Check out Adele Stein's profile of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and its leaders, Teaching Democrats 'How to Fight': PCCC's Adam Green & Stephanie TaylorAlternet 02/03/2011. It's a look at an important piece of the "ground game" that Democrats who want to move the Party in a more progressive direction are running. Describing Adam Green, she writes:
Green's evolution from "being a Democratic hack to being more of a progressive movement person" originated in work he did for the party on the 2002 senatorial campaign of Tim Johnson in South Dakota, for which Green served as press secretary. It was there he saw the power of economic populism work for his candidate.
At one point in the campaign, Green says, a big agribusiness firm took out ads against Johnson -- who had a record of supporting family farms -- in every daily newspaper in the state. And Johnson decided to fight back aggressively.
"And there was a key moment where there was a press event at a local library, that was just flooded with all these local people in cowboy hats," Green recalls. "And there was this one guy who gets up there, and he's like, 'Look around this room. Look at all these cowboy hats. Pretty much every one of us is a Republican. But we're standing with Tim Johnson because he fighting for us for our economic interests and our family farms.' And I was like, huh, I mean, these are all people who are very pro-life, very pro-gun, and went to church every week -- culturally conservative -- but by being willing to pick the fight on economic populism issues, this Democrat was able to get their support. And if he hadn't, the only contrast in the race would have been on these cultural divide issues, and he would have lost."
Neoliberal economic policies and the warfare state are not the direction the United States needs to be going. And if either of the two major parties are going to exert real leadership to move in a more constructive direction, it will be the Democrats. It's efforts like that of the PCCC that are needed to get us there.
Robert Parry, who has done extensive reporting on the dark sides of St. Reagan's Administration, summarizes Reagan's legacy in Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time BombsConsortium News 01/28/2011:
... Reagan’s current historical reputation rests more on the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda machine – and the timidity of many Democrats and media personalities – than on his actual record of accomplishments.
Indeed, many of today’s worst national and international problems can be traced to misjudgments and malfeasance from the Reagan years – from the swelling national debt to out-of-control banks, from the decline of the U.S. middle class to the inaction on energy independence, from the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
He also notes two aspects of Reagan's legacy that don't get sufficient attention in the popular press reports: his attempts to politicize the CIA and his concentrated efforts to co-opt the mainstream press by getting them to absorb Republican narratives. On the latter he writes:
... well-financed right-wing operatives and administration officials worked to marginalize mainstream journalists (the "liberal press") who raised troublesome questions about Reagan's domestic and foreign policies.
The impact of these information strategies [toward the CIA and the press] had deadly consequences even years later, such as when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney essentially dictated the intelligence "analysis" on Iraq’s WMD to the CIA and the Washington press corps fell in line behind the march to war.
Even today, President Barack Obama complains that his options for addressing the nation's growing problems are limited by what he calls the Reagan "narrative," demonizing government.
Beck's new world-conspiracy theories are negligible in terms of their truth-value. It is a sad example of a classical political-paranoid conspiracy theory, more unhinged from reality than a lot of them.
But FOX News has been generally hostile to the democratic movement in Egypt in its propaganda "reporting". This is notably different from the position a lot of the hawkish neoconservatives have been taking, a difference referenced in Amato's post title. Sen. John McCain and star pundit David "Bobo" Brooks are two examples of people who follow the neocon line of thinking who are being cautiously supportive of the Egyptian democratic movement in their statements.
Daniel Luban has a good discussion of the neoconservatives' departing from the usual positions they taking closely conforming to the hard-right line of the Israeli Likud Party: Whither the Neocons?LobeLog Foreign Policy 02/01/2011. He frames the matter this way:
Neoconservative claims to be ardent democracy promoters have always been met with well-deserved skepticism. Despite a great deal of high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, the movement has largely continued to abide by the framework set forth in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards”: hostile dictators bad, friendly dictators good, and democratization worthwhile only so far as it replaces rivals with allies. Egypt itself has served as a good example of this tendency, as the Bush administration quickly abandoned its “freedom agenda” in 2005-6 once it became clear that free and fair elections might very well bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. (Palestine was an even more striking example, as that pious democracy promoter Elliott Abrams helped launch a failed coup against Hamas after they won elections in 2006.) Still, it may be unfair to see the neocons’ support for democracy promotion as purely a cynical cover for other geopolitical goals. It is far from inconceivable that after reciting the pro-democracy script for so long, some neocons have genuinely come to believe it. [my emphasis]
But he advises not putting great hopes on the neocons' reverence for democracy:
In fact, many of the neocons appear unable even to deal with the possibility of a government led by Mohamed ElBaradei, who is about as much of a liberal secularist as the US could realistically hope for. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer is suggesting that the US's "ultimate objective" should be keeping the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, and that "arranging for a transition to a secular moderate regime" — note the absence of the qualifier "democratic" — "is our number one priority." One can easily anticipate a scenario in which US support for Egyptian democracy proves to be largely empty rhetoric, as it did during Bush's second term. [my emphasis]
It's also important to keep in mind that the neocons are used to playing the long game. Every since the Gulf War of 1991, the neocons wanted to have another war against Iraq. It took them until 2003 to get it. In the interim, they supported the US intervention in the Balkans and the humanitarian, pro-democracy justifications that were used for it. John McCain was one of them, while a number of Republicans in Congress, including then-Majority Leader of the Senate Republicans, Trent Lott, opposed the Clinton Administration's war policy. For better or worse, the neocons support of the US/NATO interventions in the Balkan Wars helped create the climate for what support was there later for invading Iraq.
