Danny Katch [Katch - America’s Got Democracy

America's Got Democracy2012 Danny KatchPublished in 2012 byHaymarket BooksPO Box 180165Chicago, IL 60618www.haymarketbooks.org773-583-7884ISBN: 978-1-60846-298-8Trade distribution:In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.comIn Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.caIn the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.comIn Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.auAll other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.comPublished with the generous support of Lannan Foundationand the Wallace Global Fund.Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction The Notorious Salma Hayek Sleeper Cell of 2004 On a mid-October evening in 2004, I sat in the crowded lobby of Hunter College in Manhattan, watching a debate between President George W. Bush and his challenger, Democrat John Kerry. Most of the crowd despised Bush for his wars and his lies and his proud ignorance, and we had a fine time mocking and hissing every other word out of his mouth.What I remember most clearly about that night, however, took place midway through the event, when the moderator raised immigration policy and Kerry saw an opportunity to land a few jabs on Bushs reputation as a national security hawk. Number one, he began, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is, we havent done what we need to do to toughen up our borders, and I will.The imagery of leaking borders has been thrown around so often that I wonder how many of us remember that its just a metaphor and that the jurisdictional line between the United States and Mexico is not made of Tupperware. Borders are in fact abstract concepts drawn across hundreds of miles of ecosystems and civilizations that unpatriotically flow back and forth, as they have done since before politicians roamed the earth.But that was just typical candidate rhetoric. After Bush replied with a defense of his record in keeping America: The fact is that we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the border. And were not doing what we ought to do in terms of the technology. We have iris-identification technology. We have thumbprint, fingerprint technology today. We can know who the people are, that theyre really the people they say they are when the cross the border. We could speed it up. There are huge delays. Kerry seemed to be calling for everyone crossing the border to be iris-scanned and fingerprinted as a way to make things move faster . And that was the more intelligent part of the comment.The real doozy was the implication of a shadowy threat to the homeland, a group ominously named people from the Middle East. Im surprised Kerry showed restraint and didnt try to freak folks out by revealing that there are actually over a million Mexicans of Arab descent, including actress Salma Hayek and gobzillionaire Carlos Slim.Perhaps Hayek is part of a century-old sleeper cell plotting to reconquer the American Southwest for Mexico, which would then be turned into an Islamo-Aztec caliphate where everyone has to be politically correct and say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas or else theyll be stoned to death.You might think I overreacted. After all, these days its a job requirement for Republicans to say strange and cruel falsehoods about Muslims and immigrants. But in 2004, even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hadnt invoked terrorism paranoia to justify making life more miserable for Mexican immigrants. It was the Democratic presidential nominee that night who took us all one step closer to Crazy Town.Of course, at the time I couldnt foresee this. But I was struck by the reaction to Kerrys comment by the boisterous, jeering crowd at Hunter College: silence.Afterward, some students defended Kerrys attack as a necessary evil for him to get elected while others were outright enthusiastic that he might have found a weakness in Bushs homeland protection resume. Many of them were immigrants, children of immigrants, or friends with immigrants. Had a warning about Middle Easterners crossing the border been raised in one of their classes, many of them would have shot up their hands to respond to such garbage. But coming from the man running against the enemy George W. Bush, it became legitimate, even clever.I felt that night that I had caught a glimpse of a normally elusive dynamic in our political life. Although it is commonly assumed that elections are the means by which the people influence their rulers, its usually the opposite. Elections are the time for our rulers to reveal the limited menu from which we get to place our order. As our rulers grow more myopic, miserly, and mean-spirited with the passing of every four years, so too does the menu.This process doesnt depend on voters being passive sheep, mindlessly grazing on the propaganda. I knew a bunch of those Hunter students; they were smart and they followed politics. In fact, it was their enthusiasm to finally be able to vote and take part in defeating Bushs policies that made them willing to accept and integrate Kerrys bullshit. Independent critical thinking was a small price to pay in what was widely seen as the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME.Thats what they called it in 2004. And in 2008 when the economy collapsed and Barack Obama became the first African American president. And of course were saying it again in 2012 with mass unemployment and a frightening Republican backlash against women, immigrants, and basic human kindness. Whoever first came up with that phrase must think that we have the lifespan of fruit flies.Maybe we should just officially name our presidential contests THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME and give them roman numerals like Super Bowls. Its inevitable that each election is terrifyingly crucial in the moment even if, looking back, we can see that the sun probably would have similarly risen and set even had Adlai Stevenson defeated Dwight Eisenhower.I also feel that urgency and excitement in the autumn of every fourth year, even though I dont support Democrats or Republicans. When Obama won in 2008 I partied in celebration that my country had voted for racial and economic justice even though I thought he couldnt and wouldnt deliver it. In 2004, I mourned Bushs victory because it would legitimize his first stolen election, and every other rotten thing he did, and further demoralize the once promising antiwar movement that had already hollowed itself out by supporting the pro-war Kerry.Its hard not to be sucked into a battle that seemingly puts your very values and tastes up for a vote. The year 2004 was when we all started talking about red states and blue states, phrases that were said to describe not just how people voted in certain regions but encompassed the entirety of their opinions about politics, religion, sports (NASCAR versus soccer), food (steak versus sushi), and anything else (uh... stud poker versus Uno?). All this while the actual platforms of the two parties presented all the contrast of red versus rose. Possibly salmon.This year there are more substantial differences between the two parties, mostly because the Republicans have gone feral. The essential point of this book is these differences are still not enough to merit the term democracy .As a Marxist, I admittedly have high standards. I start from the premise that it should be possible to live in a society in which residents decide how to be policed, workers organize where they work, and soldiers vote for war and peace. Im not going to rail at Barack Obama for not creating large-scale communes in abandoned Rust Belt factories (although...) but we can only appreciate how piss-poor our democracy is by considering what it could be. Even if you dont agree with this books socialist premise (some of which has appeared in my columns for Socialistworker.org), you will hopefully find this perspective useful.And funny. Politicians trumpet small ideas with grandiose self-important rhetoric. I like it when radicals put out big ideas with a dose of humility and humor appropriate for those of us whose dreams still far outpace our accomplishments. Im not going to lay out a systematic critique of US democracy, capitalism, or any other four-syllable word (that plan was dashed when my editors nixed my groundbreaking chapter on armadillos). Instead I aim to look at some of the absurd aspects of our political process that we consider normal.And if it turns out that I was able to make just one person laugh and look at our society in a new light, then theres something wrong with the rest of you because I think this book is amazing.This is the one of many instancesincluding the books titlein which I refer to the United States of America by its incorrect name. If you dont think its a big deal to call it America, you probably dont come from Mexico, Brazil, or anywhere else in... America. I imagine it would raise some eyebrows if Germany started calling itself Europe. Unfortunately, the founding fathers showed zero imagination in naming this countryjust think, we could have been the United States of Awesomeand America has become so widely used that its hard not to use it when trying to express or lampoon ideas that are also widely used. Apologies to my fellow Americans throughout the hemisphere. Part 1 Oliganarchy Chapter 1 Absolute Power Deranges Absolutely Imagine if the United States were ruled by an imbecile king who was the product of generations of royal inbreeding. Each year he would stand drooling before Congress and spin fantastical State of the Union addresses, strange syphilis-addled tales about Irans covert underground dragon program and our own secret army of charming but unstable James Franco clone warriors. Congress, of course, would keep interrupting him with bursts of furious applause.Since Cocoa Puffs was His Highnesss favorite cereal, by George, it would be Cocoa Puffs every morning all across the homeland. More important decisions would be made behind the throne by executives and lobbyists to protect the vast estates of Goldman, Google, and the rest of the corporate nobility.The king would get to act out little-boy fantasies whenever he wished, walking around factories with a hard hat and goggles or visiting army bases and having all the soldiers salute him. Of course, the secret service would sweep these places not only for bombs and snipers but also for any of the narrow shiny objects that the king had an unfortunate tendency of getting stuck up his nose.Heres my point: Even if we were led by such a moronic monarch, I dont know if the United States could be headed down a much crazier path than the one we find ourselves on now.We have just lived through a four-year experiment. The 2008 election marked one of the most dramatic presidential switches in US history. A conservative fanatical scion of a wealthy political dynasty was replaced with an introspective liberal author and professor who also happened to be the countrys first African American president. If a democratic election were ever going to have a profound impact on the direction of the country, it would have been then. And just about everyone not being paid by the Obama and Romney campaigns would agree that it didnt.The United States is actually run by the two most powerful institutions of capitalism: business and the state. These two institutions work intimately together, despite the yammering background noise of the two political parties debating which one should have a larger role. The urgent issue that will never come up at presidential debates is that both institutions have an immense power over the vast majority of us plain old human beings. In fact, its the decades of inbreeding between corporations and government that has produced the madness that passes for US leadership today.Consider the issue of national security. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2011, could have led to some reflection about the wisdom of certain state agencies organizing and training Al-Qaeda in the first place and to perhaps reconsider the geopolitical impulses that led them to do such a stupid thing.We forget this now, but that started to happen in the initial days after the attacks. In New York City, Union Square became a twenty-four-hour gathering spot for strangers to cry and sing and debate together why the attacks happened and what was the appropriate response. Across the country, people asked a question that is very American in its genuine naivety: Why do they hate us?It only took a few weeks for the question to be lost in a pile of duct tape, anthrax rumors, and daily bomb scares and a few more weeks for the question itself to become downright fishy: They hate our freedoms. Whos asking?(Two quick questions: If Islam teaches hatred of America, why were there no attacks for the countrys first two hundred years? If Muslims dont like freedom, why no fatwas against Tom Paine or Harriet Tubman?)In any case, the War on Terror was born, a campaign to show the Islamic world how a civilized nation goes about using airplanes to kill people. Evildoers were confidently warned that Americas leaders were prepared to fight (or send others to fight) for generations. There was much inspiring talk about how the attacks were going to give Americans a new sense of united purpose. People looked forward to a decade of benevolent ass-whooping: Afghanistan and Iraq. Then Syria and Iran. Maybe France.Instead, by fall 2011, America appeared to the world like a mad king, a figure from the end of a Shakespearean tragedy: arrogant yet bewildered at what had gone wrong, covered in the blood of Fallujah and Kandahar, instinctively firing off drones to new lands even as the economic realm lay in ruins.Adding to the theatricality of the moment, the country was ravaged by hurricanes and droughts, wildfires and tornadoes. Just before the ten-year anniversary of September 11, Washington and New York were again attacked, but this time by Hurricane Irene, which submerged entire villages across the Northeast. Before that there had been record heat waveswhich came after the epic blizzard the previous winter. The new naive American question had become: Why does the weather hate us?Shakespeare might have attributed these disasters to divine retribution. Michele Bachmann said the same thing, which proves that the difference between a genius and an idiot is about four hundred years.Here was another potential moment to question the countrys path. If there was a cosmic message at work, the messenger was not God but physics. Oil and gas are well known for a few things: they heat up the atmosphere, they are rapidly running out, and they make boatloads of money for a few people. You might think this last point is least important and that therefore we should plan a future without fossil fuels. Which is why youre not qualified to be a member of the American ruling class.For corporations, making money is always the top priority. For the state, the dwindling supply of oil and gas is actually a great chance to put the squeeze on rivals as fuel supplies go down and prices go upas long as you control the sources in the Middle East and Central Asia. Thus, Bush and Cheney had used September 11 to wage war on the Muslim world because much of it happens to sit on top of some of the planets largest reserves of oil and gas. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later told the New Yorker s Nicholas Lemann that she asked her staff to think about how to capitalize on these opportunities to fundamentally change American doctrine, and shape the world, in the wake of September 11. As for global warming, melting polar caps, a grim future of worldwide catastrophic storms and food shortages? Fuck it if it doesnt show up on next quarters balance sheet.The military campaign for world domination ended up going nowhere, but the same cant be said for the temperature of the planet. Bush claimed we were fighting the terrorists over there so that we dont have to fight them here. But the oil and gas weve been fighting for over there is now on the attack here, there, and everywhere, heating the earth and flooding shorelines.Yet even as Americans were running from wildfires and floods, the big news was that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 came and went without terror. It seems that no environmental catastrophe can rise to the level of a threat to homeland security.Could an inbred monarch have embarked on a more disastrous policy? I suppose, but only if you dont like Cocoa Puffs. Chapter 2 Corpopaths The July 2011 volume of the Journal of Business Ethics contains a paper by British academic Clive R. Boddy entitled The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis.The abstract for the paper is worth quoting at length: This short theoretical paper... presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for. Hear, hear and quite so, Professor Boddy. I hereby join your call for further enquiry into this matter of corporate psychopaths as well as any and all possible roles played by zombies, vampires, and demonic clowns in our recent financial troubles.Musty academic journals generally dont engage in this sort of name-calling. European History Quarterly is not filled with articles with titles like The Russians Are Asswipes Theory of the Causes of the Crimean War. I guess the Journal of Business Ethics never recovered its high standards after its merger with that trashy tabloid International Journal of Value-Based Management .In fact, the corporate psycho theory has been gaining converts for over a decade. The early 2000s saw a smaller version of the recent financial meltdown when business giants Enron and Worldcom collapsed in a heap of debt and fraud. These calamities caught the attention of psychiatrist Robert Hare, the creator of the so-called Psychopath Checklist. (I shouldnt say so-called. Thats Hares actual name for it.)Hare had worked for decades in the field of criminology; His way-too-simple checklist has been quite popular among parole board members who hate spending more than a few precious minutes deciding where an inmate is going to spend his next three to five years. By 2002 he was looking at different types of criminals. The executives at Enron and Worldcom, he said, were callous, cold-blooded individuals with no sense of guilt or remorse. He went on to call for CEOs to be psychopath-screened and the following year he and his checklist appeared in the terrific documentary The Corporation. Talk about psychopaths in the boardroom has returned with a vengeance since the global financial collapse in 2008. Hare and others reported in Behavioral Sciences and the Law that 4 percent of corporate managers met the psychopath threshold compared to one percent of the general population. British businessman Brian Basham wrote in The Independent of an investment banker who once told him that his firm screened for psychopaths in order to hire them! Apparently, their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."It makes you wonder about the poor non-psychopaths at this bank desperately trying to keep their sanity in the closet, acting like remorseless predators around their coworkers all the while praying that their deeply repressed humanity wont come out. Come to think of it, this doesnt sound that different than many interactions between straight men, so I guess its not that big a deal.In Jon Ronsons thoroughly enjoyable The Psychopath Test , the author memorably goes over the checklist with retired CEO Al Dunlap in his Florida mansion. Dunlap, nicknamed Chainsaw for the unmistakable joy he seemed to take in firing tens of thousands of workers, was a darling of investors; the day Chainsaw was named CEO of the Sunbeam company, its stock shot up 50 percent.As Ronson and Dunlap sit in chez Chainsaw, a Florida mansion bursting with ferocious sculptures of teeth-baring predators, the author recites items from the psychopath checklist and the CEO reframes them as qualities of leadership in the corporate world.Grandiose sense of self-worth: No question, said Al. If you dont believe in yourself, nobody else will. Youve got to believe in you.Manipulative: I think you could describe that as leadership.Impulsivity: Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for 10 minutes, and if the pros outweigh the cons, go.Lack of remorse: A lack of remorse just frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. Whats the point of drowning yourself in sorrow?Its a classic scene and although Ronson dutifully points out that Chainsaw didnt score so highly on other parts of the test, one cant help but envision some of societys most notorious psychopaths hitting the corporate lecture circuit: How was I able to become the world famous Son of Sam? I worked late nights, I didnt worry about winning popularity contests, and I never stopped listening to that voice inside my head. This is all great fun but ultimately the focus on psychopaths in the boardrooms misses the point. The problem resides in the business cycle not the business psycho. Theres a recession every decade and each one in recent memory has uncovered a nest of crooks engaged in fraud that they thought would never be exposed because this timethis timethe downturn wouldnt come, the money would keep coming in, and they would never get caught. The pattern of irrational behavior is too consistent to be explained through individual deviance.When one has a question regarding strange behavior, who better to ask than a bunch of old men who wear robes to work? The conservative wing of the Supreme Court famously affirmed in Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission the legal/biological theory that corporations are people. Since the way these unique people vocalize is by emitting wads of money, the court ruled that any limitations on corporate campaign donations would be a censorship.As horrible as the ruling is, at least it has people talking about an idea first raised by the documentary The Corporation : if corporations are people, they are undeniably psychopaths. A corporation is a person whose legal wiring drives him to seek maximum short-term self-interest at all times, regardless of the impact on others. This person could take away your medicine or poison your food and not feel guilty in the slightest. In fact, he would feel great as his body was flooded with the endorphins and dopamine of rising share prices.Al Dunlap may or may not be a psychopath. Your average CEO is not. He only plays one at work so that he isnt expelled from the corporate body like a foreign pathogen. Its the rules of the profit-seeking system itself that are utterly anti-human. So Im fine with labeling the corporate titans who crashed the economy with the slightly less clinical term: assholes.Anybody who disagrees with that diagnosis has probably not been paying too much attention in recent years. Not only did these guys wreck the economy and get bailed out, but theyve been complaining ever since that nobody worships them anymore.In late 2010 This American Life did a piece for the Crybaby episode in a Wall Street bar where some traders were moaning about their industry being scapegoated by Obama. It makes for odd radio, a debate with drunken boors aired on NPR. When a producer remarked that their bank wouldnt exist if not for the federal bailout, one trader skillfully parried with Youre crazy, babe! One exchange, however, was revealing. Producer 1: You guys still have your jobs. Trader 1: Because Im a smart person. Producer 1: And you think you got to keep your job because youre smart? You got to keep your job because you guys got bailed out. You guys got bailed Trader 1: No, no, no, no, no. Thats not what happened with my job. I mean, survival of the fittest. Trader 2: Because Im smarter than the average person. Producer 2: And even if the government bails out your industry that failed, you still say its because youre smarter. Trader 2: No. The government bailing out an industry was out of necessity for whatever the situation was. The fact that I benefited from that is because Im smart. I took advantage of a situation. Ninety-five percent of the population doesnt have that common sense. The only reason Ive been doing this for so long is because I must be smarter than the next guy. Its hard to argue with the traders intelligence given their hard-hitting analysis that the bailout was necessary for whatever the situation was. But the arrogant refusal to acknowledge the bailout is hard to take.Around the same time, the New York Observer reported on similar whining: I went to jury duty about a year ago, and when I said Im in investment banking, the people in the jury room were making ugh sounds. In a movie, this moment of disapproval from the community might be the turning point in which our formerly insensitive leading man realized that his priorities are all screwed up and vows to become a nicer person. Heres how it goes in real life: Im like, fuck you. Im proud of what I do. And I think this firm did a lot to get the recovery going.Cue the stirring music. Did you catch the line about the bank helping the recovery? I assume he means the recovery from the financial cataclysm that his bank helped to cause. Its a little like BP putting out ads that read, Fuck you. Were doing a lot to clean up that oil spill.This is a recurring theme. Most of us spent the past five years watching the banking industry bring down the world economy and then receive massive bailouts along with a few stern words of criticism. These guys seem to have gone catatonic during the whole collapse and bailout thing only to wake up confused about why everybody is suddenly mad at them. Its a mental disorder unique to the rich and powerful: Post-Traumatic Stress-Free Disorder.This memory gap is the cornerstone of Tea Partyism. Step one: repress the events of the economic collapse caused by the free market fundamentalism that required massive government bailouts. Step two: Decry the massive public sector debts caused by the collapse and bailout and call for more free market fundamentalism. Much of the Tea Party movement was an attempt to find plain-folk spokesmen (yes, men ) to spout pure banker logic. It worked for a time, but there was a high bullshit quotient from the very start. When Rick Santelli launched the movement with his CNBC rant on the trading floor of the Commodities Exchange in Chicago, he pointed to the crowd, composed entirely of white dudes yelling Buy! and Sell! into phones, and called it a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.Im sure that the bankers werent able to fully repress the memory of the bailout and that the frenzy of Obama hatred was driven in part by the knowledge deep in their bones that he hated them far less than the masses did. Wealthy Americans exhibited hysteria toward any hint of political reform that was reminiscent of how slave owners reacted on the eve of the Civil War.Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private equity firm Blackstone, compared Obamas proposal to raise taxes on firms like his to Hitlers invasion of Poland. In so doing, Schwartzman took the lead in the category of absurd reference to historic tragedies from publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, whose editorial Obamas Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina had previously held pole position. I suppose Obama Is Murdering Our Profits as If They Were Innocent Afghanis at a Wedding Party would hit too close to home.Of course, some of these attacks on Americas first African American president have something else in common with the slave owners of old. In September 2010 Forbes ran a cover story by Dinesh DSouza called How Obama Thinks that posited that the presidents life-long mission was to fulfill the anticolonial dreams of his Kenyan father by undermining US enterprise.Why are there so many complaints from businessmen about a president who might lose reelection because most Americans think he bent over backwards to rescue Big Business? It seems that in Obamas attempts to at least show the public that he understood their anger, even if he wouldnt act on it, he once referred to billionaire executives as fat cats, which hurt their feelings and lowered their confidence to invest.Um... thats not how capitalism works. Economics textbooks speak of supply and demand, not backrubs and pep talks. In 1936 President Roosevelt declared that most of Big Business hated him and that he welcomed their hatred. That year the economy grew by almost 10 percent. Today in China there is a British businessman who was murdered under suspicious circumstances that might be connected to power struggles at the highest levels of the Chinese government. But profits are good so you dont hear Apple executives talking about pulling out of those Foxconn factories.Karl Marx once wrote, With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent [profit] will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.He could have added that without adequate profit, that same capital becomes whiny and sensitive and looks for any excuse not to act. On some level Schwarzman and Zuckerman must know this, but it wouldnt be surprising if such men also thought that the axis of the Earth depends on their current levels of confidence and esteem.These are the men who hold positions of power in US capitalism. They