Drones, the drug war and income inequality are important. But a vote against Obama only makes other issues worse

President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks at a campaign event at George Mason University, Friday, Oct. 5, 2012, in Fairfax, Va. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Editor’s Note:  We present this article, “the other side of the contra Obama argument” because we do not pretend to absolutism in our “certainties” (itself an absolutism), and because Coyote’s plea is among the best we have found of its kind.  Actually he’s so “reasonable” that he comes close to winning his case. Indeed, he makes a compelling argument up to a point…and then the structure sort of collapses. Leaving aside the fact that Coyote in his current incarnation is a self-professed “Buddhist priest”, and I have no use for any type of religion, even Buddhism (which, admittedly, seems less harmful than most), I found some of Coyote’s assertions and equations rankling, superficial, conventional, and hard to accept. (Mother Theresa an example of goodness balancing the universal evil of Hitler? Apparently Coyote never read Hitchens’ able deconstruction of the “beatified nun” or else he would have looked for a more formidable angel. But these are really quibbles. Coyote is a lifelong leftwinger and his heart is obviously on the, let’s call it, “the healing side of humanity.”)

For the record, let me say at the outset that we do have an important point of agreement, namely his objection to what he regards as Stoller’s “reductionism”.  Obama, despite his many flaws, including Olympian opportunism, can’t be held accountable for all that is wrong with America today (an argument, incidentally that Stoller does not make).  For that he’d have to be a Caesar, and the American executive, for all his/her bloated powers, occupies a position far more diluted than that.  Much larger forces, unchecked class forces, acting on longer horizons than his tenure, have created much of the criminal mess we inhabit.  In fact the plutocratic propaganda project which facilitated this development is of very old standing.  Self-flattering myths and outrageous fabrications have trapped the American mind in a cocoon of unreality practically from the moment the nation was born, but have taken a decisively more professional, self-conscious and cynical edge in the postwar period. Is it an exaggeration to say that at least for the last 40 years the nation has been governed by a shadow government bent on implementing an oligarchic agenda while hiding behind an elaborate PR curtain of dessicated democratic formality?  As Coyote puts it, “capital and its minions have been working carefully and closely behind the scenes for decades, disenfranchising workers, voters, women and minorities.” The upshot of all this has been the scarcely denied arrival of the age of “Finance Capitalism”, the dreaded “financiation” stage, a natural development of global capitalism already envisioned by Lenin. That said, Obama, as Stoller and others have efficiently pointed out, has actively participated in the entrenchement of this malevolent new order. His hands are plenty dirty by now. He’s no innocent bystander.

In the final analysis, Coyote winds up endorsing the same tired old LOTE script, a path that, by postponing the inevitable, can only lead to a far more intractable and destructive confrontation at a later date, a date that the oncoming ecological crisis can ill accommodate.  On these grounds alone, and considering the copious and irrefutable evidence furnished by history that temporizing with evil is rarely a good idea, it is our turn to ask: Who is really being delusional?

We look forward to your comments.—P. Greanville

BY PETER COYOTE, salon.com
MONDAY, OCT 29, 2012

Matt Stoller’s provocative piece “The Progressive Case Against Obama” is a passionate, well-reasoned argument as to why “progressives,” even in swing states, should refuse to vote for President Obama. While I do not have Stoller’s political bona fides, I, like him, have spent a lifetime in “radical” and progressive politics, and served for eight years under Jerry Brown when he was governor of California — in other words, I possess some real-world political experience. I also have about 40 years of age on Stoller, and would like to offer the value of that perspective in refuting what I believe to be several distortions in this piece, which, if taken literally, could conceivably throw the election to Mitt Romney with more disastrous consequences than Stoller may have considered.

Stoller argues, and for the record, I agree, that under President Obama’s administration economic inequity in America has grown to staggering proportions. He holds Obama personally responsible for turning down a deal from Hank Paulson where, in return for rapid distribution of the second round of TARP funds, Paulson would press the banks to write down mortgages and save millions of foreclosures. According to Rep. Barney Frank and Stoller, the president nixed this deal, saved the banks and screwed homeowners. This is a damning charge, and I’m embarrassed to say that I believe it is true. It is one among a number of charges against the president that discourage and offend me: his reversal of single-payer healthcare, extra-judicial killings; the extension of imperial presidential powers and extensions of needless secrecy and attacks against whistle-blowers, the reliance on predator drones and death lists, to name a few.

Stoller presses us to consider President Obama responsible for all the above, and demands that we ask, “What kind of America has he [President Obama] actually delivered,” and this is where his argument begins to get wonky.

The drive toward corporate dominance of our political life (literal Fascism) began in earnest after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hired soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell to write a white paper on threats to the American way of life. Justice Powell identified two dominant enemies — consumer activists (particularly Ralph Nader) and environmentalists — as sources of major concern for the future. His report went on to create the blueprint of think tanks, publishing houses, social strategies and media assault that right-wing millionaires and billionaires, like the Coors, the Kochs and others, have generously funded for more than 40 years, transforming the American political vocabulary and framing of ideas about government and freedom in the process.

In so doing, their concentrated wealth and leverage of the media have conscripted presidents of both parties, and the entire Congress, as a concierge for their interests. If Ronald Reagan had not snipped the words “fair and balanced” from FCC-enabling legislation we would not have hate radio and Fox News today. If President Clinton had not overseen the demise of Glass-Steagall we would not have witnessed the rampant Wall Street speculation, fraud and collapse of our financial system that President Obama inherited. If Clinton had not signed the Telecommunications Act, delivering the public’s airwaves to a few major corporations, or GATT/NAFTA, bankrupting millions of Mexican farmers (no standing on our street corners seeking work) and shipping jobs to the Third World, we would be inhabiting a very different America today, one with a far more open and less biased public discourse.

