Bernie's attack on "oligarchy"

He attacks capitalism while evading the question what is the socialism he actually favors over capitalism.

Just as he did during the campaign of 2016.

Bernie Sanders defines his vision for democratic socialism in the United States

When we talk about oligarchy, let us be clear about what we mean. 

Right now, in the United States of America, three families control more wealth than the bottom half of our country, some 160 million Americans. 

The top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 92% and 49% of all new income generated today goes to the top 1%. 

In fact, income and wealth inequality today in the United States is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

He says he is going to tell us what he means by "oligarchy" and then he does not.

To claim this word means anything else than what it actually means is just lying.

noun, plural ol·i·gar·chies.

1. a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class orclique; government by the few.
2. a state or organization so ruled.
3. the persons or class so ruling.

Taken literally, every government in the world today is an oligarchy, including any republic, no matter how benign.

But historically the word has usually been understood to mean government by a minority not itself subject to any legal, constitutional, or political control.

In short, absolute or despotic government by a few.

And that is not what Bernie is ranting about and we in America do not live under any such government.

He is ranting about capitalism.

He begins by reciting statistics about income and wealth inequality, both of which are inescapable under capitalism and have never been actually escaped under socialism.

"Wealth inequality" as he uses it is another label for private ownership of the means of production, the defining feature that differentiates capitalism from socialism.

He continues, quoting more statistics, many truly disturbing, in a like tone of furious rage.

And when we talk about oligarchy, it is not just that the very rich are getting much richer. 

It is that tens of millions of working-class people, in the wealthiest country on earth, are suffering under incredible economic hardship, desperately trying to survive.

Today, nearly 40 million Americans live in poverty and tonight, 500,000 people will be sleeping out on the streets. 

About half of the country lives paycheck to paycheck as tens of millions of our people are an accident, a divorce, a sickness or a layoff away from economic devastation.

While many public schools throughout the country lack the resources to adequately educate our young people, we are the most heavily incarcerated nation on earth.

After decades of policies that have encouraged and subsidized unbridled corporate greed, we now have an economy that is fundamentally broken and grotesquely unfair.

Ignoring history, pretending somehow we should have expected quite the opposite, he complains.

Globally, the situation is even more shocking with most of the world’s wealth concentrated among a very few, while billions of people have almost nothing. 

Today, the world’s richest 26 billionaires now own as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet – half of the world’s population.

Only after this savage denunciation of the object of his lifelong hatred does he address politics.

Across the globe, the [fictitious - PV] movement toward oligarchy runs parallel to the growth of authoritarian regimes – like Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohamed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary among others.

These leaders meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism. 

They redirect popular anger about inequality and declining economic conditions into violent rage against minorities — whether they are immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or the LGBT community. 

And to suppress dissent, they are cracking down on democracy and human rights.

He continues with a by now commonplace and absurdly hyperbolic comparison of our own time to the 1930s.

This authoritarian playbook is not new. 

The challenge we confront today as a nation, and as a world, is in many ways not different from the one we faced a little less than a century ago, during and after the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Then, as now, deeply-rooted and seemingly intractable economic and social disparities led to the rise of right-wing nationalist forces all over the world.

He extends the comparison over several paragraphs and then returns to the demons of the present, according to him.

Today, America and the world are once again moving towards authoritarianism — and the same right-wing forces of oligarchy, corporatism, nationalism, racism and xenophobia are on the march, pushing us to make the apocalyptically wrong choice that Europe made in the last century.

Today, we now see a handful of billionaires with unprecedented wealth and power.

We see huge private monopolies — operating outside of any real democratic oversight and often subsidized by taxpayers – with the power to control almost every aspect of our lives.

They are the profit-taking gatekeepers of our health care, our technology, our finance system, our food supply and almost all of the other basic necessities of life. 

They are Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and giant agri-businesses.

They are the entities with unlimited wealth who surround our nation’s capitol with thousands of well-paid lobbyists, who to a significant degree write the laws that we live under.

Today, we have a demagogue in the White House who, for cheap political gain, is attempting to deflect the attention of the American people away from the real crises that we face and, instead, is doing what demagogues always do — and that is divide people up and legislate hatred. 

This is a president who supports brutal family separations, border walls, Muslim bans, anti-LGBT policies, deportations and voter suppression.

It is my very strong belief that the United States must reject that path of hatred and divisiveness — and instead find the moral conviction to choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love.

It is the path that I call democratic socialism.

And yet what he calls for is far from that, and this champion of Eugene Debs knows that very well.

So why does he call it that?

God knows.

But the fix he calls for is not far from what the first Roosevelt, TR, himself urged in 1912.

Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.

This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.

In order to accomplish that goal, it means committing ourselves to protecting political rights, to protecting civil rights – and to protect economic rights of all people in this country.

As FDR stated in his 1944 State of the Union address: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Today, our Bill of Rights guarantees the American people a number of important constitutionally protected political rights. 

And while we understand that these rights have not always been respected and we have so much more work to do, we are proud that our constitution guarantees freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, a free press and other rights because we understand that we can never have true American freedom unless we are free from authoritarian tyranny.

Now, we must take the next step forward and guarantee every man, woman and child in our country basic economic rights – the right to quality health care, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.

