Most recently, Ron Paul played the part of the smiling, shucksy, old-fashioned country doctor for expatriot Brit and former newspaper editor, Piers Morgan. Here’s the interview:-

Morgan raises some good questions about Paul’s policies and beliefs, but the interview is pure softball in nature, and Paul’s unchallenged responses ranged from the downhom-ish in their nature to the totally bizarre.

Paul’s foreign policy is simple: Don’t get involved. He just about approves of our involvement in World War II, but not World War I; and everything after 1945 is just illegal. He waffled rather incoherently about pre-emptively acting against another country whom you knew to be planning a military strike against the United States.

His exasperated response to Morgan’s persistent hypothetical questioning about Iran’s threats against Israel was to bully back a sullen demand to know why the British didn’t intervene in Israel’s problems – let some British boys give their lives, or something to that extent.

The healthcare question was another waffle. Of course, we all know what Paul’s views on healthcare are – if you can’t afford private health insurance, find a kind neighbour or depend on the charity of churches. In other words, die. And the final discussion about Paul’s anti-abortion views eventually disclosed that, yes, Paul believes that life begins at conception.

This week, on Real Time with Bill Maher’s Overtime segment, the question of Ron Paul arose again. You can watch the discussion here:-

As part of his damage limitation exercise, in which he’s trying to undo all the undermining of the President he’s fronted for the past four years, Bill Maher is now one of a number of so-called Progressives and members of the Professional Left, who are trying to convince us that – hey, all those racist comments, all that talk about Obama having no spine, folks, they were just jokes – nudge nudge wink wink – hey, funny, huh?

Not.

So, even though a week doesn’t go by when Bill doesn’t get a mention in about Ron Paul, he’s now trying to say (as are a lot of others), that, although Ron Paul has a lot of ideas with which Progressives can agree (like legalised pot, dismantling the Federal Reserve and bringing the troops home), there are just a few with which they don’t agree – the bad ones, like … oh, you know, healthcare and the gold standard.

This is like whistling and looking the other way. Specifically, it’s like whistling anything but Dixie and looking away. Because no one, no one in the media, and especially not the Professional Left, are raising the one thing that should mightily offend them about Ron Paul, so much so that it should totally negate any other so-called “good” idea he might have with which the Left, under normal circumstances, could concur:

Ron Paul is a racist.

If you seriously still do not believe that, you can read about it here, here, and here.

In point of fact, before he thought World War I was illegal, he thought that the Civil War was a big mistake too, and that Abraham Lincoln totally disrespected the Constitution when it came to States’ Rights and property rights – right on down to Lyndon Johnson disrespecting the Constitution some more when he signed the Civil Rights Act, which Ron Paul opposes.

Everyone in the media avoids questioning Paul about this. Everyone. And now, his former admirers, who are distancing themselves, are not mentioning the one thing that should offend them to the hilt of their Progressivism: they simply do not say that Ron Paul’s history of racism and his ability to attract the flotsam and jetsam from the white supremacist tranche of lowlifery offend the core of their beliefs.

And that’s the worst sort of hypocrisy. It denies them the right, in my opinion, not only to regard themselves as Progressives, but also to speak for the vast majority of Progressives who find Ron Paul and his candidacy offensive in every aspect.

Bill Humphrey, in his blog entitled “Memo to White Liberals Who Support Ron Paul” actually has a very astute message for those misguided and misbegotten souls who count themselves both Paulbots and Progressives:-

Pretty much sums it up. Until these self-appointed spokespersons in the public eye openly acknowldege why they really do reject Ron Paul’s candidacy, they have no right to bill themselves as members of the Professional Left.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo ]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/not-quite-getting-there-about-ron-paul.html/feed 0 http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/football-is-progressive.html http://www.osborneink.com/2012/02/football-is-progressive.html#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:00:13 +0000 Matt Osborne http://www.osborneink.com/?p=18677 Continue reading →]]> I have to hand it to Bill Maher on this one: football is the most progressive sport ever, and the perfect rejoinder to anyone who tells you that socialism is un-American, or that it doesn’t work. It also proves that “progressive” and “pacifist” are not precisely the same thing.

Industrialized warfare began with trenches and no-man’s-lands; football has lines of scrimmage and a neutral zone. The terminology of a Superbowl is infected with martial language: bomb, formation, attack, etc. If you’ve attended both two-a-days and basic training it hits home how similar they are. The physical side of coaching is different in effect, but there is a similar mental training: players have to be aggressive to tackle and soldiers have to be aggressive to shoot.

So not only does the sport embody the economic and social ethos of the progressive era in which it was born, it consciously imitates the dominant historical experiences of the liberal age. American football is THE representative sport of our nation’s 20th Century, which was characterized (until the 1980s, anyway) by mass conscription armies and the social leveling they provided.

The Civil Rights Era began with African American veterans demanding a social status equal to their sacrifice. This coincided with, and was strengthened by, the integration of the armed forces. In a similar way, Paul Bear Bryant’s 1971 refusal to continue coaching an all-white team killed official segregation across the South. Within a year, the entire Southeastern Conference was integrated — and in ten years, George Wallace would win the governor’s mansion with 90% of the black vote.

