A significant problem I’ve been having is understanding the mindset of the people who still stand behind Obama. From no metric I can conceive of has his presidency been exceptional. On the core progressive issues, his has been a remarkably unimpressive (at best) outing. The defenses I have run into for his term boil down to a single major premise: He’s the best we’ve got, and unless you pick him, even though he’s the lesser of two evils, you will ruin this country because of your selfishness.

I was going to write that such an argument is false. But I had a brain wave last night.

The argument isn’t false. It’s wrong, but it isn’t wrong because of an intention to deceive or because the person advancing the argument is stupid. The issue simply isn’t being framed correctly. So here goes.

Everyone who has ever known a drug addict — if you ever knew someone who couldn’t put down the vicodin, the scotch bottle, the needle, or the scratch tickets — put your hand up. (No one can see you, so put your hand back down.)

Most people who have been pulled into an addict’s life know what happens. Things start to disappear. Even if you own very little, you can have a lot of things disappear before you come to the moment where you start doing an inventory and discover a whole lot of stuff has evaporated. If you’re lucky, you catch the addict in the act. You tail them to the race track, you walk in on them in the bathroom having a drink from the bottle in the toilet tank, etc. And, if you’re able to, you hand the addict an ultimatum: It stops today, right now. If you ever see them doing it again, no matter what excuse they present, you will leave, you will kick them out, you will drive to the police station and fill out a report. And then, you do it.

By all the accounts I’ve read, this is a profoundly difficult thing to do. That’s why there are so many instances of addicts conning their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc., over and over. It is hard to amputate a significant portion of your life, just like that.

The politicians who have been getting elected are, for the most part, just like addicts. They get elected, and re-elected, by the voters having a lesser of two evils moment of weakness. Having an addict in the house or kicking him out and watching his whole life go to hell on him? Well, maybe he will change this time, and I wasn’t all that attached to grandma’s silver, anyway. I mean, sure, she handed it to me on her deathbed, but, well, my addict really means to change this time. And if I kick him out, then I’m being a bad person, I’m being unreasonable (wait for it), I’m not being bipartisan about all this. I should reach across the aisle, you know. Because it would be the height of folly to pull the rug out from under him now, when he’s so close to cleaning up and flying right.

The politicians are not, if we keep picking the lesser of two evils, going to eventually one day produce a miracle of statesmanship for us, just like most addicts don’t suddenly stop drinking, gambling, whatevering, just because someone told them they had to. After the uncontrolled binge of secret prisons, unlawful detentions, murders-by-drone, stop and frisks, etc., if some politician came forward and tried to argue that the past 20 years had all been a mistake, he’d be dismissed as a dreamer or a lunatic. Pedantic lectures would commence about how the candidate simply doesn’t understand about politics. He’s naive. And so forth.

One thing I run into in the narratives from reformed addicts is a simple enough statement: They almost always say something about how they wish they’d gotten sorted out sooner. How they wish they hadn’t had to spent three years or 30 years slowly losing everything before they finally were able to put themselves together. And that’s the point I’ve reached, because that’s the point the country has reached. Why drag out the remaining descent any longer? Because we’re super-duper hoping someone will leap in, putting right what once went wrong (and hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap home)?

We all know that each “settled for the lesser” only brings us closer to the bottom, and along the way, there has been decades of misery and hardship. Let’s finally take the handbrake off and let the maniacs ruin everything once and for all. At least we can limit the amount of time we all spend suffering.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a decision that could only be described in three letters starting with W and ending with F, to give police the final authority to authorize strip-searches of people arrested for any offense. Broken tail light? Bend over and spread ’em. That goes for you too, Deadbeat Dad, shoplifting cat food granny and the rest of you guilty-until-proven-innocent 99 percenters. Bend over, squat and cough. Your body is the new battleground in the “War on Terror” and the 13 million of you arrested each year are now dungeon fodder play things for uniformed goons on the public payroll. Where once we asked for your cooperation, we now demand your abject humiliation. So if you’re getting any funny ideas about venturing out of the unheated comfort of your soon to be foreclosed upon home, whether it’s to drive with an expired license to the food bank, or more criminally, decide to exercise your democratic right to assemble in the vicinity of a rich person, be prepared not just for water cannons and rubber bullets, but a full-on finger raping by the ever lengthening arms of the law, whose weapons now perform double duty as lethal sex toys.