are an oligarchy of mental and moral midgets, combining the concentrated power of an absolute monarch with the rational patience of mob rule. Chapter 3 We Got 99 Percent but the Rich Aint One Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 primarily because voters believed in his promise to change this system of oliganarchy, anarchy of the oligarchs. The defining storyline of his presidency has been his utter failure to fulfill that promise.One of the most enlightening moments in Confidence Men , Ron Suskinds insider account of Obamas first two years in office, describes Obamas March 2009 meeting in the West Wing with the heads of the nations thirteen largest banks. The bankers entered the White House nervous in ways these men are never nervous. They had good reason to be scared. The government bailouts of the banks had not only infuriated the public but also gave the president vast potential leverage to impose conditions on the banks accounting rules, investment strategies, and evengaspCEO compensation. Then Obama laid his cards on the table: My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. You guys have an acute public relations problem thats turning into a political problem. And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices. Im not out there to go after you. Im protecting you. But if Im going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation. I want to help. Im protecting you. Thats all the bankers needed to hear. According to Suskinds account, the bankers relaxed after Obamas dramatic speech and offered him a few specific suggestions. The president had tried to scare them with hypothetical angry townspeople, but these guys had him nailed as soon as he made it clear that he wasnt there to represent the pitchfork holders. The CEOs emerged from the meeting arrogant once more. Soon they would be pushing back against even Obamas most limited reforms, encouraging the zanier outbursts from the likes of Schwarzman and Santelli.Obama, like most successful politicians, is a narcissist who believes that his electoral success is proof that he is destined to be the one, based on the glorious force of his personality, who overcomes seemingly insurmountable national problems. This narcissism has to be heartfelt in order to work its magic on ordinary sane voters. But inspiring speeches and empathetic eye contact fall flat on a profit-seeking savant with no human emotion. In the crazy version of rock-paper-scissors, psychopath beats narcissist.It took two years for many Americans who had fallen in love with Barack Obama to get over his betrayal. Two years of watching, waiting, defending, sighing, and doubting, but then justifying and waiting some more. They watched him get pushed around by bankers who wouldnt have jobs without government bailouts and Republicans who didnt have the votes to stop anything the Democrats could have proposed in Congress. They watched their neighbors fall behind on their mortgages and their kids rack up student debt and they waited.They wanted Obama to succeed so badly, this man who broke barriers and spoke with unparalleled intelligence and feeling. They wanted him to prove that the American Dream still can workfor him and for us. So they said Give him more time and We cant expect him to change everything at once . They watched Republicans take the initiative and restore their credibility by launching the Tea Party, whose slogans made no sense but whose populist anger sure did.And while they waited, Tea Partyrebranded Republicans swept the midterm elections and vowed to reverse all Obamas radical laws, by which they actually meant (since Obama had barely passed anything except bank bailouts) most of the major legislative accomplishments of the twentieth century.Then in February 2011, one of those newly elected Republicans, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, tried to cram all that regression into one enormous law and pushed about half the state into open rebellion at the state capitol. Teachers across the state called in sick and spearheaded a spontaneous weeks-long occupation of the capitol building. Democratic legislators fled the building and hid in motels across the state line to deny Walker a quorum to hold a vote. And thats when the two-year daze ended. Madison was the change we had been waiting for.Even after the protests ended, it was only a matter of time before the fight went national. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) emerged after two years in which the credibility of the United States political and economic elites was shattered. It did in September, first in the financial district of Manhattan and soon at encampments across the country. Polls showed that within a month most Americans had heard of it, half were actively following it, and people were two to one in favor of it. For one thing, the bailouts showed that every time a president or governor or mayor had claimed that this or that program needed to be cut because there was no money in the budget, it was bullshit. Clearly unfathomable sums of money could be found at the drop of a hat if someone powerful needed it.Another powerful assumption was obliterated as well: the belief that people at the top of society know what they are doing. In fall 2008 the financial system froze when Lehman Brothers collapsed in a pile of lies and all the other banks had no idea how much of the pretend money that they traded back and forth each day was backed up by real money. Even if most people couldnt keep up with all the technical economic terms used to analyze what was happening, they could see the panic among people who dont usually panic.The British magazine the Economist , for example, has been found in the offices of most executives on both sides of the Atlantic for more than one hundred years and its clever covers usually reflect the smug superiority of its readership. During fall 2008, however, the illustrations and captions on the magazines covers relayed pure un-ironic panicfrom a whirlpool (Whats Next?) to a man looking over a cliff (World on Edge) to the planet falling through space (Saving the System) to a predator felled by arrows (Capitalism at Bay). Only proper English decorum prevented them from running a picture of soiled britches and the headline Crapping Our Pants.For a few months millions of Americans asked each other a normally unspoken question in the United States: What do these billionaires actually produce thats useful to society? Polls reported that barely half of respondents favored capitalism over socialism while among young people almost a third preferred socialism.Then the financial system was patched up with spackle, rubber bands, and trillions of taxpayer dollars, the media reported bankers claims that everything was fixed, and we were all supposed to move on. But for many people, the events of fall 2008 were like seeing capitalism naked and they cant shake the image from their heads. Three years later polls showed the numbers favoring socialism hadnt changed, and had actually risen among young people.Occupy Wall Street was ridiculously successful in its initial months because it tapped into this radicalism that had been simmering underneath the two-year fog of waiting for Obama. Over and over again, you would here the same phrase from people at Occupy protests. Ive been waiting for this.This spirit produced a mood in the movement very different from what you typically find in left-wing coalition meetings in which peoples behavior is the exact inverse of their stated politics: the liberals are ruthless, the socialists sociopathic, and the anarchists power-mad. By contrast, when people found something they didnt like in the early days of Occupy, instead of storming out in protest, they actuallyand this is innovative for many of us on the lefttried to fix it, often by starting a new working group that soon became an integral part of the movement. In the same way, when OWS started getting big, people outside New York didnt complain about how backward and lame their cities were. They started their own occupations. Even more amazingly, the folks in New York didnt then sniff that occupations werent cool anymore, abandon OWS, and start wearing ironic I the 1% T-shirts.As our side gained momentum, the One Percent was thrown off balance. Republican frontrunner of the month Herman Cain said, Dont blame Wall Street, dont blame the big banks. If you dont have a job and youre not rich, blame yourself! I still dont understand how that guy didnt win the Republican nomination. Cant you just picture the campaign buttons? Blame Yourself! Cain in 2012.Rush Limbaugh denounced the protests as 99 percent white kids, which implied that he would have been down with the struggle if only there were more brothers in the park. I think if Occupy Wall Street were 99 percent black and brown kids, Rush Limbaugh would have called for air strikes.Then there was the mayor of Wall Street itself (and technically the rest of New York City), Michael Bloomberg. As the twelfth richest person in the United States, Bloomberg is actually part of the 0.0000001 percent, but thats hard to put into a chant. He claimed on his radio show that Occupiers were protesting against people who make $40,000, $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.... Those are the people that work on Wall Street in the finance sector. To be fair to Bloomberg, whose net worth is $19.5 billion, it is possible that this is the genuine pity he feels for the mere millionaire managers and vice presidents that he is sometimes forced to interact with in his capacity as a public servant.The Occupy movement did a lot more than just help rich Republicans make fools of themselves. It worked alongside local activists across the country to fight foreclosures, tuition hikes, and deportations, and sometimes it won. In New York City nurses and building workers both won improved wages and health carea rarity during this recessionafter building public campaigns alongside Occupy activists. As one nurse wrote in Socialist Worker, Its safe to suppose that some of the citys largest and most profitable hospitals didnt want to find out what having four hospitals on strike at the same time would look like in the era of Occupy Wall Street.Here is the real reason the Occupy movement inspired genuine fear in the One Percent, and its a point missed not only by most of the media but even by many in the movement itself. The power of Occupy Wall Street was not so much in the protesters themselves, as important and courageous as they were, but in the potential explosive impact it might have on the tens of millions who supported it.But the ruling classes of the world have an old saying: If you cant beat them, beat them up. It was only a matter of time before Occupy was repressed. The movement had been attacked by police from the first day, but the initial attacks were so random and ineffective that they helped the movement. Any modern police force worth its salt knows the professional way to beat up protesters is to use walls of riot-gear-clad cops to isolate individuals from a march and then victimize them. Instead the plan at many early Occupy protests seemed to be to designate one or two officers to completely lose their shit at unprovoked moments and start swinging and spraying wildly into the crowd in full view of dozens of smartphones.Two pepper spraying incidents caught on video in particular helped Occupy go viral. Early in the movement, the image of two young women being gassed by officer Anthony Bologna (yes, his name was Tony Baloney) for no reason at a march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square galvanized new supporters for the movement from around New York City. Two months later, a campus cop at UC Davis sprayed a peaceful student sit-in. Video footage, which showed the portly officer approaching the protesters with his spray can in roughly the same posture that most of us would use to spray mildew from the walls of our shower, sparked genuine shock across the country.At some points, the authorities seemed hilariously desperate. Democracy Now! reported one day in October that the owners of Zuccotti Park, in a move pioneered by Bugs Bunny when he changed the words on the Rabbit Hunting Season sign, taped up a faux-granite sign in the park to make it seem as though tents and camping had always been prohibited. Somehow, the protesters werent fooled. In those early days, if the powers that be had a black bag of dirty tricks it apparently came from Acme Corp.The good times were destined not to last, however. By November, the Department of Homeland Security was increasingly taking over for the amateurs and coordinating with local officials to tell them how to clear out their Occupy camps. Step one: find a pretext such as a concern for public health. (Apparently, the copious doses of pepper spray cities had been giving out were meant to prevent outbreaks of scurvy.) Step two: raid the camps in the dead of night with massive shows of force and block journalists from the scene. Step three: Keep Tony Baloney as far away as possible.The evictions of Occupy encampments were disillusioning for some protesters who had held out hope that the police could be won over to the cause. After all, went the argument, cops are part of the 99 percent. Consider this the Village People thesis: a police officer is simply another guy who works in a uniformlike a cowboy or a construction worker or a leather-clad biker.Instead, many protesters have had to face the fact that there might be something inaccurate about all those TV shows featuring tough but good-hearted cops. I guess thats why theres never been a show called Law and Order: Bill of Rights Protection Unit .I mean anarchy in both its negative connotations: a utopian land of freedom for the rich and a chaotic nightmare for the rest of us Chapter 4 A Paranoid State Police officers work for an institution called the state and its the state that calls (and fires) the shots. And cops dont work for just any part of the state, like the post office or the census bureau. They work for the core function of the state, the repressive apparatus at the heart of every society where some have and others dont. This is the part of the state that has guns, and it looks pretty similar across democracies and dictatorships because its authority rests not on its wisdom or consent of the governed but on authority itself.Most Republicans who denounce big government love the repressive apparatus that makes up by far the biggest aspect of government bureaucracy. When Republican primary debate moderator Brian Williams mentioned Rick Perrys frequent use of the death penalty in Texas, the audience chillingly broke into applause. What they find to be government tyranny are those additional services taken on by twentieth-century governments around the world in response to popular demand: caring for the elderly and the sick, educating the young, monitoring discrimination and the food supply, and so on.Its not only Republicans, however, who are largely uncritical of the state apparatus. In the annual Gallup poll of confidence in US institutions, the military always comes in first with more than three-quarters support and the police are close behind with more than 50 percent support, far ahead of Congress, big business, and organized labor. Even many leftists focus far more on the danger of corporations than the state. In the 1990s it was fashionable in many radical circles to talk about multinational corporations replacing nation-states even as the United States was building the largest system of external military bases and internal prisons that the world had ever seen.This is in part because its easier to understand the naked profit motivation of corporations than the murkier, longer-term factors that go into the actions of the state. The growth of private prisons makes business sense, whereas the much more substantial growth of unprofitable state prisons is only logical if you use criteria like oppression and racial fear that cant show up on a bottom line. Business eats and breathes profit. The state subsists on power.The state looks after the long-term stability that business needs but cannot guarantee itself. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once wrote (as a positive characterization) that McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valleys technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Similarly, the finance whiz kids in your local city cannot thrive in their gleaming new downtown luxury apartments without the peace of mind of knowing that the police are all over the far larger numbers of poor kids in the surrounding neighborhoods.Corporations and the state are connected not just through a shared interest but the thousands of people whose careers are a shuttle back and forth between the two institutions. Lobbyists become regulators. Senators become senior partners. Tommy Franks, the army general who famously dismissed Iraqi casualties with the line We dont do body counts, retired from the military and joined the board of Bank of America (BoA) in 2005. Frankss no-counting philosophy apparently had a real institutional impact because within four years the bank had lost billions and Tommy and the rest of the board were forced to step down. The story, however, has a happy ending, as most banker stories do. BoA got $25 billion in bailouts and Tommy joined the board of a far more respected firm, Chuck E. Cheeses.The state and business complement each other because they are different. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto , The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. In other words, the state is the grownup to the corporations child. The state pushes the shopping cart while the corporation sits on the top, grabbing whatever it wants, leaving it up to the state to clean up its spills and occasionally put a tasty but unhealthy item back on the shelf.The state is no psychopath like Chainsaw Al and his CEO buddies, but it has its own issue: paranoia. Last year Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of the Washington Post wrote a breathtaking series called Top Secret America in which they found that there are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances who work for 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies and publish 50,000 intelligence reports each year, a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.If the state were a person, it would be an unshaven recluse living among towering piles of circled newspaper clippings and hand-diagrammed flowcharts tracing dozens of conspiracy theories.Paranoid schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness that causes great misery for the people who suffer from it. The paranoid state, by contrast, is the one dishing out all the misery. According to the Mayo Clinic, the major symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia include:Auditory hallucinations, such as hearing voicesDelusions, such as believing a coworker wants to poison youAnxietyAngerEmotional distanceViolenceArgumentativenessSelf-important or condescending mannerSuicidal thoughts and behaviorIll admit that this isnt a cut-and-dried diagnosis of the state. Auditory hallucinations are different from wiretapping millions of conversations, although they both reflect a strong desire to hear voices. More importantly, the state is far from suicidal. In fact its all about self-perpetuation. But this zeal to hold on to its power, and perhaps its knowledge of how unjust that power is, leads it to all the other symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. This is more obviously seen in a dictatorship facing an uprising, like Syria or Bahrain. But the same logic, the moral equation of sacrificing human lives at the altar of the states authority, is part of the foundation of the US justice system that prefers for innocent people to be executed rather than having its own wisdom and authority questioned through retrials and reversals.Troy Davis was a death row inmate in Georgia who was executed in 2011 despite how almost every original witness against him had since recanted his or her original testimony. Even as thousands of people petitioned and rallied in support of him, Troy understood the ruthless institution he was up against: Georgia feels its better to kill me than admit Im innocent.For an actual person, such a stubborn refusal to admit error would be a major character flaw. For the US state, it is a bedrock principle dressed up in pleasant-sounding notions like finality or respect for the original verdict. In 1993 the Supreme Court even declared that actual innocence was not relevant in the death penalty appeal of Leonel Herrera, whose final words before Texas killed him indicated his strong disagreement: I am innocent, innocent, innocent. I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight.Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels once wrote that the states imposed authority made it quite different from earlier tribal societies: The shabbiest police servant has more authority than all the organs of clan society put together, but the most powerful prince of civilization may well envy the humblest gentile chief for the unstrained and undisputed respect that is paid to him.Whereas human beings who suffering from paranoid schizophrenia are often some of the most vulnerable and powerless members of society, the paranoia of the US state comes paradoxically from its ever-growing strength.The United States has more than a thousand military bases in dozens of countries and a defense budget greater than the combined spending of the fourteen next most paranoid nations on the planet. So now the military is worried that its very hugeness makes it more vulnerable to asymmetrical warfarelittle-guy weapons like landmines and car bombs. Domestically, police departments are tricked out with tanks and concussion grenades and even drones, but thats done nothing to stop the eternal prattle about how dangerous it is to be a cop. In reality, on the list of dangerous jobs in the United States, policing consistently ranks lower than fishing, logging, construction, and truck driving. Yet we dont allow truck drivers to have submachine guns to prevent cell phoneusing drivers from cutting them off on the interstate.State paranoia is also drenched in racism and bigotry. The hypermilitarization of the US state in recent decades has come about through a series of foreign and domestic wars against terrorism, crime, and immigration. In polite society its considered crude or simplistic to declare these wars to be racist, even though they are all waged against people with skin tones darker than peach. Were encouraged to think of racism as being a product of individualstypically rude, lower-class ones with Southern accents who dont hold positions of state power.The popular image of racists as some dumb yokels who learned it from dumb yokel parents is a comforting diversion from the plain historical fact that US racism has always started with the rich and powerful and been enforced by the state. From the moment the Declaration of Independence declared all men to be equal, racism has been the fingers crossed behind the national back. (Obviously sexism didnt even need to be hidden.)Consider the vast surveillance of Arabs and Muslims by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), which has worked with the CIA to create a Demographics Unit tasked with sending spies into mosques, Islamic bookstores, and Muslim campus clubs. Journalists at the Associated Press have done a great job of exposing and criticizing these NYPD operations. Inevitably, however, they have been portrayed as a product of some West Wingstyle debate in which intelligent government officials agonize over the balance between public safety and constitutional freedoms. After all, neither New Yorks mayor Michael Bloomberg, who speaks eloquently for freedom of religion, nor NYPD chief Ray Kelly, who visits many mosques in the name of building community trust, seems like a raving Islamophobe. Surely these men would only approve of a blatantly un-Constitutional spy network in response to tangible terrorist threats, right?Actually, the surveillance of Muslims is based on the idea that police need to identify potential terrorists before violent thoughts have even entered their heads. Thats a quote from a report produced by the dubiously named NYPD Intelligence Division called Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The authors of the report, whose main intellectual influences appear to be the Crusades and the film Reefer Madness , identify a four-step radicalization process that turns ordinary Muslims into terrorists, and they argue that police need to catch the process in its early stages. But this is hard to do using ordinary police techniques because, you know, they havent done anything remotely criminal. The individuals are not on the law enforcement radar. Most have never been arrested or involved in any kind of legal trouble. Other than some commonalities in age and religion, individuals undergoing radicalization appear as ordinary citizens, who look, act, talk, and walk like everyone around them.Im going to translate this bureaucratic language into the clichd hillbilly talk more popularly associated with racism: See that thars the problem with these ol Musslim boys. Its them ones that act all normal-like that are probly the tarrists! The NYPDs unprecedented surveillance of more than eight hundred thousand of its residents is not the result of a difficult debate over freedom and terror. Its just fucking racism.Racism, of course, is supposed to be over. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. did some stuff and now America is colorblind! More like color mute. African Americans are seeing their rates of poverty, unemployment, and school segregation plunge down toward pre-1960s levels, but its no longer legal for them to be told on the record that its due to their race. In return, its no longer acceptable for black folks to play the race card. Its a fair bargain: oppressors and oppressed are equally banned from naming the oppression.Nowhere is this truer than in the criminal justice system. Cops can do whatever they want as long as they dont say (publicly) the N-word. The new rule is pepper spray it, dont say it. In her dynamite book, The New Jim Crow , Michelle Alexander lays out the legal formula for racism that has replaced official segregation: How exactly does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather easily, it turns out. The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are the product of intentional racial discriminationi.e., the work of a bigot. This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness, because everyone knowsbut does not saythat the enemy in the War on Drugs can be identified by race. Imagine if the rest of us had the same leeway in our jobs. A surgeon who left a scalpel inside a patient could only face malpractice if it could be proven that he did it out of malice. Restaurant kitchen workers could feel free to piss in the soup as long as they dont actually say they hate yuppies. Alexanders point that everyone knows but does not say is what makes the US criminal justice system combine all the brutality of totalitarianism with the lame hypocrisy of political correctness at its worst. Its as if the Nazis forced Jews and gays to call their badges heritage stars and pride triangles.There was at least one moment when the justice system admitted its racism. In 1987, Warren McCleskey challenged his murder conviction with a study by Professor David Baldus that showed that a black defendant in Georgia convicted of killing a white victim was far more likely to receive the death penalty than a white defendant convicted of killing a black victim. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the Baldus study demonstrated a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race. But the most exalted jurists in the country then shrugged and said that there was nothing they could do because apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system. Call it the Shit happens when youre black doctrine.To add insult to injury, the justices went on to argue that if McCleskeys claim were accepted, it could lead to studies looking for discrepancies based on any arbitrary variable, such as the defendants facial characteristics. As if the country has a history of slavery and segregation based on the size of peoples ears or the cut of their jawline. But then the court made a strikingly honest concession: McCleskeys claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.... Thus, if we accepted McCleskeys claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty.In essence, what the Supreme Court said in McCleskey v. Kemp was Okay, fine, the system is racist. We said it. Happy now? Next case. This is the state, cold and merciless, with which the Occupy movement has found itself in confrontation. All the powers and weapons with which the state has armed itself in recent decades for its wars on people of color work just as well on all people who challenge US oligarchy.These first few chapters have focused on the enormous control that economic and political institutions have over our lives. In so doing, am I letting ordinary Americans off the hook? We do live in at least a formal democracy. Any and all of the questions I raise could be but arent up for debate in the 2012 election. Doesnt that mean that the true craziness lies in the people who keep voting for this status quo?Returning to the subject of climate change, for example, it can be dismaying to see how many of us have until recently told pollsters that it doesnt even exist. But this ignorance starts at the top. Not only with the Republicans who deny the scientific evidence that we are heating up the planet to the point that we might not be able to live on it in fifty years. Democrats acknowledge it but then ignore it and continue drilling and fracking, basically treating the scientists like dentists urging us to floss. In this context, I dont think its strange that many Americans concluded that the scientists were probably exaggerating.The craziness of our society comes from the irrational needs of corporations and the state. Much of the democratic process is the way that we the people learn to internalize these needs. The common assumption is just the opposite. Not only do we suppose that the rich and powerful must have gotten that way by being smart and rational, but even those of us who resent their power at least think that they have an interest in keeping things going. This is the stakeholder argument, the old idea that those who have a stake in society have the most interest in keeping it running. Karl Marx turned this idea on its head and said that in a system like capitalism built on insanely shortsighted greed, those with a stake in the system are the ones unwilling and unable to address its obvious deficiencies and only those with nothing to lose but their chains would do the job.Im not out to blindly defend the American people. We get our asses rhetorically kissed enough during election season anyways. There is plenty of evidence that we are not always the brightest bulbsnot just about global warming but many other issues as well, from immigration to using Axe body spray. I myself am driven to a catatonic state just from watching a football team with a blue NY on their helmets try to give concussions to players on teams with other things on their helmets.Would we do better if we could run society according to our own wants and needs? I cant prove it, but I have to think that any random group at a bus stop would do a better job at just about anything than the men like Tommy Franks who have created this voracious militaryChuck E. Cheese complex. Part 2 Universal Suckerage Chapter 5 The Cheddar Evolution Okay, okay, you might be saying. If you think things are so bad, maybe you should stop complaining so much and start using your wit, charm, and rugged good looks to propose a solution. I agree with every single word you just might have said.But in order to figure out what to do we have to discuss the problem with what we are usually told to do, which is to get involved in the elections to put a different person in charge. This advice was best summarized by Homer Simpson after the aliens Kang and Kodos had invaded Earth, disguised themselves as the Republican and Democratic candidates to win the presidency, and then enslaved the human population. Dont blame me, Homer said to Marge as they toiled under the lash of alien overseers. I voted for Kodos.The futility of two-party elections doesnt only apply to situations in which both candidates are identical. Consider the attempted 2012 recall of Wisconsins Scott Walker. The campaign to oust the Tea Party Republican governor had as much grassroots enthusiasm as any major US election in recent decades because it came directly out of 2011s Cheddar Revolutionthe electrifying occupation of the capitol building in Madison.The Madison occupation was a spontaneous explosion against Walkers plan to slash services and workers rights that for a few weeks turned into a joyous reclamation of the tradition of working class rebellion. Of course, that collective elation was ominous to the dark overlords of hate radio. Rush Limbaugh and others repeatedly referred to the smiling teachers who staged a three-day sick-out to take part in the protests as union thugs. As if Monday morning at Osh Kosh Elementary is like a scene from On the Waterfront . Dont cross Mrs. Mendelson in the Reading Room. Your body might end up at the bottom of a sandbox. When the occupation began, Jon Stewart called it the Bizarro Tea Party, which is funny because its the Tea Partybillionaires organizing mad-as-hell rallies against working-class programsthat is a bizarro version of a genuine grassroots protest movement. But there had been so little of the latter in the pre-Occupy decade that when it popped up in Madison people had forgotten what it was. This is odd. People are gathering in large numbers to hold signs and march and chant. But theyre saying nothing about anchor babies or false birth certificates. What do you call this strange phenomenon? As a protest movement, Madison was powerful enough to breathe new life into the national labor movement and help plant the seed of Occupy Wall Street. And yet when its participants turned their energies toward a recall election they were swallowed up so easily by the Democratic Party that they ended up campaigning for the same lame-ass that Scott Walker had beaten in his original election. Tom Barrett didnt promise to restore union rights or most of Walkers budget cuts. He didnt run on any of the issues that had inspired the protests even though the protests were the only reason he had an opportunity to run again and prove what a genuine first-time-was-no-fluke loser he really is. In other words, a long time before Scott Walker won the recall, the Wisconsin movement had already lost.The contrast between the Madison occupation and the recall campaign afterward demonstrates how our electoral system systematically negates most of the ideas and values we usually associate with democracy. Lets start with the ideal of letting the peoples voices be heard. One of the reasons that Madison went viral last year was that people around the country connected with the anger and pride brilliantly expressed on hundreds of handmade signs at the early protests.One quality that jumped out through YouTube and Facebook was the humor, ranging from the nerdyTheres Still Good in You, (Sky)Walker to the admirably straightforward Dick Move, Scotty. There were also plenty of signs reflecting the gallows humor of public sector workers: My Kindergarteners Are Better Listeners than My Governor, Hey Walker WI Ranger: Whos Gonna Wipe Your Ass When You Have a Stroke? I Protect Your Family from the Criminally Insane. Remember That. Signs like these helped build national support by showing that the protesters are the regular people we all work with. No one gets that reaction from a sign that says Tom Barrett for Governor.Even before the protests were over, union officials with an eye on upcoming elections started to push for the sign Its not about the money. This slogan hoped to portray the unions as reasonable folks who were willing to compromise, but it actually portrayed them as special interests willing to fight for their own unique bargaining rights but not against the cuts to everybodys health care and education. This sellout set off a chain reaction of karmic punishments. After the unions proclaimed, Its not about the money, its just about collective bargaining, they were told by Tom Barrett, Its not about collective bargaining; its just about electing me. And then the voters let Barrett and his content-free campaign know that it wasnt going to be about electing him either.Despite its roots in the Wisconsin uprising, the Barrett campaign was a typical operation in which the grassroots was given no input in the candidate platform. What a massive step backward from the occupation in the capitol building, where the peoples mic was open to all. Imagine if corporate lobbyists had to do their business in the rotundas of capitol buildings instead of the private offices. Uh, hi everybody. My name is Phil and I work for Koch Industries. I think we should support this environmental exemption because it will make my company a boatload of money. Thank you and God bless America. Another value we associate with democracy is self-rule. We the people dont need a monarch to tell us how to live because we can solve our own problems and determine our own fate. That was the choice confronting the Wisconsin protests last year. One reason the occupation spread so quickly was the need to physically stop the Republican-dominated legislature from ramming through Walkers bill. The same old symbolic protest wouldnt do; workers and students in Madison had to figure out what they could do to actually kill the bill. Thats how See you in November became Well see your ass every day until we win. Thats how Im a union member and I vote became Im a teacher and I call in sick. Walkers attack forced the Wisconsin labor movement to rediscover a long-forgotten lesson: Protests can... like, try to win. Workers can strikeor at least call out sick for three days like the teachers did. State senators who oppose bad legislation can leave. And everyone else can stay.But, while the occupation and protests succeeding in delaying the passage of the bill, it was going to take a higher level of struggle to prevent it. For the first time in generations, people who raised the idea of a general strike were not considered crazyor European. So what happened when Scott Walker upped the stakes by illegally passing his bill without public notice in the middle of the night? One hundred and fifty thousand workers assembled in Madison and vowed to... gather signatures to recall the governor next year.But Walkers bill would crush public sector unions not next year but immediately. Wasnt there something more immediate and direct that could be done? Dont workers have a weapon more powerful than the campaign contribution or the tri-fold brochure? We dont celebrate the great Flint Phone Bank of 1937 or remember how Eugene Debs organized railroad workers to campaign in swing states. By responding to Walkers passage of the bill with a recall campaign instead of a strike, union leaders essentially brought an online petition to a gunfight. Sometimes I think that if a typical union president saw his house go up in flames, he would dash off to the bank to get money for a Democrat who promised to put out the fire after his election.What might be most revealing in the aftermath of the Wisconsin fiasco is how the election legitimized the same policies that were widely seen last year as a Koch Brothersfunded coup. Walker hadnt campaigned on an assault on unions and the state budget; consequently, many in Wisconsin viewed his sneak attack legislation as not only wrong but illegitimate. Some protesters during the Madison occupation even drew limited but real parallels between their struggle and the protests happening at the same time against the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.A year later there was a recall election in which both candidates supported the essence of Walkers legislation and there was no realistic option for an alternative candidate to represent the views of the majority of protesters the year before. This we accept as democracy, however much we grumble about how many donations Walker got from outside business groups.Elections in the United States function not as a tool of popular will but popular acceptance through a three-step process.1. Severely limit every aspect of the electoral processwho gets to vote, who gets to run, what we can debate, and how we can hold those we vote for accountable for what they promise. If our democracy were a vast canvas filling up an entire museum wall, it would be entirely unpainted except for one square inch, which of course would only contain blue and red.2. Once the extremely limited parameters of the election are set, massively pump up its significance to get us to fully buy in. Its not hard for the bazillion-dollar infotainment industry to exploit the desperate desire most of us have to feel like we participate in a democracy.3. Take our participation in the election as a democratic ratification of the political system as a whole, including the vast majority of it that is excluded from democratic control.The next three chapters will take a closer look at each of these steps in turn. Taken together, this is the democracy that the United States cherishes and wants to share with the world. Many progressives have called our leaders hypocritical for claiming to support democracy in the Middle East and then trying to block those they dont like from getting elected. But its not hypocrisy; they do the same thing here. The difference is that our electoral non-democracy is a finely tuned machine that rarely requires fraud or bullying, much less coups or invasions.The US system didnt always operate this smoothly. It has adapted and evolved over two hundred years of rebellions, protests, and a civil war. Thats why I think our politicians are being quite genuine when they worry if a country like Egypt is to quickly embrace American-style democracy. For the sake of their revolution, I hope theyre not.In contrast, did you ever see a funny sign at a Tea Party rally or Glenn Becks Paranoiapalooza in DC? Chapter 6 We Vote, They Decide Every parent knows the con. Instead of telling your kid what to do, give them a choice of two non-threatening options: You can have an apple or a banana for a snack. Would you like to quietly color in your Dora book or quietly play with your bunnies? The goal is to eliminate the thought of a lollipop or asking me to play ice cream store with those damned bunnies before it ever enters that precious little brain. It rarely works anymore for me. The seven-year-old has been around the block and the three-year-old is a born hustler.Our political life consists of a series of carefully managed choices that are far more elaborately constructed than the desperate improvisations of a sleep-deprived parent but not that much more subtle. The major economic debate these days is whether to fund eternal wars and corporate tax breaks by stealing workers pensions or to fund eternal wars and corporate tax breaks by stealing workers pensions and busting their unions.Parents of my generation are a bunch of softies who quickly give in when our kids see through the fake-choice scam and throw a tantrum. But our societal elders still believe in spare the rod, spoil the electorate. Third parties, unruly protesters, and anyone else who refuses to go for the apple or banana are swiftly given the back of the hand. (Apple or bananawhat am I talking about? Our political options