George Will, who hates football, agrees on this topic, calling the game “a mistake” that combines the two worst aspects of our previous century: violence and committee meetings. But the white and black and brown kids holding hands in the huddle with seconds on the clock on a Friday night are the best argument that we should keep the game forever, and to me the Superbowl is merely a national celebration of this.

By Emilia1956

Our biggest problem – the Left’s – is that we’re stupid. Or rather, we’re naive. So naive, we never learn from our mistakes.

And we listen too much to the Professional Left.

No sooner had Barack Obama won the 2008 Election, than we were lapping up every liquid word Chris Matthews or Bill Maher or Uncle Tom Cobbley told us about the Republicans being dead in the water – how they’d never come back from this, how they’d be the party in the wilderness for a long time.

Then, the Tea Party arose, and the Democrats lost the House in the 2010 Midterms.

OMIGOD! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? I KNOW … IT’S OBAMA’S FAULT.

Well, that was the refrain of the Professional Left, as well. After all, it was the Professional Left who told us not to vote, just so we could show Obama. Show him what, I’ve still to ascertain. How stupidly sheeple-like certain tranches of the Left are!

Anyway, the Professional Left have a new message: After three Republican Primaries in three states with three winners, the Party is splintering. Gingrich is attacking Romney, Romney’s being cagey, Ron Paul sounds increasingly weirder (although Rick Santorum’s approaching those depths, himself). They’re all fighting with each other. They’re destroying themselves from within.

Of course, there’s a method to this meme on behalf of the Professional Left. Most would like to lull their sheeple into a daze where the prospective voter thinks the Republicans are so damned batshit that there’s no way the President could lose … so they won’t need to vote, will they? That way, they could continue with their Obama-criticism well into his second term and feel even more purist in their critique because, after all, they didn’t vote for him.

But unlike the Left, who have made snatching defeat from the jaws of victory an art form, the Right always seem to find a second wind; and if you really look at and listen to what the GOP candidates are saying, you’ll find most of their policies mirror each other’s, even Ron Paul’s.

Mary Cate Cary explains in the most recent U S News and World Report:

A cursory review of the GOP candidates’ positions on the issues is surprisingly repetitive, especially on the issues of most importance to voters, namely, the economy and the budget deficit. All of the Republican candidates are fiscal conservatives, all want lower federal income taxes, and when it comes to lowering corporate taxes, it’s simply a question of who wants to cut by how much. Most support a balanced budget and raising the retirement age. All want to reform Social Security and Medicare. Most favor repealing Dodd-Frank’s restrictions on the financial industry, and all want to reduce federal regulations on businesses.

All are pro-life, and all want tougher border security. All are opposed to Obama­care, with most calling for an outright repeal. All except Ron Paul support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The biggest areas of disagreement seem to be defense and foreign policy, with stances ranging from cutting the defense budget (Paul) to no reductions in the Pentagon budget except for waste (Newt Gingrich) to keeping all U.S. bases open (Rick Santorum) and increasing overseas troop levels and warships (Romney). They have a variety of positions on how to handle Libya, and while the field is split on whether waterboarding is torture, most support keeping the Guantánamo Bay prison open.

Overall, that doesn’t sound like “deep ideological divisions” to me. On domestic issues, Republicans are surprisingly unified. Republicans agree on most economic issues, as well as on the other issues most important to voters: the federal deficit and healthcare.

There are a growing number of disaffected Progressives about, who plan on voting for a third party, knowing that this would give the election to the Republicans, in hopes that in four years a real Progressive revolution would take hold and, just like the Tea Party, prevail within four years.

Don’t bank on that, and above all, don’t give them the ammunition to achieve it.

Cross-posted from Emilia Wahoo

The White House has also been far too free with cuts to energy assistance programs for low-income households. Because I have an intimate understanding of American poverty, I’ve actively opposed this trend for two years in a row. These cuts erode economic recovery by reducing an important stabilizer for the working poor at wintertime. That shouldn’t happen.

The president also came into office promising to do something about the college bowl system; Josh Levin even called him obsessed with the subject. Yet President Obama has made zero progress on the issue, even with our season of intense public attention to the dark downside of college football programs.

Now look through those three ‘graffs and tell me which part is the obotomapology.

I have never seen my “job” at this blog to be about apologizing for, or rationalizing away, presidential decisions. There are lots of policy areas where I don’t agree with Obama, and I’m not enamored of every decision he’s made even in policy areas where I generally agree. That’s more or less how I expected things to stand when I supported him all the way back in 2007.

For no matter how receptive and helpful a president is, any broad agenda (and what could be broader than the progressive agenda?) will find itself stymied at some points by even the friendliest of presidents. No president can be 100% of what any American or group of Americans want; that is not how politics in America have ever worked.

Moreover, it isn’t just one individual politician: both presidency and parties have barriers to complete participation in an agenda. Remember, Bush did not fully satisfy abortion opponents with his stem cell policy, either. All the teapublicanism, you’ll recall, was about putting “real conservatives” in office.

One example of a progressive policy area that suffers under the Obama administration is marijuana legalization efforts, medicinal and otherwise. The way through the War on Drugs (as opposed to simply ending that war) is to divide and conquer rather than continue pretending marijuana and heroin are the same.