I mention this, because there is an unsettling “personal” quality to Stoller’s assault on the president; an imbalanced, somewhat adolescent tenor to his outrage at the fact that the president could have once used illegal drugs but is currently the titular head of the War on Drugs. By making him single-handedly responsible for having “delivered” all current afflictions to America, Stoller simultaneously demonizes the president and makes him more powerful than virtually any figure in our political history.

President Obama was not the architect of these policies. He may be the tip of the iceberg, which we can identify dead ahead of our Ship of State, but capital and its minions have been working carefully and closely behind the scenes for decades, disenfranchising workers, voters, women and minorities. Like frogs resting comfortably in gradually heating water, we are just now apparently noticing how close to boiling our environment is. While Democrats have concentrated on a plethora of issues, the corporatists have worked unremittingly to gain power over the entire financial sector of the Nation.

It is impossible to imagine any candidate running for office that did not have the imprimatur of the American corporate sector. They own the 18 inches of counter and the cash register. They fan out their products as if they were all available for consumer choice –. and they are. Would you prefer a cool, slender, brilliant black attorney who looks like he stepped out of a Colors of Benetton ad or a strong-jawed white man who reminds us of the “good old ’50s” when white people could do whatever the hell they wanted? A Bible-thumping Baptist? They’ve got them all, and we mistake our “freedom” to choose among them as liberty. The media colludes with the candidates in repeating their narratives and faux populist roles until the entire spectacle of elections appears indistinguishable from a reality show.

Despite raising unprecedented amounts of money from “the little people,” 60 percent of Obama’s first presidential campaign was funded by big donors. He was Wall Street’s darling, and his payback to them was junking his campaign financial advisers and putting Timothy Geithner in charge to ensure that Wall Street’s interests were met. Is this surprising? This is how the politics of capital works. This is why the Commission on Presidential Debates forced the League of Women Voters out of managing the debates so that they could control the narrative and exclude third-party candidates. Did Mr. Stoller actually ever assume that a single man would be able to rein in the military-industrial complex and Wall Street? That would have been delusional, and whatever the president’s real strategies may have been, he was not helped by the defection of most of his supporters, who after the election returned to the Internet and blogging, while public spaces became colonized by Tea Party wing-nuts.

Mr. Obama is an astute student of power and he navigates his presidency between its shoals. He does what he can at the margins, and perhaps as a young father with children, he might be forgiven nervousness at the many unveiled threats leveled against him:  audience members showing up at his speeches carrying arms; unvetted guests slipping through White House security to get close enough for a handshake. These are rough games, and who can fault a family man for wanting to stay alive?

However, Stoller suggests a Machiavellian, hidden subterfuge to Obama’s ascendancy, as if he assumes that (just like a Colors of Benetton ad) race were confused with liberal politics. He cites as evidence of Obama’s conservative agenda, Mr. Obama’s early control of the House and Senate, but never analyzes that control closely. Obama was plagued with a razor-thin majority and the threatened defection of mutinous Blue-Dog democrats. He had no hope of passing a number of key legislative programs that might have kept his promises and still had clearly before him President Clinton’s own healthcare debacle as a reminder against acting rashly. Singling him out as the evil genius who has  single-handedly produced the alarming state of 21st century America is a reductionism that is not helpful and certainly takes voters and others off the hook.

The Gordian knot of our current corrupt political system is money! Public financing of elections; free airtime for qualified candidates; disenfranchising corporations from spending their treasure to influence public policy are three steps that could radically transform the American political landscape. People understand them. They are not abstract and could be the basis for real radical organizing. It is how European elections are run, over a two- to three-month period, where people are not bludgeoned into catatonia by trivia and the opinions of pundits discussing everything but the issues. Candidates can be seen on every channel, in open, unstructured debates, and people get a fair chance to make up their minds between a host of philosophies and attitudes that make America’s two-party system look like a fixed three-card monte game.

“The best moment for change is actually a crisis.” Stoller’s assertion sounds good, but is it true? In my youth, young radicals refused Hubert Humphrey’s compromised liberalism and wound up with Vietnam scarring the nation for the next decade. We made the perfect the enemy of the good. The real crises upon us are global warming and extreme environmental degradation and the implications are profound and life-threatening. It should be clear to most observers that the conflict between individual self-interest and the commons is leading directly to our mutual destruction. As long as millions of people “work” in industries like coal, nuclear, petroleum and hydrocarbons, their self-interest at maintaining employment works directly against solutions for the good of the race. If the nation needs to take drastic action to save the planet, we will have to consider how we will distribute national wealth when “jobs” have to be sacrificed. That is an idea that no candidate has had the courage to address and neither have any on the left, to my knowledge. What paucity of spirit concludes that begging for a job is a form of dignity, without considering what circumstances have left men and women so bereft of common wealth that they have nothing but their labor to offer?

No one will lay down and die (or abandon their families) for an abstract goal. But unless we can guarantee livelihood to the millions who are currently engaged in destructive planetary practices, we are out of luck. Exacerbating that dilemma by provoking a political crisis is a guarantee of wasting another 10 years while reactionary forces and stopgap measures take short-term dominance over common sense and common need. Doing it in a country awash with guns, anxiety, fears or rapid social change is a recipe to re-create the streets of Syria and Lebanon at home.

Many of Obama’s constitutional violations that disturb Stoller and myself are barely known and understood by the general populace. It will take decades of education to build understanding of their importance and constituencies for them. However, education, carbon, global warming, nuclear issues, the rights of women, immigrants, minorities, etc., are immediate and pressing. In triage terms, an Obama presidency will allow time to work on these issues without sentencing another decade to the negative consequences of panic, despair and chaos.

I applaud Stoller’s concerns and his passion, but I think he underestimates how long political change actually takes. I certainly did as a young man, when I was calling for revolution and stockpiling weapons. My father was a wealthy man in the ’50s and early ’60s, a big-time Wall Street broker. His  last words to me in 1970, when he was visiting the commune I lived on, remain prophetic and true. “You think America’s going down in five years, son; it’ll take 50 and you better be prepared to hang in for the long haul. There are huge historical forces at work, and the sons of bitches running things will do whatever they can to make sure they get theirs out of it before they die.”