We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

That is what I mean by democratic socialism.

Still, this is true and fair enough.

Let me be clear. I do understand that I and other progressives will face massive attacks from those who attempt to use the word “socialism” as a slur. 

But I should also tell you that I have faced and overcome these attacks for decades — and I am not the only one.

Let us remember that in 1932, Republican President Herbert Hoover claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was, “a disguise for the totalitarian state.”

In 1936 former Democratic New York Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith said in a speech about FDR’s New Deal policies, “Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side.”

When President Harry Truman proposed a national health care program, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan as their pitchman.

The AMA called the legislation that stemmed from his proposal “socialized medicine” claiming that White House staff were, “followers of the Moscow party line.”

In 1960, Ronald Reagan in a letter to Richard Nixon wrote the following about John F. Kennedy: “Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx.”

In the 1990s, then Congressman Newt Gingrich claimed President Bill Clinton’s health care plan was “centralized bureaucratic socialism.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has claimed that the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was “a step towards socialism.”

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner claimed the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill and the budget proposed by President Barack Obama were “all one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment.”

In this regard, President Harry Truman was right when he said that: “Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years…

"Socialism is what they called Social Security. 

"Socialism is what they called farm price supports. 

"Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. 

"Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

If you are the Trump family, you got $885 million worth of tax breaks and subsidies for your family’s housing empire that is built on racial discrimination.

When Trump screams socialism, all of his hypocrisy will not be lost on the American people. Americans will know that he is attacking all that we take for granted: from Social Security to Medicare to veterans health care to roads and bridges to public schools to national parks to clean water and clean air.

When Trump attacks socialism, I am reminded of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and me. 

He believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

I believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country.

And then he adopts a line taken by liberals at least since Dewey regarding "true freedom".

(Google "persuasive definition" and "No true Scotsman")

What I believe is that the American people deserve freedom – true freedom. 

Freedom is an often used word but it’s time we took a hard look at what that word actually means.

Ask yourself: what does it actually mean to be free?

Are you truly free if you are unable to go to a doctor when you are sick, or face financial bankruptcy when you leave the hospital?

Are you truly free if you cannot afford the prescription drug you need to stay alive?

Are you truly free when you spend half of your limited income on housing, and are forced to borrow money from a payday lender at 200% interest rates.

Are you truly free if you are 70 years old and forced to work because you lack a pension or enough money to retire?

Are you truly free if you are unable to go to attend college or a trade school because your family lacks the income?

Are you truly free if you are forced to work 60 or 80 hours a week because you can’t find a job that pays a living wage?

Are you truly free if you are a mother or father with a new born baby but you are forced to go back to work immediately after the birth because you lack paid family leave?

Are you truly free if you are a small business owner or family farmer who is driven out by the monopolistic practices of big business?

Are you truly free if you are a veteran, who put your life on the line to defend this country, and now sleep out on the streets?

To me, the answer to those questions, in the wealthiest nation on earth, is no, you are not free.

. . . .

In 1944, FDR proposed an economic bill of rights but died a year later and was never able to fulfil that vision. Our job, 75 years later, is to complete what Roosevelt started.

That is why today, I am proposing a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.

A Bill of Rights that establishes once and for all that every American, regardless of his or her income in entitled to:

• The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
• The right to quality health care
• The right to a complete education
• The right to affordable housing
• The right to a clean environment
• The right to a secure retirement

Over the course of this election my campaign has been releasing — and will continue to release — detailed proposals addressing each of these yet to be realized economic rights.

We will also address the attacks that are being launched each day against the civil rights and civil liberties of our people.

And then the cat is out of the bag for all this oligarchy stuff.

At the end of the day, the one percent may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just the one percent. 

When the 99 percent stand together, we can transform society.

These are my values, and that is why I call myself a democratic socialist.

At its core is a deep and abiding faith in the American people to peacefully and democratically enact the transformative change that will create shared prosperity, social equality and true freedom for all.

Liberal anti-colonialism

Roosevelt, though perfectly OK with Stalin, could not imagine anything worse than being ruled as a French colony.

A view many others must have shared.

We refused to help the French against the Reds in Indochina, after the war, but later had no scruples in taking on the whole weight of the fight against Uncle Ho, ourselves.

Our policy for such a long time has been arrogant and stupid.

De Gaulle sent a note to Washington claiming he sought to "re-establish the independence and greatness of France that is necessary for the equilibrium of the world."

He had the strangest notion he ought to align himself and France with Russia to preserve independence from America and Britain.

He seems often to have expressed contempt and enmity for England and America as great as he felt for Germany.

Neither stupidity nor arrogance in policy making has ever been uniquely American.

Reading Fenby, The General.

Was FDR really that stupid?

How could anyone have been so delusional about the Russian tyrant by then already drenched in so much blood?

A fresh start

[Per Kissinger] “America’s favorable geography and vast resources facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity.” 

Because U.S. principles are assumed to be universal, the inclination to cooperate is assumed to be at least generally latent. 

Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s reported assurances to his former ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt: “I think if I give [Stalin] everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige , he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”

This is the mind that decided we needed to fight in Europe and dragged the nation into it?

And to this day liberals revere FDR for that.

Damn him for that

Liberals ought to damn Wilson for getting us into The Great War and FDR for getting us into its sequel, World War Two, even more than they damn LBJ for getting us into Vietnam (though actually it was JFK, but never mind).

But they don't.

How Roosevelt Wrangled His Party — And America — Into World War II

In fact they keep praising Roosevelt for dragging a totally unwilling country into that war.

Try to imagine them praising LBJ for using the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, very nearly a total hoax, to stampede the country into war.

Wikipedia amusingly reports this topic with transparent and utterly conventional - and utterly lefty (see the parts about Franco and the Spanish Civil War) - pro-war bias.

US Neutrality Acts

And yet, we entered WW2 too late to really save the Jews.

Not too late to save Joe Stalin, though.

Nor to impose on Germany a peace far more draconian than anything even the craziest Frenchman had wanted to write into Versailles, a treaty that since then American liberals have labelled too harsh and anti-German, frequently blaming it (and the French) for the rise of Hitler and ultimately for World War Two.

Why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Roosevelt and Churchill confer, map out short- and long-term goals

When this meeting happened we were officially neutral and Roosevelt had been blatantly ignoring the letter and intent of US neutrality legislation for some time.

Not a peep out of him or Churchill about the nations of Eastern Europe under Stalin's heel thanks to his nonaggression pact with Hitler.

Unless I missed something, and I don't think I did, there was never a hint from Roosevelt, Churchill, or the liberal supporters of war that Stalin was also an aggressor and a monster and at that time had long been a much bloodier and horrific tyrant.

The president, now a "compassionate conservative," advances the cause of "privatizing" Social Security

Roth IRA the model for Obama's contractor retirement plan

It was GW's idea and it was already a lie to even use the word, "privatization."

Those who supported his plan to partially defund, weaken, and replace the totally safe and mildly re-distributive Social Security program by letting people redirect part of their Social Security taxes toward personal IRAs, personal savings, rather than into the Social Security fund, called it "partial privatization."

Now, the devil is in the details, but what the president has done is direct the Treasury Department to create a plan allowing workers whose employers provide nothing for retirement to automatically save some of their own after-tax dollars.

The money would be guaranteed by the government, and so as safe as a savings account.

Not in the least clear how this is better than the private savings plans available right now through banks all over the country.

If that's really the long and short of it, what the president has done has been to advance the conservative cause of destroying Social Security by attempting to deal with the problem of retirement for the least well off among us by telling the poor, save up.

Expect Republicans to urge that the money to be saved should be exempt from Social Security taxes, thus ensuring the program also partially defunds Social Security, though it appears not to do that under the president's own plan.

All the same, FDR created Social Security to safely and effectively provide a small but secure pension for the poorest of Americans, with the worst retirement prospects, as well as aid for younger Americans in exceptionally desperate circumstances.

Want to do more along those lines for workers today who can expect nothing from their employers?

Beef up Social Security.

Strengthen its funding and increase its benefits.

Social Security is the right tool. It just needs to be made a better tool.

Of course, the president might reply that such changes are up to the congress and the congress will certainly not make them.

That is true.

Perhaps he has it in mind he can get approval for this idea from the congress.

But in that case he has refused to urge a properly Democratic plan (fixing Social Security) because a Republican congress won't pass it, and instead urged a plan for Republican acceptance whose only point, in their hands, will be to undermine, defund, and help ultimately wreck Social Security.

Not having been allowed to function as a Democratic president, he is now willingly accepting the role of Republican successor to GW, carrying on his destructive work as a "compassionate conservative."

The mind of Obama is certainly a tough nut to crack.

Barack Obama, privatizer

TVA for sale

National forests, next?

The New Majority for the Democratic Party

Acceptance by the Democratic Party and at least half its liberal activists of its reliance on the New Majority signifies its acceptance of the death of the New Deal coalition and, with it, of the century old progressive agenda.

The New Deal coalition of the industrial and agricultural, urban and rural American proletariat, the urban and rural poor including among the latter the impoverished and marginal small farmers of all regions, supported the biggest dose of socialism American had ever had to swallow in such a large, single gulp, its most notable achievement being a vast and compulsory public pension savings program, Social Security.

And that same coalition, though already beginning to fall apart, enabled the further principal gains of the Great Society including Medicaid and expanded Welfare, Food Stamps, Head Start, and Medicare.

And throughout it all there was an accompanying burgeoning of the regulatory state in the interests of protecting America’s workers, consumers, the general public, and the environment from the unacceptable results in our own homeland of the dictatorship of capitalists through market forces in the name of free competition.

And there were accompanying massive developments at the national and state levels making higher and professional and technical education much more widespread and available to the children of ordinary Americans than ever before.

But the coalition was significantly eroded in the 1960’s when the Democratic Party’s sacrifice of the blood and treasure of ordinary Americans to finance a policy of global containment of communism on behalf of global capitalism came to grief in Vietnam and created lasting antipathies between America’s working class with its Cold Warrior labor leaders on the one side and the rising generation of liberals who would be the party’s future leaders and activists on the other.