Democrats generally don’t push these issues, however, as no one in the party can speak about them coherently. (That’s a problem with Democrats on many issues — there is no common set of talking points.) Issues like marijuana legislation are perceived as coming from the “dirty hippy” wing, of course, and that makes it hard for Democratic officeholders to participate. But that may change.

Marijuana has a large, highly-engaged following that enjoys crossover political support from libertarians and some conservatives. Marijuana is an example of a highly-engaged demographic, then, but not a broad constituency. That is, few voters care enough to turn out for the issue, but those who do care will turn out in droves, even for Ron Paul. They can’t get him nominated, however, because the issue isn’t a winner in the broader electorate.

Obama has nixed any hope of sane marijuana policy on his watch, and it’s not hard to understand why. What president wants to be “soft on crime”? You can see that in Obama’s pardon policy: the White House has issued very few pardons, and only to a rigorously-selected tranche of applicants. (Note the anger at Haley Barbour in Mississippi over the issue.)

Obama did sign the Fair Sentencing Act with bipartisan support, however, and that is what drives the hyperengaged to distraction: where there is no consensus, there is no forward progress. That’s not just a problem for this particular president, either.

With no consensus for single-payer, you get an inefficient form of single-payer by enforced market participation and Medicaid enlargement. With no consensus for the American Jobs Act, it doesn’t matter that the White House writes the legislation the way it didn’t with health care, or that the president’s advisers talk it up on TV, or that the president uses his bully pulpit with a speech to Congress and a tour of decaying bridges.

No consensus of Congress, no law. That’s how the American system works; no one can make it work against its will. If marijuana policy voters put Ron Paul in the Oval Office, he still wouldn’t be able to legalize it with this Congress. In fact, the great failure of progressive movement politics is that issue hawks invested far too much expectation in a president. The laws are written by Congress and legislatures. That isn’t apologetics, it’s basic civics.

Progressives must avoid fixating on any one office or branch of government; they are all integral to problems and solutions. The government is larger than one man, and so a progressive agenda must always seek a broader base of progress than one man. My objection to firebagging is not about defending the administration, then, but defending the cause.

“We” are the change we have waited for. “He” isn’t — and can’t be. That’s not how things work, and I don’t say so because I like him or want someone’s approval. Moreover, I have no problem recognizing his imperfections. Many of them are common to Democrats and the progressive movement. As I keep saying, look where he comes from.

In a related issue, Punk Patriot — a genuine netroots phenom and a swell guy — feels restless about the president because he’s a bit of a pacifist, whereas the president has made very effective use of his executive warmaking authority. The Punk Patriot speaks for a youth cohort that is very engaged on the issue, and as I actually like his larger point here, I’m going to let him talk and put my thoughts below the fold:

A few points. First, the president doesn’t want to keep Camp X-Ray, the Guantanamo detention facility, open. The sad story of why it’s still open belongs to Congress, where powerful Senators on the Armed Services Committee have been attacking executive power over indefinite detainees. This started early in Obama’s administration, it has not let up, and it is why I find public focus on the president over NDAA completely misplaced: those notorious provisions on indefinite detention are just the latest manifestation of this congressional power-grab. Remember, the Constitution makes the president commander-in-chief — he’s supposed to have the powers of, and over, indefinite detention.

I share Punk Patriot’s desire to put detainees on trial in civilian courts, close Camp X-Ray, and put the worst of the worst in supermax prisons if necessary — but we don’t have a vote in Congress. In fact, our point of view barely gets a voice there at all.

Second, most of the American public wanted progress in the war against al-Qaeda and approves of the progress Obama has made since his inauguration. It has always been normal presidential business to kill America’s enemies (see: Constitution, “common defense”). He promised a laserlike focus on al-Qaeda when he ran for president, and I don’t think anyone can seriously say he hasn’t fulfilled that promise. The Bushies, on the other hand, seemed in no special hurry to win the war on al-Qaeda. So don’t tell me they’re the same, because they’re just not.

Third, I do not agree with the common framing on drone strikes. If Obama sent Marines to shoot everyone and urinate on them instead of firing missiles from drones, would it actually make anyone feel better? I doubt it. Marines who fail at military discipline and violate the laws of war can get caught and punished. But it’s still war, and the punishment is for pissing, not killing.

Furthermore, the only “Overton Window” you can look for in the current presidential field is Ron Paul, who would issue letters of marque and reprisal to the company formerly known as Blackwater. Good luck getting any accountability for whatever horrors Erik Prince can come up with in Waziristan.

War is not fair. The art of war is the creation of unfairness. The enemy cannot be granted a sporting chance; he will likely kill you as thanks for the opportunity. He’s not playing games, and neither should you. That’s why people who wage war — by blowing up families in Kabul, or Marines on convoy in Afghanistan, or planes full of passengers — don’t deserve sanctuary or special protection across the artificial political boundary of a “lawless tribal zone.” Moreover, the drone strikes have worked: the Taliban are now talking, which is the first step to getting out of Afghanistan.

The president’s mission in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. His mission in Pakistan is to stay out of Pakistan. His mission in Libya has been to stay out of Libya. Right now, that strategy seems to be working.

