This blog has been quiet for some time now. Been busy. That’s my excuse and I’m stick’n with it. On rare occasions I stumble across brilliant insightful gonzo writing that blows the frost right off the political pumpkin and compels a repost. So buckle in and have yourself a nice ride compliments of  Evert Cilliers of 3quarksdaily as he splains it all to Obama … and the rest of us  ;)

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

My name is Obama. But call me Icarus.

I soared on the wings of an angel. I was the biggest star the planet had ever seen, without having to go near a guitar. I was dancing on the moon, when suddenly, the moon gathered its bowels and dropped me like a turd back on earth.

Plop!

And here I sit, in my redecorated Oval Office, surrounded by all these clever Ph.D people, and by my pointillist-picture-perfect family, and I’m gobsmacked and paddywhacked and privately pissed and publicly petulant.

People scorn me. Left and right. They treat me like a dog.

After all I’ve done. What a record of legislation! How did I legislate? Let me count the bills.

On my 24th day in office, I whelped a $787 billion Recovery Act that included $78.61 billion of green energy stimulus, and cut the taxes of 95% of our taxpayers.

But I didn’t rest.

I squeezed out Healthcare Reform. That took a little longer. It was an almost stillborn breech baby, but today it is incubating and will start kicking about four years from now if the Republicans don’t starve it to death before then. Wonder of wonders, in its placenta can be found the detritus of the “pre-existing condition” scam. Unfortunately the baby is missing its genitals — the public option — but some industry deal snipped that one out of its genetic code.

Still, I didn’t rest.

Soon I begat Financial Reform that included a Consumer Financial Protection Agency birthed by Elizabeth Warren and now being midwifed by her.

And then, lest you forget, as most Americans have, I saved Detroit. Plus I shook down BP for $20 billion.

Those were my five biggies. Stimulus, health, finance, Detroit, BP shakedown. There’s a lot of little stuff too numerous to mention: my ban on torture, the student loan overhaul, our foreign rep restored, two okay Supreme Court ladies, etc.

But what happened? Where have all the voters gone? I feel like Sartre locked out of De Beauvoir’s bedroom because she’s banging the husband of the wife I banged, or their daughter, all because of some combination of nausea and misplaced ressentiment because our final philosophy agregationexam jury quibbled about whether they should give first place to me or to her, and then naturally confirmed her second-sex status.

Me, young and virile Barack Obama, locked out of the American bedroom? Can you imagine? Can you imagine that happening to the smartest guy in the room?

I can. Look at my approval ratings. Under 50%, to sleep with the fishes in the Seventh Circle of Consequences Unintended and Hopes Dashed on Pointy Rocks.

WTF? What happened?

Simple, Mr President. What happened was you.

You did it, Barack Hussein Obama. You baked the crap on which you gag. You ate the banana on whose peel you’re slipping.

Here’s what you did, you Hope Pope Dope, which I will describe to you in words of wackedoo woe with my balls on fire and my hair smoking Medusa snakes. In fact, I’m going to be stooping to the atavistic non-Latinate rhetoric of Henry Miller, Rabelais and Judd Apatow cock-joke movies … so you might mind-grip with feral clarity the global geography of your idiocy and my fury about same. Here’s what you wrought, in straight-up Anglo-Saxon:

After giving your base a great fuck as a candidate, you pulled out.

You entered the White House and slammed the door on your base. You handed over your personal stash of 13 million email addresses — your direct line to your fans — to the Democratic Party. As if you couldn’t be bothered with them anymore.

Your fans didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, pal. Independents didn’t vote for the Democratic Party, sonny. They voted for you, asshole. That coalition of youths Hispanics labor-union African-American progressives: the stars in their eyes blinked Obama-Obama-Obama.

You had a fan base inside-outside your Party, like the Tea Party stands inside-outside the GOP, which you could have used again and again — against Congress, against the GOP, even against your own party. An organized community all your own.

Between you and your fans there was a much stronger bond than a mere party-political bond. A mystical, sacred bond.

But you went all secular on them and pulled out. You acted as though your base never existed. You committed the greatest act of political coitus interruptus since JFK got himself shot.

Then you pointed your wind-dry erection at a rainbow. It was actually a shitstorm, but you saw opportunity where others saw an iceberg. You happen to be a donkey, but you thought you could get it on with an elephant. It was species overreach, dumbo. You insisted on looking for a hole somewhere in the GOP — your avowed and self-declared enemies — to stick your putz in.

They blocked your cock solid. You got nowhere. That hole was closed tighter than the jars in which they store the last smallpox viruses on earth in the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Vector Research Center in Koltsovo, Siberia.

