65% of Americans say they agree with Pope Francis I’s critique of capitalism. But because we’re not allowed to publicly voice our opposition to capitalism, we resort to a sort of “dog whistle” — a “pope code” — in which we express our approval of the pope as an acceptable way to transmit our closet sympathies for socialism and communism.
Socialized Medicine Would Be Better Than Obamacare. In the Meantime, Let’s Waste Some Time on Some Lame, Doomed Reforms.
Anyone who has tried to sign up for Obamacare, as I have, knows that the launch of the Affordable Care Act has been — is — an unmitigated disaster.
Can it be fixed? Maybe.
But first, it’s important to digest the sheer ginormousness of this bastard cross between privatized grift — a wholesale transfer of wealth from individual patients to giant insurers subject to no oversight but their own absent consciences — and a spectacularly inept government bureaucracy run by careless, corrupt, connected buffoons.
More than 2 million people are getting booted from their existing health insurance because their current plans fall short of ACA standards.
Obama’s defenders say the cancelled coverage was “junk quality.” Which may be true. Still, it might have been nice to tell people about this provision, which the White House was well aware of, three years ago. When the president signed the law. As opposed to, you know, assuring us of the exact opposite.
Back in 2010, it turns out, the feds estimated that 50% to 75% of all current individual policies would have to be cancelled due to the ACA. So the current crisis is likely to expand in scope.
There’s no evidence that anyone has successfully purchased a plan. None. No one. Zero.
Six people managed to “sign up” on October 1st. Nationally.
As for the “signs-ups” — people who managed to register online or by phone, but couldn’t choose or sign up for an actual plan — it turns out that 90% of these people are so poor that they’ll get Medicaid. Only 10% might wind up buying the mandated private insurance plans. “When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” Matt Salo, head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, told The Washington Post. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”
Seriously?
The United States is not a rich country — well, it’s rich, but most United Statesers are poor. And anyway, who do you think is going to jam up the Intertubes to get healthcare first, 23-year-old “young invincibles” earning $10 an hour, or 53-year-old diabetics?
There may well be fewer Americans covered by insurance on New Year’s Day 2014 than on 2013 — due to Obamacare.
It’s been estimated that 45,000 Americans die each year because they’re uninsured. In other words, according to back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, 3,800 people will die because Obama and his underlings didn’t focus on the website launches until a couple of weeks before October 1st. Those are Katrina numbers. With more victims by the day.
I’m not counting those who will lose their existing plans without being able to replace them.
OK, it’s easy to complain (than to sign up for Obamacare, bapadumbum). What would I do differently?
Socialized medicine. Like in England. It works.
But an intelligent, pro-human solution is not in the cards. Not in bankster-owned America. Not now, anyway. Both the Democrats and Republicans are owned by the big corporate insurers that stand to make billions from the Affordable Care Act. Before the country, and eventually its political class, get real and get serious, we’ll have to waste a few years on attempts at reform.
If I were advising President Obama, here’s what I’d tell him to do:
Simplify the pricing structure. The current system’s complexity didn’t develop organically. It’s a feature. Deductibles and partial co-pays are hidden extra fees, like baggage fees charged by airlines. A plan that charges $7000 a year, but has a $3000 deductible, should be sold as a $10000 plan. Sticker shock is good. It encourages competition.
Price controls. Letting insurers charge whatever they want is ridiculous. The Department of Health and Human Services should set prices of everything from tests to drugs to visits to operations. They should squeeze the insurers to a reasonable, rock-bottom profit margin.
Eliminate sleazy out-of-network structures. Every plan should cover every doctor, every hospital, every drug. Americans shouldn’t have to live in a world where they can get a procedure at their in-plan hospital only to be told later — via a surprise bill — that the anesthesiologist, who works at the hospital, isn’t affiliated with it.
Suspend the stick, leave the carrot. The tax on Americans who can’t afford to buy for-profit insurance is unfair and cruel to working-class Americans — those who can least afford either the coverage or the fines.
Make it a national system. Rates vary wildly, not just between states, but even by county. We’re one nation. Let’s pool our resources as well as our risks. Under Obamacare as it stands, people who live in rural areas pay the highest rates — even though average salaries are lower away from big cities.
Whether these reforms fail in Congressional debate due to insurance company lobbyists or get enacted but don’t do enough to fix the system, they’ll get us closer to what we really need: a single-payer system. You know, like the rest of the First World has.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Learning the Lessons of Egypt
I’m not much for sports analogies, but any athlete knows about the home field advantage. It’s easier to win if you play your game, not your opponent’s.
This is even more true in politics. Playing by your enemy’s rules is a mug’s game.
For whatever reason, conservatives and right-wing activists — the latter distinguishable from the former because they want to push past stodgy establishmentarianism into radical reactionism (e.g., fascism and its close relatives) — understand that he who makes the rules usually wins the fight. Whether it’s the aggressive redistricting of Texas voting districts engineered by Karl Rove on behalf of Republicans, or the brutalist media activism of FoxNews and other Murdoch properties like The Wall Street Journal, or hiring goons to beat up election officials during the 2000 Florida recount, right-wingers get that politics is war, no Queensbury rules. Only victory matters.
Leftists — not soft, smooshy liberals but real, honest-to-a-nonexistent-God socialists and communists — get it too. Not that you could tell from recent history, at least in the United States. They’re dispirited and disorganized. Nevertheless, they remember enough Marx and Mao to remember that might makes right.
Liberals, on the other hand, can’t manage to internalize this depressing, historically proven fact.
Columnist’s Note: At this point, if you’re a seasoned reader of opinion essays, you no doubt expect me to list examples of liberal wimpiness. Al Gore giving up in 2000. Obama not getting anything done with a Democratic Congress a few years after Bush rammed through a raft of right-wing legislation through…a Democratic Congress. Next should follow the usual exhortation to grow a pair.
A reasonable assumption, but I’m taking a different tack this time: liberals don’t understand why others refuse to get suckered.
On the morning of Thursday, August 15th, NPR interviewed a “liberal intellectual” in Egypt, where the ruling military junta had ordered soldiers to slaughter hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators staging sit-ins to protest the coup d’état that toppled the democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party. As is typical in these pieces, we were given no explanation as to why this man was picked to represent the reaction of the Egyptian public to the crackdown. Fluency in English? Friend of the reporter? Well-connected publicist? They didn’t say. Regardless of the reason, the effect was to anoint this “liberal” as a reasonable, albeit extraordinarily well-educated, Average Joe. Whether or not NPR producers intended it, Mr. Egyptian Liberal Voice of Reason served as the voice of NPR and thus, by extension, of American liberalism.
NPR’s pet Egyptian liberal Thursday was “novelist Alaa al-Aswany, who protested against the Mubarak regime and criticized ousted president Mohammed Morsi during his time in office.”
Al-Aswany wasted no time discrediting himself — “No, there is no military rule in Egypt, and there will never be a military rule in Egypt. And what happened is that we are living in a transition period” — before an observation I found unintentionally illuminating: “We must have the constitution first, of course. And then after that, the election. And I believe that there would be civil elected president and elected parliament who will take over.”
What about the Muslim Brotherhood? They should participate in the democratic process, he said.
But why?
On the same network, on the same show, Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations was pointing out that “it’s hard to make a credible claim if you’re an Egyptian liberal” because they supported the military coup.
“There is something called the Repression Radicalization Dynamic,” said Cook. “And one can imagine Muslim Brothers saying that they tried to play by the rules of the political game. They were shut out, shut down and now being hunted and they have no recourse but to take up arms against the state. We’ve seen that before, in fact, in Egypt, in the mid-1990s. There was a low-level insurgency which killed anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people. Throughout the Arab world we’ve seen it in places like Algeria.” In 1992 the Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) was expected to win Algeria’s elections. The military, acting with the backing of the U.S., canceled the election, prompting the coining of the term the “American Veto.” The Americans also effectively vetoed Hamas’ win of fair elections in Gaza in 2006.