Look at it this way: coal companies have been bombing Appalachia for a decade now, to staggering effect on communities and people in the region. At least as many West Virginians and Kentuckians have died of carcinogenic heavy metals released into streams as Pakistanis have died of drone strikes. There is no accountability for Don Blankenship, either, no matter how much he pissed on mine safety and the miners union. So you’ll excuse me if I just don’t place drone strikes at the top of my list of concerns.

The horror I share with Punk Patriot is that such crimes are not actually crimes at all, at least not in terms of individual accountability. It is perfectly legal for Don Blankenship to kill Americans with an unsafe workplace, and kill their communities with mountaintop removal mining. It was also perfectly legal to call toxic subprime mortgage debt a AAA good-as-cash investment. I am less concerned by putting people in the dock, however, than I am in making laws that stop these practices. And who writes the laws? Again, that would be Congress. Punk Patriot should talk to the folks at Appalachia Rising about how long they’ve pushed legislation to end mountaintop removal mining, and how much luck they’ve had (none).

Punk Patriot is concerned about the president’s progressivism, but what he’s really complaining about is the presidency. It’s a limited office, though until the election of Barack Obama the president’s wartime powers had very few limits. This is actually not the first time the United States has pursued a non-state actor into uncertain territory. If then-Lieutenant George S. Patton had access to a drone while chasing down Pancho Villa’s guerilla forces in Mexico, he would have used it. Indeed, the US Army used biplanes in 1916. That wasn’t fair, either, and it brought negative attention from pacifists to President Wilson’s policy. We have been here before.

The United States has been at war now for a decade. Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) after 9/11, and it requires the destruction of al-Qaeda. If, on the other hand, the president were to begin his tenure by purging the Pentagon, Langley, and the NSA of everyone who knew about torture, who would be left to tell him where Osama bin Laden is?

The Punk Patriot wants peace. So do I. And on the other side of AUMF is a place where the “war on terror” ends, which is why the president has applied force to get there. Hate it if you want. In the meantime, he just declared his intentions to shrink the nuclear stockpile even further, to reduce the active duty land force so America cannot invade more than one country at a time, and continue withdrawing from Afghanistan. He has transformed the Department of Defense with solar Marines, alternative fuels, and the reversal of DADT. These changes will have permanent positive effects on the progressive agenda.

The alternative is to wait for a more progressive president (as Punk Patriot would define one) to come along. Pardon the talking point, but we can’t wait. Progressives cannot sit out the chance to displace the Congressional war machine and install candidates who will back up plans to shrink the military. If we don’t get that done, then the 113th Congress will fight to maintain the size of the active force, keep Camp X-Ray open forever, and stymie reform — just like the 112th Congress is doing. And how progressive is that?

In 2011, the progressive blogosphere assumed that fabled, infamous circular firing squad formation and opened fire. The internal politics of netroots are showing up in posts. Digby:

The jobs numbers are good, but there also good reason to contain the jubiliation for the time being, at least according to Jared Bernstein, who’s not a hostile emo-prog the last I heard.

I’ve met Digby, and read her blog for years. I always admired her and never thought of her as a hostile emo-prog. Yes, she’s way to the left of Obama on many issues, and she has the interesting young David Atkins writing in her blog, but she’s always been a proud Democrat. Nor would I react to Bernstein that way: I’m the first to say the recovery is still precarious. And I know what Digby is trying to do with the Overton window.

Digby felt it necessary to acknowledge a distinction within progressive politics. This kind of preemption is, I think, unnecessary, and furthermore I do not like the naming conventions that have emerged. A few months ago, a faction of the progressive netroots declared itself “pragmatic” as opposed to “emo.” Let me be the first to call this terminology ridiculous.

Pragmatism is a means, not an end, and being pragmatic doesn’t make you correct or effective. I have news for “pragmatic” progressives: those white people just now concerned about police brutality have always been concerned by police brutality. Digby has carried a torch for years in her blog to bring a light to abusive tasering. What’s more, activism has grown huge in the progressive youth cohort; they have learned from the old leaders, and they have responded to the call of nonviolence. This blog has chronicled that, and guess what pragmatic figures they learned it from?

Which brings me to “emo,” a broad musical genre rooted in punk, metal, and rock but characterized by highly-personal and emotive lyrics (hence, “emo”). Neither “pragmatic” or “emo” belongs in a compound noun with “progressive.” Emo is held in disregard by metalheads, who appreciate lyrics about strong feelings other than sadness. So if you’re using either term, please stop it before we confuse musical politics with the politics of progressivism.

My co-blogger and webcomic Jesus once described the problem well using a diagram. In fact, the “split” between progressives is that some progressives have a more narrow zone of acceptability than others. The president’s decisions won’t always be acceptable to progressives, or to all progressives. In fact, they usually won’t be acceptable to all progressives. I have taken the liberty of modifying his chart:

Let two issues stand for the rest here, since most issues on which the left divides these days are about his use of authority. For the first two years of his presidency, the left complained that Obama did not use his ultimate powers of suasion and veto to achieve narrower progressive victories. Simultaneously, Americans were grabbing mainstream attention with teabags hanging from tricorner hats and signs that called Obama a dictator over the ACA. Yet it was hard to get progressives to freak out enough about health care to show up en masse, much less in coordination. Remember “kill the bill”?