Then, instead of going back to your fans, you stuck your nose in your briefing books and acted like a monk and never looked up until you felt an uncomfortable feeling deep inside you, which turned out to be a huge GOP cock rammed up your butt powered by phalanxes of crazed Tea Party people.

Now you’re stuck between a cock and a hard place. You’re trapped in what the TV Puking Packs of Pundit Poseurs call an enthusiasm gap. That gap is a hole, the hole in which you cast your base like the dungeons in which Henry VIII cast wife after wife so he could go and ding-dong some other highborn floozy.

In your case, a whore called Washington.

Where does your enthusiasm come from? From your base, dummy. Nowhere else. You dumped your base and you dumped all enthusiasm for you. It’s that simple, idiot.

Now you’re complaining. Petulant phrases like “buck up” and “stop whining” and “inexcusable to stand on the side lines” are flowing like platelets from Caesar’s wounds.

The pity of it all is, it could have been so easy — if you were a little smarter, or maybe just a bit of a hypocrite.

Look how Karl Rove milked the Bush base, like twenty piglets sucking a fat sow dry. Came the 2004 election, what did Rove do? He and Bush raised a mighty hue and cry about gay marriage. And that old stand-by, the court-sanctioned whacking of human fetuses.

Now listen. Legal abortion will be with us forevermore, and gay marriage will spread from state to state like Sherman’s march across the South.

In short, these base-stroking moves by Herr Rove and Meister Bush were the shit of the bull. Totally. They’re like applying a phantom tongue made of chicken liver to a blind man’s wang and calling it fellatio.

But they worked. They made the base believe that Bush cared about them. It actually happens that Bush could give two shits in a rusty bucket about either gay marriage or abortion. But that’s not the point. The point was to bond with his base via hoops of steel. Ergo, in order to play patty-cake on that bond like a rhapsody singing heavenly choirs in the bosoms of his base, Bush strummed those two strings of anti-gay and anti-abortion BS harder than Kurt Cobain plucked his ax before he sucked a bullet.

That’s all it takes. Just a few pointless promises and a few empty gestures.

All you had to do, Mister President, was say this:

“Listen, folks, we got healthcare reform done. Thank you for sticking with me through the long ordeal of death panels and socialism. But we didn’t get the public option. Damn. Double damn. You’re disappointed. I’m disappointed. Never mind, next time. Don’t think for one moment I’m giving up. We didn’t have the votes for it, but if you keep voting for me, we’ll get there. The battle has just begun. When I’m re-elected, that’s my first priority. Let’s all pull together — the public option or bust!”

Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher would’ve grown bangs for you over that. And it wouldn’t have cost you a dime or a vote; maybe a scowl from Liebermann.

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the healthcare industry and the hospital lobby.)

About jobs, jobs, jobs … well, you should’ve done this: started building out our infrastructure with government work programs, like FDR used the government to hire people. No one would’ve complained about big government if big government were giving them a goddam job.

But you didn’t do this, El Jerko, so you could’ve done the next best thing: coaxed a rhetorical lily from your mud, as follows:

“This is my monthly jobs report. We lost XX number of jobs and gained XX number of jobs, for an overall gain of XX. That’s XX times better than the GOP did under the previous administration. It’s also XX fewer jobs than we need to add to be out of this mess in three years time. That’s my goal. Three years. They actually dug us an eight-year-deep hole, but I’m aiming to get us out in three. So stick with me and my party. We’re climbing out of the Republican hole slowly but surely, and I won’t rest until every American who wants a job has one.”

And then, after Financial Reform got passed, you should have ladled on this base-kissing sauce:

“We got that through. Thank you for your support. But we couldn’t break up the banks and stop too-big-to-fail for all time. Didn’t have the votes for it. Damn. Double damn. Never mind, next time. When I’m re-elected, I’ll be watching Goldman Sachs and Citicorp like a hawk watching a momma rat giving birth to a feisty tasty squad of baby rats. If those banks start repeating their shitty moves, I’ll be on to them like that hawk, and I’ll launch peck-’em-into-pieces legislation that’ll separate their lending from their gambling and their bonuses from their pockets so far you’d need an intergalactic umbilical cord to connect them.”

(Of course, in the privacy of your handy backroom, you were free to share a wink and a nod with the banks.)

