Now that the mid-term elections are over, what can we expect to see in the next few months? As I said in yesterday’s post, the advantage to the leadership of the two parties of so-called ‘divided’ government, where one party controls one part and the other party another part, is that they can blame lack of action on the issues their core supporters care about to this gridlock while they can be ‘bipartisan’ when it comes to serving the needs of the oligarchy.
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As predicted the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives, have a smaller majority in the Senate, and lost many governorships. The election results are widely viewed as a major setback for that party, with even President Obama calling it a ‘shellacking’, so why do I think it was a good night for them? For reasons that I outline below and elaborated on in a post at the beginning of this year, this post-election situation will be less embarrassing for them than one in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House.

As I have said repeatedly, the US is a one-party system with two factions, labeled Republican and Democratic. This one party serves the interests of an increasingly rapacious elite that seeks to divert more and more wealth from the public good for their private benefit, and the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic factions seeks to accommodate them. This agenda is profoundly anti-democratic and thus must be covert and is never publicly articulated. One has to infer the existence of this agenda from the fact that since 1980, there has been a steady and massive shift in the income and wealth distribution of this country towards a small elite, irrespective of which party controlled the branches of government, and this could only occur because of policies that both parties collude to create.

The two factions differ on some social issues (abortion, gays, religion, guns, immigration, race, etc.) and it tends to be these issues that are publicly discussed, often at great volume. Each faction also talks in vague terms about jobs and taxes and trade and cutting spending, but never in terms specific enough that one can pin them down to any specific policy proposal. Each party leadership feeds their factional base with rhetoric they do not really support just in order to keep them in line and voting for them, but hopes that they will not have to actually implement them. They try to meet their party supporters’ demands as minimally as possible, but for this strategy to work, they need plausible excuses for why they keep failing to follow through on their promises.

For the Democrats, winning the presidency and big majorities in the House and Senate in 2008 was embarrassing because their supporters now expected them to actually carry out their promises for major health care reform such as a single payer system, wind down the two wars, close down Guantanamo, reverse the trend towards a national security state with all its concomitant violations of the constitutional protections of basic liberties, and so on. The Democratic leadership clearly had no intention of doing any of these things and had to try and deflect blame by pointing to the Republican use of the Senate filibuster rules to explain their failure. But their supporters were not impressed, rightly suspecting that appealing to this arcane and self-imposed rule of the Senate was merely an excuse for a lack of will, and that a forceful president and party would have been able to find ways to circumvent it. After all, George W. Bush never had such control of Congress and yet he managed to get his favored policies passed.

Obama and the Democratic Party, rather than being apologetic about their lack of progress, then deliberately and publicly denigrated their core supporters, the very people who put them into power in 2008, as being ungrateful and having unrealistic expectations, thus further dampening their enthusiasm. Is it any wonder that there was a so-called ‘enthusiasm gap’ between supporters of the two parties when it came to voting? Ted Rall calls this Democratic Party strategy ‘political suicide’.

My main regret with the elections was the defeat of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the sole Senator to vote against the infamous USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, that is responsible for many of the abuses of basic rights and liberties that we now see. That was an act of political courage and history will place him alongside Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who were the only senators who resisted being steamrolled into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson then exploited to expand the Vietnam war.

Now that the Democrats have lost control of the House, they can more comfortably repudiate their supporters and capitulate to the oligarchy’s agenda, all the while saying that now they truly lack the power to carry out their supporters’ wishes and thus must compromise with their Republican opponents. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1994, selling out his party’s supporters after losing control of both houses of Congress. Clinton handily won re-election in 1996 and I expect Obama to do the same in 2012, because he can blame the Republican-led house for his inability to achieve anything meaningful.

The Republican Party leadership also faces a similar challenge. They don’t really care about cutting spending or balancing the budget or paring down the debt or increasing jobs, the things they sold to their supporters as key issues. What they want to do, like the Democrats, is cater to the very wealthy even if the country goes broke in the process. They will try and sell their tea party supporters the idea that it was because they do not control the Senate and the presidency that they could not carry out their wishes. How well the tea partiers react to this inevitable betrayal will be interesting to observe.

The main difference between Republican Party rule and Democratic Party rule is that the former will bring the country to fiscal ruin faster and is more openly callous about the harm they inflict on the poor and middle class in their desire to serve the rich. The Democrats do it more slowly and with more hand wringing about how sad it all is. Although the Democrats can stop Republican House initiatives either in the Senate or with a presidential veto, I suspect that they won’t do that with issues that benefit the oligarchy, so the only achievements of the next Congress will be those things that serve the interests of the oligarchy, and these will be done quietly and with little fuss.

Next: So what should we watch for in the coming months?

The plot to blow up a bomb packed in laser printer cartridges and sent via an airmail package fortunately failed. Because the trigger may have been a cell phone, this incident may result in the cancellation of plans to provide Wi-Fi and cell phone access to people on planes.

While the lack of Wi-Fi access is a minor inconvenience, not allowing cell phones on planes is a great relief. I had always viewed with horror the thought of being trapped next to a passenger who yakked loudly on a cell phone for the duration of a flight.

A homeowner in Missouri put up a Halloween display on their front yard (visible even to motorists going by on interstate I-55) that consisted of a robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan figure standing next to an effigy of a black man hanging from a noose. He seemed to feel that his display showed “white pride”.

What is disturbing about this is not that some people have such attitudes. We surely know that such people exist and will always be among us. What is disturbing is that it is a throwback to an undesirable past when ugly manifestations of racism were blatant and overt. If such incidents start to become more common, it will not reflect well on the political climate that is developing in this country.

As anticipated, Wikileaks has released over 400,000 new secret documents, this time on the Iraq war. The Guardian report on the leaks says that it has new revelations of deaths and abuses of Iraqis.

As predicted, the anti-Wikileaks propaganda has begun, with the Pentagon saying: “This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment.”

We should bear in mind that similar alarms raised after the previous leaks proved to be highly overblown.

Juan Cole describes what is going on in the occupied territories as Israeli settlers set fire to girls schools and mosques, destroy olive groves, take over land, and dump their sewage on Palestinian vineyards, all in the effort to force Palestinians out.

In an article titled It’s the Occupation, Stupid, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who has been studying terrorism in many countries for a long time, says that the argument that we hear that terrorists hate us for who we are and what we represent, as formulated bt then president George W. Bush that “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other” is simply not true.

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day.
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Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer — in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Cartoonist Ted Rall explains the baffling phenomenon of poor people being so protective of the interests of the very rich, at a time the rich don’t seem to give a damn about the poor.

The US government is bracing for a fresh release of WikiLeaks documents that is likely to occur soon. When it happens, we will once again be deluged with claims that WikiLeaks has both damaged the war effort on the ground and put innocent people at risk.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of that past propaganda and how it has proved to be false.

In this conversation with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, writer Philip Dray reminds us of how much we owe trade unions for improving the working conditions of everyone.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Philip Dray

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