are more like the obesity of soda or the cancer of diet soda.)If you have ever organized for an option on the political menu besides corn syrup and aspartame, you have no doubt experienced being patted on the head and told that your idealism is admirable but immature. Take it as a compliment. Kids may throw tantrums and be melodramatic, but they have also been known to be lots of fun and occasionally change the world. Undoubtedly, thats why kids arent allowed to vote, which is too bad because our decrepit democracy could use a shot of vitality.Here is a scoreboard of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in terms of percentage of the total vote.2004 Republican 51 Democrat 482008 Democrat 53 Republican 46If the two parties were basketball teams, those scores would reflect two close games between evenly matched teams. And yet the 2008 election followed a dramatic shift in the national political mood that took place in the four years after Bushs reelection triumph as Dubya careened from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the collapse of Iraq to the historic financial meltdown.Why are election results a pale reflection at most of our ideas and hopes? Lets start with who votes.Imagine that there were one hundred voting-age Americans. That would mean that in 2004 Bush got fifty-one votes and Kerry forty-eight, right? Not quite. To begin with, eight folks are non-citizen immigrants who cant vote. (After all, all they do in this country is raise kids, work, and pay taxes.) Two others out of our hundred are prisoners or ex-prisoners. Our system only allows those who have lied, stolen, and used illegal drugs to be candidates, not voters. Of course, if immigrants or ex-cons have a problem with this setup, they should simply vote to... oh wait.Out of the ninety people actually allowed to vote, thirty-six didnt. These days at least a few of them were likely Democrat voters barred or discouraged from voting by Republican state machines. What about the rest? Did they feel they hadnt sufficiently studied Bush and Kerrys environmental policies to make an informed decision? Or did they think that catching an extra hour of sleep that day would have more impact on their lives for the next four years than whichever candidate won? Its hard to say because the entire media doesnt assign a single reporter to the one hundred million non-voter beat.Thus, out of this population of one hundred adults, forty-six didnt or couldnt vote, twenty-eight voted for Bush, and twenty-six for Kerry. So what happened in the big shift of 2008? Twenty-six voted for McCain and thirty voted for Barack Obama. Out of one hundred people, two switched their vote from the Republican to the Democrat and two who hadnt voted in 2004 voted for Obama. That is to say, even in this very different feeling election, more than twice as many voting age adults were excluded from the election as changed their votes (or non-votes) to Obama. And more than eight times as many still didnt vote.Even most of the people who changed votes didnt have anything to do with Obamas victories because they live in all those backwaters like Texas and New York that dont matter because they arent swing states. When you get right down to it, the political shift that led to Obamas victory was expressed electorally by about 1 percent of the population. In the days before Occupy Wall Street, this was the One Percent that was said to control both partiesat least according to political scientists. Its known as the Median Voter Theorum, first posited by Anthony Downs in his 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy .Downss title might lead you to believe that he subscribes to the rather obvious observation that those in charge of the economy control the democracy. Actually the word economic signals instead that Downss theory is borrowed from classical economics, a field mostly devoted to clouding the obvious inequality of capitalism in a haze of formulas and happy talk.Mainstream economists believe that unregulated capitalism is the ultimate democracy because in a world based on law of supply and demand, We the Consumer are the ultimate masters. Similarly, the Median Voter Theorum states that since American democracy is competition between two parties seeking to win approval from the most voters, these parties will try to tailor their policies to the voters in the middle of the political spectrum. The theories of supply and demand and the median voter have their place, but they do not explain all facets of life in the real world. No matter what Antonin Scalia might think, for example, fifty million Americans lack health insurance not because they demanded to but because of a failure of the hallowed market.If the political system really is controlled by voters, Republicans and Democrats would be furiously racing to be the first to end the war in Afghanistan, raise taxes on the rich, and take other actions that every poll shows to have majority support. Heck, if swing state independents had all the power given to them by campaign reporters, a handful of these median titans would be able to ruthlessly extort the political class. Blue-collar white guys in Ohio, soccer moms in Florida, and third-generation Latinos in Colorado would be rocking special edition Gucci The Future Is Bright with Barack sunglasses while cruising town in Rollin with Romney Escalades.For those of us outside the academy, its pretty obvious that theres a different One Percent in charge. Radical analyst Michael Parenti has written that candidates for major office actually have to run in three primaries: There is the voting primary, the one we all know about and sometimes participate in. But before that is the media primary and before that the money primary.Each primary functions as an elimination round. If you cant raise serious coin from wealthy donors, the media decides that your campaign isnt realistic and doesnt cover you, which is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy. Theoretically it seems possible for a candidate with an impressive grassroots organization connecting her to millions of votersthrough unions perhapsto be a viable candidate even without spending hundreds of millions of dollars on television and newspaper ads. But for some reason television and newspaper executives seem to disagree.The ruling elites of the United States dont just control the two parties. They actually are the two parties. Its more obvious with the Republicans, whose past two presidential nominees have been privileged prep-school scions of famous wealthy political dynasties. The Democratic Party is a more subtle party of the rich. Sure, most of their members of Congress are millionaires, but they are earnest ones who worry about how the rest of us are doing.The point goes deeper than politicians incomes. Think about the structure of the Democratic Party. Its not a membership organization. You may call yourself a Democrat because you vote for them every election, but youre actually just a fan. You have as much input into party decisions as I have in the play calling of the New York Giants, no matter how many jerseys I buy or how loudly I scream at my television. Its true that you can become a part of the Democratic Party through volunteering or running for a local committee or public office. As a holder of a tiny share in a multibillion-dollar corporate party, you would have a direct interest in the partys fortunes but still no influence.The Democratic Party is two hundred years old; the GOP is one hundred fifty. Thats an impressive lineage, but it also means both parties trace their roots to the days when political parties were handfuls of rich guys who found they had some common interests and decided to pool some money to buy candidates and votes. Thats still a fairly apt description. Lance Selfas indispensible The Democrats: A Critical History identifies the key feature of the party (which also applies to the Republicans): structurelessness. Selfa explains: It has no fixed membership or membership requirements.... The party has no stated set of principles or programs.... Candidatesfrom the presidency to the city councilare free to follow or to ignore the party platform in their election drives. It has no official political leadership outside of its candidate for president and important Democratic congressional officials. The Democratic National Committee... exists mainly to raise money.... In essence, the Democratic Party is a loose federation of candidate-based local and state electoral machines. Such a loose structure would seem to make the party ripe for takeoveror at least influenceby any large, well-organized political interest. Thats been the strategy for decades of labor, equal rights, and environmental organizations that have poured ever more resources into the Democrats with every election. In fact, the partys amorphousness is the insiders secret weapon. Real power resides in the informal spaces of the Democratic and Republican Parties, in the banquets and closed-door meetings among major donors and their army of think tank researchers, lobbyists, consultants, pollsters, and yes, candidates.The parties most important decisions are made unofficially and off the record, which often makes their inner workings so mystifying to us outsiders. Are the Republicans actually crazy? Why are the Democrats so spineless? Is it by some law of nature that the conservative Blue Dog Democrats always get their way over the partys Progressive Caucus even though the latter has far more members?While both parties seem to be chasing the all-powerful median voter, the power blocs inside boardrooms and war rooms pull the entire spectrum of acceptable ideas toward them like a tractor beam. This rightward shift has only been broken during times of enormous non-electoral protests, and we havent had one of those since the 1970s. Since then, politics has been a choreographed jamboree where the ruling class plays the fiddle. Call it the Two-Party Shuffle: Hey Tea Party, looking for a fight? Step from your right to your really far right! Now reach for your partner, the GOP Pull them a step toward you on three! Okay Democrats, now its your turn Slide to where the Republicans were! Now grab on to your liberal base Yank them a step to a realistic place! One effect of thirty years of this ever-rightward-moving dance is that the Republican Party is now nuts. From denying climate change and evolution to allowing guns in classrooms, GOP leaders seem to be down for whatever crazy-ass position will keep the partys small but fervent hard core happy. Since the right wing is too caught up in its Leave It to Beaver meets Mad Max fantasy to care about the actual world we live in, most Republicans seem to have no interest in governing. Even some of this years Republican presidential candidates dont take their own party seriously. They took the Sarah Palin path of simply using the campaign as an audition for the role of former presidential candidate on Fox News. For Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, running for president was primarily a way to hawk their books; both men displayed a degree of self-interest that would make Ayn Rand proud as they prioritized lucrative appearances at bookstores over campaign stops among undecided voters. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that each of those guys at one point was beating Mitt Romney, who wants to be president so badly hes willing to kiss the babies of commoners.The debate over Obamas health care law showed that Congressional Republicans are just as unserious. Before it was Obamacare it was Romneycare and before that it was the brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, supported by many of the Republicans who denounce it as tyranny today. Whats remarkable about the GOP flip-flop is that the US health care system is not just a crisis for working people but for their bosses too because the insurance and pharmaceutical industries parasitically feed off employer-provided health coverage. Its hard to imagine a solution to this crisis that will ask more of ordinary people and less of corporations than Obamas law but the Republicans rail against it anyway because theyve moved so far to the right that much of their base thinks its the presidents secret religious mission to kill Americas white grandmas with death panels.Democrats have quite a different relationship with their voters. The conservative analyst David Frum once quipped that while Republicans fear their base, Democrats loathe theirs. The same party that timidly concedes in debates with Republicans is quite the bully when facing even mild dissent from its left. This was evident in the months leading up the midterm elections in 2010 when some supporters of the Democrats dared to mention that the party had barely accomplished anything in the two years they held the presidency and both houses of Congress. A time for humble self-criticism, perhaps? Not so much.In an October interview with Rolling Stone , Obama presidentially pouted that the idea that weve got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible... if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks werent serious in the first place. Obamas comments were part of a coordinated series of high-profile whip-crackings to steer the left of the herd back to the trail. Joe Biden told the base to stop whining and press secretary Robert Gibbs complained about the professional left that would only be satisfied when we have Canadian health care, and weve eliminated the Pentagon.I have to admit that I am one of those people who like the sound of Gibbss dystopian nightmare of world peace and free medicine. But it was odd to hear Obamas spokesman sound so much like Glenn Beck in describing people merely for having the audacity to still hope for change.Not surprisingly, these putdowns didnt help the Democrats enthusiasm deficit and the party got roasted that November, losing the House and many seats in the Senate. Obama seems to have learned something this year; rather than telling his supporters what a bunch of shitheads they are, hes pulled out of his pocketbook some tiny tantalizing treats, from his personal nonbinding support for marriage equality to his pledge to reduce deportations of young immigrants. These morsels have been received enthusiastically, but they are a far cry from the bold talk of four years ago. Back then, the cover of Time magazine showed Obama inserted into an old photograph of Franklin Roosevelt and predicted The New New Deal.To understand why Obama has fallen so far short, it helps to have a picture of why FDR didnt. In 1932, joblessness was at almost 25 percentat a time when there was no