Throwing red meat to your base is the easiest thing on earth. Say it loud, say it all the time, and make sure it’s empty. They’ll lap it up. All they want is the emotional connection. That secret feeling between you and them that hey, you may whore like a tomcat all over town, but when push comes to shove, there’s only one place where true love rules your libido, and that’s in their little beating bleeding hearts. You’ve got to keep titivating your base, baby. What’s the skin off your nose, for chrissake? A little hypocrisy goes a long way. It’s the number one tool in any politician’s kit.

Just one crude example. (Sorry, we’re not doing subtle today.)

Say, what do candles and flowers have to do with fucking? Absolutely nothing. But chicks dig them, so guys who want to get laid, put up with having perfumed candles lit in the bedroom, and the place smelling like a geisha’s crotch, and your most surly pleb of a horny rube thinks nothing of thrusting a bunch of roses he bought at the Korean deli at the groin of his anointed, and cannily pre-tickling his beloved’s amoreuse-sodden fun button with earrings or some such trinket from Target.

A few trinkets, and your base would’ve followed you over a cliff like rodents mesmerized by the wily Pied Piper. Now you’re looking at your hand instead of a sugar ditch, because you scrimped on the blandishments. Your base got nary a rose nor a glass of white wine at a corner table. So no candles are being lit for you.

How could you be so dumb?

Instead of studying Bill Clinton’s history for clues about what to do if you get stuck with a Republican House, you should be studying Lady Gaga.

There’s a lady who knows the first thing about staying popular.

It’s not jobs, jobs, jobs.

It’s base, base, base.

When that chick started out, queers said to themselves: hey, she’s just the perfect fag hag.

So they jumped on her: heck, she was the best thing since Judy Garland.

And little girls — those who felt trapped in their families — said to themselves, she’s got the independent outrageousness that secretly defines the inner me. Lady Gaga became the personification of how sassy a young girl could be and not only get away with it, but become popular and noted for it.

Every girl has a sass inside her wanting to come out.

Plus, Lady Gaga backed up her persona with the goods. She wrote great club dance tunes, maddeningly catchy, so both out-on-the-town dancing-queen queers and private-dancing-in-front-of-their-bedroom-mirrors princess girls, had a soundtrack to adore her by.

Lady Gaga also played to the dressing-up aesthetic of the little girls and the big queens by wearing crazy clothes. A veritable Carmen Miranda, who wore a fruit basket on her head because poor women in Brazil carried fruit home on their heads from the market. Lady Gaga wears a dress made of meat — same story, different time and place. Pretentious people call it performance art, because these two gestures make statements that go beyond mere fashion.

Now here’s the point about Lady Gaga and popularity. Lady Gaga wields Facebook and MTV and the media for one purpose only: to stay close to her base.

You don’t, which is why you’re dumb and she isn’t.

Heck, Lady Gaga has even given her fan base a pet name: “my little monsters.” You could’ve done something like that: “my Obamabots.” You could’ve embraced your own Boy Scout-loyal posse of millions in your own intimate pet talk. You could have stayed blazing like an eternal flame lit prettily in all four chambers of their hearts. Instead, you pulled out and the flame died.

Here’s another lesson to park between your big ears. When things started getting hot about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Discrimination, what did you do? Nothing.

What did Lady Gaga do? She played to her queer base: she invited gay and lesbian service folks who got fired by the Army for being lesbian and gay to accompany her to the MTV Awards. She went to a political rally and made a speech, bringing a lot of young people with her.

Lady Gaga knows how to play base politics, Obama, and you don’t. She has base instincts like Huey Long, while you have the base instincts of Marie Antoinette.

As for you progressives, all disappointed because Obama didn’t change Washington and stem the rise of the oceans, it’s time you got one thing through your pointy heads: you may be on the left of the Democrats and the Republicans, but you’re actually dead in the center of the country.

There’s no way America is a center-right country. If one more pundit says that again, I’ll have to hire one of those Hottentot Venus-bellied Army freight planes to cart away the puke in all my kitchen pots, and drop it on the chirping heads of the chatterati.

Go through every issue one by one, and you’ll find that a majority of voters back every single progressive position, from getting out of our wars to keeping Social Security and Medicare safe from Wall Street to the public option in healthcare to upping minimum wage etcetera right down the line. Jeez, American kids under 30 feel more positive about socialism than capitalism.

It’s time you progressives realized the Dems and Obama do not represent you or the country, and therefore you have to do to them what the Tea Party is doing to the GOP.

You have to take over the Democratic Party.

You can do it. Between Move On and the Change Campaign Committee and Daily Kos and Firedoglake and George Soros and Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow, you’ve got the firepower.