There has been no sense of co-belligerency on the left until recently, and even the Occupy movement has been a source of division. This is utterly unnecessary. Progressives have long wanted to change the subject of the public conversation away from austerity; that time is now, so let’s talk about it instead of spilling electrons in blue-on-blue fratricide. Yes, the movement is going to have a hard time accepting Obama. Yes, Obama has his own movement within progressive politics. These people have to find a way to get along and use a weak Republican field to put Obama in coattails instead of cutting them off.

Because we actually can’t wait. We cannot wait for a more progressive president to come along before we retake Congress, the most broken branch of the federal government. There are thirty-nine state legislatures to take back. There are fifty states to fight in, and all of them are swing states. They are full of swing voters (yes, swing voters exist; I have been watching them swing since the 1980s). The task is to generate a landslide broader than one man. If you’re not part of that, you’re not helping.

OK, everybody who thinks Ron Paul’s the only politician worth the bother, who thinks he’s the answer to your wet dreams of getting a Progressive (well, what you define as “Progressive”) foot into the door of government, tell me …

Did you hear anything in that ad about legalising pot, or any drug for that matter? No.

Did you hear anything about bringing the troops home and ending the so-called American Empire? Not at all.

What about ending the Fed? Zilch.

Tell you what you did hear, though …

Budget cuts – he’ll cut up to one trillion dollars off the budget in his first year. The Department of Education becomes history – and so, eventually, will free K-12 public education.

Department of Interior? Toast. Ditto, the Department of Energy. How about that, environmentalists? (Of course, you do realise Ron Paul doesn’t believe in global warming.)

HUD? Dead in the water. Think of what that will entail. You think you’ve got slums now? How about real honest-to-Pete Nineteenth Century Dickensian slums?

And the Department of Commerce? I leave you with this thought: It’s positively oxymoronic that the Occupy movement looks at this man as their hero.

I am not Ron Paul, and you’re crazy if you endorse his message without knowing everything for which he stands. ]]> http://www.osborneink.com/2011/12/just-in-case-anyones-really-thinking-ron-paul-is-the-answer.html/feed 25 http://www.osborneink.com/2011/11/alan-grayson-judged-by-the-company-he-keeps.html http://www.osborneink.com/2011/11/alan-grayson-judged-by-the-company-he-keeps.html#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:00:32 +0000 Emilia1956 http://www.osborneink.com/?p=15300 Continue reading →]]>

Alan Grayson’s runnning for Congress again next year. Somehow, I seem to be on his mailing list, and this weekend seems to be his money bomb weekend. Yesterday, I received an e-mail, courtesy of ActBlue, featuring this endorsement of Grayson, along with a plea for a contribution to his money bomb:-

First of all, that is the man whose third party candidacy in 2000 gave us eight years of George Bush. Please remember that in Grayson’s own state of Florida, Gore lost this state by the final recount of 495 votes. Ralph Nader garnered 15,000. It’s reasonable to think that all of those disgruntled voters who believed the political savoir faire of such noted political operatives as Michael Moore, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Bill Maher (none of whom had ever had any discernible political experience), would normally have voted for a Democratic candidate. Ergo, no Nader on the ballot, no Florida hanging chad controversy and no Bush.

Things could have been so different.

But what is controversial and niggling is Grayson obviously sought support of Nader in filming this endorsement, and although Nader speaks of Grayson as a man of the people, as someone who is interested in working people and their rights and as someone who favours unions, Nader’s dialogue is more than just a bit of the pot meeting the kettle.

First of all, Nader is, himself, nothing less than a union buster. Eric Alterman discovered and reported this as early as 2004:-

Then take a look at this letter that I received a long time ago, but saved… It’s by a fellow named Tim Shorrock.

Subject: Nader is a union buster.

I read the reports about the UAW and Teamsters considering a vote for Ralph Nader and interviews like Kuttner’s and think – I must be living in never-never land.

Ralph Nader fired me and two other editors from Multinational Monitor in 1984 for trying to organize a union in our shop. You can look it up in the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review and Labor Notes.

I was fired the day after we filed our union recognition papers with the NLRB; in the hours that followed, Nader ‘transferred’ ownership of MM to Essential Information run by John Richard (who would become his H.R. Haldeman if by some stretch Nader was ever elected prez) and let them do the dirty work, which included trying to get the cops to arrest me for allegedly ‘stealing’ my own files. Myself, my two fired colleagues and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies, our closest supporter, were then sued by Essential Information for trying to ‘destroy their business,’ a pure harassment tactic designed to make us shut up about what happened.

And now the guy says his key campaign theme will be reforming U.S. labor laws so it’s easier for workers to form unions? Simply amazing for a man who has used those laws to prevent his own workers from organizing – and MM is not the only place he’s done it.

To Doug Henwood’s credit, he is the only journalist on the left to raise this issue; The Nation, Mother Jones and other ‘leftie’ pubs have refused to run a word about Nader’s anti-union tactics – not even a letter to the editor.

The Nation… and who edits and publishes The Nation. Katrina vanden Heuvel, who trolled the country in 2000, campaigning for Ralph Nader, union-buster.

And Paul Hogarth unearthed this little titbit about Ralphie in 2007:-

Rather than “unreasonable,” Nader is a selfish egotist. Accountable to nobody. He burns through his disciples. He believes that any disagreement with him amounts to a betrayal.