national unemployment insurance. Even that figure doesnt capture the hundreds of ways that across the country three years of the Great Depression were starting to loosen the bonds of authority and obedience. These were years of food riots, raids on delivery trucks, and widespread freight trainhopping. In cities like Chicago and New York, communists organized unemployed councils to demand assistance and break landlord locks to move evicted families back into their homes. In Labors Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais estimate that this happened seventy-seven thousand times in New York City in 1932 alone.In summer 1932, as Roosevelt campaigned against Herbert Hoover, thousands of veterans from the First World War camped threateningly in the parks of the capital city, demanding early payment of their war bonus. The Bonus Army was only dispersed when General Douglas MacArthur led a regiment against them with bayonets and gas. This is the degree of grassroots lobbying it takes to convince even the most liberal Democratic president that he needs to drive through meaningful reformseven if it makes his Republican friends sad.Occupy Wall Street revived some of that rebellious spirit of 32, from the encampments on public land to the eviction and foreclosure defense taken up by Occupiers across the country. The rebellion has been largely squelched, however, at least for now.Not only were the Occupy camps broken up, so were the protests outside the party conventionssix months before they occurred. In January 2012 the city council of Charlotte, host of the Democratic National Convention later in the year, decreed that at any occasion designated by the city as an extraordinary event, police would have massively expanded powers to search anyone in the vicinity and arrest those who refuse to cooperate. (How thoughtful of them to allow us to keep our freedoms for ordinary events. I think next Tuesday morning Ill go picket some folks waiting for a bus.)Interestingly, a few months later it was reported that the Super PAC run by conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts was planning to fly anti-Obama aerial banners back and forth over the convention center. Romney officials ended up nixing the idea, but its revealing that a wealthy white dude felt confident that he would be allowed to fly an airplane right up to a building filled with his political opponents. He probably figured that the courts, which didnt lift a finger to help Occupy Charlotte protesters get a permit to simply be able to march on the same day as the convention, would leap to the defense of a Super PACs freedom of aeronautical speech. In the land of Citizens United, their money is speech but our speech is violence.The authorities problem with the protesters March on Wall Street South was that its anticorporate message was not an officially approved subject for debate. Its remarkable how often reporters, pundits, and the candidates themselves feel the need to assert that the November election offers voters a clear choice or a stark contrast between two opposing visions of the governments role in the economy. On the one side, Obama likes to frame his vision in sweeping terms, as in this February speech to Congress: I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves, that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity, for history tells a different story.For contrast, it would be nice to quote Mitt Romney, but his words on the economy rarely rise above, Obama says lots of pretty words but in reality the economy still stinks. Dont let the suave mysterious man fool you. Cover your ears! So well have to go with House Speaker John Boehner, who is delightfully free of insecurities about sounding less intelligent than Obama: When the economy grows, its not because of a new government program or spending initiative. Its because a lot of people in the private sector worked hard, and were successful in overcoming the obstacles thrown in their path. The rash of stimulus legislation passed by Congress in recent years has been one of those obstacles.Sounds like a substantial disagreement between a philosopher-king seeking the delicate balance of private and public sector and a guy who thinks hes in a 1980s video game. ( This economy could have climbed so many ladders by know if that damned Donkey Kong didnt keep tossing barrels of cumbersome regulation!) But the central irony of US politics is that the bitterness of debate between the two parties tends to rise in proportion to how much they actually have in common, especially when it comes to the economy. Consider the question of the budget, which has led to high-decibel fights in statehouses and threats of a government shutdown in Congress even though their policies of cutting schools and hospitals while preserving low taxes for the wealthy would seem almost identical to most non-US observers. Where the parties differ is in how they sell it.Republicans like Scott Walker and Romneys running mate Paul Ryan are downright gleeful about massive cuts because they see taking food from poor children as a moral good. These Republicans justify cuts to bus routes and day care programs that destroy families budgets by using the ironic metaphor of a family budget: Mom and Dad have to balance their books so the government should, too. Given that our government wont reduce its massive military spending or corporate tax breaks, the only family it could possibly resemble is one in which Dad forces Sis out of college, makes Mom to get a second job, and halves Grandpas medication just so he can keep himself deep in pure cocaine, untraceable handguns, and hush money for the local cops.Democrats, on the other hand, prefer a two-step process in which they first pass up the chance to raise taxes on the wealthy and then publicly agonize over the cuts they then inevitably make. Or, in the case of Congressional Dems, first they have a majority but dont tax the rich and then they claim to be really eager to do it once they lose the votes to make it happen. Theyre like the guy pretending to be held back by his friends so that he cant get in a fight that he wants absolutely no part of.Im not saying the two parties have identical budget policies. Most of the time, Democratic proposals are not as bad as Republican ones, and in that difference are vital programs and services that millions of people consider to be reason enough to stay loyal Democrats. It would be a mistake to blithely dismiss these differences. But its also a mistake to accuse those of us who dont support the Democrats of not knowing or caring about those affected by the difference between the policies of the two parties. The best rebuttal Ive ever seen to this dubious charge was a two-panel cartoon from the mid-90s when Bill Clinton was gutting welfare.Panel One: Newt Gingrich proposes that all poor people be hit on the head five times.Panel Two: President Clinton, arms triumphantly raised, soaks in rapturous applause while he shouts, Two and a half times! Two and a half times!Its also important to remember that there are times when the Democrats are actually the ones proposing deeper cuts. Thats what happened during summer 2011 when the Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling in order to manufacture a crisis and extort massive spending cuts. Obama actually countered with a grand bargain that called for even larger cuts to the Social Security and Medicare programs in return for some modest tax increases. Republicans, confused as usual by sudden movements, passed up this historic opportunity to gut the Holy Grails of entitlement programs and refused to go along. So for a brief period of time, Obama stood there revealed as the one who was doing what only a few months before seemed to be a crazy Tea Party tactic: using the bullshit debt ceiling crisis as an excuse to cut two beloved government programs. It was one of those moments when someone screws up the Two-Party Shuffle and somehow the Democrat is standing to the right of the Republican and nobody knows what to do.As it turned out, within two months Occupy Wall Street erupted and put a temporary halt to the entire bogus emergency deficit charade. The Occupy protests were in large part a response to the massive injustice of the bank bailouts jointly conducted by the Republican Bush and the Democrat Obama. Under the latter administration, Republicans played the populist card and pretended to oppose government handouts to the banking and auto industries. Of course, had it retained the presidency, the GOP would have done the same thing. Just like with the health care bill, the partys shameless ability to work itself into a serious lather to oppose policies it supports in principle is genuinely impressive.Republicans branded Obama a socialist who was increasing government spending even though most of this spending has gone to banks and the military, two institutions not traditionally associated with militant Marxism. It makes you wonder if GOP speechwriters went to prep schools in the 1960s that were so worried about the radical spirit that they redacted or altered their copies of The Communist Manifesto in the school libraries. Perhaps they inserted earned income tax credit in place of every mention of seizing the means of production and replaced each proletariat with environmental regulation.Some Republicans feel genuine anger because the bailouts challenge the ideal of the United States as a nation of rugged individuals with invisible hands that pull on bootstraps, yada yada yada. When a giant capitalist enterprise is in trouble, theres really no question that it is going to get the taxpayer bailout. The only debate comes afterward over whether we should acknowledge what just happened or impose collective amnesia for the sake of the Ayn Rand narrative. In effect, the country is held hostage to a ruling-class identity crisis: Are we members of a master race, creating wealth without assistance from the lower orders or do we accept that we depend on the labor of the dirty masses and need those despised government bureaucrats to protect us from our own insatiable greed? Jesus Christ, just take our money and shut up already.Even in an election marked as deeply by recession as this one, there are non-economic issues like gun control and abortion rights that can provide voters with a more genuine choice between the two candidates than we get regarding wealth distribution or what country our military is going to invade next. Some critics dismiss these as cultural issues played up by the parties to excite their bases and distract us from their fundamental similarities on the core issues. As if getting shot or having a dirty underground abortion is a frilly lifestyle choice. One indication of the importance of these issues is that most discussions of them are as vapid and limited as those around the economy.In the gun control debate, for example, neither side is capable of raising the question of why the United States is such a violent country because the question is so intimately tied to a long history of racist lynching and deadly brutality against striking workers. For the hard right wing who long ago infiltrated and took over the mass membership National Rifle Association, (which used to be a sort of AAA for hunters), guns are necessary for Americas age-old fight against the dark (often literally) forces who threaten our property and families. The more guns we have, places we can carry them, and rights we have to fire them without worrying about landing in jail, the more they can be held at bay.Many gun control advocates refuse to take up the bigotry of their opponents and focus on the harm caused by guns themselveseven after obviously racist incidents like the shooting of Trayvon Martin by the neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman. Its true that Trayvon would still be alive if Zimmerman didnt have a gun, but he would also be alive if George Zimmerman could see a black teenager as a human being.The NRAs old slogan of guns dont kill people, people kill people is widely mocked in liberal circles, but it makes just as much sense as drug legalization to lots of people. The desire to protect oneself and ones loved ones is not inherently reactionary. Arming the people has been a common demand of many revolutions and this countrys gun control laws were largely a response to the sight of Black Panthers going on armed patrols to confront police brutality. Anti-gun groups seem to view bigotry and brutality as inevitable forces among Americans who can only be made less dangerous by taking guns out of their handsunless they work for the state. The problem is that US military and law enforcement institutions are historic engines of both racism and violence. The silence of gun control advocates regarding the growing supply of high-tech weapons to cops and soldiers, or the regular shootings of police against unarmed African Americans or soldiers against unarmed foreign civilians, is deafening.There is not a simple one-to-one relationship between the issue of guns in America and racism in America, but they are deeply connected. As long as the former is discussed in isolation from the latter, the debate will continue to be a useless counterposing of the abstract values of self-defense and nonviolence as if we all have to choose one or the other.The abortion debate differs from gun control in that the two sides more clearly align with the politics of the left (womens liberation, individual rights) and the right (state control, being pricks). But the feminist groups inside the Democratic Party gave up control of the message so long ago that we now have a lopsided debate in which one side shouts that abortion is murder and the other says its... complicated. This is how Obama put it in 2008 when he was campaigning for womens votes. I dont think youre ever going to get a complete agreement on this issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then I cant change your mind.Really? Because the other side has been changing lots of peoples minds in recent years. Polls show that for the first time in decades a minority of Americans identify themselves as pro-choice. Its a travesty because abortion is not actually such a complex philosophical debate. Of course some sort of life begins with a fertilized egg. The whole reason its awesome to ponder that a thinking, feeling human being develops from that microscopic little thing is that the two are NOT THE SAME THING.If you try to pretend that they are, then youre quickly forced to accept an even crazier idea: that the one in three women who terminate a pregnancy at some point in their lives are murderers. Of their own children. If