Mayors Quan and Emmanuel aren’t the solution and they’re not going to help the solution along. They’re the problem.

“I’m most definitely not saying that I’m happy with the dem’s procrastination, or any of their other failings. I’m saying that I am most certainly going to vote, and I want to make the best choice.

And I’m not saying I expect something fundamentally novel to happen in 11 months. That’s my whole point. Its going to take longer, much longer, and until there is an alternative you have to decide who you are voting for. And until somebody emerges that more clearly represents the goals of Occupy our choices are very limited. Not voting is not an option.”

Of course it is. The United States isn’t Australia and voting isn’t mandatory here.

Furthermore, the approach that you’re advocating (and OWS is so far not falling into, much to their credit as far as I’m concerned) is one of the other big methods by which leftists and liberals have been disempowered in this country.

The decision for groups to support the Democrats comes with a lot more costs than benefits. Although these consequences do not have to occur this way, this is what I’ve typically seen happen:

1) The decision is made to back away from criticism of the Democrats for those positions where they agree with Republicans. After all, making those criticisms could hurt the Democrats’ chance in the election.

2) Naturally, all of the members of a group won’t agree on this and some will want to follow through on an issue or issues no matter where it leads. The typical reactions to this are to either censor those who make the criticism, force them out, or otherwise marginalize them.

3) When a group is seen as acting in this manner, it loses credibility because it can be accused of being seen (somewhat rightly) as being more concerned with partisan gain than the issue or issues that are supposed to be central.

The results of this approach are that you end up with groups that are self-censoring, demoralizing to the cause that they supposedly support because supporting the Democrats takes over more than anything else, and ineffective-because again, once the Democrats understand quite clearly that you’re going to vote for them no matter what, or with a couple of pointless sops to the idea that you know that they’re pathetic such as “I’m holding my nose” or “Anybody But Bush” they have absolutely no further motive to listen to you. According to centrism, they’ll now chase after conservative voters who have no intention of ever voting for them-and moving further to the right in the process.

“Maybe we’ve been arguing two sides of a different point, but if you think I’m advocating some blind support of the Dem’s you don’t understand what I’ve been saying. You don’t want to vote for Obama –  fine, then who are you going to vote for in 11 months?”

I won’t be voting for either Democrats or Republicans.

I’m most definitely not saying that I’m happy with the dem’s procrastination, or any of their other failings. I’m saying that I am most certainly going to vote, and I want to make the best choice.

And I’m not saying I expect something fundamentally novel to happen in 11 months. That’s my whole point. Its going to take longer, much longer, and until there is an alternative you have to decide who you are voting for. And until somebody emerges that more clearly represents the goals of Occupy our choices are very limited. Not voting is not an option. 

Maybe we’ve been arguing two sides of a different point, but if you think I’m advocating some blind support of the Dem’s you don’t understand what I’ve been saying. You don’t want to vote for Obama –  fine, then who are you going to vote for in 11 months?

Why should patience only be extended to the status quo, and not to people attempting to change it?

How do you actually know that, though?

More than anything else, that sounds like the Democratic Party talking-and that’s the problem (or rather, a significant part of it).

“Because even if the vast majority of Americans would benefit from Wall Street reform, and a public health care system, and the end of lobbying, most Americans won’t support that candidate because they are going to get caught up in the ideologial debate and slandering that goes on in an election. If you want that liberal candidate to win you fight is with the American people, and not with lousy two party system as f-cked up as it is.”

I don’t think that’s even remotely true. The fight is far, far more against the two party system than it is against the American people (even though I concede that there is a significant portion of Americans that are satisfied with it). The reason why is because the two party system essentially functions as a filter that passes right wing ideas through, no matter how ludicrous or antithetical to facts or even basic ethics they might be, while preventing left wing ideas from going through except sporadically at best. The PATRIOT Acts, the regressive budgets, the legislation intended to punish the ‘wrong’ people, the support for other repressive governments, and the giveaways to major corporations sail through Congress. In comparison, the institutions practically convulse themselves to death over even attempting to give the American people benefits that would seem paltry in much of the industrialized world.