A simple walk through any European streets will reveal plaques on the walls commemorating where neighbors were dragged from their homes and shot by partisans, by fascists, by communists, by Falangists. True social upheaval is horrifying, it is being danced before our eyes on TV and in print every day. While in the abstract it may “cleanse” the political body or other comforting nostrums, for the dead, the wounded, the maimed and the millions who continue to suffer, those are the slogans of a removed, detached leadership. It is obvious that Stoller considers himself among them. “We need to put ourselves into the position of being able to run the government,” he says with no apparent irony, as if he and his friends were obviously “good” people and if the world were left in their hands, only good would come of it.

As a Zen Buddhist priest in my seventh decade, I know better. I know that  each of us carries within us the capacity of all humanity for positive and negative behavior; we can be Hitler or Mother Teresa. We leak anger, jealousy, competitiveness on a daily basis and if we are not careful and do not monitor ourselves, our best intentions become murderous to others. (Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam.) Were the millions upon millions of deaths we caused in those places done only by “bad” people or a mistake? That’s a delusion.

I would suggest that the lesser of two evils is “less evil.” Sometimes in the real, impure world the bad man and the good are indivisible and morph from one to the other. It makes fixed judgments difficult. You take what you can get, and you organize to protect yourself. To deliberately create a political crisis as an organizing tool sounds remarkably like the old Marxist saw of “heightening the contradiction.” Been there, done that. It’s tough being human. Picking one’s way through reality moment by moment requires delicacy and finesse. Instead of preparing to ‘rule,’ I would be interested in learning more about Stoller’s desires to “serve.”  In the meantime, I can only cling to the hope that his advice to vote against the president in swing states is not widely observed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Coyote (born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon; October 10, 1941)[1] is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. Coyote’s left-wing politics are evident in his articles for Mother Jones magazine, some of which he wrote as a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention; in his disagreements with David Horowitz; and in his autobiography Sleeping Where I Fall. In 2006, he developed a political television show for Link TV called “The Active Opposition” and in 2007 created Outside the Box with Peter Coyote starting on Link TV’s special, Special: The End of Oil – Part 2.   SEE FULL WIKI PROFILE

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Bottom line: The president is complicit in creating an increasingly unequal — and unjust — society
BY MATT STOLLER
SATURDAY, OCT 27, 2012 08:00 AM EDT

President Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
A few days ago, I participated in a debate with the legendary antiwar dissident Daniel Ellsberg on Huffington Post live on the merits of the Obama administration, and what progressives should do on Election Day. Ellsberg had written a blog post arguing that, though Obama deserves tremendous criticism, voters in swing states ought to vote for him, lest they operate as dupes for a far more malevolent Republican Party. This attitude is relatively pervasive among Democrats, and it deserves a genuine response. As the election is fast approaching, this piece is an attempt at laying out the progressive case for why one should not vote for Barack Obama for reelection, even if you are in a swing state.

There are many good arguments against Obama, even if the Republicans cannot seem to muster any. The civil liberties/antiwar case was made eloquently a few weeks ago by libertarian Conor Friedersdorf, who wrote a well-cited blog post on why he could not, in good conscience, vote for Obama. While his arguments have tremendous merit, there is an equally powerful case against Obama on the grounds of economic and social equity. That case needs to be made. For those who don’t know me, here is a brief, relevant background:  I have a long history in Democratic and liberal politics. I have worked for several Democratic candidates and affiliated groups, I have personally raised millions of dollars for Democrats online, I was an early advisor to Actblue (which has processed over $300 million to Democratic candidates). I have worked in Congress (mostly on the Dodd-Frank financial reform package), and I was a producer at MSNBC. Furthermore, I aggressively opposed Nader-style challenges until 2008.

So why oppose Obama? Simply, it is the shape of the society Obama is crafting that I oppose, and I intend to hold him responsible, such as I can, for his actions in creating it. Many Democrats are disappointed in Obama. Some feel he’s a good president with a bad Congress. Some feel he’s a good man, trying to do the right thing, but not bold enough. Others think it’s just the system, that anyone would do what he did. I will get to each of these sentiments, and pragmatic questions around the election, but I think it’s important to be grounded in policy outcomes. Not, what did Obama try to do, in his heart of hearts? But what kind of America has he actually delivered? And the chart below answers the question. This chart reflects the progressive case against Obama.

The above is a chart of corporate profits against the main store of savings for most Americans who have savings — home equity. Notice that after the crisis, after the Obama inflection point, corporate profits recovered dramatically and surpassed previous highs, whereas home equity levels have remained static. That $5-7 trillion of lost savings did not come back, whereas financial assets and corporate profits did. Also notice that this is unprecedented in postwar history. Home equity levels and corporate profits have simply never diverged in this way; what was good for GM had always, until recently, been good, if not for America, for the balance sheet of homeowners. Obama’s policies severed this link, completely.

This split represents more than money. It represents a new kind of politics, one where Obama, and yes, he did this, officially enshrined rights for the elite in our constitutional order and removed rights from everyone else (see “The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship” in the Fordham Urban Law Journal for a more complete discussion of the problem). The bailouts and the associated Federal Reserve actions were not primarily shifts of funds to bankers; they were a guarantee that property rights for a certain class of creditors were immune from challenge or market forces. The foreclosure crisis, with its rampant criminality, predatory lending, and document forgeries, represents the flip side. Property rights for debtors simply increasingly exist solely at the pleasure of the powerful. The lack of prosecution of Wall Street executives, the ability of banks to borrow at 0 percent from the Federal Reserve while most of us face credit card rates of 15-30 percent, and the bailouts are all part of the re-creation of the American system of law around Obama’s oligarchy.

