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Sunday, July 10, 2011

[G]rand [O]perating [P]rinciple: Tax Cuts For Rich People

Tax cuts for rich people: It's the whole agenda of the Republican Party. Literally every apparently bewildering thing the GOP does is explained by this singular obsession.

The GOP has zero interest in governing, so there is no point in working yourself into a pretzel trying to grasp the governing principle in play in this or that completely random act of opportunism, or tearing your hair out in exasperation every single day with the realization that Republicans have done yet another pointless irresponsible thing to undermine even basic commonsense governing principles a child could understand.

Everything Republicans do is explained by their endless skirmishing to get more tax cuts for rich people, to connect every question to a demand for tax cuts for rich people, to work their way to a place of leverage from which to demand more tax cuts for rich people.

Since this isn't a goal that benefits many Americans the GOP also has to devote considerable energies to disenfranchising voters with Jim Crow Voter ID proposals and dividing voters with culture wars and distracting voters with literal wars and bribing voters with unpaid for goodies here and there, but everything is about tax cuts for the rich people who are their only real constituents.

These aren't bright people, they have one goal, one prize, one injunction, one drive and it imparts to their world a luminous clarity of vision and action unavailable to those of us who actually attend to the changing dynamics of stakeholder politics in a living world of diverse people with shared problems.

Their organized force derives entirely from their singularity of focus and purpose... and their defeat (or our own, and then theirs in consequence) must also derive from it.

31 comments:

myst101 said...

"Since this isn't a goal that benefits many Americans..."

I beg to differ. Sadly, this IS a goal for most poor yanks. That's the problem. Most of them vote according to the delusion that they'll somehow strike it rich someday.

myst101 said...

[G]Greedy[O]Odious[P]Pricks

The Mathmos said...

I guess the GOP sucks. They're a cynical vehicule for ruling class interests, and as such a known quantity for many decades now.

But what about the Dems? Aren't they the variable element in the two-party system? By that I mean, aren't they the one that have 'triangulated' away most of their distinctiveness in relation to the Republicans, essentially driving the rightward shift on socioeconomic matters? And isn't that exactly what we see (and have seen) happening all over the OECD countries : formerly union-backed social democratic parties being transformed by circumstances into yet more vehicules for supply-side economics, neocolonialism and the dismantling of welfare services?

Now that both ruling parties in America are obeying very similar neoliberal narratives ('entitlements', 'deficits', 'tax cuts', etc.) with the social divide between rich and poor reaching unimaginable dimensions under a Democratic administration, further electoral activism appears ill-advised.

Dale Carrico said...

I have zero patience for bullshit equivalence theses.

meat olaf said...

"According to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — including both Republicans and Democrats — the president offered an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, from 65 to 67, in exchange for Republican movement on increasing tax revenues."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/obama-medicare-eligibility-age_n_894833.html

Go back and read what you wrote about Earl Blumenauer just a few weeks ago. "Signaling his openness to raising the retirement age and justifying this betrayal of the progressive legacy of his party, his betrayal of the majority of Americans, his eagerness to murder and immiserate hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in thankless back breaking stressful toil in service to the forever continuing wealth concentration benefiting a handful of billionaires," I think it went.

Pardon me if I'm just some myopic moron, but I couldn't even see the goalposts flying by they were moving so fast....

Dale Carrico said...

Don't count your betrayals before they've hatched.

Dale Carrico said...

Signals aren't outcomes, optimal ideals are not practical possibilities, armchair revolutionaries are not street revolutionaries, deals along the road to reform are not properly judged by the criteria we use to evaluate philosophical arguments. I didn't accuse you of being myopic... but, well, are you?

meat olaf said...

Sorry, I hadn't realized my handle had changed. You know me as thanatz and we have a longstanding, if mild, mutual antipathy.