The Supercommittee is a recent example. The entire reason why it was formed was because the Democrats refused to pass the debt limit increase when they had a majority (never mind that the Republicans supported the exact same measure when it was Bush that was doing it). Its only serious priority was austerity measures which Obama supported and it has always operated as secretly as possible.

In a recent survey (and I’ll find the link later) what did most Americans say the biggest priority of the government should be? It wasn’t debt reduction and it certainly wasn’t hacking down Medicare/Medicaid. It was job creation.

They’re totally disconnected with what the American people either want or need.

“The onus is on us to go out and convince our neighbors and friend why liberal policies are good for them and why they are being Owned by wall street and corporations, and that is what is so damn important about Occupy. Then a liberal candidate will stand a chance, no matter where they are coming from. ”

Even after that convincing, they would still have to face a two party system. Your argument is essentially trying to forestall the inevitable confrontation against their intransigence.

“You’ll find such a candidate is much more likely to emerge from the liberal side of the Dems than anywhere else. Such a trend would move the GOP away from the moral conservatives back to the fiscal and policy conservatives where they really contributed an invaluable role to the dialog in the US. That would be a win win.”

Except that following your own logic, the Democrats wouldn’t support such a candidate because they’d be convinced that such a candidate would lose. An alternative leftist prevention scheme would be putting so many preconditions on the circumstances when such a candidate would be acceptable to the party apparatus (the argument from 2000-2008 was called ‘keeping our powder dry’) that the right time really means never.

The Democrats have just as much to fear as the Republicans.

The important thing isn’t whether more Democrats or more Republicans get elected.  The important thing is to create conditions during the election campaigns that get the politicians competing against each other for the OWS vote.
 

Listen, if you miraculously get a liberal candidate to run, I have news for you – they are going to loose. Because even if the vast majority of Americans would benefit from Wall Street reform, and a public health care system, and the end of lobbying, most Americans won’t support that candidate because they are going to get caught up in the ideologial debate and slandering that goes on in an election. If you want that liberal candidate to win you fight is with the American people, and not with lousy two party system as f-cked up as it is. The onus is on us to go out and convince our neighbors and friend why liberal policies are good for them and why they are being Owned by wall street and corporations, and that is what is so damn important about Occupy. Then a liberal candidate will stand a chance, no matter where they are coming from. You’ll find such a candidate is much more likely to emerge from the liberal side of the Dems than anywhere else. Such a trend would move the GOP away from the moral conservatives back to the fiscal and policy conservatives where they really contributed an invaluable role to the dialog in the US. That would be a win win.

We need a law to regulate money in politics. Politicians need real legal deterrents from taking money. 

Carol
Lifelong Democrat

Carol
Lifelong Democrat

Agreed, you can’t make that happen by putting them in office. Once they’re there, the seduction is too strong. They’ll turn into just another jackass, right? But how do you force congress to hang itself? To directly vote against its personal interests?

This is where my plan always falls apart.

These two statements contradict slightly. I’m not a fatalist, after years of seeing fatalism fail as well, and I do think that there is a solution. However, I don’t think that there are going to be any solutions that will come out of voting-much less for Obama-because of the reasons that I stated above.

“I’m not sure the Dems moving away from centrism will help.”

Actually, yes: if they moved away from centrism and the problems of centrism it would help tremendously. Even the minor moves that they made away from centrism after the 2004 disaster, such as having a 50 state strategy and having Howard Dean, who was a lot more inclined towards confrontation, be in charge of the DNC, helped quite a bit. I’ll also point out that iirc, this move was actually opposed by some of the consultariat of the Democratic Party, such as Carville who sneered about how these people (read: average Democrats) were strutting around thinking that they were in charge. I’ll grant that in 2006 and 2008 the Democrats had two major disasters, one of Congressional corruption and the other economic, that were clearly assignable to the Republicans that helped them. At the same time, if they weren’t at least somewhat prepared to take advantage of these, it wouldn’t have helped.

So after 2006 and 2008 what did the Democrats do? Did they build upon what was finally changing in their favor?