The policy continuity with Bush is a stark contrast to what Obama offered as a candidate. Look at the broken promises from the 2008 Democratic platform: a higher minimum wage, a ban on the replacement of striking workers, seven days of paid sick leave, a more diverse media ownership structure, renegotiation of NAFTA, letting bankruptcy judges write down mortgage debt, a ban on illegal wiretaps, an end to national security letters, stopping the war on whistle-blowers, passing the Employee Free Choice Act, restoring habeas corpus, and labor protections in the FAA bill. Each of these pledges would have tilted bargaining leverage to debtors, to labor, or to political dissidents. So Obama promised them to distinguish himself from Bush, and then went back on his word because these promises didn’t fit with the larger policy arc of shifting American society toward his vision. For sure, Obama believes he is doing the right thing, that his policies are what’s best for society. He is a conservative technocrat, running a policy architecture to ensure that conservative technocrats like him run the complex machinery of the state and reap private rewards from doing so. Radical political and economic inequality is the result. None of these policy shifts, with the exception of TARP, is that important in and of themselves, but together they add up to declining living standards.

While life has never been fair, the chart above shows that, since World War II, this level of official legal, political and economic inequity for the broad mass of the public is new (though obviously for subgroups, like African-Americans, it was not new). It is as if America’s traditional racial segregationist tendencies have been reorganized, and the tools and tactics of that system have been repurposed for a multicultural elite colonizing a multicultural population. The data bears this out: Under Bush, economic inequality was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every dollar. That’s right, under Barack Obama there is more economic inequality than under George W. Bush. And if you look at the chart above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the mean Republican Congress. And it’s not strictly a result of the financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.

This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order, and it has a certain equilibrium, the kind we identify in Middle Eastern resource extraction based economies. We are even seeing, as I showed in an earlier post, a transition of the American economic order toward a petro-state. By some accounts, America will be the largest producer of hydrocarbons in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This is just not an America that any of us should want to live in. It is a country whose economic basis is oligarchy, whose political system is authoritarianism, and whose political culture is murderous toward the rest of the world and suicidal in our aggressive lack of attention to climate change.

Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But the primary policy framework Obama put in place – the bailouts, took place during the transition and the immediate months after the election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress. In fact, during the transition itself, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the incoming president vetoed the deal. Yup, you heard that right — the Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky’s book ”Bailout,” we see why. Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to spread out pain for the banks, the famous “foam the runway” comment. This central lie is key to the entire Obama economic strategy. It is not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no. He was not constrained by anything but his own policy instincts. And the reflation of corporate profits and financial assets and death of the middle class were the predictable results.

The rest of Obama’s policy framework looks very different when you wake up from the dream state pushed by cable news. Obama’s history of personal use of illegal narcotics, combined with his escalation of the war on medical marijuana (despite declining support for the drug war in the Democratic caucus), shows both a personal hypocrisy and destructive cynicism that we should decry in anyone, let alone an important policymaker who helps keep a half a million people in jail for participating in a legitimate economy outlawed by the drug warrior industry. But it makes sense once you realize that his policy architecture coheres with a Romney-like philosophy that there is one set of rules for the little people, and another for the important people. It’s why the administration quietly pushed Chinese investment in American infrastructure, seeks to privatize public education, removed labor protections from the FAA authorization bill, and inserted a provision into the stimulus bill ensuring AIG bonuses would be paid, and then lied about it to avoid blame. Wall Street speculator who rigged markets are simply smart and savvy businessmen, as Obama called Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, whereas the millions who fell prey to their predatory lending schemes are irresponsible borrowers. And it’s why Obama is explicitly targeting entitlements, insurance programs for which Americans paid. Obama wants to preserve these programs for the “most vulnerable,” but that’s still a taking. Did not every American pay into Social Security and Medicare? They did, but as with the foreclosure crisis, property rights (which are essential legal rights) of the rest of us are irrelevant. While Romney is explicit about 47 percent of the country being worthless, Obama just acts as if they are charity cases. In neither case does either candidate treat the mass of the public as fellow citizens.

Now, it would not be fair to address this matter purely on economic grounds, and ignore women’s rights. In that debate with Ellsberg, advocate Emily Hauser insistently made the case that choice will be safe under Obama, and ended under Romney, that this is the only issue that matters to women, and that anyone who doesn’t agree is, as she put it, delusional. Falguni Sheth argued that this is a typical perspective from a privileged white woman, who ignores much of the impact that Barack Obama’s policies have on women, and specifically women of color. And even on the issue of choice, you could make a good case, as she does, that there’s less of a difference between Obama and Romney than meets the eye.

Sheth’s piece is persuasive. Barack Obama is the president who hired as his lead economic advisor Larry Summers, a man famous for arguing that women are genetically predisposed to being bad at math. Unsurprisingly, Anita Dunn, a White House adviser, later called the Obama White House a “hostile work environment” for women, in large part because of the boys club of Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers. Obama is the president who insisted that women under 17 shouldn’t have access to Plan B birth control, overruling scientists at the FDA, because of his position ”as a father of two daughters.” Girls, he said, shouldn’t be able to buy these drugs next to “bubble gum and batteries.” Aside from the obvious sexism, he left out the possibility that young women who need Plan B had been raped by their fathers, which anyone who works in the field knows happens all too often. In his healthcare bill, Obama made sure that government funds, including tax credits and Medicaid that are the key to expanding healthcare access to the poor, will be subject to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits their use for abortion.  It’s not clear what will happen with healthcare exchanges, or how much coverage there will be for abortion services in the future.

As Sheth also notes, there is a lot more to women’s rights than abortion. Predatory lending and foreclosures disproportionately impact women. The drug war impacts women. Under Obama, 1.6 million more women are now in poverty. 1.2 million migrants have been deported by the Department of Homeland Security. The teacher layoffs from Obama’s stimulus being inadequate to the task disproportionately hit women’s economic opportunity. Oligarchies in general are just not good for women.