To cut to the chase, I'd have more sympathy for what I take as the democracy as incremental remediation argument you seem to often offer if you were more willing to honestly assess the President's dealings as the radical deviation from "the road to reform" that they inarguably represent and as you so clearly and admirably articulated in response to Blumenauer's trial balloon.

It is possible to say (on the internet even!) that Obama is often a) incompetent/evil, for, as Atrios often reminds us, there is no need to choose, and that b) the Republicans are incredibly, impossibly, unimaginably worse and therefore BO is the only practical option given the goal of incremental reform.

Calling Blumenauer's signal out as the betrayal it was did not make you any more or less of an armchair r3v0lut!0n@ry then an honest assesment of Obama's dealings would.

Dale Carrico said...

I recognized you from your picture, as it happens. I have no "antipathy" toward you inasmuch as I don't even know you. Now, Obama is a President, and as a President it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to describe him as evil or incompetent (as opposed to which President exactly?) among the many other things one could say of him. I suspect you should just focus elsewhere than the executive branch when you want to talk politics, since your standards appear largely irrelevant to the Presidency as a vector of reform in the actually existing world. Obama has accomplished more progressive reform than any actually existing President in my lifetime, annoying and disappointing though he also manages relentlessly to be to this green democratic socialist -- and Obama has managed to nudge things forward in the context of the GOP in its movement conservatism phase, the single most dangerous organized force on the planet. Anybody who thinks anything substantive can be accomplished in Washington while this GOP holds the House or who expected anything but what has happened so far in 2011 really must be too stupid for words. Anyway, glibly declaiming on Obama's "radical deviation" from reform is just plain foolishness, and I'm almost embarrassed for you as I always am when I see this sort of nonsense. Look, I don't care whether or not you "sympathize" with democracy as incremental reform, the point is that if you fancy yourself more radical than a reformist like me it'll take more as a matter of fact than you running your mouth to make it so. If you are a street agitator for revolution or even a community organizer I'm happy to tip my hat to your self-image as a radical beyond reform. Otherwise, I call bullshit.

meat olaf said...

Well it's a good thing you don't have any antipathy towards me.

But as always happens when I cite any actual specific facts you completely ignore them. Again: Why is Blumenauer's trial balloon a "betrayal of the progressive legacy of his party" when at the same time you literally cannot be compelled to a utter a single word when "[a]ccording to five separate sources with knowledge of negotiations — including both Republicans and Democrats — the president offered an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare." A deal which would, of course, end in the needless suffering and early deaths of countless Americans. If YOU weren't being an armchair radical in declaiming Blumenauer's position then why do you refuse to hold the President to the same standard?

As for calling politicians evil, it's OK to say that a congressman from Oregon could in some small respect be held responsible for the "murder and immiserat[ion]" of "hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in thankless back breaking stressful toil in service to the forever continuing wealth concentration benefiting a handful of billionaires" but it's not ok to call that action evil? Well, OK.

Finally, just so you can't keep using this strawman every time I foolishly return to comment let me state clearly that I forsake revolution as a practical or even desirable political goal. Violent insurrection today is a suicidal, empty gesture. Nor am I a street agitator or rally leader or pom-pom waiver, and I am most certainly not a community organizer. Nor do I have dreams of third party deliverance. While recognizing that most Democrats have no desire or capacity to abet the rising neoliberal tide, I simultaneously am aware that they remain the sole instrument by which any actual remediation of the corporatist religion may make its appearance. My sole political aim in all my relations is this: I too call bullshit. It is bullshit to say that Obama is hamstrung in his debt limit dealings with Republicans and that There Is No Alternative to sacrificing the elderly and poor in the name of Shock Doctrine. It is bullshit to say that I'm whining because nothing "substantive can be accomplished in Washington." Something substantive is being accomplished right now if you'd only open your eyes.

Dale Carrico said...