From Algeria to Gaza to Egypt, the message to Islamists is clear: don’t follow the West’s rules. Electoral democracy is for them, not for you. If you play the West’s game, if you work within their system, they’ll do whatever it takes, including cheating, to prevent you from winning. If you win anyway, they’ll overthrow you in a coup. And if you demonstrate — peacefully, nonviolently, just the way they tell you you’re supposed to, they’ll shoot you like dogs.
I’m pretty sure Islamists — and other radicals who seek political power — have learned their lesson. Goodbye ballot boxes, hello guns.
Liberals, on the other hand, clearly haven’t. Not only do they themselves insist on accepting the rhetorical framework of the right, they expect everyone else to do so as well.
Of course, there may well be a simple if unpleasant explanation for that. Stylistic differences (e.g., George W. Bush vs. Barack Obama) aside, when push comes to shove, liberals side with authoritarianism — even though the autocrats in question plan to get rid of them sooner or later — over their leftist “allies.” We’ve seen it over and over, from Germany in 1848 to Washington in 2013, where a liberal president presides over an empire of torture camps, fleets of killer robot planes, and a police state that makes East Germany’s Stasi look penny ante.
Liberals are right-wing.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Think the President is Socialist? We Wish!
Memo to Republicans: you don’t have a monopoly on hating President Obama.
I dislike America’s two-party system for a lot of reasons. Mostly because the duopoly is undemocratic: no two political parties can represent the diversity of opinions held by a nation’s voters. We’d need dozens of parties to approximate adequate representative government. Another reason, one that deserves attention, is that it reduces political dialogue to binary imbecility.
Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. If you’re not one, you must be the other. If you don’t vote, people — apparently rational, functional people who manage to drive their cars without ramming them into walls — tell you with a straight face that your non-vote is a de facto vote for the candidate you would have voted against (had you voted). Because you’re not allowed to hate both. Because, in under our idiotic one-or-the-other political system, even if you hate both parties, you’re supposed to hate one party more than the other.
Which is why, for the last four years, Obama-hating has belonged to the racist right.
In the real world, of course, lots of lefties can’t stand the president. In the mainstream corporate media narrative epitomized by MSNBC on the “left” and FoxNews on the “right,” however, left=liberal=Democrat and right=conservative=Republican. They say it so often and we hear it so much that many of us think it’s true.
In the real world, away from the barking dogs of cable television news, lots of Americans would vote for a party other than the Ds or the Rs. A 2012 poll found that 46% of Americans would support a third party if it were viable. Many on the right think the GOP is too extreme or too soft. That debate, the “civil war” between generic Republicans (e.g., Chris Christie) and the libertarian right (e.g., Rand Paul), gets some play.
Not so much on the left. Thanks largely to the left=Democrat propaganda of the late Air America and now MSNBC, lefties disgusted with the Democrats get zero play.
You’ll never find our views discussed or our champions interviewed, not even on the “liberal” shows hosted by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert or Bill Maher. But we exist. We are many. Even among self-identified Democrats, 14% of overall voters say they are “very liberal.” Unsurprisingly, this group disapproves of Obama’s job performance, which — contrary to right-wing talking points — has stayed away from policies friendly to his party’s traditional liberal base. Beyond that, about 10% of voters say they’re “disaffected” — so alienated from both parties that they refuse to participate in elections.
Greetings, right-wingers! We live in the same country. You should know about lefties who don’t like the Democrats — hold on to your seats — because they’re too conservative.
So, righties, you hate Obama because he’s a socialist. Or a liberal extremist. Because the Affordable Care Act goes too far. Because he was born in Kenya (and stole the presidency). Maybe (though you’re only allowed to say this among trusted friends) because he’s black.
Fine. I’m not going to try to change your minds.
Instead, I’m going to provide some perspective. To demonstrate that despite two centuries of puerile choose-one-outta-two electoral politics, America’s ideological landscape is broader and more diverse than you may be aware.
Tens of millions of Americans — progressives, paleoliberals, greens, populists, left libertarians, left anarchists and yes, socialists and communists — hate Obama for being too far to the right. Socialist? We wish! We think he’s a sellout. At best! More like a corporate shill. Definitely a militarist. Possibly a fascist.
