Blind Staggers

 

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Here's a great example: Charles Bouley, writing at HuffPo, with "America is Losing Its Collective Mind" ...

    I am leaving the Democratic party. It is with heavy heart that I change my affiliation to Independent. I'm 46, have been a registered Democrat since I was 18. My parents were from the East Coast, and proud Democrats. But it took the Democrats taking over, being in power, for me to see that Democrats talk a good talk but do not have the spine to walk the walk. They buckle under pressure, even ridiculous, obtuse pressure.
    But it's not just the Democrats. I'm going to ask my country soon the horrible question, "them, or me." Truly; either we start listening to, following and promoting educated, sane, individuals and doctrines or I will seriously consider leaving the country. Because after all, what kind of country is it now, or will it be if this discourse and noncourse of action keeps up? ...

I certainly don't disagree, but my question is, "leave the Democratic Party for what?" Presently, there is no where to go. Period. Libertarians? Greens? They can't even get on the damned ballot in most states. The hard campaigning for the 2010 mid-terms is right around the corner. And if you think the non-existent leadership of either of those parties has a chance, I can connect you with your next crack dealer.

The fact is that we're at a point where there are no parties. There is no real leadership in any one, no party discipline, no discernible platforms. All that's left of the two "major" parties are a bunch of very pissed-off people calling each other names and accusing each other of everything from pedophilia to high treason. Instead of paying attention to real issues and concerns, we're now subject to rumors about whether Glenn Beck raped someone a few years ago and a controversy over whether our children should watch a presidential speech about education. Frankly, the "Left" is no better than the "Right". If this is not a massive national mental breakdown, it'll do until one comes along. But, no matter where you are on the post-political "spectrum" (or kaleidoscope?), the other guy is not the problem. We all are.

We have all clearly lost our way, stumbling blindly through a morass of our own making. You would think that eight years of The Dubbleduh-Chainey Gang would teach us some clear lessons about electoral politics and who really runs this country. It's not as if the information isn't out here. But we failed. We took the easy way out. Instead of rejecting a failed system and building our own, we embraced it once again and allowed ourselves to entrust our lives to the slick concoction of professional snake oil salesmen. Now everyone is shocked and dismayed that we got snake oil. Go figure.

Let me take a bit of a side road here. Government is the problem. But the solution is not the elimination of government, as the anarchists and libertarians propose. The solution is in taking the government back from the powers to whom we gave it and in making it work again as a tool of the citizens.

Edward Jayne, writing at Dissident Voice, in "Running on Empty", explains ...

    Nor can much help be expected toward an effective solution from our government in Washington, D.C. Congressmen, for example, are almost entirely in the pockets of industries opposed to economic reform that might bear a negative impact on their profits. These elected officials are amazingly unprincipled in their acceptance of hefty campaign contributions in exchange for services rendered, and indeed big business, big banks, big agriculture, big labor, and inclusively anything “big” engages in the practice of paying them off. The amount of these contributions might seem large, but it turns out to be nominal compared to the yield, often more than 100-1 in federal subsidies obtained through earmark legislation and comparable services provided by these congressmen. The few Congressmen unwilling to go along with this arrangement quickly disappear from politics because of inadequate campaign funding. When others more willing to depend on corporate donations finally retire, most find the means to transfer their remaining campaign funds to their own bank accounts and often join the ranks of lobbyists who, like themselves, had first learned the ropes as congressmen. The situation is strictly plutocratic verging on klepto-plutocracy when the law is broken to make it happen. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens have little if any influence except to the extent that they belong to issues-related public constituencies represented by their own variety of lobbyists.

Not only are the government and the governed divorced, but the government increasingly does its business in the shadows, thumbing its nose at any remaining curiosity on the part of people. In The Nation recently, in the article "The Secret Government", Christopher Hayes details the struggle to rein in the forces of the burgeoning security state, beginning with the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. He writes:

    In 1976 the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House followed suit with its own Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a year later. Also in 1976 President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which flatly stated, "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Two years later, Congress passed and President Carter signed FISA, which provided clear procedures for covert action, surveillance and oversight. The law created the special FISA court, which grants warrants for wiretapping and surveillance of anyone on American soil as well as Americans abroad. The Church Committee's revelations also had a profound effect on the bureaucratic culture of the CIA, NSA and FBI. At all three agencies, internal legal controls were put in place requiring layers of attorneys to sign off on any possibly questionable activities.
    But for all these needed reforms, it's impossible to look at the past eight years and conclude they were sufficient. If cold war presidents were surreptitious and/or cavalier about the lawlessness of their actions, the Bush administration perfected a kind of perverse legalism, using sympathetic lawyers to decree legal that which was manifestly illegal. It was an ingeniously devious approach. By relying on John Yoo, a loyal ideologue inside the OLC, Cheney et al. were able to perform an end run around the extensive legal checks and restraints created precisely as a response to the Church Committee's findings. Indeed, the reason the infamous OLC memos are so garishly specific is that CIA lawyers, still operating with a memory of the Church Committee, were insistent on obtaining explicit sign-off for every action and technique that they (quite rightly) believed to be of dubious legality.
    Similarly, Congressional oversight proved no match for a determined executive. Many critics from across the ideological spectrum, from Clarke to Scheuer, note that this is at least partly because Congress often would rather not know what is going on behind the curtain. But the controversy over just what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about the CIA's use of torture, and when she knew it, underscores how dysfunctional the notification system has become. Created as part of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the so-called Gang of Eight system allows a president, under emergency circumstances, to restrict briefings on covert activities to the leader of each party in both houses and the top member of each party of the House and Senate intelligence committees. What was intended as a limited briefing to be given only temporarily during crises has emerged, instead, as the standard.
    Clarke explained its shortcomings to me this way: "Essentially what happens, you're a member of the Gang of Eight. You get a phone call: 'We have to come and brief you.' They ask you to go to the vault. They brief you. You can't take notes, you can't have your staff there and you can't tell anybody." In addition, each member is briefed separately and individually, so they can't even discuss the briefing and ask questions in a group setting. "That's oversight?" Clarke asks. "That's a pretense at oversight. That's a box check. The law required us to do that, and we did this."