You deny that Obama is constrained here? Really? There are differences between the executive and legislative branches of government, you know? I have to assume you grasp what it means that crazies have commandeered the party holding the majority in the House and that Senate Republicans declare making Obama a one-term president their first priority? You admit that third parties aren't practically possible right now, you share with me the sense that violent revolution is unlikely to achieve emancipatory outcomes in a US context, you admit Democrats are our best available instrument to resist neoliberalism (I also happen to think most people who disapprove in any substantive measure with neoliberalism also happen to caucusing with Democrats, and that this matters, tho' I'm not sure you agree). Then suddenly, after all this, you still reconstruct Obama's negotiating position as an embrace of the shock doctrine declaring Thatcherite TINA? Wtf? The difference in my treatment of Obama and Blumenaurer is shaped by my sense of context -- given his constituency, his position in the budget committee and membership in the Progressive Caucus I didn't want Blumenauer in that stage of the negotiation to feel no pushback if he is trying GOP talking points on for size. Simple as that. I don't agree that Obama's context or conduct is the same. You seem to me to be confusing propositional analysis for political analysis, abstract consistency for context-dependent position-taking. I happen to believe the President floated entitlement reform to show from the push-back that votes for that were exactly equally impossible as the GOP were claiming raising revenue was -- therefore altering the terms of the negotiation. Obama has to frame things in a way that enable a deal. He's positioning himself for a second-term in which it may be possible to do substantive things again. This is partisan politics directed to reformist ends in light of regulative ideal policy outcomes. As far as I'm concerned, it rarely makes much sense to focus on anything but how crazy and evil the GOP is. Oh, yes: My eyes are already open, thanks.

myst101 said...

The dems are soft-spined little guppies who eat their own.

Btw, what's with the casey anthony "countdown" link??

Dale Carrico said...

The dems are soft-spined little guppies who eat their own.

Of course I know what you mean, but that over-generalization is demoralizing and disempowering in actual reality in my view. More, and better, Democrats, is the better watchword.

Also, I always remember the great American democratic socialist Michael Harrington: "The best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but I want to be on the left wing of the possible."

I'm not sure what link you are talking about in your other point? I thought "Casey Anthony" must be the name of yet another pop star I didn't know until I just looked it up.

The Mathmos said...

The thing that gets me at every iteration of this discussion (pouting left-purist versus cool-headed pragmatist) is that, for all the sticks being shaken in the general direction of Savvy Political Realism, the reality of power and its attainment in our current mass-mediated electoral system remains out of reach. While wonk-like dissections of current legislative horse-trading and the like are all well and good, their use as a bludgeoning sort of Reality Principle against so-called purists is a complete travesty of what is supposed to be left-wing politics. Where is the 'push-back' (you think Obama was prodding for) against regressive entitlement reform to come from, if the left-wing of his base is more concerned with technical explaining-away of actually right-wing policies? What is Obama’s staff to think of the import of left-wing positions in policy-making if the people advocating for such positions are in effect pledging undying fealty to Not-Republicans? Where is political power to be gained in unconditional support?

If Obama is affecting half as much world-weary savvyness as his backers to the left, his view of his base must be one of complete inconsideration at this stage.

Dale Carrico said...

Nobody is making you read this blog, there are plenty of members of the armchair disgruntlement caucus you could be reading instead. If my ideals, attitudes, efforts represent "a complete travesty of what is supposed to be left-wing politics" I must say, you must be fucking awesome. Your hard-core can-do spirit must convert Republicans with a wave of the hand, you must be able to obliterate inequity and climate catastrophe with your laser beam eyes or something. But when you say I offer unqualified support to this President and undying fealty to Not-Republicans, you're lying. By all means keep on saying it, if that's what makes you feel better about things. Now, do go find some more like-minded space to vent in, your attitude is boring and annoying and demoralizing me, I get your point, it's not exactly hard to grasp, now scram, bug somebody else. Best to you.

The Mathmos said...

Progressive politics will start anew when progressive people tire of the 'Obama' pen-and-paper role-playing game; when they start thinking about their own difficulties and priorities for a change.

