'Obama now faces two paths - the Clinton road, or the FDR highway.'

[seafan]

Thank you for giving us a voice, Johann Hari. We, tragically, no longer have one in our country.

London Independent (via HuffingtonPost)
January 28, 2010

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-tremors will be shaking and breaking global politics for years. ..... Representative Alan Grayson says: "It basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them - and beat to death the politicians that don't... You won't even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It'll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft."

.....

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash - and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it's not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. This runs so deep that Congressman James Clyburn says the US has become a "corpocracy." It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country's laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: "The banks own the Senate," so they had to obey. The result was that the banks made staggering profits - and were immediately rescued when they smashed the world economy. The only people who paid for it were the public, all over the world.

.....

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you reregulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power.

.....

"Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong." ---President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 27, 2010


Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush's Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito didn't agree with that statement. Probably would've also seen vicious scowls from Scalia and Thomas, had they bothered to show up for the State of the Union Address.





Hari continues:

Obama now faces two paths - the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to simply serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama's advisors are now nudging him down that path: the pledge for an appalling anti-Keynesian spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests - but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded in the fog of a depression. He switched course. He turned his anger on "the malefactors of great wealth" and bragged: "I welcome the hatred... of the economic royalists." He launched a programme of redistributing power from the corporations back towards the people, and put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas." But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn't yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists - but that's only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it - and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the Court tried to stymie the New Deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratizing the Land of the Fee.

None of the crises facing us all - from the global banking system to global warming - can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama flunks this challenge now, he may as well put the US government on eBay and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

We won't.


When this Supreme Court nullified the votes of the American people to install the usurper into the White House on December 12, 2000, the game was over. And we will suffer the countless horrid consequences for years to come.



Or not.

....

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

----From the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

On which path will you take us, Mr. President?

[madrchsod]

1. rahm was in the front seat during clinton`s presidency

so i`m thinking....fdr is so last century for the new kids on the block...

[Larkspur]

2. To the Clintonistas, FDR is a Commie

[bigtree]

8. what bullshit

[Orsino]

3. When is Congress scheduled to transform into one supporting FDR-like reforms? n/t

[Vincardog]

4. When we make them. NGU

[Captain Hilts]

6. BINGO. nt

[Captain Hilts]

5. Obama has a Congress more supportive than Clinton's but less so than FDR's. nt

[bigtree]

7. he's likely not FDR, but I'd settle for Clinton

I lived those years and we could do much, much worse. My family grew with the economy during his term. Some folks obviously were hurt by some of his economic policies, but most of the nation benefited greatly from his term's economy. And although we didn't see some great shift in progressive change, we did make significant progress in enacting our Democratic agenda into action and law.

[madmax]

9. Please take the FDR

[DKRC]

10. It really is a choice he has to make

We need him to be FDR.

K&R