That was the same decade in which the last great progressive president, LBJ, knowingly gave up the “Solid South” to the Republicans by vigorous measures against Jim Crow while all over the country Americans witnessed unprecedented outbursts of long-enduring and reciprocal racial hatreds of blacks and whites.

And then in the next decade the Supremes gave us Roe, the Jewel in the Crown of the sexual revolution in the law it had been working at since the late 1950’s, and liberals across America supported them at the cost of another blow to the Democratic coalition that had previously included grass-roots Protestant Christianity from the age of Bryan to and even beyond the end of Prohibition.

The white South and much of the center of the country went over to the Republicans, newly committed to conservative and fundamentalist religion and morals along with the defense of white people against black and other non-white enmities.

Over all that time, a party whose agenda was, in contrast to the Republicans, one of advancing social democracy and control of the economy for the good of its working class and ordinary people and whose electoral base reflected its agenda has mutated enormously.

New elements have, over the years, been added to the working class agenda of progressivism in successful efforts on behalf of secularism, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, and racial equality and inclusion.

And thanks in part to the conservative takeover of the Republican Party and the rise of the hard, Bircher right to national power the mass politics of electioneering and propaganda of both major parties and all political movements have fallen, in the US, more and more under the control of Big Money out to rein in and even undo Big Government.

While its New Deal constituency has eroded over all that time so has the commitment of the Democratic Party to American social democracy.

The real value to its dependents of Social Security and Medicare has steadily dropped for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations.

The affordability of higher education to the non-rich of America has continuously dropped to the point of now being a national crisis.

The power of unions has diminished in the face of increasingly hostile Republicanism and indifference from Democrats.

Bill Clinton betrayed the Great Society with his “welfare reforms” and Barack Obama has betrayed both FDR and LBJ with his attacks on Social Security and Medicare.

And O did it to finance other, more subtle betrayals, first to finance a national program of compulsory purchase of health insurance from private companies that has still left some forty million Americans without health coverage.

And now to pay for a national program of public works to be carried out as a boondoggle for private and anti-union contractors and not by the new WPA the professional and further lefts have repeatedly called for since the collapse of 2008.

The era of Big Government is over, as Bill Clinton told us, to the everlasting shame of America’s most shameless man.

And the New Deal coalition of those whose interests it served has now been pretty much openly and wholly abandoned.

The new model Democratic Party is quite frankly out to be as friendly to the Big Money and the Big Money interests as it can be and still win elections.

Elections it plans to win by relying not on a working class it has helped to fragment into nearly complete political insignificance and economic helplessness but on long-standing divisions among Americans around issues of race, religion, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity.

And that will allow Democrats to win, once in a while, even as they join with the Republicans across the aisle in bipartisan elite projects of globalization in which liberals and conservatives, but especially the billionaire class, sell us all out for the greater good of the very rich and, allegedly, of the non-rich who are not Americans and are in so many ways more deserving of their solicitude than we.

The view from where?

Justice Ginsburg is right about Roe

The view from PUMA-land.

Somewhere out beyond any known galaxy, anyway, on a planet of Amazons obsessed with their own anatomy, Obama’s attack on the Great Society and the New Deal has not even been noted, it seems.

The botched syntax is her own.

My theory is that Roe dealt a huge blow to the movement for women’s equality because once it was decided, many women had the mistaken idea that the battle was won. 

Instead, Roe became the political football for BOTH political parties.  

It’s the primary criteria for which party voters decide they belong. 

It’s the fear tactic that Democrats use to corral women to vote against their economic interests as much as it is the tactic that Republicans use to rally their constituents to feel power and control over other people’s lives.

. . . . .

Because abortion has been such a cultural hot potato, we tend to see women as a collection of body parts, primarily reproductive body parts. 

We are uteruses and vaginas and breasts and all of our discussion is about who gets to control those body parts. 

I am not a man or a male hiring manager but I have to wonder what crosses men’s minds when they see a female colleague. 

Do they consider her intelligence, determination, ingenuity and hard work or do they secretly thank god that they weren’t born with ovaries that are subject to religious and governmental regulation? 

I am a man.

The answers are Yes and No, respectively.

But she’ll never get it because of the way she sees men, women, and the world.

And she is really out there.

By the way, the Times editorial on Ginsberg’s comment that she links to is fascinating.

I disliked Roe then and I dislike it now for the same reason, late term abortion is just infanticide by another name and I dread and oppose the legalization of infanticide for any but the most compelling grounds for euthanasia.

And I have never sided with the feminist demand that the choice, if there is one, be entirely that of the pregnant woman with the advice of her chosen physician, the latter being the only man, if such happens to be the case, with any say in the matter, at all.

The Times editorial board has quite a different view.

Oh, and I really dislike the ERA.

Talk about an invitation for endless further intrusions of judicial dictatorship.

And that’s the point, of course.

Meanwhile, Digby has apparently noticed the existence of numerous soi-disant liberals like the BooMan willing to stop worrying about cat food, given how close they are to an enormous boost in the Democrats' Hispanic vote.

Digby

David Atkins was furious, the other day.

Atkins

Digby also had this up to show the spending priorities of O’s big money contributors.

You know.

They guys who own the Democratic Party and set the priorities.

Very revealing.

These folks are not the biggest fans of FDR or LBJ, are they?