Dale Carrico said...

I like how you put Obama's name in quotes as if the Presidency isn't actually real or something. It's true, if people finally start thinking about their problems (because nobody is doing that apparently), then a glorious dawn will take place in some unspecified manner. Lead me, Mathmos, away from my "role-playing game" to the Promised Land! Hey, who farted?

The Mathmos said...

I don't think the mo' better Democrats crowd should be playing with blunt objects while inside that cold, crystalline realism of theirs.

jimf said...

> [Y]ou must be fucking awesome. Your hard-core
> can-do spirit must convert Republicans with a
> wave of the hand. . .

Convert this, if you please:
http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/sarah-palin-newsweek.jpg

Dale Carrico said...

I don't think the mo' better Democrats crowd should be playing with blunt objects while inside that cold, crystalline realism of theirs.

You can be sure I'll take that under advisement.

The Mathmos said...

Republicans are certainly influential, but a good part of their policy options are being given institutional weight (if not outright implemented) by this nominally Democratic administration, just as it was Clinton (with much the same staff as Obama : Sperling, Summers, etc.) who went the furthest in dismantling social relief for the poor.

The hypothetical conversion of Palin or some other cartoon villain wouldn't change a thing in the electoral dynamic of the two-party system. Just as the killing of Bin Laden didn't entail the slightest reduction in authoritarian security measures and warmongering.

jimf said...

> . . .a bludgeoning sort of Reality Principle. . .

Speaking of which:

Bachmann's Unrivaled Extremism
by Michelle Goldberg
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/14/michele-bachmanns-unrivaled-extremism-gay-rights-to-religion.html

Rep. Michele Bachmann [has been]
...catapulted... near the front of the GOP pack,
but the radical roots of her ideology remain
poorly understood.
-------------
After graduating from high school, [Michele] Bachmann went to Israel with the evangelical youth group Young Life. . . At the time, the evangelical movement was not particularly political. Indeed, according to Randall Balmer. . . a historian of American evangelicalism at Columbia University, it was the born again Jimmy Carter who first marshaled the era's newly awakened Christians. "He brings them into the political arena. There's no question about that," says Balmer. "And the great irony is that they turned so rabidly and rapidly against him four years later."

That's exactly what happened with Bachmann, who campaigned for Carter in 1976. . . but soon tacked sharply rightward. A key moment in her political evolution, as for many of her generation, a was the film series "How Should We Then Live" by the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who is widely credited for mobilizing evangelicals against abortion, an issue most had previously ignored. . . Schaeffer argued that our entire perception of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things. Christianity, he argued, is "a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence." Theories or assertions from outside this system -— evolution, for example -— can be dismissed as the product of mistaken premises.
-------------

But don't try talking to her about it in the bathroom:

-------------
In April 2005, Pamela Arnold wanted to talk to her state senator, Michele Bachmann, who was then running for Congress. A 46-year-old who worked at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Arnold lived with her partner, the famed Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft, on a farm in Scandia, Minnesota. Bachmann was then leading the fight against gay marriage in the state. She'd recently been in the news for hiding in the bushes to observe a gay rights rally at the Capitol. So when members of the Scandia gay community decided to attend one of Bachmann's constituent forums, Arnold, wanting to make herself visible to her representative, joined them.

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was "absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her." The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges. . .
-------------

Dale Carrico said...