You’ve got to spend all the money you can raise on running progressive candidates against establishment Democratic candidates in every primary from now until forever, or till you’ve taken over the Dem Party. Whichever comes first. Pick ‘em off one by one if that’s all you can afford, but pick off enough of them so sooner or later the rest of the Dems have to dance to your tune.

And make sure you nominate scary outsider people, labor union people, lefties with bigger mouths than Sarah Palin or Christine McDonnell or Sharron Angle. Passionate pitchfork-wavers who talk outrageous crapola about how they’re going to hang Wall Street by the thumbs when they get in and nationalize Big Oil and zap rich people with tax hikes that’ll make them gag on their Bollinger’s.

Scary sensational stuff. Angry rabble-rousing BS. Populist demagoguery of the juicily extreme kind.

Why? Because talking crazy gets you world domination on the TV machine and is a big enthusiasm getter. Where are the Sarah Palins and the Michele Bachmanns and the Sharron Angles of the left? That’s what progressives need. Their own angry deranged idiots. If the bile happens to spew forth from the fire-breathing pieholes of pretty fuckabillies, all the better. Whoever barks it, you want your piping-hot piffle sizzling so volcano-vicious it scares the crap out of the establishment all round.

Just like the establishment GOP folks fear Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party, the establishment Democratic Party folks have to fear you.

Most important, the President has to fear you.

He has to bow before you. Cringe. Prostrate himself and his gland. Brandish sackcloth and ashes. Kiss you all over 24/7.

Only a mortal fear for himself and his party will turn Obama from a compromiser into a fighter. From a moderate Democrat — aka a Republican — into a progressive. You’ve got to scare him left. (How about running Howard Dean or Alan Grayson against him in the 2012 presidential primary?)

Obama is nothing without your votes. The Democratic Party is nothing without your votes.

You are the soul of the Democratic Party, and you should rule it.

That’s all I have to say.

What a relief. Now I can revert to my Latinate Other, and sequester myself in the verdant arbor of Matthew Arnold and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, where one can doff high purpose and don Olympian diffidence with a dandy’s nonchalance, far from the madding coverage of November 2, 2010.

Apologies for the effluence of tempestuous and benthopelagic agog verbiage. It’s all your fault, dear hearts. Your hegemonic immensity of vacuity drives me to cling to the guns of my down-home vernacular.

So adieu and anon till November 2, sweet petulant Obama and darling prodigal progressives. See you after the cock-up of that buck-up-or-fuck-up.

(original post in 3quarksdaily)

A tap on the current political barometer reminds me of  a favorite saying; “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Change you can believe in?  Perhaps.  But first you gotta have some.  Change that is. Healthcare ”reform” notwithstanding, Obama’s rapid drift towards the center-right already has many progressives (and even independents) thinking NoBama in 2012. Evert Cilliers offers an irreverant analysis and a recommendation for an alternative progressive candidate.

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By Evert Cilliers in 3quarksdaily

Here’s the story as I see it.

In 2008, after eight years of Bush/Cheney, the horrors and wrongs of this worst-of-all presidencies were plain to see — like Dresden after the fire-bombing, or a maroela tree after an elephant chomped it. The country had been wrecked by the dotty ideology-driven actions of extremist nutters: the false prophets of anti-science, anti-common-sense, anti-democracy, free-market-gone-crazy, conservatism-gone-fundamentalist, male-belligerence-gone-psycho.

Economically we were down the toilet and halfway to the sewer. Internationally we were pariahs. Psychologically we ping-ponged between genuine anxiety and false bravado. Worst of all: morally, we were hollowed out. Wars. Torture. Human rights abuses. Tora Bora. FEMA. Washington corruption. Wall Street fraud. Foreclosures. Unemployment. Deficits. Off-budget accounting. 30% interest charges on credit cards. Debt. Debt. Debt. Had we been ruled by the Kremlin, we couldn’t have done worse. It was as if America had become a nation of 300 million suffering Jobs, struck down by the vengeful hand of an old-testament God.

It was the worst of times, and the best of times only for the nicely rich, dah-links.

But this most horrible of horrorshows opened up a great opportunity. The longing for change ached in every sensible American heart. The time for a progressive moment in our history had arrived.

Enter Barack Obama. Fueled by a compelling story, inspiring oratory, obvious decency, a challenging intellect and seemingly progressive liberal beliefs, he stepped into the moment with dazzling ability. He benefited from the progressive moment and took full advantage of it. After all, he was one of a very few voices who had spoken up against the Iraq War when it was political suicide to do so. He was the dewy rose in the scratchy patch of weeds.