Here is a brief summary of the left’s brief against Barack Obama:
He bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. The banksters who wrecked the economy should have gone to prison; he gave them $7.77 trillion. Distressed homeowners got nothing. Nor did the unemployed. Lefties see Obama as a slave of Wall Street scum like Timothy Geitner and Lawrence Summers.
He didn’t lift a finger to create new jobs. Right-wingers blame regulations and ObamaCare. Not us. Leftists want big jobs programs, like the WPA during the Great Depression, to add tens of millions of un- and underemployed Americans directly to the federal payroll.
He’s a warmonger. He expanded and extended the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. (And lied about ending them. He renamed “combat troops” to “support personnel,” and replaced soldiers with private “contractor” mercenaries. The U.S. will be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq long after Obama “ended” those wars.) He got us into a new war in Libya. Now it’s Syria. In both cases we are supporting Islamist factions whose values we — not just lefties, but all Americans — do not share.
He refused to investigate the crimes of the Bush era: the lies the Administration used to con us into war in Iraq, torture, extraordinary rendition, spying on American citizens. We believe in accountability.
He expanded the drone wars. Many leftists are pacifists, opposing all war. Others accept the necessity of fighting to defend against an invasion. All agree that drone strikes, managed in secret, devoid of legal authorization and without checks or balances, are the worst kind of war: aggressive, impersonal, sanitized, mechanized, and especially enraging to its victims.
Most leftists are civil libertarians. We believe that personal freedoms are more important than the rights of the state. As we learned thanks to Edward Snowden, Obama has presided over a breathtaking expansion of the post-9/11 police state, violating the inherent right of every American to speak on the phone or write correspondence in private on a comprehensive, totalitarian scale.
Even ObamaCare, bête noire of the right, annoys us.
For us, the profit incentive has no place in something as existentially necessary as healthcare. We want big insurance companies out of the equation entirely. So, even though there are early indications that ObamaCare’s insurance marketplaces will lower premiums for many patients, we shrug our collective shoulders at such incrementalism. We wonder why socialized medicine — doctors and nurses employed directly by the state, hospitals nationalized — or at least a “single payer” option (which Obama promised during the campaign) was never seriously considered.
Then there’s Guantánamo, which he should have closed. Bradley Manning, tortured under his orders. Edward Snowden, who should have gotten a medal, hunted like a dog.
Any one of the above outrages deserves a long prison term.
If you’re a right-winger who hates Obama and the Democrats, remember us. We hate them just as much as you do — but not for the same reasons.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Gov. Jerry Brown’s new budget projects paying off $28 billion in state debt. But the debt actually totals hundreds of billions of dollars. Possible solutions to paying off the whole thing? Maybe we could start by nationalizing Apple Computer.
GOP Pols Exploit Anti-Wall Street Rage
Newt Gingrich made a name for himself as the right-wing ideologue who led the 1994 “Republican Revolution.”
What a difference the wholesale collapse of international capitalism makes.
Forget 9/11—everything changed on 9/14/08, when Lehman Brothers hit the skids. Millions lost their jobs. Millions more lost their jobs. And the government refused to help them.
The government’s masters, the bankers, wouldn’t let them. They wanted all that taxpayer money for themselves.
The system was finally exposed as the corrupt, inefficient, cruel pseudodemocracy that we on the Left had always known it was. More than three years have passed yet neither the political class nor its corporate bosses have found the wherewithal to sate the anger of America’s roiling masses with the traditional bundle of social programs. To the contrary, the powers that be are calling for austerity, for gutting what’s left of the safety net.
They’re stealing the rope with which we will hang them.
Political disintegration is disruptive and painful. But it sure is entertaining.
The rise of the Republican primary season’s Anti-Capitalist Brigades is the center ring of this circus of death. At the head of the anti-Romney cadres is one of Newt’s well-heeled supporters, who is dropping a cool $3 million on an ad blitz that denounces Mitt Romney for engaging in slash-and-burn capitalism. (Is there another kind?)