Obama is to the left of Clinton, if not nearly as far as I'd like, obviously, and the Obama epoch already has more real accomplishments and fewer crimes to show for itself than the Clintonian era managed in two terms (and that's granting Obama's terrible augmentation of the unitary executive and ongoing wars). Don't let facts get in the way of your circular firing squad, though, by any means. Take a look at what the House passed with Pelosi's majority in the last session. I'm still to the left of the Dems but they give me something to work with, especially when they aren't beholden to their rightmost flank as they were in the Senate with their momentary razor-thin supermajority given Senate rules. By all means, don't let the facts get in the way of your hyperventilation, but the more Democrats the better the policy outcomes we get, simple as that, and nobody on the left has any business pretending otherwise, and nobody who gives two shits about actual outcomes has any business doing anything but fighting for more and better Democrats in consequence. Do you really think policy shaped by actual Democratic majorities would be as bad as what Republicans do, in defiance of all the evidence, or that the real problem we need to be focusing on today is Democrats actively abetting Republican madness? Either you're completely full of shit, or you're a right-wing plant sowing demoralization among well-meaning idealists all too prone to that. Now, really, please go away, you're a boring pest and this never goes anywhere, what are you getting out of this useless grinding interminable minuet?

Dale Carrico said...

As any reader of this blog knows I was quite as appalled and depressed by the bin Laden war-dance as I assume you were. As any student of mine in courses on network politics knows I am quite a critic of security theater also.

As for your comment about the two-party system -- what exactly are you proposing beyond rolling your eyes at our corruption? Campaigns to create institutional conditions under which third parties are actually viable, like instant runoff voting and public financing of elections are I have supported in words here and in the cloassroom and to the promotion of which I've signed petitions and contributed money to organizers, real stuff.

Third party runs in the absence of such reform amount to spoilers mostly to the benefit of elite incumbents in the actual world. Whining about the parties without doing anything to make third parties actually viable is bullshit. Worse, if you relinquish the field of organized politics until such time as the two-party dynamic no longer prevails, leaving the actually existing institutional field on collective agency plays out, that too is bullshit.

I am happy to educate, agitate and organize campaigns to facilitate viable third parties (and did so for IRV here in Oakland for example). Until such time as that pans out nationally, I advocate more and better democrats because they are the best force available on hand to facilitate progressive reform and especially to fight Republicans who, in this phase of movement conservative prevalence, really do represent in my view the single most dangerous organized force on the planet.

That's my position. You can declare me eye-rollingly naive, blind compared to your own luminous knowledge, or insufficiently radical in the face of your interminable holier-than-thou armchair bloviating all you want.

You're completely full of shit as far as I can tell. Now, go bother somebody else.

The Mathmos said...

No need to publish the following comment.

The only parts of your lively responses that have any bearing on our argument are those like this :

Republicans [...] really do represent in my view the single most dangerous organized force on the planet.

In the grand scheme of things, this emphasis on the rhetoric of an influential yet out of power faction is questionable. It remains so for all the bluster and unrelated one-upmanship one can throw into an otherwise intellectual argument.

Dale Carrico said...

If you can't grasp the threat represented by the GOP at this very moment, in spite of what they are doing, in spite of what they have done, in spite of what they say they want to do, then I honestly don't know what to say to you. If your variation of radicalism has rendered you indifferent to differences that make such differences it's the shittiest radicalism ever. Your sense of the "grand scheme i=of themes" amounts to an utter parochialism, what you dismiss as "rhetoric" is full of blood and terror in the real world, your trivialization of the GOP as "out of power" despite their hold of governorships, their majority in the house, their deployment of Senate rules to paralyze that body, and on and on and on expresses a contempt for political reality that should make an engaged earnest lefty blush utterly for shame.

myst101 said...

Anyone who says the dems and the repugs are the same is an idiot AND a dickweed. It's dickweeds like this who threw the 2000 election to the repugs and left us with a fucked up supreme court for decades to come.

Dale Carrico said...

A sane reader! Yay!

jimf said...

> It's dickweeds like this who threw the
> 2000 election to the repugs. . .

This whole debate is nicely encapsulated in a short but pithy YouTube video, and a couple of comments thereon.

Daily Pennsylvanian Interview with Dan Savage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDzbTyz3_VI

On October 10, 2006 in Philadelphia, Spin columnist Stephen Morse interviewed nationally syndicated author Dan Savage. . .