Obama is intentionally throwing the elderly under the bus. Republicans were telling the truth.

11 dimensional dominoes, my foot.

Karoli quotes insiders letting the cat out of the bag at C&L.

Untangling the Chained CPI Hairball

Obama sees “entitlements” – and it's revealing that inside the White House that’s what they call these earned and paid for working-class benefits – as getting in the way of his projects for infrastructure spending, education, and so on.

And the fight over all this deficit stuff needs to be swept out of the way so he can get his deals on guns and immigration, and maybe something about gays and women, too.

Obama has told people in his orbit that he feels “squeezed” by the rise of entitlement spending and sees it as a threat to getting anything else done, especially his plans for increased education and infrastructure spending.

Feed Granny or send Junior to law school, what do you think this Harvard climber puts first?

And, heck, what about the really important stuff like gun control, citizenship for 11 million illegals who will vote Democrat for decades, gay marriage, and the glass ceiling obstructing the ambitions of privileged white girls who went to Harvard law, just like he did?

More at Salon.

President’s desire to cut Social Security was public before he even took office.

No surprise BooMan and the squishy liberals of his generation and class are fine with this stuff.

He has often made it clear how much he despises the white working class and I have no doubt he thinks the Democrats can do fine against the Republicans yelling about race, religion, and sex even as they betray all working Americans of all races and religions, regardless of sex.

It will be easy, he thinks, to win so long as they keep the crucial support of billionaires who worry a hell of a lot more about female circumcision in Africa than they do about somebody else's granny eating cat food out of a can in the rattier parts of Pottersville.

And many of those same billionaires - and squishy, upper class liberals like BooMan - are pretty sure Americans are overpaid and have it way too soft, anyway, globally speaking, and certainly don't somehow magically deserve to be better off than Indonesians, Malays, or Chinese of the same class.

And we know how important moral desert is to those billionaires and the BooMan liberals, and indeed most liberals raised and living in privilege who certainly don't expect to be eating cat food, themselves, at any time in their lives.

That's the same BooMan who has twice supported the demand of George Will and others of the further right that the 17th Amendment be repealed and popular election of senators be abandoned, returning the power to choose them to state legislatures where plutocrats can exercise better control.

And he might be right about the future of the Democrats as a party for globo-meddling sociolibs who want to increase the Navy's budget for helping South Asians deal with coastal flooding by trimming those pesky entitlements that just so get in the way.

11 million new Hispanic votes might be just enough to make up for the hemorrhage of white working class votes this kind of stunt will cost the Democratic Party.

It just might.

But if not then we can thank Obama not only for doing Paul Ryan's work for him maybe as much as a decade early but for putting Ryan, Rand Paul, or someone just like them in the White House in 2016.

I haven't looked, but I'll just bet the PUMA's are screaming their heads off, all over the web.

"Real Democrats don't cut social security benefits, period[.]”

Greider on Social Security and the budget battle.

Will Voters Forgive Obama for Cutting Social Security?

Nothing quite like a very succinct summary of the bitter truth.

So who gets tell the folks that their FiCA deductions were a joke—only an accounting fiction?

The financial problems facing Social Security are easily fixed (as Obama himself has said) and are actually 30 years away.

When the Congressional Budget Office is required to “score” Obama’s so-called cost-of-living reform, it will be compelled to announce that whacking the old folks contributes not a penny to reducing the federal government’s deficits.

In fact, there is an even bigger lie concealed by the fiscal scolds and ignored by witless media, too.

Again and again, self-righteous critics have portrayed Social Security as the profligate monster borrowing from the Treasury and sucking the life out of federal government.

Guess what?

It's the other way around.

The federal government borrows from Social Security.

The Treasury has been borrowing from the Social Security Trust Fund for 30 years, and the debt to Social Security beneficiaries now totals nearly $3 trillion.

The day is approaching when that money will be needed for its original purpose: paying Social Security benefits to the working people who contributed to the fund.

That is the real crisis that makes the financial barons and their media collaborators so anxious to cut Social Security benefits.

They would like to get out of repaying the debt—that is, giving the money back to the people who earned it.

The only way to do this is cut the benefits—over and over again.

Count on it.

If the president and Congress succeed in this malicious scheme, they will come back again and again to cut more and more.

If the politicians join this sordid conspiracy, voters should come after them with pitchforks and torches.

John Nichols is right, too.

And so are all the people he refers to.

2.3 Million Petitioners Urge Rejection of 'Chained-CPI' Social Security Cut

"Real Democrats don't cut social security benefits, period[.]”

And so is Alan Grayson.

Progressives Say They'll Primary Dems Who Vote for Chained CPI

In a conference call organized by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, co-founders Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor pledged to launch primary challenges against Democrats who vote for a budget bill that includes chained CPI.

"There needs to be accountability in 2014, and we're very serious," said Green. "You cannot call yourself a Democrat and support Social Security cuts."

Progressive member of Congress Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, warned that Obama's changes to both Social Security and Medicare benefits in his budget may drag down the whole Democratic Party.

"A Democratic President is proposing cuts to benefits, without receiving anything form the other side . . . that undermine the core Democratic accomplishment of the last 50 years," he said.