…No. They brought back a bunch of Clinton-era retreads, went back on or totally misfired with regards to just about every promise they made (expanding the wars, of course, they took seriously), decided to rhetorically piss on their most ardent supporters, and went back to the same strategies that had nearly brought them to extinction as a political party.

Ultimately, they hadn’t changed. What’s far more likely from now on is that they’ll just borrow the rhetoric of what their voters want-and then proceed to enact absolutely nothing of what they wanted (as usual).

” It will likely only weaken them and make it harder for them to enact any of the liberal policies we’d like to see. The GOP is experiencing a similar shift to the conservative margin, and the party is a mess, divided, and unable to put forward a viable candidate.”

Or alternately, with a more coherent ideological core, when the Democrats did gain power again, they would be able to do far more with it.

This is another one of the dirty little hypocrisies of American politics (and I don’t want this to be seen as me calling you a hypocrite, as much as I’m saying that the ideology involved is hypocritical). The Republicans didn’t enact the policies of their donors through constantly being internally sabotaged by people that disagreed with them. Politicians that betrayed the ideology consistently would find themselves either challenged internally or externally until they left one way or another. Similarly, centrists are equally intolerant of challenges. Candidates that don’t follow the dogma find their campaigns underfunded, or are left to stand or fall on their own in a general election, or are starved out of the Democratic Party. Kucinich attempted to sue because of the way his was undercovered and disgraced by the press during the 2008 election. Not a single other candidate would support him-because they wanted him out.

In comparison, it is ONLY the left, in the United States, that is expected to endlessly compromise and sell itself out for people who have no intention of giving us anything we want-no matter how reasonable it might be. Only we are expected to break the foremost rule that I’ve seen in politics: which is that you don’t reward people for stabbing you in the back.

“I think the best option is a second term for Obama where he is free of re-election concerns and is more likely to persue a liberal agenda. If something better crops up, I’m all for it.”

Or, based on the ideology of centrism that I described above, he’ll conclude that all of the compromises that he’s made, such as the supercommittee, the continued militarism, the lackadaisical approach towards the crimes of the financial sector, were what got him re-elected and he won’t change a thing.

Why would he, when there is no way of throwing him out within the constraints of the system by that point? In fact, that’s another element of the game that American politicians play against us: most of the politicians that are involved with decisionmaking that would be insanely unpopular with their constituents or the American public in general, have already come out as saying that they’re not running for re-election anyways. In this way, given that they’re guaranteed better jobs after they leave or the financial rewards of their decisions, they have little motive to make any decision that contradicts the will of their donors. They’re insulated from the consequences of their decisions.

I’m not sure the Dems moving away from centrism will help. It will likely only weaken them and make it harder for them to enact any of the liberal policies we’d like to see. The GOP is experiencing a similar shift to the conservative margin, and the party is a mess, divided, and unable to put forward a viable candidate.

I think the best option is a second term for Obama where he is free of re-election concerns and is more likely to persue a liberal agenda. If something better crops up, I’m all for it.

The reason why is because both political parties have vital roles to play in how things got this bad. The Republicans’ role is fairly obvious. They are the outright, direct, advocates of favoritism for the wealthy and the privileged and advocates of social reaction-whether because they believe in it outright or because they use it to get people who aren’t wealthy to support them. Both motives aren’t entirely exclusive of each other.

The Democrats’ role is less obvious but still destructive against any positive change. I’ve listened to the justifications from the type of people who can look at Democrats voting for a bill called “Authorization for Use of Military Force” and tell themselves that the Democrats didn’t vote for war, and watched the manner in which they are actually run (as compared to the rhetoric) as best I can. As far as I am concerned, this type of person deep down, either wishes that they could be Republicans except that not being rich enough (any more), or WASP enough, or insane enough kind of got in the way, or alternately,  they think that the ideology of the Republicans has already won, so since their victory is inevitable or is going to be inevitable, they would cynically rather ‘humanize’ it a bit by offering a smile with that IV tube filled with poison.

The reason why liberal Democrats (as few of them are left) can’t control the reactionaries in the party is because at this point the reactionaries are the party. The core ideology of the Democrats at this point (‘centrism’) inadvertently disallows them from being anything else. Its goal is to find a mythical golden mean between the right wing (which they’ll attempt to emulate at every turn) and the left wing (which they blame and disenfranchise at every turn).