“There’s a company in The Wall Street Journal today that Bain [Capital, Romney’s company] put $30 million into, took $180 million out of and the company went bankrupt,” Newt Gingrich said on January 10th. “And you have to ask yourself: Was a six-to-one return really necessary? What if they only take $120 million out? Will the company still be there? Will 1,700 families still have a job?”
Good questions all. But the heartless beasts who populate Wall Street venture capital firms don’t worry about the blood and tears they leave in their wake. Like all vampires they feast and flee. Their pet Republicans don’t care either. Not usually.
“I think there’s a real difference between people who believe in the free market and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment,” the former speaker continued.
Not much difference. Not when you think about it. Still, this is a serious slap-the-forehead moment.
Bear in mind, Gingrich is still a man of the Right. A few weeks ago his proposal for forced child labor of impoverished waifs marked the Dickensianest moment of the 2011 Christmas shopping season.
Newt isn’t the only Republican presidential candidate attacking capitalism’s sacred right to loot and pillage. Texas governor Rick Perry, whose brain freezes and loutish yucks over his role as the nation’s top executioner of lower-class misérables (and at least one innocent man) make his predecessor George W. Bush look like Adlai Stevenson, calls buyout specialists like Romney “vultures” who “swoop in…eat the carcass, and…leave the skeleton” of companies they target. Romney, he said, is a “buyout tycoon who executed takeovers, bankrupted businesses, and sent jobs overseas while killing American jobs.”
“Governor Romney enjoys firing people—I enjoy creating jobs,” added Jon Huntsman.
These are Republicans?
What’s up?
“For all the talk about this being a center-right nation, there’s a realization that Americans are uncomfortable with excessive greed and the kind of ruthless, screw-the-workers style of capitalism Romney used to get rich,” Steve Benen writes in Washington Monthly.
Greg Sargent of The Washington Post chimes in: “The leading GOP candidates are on record arguing that Romney’s practice of [capitalism]—which he regularly cites as proof of his ability to create jobs, as a generally constructive force and even as synonymous with the American way—is not really capitalism at all, but a destructive, profit-driven perversion of it. Thanks to them, this is no longer a left-wing argument.”
(Actually, destruction and profit-taking are the essential cores of capitalism. But why quibble? Everyone agrees that capitalism sucks. Yay!)
Times are changin’. According to polls, communism is more popular than Congress. So why isn’t the party of the left jumping on the Wall Street-bashing bandwagon?
Throughout the 2008 campaign and his presidency Barack Obama has taken pains to reassure the 1 percent that if he’s not exactly one of them he’ll look out for their bank accounts. Certainly he has enacted policies that have increased the gap between rich and poor while sucking the life out of the dry husk of the middle class.
Meanwhile, revolution looms.
Why don’t the Democrats see it? Don’t they understand that capitalism is discredited? Newt Gingrich does. So do most Republicans.
It comes down to a simple explanation: Everything has changed, but not the Democrats. They’ve always been slower than the GOP to recognize the shifting winds of American politics, slower to respond, inept when they try.
We used to be a center-right country. Now we’re left-right. Soon we’ll be left-left. Both the Dems and the Reps will be left behind. In the meantime, watch the dying Republicans make the most of an agenda that ought to belong to the dying Democrats: bashing the rich and greedy.
If nothing else, it’ll be entertaining.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
MoveOn Co-opts OWS Rhetoric, Dilutes Its Message
If Democrats were doing their jobs, there wouldn’t be an Occupy movement.
The last 40 years has left liberals and progressives without a party and working people without an advocate. The party of FDR, JFK and LBJ abandoned its principles, embracing and voting along with Reagan and two Bushes. Clinton’s biggest accomplishments, NAFTA and welfare reform, were GOP platform planks. These New Democrats were indistinguishable from Republicans, waging optional wars, exporting jobs overseas and coddling corrupt CEOs while the rest of us—disconnected from power, our needs repeatedly ignored—sat and watched in silent rage.
Barack Obama is merely the latest of these phony Democrats. He’s the most recent in a line of corporate stooges going back to Jimmy Carter.