Your government (or whatever you call the publicly funded entity that exists wholly and unabashedly to ensure the unimpeded transfer of the nation’s wealth into the select coffers of the gangsters on its payroll and their corporate cronies) wants to fuck you. There’s no other way of putting it. They want to fuck you in the worst possible way. Literally, lewdly and above all, painfully. Think joyless dungeon master/camp guard giving your genitals the taser treatment kind of painful. You realize, of course, under your tormenter’s pleather gimp suit is some blandly visaged, pot-bellied technocrat hoping to be home in time to watch NCIS with the wife while you are left to whimper in your restraints.

Once content to “screw” you, or just fuck you over, our “elected” oligarchs have now upped the bar on their depraved appetite for torture porn with a ready army of doctors, soldiers, law enforcement officials and airport screeners to carry out their perverse handiwork. We can now add the judiciary at its highest level to this motley mix of state-sanctioned sex offenders.

It’s bad enough that air travelers have to submit a XXX-Ray or a rough probing molestation by TSA officials to ensure the absence of explosive contraband in their hoo-hoos, or that abortion seekers in some states are forcibly raped with sonic dildos. You thought that Republican presidential candidates making misogyny and homophobia the centerpiece of their campaign trail hate speech was reason enough to fear for an encroaching Idiocracy ruled over by a posse of evil clowns. Now comes the crowning jewel of a full-blown gulag police state in the form of a rubber gloved, raised finger salute to the Bill of Rights and all the other shredder-ready old documents that once served to pre-empt the abuse of power and provide the checks and balances necessary to maintain a republic. The vigilance of The Founding Fathers is clearly no match for the brain trust who brought us the Gaza strip, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay. That the puerile raunch one associates with ‘gonzo’ and straight-to-DVD ‘grindhouse’ porn now serves as blueprints for law enforcement and social engineering in the age of ‘Hope’ is just something else to choke on like a rubber gag ball restraint.

In the swinging, wife-swapping spirit of ‘bipartisanship’, five Republican and four Democratic appointees have proven they have bigger fish to fry than upholding some shredder-ready old document. By adding DWD (Driving While ‘Do-Able’) to the roster of punishable offenses like DWB (Driving While Black) law enforcement will have even further impetus to be discerning, heat packing meat graders deciding which ‘cuts’ to inspect for the mildest of infractions. Giving police free rein to play the Officer Frisky role in ‘Caged Cuties III’ is just one of the many (and hardly unintended) outcomes of a legal amendment meant to pre-empt civil strife in the event of more robust ‘Occupy’ or anti-war movements. Or should any of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” among the 99-ers finally realize that their humiliation will follow them to the grave and rise up, zombie style to snack on their former overlords as if they were delicious ‘pink slime’ school lunches. In which case, the Supreme Court is ready to rubber stamp into law anything to remove existing legal or constitutional impediments to a scorched-earth policy of zero tolerance to dissent. Constitutional safeguards like the 4th Amendment and all its blah-blah-blahing about unreasonable searches and seizures be damned.

What US leaders openly encourage overseas in the form of civil disobedience, they will not tolerate at home. An ‘Arab Spring’ for our colonial subjects overseas, whose dissent we can work into a neo-liberal framework and impose austerity and military rule later on. For American dissenters, even ones who express an anti-authoritarian bent with a broken bicycle bell, its a swift jack boot to the genitals.

Many thanks to Ted Rall for the opportunity to guest post here.  I am so pleased to participate on the blog of someone whose work I admire and appreciate.

Last week Ted Rall predicted that, despite assumptions to the contrary in the “corporate pundit class,” Mitt Romney will be elected president.  Rall observes that Obama is currently leading Romney in the polls by only 4-5 points – not enough to carry him through a long campaign season of pro-Romney attack ads – an aspect of campaigning at which Republicans excel.  Further, Rall asserts that the narrative this time around favors Romney rather than Obama.  People know the economy is getting worse, not better, and historically have been susceptible to the argument that we should run the country like a business.  Finally, Rall points out that Republicans have a huge fundraising advantage and that they are a “loyal bunch.”  For these reasons, his money is on Romney.

It’s risky to disagree with Rall, given his track record of being wrong only once in 17 years.  But what the heck; here goes!  First of all, I suspect the old narratives are not working as well as in the past.  They’re worn and frayed and more and more people, including conservatives, are suspicious of a businessman who inherited much of his wealth and made the rest by buying up companies, breaking them up, and laying off workers.  As for Republican loyalty, the Christian evangelicals, a crucial voting bloc for Republicans, will not be voting in large numbers for a Mormon.  I suspect that many progressives and young people who have soured on Obama, and Christians who can’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon, will be sitting this one out and confounding the pollsters.

Finally, President Obama proved himself a champion fundraiser last time around and as of February 2012, had accumulated a war chest more than twice as big as Mitt Romney’s (though, as Rall says, once Romney is the nominee his fundraising will kick into high gear.)  And, Obama is the only presidential candidate ever to have won Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year award for his campaign.  His ability to win an election should not be under-estimated.

However, those are not the primary reasons I believe Obama will be re-elected.  The main difference between my analysis and Rall’s is that Rall is focusing primarily on voter behavior, while my primary focus is on the goals of the oligarchy, the financial elite, if you will, that really run this country.  For that class, Obama is the best candidate to implement the austerity agenda that is going to be foisted on us after the election by whoever wins.  (Here I agree with Rall that “the D vs. R horserace is a parlor game with minor ramifications for our daily lives” and that whichever “corporate party” wins, we will continue to get widening economic inequality.)

Economist Michael Hudson pointed out last July, during the phony debt ceiling “crisis”, that just as it took a Republican president, Richard Nixon, to go to communist China, it will take a Democratic president to dismantle the social safety net and impose an austerity agenda.  Hudson wrote:

Wall Street knows that to get sufficient Congressional votes to roll back the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, a Democratic president needs to be in office. A Democratic Congress would block any Republican president trying to make the kind of cuts that Mr. Obama is sponsoring. But Congressional Democratic opposition is paralyzed when President Obama himself – the liberal president par excellence, America’s Tony Blair – acts as cheerleader for cutting back entitlements and other social spending.

It’s the same in many western countries, Hudson observed, from France where the Socialist government supported the “privatization program dictated by European Central Bank,” to  Greece, where the Socialist party led “the fight for privatization and bank bailouts,” to Britain where involvement of the Labour party proved crucial in quelling popular opposition to privatization of the railways.

Hudson accurately anticipated last July that the playing field would be tilted by a clown car of Republican candidates, and that their extremism would allow Obama to fake left and move right.  He wrote:

The Republicans help by refraining from putting forth a credible alternative presidential candidate. The effect is to give Mr. Obama room to move far to the right wing of the political spectrum.

In addition to being the leader of the most effective political party for imposing an austerity agenda, Obama’s personal style is far superior to Romney’s for the task at hand.  Obama can be charming, gives the appearance of sincerity (unlike Romney, who is so obviously phony), and sounds like the reasonable guy in the room.  He is the perfect executive for the oligarchy, adept at pushing through their agenda while pretending to be one of us, even occasionally appropriating some of the language of the Occupy movement when it suits his purpose.  In sum, he is one smooth operator, highly skilled at “cooling out the mark” (that’s you and me).