When this fails because their voters actually wanted an array of changes much closer to a leftist perspective than a rightist or conservative perspective, this does not mean that centrism actually failed to them. It just means that centrism wasn’t practiced enough-so they’ll try it even harder next time.

When it succeeds it’s seen as a triumph of centrism and so voters on the left and liberals can be dispensed with or ignored in favor of attempting to peel off more voters on the right.

The point I’m getting at is that it is more important for the current array of Democrats to keep centrism in charge than to actually change anything or answer to their constituents. If this means losing elections like they did in 2010 and 2004, or ignoring basic and rank violations of voting rights, like they did in 2004 and 2000, or continually rehiring or retaining intentionally or chronically inept leaders and consultants like Pelosi and Bob Shrum, then they’ll do it. What they won’t do is tolerate any challenges from within the party to the status quo or the underlying ideology from the left. Anything the right within the party does, however, is tolerated. I’ll get to that a bit later.

Ultimately, the Democrats wouldn’t do anything but suck OWS into the same mire in which they have been caught for decades now.

Amy L. Sacks mentioned the sellouts of the Democrats. If anything, she underestimated just how terrible they are. With regards to the health care bill, at every single turn practically every perspective except for the one that maximized insurance company profits was marginalized by them. Single payer advocates weren’t even allowed to testify even though this is what much of the industrialized world uses (already a great start as far as intellectual honesty is concerned. The Senate version of the bill was left to be privately frittered away between Baucus (a conservative Democrat) and Grassley at first and largely in secrecy (which, of course, centrists love because it epitomizes the idea that they serve a cause of ‘moderation’ that only they truly understand). It was then further hacked down by letting its passage be seen as dependent on pleasuring Joe Lieberman-a man whose entire career is a lurid display of the pathologies of the Democratic Party in terms of his smarmy moralizing, continuous defense of censorship, militarism, and willingness to take money from just about anyone-and that even after the voters attempted to reject him and he went out of his way to humiliate the party by speaking at the Republican national convention-they still welcomed him back and even let him keep his seniority.

At the end of all of this, who gets pressured to approve of the final bill? Those few Democrats who had any objections based on actual liberal or leftist principles.

The point I’m ultimately making is that the Democrats are irredeemable. All of these same factors would come into play if OWS had anything to do with them-and at best, they’d end up as just another ‘kept’ group, attempting to justify why nothing changed but we should keep voting Democratic anyway.

There is plenty of money to go around unless I’m missing something.  CEOs of decades past had wealth and prestige and they “only” earned about 40 times what the guy on the assembly line did. But no, the wealthy and powerful won’t stop until they have completely jacked up everything.

They need to overcome
- Screwing the economy while still getting paid.
- Foreclosing on homes with fake documents.
- Foreclosing on homes they did not own.
- Trying to cover up the loans to spouses from the Fed that need not be paid back.
- Crying poverty and change in attitude while sacking workers for a better bonus.
- Pumping nearly a million dollars into a campaign to make the people they helped screw over look bad.
- Making billions while trying to get back $5 a month from each customer because rates changed.

I think that number needs about 3 more zeros before they have a real shot at making themselves look sympathetic.  6 more zeros and they might even get away with some of it.

If only we had organizations that reported on things factually, that were not beholden to corporate masters, who could tell people the truth.  You know keeping them informed of current events and not trying to promote the corporate version of reality, but dig deep and report actual facts.  They could print up stuff on paper and sell it on the streets, or if they had a camera they could film it and broadcast it.  There is this thing I’ve heard of where you can put stuff on this “world wide web” thingy and people could discuss it.

One might think that seeing this much money to try and stop a world wide movement, might mean this is actually an important issue and should be considered seriously.  Instead expect a new round of birther crap, filthy hippy crap, slackers pooping on your yard crap.

For all of that money they have they seem to have no education about history, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, etc… there was all kinds of bad press about them, and they still won.  Maybe they didn’t learn that things that are “right” can only be suppressed for so long, and in the end will triumph. 
Luckily for them now we think guillotines are bad things.