I must repeat here that the solutions to these problems do not lie in simply eliminating the government. The fact is that even if the United States of America ceases to exist - is broken up into several sovereign entities - government(s) of some order will remain. The solution, therefore, must be based in the people once again taking personal responsibility for that government. And that, indeed, is hard work.

Our downfall, it seems, is the degree to which we actively participate in self-government. What can we expect when that participation is limited to waiting until all we can do is vote for the choices that international finance and corporate media give us? It is insufficient to simply growl and howl that there is no difference between the major parties without committing to put viable alternatives on the ballot, while actively working to bar corporate campaign contributions. We will, in this instance, continue to get what someone else is paying for.

Of late (and perhaps too late), many Obama supporters have awakened from self-hypnosis and begun to abandon this new, young administration. As I have noted at length in the past few months, the cry is that "we were lied to". But we were not - we didn't do the work to examine Obama's true political character. So we lied to ourselves and got caught. What now?

David Michael Green, in "After Obama" at Common Dreams, writes:

    Eight months into it, it now seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is finished.
    There were some of us -- indeed, many of us, myself included -- who thought there was a possibility that Barack Obama might seize this moment of American crisis, twinned with the complete failure for all to see of the regressive agenda, to become the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt ...
    Right now, the question is what comes next? The Obama presidency is probably already toast, though of course anything can happen in three or seven years. But he is on a crash course for a major clock cleaning and, what's worse, he doesn't seem to have it remotely within him to seize history by the horns and steer that bull in his preferred direction. Indeed, near as I can tell, he doesn't even have a preferred direction.
    Obama was complete fool if he ever believed for a moment that his campfire kumbaya act was going to bring the right along behind him. Even s'mores wouldn't have helped. These foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics have completely lost all sense and proportion, and were bound to viscerally hate any president left of Cheney, let alone some black guy in their white house. Meanwhile, centrist voters in this country seem pretty much only to care about taxes and spending, and so he's lost them, too, without the slightest rhetorical fight in his own defense. And he's blown off a solid progressive base by spitting in their eyes at every imaginable opportunity, beginning with the formation of his cabinet, ranging through every policy decision from civil rights to civil liberties to foreign policy to healthcare, and culminating with his choice not to even mobilize his email database in support of his policies ...
    Put it all together and it's pretty hard to see how Obama gets a second term. Which can mean only one thing: We're looking at a Romney or a Palin or some sort of similar monster as the next president, despite the fact that their party was absolutely loathed only a year ago, and actually still is today. It won't matter. People will be voting against the incumbent, not for any candidate, and that will leave only one viable choice, especially for centrist and right-wing voters. Whoever wins the Republican nomination will be the next president, crushing Obama in the general election (assuming he survives the Democratic primaries). And that's a particularly scary notion, since the party's voting base who will make that choice in the Republican primaries is the same crowd you've seen featured all this summer at town hall meetings. Olympia Snowe is not going to be the Republican nominee in 2012. Know what I mean? ...

Let me finish this in a somewhat more concrete way, because at this point we must have solidarity with a solid foundation. Cindy Sheehan, at her Soapbox blog, just wrote an impassioned piece, "If McCain Were President". It is not very kind to the sitting president. In it, she offers some specific suggestions ...

    There will be two major opportunities to put our bodies on the gears of the Machine this fall….

    The anti-globalization movement will be out in full-force during the G20 nations’ meeting in Pittsburgh September 23-27 despite the jackbooted thuggery planned by the organizers of the G20 summit. Not only will there be 4000 riot police, but there will be 2000 Pa. National Guard there to suppress opposition. This is merely a bullying tactic designed to scare us away from the global “elite” while they plan more economic devastation for the world.

    On October 5th, we will be gathering in front of the White House to protest Democratic wars of aggression (especially Af-Pak, since the 8th is the anniversary of the US invasion) and there will be opportunity for civil disobedience that is not just symbolic. We will also be reading the International People's Declaration of Peace (IPDoP) in front of the White House that day and kicking off the campaign to build an effective grassroots movement against all violence, but particularly, state-sanctioned violence.

    The face has changed in DC, but the odious policies of the Machine remain the same.

    Remember, if you don’t actively oppose the policies of this government, then you are passively supporting them and you are responsible for helping to oil the Machine and keep it running.

    If you can't physically attend the protests, please consider making a contribution, even if it is tiny, to help defray expenses.

It may be a small one, but it's a steady step. Will it lead to a series of such purposeful steps, eyes open and clear? Or are we doomed to just stumble around in the dark of the Blind Staggers?