In addition to chained CPI, Grayson pointed out, the White House budget contains a two-tier approach to Medicare long favored by Republicans that treats new beneficiaries differently from current beneficiaries, imposing means-testing on incomes above $47,000.

"You may recall I lost my election two years ago because Republicans took a shot at convincing the public that ObamaCare was a cut in Medicare," Grayson said.

Now, he said, the President is handing the Republicans an issue they can use to win elections.

I didn’t realize he was that old

Pat Buchanan: Obama's Speech Was "Pedestrian" And "Deeply Partisan"

Actually, that well describes Pat’s reaction, here, to Obama’s speech.

But never mind.

This is the interesting part.

PB speaking,

The president is a fine speaker, and I really was looking for something uplifting.

I've read speeches, I've worked on inaugural speeches -- I remember both of Lincoln's, and Kennedy's, and FDR's.

[Lincoln's] second inaugural is one of the greatest -- it's far better than the Gettysburg Address, in my view.

I would never have guessed.

Is he a vampire?

No human lives that long.

Anyway, as he might have it, not since Old Testament times.

;-)

Obama unchained?

Text of Obama's Second Inaugural Address

Going straight to the Declaration, he sounded more like a progressive than he has at any time since the campaign of 2008.

Good stuff, domestically, on the whole, aside from immigration.

Something for all the liberal constituencies, including a commitment to the safety net and to earned benefits that was given billing reassuringly close to the top.

Lesser evil, but only just, in foreign affairs.

This turn did not go unnoticed.

Obama's Inaugural: A New Foreign Policy?

Elsewhere he asserted a need to deal effectively with global warming and a moral imperative to care for the planet for those who will come after us.

But this is the crucial passage in O’s speech committing him and us, unmistakably, to the tradition of presidential liberal global interventionism.

America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation.

We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.

And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice—not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

A mix typical of progressive presidents since TR. And Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, for that matter.

And the American Vice President lately so much publicly venerated, Henry Wallace.

About which writes Robert Dreyfus at The Nation in that strain of global welfarism that is becoming more influential in contemporary liberalism, or seems to be.

That, to me, ought to be the absolute core of a new US foreign policy.

Not finding small and medium-size enemies, whether impoverished nations such as Iran or mini-threats such as the Algeria-Mali Islamists, and by attacking them creating big ones; not by riling up gigantic rivals such as China by “pivoting” toward Asia and the Pacific with our air force and navy.

Instead, by organizing the world’s attention on urgent needs, such as clean drinking water, vaccination, healthcare clinics, sustainable economic growth, and other achievable goals that, according to countless analysts, could be bought and paid for worldwide at just a fraction of what we now spend on what we euphemistically call “defense.”

There was lots of God in the inauguration, by the way.

Not least in the lyrics of America, sung by a pop star in pop star style.

Well, talk of God was always characteristic of Lincoln, too, one of our president's heroes.

Oh, what is it with the cheesy divas at these affairs, anyway?

I like the national anthem better the way they do it at ball parks.

The global war on terror goes on

Obama to Nominate John Brennan, 'Kill List' Architect, as New CIA Chief

Not backing down on his right to fight, is he?

The president, I mean.

Just to be clear, the whole idea of defining certain methods of war as “war crimes” has always struck me as stupid and even malicious.

The concept was abused by the allies in both world wars and hypocritically exploited by both Wilson and FDR to drag the country into war.

Phooey.

Which is not to say that informal commitments among belligerents to reciprocally honor conventions regarding use of weapons, treatment of prisoners, etc. is never a good idea.

A loophole big enough for a battleship

Daniel Webster made a speech in the House denouncing Madison and the Democrats both for starting the war of 1812 and for seeking to draft people to fight it, in December of 1814.

He declaimed drafting people to fight an offensive war unnecessary to the defense of their liberties, their country, their homes, or their families was unconstitutional.

He thus left open the possibility that a draft for a war to serve the nation’s vital interests could be constitutional.

And that makes one wonder what he thought of all those Brit troops who had invaded America and burned Washington DC to the ground.

Anyway, who has not heard of Cap Weinberger’s stunning declaration that there is no place so remote or insignificant in all the world that the US does not have vital interests there?

Who is not aware that the supporters of Mr. Wilson's war insisted America had to fight to make the world safe for democracy?

Or that, according to FDR's supporters, Hitler was out to conquer the whole world, America included, just as the Kaiser had been?

Or that, without America's cold war efforts, communism after WW2 (but apparently not after WW1) was a serious threat to overtake the whole world with Stalin-like tyranny, us included?

Madison, by the way, left Webster undisturbed, so far as I know.

Lincoln would not be so mild toward Clement Vallandigham.

Interestingly, Daniel Webster in his speech of 1814 rejecting the constitutionality of the draft directly addressed the claim that the bare necessity of the thing made it constitutional because the congress and the government in general had to be thought of as endowed with the power to do anything necessary to the achievement of its legitimate, constitutionally prescribed or allowed ends.

And he denounced that idea as Tommyrot.

He flat denied the power of the congress to raise armies, in particular and for example, entailed the power to do anything necessary to raise armies adequate to their admittedly constitutionally authorized purposes.

Yes, at the cost of losing.

What do you think of that?

