Reply #12: Speak for yourself [View All]

[clear eye]

I'm a progressive who for many years has objected to and advocated reversing the structural changes the neocons made to facilitate fascism, as the #1 priority for progressives. The national director of PDA (I notice you're on their board), no longer answers my emails because I sent him a list of four important structural changes that needed to either be reversed from neocon sabotage or needed to be introduced to protect democracy due to new challenges to the system. He replied claiming that PDA was already doing these things, so I carefully rechecked all the positions on their website and press releases w/o finding any such thing. I don't believe progressives will get very far advocating for important programs, e.g. single-payer health care, w/o the changes that are needed to restore the power of the electorate. In fact, I find just advocating these popular programs that have a snowball's chance of succeeding, w/o augmenting the representative aspect of government, a form of meaningless posing. Here is the wording of the email I sent in response to that PDA official's answer to me last August:

I appreciate your taking the time to respond, but could it be you've missed the point of my message? I mentioned ending the war, health care, and economic justice as the traditional worthy issues that are being derailed by neo-con structural changes that need to be addressed before these have much chance of prevailing.

Core progressive issues like universal healthcare, economic justice, and ending wars for capitalist expansion will gain no traction without winning structural victories, despite their popular appeal. Without the structural changes, as soon as progressives approach success on an issue, a corporatist MSM will erode popular support, neocon collaborating voting machine companies will remove key Congressional supporters, and/or neocons will find a way of spending/stealing enough that corporatist MSM and politicians can claim these measures are unaffordable."

The structural issues that I'm advocating are: 1)impeachment of Bush/Cheney to set precedent re the Constitution, 2)election integrity including open source (to qualified representatives of the candidates) code on both voting & tabulating machines, and non-partisan civil service BOE's required at both state and federal levels, 3(repeal of those provisions of the current "trade" agreements that claim supremacy over national law, and 4)steps against the current consolidation of the media and re-instatement of the Fairness Doctrine, to allow non-corporatist voices and opinions on MSM.

The PDA director felt that I was no longer worth speaking to, and didn't respond.

So I don't think it is the grassroots activists and commentators (check Sirocca and Thomas Frank, for two of many progressive commentators that are well aware of the underlying problems) who are conceding all power to the Administration. It is Congress that for reasons of its own feel that they can ignore all pressure that does not come from big money interests. Organizations which are outgrowths of Congress like the PDA, and conflicted liberal commentators like Krugman have developed the habit of saying that some particular thing should be done, but then go on to claim it can't--not us. Faxes, phone calls and emails flooded Congress in unprecedented amounts before both the FISA vote and the Bailout bill, and were disregarded.

I hope your citizens' lobbying effort is successful, although I'd finetune your demands, if I were you. I know that one of the Bush administration's many erosions of our rights has been to systematically deny permits for protests, then use excessive force against the resulting "unpermitted" protestors. But even when there has been a massive outpouring of people into the streets on an issue as in the Feb. 13th, 2003 anti-war protests, our entire government has been perfectly comfortable ignoring it, and that state of affairs doesn't even prompt questions in the muzzled MSM. Rove is allowed to romp around gathering dirt on everyone in power, and instead of turning around to expose his misdeeds and jail him, these "powerful" people with few exceptions prefer to give up on the duties of their offices. I'm beginning to think citizens groups would have to hack into the bank accounts of members of Congress or hire PI's to follow them around to get effective access. (That's not a serious suggestion, in case the FBI is reading this.)

Young people decided to boost a Presidential candidate into the forefront w/ huge #'s of small donations, until they felt betrayed by his FISA vote. Instead of negotiating to regain their good graces, the candidate decided to listen to a failed mega-bank director, and recoup his funding by becoming beholden to just the interests he had claimed to eschew when he was courting college students.

So it's not as though citizens haven't been trying one avenue after another to regain some influence. Unless I misunderstand your call to action, you seem to feel that there is a 2nd $8.5T available to distribute to citizens now that we have given an equivalent amount to a handful of bastards. If that's what you are advocating, it sounds about as viable as the African-American reparations movement of 10 years ago was.

There is one thing we haven't tried--a serious list of structural reforms as well as the Bush/Cheney impeachment, billed as a "Restore the Constitution" movement, and tied to a general strike. The MSM would claim participants were crashing the economy beyond all recovery, and create wall-to-wall reporting of how much money each economic sector or large business was losing, but it would be a little less easy to pretend it wasn't happening than all former tactics were. I have to wonder if it would be the only thing that would reframe the debate. There would be huge organizational problems to overcome, especially as the gov't, and I include the Obama administration, would have the organizers arrested and prosecuted as "terrorists", and the college student contingent would matter less than working people who are much harder to organize. Right now most citizens are not particularly savvy about the implications of the Obama appointments, or the chilling effect on Congress of leaving enhanced executive "powers" in place even if they are not overtly being used much. They think it is only fair to take a wait-and-see position, and give Obama a chance to fix everything single-handedly. The reckoning won't come until the Congressional campaigns of 2010. I only hope Social Security is not largely dismantled as being "unaffordable", by then. I think we are in for "interesting" times, but I wouldn't start by attacking grassroots progressives. I wouldn't make any major generalization about them unless you have an in-depth study of self-identified progressives upon which to base it.