1. HOPES UP THEN DOWN

Obama won the presidency thumpingly. The progressive winds were behind his back. The country was overflowing with hope and enthusiasm. His inauguration was like some godsent event — for us and the world. At the Inaugural Balls, Michele appeared all fluffily snow-white-begowned, the magical princess in a happy-ending fairy tale, haloes descending on us all.

The wreck that was America called for bold action FDR-style. The time had come to bring Wall Street to its senses and concentrate on putting Main Street back on its feet. Instead of having government by the rich of the rich and for the rich, it was time for government by and for the people again. Time to clean out the stables. Time for change we wanted to believe in. A magic wand as big as a sequioa tree was about to be waved.

What happened?

It’s twelve months later and unemployment has climbed over 10% with underemployment around 17%. The bastards who caused this unemployment are about to earn fat bonuses because our tax dollars saved their skeevy behinds back in 2008. The Fed is doling out cheap money to these fraudsters so they can continue their gambling in the Great Wall Street Casino — socially useless gambling that makes them rich and has made everybody else poor. They’re funneling our money into record bonuses on a par with 2007, yet they’re not doing what we were promised the bail-out was for: restoring credit to businesses big and small. In spite of this, Goldman Sachs and other crony banks have been rewarded with thirteen trillion bucks by the Fed.

Obama keeps saying of the banks, “they don’t get it.” What are they supposed to get when he keeps enabling them? Until he taxes financial transactions to slow down their gambling and extract something socially useful from it … until he taxes their short-term bonuses like the UK is doing (they will tax firms 50% of every bonus they pay out over $40,000, affecting 20,000 bankers) … until he brings back the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept the US bubble-free for 50 years until Clinton repealed it, and kept banks small enough to fail … until Obama does these things, he’s conning us. It’s not the banksters who don’t get it, it’s Obama who doesn’t get it.

On December 13, Obama said on 60 Minutes: “Now, let me say more generally I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street.” But in his administration, Obama has guys who caused the problem and enabled the bastards — Summers, Geithner, and crew. They’re helping Obama build a nifty financial IED that’ll blow up our economy yet again in five to ten years time. Giving Summers and Geithner the job of fixing our economy was like appointing your rapist as your therapist. The fix is in: the rich will continue to steal from the poor.

It’s not even Bush-lite. It’s Bush-same. Or Bush-worse.

What’s more, our job loss might be permanent. Who says those jobs will come back? The Reagan Revolution created our deficit-ridden bubble economy and turned us into a nation in which regular folks don’t earn enough money to make a decent living unless they go into debt. A democrat, Bill Clinton, completed the Reagan Revolution with (a) NAFTA — making the export of our good jobs official; (b) the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act — removing the wall between investment banks and traditional lending banks, and guaranteeing that we’ll get banks that are too big to fail; and (c) excepting the unregulated derivatives trade from any oversight — thereby guaranteeing that the “free” market will blow up. A democrat, Barack Obama, keeps enabling Wall Street while short-changing Main Street. Meanwhile, big business is finding out it can squeeze more work out of fewer people.

What makes economists say the jobs will be back sometime in 2010? Who believes economists anymore? Is economics a science or simply ideology plus numbers, and utopian numbers at that? Isn’t our economy rotten to the core? Aren’t we a nation of consumers, a market for China’s crap, instead of a nation of producers? Aren’t we a plutocracy dominated by Wall Street predators, in which wealth keeps trickling up from the middle class to the rich? Why is Spain a better creator of green manufacturing jobs than we are? Why are Mexicans in Mexico sending money to Mexican immigrants in the US so they have money for food?

This is the economy that is still paying for a war in Iraq and doubling down on a losing bet in Afghanistan. Obama gave a rationale at Westpoint for sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan that was a half-baked plethora of stale Bushisms and at least one flat-out lie (that the Taliban refused to negotiate over Osama Bin Laden being brought to justice). The people we’re fighting for, Hamid Karzai and a bunch of faction-ridden gangster-druglords-warlords, are odious. Karzai’s brother is a major drug lord, and his first cousin Hashmat Karzai, who owns the Asia Security Group with contracts of millions of dollars with the U.S. military, is a murderer: he drove with his gang up to the house of another cousin, Wazeed Karzai, corraled passers-by into a mosque, removed the front door of the house, entered the house and, in front of Wazeed’s 12-year-old sister, shot the 18-year-old Wazeed three times; Wazeed died two days later, having identified his killer, yet there’s been no investigation by the Afghan government. The people we’re fighting against, the Taliban, are odious too, but neither they nor the druglords have much interest in exporting terror to America or harboring Al Qaeda, who lurk in Pakistan, Hamburg, London, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere, none of whom we’ve seen fit to declare war on. We’re already drone-bombing the heck out of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, so why are we fighting in Afghanistan? Go figure. Bush was happy to underfund the Afghanistan War; Obama overfunds it. This isn’t Bush-lite; it’s Bush-heavy.