this were actually true, it would alter the experience of childhood for all those lucky enough to escape their mothers homicidal instincts in the womb: Let me take out that garbage for you, Mom! I dont know why Jason isnt helping. If you to decide to murder one of us it would definitely be Jason, right? This woman-hating might makes sense to those who spend their days reading Old Testament stories of demonic harlots and temptresses, but the anti-abortion crowd understands how to employ some gentler arguments to reach out beyond the hard core. The only weakness of these arguments is that they also dont make sense. Take for example, abortion changes you. The is the name of a pseudo-counseling service whose ads show people with their heads in their hands and other very sad poses to demonstrate how theyve been changed by having an abortion. According to these folks, if you really dont want your life to change, have a baby. With that type of advice its not exactly shocking that the groups homepage warns this site is not a professional counseling site.Then there was the infamous 2010 Super Bowl spot with then college star Tim Tebow and his mother, who chose to continue her risky pregnancy against the advice of doctors. The ad, paid for by Focus on the Family, attracted controversy because many felt that our countrys most sacred holiday was not the place for Christian extremism. Not enough was made of the silliness of the ads main message: An abortion would have prevented Tim Tebow from being born and leading the Florida Gators to a national championship. (Shouldnt this make fans of Florida State, Alabama, and Tennessee pro-abortion?)There are countless things besides an abortion that could have prevented Tim from being born. If his parents had sex in a different position, a different sperm with different DNA (like that for a better throwing arm) might have made it to the egg. How about if the Tebows had never met? What if events led Tims ancestors to come to this country because of wars or famines in the Old World? Should we celebrate these tragedies since they eventually led to the birth of Tim Tebow? Using this logic, I can proudly claim that if it werent for the Nazi Holocaust, I would never have been bornalthough Im not sure if my mother would to do that ad with me.It may be satisfying to poke holes in the logic of pro-life (Warning: this label does not apply to those suffering loss of life from the US war machine, criminal justice system, extreme poverty, or workplace accident). But that worldview is mainstream while pro-choice Democrats are so reluctant to even say the word abortion that most people under thirty have only heard it publicly spoken by the people holding up doctored photos.Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University have done studies in recent years showing that Fox News viewers are less informed about current events than those who dont watch the news at all. Its self-evident that a news show that makes you stupider is not news at all but propaganda. We can say the same thing about elections that allow us a choice within the narrow boundaries of acceptable opinion to a ruling class that is growing meaner, crazier, and more ignorant every four years.On the bright side, I guess its a good thing that parents like me are so bad at getting our kids to fall for the false-choice scam. We might ruin them long before the politicians ever get a crack at it.In the style of Short Round screaming Indy! Cover your heart! in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Note to younger readers: that strange little man from this years primaries was once the Republican Speaker of the House. My apologies to the cartoonist, by the way, whose name I couldnt find. If youre reading this, take revenge by sending me your name and then getting so many people to buy this book that it has a paperback run in which I will humiliatingly issue an apology. The mandate in the health care bill is a kind of bailout in advance for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that make massive profits today but have an unsustainable business model of bleeding employers and employees alike into bankruptcy. For what its worth, MSNBC viewers came in second to last. Chapter 7 Why We Buy In Let me apologize. When I referred to Fox News as propaganda at the end of the last chapter, I meant no disrespect to propaganda, which simply means the deliberate spreading of ideas or information to help or harm one side of a conflict. Propaganda is inevitable and even useful, provided it stays clear of lies, bigotry, and Sean Hannity.Nevertheless, the word makes most of us think of evil geniuses able to brainwash the simpletons, a common cynical perception of US politics that I emphatically do not share. If Karl Rove, David Axelrod, and other campaign managers are really such maestros, why are they barely able to convince about half of eligible voters to even show up on Election Day? Why do many of those who do vote do so not with starry-eyed enthusiasm but calculated resignation?Despite (or perhaps because of) the effort that goes into focus groups, press releases, and speech writing, most Americans despise politicians. The main focus of most campaigns is not to reverse this dynamic but to selectively enhance it, to kindle our fear and hatred of the opposition to the point that well come up with our own reasons to support their guy. American democracy has mastered the art of jujitsu, using the force of our dissatisfaction with the status quo against us by channeling it against one of the two status-quo parties and thus in support of the other. Its not an ideal arrangementIm sure our politicians would prefer to be belovedbut it has maintained stability in a country thats become a virtual kleptocracy in recent decades and thats nothing to sneeze at.Afghan good enough is reportedly a new catchphrase among Obama officials who are so desperate to get the hell out of the fiasco that is the Afghanistan occupation that they are drastically reducing the criterion of peace and stability that would allow them to claim at least partial success. Its racist and revolting, but I have a feeling its the same way our rulers view us: Schools are being closed, bridges are falling apart, those without a job have no prospects, and the overall mood of the country is angry and disillusioned, but not in a way that poses an effective threat. Not great, but American good enough. You can feel the contempt that the political class has for us in the remarkably poor quality of most campaign ads compared to those from the corporate world. Now those guys really are evil geniuses. They convinced me for two whole years that Taco Bell fare was delicious against all evidence produced by my taste buds and intestines. By contrast, think about a typical spot during campaign season. Its usually twenty seconds of creepy music and grainy black-and-white footage of the opponent followed by ten seconds of the candidate in bright sunshine with families, soldiers, dogs, and flags, either all together or in rapid succession.If Madison Avenue makes an ad like that, its going to be dripping in hipster irony that can be annoying but at least acknowledges our intelligence: You know and we know that we are trying to sell you this Whopper, so lets have some fun with this relationship. The thinking that goes into most political ads is much more primitive. Democratic consultant Carter Eskew explained to the New York Times in May 2012 the thinking behind the initial wave of general election commercials: The first ads that are run are in many ways the most important because the mind is the most open and uncluttered at that point. Its strange but I dont remember my mind feeling that empty back in May, just waiting to be filled up with the slogans of Carter Eskew and his Republican counterparts.We assume that campaign ads are effective because more and more money is spent on them each election. Could it be possible that we only think they work because the people who tout their supreme effectiveness are the campaign consultants who are paid to produce them andmore importantlythe media outlets who are paid to run them? As with most advertising, its hard to generate definitive proof about the effectiveness of political ads, but heres one piece of anecdotal evidence: everybody fucking hates them.Perhaps the massive increase in spending on political advertising simply reflects the rise of an election-industrial complex, yet another useless but self-perpetuating field section of our economy. Schools lay off teachers each year so they can hire more consultants, test prep specialists, and other administrators who produce reams of data about their own indispensability but little proof of educational improvements. Then theres the health insurance industry, which has grown astronomically by providing the non-service of denying people health care. It might be that the increasing sums spent on ads, polls, and consulting firms has bought almost nothing of value. In this case it would be a neoliberal trickle-down version of the old spoils system, which at least had the Keynesian virtue of creating working-class jobs.Imagine how much more fun campaign ads could be if they borrowed from the corporate world. Both candidates could greatly benefit from the old advertising strategy of marketing your weakness as your strength.Mitt Romney, are you worried about being portrayed as an elite billionaire far removed from ordinary problems? Dont run away from it. Embrace it! Lets have a Polo-style ad with Mitt and a crew of gorgeous young blonde women and men on a yacht, frolicking in crisp white linen shirts and drinking gin and tonics. One of the women could look seductively at Mitt and coo, I like firing people, as he confidently laughs like the goddamned captain of the universe we all would kill to be.Meanwhile, Obama could do a dynamite series of ads based on the Dos Equis most interesting man in the world campaign. Show him in Indonesia laughing with imams, in Kenya dancing with the Masai, and at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany speaking to hundred of thousands. Make us feel lucky that he chose this country to lead: I dont often run for president, but when I do...Let me throw out a few caveats. First, theres a chance that as youre reading this, everything Im saying about campaign ads will be outdated. With all the money unleashed by Citizens United, some Super PAC somewhere is bound to stumble upon a more effective way. Its like the old saying about putting a thousand monkeys with typewriters in a room, except the Super PACs will throw a lot more feces.Second, Im not saying that political ads can never have any effect. In the Wisconsin recall, for example, Scott Walker crushed Democrat Tom Barrett because he massively outspent him on advertising that cast the recall itself as an intrusion on the democratic processa great example of marketing your weakness by the man frequently called a dictator during the Madison occupation. Walkers victory led to dire pronouncements by many progressives that in the wake of Citizens United, right-wing candidates will cruise to victory after victory by filling the airwaves with Super PACfunded propaganda. In reality, its hard to measure the effectiveness of all Walkers outside money because Barrett was so lame. Even a butter knife can be deadly weapon against someone who is highly sedated or already deceased.Progressive journalist John Nichols declared the election a victory of big money over people power because of Barretts army of union member volunteers. But it doesnt matter how many people you have to spread your message if you have no message. People power is a term generally used for mass movements whose strength is drawn from the creativity and initiative of, you know, the people. That is not the way unions mobilize their members during election seasonalthough the potential is certainly there.Unions are reportedly planning to mobilize four hundred thousand members to help campaign in 2012. Even power brokers like Stephen J. Law, president of Republican Super PAC American Crossroads, are impressed. Their ability to be totally unified and focused on their message will make them ultimately the most decisive single player in the political landscape this year, Law told the New York Times . Groups like us, we dont have millions of members that we can readily deploy. We tend to be more active on the airwaves and mass communications. For all our billions of dollars, we still cant buy love.I made that last sentence up, but you get the idea. The mass participation of union members provides an element of human interaction missing from advertisements. But these interactions would be so much more effective if they were actually two-way conversations, if campaign volunteers were listening to peoples concerns and bringing them back to party headquarters where they could actually help shape the candidates platforms. But thats not how either party works. Union leaders and Democrats agree with the head of American Crossroads that the purpose of the campaign is to stay totally unified and focused on [the candidates] message and thus will reduce those four hundred thousand union volunteer house callers and phone bankers into humanoid versions of campaign ads.Long before they started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements, the two parties had mastered the marketing campaign thats worked throughout American history: culture war. For parties with only minor policy disagreements facing a public that longs to feel like it has genuine options, it pays to play up their supposedly unbridgeable gaps in values and identities. Democrats are nice; Republicans are tough. Democrats like the underdog; Republicans appreciate success. Democrats like the Beatles; Republicans like Elvis. Most of us start identifying early on with one party or another through this virtual Cosmo quiz (Are You a Red State or a Blue State?) that permeates the culture. Of course there are more substantial factors, such as which party passed labor and civil rights legislation, but the further these feats recede into ancient history, the more they also become points of identification rather than policy directions moving forward.A major exception, of course, was Obamas campaign, which gave voters who supported civil rights the chance to actually advance them by electing an African American president. Republicans are still pissed about this advantage Obama had because hes black, and you have to admit they have a point. History shows that its been super easy for African Americans to become president of the United States.
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