The Occupiers revolted under Obama’s watch for two reasons. The gap between the promise of his soaring rhetoric and the basic indecency of his cold-blooded disregard for the poor and unemployed was too awful to ignore. Moreover, the post-2008 economic collapse pushed a dam of insults and pain and anger that had built up over years past its breaking point.
Haphazard and disorganized and ad hoc, the Occupy movement is an imperfect, spontaneous response that fills a yawning demand gap in the American marketplace of ideas. For the first time since 1972, the spectrum of Left from liberalism to progressivism to socialism to communism to left anarchism has an audience (if not much of an organization).
Now the very same Democrats who killed liberalism and blocked leftists from candidacies, appointments, even the slightest participation in discussion—are trying to co-opt the Occupy movement.
MoveOn.org, which began as a plea for the U.S. to “move on” during Bill Clinton’s impeachment for perjury, claims to be an independent, progressive activist group. It’s really a shill for center-right Democratic politicians like Obama, whom MoveOn endorsed in the 2008 primaries against Hillary Clinton, who was running to Obama’s left.
All decision-making within the Occupations is consensus-based. Nothing gets approved or done before it has been exhaustedly debated; actions must be approved by 90 to 100% of Occupiers at General Assemblies. It can be arduous.
Without respect for Occupy’s process, MoveOn brazenly stole the movement’s best-known meme for its November 17th “We Are The 99%” event. And no one said boo.
Some Occupier friends were flattered.
Idiots.
Why didn’t MoveOn ask permission from the Occupy movement? Because they wouldn’t have gotten it. “We’re just days from the Super Committee’s deadline to propose more cuts for the 99% or increased taxes for the 1%,” reads MoveOn’s ersatz Occupy “event.”
“So come out and help increase the pressure on Congress to tax Wall Street to create millions of jobs.”
Um, no. Lobbying Congress directly contradicts a fundamental tenet of the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street. Occupy doesn’t lobby. Occupy doesn’t endorse either of the corporate political parties. Occupy doesn’t care about this bill or that amendment. Occupy does not participate in stupid elections in which both candidates work for the 1%. Occupy exists in order to figure out how to get rid of the existing system and what should replace it.
What MoveOn did was shameful. They ought to apologize. Donating a year or two’s worth of their contributions to the Occupations would be small penance. Given how little MoveOn has accomplished since its founding, Occupy would likely make better use of the cash.
On December 7th it was the turn of another Democratic “Astroturf” organization, the “American Dream Movement,” to lift the Occupy movement’s radical rhetoric to promote a very different, milquetoast agenda.
The American Dream Movement was co-founded in June 2011 by former Obama political advisor Van Jones and—turning up like a bad penny!—MoveOn.org.
A written statement for the ADM’s “Take Back the Capitol” threatened to “make Wall Street pay” for enriching the richest 1% and to “track down those responsible for crashing the economy and causing millions of 99%-ers to lose their jobs and homes—while failing to pay their fair share of taxes.”
Sounds like Occupy. Which is great.
Somewhat less than awesome is the content of the “Take Back the Capitol”: begging Congressmen who ought to awaiting trial for corruption and treason for a few crumbs off the corporate table.
“Throughout Tuesday, demonstrators visited the offices of about 99 House and Senate members, from both parties, and most were refused meetings with lawmakers,” reported NPR.
Duh.
What part of “we hate you” do these ACM fools not get?
Robert Townsend, an unemployed 48-year-old man from Milwaukee, managed to meet his Congressman, Republican Thomas Petri. “We asked him if he would vote for the jobs bill. He was evasive on that. And I asked him, ‘Tell me something positive that you’re doing for Wisconsin that will put us back to work.’ He mentioned something in Oshkosh, but that’s mostly for military people. He really didn’t have much of an answer. It’s like he had no commitment to addressing this problem.”
Double duh.
If Congress were responsive, if Democrats or Republicans cared about us or our needs, if Obama and his colleagues spent a tenth as much time and money on the unemployed as they do golfing and bombing and invading and shoveling trillions of dollars at Wall Street bankers, we wouldn’t need an Occupy movement.