(snip)

For my generation, Nader will always be remembered as the reckless ideologue who gave us the worst President in American history.

(snip)

Ralph Nader pioneered the practice of non-profit organizations hiring idealistic young workers for slave wages. Because the Nader’s Raiders had jobs “where you can bring your conscience to work,” he found no reason why he shouldn’t demand them to pull insane hours for little pay. It’s honorable to have a legion of disciples who are in love with their jobs, but the manner that Nader worked them at Public Citizen bordered on the sadomasochistic.

(snip)

Today, he’s even worse. Beyond “trying to adapt the world to himself,” he has refused to adapt to any reality at all. The world has changed, and everything he has argued about electoral politics has been completely disproven in the last six years. But still, Ralph Nader insists on proving a point – and he doesn’t seem to care how many more people suffer under Republican Administrations. After all, he’s not poor and won’t be hurt by the Bush budget cuts.

And then, who can forget this jewel?

Right, got that?

Alan Grayson, Mr Progressive, himself, is using a union-buster, an advocate of slave wages and someone who’s not afraid of using racial epithets, to tout his candidacy. No secret either that Nader’s personal favourite politico is Ron Paul, a man who co-sponsored a bill with Grayson to audit the Federal Reserve.

But that’s not all.

Just minutes ago, I received another ActBlue e-mail, with another celebrity endorsing Alan Grayson in yet another way – with emphasis on the Progressive part:-

I think a great deal of Alan Grayson, although my opinion of him has faltered a bit, recently. I think he had honourable aims when he was elected to Congress and that he was a good voice for his constituents; but then I think his head was turned by all of the publicity he was receiving through the media. At one point, you could bank on seeing him on MSNBC at least once a week, expostulating. I also thought little of the fact that he turned particularly nasty towards the President during his lame duck period in office.

One of the main reasons, Grayson’s ratings amongst his constituents dropped like a lead balloon overnight, was that he was caught doing unto his Republican counterpart that which the

Republicans regularly do unto us. He not-so-cleverly edited a film of his opponent, Dan Webster,in order to reincarnate him as “Taliban Dan,” a point upon which Anderson Cooper heavily criticizes him. Grayson took a comment made by Webster blatantly out of context and spun that comment in a nefarious way for votes.

Out of context … as in what Breitbart did to Shirley Sherrod.

(Sigh) Best to leave unto Breitbart that which Breitbart, regrettably, does best, and leave unto the Democratic party to cleave to a higher ideal. Really, ratfucking is not something which comes either easily or naturally to Democrats.

But I digress, because with this second ActBlue plea, I’m even more astonished at whom Alan Grayson’s enlisted to promote his cause: Bill Maher.

In the video, Maher, yet again, refers to himself as a Progressive. He simply isn’t, and I don’t know what spell he holds over his fanbase that simply by hearing him say this, they believe it to be so.

Maher supports the death penalty. This is not a Progressive position. The week after Troy Davis’s execution, which saw many high-profiled Progressives speak out against this cruel and unusual punishment, Bill didn’t even raise the issue on his show.

Maher is anti-union. Who remembers this famous attempt at having it both ways in early 2008, after having crossed the picket line, himself, to “teach his writers a lesson?”

Maher throws out racist epithets, especially at the current President. He doesn’t think he’s stereotypically black enough, and has been called out on his racism by no less than Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic and Adam Serwer in Mother Jones.

Of course, no one on the Left or the Right wants to admit to white privilege, much less racism, but how many Progressives do you know who are anti-union? How many Progressives do you know who are against the National Endowment for the Arts? Ann Coulter is, but she’s certainly not a Progressive; but she is a close friend of Bill Maher’s, and Bill has stridently opposed this, actually saying:-

If I ran the NEA? I’d abolish it. I’d be the Gorbachev of federal arts endowing and destroy my own job as the head of it. Artists are so self-important — art is basic to human nature, it will always be produced and does not need the government’s help. The NEA is a perfect example of Mission Creep: The government’s job is to protect you, from external enemies and internal criminals, and to maintain roads, schools, and a social safety net. Art is far afield, and in no danger of going away without government money or guidance.

Sound like a conservative speaking?

As far as racism goes, Bill doesn’t limit his prejudices to hurling racist remarks the President’s way, albeit cleverly disguising them as “comedy.” Bill has a distinct problem with Islam, as exemplified by his interview with Rep Keith Ellison, the co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House, and a practicing Muslim.

He’s neither playing the devil’s advocate here, nor is he trying to be an incisive interviewer. Maher has always had a bee in his bonnet about Islam, and it’s nothing to do with his stance on religion in general, and everything to do with Maher’s views on Israel. If the above video isn’t proof enough of his stance on Islam, just check out his remarks on that subject with Anderson Cooper here.

And, finally, Bill’s misogyny notwithstanding, I’d have a problem with anyone who calls himself a Progressive, referring to a woman, any woman, publically as a cunt, even if that woman does happen to be Sarah Palin. But then, maybe Alan Grayson doesn’t have such a problem with that, considering that he found it difficult to apologise for having referred to Linda Robertson on a radio broadcast as a K Street whore.

