The Debt Debate: Misdirection and Political Civil War

A lot of people have been asking me questions lately about this entire debt debate. This is only natural, because as it stands now, politics is difficult to follow if it is not one’s passion; the task becomes even more difficult when it comes to economic issues, as those of us who have not studied either economics or political science can quickly find the terminology too vast to navigate in addition to our daily responsibilities. I certainly understand this, and that is why I am compiling this quick guide to what exactly has gone on in the “debt ceiling” debate, and why you should be really, really concerned about what is going on in Washington.

First, what is the debt ceiling? Basically, it is the credit limit on the Treasury, which pays the bills that the federal government has racked up. Because the U.S. is a giant country economically and militarily, with substantial expenditures on defense and social programs, we have a lot of debt. Because the nature of budgets requires that they usually be determined well ahead of time, sometimes the government reaches a point where the federal “accounts receivable” is taking in is less than the money it needs for its “accounts payable” (bonds, foreign debt, Social Security and military checks, federal employee salaries, etc.). When that happens, the credit limit has to be raised, in order for the Treasury to borrow the needed money to honor those bonds, write those checks, and pay those bills. Raising the debt ceiling is purely a necessity to keep the government running sometimes. Should the government be shrunk? Probably, but that gets done in the budget debates, not when the timer runs out on raising the limit so we can keep paying our bills.

The Constitution, as designed by its authors, established a number of things. First, it laid out the powers and responsibilities of Congress. Primary among these powers was the so-called “power of the purse,” meaning that Congress was ultimately responsible for determining what the federal government could spend money on. Second, but arguably more important, the Constitution established a separation of powers. The entire purpose of this structure (Legislative vs. Executive vs. Judicial) was laid out by James Madison in the federalist papers: “ambition must be made to counter ambition.” The theory behind our government from the outset was that conflict is good because it checks tyranny and forces everyone to meet in the middle.

Enter the “Tea Party” (a loose term, to be sure, as it is not a party at all but an artificially constructed and corporately sponsored faux populist movement within the larger Republican Party). Here is a group that snuck into Congress in 2010 based solely on two factors: the Citizens United verdict by the Supreme Court (which enabled corporate donors in any state to spend unlimited amounts of money in any election based on the premises that corporations are people and that money counts as free speech- see my previous blog on the egregious errors of logic behind that landmark decision), and the vast dissatisfaction of the American people with President Obama’s apparent failure to improve the job situation in the United States in his first year and a half in office. Regardless of your or my sentiments about that election, voter apathy- coupled with increased backing for the candidates from the Republican Party, which without fail represents corporate interests over those of individuals- resulted in the balance of power shifting in the House to the Republicans.

Truth be told, the outcome might not have been helped anyway, as mid-term elections historically reward the opposition party to the sitting president, but no one knows for sure. What is more significant than which party took control of the House, however, is WHO WITHIN that party won the seats. Republicans were challenged even within their primaries by a renegade faction of radicals. These radicals shared a few commonalities: they were vehemently anti-immigration, anti-homosexual, anti-Muslim, anti-taxation, and never once spoke of compromise with the President. As a matter of fact, most of them ran on going to Washington to oppose, thwart, and overturn his agenda at every step. This polarizing message, placing Obama in the role of the “other,” was a galvanizing message to a specific portion of America that was dissatisfied that Obama could have even been elected to begin with (you can draw your own conclusions as to the underlying causes of such an attitude).

On a tide of dissatisfaction and apathy for politics, the Tea Party arrived in Congress. While their presence was initially a welcome climate for House Speaker John Boehner, what he and his party would quickly realize was that they had attempted to harness a negative energy they could not quite control. The House went from a body of legislation to a body of symbolic votes against the President’s agenda, followed by a series of literally insane bills that were either ignorant of political process and the Constitution or merely destined to fail in the Senate, such as banning federal funding for abortion (which was already a law), to eliminate the IRS and all income taxes in favor of a sales tax (which is inherently regressive and hurts the poor far more than the wealthy), to switch from fluorescent to incandescent bulbs in the Capitol, to switch from paper and cardboard to Styrofoam coffee cups, to overturn the health care legislation passed by the previous Congress, to amend the Constitution in multiple ways, to repeal gun-free school zones (thus allowing guns INTO school zones), to reclassify man-made greenhouse gases as “non-pollutants,” to cut federal education spending, to essentially repeal the Clean Water Act, to end birthright citizenship, and more.

This was hardly the “job-creating” agenda they had promised when running. In truth, it was an ideological assault, an all-out rejection of social principles agreed upon by decades, even generations, of previous Americans. It was a pure attack, not only on the President, but upon Civil Rights, the New Deal, and even the Constitution itself. President Obama, himself a target of the Tea Party, became the convenient symbol to rally the base, using fear and anger at him personally to justify their social agenda of rejection.

Of course, elections have consequences, and these were the people the Americans had elected. While their antics seemed childish, they were, by and large, quite harmless. Their radical agenda, even when it managed to leak out of the House, was halted in the Senate when such was necessary. It seems fairly obvious that the “grown-ups” in Washington understood they were dealing with legislators that had the collective attitude of a belligerent preteen, breaking rules and making trouble just to make noise and defy their elders. These Tea Party freshmen would either learn how to compromise or they would be voted out in two short years.

However, what no one counted on was that they would remain intransigent to the point of turning the House into their own personal crusade headquarters. John Boehner came to eventually realize that many of these Tea Party representatives lacked a fundamental appreciation for how republican (small “r,” meaning representative government by consensus) government worked. The underlying premise was, again, that despite disagreements, the fact that the government NEEDED to get things done would FORCE opposing sides to sit at the same table and achieve compromise, particularly on issues that were required to be addressed in order to ensure the stability and the future of the country.

What no one counted on was that many members of the Tea Party were either unaware of, or even did not care about, what was necessary to keep the government running. Some of these people came to Washington literally on a mission to destroy the political process. They had many motivations: disdain for the President, objections to taxation, disdain for the federal government in general, etc. As such, they were almost able to successfully shut the government down during the debate over authorizing the federal budget in early 2011, refusing to pass a budget without symbolic cuts they could return home to their constituents and tout. Recognizing the need for the government not to shut down, Boehner and Obama were both forced into positions to the right of where they would have otherwise settled politically, while they watched a minority faction of the Republican Party hold the entire country hostage to their ideology-driven demands.

Fearing that he might lose control of his own party, and therefore his job, John Boehner made a politically expedient but potentially historically catastrophic mistake: he decided to pick a fight ON BEHALF OF the Tea Party. The calculation was clear: if he sought to draw a line in the sand and appeal to their interests, he would stave off a challenge from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, whose rhetoric and political intransigence was more compatible with those of the Tea Party than were Boehner’s. He laid out the demands in May 2011: there would be no increase in the debt ceiling approved by the House without an equal amount of cuts in federal spending.

Now, the majority of independent voters and middle America probably would not see anything inherently wrong with that maneuver. Those who feel the government is bloated beyond its needed size might be sympathetic to cutting spending. I can certainly get on board with appropriate spending cuts. However, by tying the debt ceiling to spending, Boehner and the Republicans created the conundrum in which we now find ourselves. The House, in order to pass a bill, would now require massive spending cuts in order to authorize a fairly routine increase in the debt limit. Further, Republicans and the media allowed Tea Party members like Michele Bachmann to speak ignorantly about the debt limit, allowing her and others to make erroneous statements, such as that raising the debt limit somehow raised spending (which it does not), and that perhaps defaulting on its debt would be a good thing for the U.S. (which it most CERTAINLY would not). This altered public perception about the nature and importance of the issue until we drew much closer to the zero hour on the default date.

