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Wisconsin Recall Reveals the True DNC Agenda

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undisciplinedphd

Visiting with my dad last week, talk turned, as it inevitably does, to politics.  A retired electrician and proud member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Dad has been closely following the attack on labor in Wisconsin since the 2011 uprising.  He expressed amazement at the reluctance of the DNC to offer anything more than token support of the attempt to recall our notorious Republican governor.  “I just don’t understand it,” he marveled.  “What can they be thinking?”

“Well,” I said, “clearly they don’t want to encourage mass mobilization against austerity measures.  They plan to work with the Republicans after the national election to implement austerity – cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and so on.  Remember, Obama and Boehner made a deal last July to do just that.  Ironically, it was the Tea Partiers that derailed the whole thing, and not because they care about social programs.  Outside money is supporting that kind of policy in Wisconsin.  It’s not just an attack on collective bargaining; it’s cuts to Badgercare, education – all kinds of things.”

Dad just kind of stared for a moment; then we went onto other topics.  Although he has only a high school education, he’s well-read and intelligent.  He senses I’m right; he just doesn’t want to believe it.  I don’t blame him.  Not so many years ago, I would have reacted similarly.

It’s obvious that if the DNC were truly interested in a progressive agenda, Wisconsin would be a high priority.  Massive funding from organizations such Freedomworks, Club for Growth, and ALEC, as well as from wealthy individuals such as Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who funded Newt Gringrich, Bob Perry (funder of the Swift boat ads), URL Pharma President Richard Roberts, and Christy Walton of the Wal-Mart Waltons, has poured into the state to support Governor Walker.  If their dollars can buy the implementation of their neoliberal and austerity agenda in a state where hundreds of thousands marched in the snow, week after week, to strenuously protest that agenda, then they can do it anywhere.  The DNC, Wasserman-Schulz, and Obama clearly understand this.  They know exactly what they’re doing.

Andrew Levine expands on this in an article in Counterpunch today:

One would think this would be a no-brainer for Obama and the DNC.  A Walker defeat would all but insure that Wisconsin, a battleground state, would again go Democratic.  It would demoralize the Republicans nationally, and (re)energize the forces that put Obama in office in 2008.  But there’s the rub.

Obama needs the people who enthused over him four years ago to enthuse over him again; that’s where the votes are.  And so we can count on him trying to reel the base back in.  Therefore expect more of what we got two weeks ago on gay marriage: encouraging words.  Some of those words may even come packaged in a vaguely populist register.

(snip)

But the last thing he or Wasserman Schultz or any other national Democrat wants is for the people to call the shots.  It’s not just that they want to run the goings on from the top down as in 2008.  More than that, they want to make sure that popular mobilizations don’t get out of control – to the point that they threaten the interests of the fraction of the one-percent whose favor Obama and the DNC assiduously court.

Levine goes on to explain that the uprising in Wisconsin, which began as a reaction to the attack on collective bargaining, evolved into a deeper understanding of our economic and political predicament that prefigured the emergence of Occupy:

Although the anti-Walker insurgency was defensive in nature, it developed into a movement that began to name the enemy, the plutocrats behind Walker and his fellow over-reachers.  From there, it is not a great leap to move on to Obama’s plutocrats, the ones who fund him already and the ones he still seeks to enlist.

This, of course, was what the Occupy movement, drawing on the Wisconsin experience, was about.  And this is what Obama and Wasserman Schultz cannot abide, even if it means acting against their own electoral interests.

Levine is on the money here.  The Wisconsin protests were exciting for me for just this reason – the conversations that took place in bars during breaks between marching, with people asking, Who are the Koch brothers again?  What’s ALEC? I was thrilled that people were interested, waking up, asking questions, and making an effort to get informed.

And this is precisely what Obama and the DNC don’t want.  Like the Republicans, their loyalty is to their corporate paymasters, not the people.  So Wasserman-Schulz will make a couple of belated token appearances in Wisconsin.  President Clinton will try to “sort out his schedule” to see whether he can drop by.  The strategy is very Obama-esque – make a pretense at doing something, but ensure it’s mostly ineffectual.  Then privately carry on with the agenda of the 1%.

It remains to be seen whether people power will win over corporate money in Wisconsin next week.  In any event, I expect the outcome to be a portent of things to come.  Just as the protests in Wisconsin helped to inspire Occupy, a victory will infuse the movement and its fellow travelers with a shot of energy.  A defeat, on the other hand, will further embolden our corporate overlords.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Next Memorial Day, Remember America’s Victims Too

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Ted Rall

Self-Delusion and the Cult of Militarism

Memorial Day: our national celebration of charred meat (but the four contractors hung from that bridge in Iraq don’t count).

Hope you enjoyed the weekend.

However, as we begin the countdown to next year’s Warapalooza—only 362 more days before you fire up the grill or, if someone near and dear died in one of our wars, spend the day at the graveyard grumbling about the fact that too few Americans share your sacrifices—I’d like what’s left of the Left to stop missing a golden opportunity to protest, mock and undermine the cult of militarism.