Wouldn't you think that a claim that congress has so awful a power, so terrible in its impact on the people, on  individuals and on families, could and should be backed by some shred of text?

Surely Webster was right this is far too heavy a weight for the necessary and proper clause to carry?

Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Suppose Lincoln had forced the country through all that horror and loss and, in the end, let slavery stand.

Could any national leader have been more infamous in US or even world history for doing anything of more costly and unspeakably stupid futility?

The Articles of Confederation established a perpetual union of the subscribing states under itself, that union’s equally perpetual constitution.

The generation that wrote them blew off both the union and the Articles in flat defiance of several of them and wrote a new constitution far more national in nature – members voted as individuals in that new bicameral legislature instead of each state’s members voting together as a block, for example – that they were willing to see disrupt the union fatally and forever in case it was not ratified by them all, with states previously in now staying out.

The leaders of the southern Confederacy were no more cavalier about the constitution or the union than they had been, and anyway the claim to perpetuity had been discreetly, understandably, but not inconsequentially omitted from the Philadelphia document by its lawless creators.

Union forever?

Phooey.

It is clear as day, I think, that Lincoln’s bloody war to save the union would have been an outrage against humanity and the least common sense had he won and let slavery stand.

And if slavery had within a few decades been actually abandoned voluntarily in all the states that would only have made it worse.

But he did not let slavery stand and what the South feared at the time was very possibly true, though the neo-Confederates today deny it, that Lincoln from the moment the first shot was fired aimed both to keep the South in the union and to end slavery everywhere within it, though he could not at that time say so.

That is, and contrary to what had been the expressed views of many abolitionists before him, he meant to prevent the southern states breaking off and forming a powerful slave confederacy right on our borders, taking away a large part of our national strength and perhaps expanding into the Caribbean, inevitably becoming an enemy and perhaps a menace to the northern, free-state, rump union they would leave behind, as some who favored secession intended.

Many today speculate that had he let the southern states secede slavery would have died out among them anyway within a few decades, as at any rate seems more plausible than the nightmare of entrenched, vigorous, and spreading slavery I have hypothesized Lincoln fought to avoid.

Certainly it is difficult - though I think not impossible - to believe it could in that case have survived as a legal institution anywhere in the Occident up to our own day, though it survives even now illegally in many areas of the world and even legally in some parts controlled by Muslim religious law.

But even granting – and I think it is not certain – that slavery would anyway have disappeared before now it remains true that the Civil War did at any rate much shorten the life span of slavery in the southern states, themselves, and almost certainly elsewhere.

So, why could Lincoln not say so from the beginning if, as I have suggested, he meant to save the union and kill slavery within it from the start?

Because he thought he just might have a plausible constitutional case that secession was nothing but rebellion and he as president had a duty to put it down.

That was the view of the Republicans at the time whose outlook on the matters of federal power and states’ rights made them old-time Federalists on steroids.

But he had no case whatever and did not believe that the federal government under the then constitution had the least authority to disturb slavery in the South under any pretext whatever, and specifically not even under pretext of rebellion.

Though during the war he claimed and exercised the power of emancipation he applied it only to some of America's slaves and was by no means sure of its permanent effect.

Hence the need, eventually, to force through the 13^th Amendment banning slavery to give the Civil War an indisputable meaning it would otherwise most certainly not have had.

Should Lincoln have done it?

Should he have fought this war?

The Democrats who opposed him were certainly right, I think, that he ought not to have fought merely to save the union, just as we mostly feel today, I think, that Canada ought not to fight to keep Quebec in, nor Italy to keep in an unwilling South Tyrol, nor anyone at all to keep the Flemings and Walloons from splitting Belgium as the Czechs and the Slovaks split Czechoslovakia.

And is not the UN, even today, defending the right of secession in the former territories of Yugoslavia?

Those who protest that admitting a right of secession is an absurdity in normative political theory are quite right, but they are missing that normative political theory is absurd in the first place and has little bearing on actual history.

See the earlier posts labeled “amoralism.”

In the real world not only secession but even the more radical step of partition are sometimes acceptable and even the only defensible course.

But assume that, though he said he was, Lincoln was not fighting, even at the beginning, merely to save a union half slave and half free.

Assume he aimed from the beginning both to save the union and to kill slavery within it, if he could.

Should he have fought this war?

Were those in the North and West who opposed him at the time actually right?

Especially the thousands of draftee immigrants forced to fight either meaninglessly to save a pointless union or wholly altruistically, tens of thousands of them dying to free slaves little worse off than the free men of their own working class in the cities of the North?

Everything I have ever read denouncing the draft as the most horrific and hateful servitude when the draftees are taken to fight for anything at all but the defense of their own lives and liberty, their country, homes, and loved ones - if perhaps not in that case - comes here to mind, inescapably, and I cannot but sympathize with them rather than him.

And a good deal of all that was written by American republicans sure the end of monarchy and placing the war power in the hands of a popularly elected congress had put an end to the normal feature of history, the powers that be dragging hundreds of thousands, again and again, to kill and die in causes not their own.

Or by anti-federalists opposed to ratification of the Philadelphia constitution, sure that a strong, national union would perpetuate in American that same ancien regime in which the common people fight endless wars for the empire and glory of rulers to whom they are but canon-fodder and cattle.