What followed was a political nightmare. Democrats offered a compromise close to what was being asked, but one that included revoking some of the millionaire/billionaire tax cuts currently in place and closing tax loopholes. Since one of the Tea Party’s most extreme and core beliefs is that taxes should never be levied on ANYONE, EVER (except maybe immigrants), and since the Tea Party does not understand the nature of compromise, they stated they would immediately reject any plan that included any increase in federal revenue. They would only accept cuts. They held a vote on an increase in the debt ceiling with no spending cuts and defeated it soundly. Thus, spending was irrevocably tied to the debt ceiling vote.

Eric Cantor and John Boehner each walked out of talks with Vice President Joe Biden and the President, respectively, each time citing revenue increases as an unacceptable starting point. Their Democratic counterparts insisted that the spending demands were too steep, as the numbers being debated would have required cuts to essential programs like Social Security. Each side began waging a battle to frame the debate: Republicans pointing to the Senate and Obama as tax-raising, fiscally irresponsible tyrants, and Democrats pleading with the people to understand they were only asking for a reasonable middle ground between the absolute demands of the Tea Party and what was practically achievable and fair for America.

The debate shifted further and further to the right. Democratic proposals continuously featured increased cuts, allegedly even considering cuts to entitlement programs (the Democratic equivalent of giving in on taxes). All they asked was the repeal of tax cuts for billionaires. This was always the breaking point in negotiations.

The “Gang of Six” (a cabal of bipartisan legislators who met in secret to design a compromise) designed a plan that seemed to meet close enough to the middle to work. They had a plan. Instead of waiting for the plan to be brought to a vote, the House decided to once again pass an ideological bill and came forward with the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill. While Cut and Cap were reasonable (sort of), once again Republicans had brought forth the Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, something that could never pass the Senate when forced down their throats as a condition for raising the debt ceiling. The measure was swiftly destroyed in the Senate. Again and again, the Senate sent messages back to the House about how impractical their solutions were, but within the body that generated the Paul Ryan “Roadmap to the Future,” the pleas from party leaders fell on deaf ears.

As the deadline drew nearer, more and more economists came out and stated that failure to raise the debt limit could be catastrophic for the nation, as it would mean the potential loss of America’s AAA bond rating. A downgrade would make the U.S. no longer one of the safest and most reliable places to lend money. The result could be increased interest rates on mortgages and other loans, and other rippling effects that could damage the economy over the long term and cost American households far more money than any non-existent tax increase that the Tea Party was dangling as a specter over the heads of middle-class Americans. Additionally, the passing of the deadline would cause the Treasury to have to make some difficult triage decisions about which bills to pay and which to ignore. Of the debts it would have to consider: foreign debt, military pay, federal worker pay (FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Justice Department), federal social programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid), veteran benefits, and much more.

The Tea Party remained intractable. Boehner brought forth one more plan in the House, one that featured some of the previously agreed-upon compromises. However, he had to delay the vote on his own bill one day in the week before the deadline because he lacked enough support from his own party to pass it (thanks, yet again, to the Tea Party). He only garnered the minimum number of votes for House passage (218) by ONCE AGAIN adding the Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. The bill had zero Democratic votes, and a number of Republicans did not vote for it either.

The American people looked to the Senate. Of course, the Constitutional provision of the House bill once again doomed the bill to failure in the Senate; it was thus quickly rejected, even by some Republicans in the Senate. Democratic leadership decided to take up their own measure in the Senate, to which the Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded by initiating a filibuster and outright stating that negotiations would not happen over their proposal. The Senate proposal, even in its nascent form, seemed doomed to failure, which was both tragic and ironic because it featured NO REVENUE INCREASES and was so far to the right of the initial starting point for the Democrats that it would have passed in any other Republican House in the past half century, but for this one.

To analyze the events detailed herein: the debt ceiling vote has always been a rather cursory measure, not often creating controversy. While unpalatable to fiscal conservatives (and understandably so from their perspective), they usually go along with the measure because they understand the greater importance lies with the country being able to pay its bills and not risk its global economic standing.

However, the Tea Party does not care about what happens outside the borders of the United States. As a result, Tea Party members of Congress took a stand on a national issue with global implications and dropped an anchor in the sand, refusing to allow passage and refusing to compromise. A minority within a single body of the government, because of its unwillingness to understand or acknowledge the broader purpose of government and the two-party system, has ground government to a halt. We saw something similar when Republicans in the Senate issued filibuster after filibuster in Obama’s first two years, but on issues of national importance even they were willing to negotiate.

This, on the other hand, is a nearly unprecedented failure of the American political system. It is sabotage of the highest order. And, unfortunately, it is succeeding because those who initiated the sabotage are seeking to prove a broader point than even the one they claim. It is not just that they want government to shrink: they wish to demonstrate that centralized government can achieve no useful purpose at all. If they are allowed to succeed, they do more than simply make President Obama look bad: they will continue to spread disillusionment with American government. Once this happens, they can continue their ideological assault on the institutions our Constitutional ancestors have built over the past two and a half centuries: a balance of federal and state power, a system of checks and balances that requires compromise, the integration of pluralism at the center, the struggles of labor, women, minorities, immigrants, and homosexuals for political and civil rights, the New Deal, a Great Society, and the notion that opportunity can be equal for all.

This is not the party of the people. They do not represent either a majority of the people or the interests of a majority of the people. Yet they are defeating representatives elected by various majorities throughout the country because they have embraced a single vision: say “no” to everything. They claim to represent fiscal responsibility, but ultimately they took a stand for only two things: the federal government is useless, and the rich in this country should bear a significantly smaller proportion of the tax burden than the middle class and the poor should. By tying the vote on the debt ceiling, an issue they clearly never understood and which they never took seriously, to the more general issue of federal spending (a fight they could pick any other time) they have brought the government to its knees.

This is a political war. These people have not declared war on the federal government, but on you and me and our entire political heritage. These are modern-day secessionists; they did not come to Washington to govern, but rather to demonstrate that any form of government than that which they desire must be destroyed or prevented from existing. They are wealthy enough to bear the short-term economic downturn that may come from their irresponsible governance, and they are willing to make the rest of us pay the price for their recklessness. They have seceded from the process of governing. A balanced budget amendment is infeasible while two wars are being fought, and such an amendment can never be proposed during times of conflict because expenditures will always outweigh revenues without tax increases. They assume that the situation is win-win for them, because if they get what they want, they will successfully dismantle much of our government, and if they are wrong, the economy will tank and they can blame the President in front of their constituents, who will continue to lap up the dogma these extremists peddle and return them to office in the next election.

Governments need not be brought down by force of arms. This is a protest at the heart of our nation: not a protest purely against the President or Democrats, but against the system of government in which they believe. When a faction within the government is so demonstrably insane as to be willing to push the country past the debt ceiling deadline regardless of the warnings of economists, the inmates have truly come to run the asylum. That they would continue to blame the other party for the problem they caused (tying debt to spending) and the failure of compromise (when they have offered none from the start), their position rings as hollow as the Grand Canyon.

Make no mistake, the federal government is not perfect. It is bloated and over-sized like a Super-sized Big Mac meal. However, we can have a reasonable debate about the size of government when we discuss the actual budget in those annual debates, NOT when someone uses it as a tool to stop the process of government completely and hold the country’s economic standing hostage as a display of political theater. The Republicans have lost control of the ember they nourished; now, the flame they once welcomed threatens to become an inferno that could reduce the Constitution and the credibility of the United States to a smoldering cinder.

