Yet Another Picture of the Week Plus A Rant

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Blue Monday - Click on Picture for larger image.

 

My partner here at Hoggers, John Ballard, sent me this link to a piece by Robert Parry: Why Obama Is Failing.

Faced with a dire financial crisis and
two foreign wars � not to mention a host of long-festering problems
like health care, the environment, debt and de-industrialization �
Obama�s choice was not an easy one.

If he took the populist route and further panicked the financial
markets, the nation and the world might have plunged into a new
Depression with massive unemployment.

There
were also political dangers if he chose the populist path. The national
news media rests almost entirely in the hands of corporate �centrists�
and right-wing ideologues, who would have framed the issues in the most
negative way, blaming the �radical� Obama for �wealth destroying.�

This
media problem dates back a quarter century as American progressives
have mostly turned a deaf ear to those calling for a major investment
in media and other institutions inside the Washington Beltway, as a way
to counter the dominance of the Right and the Establishment.

So, if Obama had nationalized one or more of the major banks, the stock
market would likely have dived � even more than it did in early 2009.
And there would have been lots of commentary about the inexperienced
and inept Obama making matters worse.

He
would have confronted media denunciations as a �socialist� or worse.
The CNBC �free-market� crowd, led by Larry Kudlow, would have used
their influential forum to rally the business sector; Fox News would
have cited nationalization as proof they were right about the
�communist� Obama; Washington Post editorials would have chastised him.

A new Depression might well have been pinned on Obama.

There's much more and go read the entire thing.  He's right about the media but misses a very important point.  The State of California has a fiscal crisis because the State has been made ungovernable as the result of several Grover Norquist country club Republican sponsored ballot measures that require a super majority to do anything.  As James Fallows explains the filibuster now has the same impact on the US government. 

The history here is well known to everyone interested in politics but
worth summarizing. For most of the first 190 years of the country's
operation, U.S. Senators would, in unusual circumstances, try to delay
a vote on measures they opposed by "filibustering" -- talking without
limit or using other stalling techniques. For most of those years, the
Senate could cut off the filibuster and force a vote by imposing
"cloture," which took a two-thirds majority of those voting (at most 67
of 100 Senators). In 1975, the Senate adopted a rules change to allow
cloture with 60 votes, and those are the rules that still prevail.

The significant thing about filibusters through most of U.S. history is that they hardly ever happened.
But since roughly the early Clinton years, the threat of filibuster has
gone from exception to routine, for legislation and appointments alike,
with the result that doing practically anything takes not 51 but 60
votes.

So taken for granted is the change that the nation's leading
paper can off-handedly say that 60 votes are "needed to pass their
bill." In practice that's correct, but the aberrational nature of this
change should not be overlooked. (The Washington Post's comparable story is more precise: "A bloc of 60 votes is the exact number required to choke off the filibuster, the Senate minority's primary source of power, and the GOP's best hope of defeating the bill.")

The filibuster was a valuable fail safe but now that the country has become so polarized politically it has made it virtually impossible to accomplish much on anything.  Most significant is it makes it virtually impossible to do anything that would upset the status quo. So what is the status quo?  The system that allows the corporatocracy to retain the real decision making power.  If Obama ever had any intention of making real change the deck was stacked against him.  He is a pragmatic politician who realized the banksters and Wall Street had incredible power so their friends became his economic team.  He realized the Military Industrial Complex had incredible power so there must be war.  He realized the Insurance Industry had incredible power so single payer was never an option and public plan was never more than a campaign slogan. 

There is an "F" word that is interchangeable with corporatocracy and we are closer to Fascist country than ever before.    

This is a Blue Monday - not the first and not the last.

Update

Krugman weighs in on the filibuster: A Dangerous Dysfunction

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put
health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this
would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major
changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a
filibuster � a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution,
but is simply a self-imposed rule � turned what should have been a
straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a
handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.