Iran is the next war on which most of the neocons are focusing. And I suspect that's part of what is at work here. Seeing some kind of change in Egypt as inevitable - and is already taking place for the short run - the neocons surely must realize that encouraging "regime change" in Egypt can help lay the groundwork for promoting regime change in Iran, both by subversion and sabotage and eventually by an American invasion.
Not all the neocons are in agreement over the current revolutionary situation in Egypt. Jack Ross at the Old Right isolationist site Right Web writes on the differences in Whither the Party Line on Egypt? 02/01/2011. Frank Gaffney, Caroline Glick, Thomas Joscelyn and Clifford May, Ron Radosh are instances of neocons who have reflected the main FOX News position of worrying about the takeover of the supposedly very, very scary Muslim Brotherhood.
I'm just very wary of neocons talking about their support for democracy abroad. Their basic outlook is essentially on of raw power politics, and their intellectual guru Leo Strauss famously urged deception on the part of enlightened elite - which is how the neocons see themselves - in promoting their more unpopular policies. I have big reservations about some of the "democracy promotion" programs that even some genuine liberals favor in the name of strengthening civil society. When a country like the United States funds an opposition movement in another country, they expect a return on their investment. And such subsidies not only put the beneficiaries at risk of being nailed for subversion. In many countries, having financial ties to the US revealed can greatly discredit pro-democracy organizations.
As the Egyptian upheaval is reminding us right now, the ability of the United States to steer political events in other countries is actually very limited. But efforts to do so by subsidizing or arming opposition groups have the potential to set off far-reaching reactions against the United States.
The best achievement of Ronald Reagan's Presidency was the new beginning he made with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control during the latter part of his second term in office.
But a large part of the reason it was such a significant achievement is that it (partially) reversed the course on which he had put the country and the world during his first Administration. The Carter Administration had negotiated the SALT II Treaty, which Reagan opposed during the 1980 campaign. Although Reagan never pushed Congress to ratify it during his Presidency, he did agree to abide by the terms of the treaty.
On the other hand, he started a huge military buildup, including nuclear arms - large at least by the standards of that time. As Andrew Bacevich recently reminded us, "The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a 'peer competitor'"! (Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains UntouchableTom Dispatch 01/27/2011)
Reagan also kicked off a major push for what may literally be the single largest boondoggle project in the history of humanity: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),or Star Wars as it came to be known, "missile defense" in current jargon. In Reagan's original conception, the US would create a missile defense shield based on a combination of rockets and laser beams based on satellites and the ground that could reliably block all incoming Soviet rockets if a nuclear war broke out. For a brief description and timeline of the project up to 1998, see Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), The Fifteenth Anniversary of "Star Wars"Global Security 03/17/1998; also from UCS US Ballistic Missile Defense Timeline: 1945-2008 11/24/09.
There were two basic problems with the program which were widely recognized by experts in the field from the very beginning. One was that it wouldn't work, at least not at any cost the United States could manage, even assuming (as Reagan's Administration did in practice) that deficits were no obstacle; the missile shield was expensive, but countermeasures for the other side were relatively cheap. The other was that it would destabilize the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union; the nuclear balance of terror was based on the appropriately named doctrine of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and anti-missile defenses were incompatible with it. Gary Guethner's article from that time, Strategic Defense: New Technologies, Old TacticsParameters Autumn 1985, discusses the issues involved.
But the project proceeded, to the great profit of the military-industrial complex.
Star Wars remains a boondoggle to this day, as Pavel Podwig explains in The false promise of missile defenseBulletin of the Atomic Scientists 09/14/2011.
