democratic Party.

Yi also points out:

Despite initial opposition by cable companies and continuing objection from local governments and consumer groups, which say the increased competition for video service won't lower prices, the legislation has yet to receive a single "no" vote during committee and floor votes. Final votes are expected on the bill this week.

"This appears to be an example of special interest(s) using their financial clout to buy public policy," said Ned Wigglesworth, policy advocate of California Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group. "If you look up 'juiced bill' in the dictionary, this would be the definition."

Here we see how the Democratic Party serves the interests of its corporate sponsors. Let this be a reminder to anyone who thinks that the Democratic Party is a "progressive" force in American politics.

Posted by The Haikuist at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

Clive Crook, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, is no socialist. On the contrary, he has largely been an apologist for the capitalist system; one article that he wrote for the magazine in 2005, for example, complains that capitalism gets an undeserved bum rap. And yet, interestingly enough, in the current issue of the magazine, he has written an article that serves as a devastating critique of modern capitalism. Crook points out that, in contemporary American capitalism, almost all of the productivity gains in the last few decades have gone towards giant salary increases for the richest people. Our increased productivity as workers is not, in other words, resulting in more income for us--it is only serving to pad the pocketbooks of the very wealthy.

Crook writes:

Between 1966 and 2001, median wage and salary income increased by just 11 percent, after inflation. Income at the 90th percentile...increased nearly six times as much--by 58 percent. At the 99th percentile..., the rise was 121 percent. At the 99.9th percentile..., it was 236 percent. And at the 99.99th percentile(...representing the 13,000 highest-paid workers in the American economy), the rise was 617 percent.

Crook points out that "the dramatic rise in the share of national income earned by the very rich is due not to the strength of their investment portfolios but to their growing share of labor income." What is going on here? According to Crook,

Productivity growth has always been seen as perhaps the single most important indicator of rising, broad-based prosperity. But remarkable growth in top-end pay, together with the relative constancy of labor's overall share of income, has an obvious implication: the highest earners are now capturing most of the gain in national income caused by economy-wide productivity growth.

It might be easy to blame all of this on the Bush administration. But Crook cites a study that found that this trend preceded George Bush. In fact, from 1997 to 2001--when Bill Clinton was president--"the top 1 percent captured far more of the real national gain in wage and salary income than did the bottom 50 percent."

This is the reality of modern capitalism--the rich get richer.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments

From Youtube:

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Norman Solomon has written an article in Counterpunch that highlights the blatant inconsistency in of MoveOn's approach towards Democratic Party politicians. While they joined in with other anti-Lieberman liberals to defeat him in the Connecticut primary, MoveOn is remarkably silent about another prowar Democratic Senator, Hillary Clinton. Clinton has an upcoming primary election in New York, and she is facing an antiwar challenger. But her challenger, Jonathon Tasini, is in fact more seriously antiwar than Lamont. Yet all the liberal energy was focused on supporting Lamont in Connecticut, while ignoring the Tasini campaign.

Any attempt at "reforming" the Democratic Party mysteriously stops when it comes to challenging Hillary Clinton. Or is it so mysterious? Was Lieberman just a scapegoat by liberals who are only willing to go so far in "reforming" the Democratic Party?

I would suggest that for many Democrats, criticizing Hillary Clinton hits a little too close to home. She is the spouse of the last Democratic Party president to win an election, and liberals who are so solidly attached to the Democratic Party are largely willing to overlook his triangulation, his corporate whoring, and his attacks against the poor. Her association with Bill Clinton makes her immune, at least to some degree, to liberal objections to her warmongering. Although it is an open question as to whether she can win a presidential election, the fact that her husband won twice gives her a glow to many liberals who would rather support a winning Presidential candidate than support progressive politics. The willingness to overlook Hillary Clinton's failings really seems to boil down to loyalty to the Democratic Party. It is a little too discomforting for some to openly condemn a politician who is so intimately associated with recent electoral fortunes of the party they love. The fact that she, in many ways, epitomizes the modern Democratic Party, and everything that is wrong with it, just gets overlooked in the process.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

Many liberals have lined up to support Ned Lamont's challenge to Joe Lieberman in the upcoming Democratic Party primary. Much of this support is based on Lamont's differences with Lieberman over the Iraq war.

Yet what is interesting about this election is that it highlights one of the fundamental problems with contemporary liberalism. Liberals are willing to support Ned Lamont--a millionaire capitalist who is worth, according to Time magazine, "between $90 million and $300 million", and who, it seems, owns up to $30,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock.

Rather than looking to Lieberman's faults as a symptom of a deeper problem with the Democratic Party, many liberals continue to see him as an aberration, and hope that some "better" Democrat will solve their problems. Loyalty, unfortunately, isn't always a virtue. Here we have a party that has time and time again demonstrated itself to be so utterly corrupt and bereft of ideas. It is a party that demonstrates repeatedly a stark absence of concern about corporate power and the burdensome consequences of capitalism for working people.

For what it's worth, as far as I can tell, the only candidate outside the duopoly who is running for Senate in Connecticut is Ralph Ferrucci of the Green Party.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments