The Criminality of Pretence: Dysfunction of Two Parties Incestuously Spawned from Corporate Money and Corruption                        

"Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests. Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only battle worth waging. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments - a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason."

                                                                                        -Albert Camus

The 2000 presidential election was the first time in my lifetime that I was able to vote for a candidate instead of using my vote to defeat the lesser or two miserable alternatives. Those of us who had the temerity to buck the dysfunctional political system in this country, satirically referred to as a democracy , were lambasted for wasting our vote on the “egomaniacal” Ralph Nader and by default electing the pathetic little Texan bastard from the inbred Bush clan. Chastened and guilt-ridden, many of us were herded back into the flock of the slightly less bad, albeit feckless and spineless, Democratic Party. The fact we had voted for a candidate who spoke to the issues we believed in as well as a man of conscience, erudite intelligence, and possessing a record of accomplishment that defines decency and courage did little to ameliorate our collective grief over the murderous criminality of the Bush junta with the hapless Democrats, in control of Congress after 2004, as willing accomplices.

 

In 2008, many progressives and more authentic leftists were seduced once again by the promises of the Democratic Party and the soaring rhetorical poetry and of Barack Obama. Obama was elected because he convinced the left that he had an agenda that would make social and economic justice the centerpiece of his administration, and he would lead a resurrection of American ingenuity and idealism to confront the serious issues facing our country and the world. America’s voracious imperial ambition, perpetual war to brutally repress challenges to our global dominance, accelerating climate change, ecological degradation, unfettered corporate hegemony, the outlandish and rapacious criminality of Wall St., and justice for the long suffering Palestinian people are merely a few of the festering issues that continue to define our world as a brutal and unjust place for the vast majority of its citizens. In short, Obama convinced progressives that he was on their side and that he actually had balls and a spine. Obama, we came to believe, had game. We did not vote for the abstractions that became the meaningless slogans of his campaign, but rather we voted for a man who marketed himself as having the courage to transcend the political posturing of both major parties and act according to his ethical principles applied to economic, social and ecological justice. We voted for a leader who would have the necessary audacity to demand that America finally live up to the promises of its creed.

 Instead, we have gotten four more years of “just us” policies along with a dash of empty eloquence added to our global swagger. We voted for another Coelenterate who waffles in the turbid currents of a reality defined by the virulent ideology and unrelenting propaganda of our corporate media. Pervasive visual technologies along with the scripted torrents of hate flooding the public airwaves from talk radio now define our perception of reality and what is acceptable to think and believe.

   Unfortunately, President Obama has shown us clearly since he took office that he is no progressive. His limp dick pretensions to be otherwise only reinforce the self-fulfilling conviction that the left is incapable of boldly defending its putative core ideology. Examples of Obama’s milquetoast appeasement to the zealotry of the right are numerous and troubling. To reign in the metastatic greed of Wall St. and institute the constraints necessary to prevent another economic meltdown, Obama did just what any good Republican would do; he delegated the job to Geitner, Paulson, and Bernanke all of whom still reek of the stench of their own complicity and corruption from Goldman-Sachs to Stanley-Morgan.  In Afghanistan, Obama relinquished his promise to be a peacemaker, and implemented his own version of the “surge”. With the death toll of innocents and combatants rising, nobody in the Administration seems capable of articulating any cogent rationale to explain why our young men are sent to kill and be killed. Ask returning soldiers why he or she is fighting in Afghanistan and they will inevitably reply that they are doing it for their buddies and themselves. Their mission is to survive.  No flag waving platitudes for these very brave, but misguided soldiers. They get it. Last week eight woman gathering wood were killed by an American drone attack; just more endless collateral damage along with a tincture of probable blowback.  

The pernicious litany of lies and reptilian propaganda has been seamlessly transitioned from the odious Bush neo-cons to the Obama invertebrates. Obama’s response to the issue of greenhouse warming, a problem that potentially imperils all life on this planet and poses a greater threat to US security than terrorism according to a Pentagon report released last year, was to support the ludicrous market based approach of cap and trade.  His ineffectual rhetorical posturing and apparent eagerness to compromise keystone values promise to make complex ecological, social, and economic problems far more intractable for those who have the moral spine to act assuming that we now have time to take meaningful action. The consequences of the gutless failure of Democrats to responsibly react to the dire effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels recently exceeding 400 ppm will ensure intensified suffering and dislocation to millions of global citizens who had no part in creating the problem. This moral and ethical abdication of responsibility has occurred on the watch of the last five presidents, but Obama seemed, at least, to understand the complexity and immediacy of the problem.

 The climate policies of the last twenty years might as well be called “An Idiot’s Guide to Saving the Planet” written by the fossil fuel industry for the science illiterate Congress. Listen to the moronic babble of Oklahoma’s senior senator  Jimmy Inhofe to get a real sense of the level of idiotic incapacity ruling the greatest country on earth. Inhofe simplistically reduces the planet’s changing climate as merely a natural cycle thus negating any need to invest in policies that will mitigate the severity of the looming crisis. Half of the Republican Congress do not believe in anthropogenic warming and have used their new power to attack climate science and climatologists as alarmists, so the nutty narrative of the right goes, whose real interest is to profit from the irrational fear they have engendered in the American people. And fear induced paralysis steadfastly remains one quality American product that has not been outsourced. We manufacture it using the ubiquitous right wing propaganda outlets and disseminate it through the complicit corporate media much of which has been consolidated into a small oligarchy of powerful and obscenely wealthy zealots        ( Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers for example). And while Republicans taught the nation to ignore science, Democrats frantically continued their hopeless search for a backbone.

And let us not forget the long suffering Palestinians. Did anyone seriously believe that Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which has received nothing but tacit and overt support from its American Bitch, would change in response to the Obama peace initiative? Even Obama knows Israel will never abdicate land promised to God’s chosen people. The show must go on, as does the killing. I wonder if our government ever expressed its condolences to Rachel Corrie’s family. She was a brave young woman committed to Palestinian emancipation who was murdered by the Israeli’s in the West Bank.  Rachel Corrie’s young life dedicated to the pursuit of justice for the oppressed is a testament to human possibility.  An Israeli court recently found that Rachel’s death was a tragic accident with zero Israeli culpability. For Israel, the execution of a young American woman was merely an issue of spinning a few days of bad press. .

In  the 2008 Congressional elections, Democrats discovered that the patience and credulity of progressives does indeed have limits. In the ensuing post-mortem analyses, the general consensus seemed to be that Democrats had misread their 2008 mandate as a license to swing a couple of nanometers to the left.  Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana stated that the party needed to move back to the center in order to regain the trust of voters. Bayh ironically is the son of the late Senator Birch Bayh who by today’s standards would be labeled an extreme leftist. Indeed, Birch Bayh exemplified a very different zeitgeist when it was not considered frivolous policy or weakness to care about the disenfranchised in America and elsewhere. President Obama lamented that he had “lost touch” with the American people. Obama assured Americans that he would negotiate                  (compromise) with Republicans on issues like energy and education and the Bush tax cuts. The president might want to consider how it is possible to compromise on an issue like climate change which most Republicans and increasing numbers of Democrats reject as either not happening or view with disdain as an issue of trivial importance. They don’t believe because they don’t understand the science, haven’t taken the time to learn the science, and most importantly are in a tangled incestuous corporate embrace that pays them not to believe and not to act.

It should be noted that the faith based approach to responding to significant issues based on feelings and opinions devoid of data, fact and scientific methodology is antithetical to the way science is interpreted and advanced. I suppose it is okay to believe in God or ghosts based on your faith and intuitive certainty that such entities exist, but it is childish and irresponsible to say you do not “believe” in a scientific theory without presenting countervailing evidence. In other words, one cannot validly believe or disbelieve in science simply because it does not conform to his or her politics or preconceptions based on faith or stupidity. Republicans and conservative “red state” Democrats have integrated the blame the victim dogma into a nasty, and vindictive theology. Christ would be so proud of his sociopathic flock.