Reagan's turnaround on nuclear arms control, interestingly enough, may have been influenced by the left-leaning peace groups of which he was part in the years just after the Second World War. Nancy Reagan also pushed him to get something down on arms control during his second term so that he could leave some clear peace legacy. Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione summarizes his arms-control legacy in Reagan the AbolitionistHuffington Post 03/03/2011:
He and Mikhail Gorbachev famously discussed abolishing all nuclear weapons at their 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two leaders came very close but failed to reach agreement on a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons within ten years. Their talks, however, paved the way for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 that eliminated all of the thousands of medium- and intermediate-range US and Russian nuclear missiles that threatened Europe. To this day, neither nation has nuclear weapons of these ranges, and several experts would like to take this treaty global, eliminating these missiles from the few other nations that have them.
Reagan outlined his views on an INF treaty in a speech three years before Reykjavik, concluding: "I support a zero option for all nuclear arms. As I've said before, my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."
Sadly, he was never able to sign a comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons, but Reagan did establish a framework for mutual and verifiable reductions -- through the INF treaty and original START treaty -- that the United States and Russia continue to this day.
The Iran-Contra scandal was the event that detracted the most from Ronald Reagan's image during his Presidency, though his hardcore admirers enthusiastically supported the controversial operations involved. This report from the National Security Archives has a good general summary and many links to more recently available documents, The Iran-Contra Affair 20 Years On 11/24/2006:
On November 25, 1986, the biggest political and constitutional scandal since Watergate exploded in Washington when President Ronald Reagan told a packed White House news conference that funds derived from covert arms deals with the Islamic Republic of Iran had been diverted to buy weapons for the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
In the weeks leading up to this shocking admission, news reports had exposed the U.S. role in both the Iran deals and the secret support for the Contras, but Reagan's announcement, in which he named two subordinates -- National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter and NSC staffer Oliver L. North -- as the responsible parties, was the first to link the two operations.
The scandal was almost the undoing of the Teflon President. Of all the revelations that emerged, the most galling for the American public was the president's abandonment of the long-standing policy against dealing with terrorists, which Reagan repeatedly denied doing in spite of overwhelming evidence that made it appear he was simply lying to cover up the story.
Despite the damage to his image, the president arguably got off easy, escaping the ultimate political sanction of impeachment. From what is now known from documents and testimony -- but perhaps not widely appreciated -- while Reagan may not have known about the diversion or certain other details of the operations being carried out in his name, he directed that both support for the Contras (whom he ordered to be kept together "body and soul") and the arms-for-hostages deals go forward, and was at least privy to other actions that were no less significant. [my emphasis]
From St. Reagan's address to the nation in which he admits having "traded arms for hostages":
The Federation of American Scientists, a great resource for a lot of things like this, has a copy of The "Walsh Report", the final report from Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. It's formal title is Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters 08/04/1993.
Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney's Iran-Contra defense would provide to be a significant step onto the road that took the United States into invading Iran and directly employing sadistic torture as a terror measure in foreign policy.
Paul Krugman reviewed the record succinctly a few years ago in Republicans and RaceNew York Times 11/19/2007.
St. Reagan pursued the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon eagerly, which included using race-baiting. The episode mentioned most often is his speech in Mississippi expressing his support for "state rights", which in the Deep South's political jargon meant support for segregationist ideas and attitudes. He also reminds us of this:
There are many other examples of Reagan's tacit race-baiting in the historical record. ... During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a "strapping young buck" buying T-bone steaks.
In a more recent assessment, The divisive underbelly of Reagan's sunny optimismSalon 02/03/2011, historian Matthew Dallek describes how St. Reagan used race and other culture-war issues to polarize voters in his favor:
Throughout his three decades in political life, he repeatedly seized on people's hopes, but also found their anger and played on their fears. In Reagan's lexicon, optimism competed with anger.
For instance, while he spoke of unleashing Californians' individual initiative during his first 1966 gubernatorial campaign, he also tapped voters' fears that the social order was beginning to crumble and that liberals and their allies had caused the crumbling. He campaigned by charging that "a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" had "brought shame" to the University of California at Berkeley, an elite, publicly funded school in the state's higher education system. Describing California's city streets as "jungle paths after dark" and college campuses as hotbeds of sexual licentiousness and immoral behavior, Reagan rode to power by depicting California as an overly liberal, permissive society. He vowed to crack down as one of his first priorities in the governor's mansion. Appropriately, he had a sign in his capitol office that said: "Obey the rules, or get out."
Nor was Reagan above using the hot-button social issue of race to further his political agenda by tacking rightward. At one news conference during his campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Reagan refused to criticize Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who had become a leading symbol of segregation and white Southern resistance to the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s.