Savage: "The Green. . . Green Party and its supporters are tools and fools for the Republicans and the Radical Right. Santorum entirely funded Romanelli's effort to get on the ballot to drain votes from Casey. The Green Party in Pennsylvania is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Any progressive who votes for a Green **any** more after Nader and now after Romanelli is a fucking **idiot** and should be beaten with sticks. . ."

S.M.: "And so, do you see no hope for third parties in America?"

Savage: "We don't have the luxury of a third-party movement in America right now. The stakes are too high, and the situation is too dire with the country and where the Republicans are taking it, and if Democrats have no power in D.C. 'cause a bunch of idiot lefties are voting their hearts on idiots like Romanelli and idiots like Ralph Nader, then we deserve the end of our democracy, we deserve everything we're getting right now from the Bush administration and its enablers in the Congress."

And from the comments:

Given the utter failure of the Democrats to do anything good for gays unless in dire straits (like the last-ditch repealing of DADT in a lame-duck session solely to give a tidbit to part of their electoral base), I find Dan Savage to be utterly mindless about politics in America. He knows nothing. He is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democrat party, a pair of lips in the service of the Democrat central committee, a brain-dead Demo-bot who was programmed by a fool.
jimtrueblue99 1 month ago

Dan is a moron. People like him give the Democrats their unconditional vote and then expected the Democrats to actually listen to what they have to say. That's why the Dems move more and more to the right. The are looking for people that actually are willing to change their votes, for or against them.
EeyoreWhyBother 1 month ago

Republican strategists **love** these people!

jimf said...

Brother Boo explains it all for you:

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/7/13/0852/80387
------------
I'm Almost Sad for the Tea Partiers
by BooMan
Wed Jul 13th, 2011

**[R]eal** Republicans represent Wall Street, and Tea Baggers are merely their (mostly) useful idiots. . .

There are a few very wealthy people in this country and there are hundreds of millions of...well...**everyone else**. Very wealthy people have a particular set of concerns. They would like to keep the money they have and they'd like to set the optimal conditions for them to make much more money. In this, they're not really much different than the rest of us, but their behavior can have an outsized impact on all kinds of things, like the integrity of investments or the quality and safety of products or the healthiness of the air and water or the kind of compensation we receive as their employees. Very frequently, our interests conflict with their interests. They're badly outnumbered, so they should expect to lose political arguments pretty much all the time. But they have money. Lots and lots of money. And they use that money to create political speech and political outcomes. But speech isn't enough. They need votes. And the only way for them to get enough votes to have their interests reach parity with ours is to align themselves with some other large segment of the population. In our recent history, this has been religious conservatives and, especially, Southerners who still retain an unhealthy contempt for the Federal government that beat them in the Civil War. There's also another group of people, usually called libertarians, who are basically cheerleaders for rich fat cats not out of any particular self-interest but probably as a result of some quirky protein produced by their DNA in utero. Who knows what is wrong with these people? Most of them were born on third base, think they hit a triple, and are really pissed that they haven't yet scored. They blame empathy. And Al Sharpton.

Now, you can believe political rhetoric or you can believe your lying eyes. Republicans run up huge deficits whenever they have the power to do so, and they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their political donors. That is literally what real Republicans live to do. That's the party's entire purpose. . .

If you joined the Tea Party because you want to see lower taxes on millionaires and less regulation of business, then good; you're on solid ground. But if you joined because you want smaller government and a balanced budget, you made a grave mistake. The thing about greedheads is that they have no moral qualms about ripping you off and selling you out. They're almost sociopathic by definition. I mean, who attacks empathy? That should be your first clue that you're on your own. . .

[I]f you actually believed that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell want to transform the government into some Galtian paradise, you're just a sucker. Plain and simple.
------------

Boo hoo.

Boo who?

jimf said...

Just a small piece for me, please -- I'm on a diet.

http://current.com/community/93337336_why-is-the-most-wasteful-government-agency-not-part-of-the-deficit-discussion.htm