Then Obama followed up with a well-received Nobel speech, in which he dropped this distortion of recent history: “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.” I guess he conveniently forgot how we spilled the blood of between a million and two million citizens of Vietnam, backed the genocidal Pol Pot, and overthrew many democracies to install thugs and butchers like the Shah in Iran, Pinochet in Chile, Mobutu in the Congo, etcetera. Yes, we did a great and wonderful thing when we helped put a defeated Germany and Japan back on their feet after WW2. But for the next four decades, together with Russia, we helped underwrite global insecurity: countless proxy wars, CIA plots and destabilization all over the globe. I vividly remember the fear-ridden days of the Cold War. It seems the Obama Doctrine is built on some massively weird Jason Bourne-like amnesia.

Currently there’s a health reform bill in the offing that looks more and more like it’s going to be a big handout to the health insurance companies, who keep 30% of the dollars they get as premiums for themselves and spend only 70% on providing health care. Here’s a typical comment on a recent thread from Elizabeth Renant in Santa Fe:

“America is the laughingstock of the developed world. Every last damned affluent democracy therein has managed to find a way to offer its citizens some kind of national health insurance, either via the government or via private nonprofits – except us, and there we sit, ranking 38th in outcomes but #1 in expense! This is medieval, it is positively medieval!

“Certainly the health care bill now before us is ludicrous, but it’s ludicrous because our government, and that includes ruthless dinosaurs like Lieberman, who as a member of Congress enjoys the best health plan in the nation, paid for by the taxpayers, have done everything they could to prevent the country from going where it is very clear it has to go if this is to work: where France, Switzerland, Japan, the UK, Canada, Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc., have all gone, all with better outcomes at less expense.”

It’s becoming obvious that all along Obama and Rahm Emanuel regarded the public option as a bargaining chip to be traded away to get a bill done. With the individual mandate and no public option, you’re forced to hand over thousands of your hard-earned dollars to some predatory health insurance company. It’s unconscionable. There’s a reason health insurance stocks hit a 52-year high this past Friday. Howard Dean is right: the Senate bill is worth killing, because the insurance companies have won (Medicare spends only 4% on non-healthcare expenditures, while the Senate bill lets insurance companies spend 25% or 20%; plus it lets them charge older folks three times more than younger people). But of course Congress shouldn’t kill it, because even a shitty bill is better than nothing. We’ve got to take what we can get, as Ted Kennedy would’ve told us. Even if what we get falls short of what we need; even if it’s a teaspoon of water for a man dying of thirst in the desert.

Another bill — some kind of regulatory financial reform — is also wending its way through Congress, and being loopholed, gutted and filleted like a catch of Atlantic cod by bank lobbyists, who got $334 million from Wall Street in the first three quarters of 2009.

The elephantine UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has birthed a gnat of a deal — a sort-of-a-deal that is not actually a deal, with fewer teeth than an amoeba, and a promise as binding as “I promise not to splooge in your mouth.” This was supposed to be at the very top of candidate Obama’s agenda — the environment, green energy, oil independence and all — yet he checked in at the last moment in Copenhagen, when it was too late to get anything meaningful accomplished.

And so far, Obama has blithely continued many of Bush’s worst policies: indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus. He has replaced his top White House lawyer, Greg Craig, the one guy with a conscience about these matters in his administration. More Bush-same. Why did Obama reverse his own position on releasing more photos of Guantanamo freakiness (they show US soldiers pointing guns at a detainee’s head, and a broomstick at another detainee’s backside) and other Bush horrors? Because Cheney and a bunch of ex-CIA directors complained and polls showed Obama losing support among independents. So much for Obama’s “principles.” What’s more, he lets the Bush regime and its Geneva Convention-subverting lawyers get away with torture; no one has been held accountable. Seems like Obama decided to learn from the mistakes of the post-war German government: all those poor Nazis they prosecuted. What a shame that was.

Obama’s latest Bush move: he has refused to sign the international ban on landmines, along with Bahrain, Burma, Iran, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and others. A collection of the worst nations on earth, and Obama has put us in their company. Jeez, if Obama is a true-blue liberal, then I’m a pre-Raphaelite maiden wafting through a garden of rose-petaled delights gaily chanting “hey nonny-nonny, yon nightinggale be oh-so-bonny.”