Sociologist Erving Goffman used the analogy of a confidence game, and the role of “cooling out the mark,” to illustrate how individuals are persuaded to adjust to loss in various social situations. In a confidence game, potential marks are targeted and then convinced that they have a chance to win the game (actually rigged in favor of the confidence men).  Once relieved of their cash, marks are expected to depart, sadder, but wiser.  Some marks, however, are not prepared to accept their losses.  In these cases, an associate of those running the confidence game has the job of “cooling out the mark,” or getting him to accept his loss.

Goffman explains:

After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team-mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home.

A classic example of a social situation where “cooling out the mark” – or persuading an individual to accept a loss of money and/or status – is required, occurs when someone is fired from a job.   In the film Up in the Air, George Clooney plays a character, Ryan Bingham, whose job it is to fly around the country firing employees whose companies are downsizing.  Clooney’s character functions as a “cooler,” by attempting to defuse the anger and hurt of individuals losing their jobs, and reframing the loss as a great opportunity.   Bingham begins every firing by telling the former employee:

Anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world, sat where you are now.  And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.

Whoever wins the presidential election will function as the Ryan Bingham for the 99%, charged with giving us the bad news that the money we have paid in all our working lives for Social Security has been borrowed by the Federal government and they’re not going to pay it back, that Medicare will be privatized, and that programs for low-income people such as Medicaid and food stamps will be eliminated because, sadly, “we’re broke.”  (Of course, we’re not  broke – see this film – but that’s a subject for another post.)

Who do you imagine will be better at “cooling out the mark,” President Obama or Mitt Romney?   Who do you think the oligarchy will favor for the job?

Katherine M Acosta is freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin.  Contact her at kacosta at undisciplinedphd dot com.  Her blog is UndisciplinedPhD.

I posted this one yesterday, and it was linked to by a few notable blogs, including in this post which explains the broader issues.

About me

American Extremists archive

It’s day one. Sporadic fighting continues. The Capitol is ablaze. Pumped with adrenaline and thrilled that the day of victory has arrived, revolutionaries storm into the centers of power of the former United States of America.

What will they find? What should they do?

This question looms large in the minds of everyone who tries to imagine a different political and economic system than the one we live under now. Few of us can think of anything new, much less better, much less how it would/will look like.

I am asking your support to help fund the research and writing of a follow-up to The Anti-American Manifesto with the title “Congratulations! You Have Just Overthrown the Government of the United States of America.” The idea is to walk through the early days, weeks and months of a theoretical American revolution: What should be done to make sure that what comes next is better, not worse?

If I get support, I will rely on historical precedents as well as the experience of actual leaders in parts of the world that recently came into the control of revolutionary movements to set up a sort of Revolution for Dummies book.

Please go to Kickstarter for the details and to watch a video.

I know, I know.

Daily Kos has added just about every leftie cartoon in America except me and Stephanie McMillan. Lots of you have written to me asking me about this, and it’s gotten to the point that it’s probably easier for me to just post here.

Here’s the skinny:

Q: Is it some permission thing?
A: No. I’d be happy to have my work appear on Kos or any other website that wants me. Unfortunately, they’re not interested in my work. I’ve asked. My friend and colleague Tom Tomorrow is the editor over there. He pitched me but Markos (who runs Daily Kos) doesn’t like my work.

Q: Why doesn’t Markos like your cartoons?
A: Dunno. Never met the guy. I assume it’s politics. The only two major leftie cartoonists he excludes are me and Stephanie, neither of whom conform to his support of President Obama and the Democratic Party. But then, some of his cartoonists have criticized Obama (though not as much). I’m guessing here.

Q: How about running on some other liberal blog?
A: At this date there are no other liberal blogs that pay to run comics. Which is insane when you think about it. It’s the Web. This is a visual medium. Comics are popular with readers. I assume it’s only a matter of time.

At this point your energies would be better spent trying to get me and other cartoonists into sites like Firedog Lake than Kos. Even though Kos’ reader survey overwhelmingly called for me to be added, Markos ignored it. But a well-placed email and/or post to Firedog Lake, Real Clear Politics, etc. might be worthwhile.