In terms of the Supreme Court itself, Obama’s track record is not actually that good. As a senator, Obama publicly chided liberals for demanding that Sen. Patrick Leahy block Sam Alito from the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Obama-appointed Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor has in her career already ruled to limit access to abortion, and Elena Kagan’s stance is not yet clear. Arguing that Romney justices would overturn Roe v. Wade is a concession that Senate Democrats, as they did with Alito and Roberts, would allow an anti-choice justice through the Senate. More likely is that Romney, like Obama, simply does not care about abortion, but does care about the court’s business case rulings (the U.S. Chamber went undefeated last year). Romney has already said he won’t change abortion laws, and that all women should have access to contraception. He may be lying, but more likely is that he does not care and is being subjected to political pressure. But so is Obama, who is openly embracing abortion rights and contraception now that it is a political asset. In other words, what is moving women’s rights is not Obama or Romney, but the fact that a fierce political race has shown that women’s rights are popular. The lesson is not to support Obama, who will shelve women’s rights for another three years, but to continue making a strong case for women’s rights.

The Case for Voting Third Party

So, what is to be done? We have an election, and you probably have a vote. What should you do with it? I think it’s worth voting for a third party candidate, and I’ll explain why below. But first, let’s be honest about what voting for Obama means. This requires diving into something I actually detest, which is electoral analysis and the notion of what would a pragmatist do. I tend to find the slur that one need be pragmatic and not a purist condescending and dishonest; no one ever takes an action without a reason to do so. Life is compromise. Every person gets this from the first time he or she, as a kid, asks his or her dad for something his or her mom won’t give him. If you are taking action in politics, you have to assume that you are doing it because you want some sort of consequence from it. But even within the desiccated and corroded notion of what passes for democracy in 2012, the claims of the partisans to pragmatism are foolish. There are only five or six states that matter in this election; in the other 44 or 45, your vote on the presidential level doesn’t matter. It is as decorative as a vote for an “American Idol contestant.” So, unless you are in one of the few swing states that matters, a vote for Obama is simply an unabashed endorsement of his policies. But if you are in a swing state, then the question is, what should you do?

Now, and this is subtle, I don’t think the case against voting for Obama is airtight. If you are willing to argue that Obama, though he has imposed an authoritarian architecture on the American system, is still a better choice than Romney, fine. I can respect honest disagreement. Here’s why I disagree with that analysis. If the White House were a video game where the player was all that mattered, voting for Obama would probably be the most reasonable thing to do. Romney is more likely to attack Iran, which would be just horrific (though Obama might do so as well, we don’t really know). But video game policymaking is not how politics actually works — the people themselves, what they believe and what they don’t, can constrain political leaders. And under Obama, because there is now no one making the anti-torture argument, Americans have become more tolerant of torture, drones, war and authoritarianism in general. The case against Obama is that the people themselves will be better citizens under a Romney administration, distrusting him and placing constraints on his behavior the way they won’t on Obama. As a candidate, Obama promised a whole slew of civil liberties protections, lying the whole time. Obama has successfully organized the left part of the Democratic Party into a force that had rhetorically opposed war and civil liberties violations, but now cheerleads a weakened America too frightened to put Osama bin Laden on trial. We must fight this thuggish political culture Bush popularized, and Obama solidified in place.

But can a third-party candidate win? No. So what is the point of voting at all, or voting for a third-party candidate? My answer is that this election is, first and foremost, practice for crisis moments. Elections are just one small part of how social justice change can happen. The best moment for change is actually a crisis, where there is actually policy leverage. We should look at 9/11, Katrina and the financial crisis as the flip side of FDR’s 100 days or the days immediately after LBJ took office. We already know that a crisis brings great pressure to conform to what the political establishment wants. So does this election. We all know that elites in a crisis will tell you to hand them enormous amounts of power, lest the world blow up. This is essentially the argument from the political establishment in 2012. Saying no to evil in 2012 will help us understand who is willing to say no to evil when it really matters. And when you have power during a crisis, there’s no end to the amount of good you can do.

How do we drive large-scale change during moments of crisis? How do we use this election to do so? Well, voting third party or even just honestly portraying Obama’s policy architecture is a good way to identify to ourselves and each other who actually has the integrity to not cave to bullying. Then the task starting after the election is to build this network of organized people with intellectual and political integrity into a group who understands how to move the levers of power across industry, government, media and politics. We need to put ourselves into the position to be able to run the government.

After all, if a political revolution came tomorrow, could those who believe in social justice and climate change actually govern? Do we have the people to do it? Do we have the ideas, the legislative proposals, the understanding of how to reorganize our society into a sustainable and socially just one? I suspect, no. When the next crisis comes, and it will come, space will again open up for real policy change.  The most important thing we can use this election for is to prepare for that moment. That means finding ways of seeing who is on our side and building a group with the will to power and the expertise to make the right demands. We need to generate the inner confidence to blow up the political consensus, against the railings of the men in suits. If there had been an actual full-scale financial meltdown in 2008 without a bailout, while it would have been bad, it probably would have given us a fighting chance of warding off planetary catastrophe and reorganizing our politics. Instead the oligarchs took control, because we weren’t willing to face them down when we needed to show courage. So now we have the worst of all worlds, an inevitably worse crisis and an even more authoritarian structure of governance.

At some point soon, we will face yet another moment where the elites say, “Do what we want or there will be a meltdown.” Do we have enough people on our side willing to collectively say “do what we want or there will be a global meldown”? This election is a good mechanism to train people in the willingness to say that and mean it. That is, the reason to advocate for a third-party candidate is to build the civic muscles willing to say no to the establishment in a crisis moment we all know is coming. Right now, the liberal establishment is teaching its people that letting malevolent political elites do what they want is not only the right path, it is the only path. Anything other than that is dubbed an affront to common decency. Just telling the truth is considered beyond rude.