Rather than be disillusioned by the actions of the Tea Party, Americans must get angry and get involved. Participate in elections: national, local, mid-term, and presidential. You must vote to prevent these extremists from asserting their will at the national level. This kind of extremism is eerily similar to that of the nascent Nazi rise in Germany after World War I. Their ideology is not far off: preserve the “purity” of the country by protecting its wealth, oppose the dilution of the people by undesirable elements, govern by their own religious interpretation of history, and solidify the harmony of government and corporate interests.

These people MUST be prevented from ever possessing deciding power at the national level again, at all costs. I pray that you, as the American voters, recognize how insane our political process must look to outsiders, and how dangerous it is that this kind of brinkmanship has become the norm since the Republican Party decided from Day One of the Obama presidency that they would oppose him on every issue at all costs, simply to defeat him.

We are a better country than this. At least, we should be. I hope that you and I, through activism and the next national election, can return a sense of sanity to our political process. Otherwise, the Tea Party will have won their independence from our nation, because they will have successfully divided us into two nations within one set of borders: a nation of wealthy Americans waging class warfare on a nation of rest of us, using the power of our own government. What the media has turned into theater and spectacle is a deadly serious issue. Stand up and fight, or watch these lunatics burn everything our forefathers struggled, bled, and died to build be burnt to the ground. The Tea Party must be stopped.

On Freedom of Thought and Choice

This will be the beginning of my several investigations into the nature of free will, choice and identity.

It is arguably self-apparent that human beings are gifted with free will, by virtue of the fact we appear to be free to do or not do most anything we please within our physical and intellectual limits. There is some philosophical speculation that if fate exists, free will is illusory; it is neither my current purpose nor my current interest to delve into this esoteric discussion. I am concerned with choices we can observe; since I cannot observe my own fate, for this discussion, no such fate exists.

Rather, my purpose in this investigation will be specifically to defend the existence of choice, and to emphasize aspects of our lives where we as human beings in our societies either willingly or unwittingly forfeit the ability to choose our own respective destinies in favor of accepting courses that may have been placed before us by another agent or group of agents, depending on the circumstances of the “choice” in question.

If the passages that are to follow are to be called “Chapters,” this can be considered their introduction.

Proceeding from the initial argument, free will exists. If free will exists, human beings have the freedom to choose between available sets of decisions in almost every instance in which more than one choice is recognized as available. Accordingly, the most significant component of free will is the recognition that alternatives exist to an otherwise given course of action in a particular situation. In other words, in order for choice to exist, there must be an alternative course of action B to some considered course of action A.

Following this reasoning, it is also essential that human beings think critically about situations in which they are not currently aware that alternatives exist, and each person must ask himself (Note: Pardon the gendered language- it is a long-ingrained habit that I hope does not invalidate the premises outlined herein; I simply find as a grammatical matter that choosing a gender avoids certain ambiguities that the use of “one” or “a person” would otherwise generate, and gendered usage also abbreviates a passage in a way that the inclusion of both gendered pronouns in every required instance would not. That being said, I choose “himself” because I choose to define myself as a male in gender as well as sex, and cannot therefore presume to write this piece from the feminine perspective, although such commentary is welcome and encouraged. End digression here.) if alternatives not considered might exist. If the answer is yes, the person must then ask the most important question regarding choice: Why was he not fully aware of the existence of alternatives?

There are several possibilities for the exclusion of the awareness of choice. The first and most obvious is that while alternatives exist, they are precluded by some universal norm. For example, in most (but for extreme and exceptional) cases, choosing to end the life of another is not an acceptable choice by universal norms that dictate the immorality, unacceptability, and consequential punishment of life-taking. In this sense, some choices are unavailable on moral or ethical grounds. This particular context of choice will be discussed and investigated further in one or more future examinations.

However, what about choices that exist that do not seem apparent, not for moral or ethical reasons, but for more specifically socially constructed reasons?

Consider the family: children obey their parents. This obedience is usually a byproduct of fear, love, and a respect born of some combination of the two. Does the child have the choice to disobey his parents? Yes. Does the child often disobey? In some cases, yes, but most normally-socialized humans would say the average socially-adjusted child is disobedient less often than he is obedient, especially beyond a certain infantile age. The choice to disobey exists, but the disobedience itself becomes conditioned out of the child as a function of love and fear, maintained by some additional social conditioning, that which imparts rules (rules to which obedience is given transitively from parent to authority, and from authority to the rules, backed by the same criteria through which parents initially achieve respect from their children: respect born of fear and love).

Now, consider religion in a similar vein. Religion is, for the most part, not a choice as a child. My religion was chosen for me by my parents, whose parents chose their religion, whose parents chose theirs in turn, ad nauseum until the first of my ancestors who first believed in a god of the same kind in whom I was raised to place faith. As an adolescent, I was given again the “choice” of whether to continue following that religion as an adult. This “choice” is expressed through some form of ritualized initiation (Christians call such a thing “Confirmation”; Jews call them “Bar” or “Bat Mitzvah,” among other rituals, and so forth). However, the decision to follow in one’s family’s tradition is also conditioned not merely on the outcome of the choice itself, but on the expectations of an adolescent’s family that he will continue on in the same tradition that has come before in his family, all of which came into play either prior to or at the same moment as the decision itself.

Herein lies the problem. While there existed the appearance of choice, the “choice” was complicated by several factors: the pre-conditioning of the faith determined from birth by the child’s parents, years of indoctrination into that particular faith (thereby disinclining a youth from other faiths, and moreso from the choice of no faith at all), the expectations of the child’s religious community, the expectations of his family, and the expectations of his parents.

Thus, while there existed an appearance of a choice to be made, the “choice” cannot be considered to have been truly free, because at an adolescent age, all these conditions could function in such a way as to obscure or even occlude the adolescent’s potential to come to the realization that there was ever a choice to do not what was expected. The alternatives are wrought with negative future projections that include disappointment, shame, guilt, and other negative reactions to the alternative. Rational choice theory would hold that this decision is calculated. I, however, argue that this was no decision at all. The choice of a future that included the non-choice of religion was never apparent as an alternative that held any positive outcomes for the adolescent. As a result, it is not an undesirable choice, it is literally a non-alternative. There was no calculation, because there was, in fact, no choice.

This brings us to the core assumption of my argument: a course of action may not be called a choice if it is not made freely among at least two desirable and mutually exclusive outcomes. Therefore, a choice without an alternative is not a choice. It is a compulsion, or it is servitude, or it is coerced. Thus, extending the example forward, the example above demonstrates the very real possibility that religious choice is more often an illusion of choice, and more frequently coerced or compelled by social circumstance than freely chosen.

To put it in more obvious terms, if the child of a Muslim couple and the child of a Jewish couple were accidentally switched at birth, would the child raised by the Muslim parents elect to be Jewish; and would the child raised by the Jewish parents elect to be Muslim? It would seem the clear that the answer to both questions is “no;” therefore, the conditions of birth so heavily influence the “choice” of religion so much as to make it almost a completely dependent contingency on the parents. Thus, the “choice” of religion is more often than not, not a choice at all.

Now, I recognize that the implications of this statement, by virtue of questioning a characteristic that is by definition so personal to the individual, might initially cause discomfort and even an involuntary sense of offense. Bringing religion up as an example is unfortunate, because reaction to the subject matter itself is always deeply personal, occasionally visceral. Notice, however, I did use such terms as “seems” and “more often than not.” As this is merely an introduction to the broader subject under discussion, the example is admittedly a crude thought exercise; I can speak in no definite terms until I have more closely examined the topic through the lens of my own experiences, in the realm of the intellect, and with far more numerous and rigorous standards. Further, allow me to provide an additional disclaimer: it is neither the intent nor the argument of this examination to invalidate all religion or any religion at all. Instead, my purpose is to point toward the possibility (and your recognition of the possiblity) that the popular notion that a person freely chooses his faith may not be as true as it seems; and therefore, more careful examination into the circumstances surrounding the “choice” to embrace a particular faith might be necessary in order to validate the existence of freedom of choice with respect to religion.

If, as an objective observer to this argument, you consider the fact that a negative or hostile reaction to the exercise above may very well itself by implication not really have been your own choice, you see the dilemma; further, perhaps you begin to see why I chose this particular example. There are few instances in life where something that so determines our choices is so clearly also a constructed social identity that, but for our parents, we might never have chosen it for ourselves. Consequently, religious freedom more than most other choices in life is one of the clearest examples of where the concept of choice is far more complicated than a cursory glance in its direction would indicate. Factor in the additional possibility that atheism can also be inferred to be, for reasons both stated and implied above, more a rejection of one’s parents than a repudiation of one’s own faith or particular god, and even this apparent “choice” can demonstrate the difficulty of separating the social conditioning surrounding one’s awareness of alternatives from the actual existence of another, completely unrealized and unexplored set of alternatives.

Thus, I become a Pandora, and all the world’s evils spring forth in luminous clarity through the doorway I have now chosen to unlock. With the promise of knowledge comes the risk of the end of everything we believe, a journey for neither the timid nor the ill-equipped. If you continue the journey with me, I promise no fulfillment, no nirvana: I promise only to be honest about what I discover, to hide nothing, and to apologize for none of what I find…because it will be truth.

If choice is more often illusion than fact, where must I go to identify a choice freely made? It is my hypothesis that to fully appreciate the true and painful beauty of human existence requires that I fully appreciate the essence of a truly free choice. In order to do so, I must convince myself that any choice I have made in my life was truly a choice. To prove this, I must attempt to show that every choice I have made in my life has been an illusion, and not truly a choice; I must hope that in the attempt to do so, I discover somewhere a truly free choice, thereby proving my assumption an error and validating the existence of at least one free thought in my lifetime. Once and if found, I must thoroughly examine the choice to discover why it was free, what makes it free, and what defines the unbound thought, which I would call “will.”

Through the following investigations, I will consider some of the most significant “choices” I have made in my own life, choices the likes of which which will not be dissimilar from decisions you have made in your own lives. I must consider these “choices” and deconstruct the socializing conditions that may have mitigated the freedom of each of them in their particular instances. In doing so, I expect to find that most of my decisions have not been free; in joining me on this journey, I fear you may come to similar conclusions about how you view your own decisions in retrospect. However, in order to recognize freedom, one must become free, and in this critique I shall attempt to peel away the layers surrounding my decisions, until a single object remains: a will unbound by condition. It is my hope that in the discovery of my own human will buried beneath the infinitude of motivating forces that attempt to bend, usurp, or otherwise mold my decision-making processes, I will finally recognize a choice that bears no conditions: a free thought.

Thus, this serves as my introduction to the investigation of free will. Over the next several investigations, which may take some time to construct and which will surely be revised many times over in response to commentary (and the possible occasional outrage they evoke when misunderstood), I will investigate how some of the personal identiying markers we hold most dearly- our faiths, our cultures, our genders, our personal histories…indeed, our very identities themselves- are so clouded by the socialization process that almost nothing we do on an everyday basis can truly be a choice freely made.

That being said, the goal of this process will be to better enable myself, and perhaps you, to reject the various motivating forces in life that push us toward decisions that have little or nothing to do with actual choices about who we are individually and how we choose to live. I no longer wish to feel compelled by the rules of systems of which I had no hand in the construction, nor governed by dictates to which I do not acknowledge having ever given consent. In order to believe the systems that govern my behavior are just, I must prove to myself that I have the choice to opt in or out; and if the choice still exists, I must be willing to make it freely again, or else there is little to suggest that existence is anything but servitude to some faceless master.

Thus, one life ends, and the search for another begins. I hope you will continue to accompany me on this journey.

A Declaration of Independence from the Rhetoric of Party and Ideology

What is going on in American politics?  This system is choking itself to death, and it is mainly due to the fact that the major parties cannot decide what they stand for.  In fact, it seems to be nearing a point that they barely stand for anything at all.  The existence of all the current animosity, and the political disengagement by the people (with the notable Tea Party exception, addressed below), are symptoms that we no longer possess any faith that our politicians stand for anything that remotely relates to our interests and lives.  A major, if not the major, cause for this disconnect, is a failure by our two major parties to define themselves and their agendas.  As a result, this is a call for a new declaration of independence: a declaration by the American voter of our independence from the rhetoric of party and the false dichotomy of ideology implied by that rhetoric.

Is the Tea Party a “conservative” movement? Are all Republicans “conservatives”? Are Democrats truly “liberal”?  What do any of these terms mean?  In today’s media, a number of blatantly false associations between faction and ideology have become so commonly accepted that they have steered nearly all debate away from policy matters, instead drawing battle lines defined by fantastic ideologies that often have very little relationship to the philosophies with which they share these labels.

Take, for instance, the problem of referring to Republicans as “conservatives”, or Republicans self-identifying as “conservative”.  In fact, conservatives make up only a portion of the Republican Party; and further, during the Bush years, conservatives were hardly a voice at all.  Rage and fear after the wake of September 11th visibly and frighteningly shifted liberals to the right temporarily, and drowned the small government sentimentalities of traditional conservatives beneath a powerful current of fear: about terror, about religion, about America losing its way, and simply about living in a country that no longer felt safe.

Enter: the “neo-conservative” ideology.  This radical take on traditional conservatism championed the xenophobia that is an inherent but usually suppressed undercurrent within conservatism (the rejection of immigration and fears of cultural, ethnic, religious, and racial contamination).  It capitalized on that xenophobia during a time of fear and confusion to override other outstanding conservative principles, such as the freedom from government intrusion into our private lives.

How else can one explain the popularity of the Patriot Act at the time it passed?  The conservative movement had been so galvanized by the tragedy of 9/11 that conservatives were willing to cast aside previous objections to government intrusion into their lives, as well as what would normally be a commitment to due process and civil liberties (all parts of our Constitutional heritage), in order to empower a central government they believed could protect them.  Military spending increased, and our government went to war against countries with predominantly Muslim populations, twice.

The neo-conservative turn could only last so long, however.  Upon catching our collective breath, Americans finally began to wake up from the haze of anger and fear after our national tragedy and found that our country was running up irresponsible amounts of spending and seemed trapped fighting wars abroad in which we were uncertain if our objectives and enemy could even be clearly identified.  Coupled with economic troubles at home that were caused by other irresponsible, non-conservative tax policies, the public turned in the 2008 elections to Democrats, as a rejection of the neo-conservative ideology and what it had done to our country.

This left today’s Republicans the “real” conservatives, right?  Not at all.  While neo-conservative foreign policy had fallen out of favor among the public, neo-conservative economic principles, those put in place by Ronald Reagan, continued to be held dear not only by the Republican Party, but also “moderates” in the Democratic Party as well, such as Bill Clinton.  This schism could not have been made clearer by the conservative split evident in the 2008 elections by Ron Paul’s independent candidacy for the Presidency.  Paul represented for traditional conservatives an ideology much closer to their traditional conservative principles: a belief in individual responsibility, an aversion to foreign wars of excess, and an adamant faith in the free market principles of economics.  Truly, followers of the libertarian split were closer to a true “conservatism” than the Republican right, which was still permeated by flavors of neo-con ideology.

What about the so-called “liberals”?  It is a striking irony of American politics that the Democratic Party can be referred to en masse as a liberal party, when in fact it is simply closer to being a “moderate” party than a liberal one.  However, as true “liberals” lack any party of their own in American politics (in part because one may be economically liberal but socially conservative, as well as a number of other possible combinations), they generally have little place else to reside in American politics than with the Democrats if they wish to run for office or achieve a voice of any prominence in politics.

Democrats are only liberal inasmuch as Adam Smith, John Locke or John Maynard Keynes was liberal.  These individuals were far from socialists.  They believed in the protection of private property and the principles that an economy can generally run well on its own most of the time, but they also believed in limited restrictions on the expansion of massive enterprises that threaten to become too powerful for the market to control.  The concept of “intellectual property” so championed by conservatives today is a far cry from the Smith/Locke version of liberalism, because it is anti-competitive.  While a patent should exist to enable an idea to be developed and find its own market for a brief time, furthering IP law protections to obstruct competition by preventing similar ideas from entering the market at competitive prices is something that runs contrary to that interpretation of traditionally “liberal” economics.

Adam Smith and David Hume each agreed with an argument later made by Karl Marx that if capitalism were to transform into a corporate capitalism, where the power of government either failed to check- or worse, encouraged- the growth of super-sized corporate entities that approached the status of monopolies, the basic economic freedom of choice would be at risk.  And yet, that is the system we have enshrined, and it is the system the Republicans falsely claim is our direct political heritage and which must, at all costs, be affirmed and protected.

This is not the system that conservatives should endorse.  True conservatism requires of the economy that it help ensure competition and check abuses by cartels and monopolies.  Yet, in today’s economy, those are the first things protected by Republicans and “conservative” Democrats.  Oil and health insurance are produced at collectively defined prices by limited providers, and “conservatives” have consistently used the power of the government to protect these entrenched interests and the power of politics to prevent these interests from being challenged.  Honestly, would Locke have been in favor of an economy in which even Microsoft could not be defined as a monopoly?  The principles of our economy, the principles of choice and competition, exist specifically to check high prices by the super-powerful corporations.  Yet these principles are continuously and heavily assaulted by Republicans in the name of “conservatism”, a claim that cannot be justified by conservative theory.

Yet, instead of getting mad that the power of government is being used to further the economic interests of corporate giants, we get mad when the government tries to clamp down on the dominance of super-corporations.  We have become allergic to regulation.  This is usually because we are lied to by Republicans who tell us that Democratic liberals are socialists trying to destroy small business and bring about the new Soviet Republic in the U.S.

Can anyone honestly believe that claim?  The Democrats are essentially Soviets?  They want a Red Republic?  People that buy into this mentality are basically conspiracy theorists.  Why not simply accuse all Democrats of treason?  There is no reason to think that anyone in our government: a) truly considers Communism a preferred form of political life, or b) could even succeed in passing a Communist agenda in our democracy.  The unfortunate truth is that under the neoconservative agenda of the Bush years, our country slipped far closer to fascism than it ever slid toward Communism.  Detention without rights, torture, warrantless wiretapping, the strict monitoring of private email traffic and search engine behavior; all these represented attacks on individual liberty that brought us dangerously close to a new paradigm of fascism in America. That Texas continues to fight to enshrine McCarthyism as a positive episode in American history (or, at the very least, not a shameful one) is evidence that these dangerous trends still linger at the fringes of mainstream politics.

The reason people buy into the liberal/conservative dichotomy handed to them is simple: people believe in the market.  Even when Democrats attempt to regulate the market, they are not doing it in the interest of destroying or controlling it; they are attempting to preserve a system that, left unchecked, would result in exactly the hyper-giant industries we have now.  The very same industries that almost destroyed the financial system that Republicans claim survives best when deregulated and allowed to operate of its own will.

“What, exactly, is the problem with a few massive corporations in our economy?” one might ask.   Traditionally, corporations have been able to exercise a disproportionate influence in American politics through the power of the lobby.  The Supreme Court, in the Citizens United verdict, has provided them with the political equivalent of a nuclear weapon, in allowing unlimited spending by corporations in elections.  It is a weapon that no citizen can match in potency, and a weapon more powerful than speech, as money can change someone’s mind without persuading them.  The verdict essentially means that a board of directors, who are already a disproportionately empowered minority, now has the capacity to spend the money of their shareholders (as of now without their consent) on electing or sinking public officials in accordance with their professional and personal agendas.

Never before have the interests of businesses been so heavily advantaged over the voice of the people in shaping the political landscape of Washington.  What is most damaging about this impact on our politics is that the power that has been handed to businesses is not transparent or visible, necessarily.  The mere threat of campaign spending can be enough to intimidate or affect political candidates before the public even have a chance to vote for or against them.  The power given to corporations in this manner is pre-political; it will affect our politics before we have a chance to counter its influence.  This is decidedly undemocratic and there is no available democratic check on its abuse in the new terrain opened up by the activist, reactionary Supreme Court.

Which brings me to the problem with the “Tea Party” phenomenon.  While they are politically related offshoot of the conservative backlash previously embodied by Ron Paul’s presidential run, they also represent the misdirection of conservatives in American politics.  Certain American media outlets, led by FOX News, have successfully convinced American conservatives that the government, meaning the current broken incarnation of it in Washington, is the sole enemy.  This seizes on the popular anger against the irresponsible Bush years, but also perpetuates an historically unjustified fear of government.  (It also, of course, is probably capitalizing on racial resentment among those who have difficulty believing that a black President somehow “knows what is best for us”.  While this is clearly a minority voice in the movement, it is not necessarily a minority mindset, as it may in all honesty be something of which members are not even conscious, as is often the case with racial bias.)  With the new, post-Citizens United system, FOX News can sponsor Tea Party candidates across America, and use its media power to promote them for free through interviews and guest spots, essentially transforming it from a mere propaganda media organization to an unabashed political election machine.  Somehow, I do not think that is what the Tea Party had in mind; but, as we have seen, the movement has already fallen victim before to those who would co-opt it for their own for-profit interests.  The Tea Party movement is not cohesive, because it has no ideology: it rejects much but agrees internally on very little.  This is because it is reacting to the lack of consistent policy in American politics.  They reject national consolidation of power, and therefore have turned against Democrats, but also resent the political games and middle class neglect characteristic of the current Republican public officials as well.

Back to the question: who is “conservative” and who is “liberal” today?  Using these terms to describe the two major parties is such a distraction from the real political and policy issues that its deletory impact on political discussion cannot be understated.  This inaccurate terminology helps to perpetuate the myth that there is some unbridgeable divide between Democrats and Republicans, and that the divide is simply over the issue of the size of the national government.  What this dichotomy suppresses is the fact that, owing to our collective political heritage, real “conservatives” and “liberals” would not, and should not, disagree about the role of big business in our politics as much as they do.  Republicans have not been afraid to expand government when it comes to terrorism, war, abortion, and gay marriage, and have not been advocates of free market so much as the interests of America’s largest businesses.

Therefore, most self-described “conservatives” for some reason will accept actions that protect the biggest businesses in our economy, even when the irresponsibility of those very businesses threatens the entire system itself.  This contradiction is clearest when looking at attitudes toward the federal bailout.  Everyone hated it.  Democrats knew it was political poison and hypocrisy to support big businesses as Main Street citizens were losing jobs and homes nationwide, and Republicans argued against the bailout on principled spending grounds.  They all agreed that it was odious.  Yet everyone eventually came to realize, as economists now verify, that it was necessary.  Why?  Because our system is one in which poor performance by a few large businesses threatens the entire system itself.  And this is a system that Democrats wish to fix, whereas Republicans seem to ignore the massive and dangerous economic hiccups this system produces.  That is the difference between the parties, not the issue of whether being liberal or conservative is better for America.