As president, Reagan mocked "welfare queens," implying that African-American women on public assistance habitually cheated taxpayers out of their hard-earned money. President Reagan also defended segregation academies such as Bob Jones University (where interracial dating wasn't allowed)... [my emphasis]
I've been impressed with the analyses by David Bromwich that I've seen in the London Review of Books. He has out an evaluation of Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address, in which he set his initial approach to the next two years of his Presidency, in Obama, IncorporatedNYR Blog 01/28/2011. His basic take on how Obama is positioning himself as shown by the SOTU can be summed in the sentence I quote in the title, "By offering himself as the rational corporate alternative to the Tea Party, Obama is taking a tremendous gamble, but with his party's fortunes more than his own." He elaborates:
The 2011 State of the Union was Obama’s first rhetorical step to seal his new reputation as an anti-government Democrat. It has been said that, facing a determined and hostile Congress, Obama had no choice but to placate and again extol the virtues of bipartisanship. Certainly this was not a moment when he could pretend to speak for liberal reforms. What is surprising is the warmth with which he has embraced the premises of his opponents: in matters affecting public life and the economy, government is now said to be the problem, and private enterprise the solution; and far from deregulation having been a major cause of the financial collapse, the way to a healthy economy now lies through further deregulation. This rhetorical concession, adopted as a tactic, will turn against Obama as a strategy. The enormous budget cuts, for example, which he volunteered to make yet steeper will work against the ventures in job-creation which he has asked for without giving particulars. [my emphasis]
It's hard to argue with Bromwich's judgment, "Every advance that he makes on these lines as a gain to himself is a loss to his party."
He is a critic of Obama's apparent inclination to compromise too quickly, and when the negotiating situation doesn't require it:
Two traits we may now judge to be conspicuous in this president, in fair weather and foul, no matter what the pressure of the occasion. He rarely explains complex matters with a complexity equal to the subject matter; and he hates to be a bearer of bad news. The appreciative words he lavished on the big corporations in November, December, and January, and his appointment of William Daley of Morgan Chase as chief of staff and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric as chairman of his White House jobs council, also indicate a larger personal tendency. When things are not going his way, Barack Obama tacks the other way farther and faster than most people would. In the process, he speaks words which sound like statements of newfound principles, for which he will not be answerable when the winds shift again. [my emphasis]
Bromwich notes Obama's equivocation on immigration reform:
On immigration, another issue of the mid-term election in which Obama’s liberal position was unpopular, he has gently instructed Congress to conduct a polite debate and try to be decent to honest and hard-working immigrants. He did say children of immigrants, including illegals, hard-working or not, should have equal access to education without "the threat of deportation." And he suggested that foreigners who came here to get advanced degrees should be allowed to stay. But he made no mention of the Dream Act, or any specific policy that would achieve such goals.
The broad meaning of these offsetting trends is clear: with almost no notice to Congress, the American people, various public interest and local law enforcement groups, the Obama administration has implemented a very substantial shift in how it is enforcing federal laws. Four short years ago, slightly more than one-third (36 percent) of federal felony prosecutions were in the five federal districts along the southwest border, while almost two-thirds (64 percent) took place in the rest of the country. Now, while still less than 10 percent of the population lives in those border districts, almost half (47 percent) of all federal felony prosecutions occur there. ...
That left all 89 remaining federal districts — despite having more than 90 percent of the federal population — with only slightly more than half of the federal felony prosecution pie. And because a growing proportion of this declining enforcement effort is focused on immigration matters, there is less and less left over for prosecuting those who are committing all the other types of serious federal crimes. [my emphasis]
Bromwich also addresses Obama's increasingly painful devotion to an illusory "post-partisan" state of things:
Obama wants to win, but he would also like nobody to lose, and he has coined some words to express his difference from the more agonistic proponents of American supremacy. ... "By 2035, 80 percent of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources." All the producers and all the consumers can be happy together: "Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal, and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all." All those folks, and all their energies. But at what time, in what place, was the central problem of nuclear energy solved: where to dump the radioactive waste that is lethal for thousands of years? ...
It remains a disturbing evasion in his presidency that Obama has hardly recognized the Tea Party’s existence, and has never attempted to answer its members—-not even where they are most deeply and harmfully mistaken, as in the belief they have taken up that global warming is a "hoax." He prefers to keep the political contest a face-off between his own abstract legitimacy and a nameless and inscrutable heterodoxy. [my emphasis]
California's Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed an ambitious plan to close the state's $25 billion budget gap for the 2011-12 budget year beginning in July. The key political strategy behind it is to call the Republicans on the scam they're been running for decades, always preaching that voters can get tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, while imagining that any cutbacks in state service won't discomfort them.
He's proposed to close the budget gap with $5 billion in one-time funding, which apparently is directed toward non-continuing expenses. He's proposed funding half the deficit by specific program cuts he's proposed and the other half by extending temporary taxes that would expire this year. Consistent with the campaign promise not to raise taxes without a vote of the people, he's asking the legislature to put those proposals on the June ballot. Along with all that, he's proposing a big reorganization that would put more of the funding of local services back with the localities. Ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the state has been funding large portions of the local services.