Let’s make Memorial Day 2013 a day to remember all the victims of American warmongering. By all means, shed a tear for the 58,282 American men and women who died for transnational natural gas corporations during the 1960s and 1970s, and a patently absurd “domino theory” in Vietnam. But make sure you cry 35 times more for the 2,000,000-plus Vietnamese men and women our soldiers were sent to kill—people who posed no threat to us, who did us no harm.

Let’s build a wall for America’s war victims in Washington. It’s the least we could do.

That sucker would be big. Huge. Big enough to stimulate the local construction economy.

Hang a flag and place a flower on the grave of one of the draftees too clueless or afraid to evade service, of a rube so ignorant of history and politics that he enlisted to fight in one of our countless optional wars of illegal aggression, of a bloodthirsty thug who seized the chance to commit murder for the state. They were our brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, and we loved them. We miss their unfinished lives.

Our war dead deserve recognition for helping to expand the American empire, and for lining the pockets of the profiteers and their pet politicians.

But worry not: the right-wingers will never let us forget these heroes.

Those of us who stand on the Left have a different duty. We stand for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the abused. We defend the innocent. We care about the underdog.

We on the Left reject the idea of The Other. To us, no life has more or less meaning or value than any other life. Our dead or not worth more than “their” dead. There is no us and them, there is only us.

Her death is not counted by the Obama Administration; still, we mourn the Yemeni woman blown to bits in a Predator drone strike on her home as much as the young man from North Carolina who goes up in an IED blast in Helmand province.

And so we, the Left, ought to declare that Memorial Day 2013 should belong not just to the jingoists and war criminals and patsies, but also to their victims. We should hang banners and march on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans murdered by U.S. forces since 2001. Call 1-800-Flowers; ask them to deliver a bouquet to a cemetery in Fallujah.

I’m not a pacifist. Some wars—a few wars—must be fought. Invading armies must be resisted.

But not most wars. War is almost always a struggle of the rich and powerful fought by the poor and powerless. War kills, maims, and makes people crazy. It destroys infrastructure. It sucks away resources—money, technology, people—that would be better deployed somewhere else.

Most Americans know this—or they think they do. On a gut level, however, we’re sheepish and embarrassed about the crimes committed in our name. We’re in denial.

It’s understandable. We’re not insane. We’re in a state of cognitive dissonance; we want to be one thing—peace-loving, good people—but we know we’re the opposite—passive, tolerant and fearful of “our government” (which not only can assassinate any one of us at any time, for any reason, but actually asserts the legal right to do so as consistent with the democratic values to which we supposedly adhere).

“Our” leaders feed us mass delusion. “You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated,” President Obama told a group of Vietnam vets on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. “It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.”

And it didn’t.

As historians have proven, no one ever spat on a soldier returning from Vietnam. To the contrary: the antiwar movement was pro-vet (in part because so many servicemen were conscripts). The spat-on-vet story began circulating after—of all things—Sylvester Stallone’s character in “Rambo 2” talked about it. Obama knows, or should know, the truth. He’s old enough to remember.

“You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war,” Obama went on. “The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly.” Why was the weather so tough, the enemy so fierce? Obama left that, along with much else, unsaid: we were invaders and occupiers, half a world away, propping up tyrants in a place where we had no business whatsoever.

And finally, an outrageous claim, one so widely accepted that the media didn’t bother to quote it in news accounts, much less question it: “We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

What a kidder!

We Americans have fought a handful of battles, much less entire wars, to “protect ourselves.” From the Barbary States to Latin America and Cuba to Grenada and Panama and Pakistan and Somalia and Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military has attacked without just cause, without legal justification, with impunity, 99 percent of the time.

It’s bad enough to live in a nation in thrall to the cult of militarism. It’s worse to lie about it. And it’s insane to believe the lies.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out June 5. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL

Funniest Obama Quote Ever

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Ted Rall

“We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/28/remarks-president-commemoration-ceremony-50th-anniversary-vietnam-war

The Book of Obama: Out This Week!

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Ted Rall

The Book of Obama kicks off this week with a Pacific Northwest Book Tour. Check dates and times below.

If you live somewhere else, and you can help sponsor an appearance, now is a good time to get in touch.

For those unable to attend, books will begin turning up at stores early next month.

Thursday, May 31, 2012
7:30 pm
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, Oregon 97214

Friday, June 1, 2012
7:30-10:30 pm
Live Wire Radio
The Alberta Rose Theatre
3000 NE Alberta Street
Portland, Oregon 97211

Saturday, June 2, 2012
7:00 pm
Elliot Bay Bookstore
1521 10th Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122

Sunday, June 3, 2012
2:00 pm
Village Books
1200 11th Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225

Monday, June 4, 2012
7:00 pm
Kings Bookstore
218 Saint Helens Avenue
Tacoma, Washington 98402

Tuesday, June 5, 2012
7 pm
Orca Books
509 4th Avenue East
Olympia, Washington 98501

Thursday, June 7, 2012
7:00-9:00 pm
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

Police Blotter

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Ted Rall

Rather than publish a story about last week’s Occupy the East End action against Bank of America, The East Hampton Star ran a photo of your humble narrator in the police blotter section.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Satire – The Revolution Will Be Digitized

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Ted Rall

This Time: Three Douches To Watch Out For

It sounds like the lede of another breathless Dot-Com Bubble 3.0 puff piece by David Carr.

