As the debt-ceiling talks drag on, Democratic party supporters keep getting alarmed at getting regular reports that he seems to be willing to give away the store to the Republican crazies who are clearly losing the public relations battle, and keep wondering why he seems to be such a lousy negotiator.

It is important to bear I mind what I have said repeatedly. Obama and the Democratic party leadership are not trying to get the best deal from the Republicans. They and the Republicans agree on what they want to do (cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and provide more tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations) because that is what their bosses, the oligarchy, want.

What Obama is trying to negotiate is a way to get all these things without completely alienating his party’s base. He will go as far as he can get away with. That is why all these trial balloons keep getting floated and then denied.

Those of us who follow politics closely, and think that it is important to do so for the future of ourselves and the nation and the world, tend to be frustrated by people who do not seem to care or whose understanding of politics does not rise above the most naïve and simplistic sloganeering (“Cut government spending!” “Get rid of government regulations!”, “All government is bad!”, “Lower everyone’s taxes!”, “Cut social services!”, “Eliminating foreign aid and waste will balance the budget!”). We wonder how these people, many of whom belong to the middle or lower-middle classes, cannot see that they are actually harming their own interests, by undermining the very things that make current their lives tolerable or even desirable.

Such ignorance about the reality of politics also makes them easy prey for those unscrupulous politicians who do know better but use these slogans to deflect attention from the things that affect almost everyone (such as health care, salaries and benefits, working conditions, and public and social services) to those highly emotionally-charged issues that directly affect only a small fraction of people in any tangible way (such as abortion and gay and gun rights) or are almost entirely symbolic (prayer in schools, ten commandments in public places, flag burning, etc.).

Why, we ask ourselves, don’t these people invest at least a little of the time that is devoted to Casey Anthony or sports to learning more about how society really works? One answer may lie in a disturbing new survey shows that half of America’s families are in a state known as ‘financially fragile’ in that they “would not be able to cope with an unexpected expense that required them to come up with $2,000 within 30 days” which is the amount of money and time that “reflects the cost of an unanticipated car repair, home repair, medical or legal expense.”

This is worrisome. It is not hard to imagine a situation where one might suddenly need $2,000. To know that you could not lay your hands on it even in 30 days must be very stressful. Financial counselors advise people that they should have six months income saved to cope with emergencies. This study suggests that this is completely out of reach for most people since $2,000 would cover only two weeks for a family that earns the median income.

Perhaps as a result of this, people may be too busy trying to make ends meet or worried about their immediate state of affairs to seek deeper causes. And when they do have some free time, they would rather escape into a fantasy world where they can forget their worries. So we have people choosing to spend their discretionary time in pursuits other than politics, seeking escapism. It used to be the case that during difficult financial times in the past, attendance at films and sports events rose. This may not be true anymore since the prices of these forms of entertainments have risen considerably, to be replaced by TV watching.

It is interesting that poor people have disappeared from our TV landscape. It seems to me that there are very few comedy shows nowadays that have central characters who are poor or working class, perhaps reflecting the fact that people don’t want to see their own lives reflected on the screen. Instead they want to see their lives as they hope it might become. For example, are there any contemporary equivalents of All in the Family, The Honeymooners, or Sanford and Son, all of which involved working class families living lives that were consistent with their incomes?

Even the shows that do not have rich characters show them having lifestyles that are absurdly extravagant. Some of the Friends, for example, did not have steady jobs or had jobs waiting tables and yet they lived in apartments in New York that would have been impossible on their income. In Married With Children, the father worked as a shoe salesman in a retail store and the mother stayed at home and yet they managed to live in a nice home. Is this why Americans are notorious for living beyond their means, living in housing that they cannot really afford and pursuing lifestyles that can only be supported by going into debt, because they think that this is how people who have jobs like they do should be able to live? Seinfeld may have been the exception in that era, with the title character living in a modest apartment, doing his laundry in a public facility, etc. (As should be obvious from the programs mentioned, I stopped watching regular TV about a decade or so ago so I may be wrong about the current state of affairs.)

In the US, it is possible that political activism is largely perceived as just another form of recreation that some people can afford to indulge in or choose to do so, while others need ways of entertaining themselves to take their minds off their worries. A case can be made that until the realities of politics whacks people upside the head, political involvement will not be seen as a necessity by enough people for them to want to get seriously involved.

The sudden fall of powerful people is an interesting phenomenon to observe, especially if they are old. Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak was seen as an invincible strongman, ruling his country with unquestioned authority. But when he couldn’t quell the street protests, in a matter of days he began to look, even when he was still head of state, like a confused old man who seemed to have lost his grip. This new perception of decrepitude further emboldened the opposition and undoubtedly accelerated his departure.

We are observing the same phenomenon with Rupert Murdoch. This arrogant man was as recently as a week ago viewed as a powerful business genius to whom the political and business elites bowed obsequiously, treating his every utterance as if he were an oracle. Now suddenly, he looks like an old dodderer who has ‘lost the plot‘ and does not seem to quite know what he is doing. Even the photographs that are now published of him smiling weakly give the image of clueless feebleness, and are causing the media to pile on.