Afterthought.

The neo-Confederates and, to be fair, other historians have pointed out quite truthfully that Lincoln was among the absolute worst of presidents for usurpation of power and trampling of liberty, democracy, and the Constitution to make his war.

Wilson’s suppression of dissent and infamous treatment of Debs was not worse, by any means.

And the Federalists who so infuriated Jefferson’s and Madison’s Democrats were cub scouts, compared to him.

Perhaps only FDR's internment of the Japanese in America was a comparable or even greater violation of constitutional rectitude.

And yet another afterthought.

The bulk of the evidence shows that Lincoln was a frank racist convinced of the inferiority of blacks to whites, intellectual and otherwise, though he rejected unto shedding rivers of blood that this justified slavery.

Where modern liberals claim to see contradictions others might see only nuance.

It doesn’t matter what he knew or when he knew it.

Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt Knew

FDR had promised he would never send American boys to die in Europe.

Never.

Just like Wilson, before him.

Needless to say, Americans were not interested in a vast war effort in the Pacific to put paid to the Japanese, either, merely because they had begun building their empire beyond China – and they had been in China since forever – at the expense of the empires of the British, French, and Dutch.

But JR is perfectly right about “the court historians” – nearly all of them, whether liberal or conservative, after the war and up to this very day – celebrating FDR for dragging the American people, by hook and by crook, into a war – actually, two wars, one each across two oceans – they wanted no part of.

For the liberals it was “the Good War” because it avenged six million of Europe’s Jews and saved the rest, probably saved millions of Slavs from a programmed death, and probably saved millions of other Slavs from racial helotry under the Germans for however long the Third Reich might have lasted had Hitler won.

They are right about that much, I think.

And they are right, I think, in supposing what Hitler would have done to the Slavs is much worse than what Stalin actually did do to them.

The specific plan may well have been a secret, but the aspiration certainly was not, having been presented by Hitler quite frankly in his Mein Kampf.

Generalplan Ost

Blood-curdling.

But I am not aware much of this was actually known to the US by December, 1941.

And all the same, it in no way means we should have joined in the war even if, as I think is plainly contrary to fact, it would have been lost if we had not entered.

And this is all too true.

[T]he myth of the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor is a pillar of the "Greatest Generation" narrative that is the foundation of our interventionist foreign policy.

That storyline goes something like this: we "saved" the world from the Axis powers, overcoming our "isolationist" inclinations, and went on to create a "world order" in which we established, forevermore, our duty and destiny to police the four corners of the earth and stand up for Goodness, Justice, and Fair Play.

We have been paying for that myth, ever since.

Against interventionism

Politicians in both major parties who take the trouble – the enormous trouble – to run for president aspire to be “the most powerful man in the world,” to control the might of the unique hyper-puissance of our time, to command the greatest military power in the world.

Apart from Ron Paul and perhaps also Denis Kucinich, not one has run for the presidency in living memory with the intention of withdrawing the US from its global military commitments and painful, useless role as “the indispensable nation.”

Not even George McGovern or his supporters would have dared go so far.

And this is true though it is notorious that Americans overwhelmingly reject globo-meddling in favor of what is variously called “non-interventionism,” “isolationism,” or for some odd reason “neo-isolationism.”

Wilson lied shamelessly in 1916, campaigning for peace as he planned for war in 1917, driving the anti-interventionist naval secretary Bryan out of office.

FDR lied shamelessly from 1933 to 1941, promising American boys would never fight another European war while violating neutrality at every turn, eventually exploiting a pre-emptive Japanese attack in the Pacific as an excuse for the war he wanted in Europe.

LBJ lied shamelessly in the campaign of 1964, promising American boys would not die in a war Asian boys ought to fight as he planned ever-deeper intervention in Vietnam, eventually fabricating a provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin.

While Gore defended Bill Clinton’s gratuitous intervention in the Balkans, Bush the Younger campaigned in 2000 against unnecessary wars and for a “humbler” American foreign policy, betraying America utterly in Afghanistan and even more so in Iraq after 9/11 provided the completely fake casus belli the Halliburton neocons in his administration had wanted all along.

In 2004 and 2008 the candidates of both major parties promised more war, though the Democrats promised less more war.

In every case, American blood and American treasure were wasted in causes having no sufficient relation to the common good of the American people but plenty of value to ambitious politicians, greed-drive military contractors, jingoist bar-fly patriots, and foreign-born advisers abundantly willing to see Americans slaughtered for the good of the foreign peoples and nations they really cared about.

Alone among the settler nations of the New World, America has done exactly what so many of its founding generation of leaders told it not to do.

They knew full well that our distance from Europe provided a future of safety from danger no nation in Europe would ever enjoy.

But instead of taking advantage of this to choose a history of peace and pursuit of the common good America's elites have taken advantage of this almost from the beginning as an opportunity for empire-building and, eventually, ceaseless political and military meddling on a global scale.

Their arrogance and ambition, and the fatuous moralism found in that part of their propaganda that did not rely on imaginary “vital American interests” and entirely fictitious “existential threats,” have been the same, all along.

Much to the cost of the ordinary people of our country.