He's put out his proposal and is pressing the legislature hard to enact it, including approving the ballot measure. He has said that if the revenue measures don't pass, then we can double the cuts already proposed to get an idea of how services would be affected. But he's refused to be more specific, because he says he doesn't want to look like his blackmailing the voters over the tax extensions. The Republicans are so far opposing the ballot measures by repeating "tax increase" over and over. But Jerry is putting them on the spot and challenging them to put up or shut up over what cuts they would propose making for the $10 billion that he proposes to be financed by the tax extensions, which really are an extension of current temporary tax rates.
The Republicans, of course, will neither put up nor shut up. They are trying to keep the scam going. But Jerry's challenge to them is fairly easy for voters to understand: I'm being up-front with you about the solutions I see, and I'm asking the voters to approve the tax part just like I promised. The Republicans are being up-front because they are opposing the revenue half of my plan and saying they want more cuts but they won't tell you what they propose to cut.
Even if the ballot measures lose, Jerry's own credibility will be enhanced. And the process itself begins to reset the anti-tax, anti-government narrative for a lot of people. It also takes full account of the fact that California is a semi-- plebisitary democracy with all the initiative and referenda measures on which we vote every year. So he's treating the voters like partners in this, rather than ducking the tax issue like the plague the way Democrats have taken to doing.
$25.4 billion deficit through a mix of cuts and tax extensions, said Republicans who oppose a ballot measure to extend temporary tax increases have not given him a list of demands in their negotiations.
He invited Republicans to release an "all-cuts" budget that could be required if tax extensions are not approved, saying, "Is it really fair and honest to keep that secret?"
But Brown himself, fearful of being seen as threatening to voters, won't release such a document himself.
"It's so horrible that we don't like to release it," he said.
He's has been taking some actions that are mostly symbolic but resonate well with the messaging of efficiecy and responsible government. He is cutting down the number of state-funded cell phones for state employees. And reducing the state vehicle fleet. His press release on the latter, Governor Brown Orders Immediate State Car Cutback 01/28/2011, he says:
Brown said his goal is to halve the number of the state’s passenger cars, trucks and home storage permits - which allow state employees to use passenger cars for their daily commute.
"Fifty percent is a starting point. If we find more waste, we’ll make more cuts," Brown added.
This is one of the most common complaints about public employees, one that has been circulating forever, it seems. "Why, ole Fred that lives on my block, he has a state car and he drives that around all the time for personal use." I've always suspected that if it were possible to investigate a representative sample of those complaints, a large portion of them would be groundless or greatly exaggerated. But by taking on a problem that is embedded in popular folklore (however great or small it may be in reality), Brown is taking a tangible action that people can understand. And who is going to object to cutting down on excessive use of state vehicles?
The legislature has to make a decision on the ballot measures by March for them to appear on the June ballot.
This is quite an interesting presentation by Bill Clinton at the Davos World Economic Forum last week. At around 29:30, he says, "I think what America needs as much as anything else is to stop conducting its politics in a parallel universe divorced from reality with no facts."
At around 35:00 and following, he elaborates on what he means by a "parallel universe". He's very critical of the way the Democratic Party handled the Congressional campaign of 2010.
Here I just wanted to excerpt some of the most substantial commentary I've seen on the situation in Egypt. For ongoing news, among others I would recommend Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, Helena Cobban's Just World News, and the excellent reporting of The Independent's Robert Fisk.
Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S. administration has operated on the assumption that the United States, with Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position in the Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of unrelenting pressure on all those "rogue" regimes and parties in the region which have resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme expression of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United States and Israel could establish pro-Western regime in Iraq as the base from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from any of their remaining adversaries in the region.
But since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare in one country after another.
In fact, this is one of those fortunate moments when the United States does not face a clear tradeoff between its moral sympathies and its strategic imperatives. For starters, Egypt is not a major oil producer like Saudi Arabia, so a shift in regime in Cairo will not imperil our vital interest in ensuring that Middle East oil continues to flow to world markets. By itself, in fact, Egypt isn't a critical strategic partner. Yes, military bases there can be useful transit points when we intervene in the region, but the United States has other alternatives and military intervention isn't something we should be eager to do anyway (remember Iraq?). Egypt is not as influential in the Arab world as it once was, in part due to the social and economic stagnation that has characterized the Mubarak era, and its recent efforts to mediate several on-going disputes have been unsuccessful. Furthermore, U.S. support for dictators like Mubarak has been one of al Qaeda's major reasons for targeting the United States, as well as a useful recruiting tool (along with our unstinting support for Israel and our military presence in the Gulf). It is also one of the main reasons why many Arabs have a negative view of the United States. Viewed strictly on its own, the U.S. alliance with Egypt has become a strategic liability.