But we won’t have one for long. Not if Occupy lets itself get Occupied by MoveOn and the Democrats.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
Two-Party System Is Not Democracy
We get the government we deserve.
Don’t get mad at the politicians! It’s your/our fault. You/we elected them.
Most Americans accept these aphorisms. Yet they are lies—lies that distract us from the fact that our political system is a farce. Really, we should get rid of this phony two-party “democracy.” And we will. In the meantime, we ought to ignore it.
The two-party system made simple:
Two worthless scoundrels are on the ballot.
If you vote for one of them, a worthless scoundrel will win.
If you don’t vote, a worthless scoundrel will win.
It’s a pretty unappealing sales pitch. How did it last 200 years?
The two-party system, a political mutation unanticipated by the Constitution and dreaded by the Founding Fathers, mainly relies on the “lesser of two evils” argument.
Next year, for example, many liberals will hold their noses and vote for Obama even though he has not delivered for them. They will do this to try to avoid winding up with someone “even worse”: Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, etc.
Conservatives will do the same thing. They will vote for Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney or whomever—even though they know full well they won’t come through with smaller government or a balanced budget—because Obama is “even worse.”
The two-party system is a sick game. Many citizens, realizing this, opt out by not voting. Others resort to negative voting.
In 2008 one out of three Republican voters told pollsters they were voting against Obama, not for McCain. Out in five Democrats voted against McCain, not for Obama.
A quarter of all votes cast in 2008 were “negative votes.” Thirty-eight percent of voters in the 2010 midterm elections crossed party lines from D to R “to send a message.”
To “get the government they deserve,” as master curmudgeon H.L. Mencken asserted, we would have to have a wide choice of options on the ballot. Two is pathetic.
Two parties isn’t even a facsimile of democracy.
Would you shop at a store that only offered two books? Two kinds of cereal? Two models of computers? Two brands of computer?
What about third parties? The Dems and Reps conspire to block the Greens, Libertarians, etc. with insurmountable obstacles. Minor parties can’t get campaign financing, ballot access, media coverage, or seats at presidential debates. So they rarely win.
“With a single elected president if you’re going to have a chance to win the states, which are all awarded on a winner-take-all basis, again you don’t have a chance,” John Bibby, University of Wisconsin professor and co-author of the book, “Two Parties—Or More? The American Party System” told PBS in 2004. “The incentive is to form broad-based parties that have a chance to win in the Electoral College.”
The argument that we, the people, are somehow to blame for the failings of “our politicians” is absurd. Even partisans of the two major parties are substantially dissatisfied with the nominees who emerge from the primary system.
Politics is not what happens on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Real politics is the process of arguing about how we want to live. In America that happens over dinner with our families, over drinks with our friends, over the water cooler at work (if you still have a job).
What happens on Election Day is a circus, a farcical distraction meant to siphon away the vitality of real politics.
Real politics is dangerous. Real politics, as we saw in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, can actually change things.
The two-party system is a twisted con based on fear. If you don’t vote for Party A then Party B, which is slightly more evil, will win. If “your” Party A wins, all you get is the dubious, incremental pseudo-victory of somewhat less suckiness. But Party A gets something infinitely more valuable: political legitimacy and the right to claim a mandate for policies that you mostly dislike.
“Hey, you elected them.”
“You got the government you deserve.”
Not at all.
It’s a terrible, lopsided bargain. You get little to nothing. They use your vote to justify their policies:
No jobs.
One war after another.
Wasting your tax dollars.
Corruption.
More pollution.
(Notice: I didn’t specify which party. Compared to the vast spectrum of possible politics from left to right, which encompasses such ideologies as communism, socialism, left libertarianism, right libertarianism, fascism, etc., the Dems and Reps are more similar than different.)
Until there’s a revolution we’re stuck with these jokers. But that doesn’t mean we have to pay attention.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL
As in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the U.S. is backing the radical Islamists of eastern Libya against a socialist regime. The law of unintended consequences surely awaits.
Wealthy (clueless) Americans claim to approve of the liberation movements sweeping the Middle East. Are they high?