The current recession is something that, according to both firm conservative and classical liberal perspectives, should never have been allowed to happen.  Yet, anger is always still channeled toward the government and rarely, if ever, toward businesses.  This is why the one politically popular message President Obama has remaining in his diminishing arsenal is that he is anti-Wall Street.  Conservatives have difficulty explaining why this is a bad position, and this is because his is a position with which they cannot philosophically find objection.  How do they react to this, then?  They simply adopt a political stance in which they oppose everything produced by Democrats, and make politics about party and “ideology” and not policy.  It matters little that the ideology they embrace varies by issue and day of the week.

Yet, we as citizens persist in our belief in the “American” myth that big businesses are somehow more benign than a big government.  This is a false dichotomy and this is why politics is becoming so muddied in today’s day and age.  Republicans find themselves torn between their neo-conservative commitment to big businesses and their conservative commitments to competition and small government.  Along the way, they’ve lost much of their commitment to Constitutional rights, which seem to still be successfully repressed by threats of terror and the fear those threats generate.  This is why, despite their horrendous record on national security since 2001, Republicans are still considered the “national security party” and “tough on terror”.  Absent consistent ideology, they still successfully whip out the 9/11 political playbook when their political positions become otherwise untenable, and we devolve into our “primal fear” state rather than evaluate the non-existent merits of their claims.

On the other hand, Democrats find themselves caught in an American political paradox.  Although our heritage is one of political progressivism and classical “liberalism”, Democrats eschew making decisions that can be labeled “liberal” or “progressive” because such actions risk being labeled “socialist” or “weak”.  On the other hand, they also remain committed to preserving the very market that the Republicans accuse them of consistently attempting to dismantle.  There is no serious political theorist of capitalism who agrees that a market completely unrestrained by regulation can survive indefinitely.  By definition, a capitalist market that continues down an unregulated path must logically result in a few, or perhaps just one, single corporate entity that produces and provides everything.  Yet, any regulation proposed by Democrats is considered anti-capitalist, anti-market, and anti-American by Republicans.

The question for our time, then, should not be whether Republicans or Democrats are better Americans.  We must reject that rhetoric.  We must also reject rhetoric that labels “liberal” and “conservative” worldviews as more or less beneficial for American society, as neither party can any longer accurately claim- or be given- either of these labels.  These are distractions, and they perpetuate a mentality wherein politics is treated more as a sport than an activity.  We are not rooting for teams; we are all on the same team.  No one is trying to destroy America; there is no secret Communist enemy.

The real threat resides in giving businesses a free pass for defining our interests and limiting our political options, when we attack government for doing the same thing.  We think that only governments can limit our choices and interfere with free will.  In the wake of the recent Supreme Court verdict, it is big corporations who can now limit our options just as much.  The election options will no longer be the Republican or the Democratic candidate; it will be the Wal-Mart or the Rupert Murdoch candidate.

If we are serious about debating the policy future of this country and not just the “political” future (which strictly embraces the two-party politics dichotomy), we must push against the rhetoric of politics as it has been handed to us.  We must reject the labels of parties as “liberal” and “conservative”, and force them to prove that they can put together some kind of consistent ideology worthy of any political label at all.  Otherwise, we are fumbling around in the dark, allowing politicians to define the issues of importance for us in each election, rather than telling them what we genuinely think is important.

It is time once again to Declare our Independence.  Not from our parent country, but from the politics as Washington has come to define them.  It is time to reject the two-party system.  It is time to reject the rhetoric of labels.  We are not libertarians, or liberals, or conservatives.  We cannot even any longer claim to be “Democrats” or “Republicans”, because from where I stand today those names do not mean anything consistent, and therefore mean nothing.  The terminology is meaningless as long as those who claim such labels do not act in accordance with the principles associated with them.

It is time to embrace the rhetoric of Americanism, and move forward based on those principles alone, and how we individually and collectively define them.  It’s time for the parties to stop playing us like we are tailgaters on a Sunday afternoon, and instead for them to earn our votes through policy and action, not through ideological promises that go unfulfilled.  Ours is a country of free spirit and free will, yet our choices are nearly completely defined by the time we reach the polling booth.  “Choose one of two,” but who chose the two?  As Americans, we should have the right to express our political voices as often as possible during election cycles.  And we should no longer trust that either party has our interests in mind, until we force them to prove it.

The very character of our democratic republic depends on our ability to reject division and work together towards common interests.  We must also be allowed to have a say at every stage in the process, regardless of political lean or lack of party affiliation.  Continuing to divide ourselves, as our two parties seem intent on doing at the national level, will halt our economic and political progress as surely as Washington is currently being ground to a halt by that very reality and that type of politics.

Disengaging from politics is what they want from us, because the less we engage, the easier it is for them to define the agenda for us.  Therefore, it is our democratic obligation re-engage, but we can do it on our own terms.  Think for yourselves, not simply along party lines, and stop letting them tell you only they know best.  Politics is not a sport; it is not about seeing which team wins on any given day. The stakes are much higher, and therefore so should be our expectations. This country was not founded by Democrats and Republicans, but by patriots…by Americans who believed this was something worth fighting for.  Let us honor that heritage by acknowledging their dream is not yet realized, but that it is still worth fighting for.  And, perhaps, it is time for Republicans and Democrats alike to realize that simply giving themselves a particular label does not prove they are necessarily the ones we need, or the ones we want, to help us carry on that fight.  America requires more than words; she requires our actions to rise to the level of our aspirations, and our expectations rise to the level of our dreams.

Status Quobama: how he’s losing the left and the middle

In Wednesday’s State of the Union, the president will announce plans for a spending freeze for the next three years, indicating a further turn to the right for the president of “change” in his economic policy. This is not exactly change you can believe in. Obama 2.0 is looking like Bush 1.0. Perhaps it would be better to call this new “version” President Status Quobama.

Since being elected, the current president has made it clear he is not who the American people thought they elected, although some of us should have seen this coming.  A good friend of mine warned me following his election that the American people would be in for a rude awakening when the person they elected to represent their desires for change was actually a strikingly moderate politician whose career was characterized more by compromise than by courage. Yet still, I had the audacity to hope.

Initially, things did not look so bad.  Politifact has rated President Obama as having kept 91 of his promises so far. He increased deployments to Afghanistan to better “refocus” the “War on Terror”, he expanded SCHIP over the objections of Republicans, cemented the Veterans’ budget as untouchable legislation, gave Cuban-Americans the ability to contact relatives in Cuba, increased the transparency of Presidency after Bush’s eight years of shadowy executive tendencies, aided domestic agriculture, expanded hate crimes to include crimes against homosexuals, increased funding for the NEA, continued the rebuilding of New Orléans, expanded Americorps, banned lobbyist gifts to members of the executive branch, invested in alternative energy, invested in transportation and infrastructure advances, and reversed restrictions on stem cell research, among a host of other promises.

To be fair, that’s a long list of accomplishments, particularly with respect to promises made during the campaign. No one can say that the president is a lazy man. However, quantity is less important than quality in politics, particularly when addressing the differences in policies pursued.  While President Obama has only broken 15 promises according to Politifact, some of them were significant promises that earned him support among large segments of voters. He promised to end income tax on seniors making less than $50,000, to end no-bid government contracts in excess of $25,000, to double funding for after-school programs, to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of home mortgages for defaults that occurred for predatory or other reasons, to reduce federal earmarks to pre-1994 levels, to create a $3000 tax credit for businesses that created jobs, to recognize the Armenian genocide, and to televise health care negotiations on C-SPAN to make the debate transparent. This amounts to broken promises to progressives, small businesses, smaller contractors, middle-class homeowners, educators, parents, and others.