Being photographed out with his personal trainer, with his jowly jaws, and spindly knees sticking out of his running shorts, the mighty mogul had very clearly aged. Then, those pictures of him alongside someone who could have been a matronly nurse in mufti in his silver-grey Range Rover showed him looking not just old but fragile, too. You could almost see the power seeping from him.

His performance at the parliamentary inquiry today further strengthened the impression of someone who seems to be losing his grip but it is not clear whether this was a charade, pleading ignorance of most things as a way of forestalling any attempt to place the blame on him.

Those who worked for people like Murdoch and stayed silent when they were still seen as invincible now feel freer to defect and spill the beans. People who would not have crossed him in the past, and would have sought to curry favor with him, are now showing some backbone. For example, the British political leadership of all parties had long been under Murdoch’s thumb. But now the new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who had been seen as a lightweight whose tenure could well have been brief, has seized on this issue to make his name, aggressively attacking prime minister David Cameron for his close association with Murdoch’s people, much to the delight of his party’s backbenchers who had been disgusted at the sight of their previous leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown toadying to Murdoch.

We should not underestimate Murdoch, though. Such arrogant people who are used to getting their way will, when faced with a real threat, stoop to anything to wriggle free. There are still enough people in Murdoch’s media empire who will try and protect him because their jobs depend upon being in his good graces. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

David Sirota provides ten case studies of rich people who seem to be so completely oblivious to the raging and widening inequalities in the US and the resentment it breeds that the apocryphal story of a princess (wrongly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette) who upon hearing that the poor had no bread helpfully suggested “Let them eat cake” immediately comes to mind.

One of Sirota’s examples is billionaire Charles Munger who, in a 2010 speech to University of Michigan students, said that the unemployed, the homeless and the impoverished, whose lives are being torn apart by the recession, should stop whining and instead should “Suck it up and cope.” Yes, those very words. Sirota also said that Munger “first lauded bankers as people who “saved your civilization” and then urged all Americans to bow down and “thank god” that the bailouts preserved the financial industry’s profits.”
[Read more…]

One of the interesting features of the current discussions involving raising the debt ceiling is how Obama keeps offering cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of the deal. This does not surprise me because I have repeatedly said that the best chance for the oligarchy to cut these programs that they do not care about is when a Democrat is in office because then the defenders of these programs drop their guard, thinking that the president will defend their interests, not realizing that his primary goal is to serve the oligarchy.

Obama’s supporters seem to think that this is just a clever strategy on Obama’s part, that by linking it to some tax raises for the very rich, it will cause the Republicans to reject the plan, thus making them appear unreasonable. I disagree. Offering something in negotiations that you actually oppose on the assumption that the other side will reject the entire deal is very dangerous because there is always the small chance that they might accept and also because in future negotiations you cannot refuse to consider those proposals if brought forward by the other side.

Matt Taibbi argues persuasively that Obama does not want a progressive deficit deal. He actually does want to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow also has Obama’s number.

Whose bright idea was it to release the new Sarah Palin fan-biopic on the same day as the final Harry Potter film? Is it any surprise that there was only one person in the theater who was there just to interview audience members? Two other people came in not knowing anything about the film but guessing from the title that it was an action flick. They left after 20 minutes.

That gave me an idea. Maybe Palin and her husband should have ditched their idiotic bus tour and instead made a real action movie, a remake of Easy Rider, with them playing the roles of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the original, roaming the country on their Harley Davidsons looking for the real America and living off the land by killing and eating moose. And Michele Bachmann could take the Jack Nicholson role, a kindred soul they meet and pick up while riding through Minnesota.

And instead of getting shot, in the remake they could be the ones packing heavy heat and killing off America’s enemies (gays, non-Christians, city dwellers, people who live along the two coasts, minorities, immigrants, non-Tea Partiers, etc.) with powerful automatic weapons.

I bet that would beat Harry Potter at the box office.

Stephen Colbert provides the best summary I have seen to date of the absurd discussions involving raising the debt ceiling.

It was always obvious that the debt ceiling would be raised because the oligarchy demanded it and the Republican party leadership, like that of the Democrats, are their faithful servants. The Republican leadership had assured the financial and business world that the ceiling would be raised and everyone, including Obama, knew this. So the Republican idea of holding the ceiling ‘hostage’ to demand other concessions was laughable on its face. How can you use hostages as a negotiating tool if both sides agree that the hostage would be released unharmed? All Obama had to do was insist that the ceiling be raised with no conditions and it would have happened.

The only reason for this spectacle was for both party leaderships to create a made-for-media drama that would allow them to arrive at ‘compromise’ policies that would further benefit the oligarchy while hurting everyone else, all the while claiming that they were forced to take this drastic action to ‘save the hostage’.

It is still possible that there will be such a deal but where things seem to have gone awry is that the Republican party base does not understand how this game is played and took at face value all their leadership’s rhetoric about how raising the debt ceiling was a horrendous evil that should never be agreed to unless a steep price were paid. Now that time is running out, they have to find a way to wriggle out of the situation.