There is no need to strain the analogy. Iran and Egypt were and are very different places, with very different political dynamics. But the fundamental nature of the decision that is required today by the United States is not very different from the dilemma faced by the Carter administration three decades ago. Should you back the regime to the hilt, in the conviction that a change of leadership would likely endanger your most precious security interests? Or should you side with the opposition -- either because you agree with its goals or simply because you want to be on the "right side of history" (and in a better position to pursue your policy objectives) once the dust has settled? ...
Revolutions are inherently unpredictable. They may fizzle or subside in the face of sustained regime oppression. They may inspire a hard line military man to "restore order" and perhaps thereby elevate himself into a position of political authority that he is later loathe to relinquish. They may propel a determined radical fringe into power and thereby impose an ideology that has nothing to do with what people thought they were fighting for. They may go on far longer than anyone imagined at the start.
Bob Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005) and no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood (to put it mildly!) Who's Behind Egypt's Revolt?The Nation 01/31/2011:
Let's look at the emerging coalition, in its parts.
First, by all accounts, is the April 6 Youth Movement. Leftists, socialists and pro-labor people know that the movement takes its name from April 6, 2008, when a series of strikes and labor actions by textile workers in Mahalla led to a growing general strike by workers and residents and then, on April 6, faced a brutal crackdown by security forces. A second, allied movement of young Egyptians developed in response to the killing by police of Khaled Said, a university graduate, in Alexandria. Both the April 6 group and another group, called We Are All Khaled Said, built networks through Facebook, and according to one account the April 6 group has more than 80,000 members on Facebook. The two groups, which work together, are nearly entirely secular, pro-labor and support the overthrow of Mubarak and the creation of a democratic republic.
The leader of the April 6 movement is Ahmad Maher, a 28-year-old construction engineer who was profiled last week in the Los Angeles Times. Well-wired and Internet-connected, Maher told the paper: "After the revolution in Tunisia, we are able to market the idea of change in Egypt. People now want to seize something." A year ago, when ElBaradei returned to Egypt, Maher was inspired to organize a movement of young, secular, and pro-labor Egyptians. "Maher began reaching out to secular grass-roots and student movements emerging to reform a nation they believed had substituted oppression for vision," reported the LA Times. "Momentum was slow to build, particularly enlisting Egypt's increasing band of labor activists representing millions of underpaid workers."
California Gov. Jerry Brown gave his own State of the State speech yesterday. The prepared text is here.
He emphasized the serious of the state's budget crisis, promoted his own plan to plug the $25 billion budget deficit for fiscal 2011-12 (starting in July), and pressed the Republicans to stop being simple obstructionists. He gave a hint of how seriously he views the state of national politics right now:
This is not a time for politics as usual. The stakes are too high. Our overall financial system, which came close to absolute breakdown, has not fully stabilized. Where we go from here—either more austerity or more stimulus—is hotly contested. Even the cause of the mortgage meltdown remains in dispute.
Voters are clearly telling us that our state and our nation are going in the wrong direction. Yet, our two main political parties both in Washington and in California are as far apart as I have ever seen them. Still, I know that politics is at the heart of democracy. It is the essence of our structure of freedom and the way in which we as a people make our collective decisions. We owe it to ourselves and to our forebears—and to our children--to rise to this occasion, do what is right and regain the public's trust. Kicking the can down the road, by not owning an honest budget, is simply out of the question. [my emphasis]
In this case, "kicking the can down the road" would essentially mean borrowing at high interest rates, which wouldn't adjust permanent spending to revenues and which would increase the already too-high level of interest payments as a portion of the annual state budget.
Jerry's budget plan for the $25 billion calls for using one-time funding for $5 billion of presumably temporary expenses, $$10 billion in programs cuts he has specified, and extension of some current taxes (enacted as temporary) for additional years. The latter will require a statewide vote, consistent with Jerry's campaign promise not to raise taxes without voter approval. California is a semi-plebisitary democracy, with initiatives and referenda put to a statewide vote setting major policies on taxes and spending.
The Republicans are so playing their usual wrecker role and trying to block the legislature from putting the revenue measures on the June ballot. Jerry addressed them:
The times call out for vision and for discipline. Discipline so that we live within the revenue which the state collects each year, and Vision so that we rise above mere party, act as Californians first, and put our trust in the people.
Under our form of government, it would be unconscionable to tell the electors of this state that they have no right to decide whether it is better to extend current tax statutes another five years or chop another $12 billion out of schools, public safety, our universities and our system of caring for the most vulnerable.