We need to build a different model of politics, one in which people who want a different society are willing to actually bargain and back up their threats, rather than just aesthetically argue for shifts around the margin. The good news is that the changes we need to make are entirely doable. It will cost about $100 trillion over 20 years to move our world to an entirely sustainable energy system, and the net worth of the global top 1 percent is $103 trillion. We can do this. And the moments to let us make the changes we need are coming. There is endless good we can do, if enough of us are willing to show the courage that exists within every human being instead of the malevolence and desire for conformity that also exists within every heart.

Systems that can’t go on, don’t. The political elites, as much as they kick the can down the road, know this. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do we?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT STOLLER writes at the progressive strategy site OpenLeft.com and is the President of the political action committee BlogPAC. He focuses his work on progressive coalition building, the mechanics of the right-wing, and communications policy. He consults for the Sunlight Foundation on open government, for Actblue, and for Working Assets, a progressive phone company. In 2005, he worked as the blogger for Jon Corzine for Governor and Simon Rosenberg for DNC Chair. He also co-created the web campaign Thereisnocrisis.com to fight against the privatization of Social Security.

 

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The author’s “Progressive case against Obama” stirred strong reactions. He takes on his critics
BY MATT STOLLER

The 2012 election is next Tuesday. We face a choice between Barack Obama, a candidate whose Presidency we can examine and evaluate, and Mitt Romney, who is a dangerous cipher. My argument – made last week in “Progressive Case Against Obama“, is that progressives should evaluate these risks honestly, with a clear-headed analysis of Obama’s track record.This piece sparked a massive debate that has had both Obama loyalists and Republicans resort to outlandish name-calling, evidently as a result of their unwillingness or inability to address the issues raised.

It is remarkable to see the level to which Obama defenders have sunk. Let’s start with a basic problem – why is Obama in a tight race? Mitt Romney is more caricature than candidate, a horrifically cartoonish plutocrat whose campaign is staffed by people that allow secret tapings of obviously offensive statements. The Republican base finds Romney uninspiring, and Romney has been unable to provide one good reason to choose him except that he is not the incumbent. Yet, Barack Obama is in a dog fight with this clown. Why? It isn’t because a few critics are writing articles in places like Salon. The answer, if you look at the data, is that Barack Obama has been a terrible President and an enemy to progressives. Unemployment is high. American household income since the recovery started in 2009 has dropped 5%. Poverty has increased substantially. Home equity – the main store of wealth for the middle class – has dropped by $5-7 trillion, in contrast to the increase in financial asset values held by Obama’s friends and donors. And this was done explicitly through Obama’s policies.

Obama came into office with a massive mandate, overwhelming control of Congress, hundreds of billions of TARP money to play with, the ability to prosecute Wall Street executives and break their power, and the opportunity for a massive stimulus. Most importantly, the country was willing to follow – the public believed his calls for change. Yet, instead of restructuring the economy and doing obvious things like hardening infrastructure against global warming, he entrenched oligarchy. This was explicit. Obama broke a whole series of campaign promises that would have helped the middle class. These promises would have reduced household debt, raised the minimum wage, stopped outsourcing, and protected workers. He broke these promises for a reason – Barack Obama uses his power for what he believes in, and Barack Obama is a conservative technocrat. Obama sided with Wall Street. He probably made the foreclosure crisis worse with a series of programs designed to help banks but marketed to help homeowners. These were his policies, they reflected the views of his most valued advisors like Robert Rubin and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Moreover, he’s proud of this record – the only mistake he cites in his first term is inadequately communicating how effective he has been, focusing too much on getting the policy right.

And the result is inequality in income gains that is higher than that under George W. Bush. Most of Obama’s defenders refuse to acknowledge Obama’s role in this policy mess. He deserves credit for the auto bailout, but when it comes to the bank bailouts, hey he’s just one man. What could we possibly expect? Yet, reelecting this man to a Presidency that is hamstrung by the system is the most important thing in the world. In other words, just as they’ve been arguing for years, Obama is both entirely powerless and utterly essential.

Let’s examine a few articles to see the contortions certain progressives go to in order to defend Obama’s policies.

Mike Lofgren, a Republican staffer for 28 years who resigned in 2011 and now seems to think it’s his role to speak for Democrats,goes down this road. First, he argues Obama did not break his campaign promises, that “progressives are deceiving themselves if they think they have been deceived by Obama”. This is simply, baldly untrue. Obama broke many campaign promises. Here’s a list. My favorite is Obama’s promise to renegotiate NAFTA. Obama was so cynical about this promise during his 2008 campaign that he sent his chief economist Austan Goolsbee to Canada during the campaign to explain privately to Canadian elites he had no intention of following through on it. Obama lies, a lot, and he lies about important things that matter. Lofgren simply refuses to acknowledge this, because it’s easier to pretend it’s the fault of progressives for believing their lying eyes. His piece gets worse. Lofgren goes on to rebut the argument he implies critics made, that “the worse [the situation] the better”, or that critics wish to “heighten the contradictions”. He then said he “not yet seen” anyone make this argument “in print”. And that is because it is far easier to smear critics as nihilistic Leninists – a charge he admits is untrue even as he makes it – than address the fact that average household income is dropping and inequality is really high.

Finally, according to Lofgren, pointing out that Barack Obama has pursued a set of destructive policies means that one is a nihilist, and in that case, we should “stock up on canned food and ammunition.” Talk to people in Staten Island abandoned by Obama’s FEMA, and you’d find that at least the canned food bit is good advice. Doesn’t Lofgren realize that politics is not a game? That Obama’s failure to act on global warming is the ultimate act of irresponsible nihilism? Partisans may enjoy Mitt Romney’s corrupt denial of man-made global warming, but nature doesn’t distinguish between Obama’s cynical lack of action and Romney’s cynical denial of reality. We simply do not have time for this nonsense anymore.