The promises broken could be attributed to the possibility that the president simply did not fully understand the political realities of Washington before taking office.  This alone could be forgiven.  What is more worrisome, however, than even the promises broken, is the president’s astounding deference to the opposition party, the Republicans. Never before has a dwarfish minority of politicians with what would normally be considered little public support and little political capital appeared so much to be the party really in power. The Republicans, knowing they were facing difficult political circumstances, dug in from the inauguration and resolved to oppose, filibuster, and/or destroy every piece of partisan legislation that reached the floor in either house of the Congress. The Republicans decided to play politics with the future of the American people. Rather than negotiate on any significant issue or display the smallest desire to compromise, they became proudly the “Party of ‘No’”. Unfortunately, they were surprisingly successful in doing so.

How did Status Quobama and the Democrats respond? With timidity and deference to the Party of No. They repeatedly attempted negotiations, particularly on health care reform, that could be considered to be unnecessarily excessive by any party that possessed a 60-40 majority in the Senate. The result of their overtures? A Senate health care bill that fell far short of what the president promised, far short of what the House successfully delivered, and one that provided virtually no cost protection for the American people, which was the core what we were asking for. AND it still had zero Republican votes. Then, the Democrats looked around in bewilderment when liberals turned their backs on the Senate bill, moderates decided the Democrats had lost touch with them and what they needed, and Massachusetts voters replaced Ted Kennedy with a Republican centerfold who all but promised to tank health reform completely while coming from the state whose health care plan was essentially the archetype of the federal proposal.

What Status Quobama failed to understand was that he was elected to represent a change from “business-as-usual” in Washington, but when he got there he became just another negotiator. He was correct when he stated that he and his advisors were too concerned with “getting things done” than in getting the right things done.  However, when given the chance to get the right things done, Status Quobama has repeatedly and frustratingly opted for the moderate road, the road of compromise; staying the course on too many important issues to retain the support of both moderates who believed he was a real change, and liberals who thought he represented the opposite of a Bush White House.

The reality is that Obama has shown that he is too committed to avoiding controversy and tough political battles to take a strong stance on anything. He essentially doomed health care single-handedly by almost immediately abandoning the public option the minute he thought it was controversial. The irony in this is painful, as the public option was by far the aspect of health care reform most desired by the people (no matter what Republicans claimed then or say now).

The president’s stimulus package, despite Republican opposition, was also not favored by liberals, which placed him about in the middle on that issue as well. In another irony, Obama’s need to maintain high levels of support may cost him his stance on the stimulus now as well. Despite the success of the stimulus, the president is now about to propose a spending freeze to neutralize federal spending. This is a shocking overture to conservatives that flies in the face of recent and long-term economic history. It is generally acknowledged that spending is a good way to reduce the impact of recessions, and last year’s stimulus seemed to work in the short term. So, why discontinue it? To reach out to fiscal conservatives that have been for the past year (and longer) buying into the “conventional wisdom” that Democrats spend too much money. Even if that money is keeping us out of another Great Depression. A similar policy of reigning in spending while the economy tilted in the balance is attributed to helping cause the Great Depression, which is why many are already calling the new policy stance foolish, if not dangerous.

President Obama claims to be ready to “fight” for the average citizen by taking on Wall Street and out-of-control financial institutions that remain as irresponsible as they were before the public bailed them out last year, yet he has renominated Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Bernanke has been criticized for failing to recognize factors contributing to the financial meltdown, and many find this very “establishment” move by Obama to be fundamentally at odds with any notion that he might be moving more toward a populist stance. Worse still is that Republicans have filibustered Mr. Bernanke’s confirmation, and the Democrats have apparently gathered 60 votes to remove the procedural block on Bernanke. This means that although Bernanke will not likely receive 60 confirmation votes, he will still be confirmed despite a filibuster. This should, and will, leave progressives outraged and wondering how the Democrats could find the votes to break a filibuster here but not on health care. The explanation: they are cowards, and preserving the current financial system is more important than health care for millions of Americans. Basically, they have fallen in line with the Status Quobama mentality: keep things in place and don’t do anything controversial that might upset Republicans because they might Twitter about it and use FOX “News” to make fun of them.

President Obama inherited a system that produced one of the worst financial collapses in recent history as well as two wars and a host of other messes left behind by the Bush era. There was little he could do to make the situation worse, and expectations were astronomically high that he could lead us into a new era of prosperity and world leadership. However, what Obama and the Democrats have done with the opportunity to fundamentally shift policy in this country toward a progressive agenda has been blocked not so much by the Republicans- they can be forgiven for being consistent- but by the Democrats’ own persistent inability to draw lines in the sand and pick fights with the Republicans on important policy issues.

Make no mistake: the Democrats will lose a TON of seats in Congress this November, not because the Republican alternatives are preferable, but because as Democrats they have failed to market themselves as effective representatives of the public will. I do not know if this is because they cannot figure out what the public will is on any substantive issue, or if they lack the courage to be as liberal as they fear they may being asked to be. The Bush administration successfully passed a fair amount of legislation over filibusters and objections by Democrats, with far less a majority than the Democrats currently have. The public is tired of hearing excuses from the Democrats about Republican obstructionism. The time has come to act. If the Democrats cannot prove to the people that they are a party who can effectively operate and pass legislation over Republican whining and objections, this coming election will serve as a vote of no-confidence in their leadership and their party in general.

Perhaps the faltering of the Democrats means more the emergence of the era of the independent more than the era of the Republicans, again. Independents expressed their voices when sweeping Obama and the Democrats into power, and they can just as easily express themselves again by taking that power away because of their demonstrated inability to do anything with it.

The president has an enormous challenge before him in this State of the Union address Wednesday night and in the year to come approaching the elections: he must show the Republicans and the people that he is a president of change and not of the status quo. All indications is that he is about to make a cataclysmic error in judgment and lean conservative when he should be carrying through on a progressive agenda to use federal money to create and incentivize jobs and spur domestic production. If he makes this mistake, it will not take the slightest effort by Republicans to end the Democratic dominance of government; independents will do it for them by electing Scott Browns across the nation in November. Obama 2.0 must not be Status Quobama, or it will mean major losses for the Democrats in November, but more importantly for the American people in the long run.

Citizens United v. FEC and the death of democracy

“Free speech” has just been used to annihilate free speech and democracy. The Supreme Court, in its ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, unleashed Thursday a force capable of destroying the very principles that founded this nation. There is no evidence that the Framers of our Constitution wanted unregulated spending on elections by corporations as part of our democracy, and as corporations have become larger and more powerful than they have ever been in history, this bodes ominously for the power of a single vote and the speech of individual citizens. As conservatives cheer the preservation of free speech, they miss the mark; money cannot be considered truly speech because its purpose is exactly the opposite, and corporations ought not to be considered constitutionally-protected persons because their power lies in their size, not in the Constitutional weight of their rights.

The amazingly convoluted verdict overturned a century’s worth of jurisprudence on campaign spending and free speech rulings, and created a paradigm in which the outcome of every election can be heavily influenced, if not predetermined, by the will of corporations; limited only by their desires to involve themselves financially in particular elections. The Court affirmed two controversial notions that have become common in Constitutional law, notions which are individually mischievous, but collectively disastrous, to the free speech rights of individuals: corporate personhood and the speech value of money.

The first erroneous notion is that corporations can and ought to be protected by the Bill of Rights. Maybe this is just my layman’s understanding speaking, but there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that justifies to me the applicability of a document that refers to individual rights to corporate entities. Group entities already carry an inherent power in their corporate nature that dwarfs that of an individual, but by further empowering these groups by giving them the same rights reserved for citizens, corporations have become increasingly impervious to legislative restrictions on their actions. It is hard enough to rein them in, seeing how often corporations influence the composition and agenda of Congress by the power of the lobby. Now, they have not only the lobbies, but unlimited access to their own profits for spending on candidate ads, negative ads, and the funding of private organizing efforts, amidst other avenues of spending that have yet to be discovered.