Let me read to you, Article 2, Section 1 of the California Constitution: "All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their protection, security and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform it when the public good may require."
When democratic ideals and calls for the right to vote are stirring the imagination of young people in Egypt and Tunisia and other parts of the world, we in California can't say now is the time to block a vote of the people. In the ordinary course of things, matters of state concern are properly handled in Sacramento. But when the elected representatives find themselves bogged down by deep differences which divide them, the only way forward is to go back to the people and seek their guidance. It is time for a legislative check-in with the people of California. [my emphasis]
Unlike our Democratic President, Brown understands the value of fighting for something he thinks is right and losing, because he can use even a defeat to reframe the public narrative in a more Democratic direction.
And he invited the Republicans to put up or shut up, for a change:
Do I like the choices we face? No. I don't. But after serious study of the options left us by a $25 billion deficit, the budget I have proposed is the best I can devise. If any of you have other suggestions that you think are better, please, share them with us. After all, we are in this together. ...
From the time I first proposed what I believe to be a balanced approach to our budget deficit – both cuts and a temporary extension of current taxes – dozens of groups affected by one or another of the proposed cuts have said we should cut somewhere else instead. Still others say we should not extend the current taxes but let them them go away. So far, however, these same people have failed to offer even one alternative solution.
As I have said before, I have not come here to embrace delay or denial, but to get the job done. If you have solutions that are truly viable, by all means present them. We need everyone's best thinking. [my emphasis]]
He ended with an upbeat vision of what a great place California is and what a promising future it has.
Message "framing" guru George Lakoff evaluates Obama's State of the Union speech in The New Obama NarrativeTruthout 01/28/2011. He is cautious in evaluating how Obama's "competitiveness" narrative may work, though he sees some possibilities of it working well for the Democrats.
But he also sees that there is a lot missing. For instance:
He failed to say that Social Security has a 2.5 trillion dollar surplus and that it is earned, not given away. What is called a "cut" would actually be theft from those who have paid into it over a lifetime. He needs to go on the offensive on Social Security, not be defensive. The same on Medicare. He failed to mention that it works and has the lowest operating cost of any form of health care by far. He failed to say that pensions are delayed earned payments for work already done, and that the conservative move to allow states and cities to declare bankruptcy is really a move to eliminate pensions for public employees and eliminate as much of public service as possible. He failed to say that "privatization" doesn't eliminate government, but institutes government by corporation for corporate profit, not the benefit for citizens. He failed to say that should have gratitude for immigrants - with or without papers, educated or not - who work hard at low pay to make possible the lifestyles of the middle and upper classes. He failed to defend the right to unionize as the foundation of fair working relationships. [my emphasis]
I would say that Obama needs to go on the offensive in defending Social Security. But he's basically right in that statement.
In particular, as long as we have to worry about the Democratic President himself caving in on defending Social Security, the Democratic Party won't have a realistic possibility of changing the dominant political narrative in their favor. And, as Joan McCarter says of the anti-government part of Obama's new narrative (as embodied by his new chief of staff Bill Daley: "Reinforcing the Republican narrative that government is the problem doesn't do much to put the White House in a good negotiating position for getting this country back on track in job creation." (Daley's debut as White House spokesman reinforces GOP spending narrativesDaily Kos 01/31/2011)
Republicans will be using the upcoming 100th anniversary of St. Reagan's birthday February 6 to celebrate his mythological legacy. Given the strange dedication to achieving an equally mythological post-partisan state of affairs by President Obama, it's worth looking back at Candidate Obama's praise of St. Reagan. This is from his interview of January 6, 2008, with the Reno Gazette-Journal on Jan. 14:
In this video segment, Obama brags that he had been the most-requested surrogate campaigner for Democratic candidates in swing districts in the 2006 election because he is "somebody who can reach out to independents and Republicans, uh, in a way that, you know, ah, doesn't, uh, doesn't offend people". (my emphasis) I'm showing the quotes here with the kind of "uhs" and "you knows" that journalists typically edit out of quotes like these. Because they illustrate the observation David Bromwich about Obama's two kinds of diction:
Any observer of Obama realises that, by contrast, he is always slow, always circumspect, and he has two distinct registers of diction: one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who are very young or very old and certainly need remedial help. In the higher idiom he talks of a 'critique' of policy and 'trend lines' and the ways to 'incentivise' better care and 'prioritise' the next steps of government assistance to show that we are 'doing everything we can to accelerate job creation'. It is the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table. In the lower idiom, there are lots of 'folks', 'folks who oppose me', 'a whole bunch of folks', interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like 'oftentimes'. [my emphasis] (The Fastidious PresidentLondon Review of Books 11/18/2010)
In his Reno interview on the video, Obama was operating more in the second type of diction.