Colbert further discusses the issue with Naftali Bendavid, the congressional correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

In a press release accompanying a new 107-page report, Human Rights Watch says:

Overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The Obama administration has failed to meet US obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, Human Rights Watch said.

The 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of Bush and senior administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured.

“There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime. His decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly reestablished.”

If the US government does not pursue credible criminal investigations, other countries should prosecute US officials involved in crimes against detainees in accordance with international law, Human Rights Watch said.

“The US has a legal obligation to investigate these crimes,” Roth said. “If the US doesn’t act on them, other countries should.”

Obama has clearly demonstrated that he is not going to do anything about this because he too may face similar charges in the future. What we have to hope is that independent-minded prosecutors in other countries will take up the cause. The fear of arrest is likely to continue to prevent Bush, Cheney, and their fellow torture cronies from visiting many countries. It serves them right to be treated like criminals.

As usual, we are being treated to the kabuki theater of debt ceiling/budget negotiations as being a high stakes conflict between the Democrats and Republicans, when all the while what is happening backstage is that both parties are acting as the agents of the oligarchy.

Here are some articles that need to be widely read, by Ralph Nader, Matt Taibbi, Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, and Frank Rich, on why those who look to Obama and the Democrats to fight for economic justice are doomed to be disappointed.

One of the curious features of American politics is how the pejorative label of ‘flip-flopper’, if successfully pinned on a candidate, can seriously hurt that person’s electoral chances. The term is used to describe someone who has made a 180-degree turn on some issue, taking a position now that is diametrically opposed to one he or she took before. This issue dogged John Kerry’s candidacy in 2004. Some people pay a surprising amount of attention to this question, even to the extent of looking into what a politician said or did even as far back as in college or high school. Journalists sometimes pore over a candidate’s past statements on some topic in order to confront them with some contradiction.

Behind this there seems to be this assumption that someone whose views have never changed during his or her entire adult life is more virtuous than someone who has changed. But is this a reasonable assumption? Why is holding steadfastly to one’s views all through one’s life seen as such a good thing? After all, as time goes by, we learn more things and acquire life experiences and these can cause us to re-evaluate our positions. Why is this a bad thing? The economist John Maynard Keynes, when he was confronted with an old statement that contradicted his current views reportedly riposted, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Even if this story is apocryphal, it illustrates the fact that changing one’s views is sometimes the most reasonable thing to do.

When I look back on my own life, I can see many areas where my views have changed dramatically. I used to think that US involvement in Vietnam was a noble thing. I now think is was an atrocity. I used to be a devout believer in god and now am an atheist. I used to disparage the feminist movement as making much ado about trivial things but now realize what an important role they played in the drive for women’s equality. I used to be indifferent to gay issues but now strongly support their move towards full equality. If I think harder, I am sure that I can come up with more examples of my own flip-flopping on important issues. But I don’t see myself as a rudderless person, drifting this way and that on the basis of whims or expediency.

Perhaps the crucial issue is motive, that it is acceptable to change one’s mind because of new facts or because one has been persuaded by arguments, but that to do so for the sake of political expediency is to justly invite criticism This is the charge currently being laid against Mitt Romney, that he changed his views from his time as governor of Massachusetts merely because of his desire to appeal to the evangelical Christian tea party base of the Republican party, requiring him to make increasingly emphatic affirmations that what he says he believes now represent his core beliefs, that he always had these beliefs, and leading to contortions to show that his previous positions were consistent with them.

Leaving aside the specifics of Mitt Romney, changing one’s public views to meet external needs without actually changing one’s beliefs lays one open to the charge of hypocrisy or opportunism and that may seem to be obviously wrong. But is it that clear cut? Surely hypocrisy is also not always a bad thing? Suppose some elected official really thinks that women should not be in leadership positions or that gay people are sinners who will go to hell or that all Muslims are particularly susceptible to terrorist influence. But this person is also smart enough to know that to say any of those things publicly is to doom the chances for election. If such a person adopts a neutral stance or even asserts support for equality for those groups, surely that hypocrisy is better than his adamant opposition? In fact, don’t we want politicians to be people we can influence to vote our way? Political demonstrations, marches, rallies, etc. are all designed to pressure public officials to take actions that they might not take otherwise. Why is it such a bad thing for elected officials to be swayed by public opinion to take actions that are contrary to their own beliefs?

To my mind, what is truly inexcusable in politics is lying, where a politician says one thing while campaigning for office and does the opposite after being elected, even though nothing else has changed. That is something that should be strongly censured and punished by the voters. But even here one has to be careful not to be too rigid and to carefully take into account the important caveat about nothing else changing. In real life, things can change and one should not hold people to account for taking those changes into consideration when forming policy. This is why I disapprove of these pledges that some candidates are forced to sign as a condition of support. Right now there seems to be an epidemic of such pledges on the Republican side, requiring pledges against raising taxes, gay marriage, and so on.

If the facts change, good governance may require a change in policy and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as a good case can be made as to why the change is necessary.