In addition to this control over the formation of public opinion, corporations have further been freed to alter and control the opinions of elected officials. The sheer threat of spending on an opponent in the next election could be enough to sway Congressional votes on key legislation to be more in accordance with the interests of corporations than the people. The problem with this type of influence is that the threat of money spent, in addition to the actual spending, becomes a speech act, and therefore the potential to speak has become more powerful than speech itself.

Which brings me to the second error in judgment of the Court, and that is in the determination that the spending of money is a speech act. The fact is that money can buy speech, but to designate the spending of money as speech itself is to doubly empower those with disparately large amounts of it relative to any other person or group. When one corporation with a board of directors can decide to involve itself in an election, and spend literally millions of dollars on a candidate, or on ads in support of that candidate or in opposition to his or her opponent, no amount of speech can counter the ability of money to influence public opinion and/or election outcomes. Essentially, from this point on, you can never trust your own opinion, because there is no way to ensure that your vote is a genuine choice or purchased by the weight of millions of dollars in biased, targeted, corporate-backed advertising tailored to falsify and obscure your real interests.

We had just witnessed the potential for this in the health care debate, in which obscured interests led to the destruction of a valuable public policy option; and this was merely a single issue and restrictions on corporations were still in place. The health care industry defeated health care reform by scaring, conning, and duping the public into shifting their priorities away from their interests. Imagine our nation after this verdict: corporations will be able to sink every candidate who favors health care reform, insurance reform, bank reform, credit reform, environmental reform, corruption reform, ethics reform, or finance reform before they ever arrive in office. Worse, even if such a candidate could ever overcome the enormous obstacles to gain public office, there is no limit on how much money can be used to persuade such a candidate to change his or her stance on an issue through offer of re-election aid or through the threat of funding his or her opposition in the next election.

No other democracy on the planet has placed the rights of corporations so highly above those of its citizens so as to annihilate the very power of the vote; for the vote is the primary form of speech protected by the Constitution, the first and last speech act necessary for the survival of a democracy. Unfortunately, the vote can no longer be trusted, as our opinions will be formed for us in the form of incessant overt and subliminal advertising targeted specifically to obscure issues that matter in favor of misdirection and suppressed consciousness. The power of a single voice, a single opinion, a single vote, no matter how much in the right, can and will fall before the power of money to buy, change, and obscure public opinion to the contrary.

Are we a nation of people, or a nation of businesses? Whose rights are paramount? By conflating and equating the two the Supreme Court has made the one vastly more powerful than the other. What matters my speech, when weighed against that of billions of dollars of campaign contributions? What matter your feelings on a candidate or issue, if they are at odds with the desires of, say, Exxon or Wal-Mart? Simply put: they matter not at all.

The Supreme Court, in the name of the First Amendment, has combined two dreadfully misguided interpretations of Constitutional law and created a monstrous paradigm that can and will reshape America fundamentally if allowed to mature. Regardless of the primacy of the First Amendment, it is the height of ignorance and irresponsible Constitutional law to elevate corporations to full personhood and grant them full First Amendment protection while considering money a form of speech.

Money is anti-speech. It stifles speech; it prevents discussion. It changes minds without offering ideas. It alters perceptions without providing reason or rationale. It corrupts with impunity. With this decision, the Supreme Court has legalized bribery of highest and most despicable order; and all the more repugnant is that we as citizens sat by and watched it happen. Worse still, some of us cheered and applauded.

Money can buy speech, stifle speech; but money is not speech. Speech is by its nature an inherently unlimited resource; you and I can exercise speech according to our wishes without restriction. Money, on the other hand, is an inherently limited and unequal resource. By classifying and preserving money as speech, the Court empowers wealthy corporations with an unequal, undemocratic and, in my opinion, unconstitutional right to speech that outweighs that of any individual citizen or less endowed collective of citizens. To treat money as speech is to give those who possess more of it double the potency in their speech over any other political entity; both in the act represented by the spending of money itself, and in what that money produces in the policy views of candidates and public officials. No voice or force of reason can fight a political force backed by money, when money itself is a political force with its own will. The “invisible hand” will guide our politics as surely as it guides the business interests of the market.

Our understanding of power at the Constitutional level is fundamentally flawed. By empowering monetary speech that occurs prior to the public discourse, corporations can now effectively limit our choices of candidates to only those they are willing to fund, for only they will be able to compete for our vote in competing for the corporare funding now necessary to win an election. In doing so, corporations now have the power to eliminate entire sets of interests from the arena of public debate by refusing to back candidates; and you can be sure they will do so.

The Executive and Legislative branches have but one chance to get the reaction to this right. They need to implement strong restrictions on corporate behavior. They ought to seriously consider a Constitutional amendment redefining speech to exclude the spending of money by group entities. They also need to seriously consider impeaching one or all of the five justices who continue to rule in favor of corporations at every turn, for failing to act in accordance with their sworn duties to the public interest. And you and I, as members of the public, must fight this ruling together with every fiber of resistance we can muster. These reactions appear extreme; but understand, they are no less extreme than the assault on democracy carried out by five rogue individuals on Thursday, the 21st of January, 2010.

The Court in its current composition is no longer legitimate. It is radically irresponsible and despicably transparent in its political character. It has come to embody the very antithesis of what the Court was intended to be; a safeguard for individual liberty and custodian of the Constitution. It is instead an activist Court bent on reshaping the character of democracy so far as to make it nearly mute. This is clear in the Court’s decision to refuse to rule on this case initially, calling instead for reargument, and then further failing to rule only on the case itself- opting instead to use this case as an opportunity to exercise a particular and obvious political and ideological agenda. The Court has had one of its darkest days; what was once the bastion of Constitutional freedom in accordance with the intent of the Framers has become the citadel from which citizens’ freedom is to be struck down in wide swaths at a time in favor of corporate “rights”.

Welcome to the Corporate States of America. It was a nice place to live; but where no opinion can any longer be considered freely formed, political life truly ends, and that happened today. My call to you, fellow citizens: fight for your democracy, or watch it die before you. It will not wither; one day, it will simply be no longer there. Wake up and challenge this before it is too late for us all.

Common Sense Politics: Call to Arms

Welcome!

The purpose of this blog will be to open a dialogue (and I truly hope it will be that as I hate pontificating) about political issues. Occasionally, I will use this blog more as a journal about my personal feelings about things going on in the world from sports to politics and beyond, but generally I want to use it to discuss political issues as they reach my radar and burn my blood until I can no longer keep my feelings to myself.

Be I madman or otherwise, I hope that you will find what I have to say engaging, provocative, insightful, or frustrating. No matter what, I hope you have a reaction.

Briefly: I am a United States citizen who is in love with the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and other works seminal to our understanding of American political heritage. While I have political tendencies in terms of party, I am not enamored with either and think they both need to do some real work to get into my good graces. That being said, it’s fair to say that it takes a lot for me to vote for a Republican, simply because they seem to be more about their group ideology than they ever are about the politics of reality.

I am taking up writing this blog because I feel that we have lost touch with many of the values embodied in those documents and held dear by those who created this to truly be the best country in the world. My purpose here will be to regularly point out the hypocrisy of those in power relative to these values, and to shed a broader and brighter light on the circumstances behind some of the political questions we are confronted with in today’s day and age.

Since I make no claim to all the answers, I hope those of you who read here correct me when I’m wrong, engage me when I’m partially wrong, and maybe let me know what if anything I’m getting right.

Let common sense prevail and let my war on the abuse of power begin here.