 Those who dismiss the compelling science of climate change do so at a perilous cost to their children in the very near future. The capitulation of our culture to denialism has transformed Americans from a people taught to cherish ideas and respectful discourse into a strident unthinking herd complacently consuming a toxic brew of disinformation and blatant lies. Endlessly repeated sound bytes and narrowly focused talking points ensure that the message will become acculturated. The complicit corporate media provide a conduit for unfiltered and never questioned pronouncements always stamped with the approval of the people to provide specious corroboration. And what has the President, the Audacity to Hope a now rancid memory, done to provide the courageous leadership now so desperately needed. The pandemic of magical thinking that insinuates contemporary American mythology is exacerbated by appeals to themes of omnipresent lurking danger and personal helplessness. We are taught not to be problem solvers but potential victims of some lurking menace that will target our vulnerabilities. This pathology has made us into a brutal social – Darwinian nation that condemns the weakness of its victims so that we can be inoculated from a similar fate. The inexorable desensitization of America to the proliferation of levels of violence and injustice that would have been unimaginable a generation ago continues to spread throughout the culture like an aggressive cancer.  As our collective courage continues to wane, our greatness as a nation and our humanity as a people are diminished. 

Obama’s genuflection to the right is hardly surprising given his twisted dalliance with compromise and his troubling affirmation of Bush policies on Iraq and Afghanistan. Both conflicts are widely regarded by the left in this country and most of the world as troubling violations of international law. Revelations from the Wiki leak’s documents only amplify the dubious moral and ethical concerns rational people have over the continued abuse of American military might and the unconscionable toll of senseless casualties. Compromise on issues like social security, unemployment benefits, a living wage, affordable healthcare, and the continued evisceration of the American economy by Wall St and multinational corporate profiteers can only lead to an accelerated race to the bottom and compounded human misery. Obama’s centrist agenda is just as reprehensible as the Republican contract on the American people. Obama has revealed himself to be only slightly less odious than Bush and his criminal cabal. The American people as well as all people of the world are viewed merely as human capital. Money and power are the only bottom line either party respects. Just like the Bible thumping, hypocrisy of Bush, the only God Obama and his administration of inept retreads worship is Mammon.

So please Mr. Obama spare the left of any further appeals for understanding. And spare us the conflicted posturing and lofty rhetoric devoid of substance. The Democratic Party has shown clearly that it has nothing to offer the left but contempt. The party always assumed we had to come back to the Democrats as we had no place left to go. As Democrats tack further to the right hoping to cast a wider net, they will lose more elections and what little ideological connection they have with progressives. A new Progressive party must emerge to engage the corrupt duopoly. The ideals of the New Deal, Henry Wallace, and Eugene Debs, Saul Alinsky and thousands of other American heroes who have fought to make the promise of America a reality for all must be reborn and forever integrated into our DNA. Rational people know there is too little time left to continue the dysfunctional lesser of two evils paradigm.

Compromise with Democrats has brought ruinous consequences to our people, country and planet. The frivolous game of fealty in exchange for a few ephemeral crumbs of meaningless, too little too late, appeasement is no longer acceptable because it keeps us on a suicidal trajectory of human suffering and ecological decay. The status quo which promulgates the notion that politics is a media blood sport, that elections and power can be bought, and that the only constitutional mandate of a politician is to do or say whatever is necessary to get reelected must be banished forever from our political culture.

 Politics is now and for the foreseeable future about doing everything in our power to save the planet and ameliorate the human condition. It is no longer a zero sum game. If we fail to act, if we fail to hold Obama or any elected official to the highest standards of performance and policy, human rights, and justice for all, then we all lose big.