3. A PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE TO BUSH-LITE OBAMA

Listen, I still prefer Obama to any GOP president. Imagine the megacrap we’d be in now under McCain. And hey, all of a sudden the world loves us again. No mean feat. Plus, Obama did more in his first 40 days than Bill Clinton did in eight years. What’s more, it ain’t easy being president: you’re up against American institutions like Wall Street, the Pentagon and the healthcare industry, who are geniuses at resisting change. Obama is doing what he can. He may be the perfect president for many Americans.

But if you’re a progressive, you have to face facts: Obama has BETRAYED the progressive moment his campaign promised us. The man’s ugly actions don’t match his pretty talk. Turns out he’s a Trojan horse for Wall Street, the Pentagon, the healthcare industry and Big Pharma. Whatever he says, his actions put him actively on their side. This is a stark fact that Progressives have to confront head-on. A fact as evident as a tattoo on Angelina Jolie’s butt.

Candidate Obama promised hope: president Obama delivers heartache and despair. Not as bad as McCain or any other GOP president would, but real bad compared to what he promised. He has betrayed his own potential. He’s no FDR. He’s not even Nixon, whose legacy includes the Environmental Protection Agency and the opening to China. He’s to the right of paranoid Nixon, forchrissake.

Obama believes he can use corporations — the health insurance companies, the Wall Street banks, GM, Blackwater — to achieve socially useful ends. That’s why he might think he’s sort of progressive, and why a lot of progressives, me included, were taken in by his inspiring 2008 campaign. But his “progressivism” is just another extension of Bill Clinton’s triangulating ways. No wonder Obama’s administration is full of ex-Clintonites, from Larry Summers to Rahm to Hillary herself. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is an ass-backwards progressive. He thinks he has no other option, because he needs the money of big business to finance winning campaigns. That’s the devil’s deal these Third Way Democrats have made with themselves — aligning their principles with the predatory teleology of corporations. Obama himself said that if he had to do health reform from scratch, he’d go the single-payer route, but he took it off the table because it just wouldn’t go through. Of course: still, taking it off the table may placate the health insurance companies, but it also forces one to start from a weak bargaining position. Being a conciliator instead of a fighter, Obama shoots low to get an achievable minimum, instead of aiming high to get an achievable maximum. He also believes the way to help Main Street is to flood Wall Street with our tax dollars. That’s where being a corporate progressive takes you.

I’m a different progressive: I don’t like to give away my money in either premium form to predator health insurance companies, or in bail-out form to predatory Wall Street banksters, because I know what I’ll get in return: something between kind-of-OK and crap. One way or another, I’m going to get ripped off, because of this absolute fact of the basic nature of capitalism: it is the sacred duty of corporations to make a profit off me, and the bigger the profit, the better for them. This attitude makes great things like iPods and Prius and Guinness and remote-controlled toy trucks happen, but it sure doesn’t work for healthcare. That’s why I believe our government should use our tax dollars to provide us with the important social goods — healthcare, social security, cops, firefighters, the military, the post office, schools — and let private industry compete if they want to with private security firms, military contractors, Fedex, private schools and private health plans for the rich who can afford it. That’s what they do in Europe, where folks pay more taxes but live longer than us and have longer vacations and out-compete us in manufacturing. I’m a social democrat, not a corporate democrat. I don’t think you can even call yourself a progressive if you’re in the Obama-Clinton-Summers camp. I remember a conversation I had this past summer with a well-to-do couple from LA who had voted for Obama. We were talking about his coddling of Wall Street. The wife said something that really struck home: “This is not what we voted for.”

Those liberals who are still defending Obama are not defending his policies: they’re simply defending their attraction to his intelligence, decency and charm. They’re like people who love Bush or Palin or McCain or Huckabee: they trust them to do the right thing simply because they’ve fallen in love with their aura.

It’s time to turn elsewhere if we want our brief shot at a real progressive moment in this country to actually yield progressive results we can see with untinted eyes.

Someone else will have to fight the progressive fight, because Obama won’t or can’t.

Such a person exists. There is a man with the progressive credentials and the progressive views — against Wall Street, against the war in Afghanistan, for the American family — who is now making a name for himself in politics.

If he were to run against Obama in the 2012 Democratic primary, he could give Obama a real run for his money. If he ran on a populist anti-Wall Street platform, Obama could be toast. Because what would Obama say if he were accused of being a sellout to Wall Street? There’s nothing he can say. He’d have to hem and haw like a deadbeat dad looking up at Judge Judy.