I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, uh, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He, he, he put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.
I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies and you know, government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. And, I think, you know, people just tapped in, he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, uh, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, and, and, you know, uh, uh, entrepreneurship that had been missing, all right?.
He says there that he thinks voters are tired of seeing the two parties "bogged down in the same arguments". He notes that the Republicans had been the Party of ideas and had challenged conventional wisdom, though he adds that their current solution for almost everything, tax cuts, can't actually solve problems like the energy issues.
It's striking now that Obama then in 2008 was promoting his value as a Democratic Party candidate and Party leader on the basis that he could appeal to independents and Republicans by speaking in a way that "doesn't offend people". Because you can't change the prevailing narrative to a more Democratic one without offending Republicans. Because to hear the we're-the-victims whining that regularly issues from Republican spokespeople and propagandists, their delicate feelings are very easily offended.
And in that 2008 statement, Obama reinforced the Republican narrative about "all the excesses of the Sixties and the Seventies" and the evils of Big Gubment. Sadly, he's still doing it today.
Robert Perry in Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan 01/19/2008 provided a reaction at the time that focused on the concept of accountability in government:
Though Obama's chief point was that Reagan in 1980 "put us on a fundamentally different path" – which may be historically undeniable – the Democratic presidential candidate went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability."
While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse Reagan's conservative policies, the Illinois senator seemed to suggest that Reagan's 1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the U.S. government. In reality, however, accountability wasn't part of Reagan’s medicine for America. Indeed, one could say the opposite. [my emphasis]
Perry goes on to talk primarily about Reagan's anti-accountability approach in foreign policy, especially his Administration's policies in Central America, which was the area in which St. Reagan let the neoconservatives run wild. Perry argues that St. Reagan's foreign policy "was one of the most brutal, most corrupt and least accountable in American history." The Cheney-Bush Administration, of course, far surpassed the Reagan Administration's in all those ways.
But he also connects Reagan's anti-accountability position to his neoliberal (to use the economics term) economic policies:
On the domestic side, Reagan oversaw the dismantling of regulatory structures that restrained the excesses of Wall Street investment banks, the energy industry and other economic powerhouses. Many of today’s problems – from the mortgage meltdown to the nation's wasteful energy policies – can be traced to Reagan's contempt for that type of accountability.
The Obama Administration's approach to accountability is far too close to that of the Reagan Administration. As Bromwich also points out:
The truth is that Obama exposed himself to the worst the Republicans can do by his conciliatory tone from the first days of his administration. He gave assurance when he entered office that he would not look exactingly into the conduct of the last administration. Bush and Cheney received from him a legal indulgence for any conceivable transgression, on the theory that after the bombings of September 2001, anything that public servants did was a hasty but honourable response to a dreadful emergency by well-meaning persons. To Obama at the time, this must have seemed a magnanimous deed as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle. Yet his decision to make justice begin today achieved a different end. It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him. It also robbed of reality all his talk of a profound commitment to justice – a justice which he had suggested went beyond considerations of bridge-building for the sake of domestic policy or national expedience. By broadening the claim of state secrets to prevent the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition, the Obama administration has lent credence to the original claim of Bush and Cheney that their actions were dictated by necessities of state. In doing so it has foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts. [my emphasis]
On the regulatory front also, this Administration's approach to accountability has been awfully permissive toward reckless financial Masters of the Universe who crashed the world economy in the financial crisis of 2008.
The full text of the recently-released Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee Report is available online. And it gives a damning account of the fecklessness of federal regulators under the Cheney-Bush Administration in the face of clear signs of serious problems in the mortgage business and the derivative securities based on mortgages.
But Obama's position on such matters is to Look Forward Not Backward. And in doing so, he passes up opportunity after opportunity to discredit the stewardship of the Republican Party during the last Administration and also to shift the general political and economic narrative toward a more Democratic-friendly viewpoint. St. Reagan was weak on accountability for his foreign policy and on accountability for reckless business practices that damaged consumers and endangered the general health of the economy. But he was very good in blaming the previous Carter Administration for all his own Administration's problems. President Obama doesn't want anything to do with that kind of accountability, either.
After all, holding people accountable isn't easy to do in a way that ""doesn't offend people" who are being held accountable.
I'm a Jacksonian Democrat - as in Andy Jackson don't-let-the-bankers-and-secessionists-take-over Democrat. Also a lifelong political junkie. One of my longtime interests has been the interaction betwee politics and religion, and I'll be doing quite a few posts on that here. I'm originally from Mississippi and have lived for years in California. So your likely to hear both Southern and West Coast references in my posts.