Alan Grayson made a big impression during his two years on the Hill as a mighty voice for Progressive values. He seems sincere in his beliefs, but as he’s a politician, I wouldn’t be surprised or condemnatory if he used both Nader and Maher as celebrity bait to reel in contributions from the sort of people who hang onto these men’s every word as political sense; but, by extension, Nader pals around with Cornel West, who describes the President as a corporatists, whilst tooling around with Tavis Smiley in a state-of-the-art poverty bus, funded by goodness-knows-whom. Maher, on the other hand, is too cosy for any Progressive in his close friendships with the likes of Ann Coulter, P J O’Rourke, Arianna Huffington and Darrell Issa.

Alan Grayson is also a very intelligent man, and he wouldn’t have been unaware that Bill’s politics blow with the wind of fashion. He sat on his panel on October 7th, along with Nicolle Wallace and P J O’Rourke, and he listened in silence as Bill and P J shared a host of laughs about the Occupy Wall Street movement, with shits and giggles about hippies and porn and portaloos, all derisory … until Grayson owns the moment and annoints himself as speaker for the ordinary person in America.

Here’s the video. The fun begins at the ten-minute mark:-

You’ll note that from the minute the audience gave Alan Grayson that standing ovation, Bill Maher has suddenly been a follower of Occupy Wall Street. So if Alan Grayson is playing politics for contributions, by using the usual suspect big mouths, including a union-busting hypocrite and an anti-union, pro-death penalty tax cheat, both of whom with a penchant for making racist remarks, I have no problem with that. After all, Grayson’s fellow Floridian politico, Marco Rubio, appears to have done much the same thing with the Tea Party, and he has a Senate seat to show for it.

But I do have a problem, if Alan Grayson is seriously involved with these people. The line which begins with Nader snakes its way around Cornel West through Sarah Palin until it arrives at Ron Paul. The parallel line which begins with Bill Maher leads to Arianna Huffington, onwards to Darrell Issa and ends with Paul as well. And since Maher was one of the major triumvirate of celebrity talking heads to endorse Nader in 2000, there’s a connection there too.

I really hope it’s a Congressional seat for which Alan Grayson is trying to raise funds and not a third party challenge to Obama. Either way, he’d be wise to remember a Spanish proverb:-

Dime con quien andas y te dire’ quien eres. Basically, that means that you’re judged by the company you keep, and the company of Nader and Maher is neither astute, intelligent nor Progressive. It’s ego-driven and ideological, a bit like the man Alan Grayson promotes as his political hero, Huey Long. Spot the uncanny resemblance:-

The Kingfish

The Kingfish Junior

At the end of the day, or rather, at the end of Alan Grayson’s moneybomb weekend, it’s all about one thing — the same thing Wall Street encompasses:-

I’m hardly “power elite” or “establishment media,” but apparently I’m a “liberal scold” when it comes to occupying Wall Street. Kevin Gosztola on the crowd in Liberty Park, via FDL:

The organizers, who pride themselves in being “leaderless,” have sought to bring together a diverse crowd of various political persuasions. They have rallied behind the slogan, “We are the 99%,” to show they will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the top 1% in America. They have rallied against banks that engage in tax dodging while at the same time foreclosing on Americans’ homes and charging exorbitant interest rates on student loans putting young citizens in deep debt. They are rising up against increased unemployment and war against the poor in America. And they have used what is known as the General Assembly process to make decisions, which democratically gives all people present an opportunity to influence the continued organization of Occupy Wall Street. (Emphasis mine)

What is that “General Assembly process”? Why, it’s rule by consensus. There is nothing wrong with consensus. As an organizing principle, it allows disparate groups to feel empowered as parts of a larger movement, but it also means that decisions take a while to reach. For example, the people in the video above each have their own homemade sign; while there’s nothing wrong with that, it makes the crowd incoherent. I’m all for the cacophony chorus, yet if the participants in that video are serious about representing 99% of America they will have to communicate with the 90% of Americans who don’t speak the FireDogLake dialectic.

I refer the reader to my post the other day on suggested signage for Occupy Wall Street events. The General Assembly resists getting behind a single message, however, and that is a problem. Take this sentence from Gosztola again, for example:

They have rallied against banks that engage in tax dodging while at the same time foreclosing on Americans’ homes and charging exorbitant interest rates on student loans putting young citizens in deep debt.

Again, I ask: how about “TAX THE BANKS”? It’s not a “gimmicky meme” offered in hopes of passing a meaningless incremental bill. To change the substance of our national conversation, a slogan must be simple and memorable while creating conversational space to talk about everything in that sentence above. Bereft of a unifying idea, one may inveigh against corporate greed all day, using a thousand permutations of the same theme, without impressing their point on anyone — because they have complaints, not a point. Same goes for this list of demands (yet another one!) that I found on Reddit last night:

While corporate profits have been skyrocketing and the wealthy have been getting wealthier, the average worker’s income has dramatically dropped. While the cost of living has exponentially increased, wages have not followed. It has been shown time and time again that tax cuts for the wealthy are NOT effective. Taxes on those who practice greed should be raised.