An even more problematic argument came from Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. Chait, in rhetoric reminiscent of Dow 36,000, argued that Barack Obama is a “Great President. Yes, Great“, surpassing every President in gross positive accomplishment, with the possible exception of Lyndon Johnson. As proof, Chait cited a laundry list of minor policy shifts, as if the Presidency is about doing well on a series of homework assignments assigned by pundits and think tanks. He did not even acknowledge that median income has dropped, that millions have lost their homes with no policy response, and that the rich have captured a historically high proportion of income gains in the Obama era (93 cents of every dollar, versus 65 cents of every dollar under Bush).

Another argument came from Peter Coyote, in Salon. Coyote’s argument is more effective than Chait’s, and more honest, in that he addresses the policy thrust of the Obama administration. He agrees that, yes, the trends described above are real, and that yes, Obama’s policies are partially to blame. But it is not Obama’s fault, he argues, because this is really the result of a long indoctrination campaign by the right launched after Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. It’s the system. This is a common argument that draws its lineage from the beautifully told story by Rick Perlstein in his book on the Goldwater campaign, “Before the Storm”, and also, in Jeff Madrick’s work “The Age of Greed”. In these books, it’s a series of policy changes, media consolidation, and conservative organizing that led to the takeover of the country by conservative reactionaries. These trends were noticed at the time; political scientist Tom Ferguson wrote “Right Turn” in the 1980s, and Sidney Blumenthal’s “Rise of the Counter-establishment” also noted the influence of this network of conservative organizers, and the shift in the loyalties of the business elite.

Obama, in Coyote’s narrative, is a politician who can do nothing in the current money soaked system but tread water. Beset by malevolent corporate forces, Coyote implies that Obama faces assassination should he choose to truly engage in systemic reform. Those of us who believe that Obama is a malevolent actor, Coyote asserts, simply do not understand the true deep roots of today’s dysfunction. Our passion and temperament should be tempered by his wisdom, his seven decades of observation in which he understands that the best we can hope for is for things to get worse a bit more slowly.

Cassiodorus wrote a detailed and excellent rebuttal of Coyote’s work, so I won’t reprise it here. But my broad response is that this binary choice reflects a fake consumer oriented view of political power. This binary choice leaves out a very important factor. Namely, us. The people. Like all Obama supporters, Coyote prioritizes the politician that pursues bad policy because this politician is of the same political party as him, rather than resistance movements that can actually lead to serious social change. To Coyote, citizens and organizing are simply irrelevant. Far more likely is that they, we, are our only hope in the face of malevolent political leaders.

In fact, despite the heated tone of Obama defenses, not one person disputed the underlying factual basis of my argument:

1) Under Barack Obama, economic inequality in terms of income growth has skyrocketed to historically high levels. After I published my piece, Ian Welsh buttressed these claims, pointing me to this St. Louis Federal Reserve chart of the Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality. Labor as a share of GDP is at a historically low level. And this is in spite of a different trend line when Obama took office – during the crisis, inequality was actually collapsing. Obama reversed this trend, restoring Bush’s unequal America, and then going beyond it.

2) Under Barack Obama, there has been a massive foreclosure crisis, with a policy response that was intentionally ineffective. Meanwhile, corporate profits have rebounded, while home equity levels (which can rebound through increased home values or debt write-offs), have not.

3) These shifts largely occurred when Barack Obama’s party controlled Congress, from 2009-2010.

4) The American energy system is turning us towards a petro-state, with investment in mining (fracking, tar sands and dirty oil, coal, etc) nearly equal to investment in manufacturing.

5) Obama broke a significant number of campaign promises from 2008, promises that would have secured bargaining leverage for debtors and labor. These included : a higher minimum wage, a ban on the replacement of striking workers, seven days of paid sick leave, a more diverse media ownership structure, renegotiation of NAFTA, letting bankruptcy judges write down mortgage debt, a ban on illegal wiretaps, an end to national security letters, stopping the war on whistle-blowers, passing the Employee Free Choice Act, restoring habeas corpus, and labor protections in the FAA bill.

Obama’s main policy framework for his first term was bailing out the financial system and the auto industry – this was more consequential than his health care plan, despite receiving less attention. Obama’s health care plan didn’t change the incentives or structure of an overpriced and underperforming health care system, while the bank bailouts greatly increased the concentration of power within the financial sector. These actions were portrayed by proponents as saving the financial system and preventing a depression. Opponents often argue these bailouts were a shift of funds to banks. This doesn’t quite encompass the scope of what Bush and Obama did. In fact, the combination of Federal Reserve activity, regulatory forbearance, TARP, and a lack of criminal enforcement against those who rigged markets comprise an intentional policy to change the American system of property rights.  The property rights of the wealthy have been super-sized. Private creditors can now enforce even dubious claims (exemplified by the robo-signing and foreclosure scandals) and get government protection from any downside, or even immunity from criminal wrongdoing. Meanwhile, ordinary debtors have property rights at the pleasure of the powerful. Obama took a financial system flat on its back, and, with an unlimited checkbook and an overwhelming mandate, entrenched oligarchy.

Remarkably, though my piece inspired tremendous vitriol, none of what I laid out is in dispute. The only point of contention is whether these shifts just sort of happened, with the President as an innocent bystander or an ineffective actor, or whether he aided these shifts with his policy framework. If it is the former, then this President is guilty of gross incompetence and one wonders why he is worth defending. Moreover, one wonders why the President should be credited for policy victories like the resuscitation of the auto industry, or, if the Presidency is so ineffective an office, why it is so important to deny it to someone like Mitt Romney. Indeed, Obama defenders – and Obama himself – simply cannot dispute any of the facts above. Is it any wonder this is a close race? Romney may be a comically foolish liar, but Obama isn’t exactly Mr. Credibility.

Moreover, arguing that Obama’s policy framework didn’t contribute to serious problems is foolish, and disrespectful. Many advocates who support Obama, such as Bob Kuttner, Dean Baker, Damon Silvers, Charles Ferguson, Simon Johnson, and Elizabeth Warren, understand that policy is significant, which is why they worked so hard to encourage the President to choose a different policy course than the one he chose. And many people who worked on policy during this period, such as Neil Barofsky, Sheila Bair, and Jeff Connaughton, are perfectly willing to explain how Tim Geithner, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama executed the policies that produced the society I described above. They even wrote books about it, all of which are available from Amazon. You don’t even have to read if you don’t want to. Ferguson made a film called Inside Job about the rampant criminality enabled by Barack Obama. It won an Academy Award.