Three douchebags hook up at a café-cum-gallery-cum-hacketeria in a section of Brooklyn so hip that hipsters can’t find it on an app. Eight minutes later, they’ve banged out a business plan. What for, they can’t say. All they know is, it’ll be wicked awesome sweet. They send out a few emails; before you can type 140 characters they’ve lined up $28 million in seed capital. (There’s also out-of-school chatter about off-the-book rubles. Whatever.)

Now everyone’s talking about Douchenet.

Not you. You’re not talking about Douchenet. No one you know is talking about Douchenet.

By “everybody,” we don’t mean “everybody.” We don’t even mean “a large number of people.” We mean “everyone who matters.” Which most assuredly doesn’t include you. Or, really, hardly anyone at all.

So.

What exactly is Douchenet? Who knows? Who cares? The point of a piece like this one isn’t to tell you what’s going on. The point is to blow some free publicity the way of well-connected 26-year-old friends of people who matter to people who matter. (Not. You.) Twenty-six-year-olds whose business ideas are obviously utter horsecrap, are clearly doomed to failure, but not before they walk away with even more cash, raised from unwashed small-time rube wannabe playas. That’s the point of a piece like this.

That, and to make you feel miserable.

You poor, stupid, underemployed schmuck. A schmuck who will never, ever come anywhere near millions and millions of dollars. No matter how hard or long you toil.

Id.

iot.

At first (and OK, 17th) glance, last week’s Facebook IPO looks like a fiasco. Federal investigators are looking into charges that Morgan Stanley knowingly set the share price too high in order to inflate its underwriting fees, leaving unsophisticated stock buyers holding the bag for an 18 percent plunge of a $16 billion offering. But that’s only half the picture.

Sure, millions of people lost their hard-earned savings. But three douchebags are rocking out.

Which is what matters.

Mark Miron, 26, got paid in Facebook shares for watching Mark Zuckerberg’s cat one summer. As of last week, he was worth $200 million. But he’s more than just another smug, Silicon Valley wanker with rich parents, who likes to wear blue shirts with white collars, and is smart enough not to let his friend’s friend’s cat die. I mean, he is that. But there’s other stuff too. Like, he made a name for himself at Google when he agreed with some other entitled kids-of-Boomers that having illustrators design the search engine’s front page for free (i.e. “exposure”) was a cool idea. (By “cool,” we mean cheap, cynical and exploitative.) Can you say moxie?

Marc Parker, 26, started out at Facebook.co.uk, where he came up with the idea to model the British version of the site after its American parent, down to using the same language. “I love the blue hyperlinks. The white background. So American. And yet so British.” Eager to be promoted from a prat or a git to a full-fledged douchebag, Parker moved to Palo Alto, California in order to relinquish first his British, then his American citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on the £200 million he earned from the IPO.

Jeff Mark, 26, drifted from PayPal to Facebook to MySpace to Compuserve to Netscape back to Compuserve. (Though closed, he somehow managed to collect €200 million from the latter.)

The three men became inseparable—and insufferable—after a chance encounter at Bi-Nary, a macrobiotic air bar that caters to sexually indiscriminate coders on the edge of the foothills near the section of the Google campus where they test attack drones for corporations.

It was during a sex tour of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn that the three douches conceived Douchenet. “We were talking about how, even though douches run just about everything in multimedia, until recently there weren’t the authoring tools and the bandwidth and/or the tablet platform for douches to hook up to do douchey things,” said Miron.

“Yeah,” agreed Parker and Mark.

I reached out to (that’s e-talk for “called”) Margot Jefferson, an analyst at D-Freak, a firm that tracks douchebaggery. “Douches account for 33 percent of start-ups, which account for 82 percent of investor fleecing, which amounts to 126 percent of economic activity in the United States,” points out Jefferson. “So the ability to connect douches across digital platforms using digital things is a game changer,” she confirms.

Given the power and the track record of these remarkable entrepreneurs, Douchenet is a story about power, wealth, journalism—and yes, wealth and power—worth watching. Marc Miron, for example, wrote that article that appeared in Wired that time. And Parker’s dad is just ridiculously rich, so we know he’s smart. Douchenet brings to mind Wingnutnet, a website you’ve never heard of because it doesn’t exist, yet which I’ve been writing about forever, by which I mean 2011.

Sometime this summer, Android will release a free version of Douchenet, so people who sign up can begin registering their personal financial information for distribution to trusted sites in Belarus. Using the so-called “freemium” model, Douchenet will charge fees for actual features, like the ability to create an “avatar” that could be sold by Farmville, which would pay a fraction of a fractile of a percent back to the original user, i.e. Douchenet.

In a live Tweetathon, Mark said he was drawn to Douchenet less by the idea than by the people who came up with it. “When you make an investment, you are betting on the team more than the idea,” he said. “If the idea is wrong, but the team is right, they will figure it out.”

“Who knows where this will end up?” he added between tokes on a clove bong.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 29. His website is tedrall.com.)

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