Again, I ask: how about “JOBS NOW”? Sure, let’s reverse the wave of austerity, decades of wage deflation, union-busting, and the great sucking-upward of wealth in America. All of those things are contained in the simple premise that America needs jobs. “Greed,” on the other hand, is endemic to human nature: most people I know have displayed greed at one time or another. Fighting “greed” makes as much sense as fighting a war on terror, which is a feeling. A job, on the other hand, is a concrete idea. Which brings me to another problem:

President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said. (Emphasis mine)

Not enough, but definitely better than what we have. So is the crowd in New York City going to press for passage? Not as yet, because the organizers are so far eschewing specific legislative or electoral goals. A jobs bill is too “incremental” for them. Indeed, a reporter’s question on the bill to someone in that Wall Street crowd is likely to devolve into yet another indictment of presidential fecklessness. The General Assembly demands sweeping change, but wants someone else to achieve it — somehow. It’s not clear what their “theory of change” is, or that they even understand how to change anything. Gosztola quotes guitarist Tom Morello in a recent exchange on Bill Maher’s show:

A lot of people who put [Obama] in office put [Obama] in office to fight for them—to fight against the Tea Party, to fight against this bullshit in Congress, to fight against the sonsofbitches who are attacking the working class and the poor in this country. And he hasn’t done any of that.

I love Morello’s music, but that’s horseshit. Tea parties happened after Obama’s inauguration. “This bullshit in Congress” is the result of a midterm cycle in which the progressive movement stayed home because it didn’t get its public option cookie. Those “sonsofbitches attacking the working class and poor”? They are organized, which is why they are strong right now. No president is capable of defeating them on his own — that takes a movement — but a president can propose a jobs bill and fight for it. If the movement doesn’t see fit to organize behind something specific, then what good is that movement? Is it even a “movement” at all?

I’ve exhausted my patience for progressives who make noise without creating infrastructure. Our current crop of awful, backwards-stepping legislation around the country was incubated in right-wing policy shops like ALEC, FAIR, the Heritage Foundation, etc., none of which has a progressive counter. There are thousands of tea party chapters around the country with no equivalent progressive organization. Indeed, progressives chafe at the very concept — and that’s why they lose.

Which brings me to my last point. Gosztola’s post posits that “establishment media” are deliberately misreporting the Wall Street protests, and “liberal power elites” are pooh-poohing them, because these sinister agencies don’t want change. That’s nonsense. By refusing to adopt simple, clear points of unity, the protesters aren’t helping the media understand their cause — which means Main Street won’t understand it, either.

If the goal is irrelevance, then success is assured: to fail, Occupy Wall Street need only keep on pretending that communications isn’t a science. Kremlinesque castigation of any and all critiques is a sure recipe for irrelevance. Guy Fawkes masks are not going to undo the damage. That will take power. To empower the people, organizers must speak to them clearly.

No blogger has wanted this kind of moment out loud longer than me. No one has begged for it longer than I have. I want this to work so bad I can taste it. Spare me the protestations that “everyone understands” the problem on Wall Street; unless they appeal to Main Street, the General Assembly isn’t going to accomplish any item on any of their innumerable lists of numerous demands. Because there is no infrastructure, and so far an unwillingness to build infrastructure, they have zero hope of effecting change without attracting middle America and using the infrastructure that exists. That’s not “scorn,” it’s hard-nosed realism about the limits of idealism.

Funny how Obama-bashing lefties will say their Puritanical criticisms of the president have no effect on the progressive agenda, then turn around and hammer any critique of the Wall Street uprising as pointless, counterproductive bitching. Over at The American Prospect, an article on Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s “poverty tour” captures my objection to firebaggery in this ‘graff:

They are not interested in the one thing that can implement the mainstream progressive agenda they seek—like-minded politicians winning elections. There is no voter-registration drive associated with the Poverty Tour. Smiley, as a journalist, doesn’t endorse parties or candidates. West hints that Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, should run for president. Like other disappointed liberals, they are dismissive of the idea that the president can only be as progressive as Congress allows. They aim all their fire at Obama, leaving little ammunition for the structural obstacles to a progressive agenda under any chief executive. The Tea Party responded to the 2008 loss with a renewed commitment to politics, taking a white-knuckled grip on the short hairs of every politician a shade to the left of Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Smiley and West succumb to the perennial pitfall of lefty reformers, believing that some new form of politics could transcend the dirty work of winning elections and twisting politicians’ arms. For all of what sounds like hard-nosed realism about the president’s record, they offer no theory of how to make way for more progressive governance. (Emphasis mine)

Everything I said last week about attempted movements that leave nothing behind, that create no groundwork or framework to build on, goes double for Smiley and West. The professor has been talking out of both sides of his mouth, both encouraging a Democratic primary challenge (slow clap) and claiming he is trying to help Obama (how?).

By now, it should be abundantly clear to the radical set that noise is an insufficient change agent. It should also be clear that progressive goals will never be obtained by electing a president alone. From the beginning, tea parties focused on flipping the House of Representatives and the Senate, while Republican GOTV efforts focused on taking over legislatures and governors’ mansions. Thousands of abortion bills, anti-union laws, racist immigration laws, voting restrictions, and austerity measures later, the answer from Smiley and West is to gripe about the same president tea parties demonized.

Progressives have a huge opportunity next year, but they will not take advantage of it by standing under spotlights. Change demands time, energy, and organization. Say what you want about authoritarians and oligarchs (I will), but they are organized. That’s why they win while progressives are perpetually disappointed. Until the firebagging radicals of progressive politics turn their anger into action, they are just noisemakers.