Obama defenders for the most part simply do not address the core moral question in evaluating the role of any political leader, which is whether the lives of their constituents have improved during that leader’s term and whether society is more just. And the outcomes for Americans under Obama – a historically higher student debt burden, deleveraging of debt occurring only through defaults, larger banks than existed before the crisis, a crushing foreclosure crisis, higher inequality, and a falling median net income – suggest that for most, the answer is no. What people care about – whether their lives are better overall – is basically irrelevant in their calculus. As Kuttner notes, this is the reason that Obama is in a very difficult reelection campaign against a comically weak opponent. The American people think he has done a bad job, because he has. And he has promised, many times, to cut more spending and cut entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, and/or Medicaid. This is what you are voting for when you vote for Barack Obama.

The Resistance Effect

What is gained by not supporting Obama for reelection? Simply put, there is power in resistance. Organized people that distrust and constrain their political leaders can have a significant impact on policymaking.

The President does not sit in the Oval Office and play a video game where he governs the country. The Presidency is constrained by the various checks and balances in our governance system, notably a partisan opposition and public opinion. Under Obama, that partisan opposition has been a right-wing Republican force buttressed by well-funded Tea Party activists. This has made it far easier for Obama to implement conservative policies. Under Mitt Romney, the Democrats will be far more likely to oppose Romney from the left, and the public will be much more likely, as it was under Bush, to mistrust its President and demand social justice.

One of the more intriguing arguments in this line came from a Canadian UAW member, Joe Emersberger, who actually tried measuring the difference between recent Republican and Democratic Presidents. He noted that Ronald Reagan was the worst President for life expectancy growth, income growth of the top one percent, deunionization, and closing the racial gap in life expectancy. But the second worst – for deunionization and share of income going to the top one percent – was actually Bill Clinton, followed by Barack Obama. George Bush did substantially better than those two on these measures, and surpassed Clinton in closing the racial life expectancy gap. This is quite possibly accurate – Clinton’s changed the country with NAFTA, a policy nearly as hostile to labor rights as Reagan’s embrace of union busting. George W. Bush though faced a hostile public and a partisan Democratic opposition. Certainly, this is not conclusive evidence, and I’m sure political scientist Larry Bartels would lay out different data. But it’s worth considering the power of this “resistance effect”. Partisan opposition isn’t worth nothing, and there’s no sense pretending it doesn’t matter.

In other words, as Glen Ford put it, Obama is not necessarily the lesser of two evils, he may be the “more effective evil”. He puts the left to sleep (whether by defunding progressive groups or allowing the destruction of Occupy encampments), and the left is where the resistance to imperial tendencies currently resides. It is this problem, of how to organize large groups of people into a political force for justice, that should concern us. Otherwise, under Bush or Obama, inequality would continue to increase. And with this, I’d bring us to the argument I made about leverage points, most notably, that policy leverage is apparent during a crisis.

Consider that there is a crisis right now, in the Frankenstorm, Sandy. Parts of lower Manhattan are still without power, and much of the Eastern seaboard will never be the same. Late night comedians, NBC, and even Businessweek are jumping up and down and screaming that this catastrophic storm is a result of climate change. Yet, on Monday, no major environmental groupsexcept Bill McKibben’s 350.org featured Sandy on its home page. These groups, from the Sierra Club to the Environmental Defense Fund – focused instead on the safety of chemicals, saving the Osprey, voting for Obama, or other such problems. As Brad Johnson noted, almost every left-wing journalist or advocate was equivocating as to whether climate change was the cause. This is the moment of leverage, when an organized advocacy space should have been arguing for a massive emergency mitigation and adaptation efforts. Tens of billions of dollars will flow into the Northeast, this money could be used for rebuilding unsustainable Con Ed, or for powering the New York with entirely renewable and robust energy. Instead, the right-wing, including Democrats like MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell, are working to undermine environmental, labor rules in the reconstruction while privatizing rebuilt infrastructure.

Moving policy to save our civilization has nothing to do with voting on Tuesday, and this is obvious when you consider Sandy as a moment to define man-made global warming as the key challenge of our society, as the Cold War was after World War II. Progressives are obsessed with reelecting Obama instead of governing, so there is silence in response to a massive leverage point (except on CNBC, where the anchors are screaming for more refining capacity in response to Sandy). We the people need to protest and demand the solutions that might have a chance at saving our civilization from the many Sandy’s to come. Indeed, global warming fueled Hurricane Katrina killed 3000 people, and we did nothing except allow the privatization of the New Orleans school system. But as we see now, this is not just because of George Bush, it is because our theory of change, of looking to right-wing politicians entrenched in the Democratic Party as an answer, was an utter failure. It is the politics of self-delusion, and catastrophe. Voting third party is a way of indicating, to yourself and your community, that you will not be party to this game any more. Voting third party is a way of showing, to yourself and your community, that you consider Barack Obama an opponent, and that you oppose his policy. This is a profound admission, and it creates the space for real opposition, for real resistance.

As recovering alcoholics know, admitting your problem is the first step to recovery.  It’s time to look honestly at Barack Obama’s record, and recognize what we are really voting for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT STOLLER writes at the progressive strategy site OpenLeft.com and is the President of the political action committee BlogPAC. He focuses his work on progressive coalition building, the mechanics of the right-wing, and communications policy. He consults for the Sunlight Foundation on open government, for Actblue, and for Working Assets, a progressive phone company. In 2005, he worked as the blogger for Jon Corzine for Governor and Simon Rosenberg for DNC Chair. He also co-created the web campaign Thereisnocrisis.com to fight against the privatization of Social Security.

 

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