Who is this perfect anti-Obama progressive?

4. THE ROOKIE FROM FLORIDA

His name is Alan Grayson, a rookie congressman from Florida. He’s against the war in Afghanistan, he’s against Wall Street, he speaks his mind, and he loves to take the fight to the enemy.

He called Rush Limbaugh a “has-been hypocrite loser” who “was more lucid when he was a drug addict.” Nice taste of Limbaugh’s own medicine, isn’t it?

Grayson’s the guy who said the health plan of the Republicans is “don’t get sick.” And their backup plan is, “If you do get sick, die quickly.” The collective knickers of the GOP went into a double-sheet-bend knot over that one. They squawked like evangelicals sodomized by a gang of Act Up gay activists.

Grayson is working with Ron Paul on an “audit the Fed” bill, which will make the shadowy workings of the Fed transparent.

He has the chutzpah to drive Republicans into a greater frenzy than their standard operational apoplexy. National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ken Spain got so spooked, he said of Grayson: “This is an individual who has established a pathological pattern of unstable behavior.” I saw Grayson on CNN, surrounded by journalists who were chiding him that his derogatory remarks weren’t helping anyone, and instead of backing down, he said that when it came to health reform, the Republicans were “foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.” Suddenly the journalists looked like monks dropped into a porn movie set: the expressions on their faces were beyond priceless.

He’s my man.

The man to hit Obama not only from the left, but to hit Obama from the bottom.

Because unlike Obama and his professorial air, Grayson comes off like a blue-collar guy. He looks working-class union. Big and lumbering. Meat-and-potatoes face. And he talks like a man from the people. Down-to-earth, blunt. Not like a guy from Harvard. He’s as regular-folks as Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, without the psycho wackiness or world-class stupidity. He would eat any Republican for breakfast, because he would make them all look like elite clubhouse wimps.

Despite Grayson’s blue-collar mien, he’s more educated than Obama, with three degrees: a regular degree and a law degree from Harvard, and a masters from the Kennedy School of Government.

Basically, he’s a progressive populist dream come true.

Plus, he’s stinking rich. $30 million rich, money he made himself, running a telecommunications company.

He grew up in the Bronx tenements. He’s been a lawyer, businessman and officer of a non-profit organization. He pursued whistleblower cases against contractor fraud in Iraq. His car had this bumper sticker: “Bush lied, people died.” He has five children.

5. NOW IS THE TIME TO START ORGANIZING

Listen up, folks. Get behind this man.

IT BEHOOVES ALL PROGRESSIVES TO RUN GRAYSON AGAINST OBAMA IN THE 2012 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY.

Start the drumbeat now. NOW. NOW. NOW. Let’s fire up the Democratic base.

I know, most likely Obama will beat Grayson. Even Ted Kennedy couldn’t dislodge incumbent President Carter for the democratic nomination in 1980. But look at it this way: in a race against Grayson, Obama is going to have to give an account of his first-term actions, and explain why he enabled Wall Street to continue screwing Main Street. And Grayson ain’t gonna give Obama any wriggle room on this, because he’s easily as smart as Obama, and he has real-world private-sector business experience. He could scare Obama a few steps to the left, which might result in a few progressive moves in Obama’s second term.

But, but, but: what if — a gigantic if — what if the democratic base is really angry at Obama, and Grayson beats Obama, and then goes on to cream the GOP idiot (Romney? Palin? where do they get these fakes and flakes?)?

What then?

Then, oh then, fellow progressives, we may have a revolution we can dance too. We may peel grapes for our beloveds and praise elegant larks for their mellifluous warblings. We may finally get to enjoy the progressive moment that our country so desperately needs — and work on becoming the more perfect union that Obama keeps talking about but won’t do much to achieve.

The last weekend before the recent presidential election, a San Francisco Chronicle interview found Mr. Obama stating, “Build the coal plants if they want, but it will bankrupt them if they do.” Not surprisingly, the conservative herd quickly wolfed down this final slab of red meat and lept to the conclusion that the Obama administration intended to literally bankrupt coal plants and more broadly the entire coal industry. Insofar as the electorate was concerned, that dog didn’t hunt. Still, many of my Republican acquaintances continue to insist that the coal industry will be in the next administration’s crosshairs.

Is bankrupting coal plant operators and coal producers a credible threat? Let’s start with where our electricity comes from today. As shown in the pie chart below, we currently derive almost 50% of our electricity from coal! Yes, coal. So let’s be realistic. No sane administration is going to shut down almost 50% of the nation’s power supply overnight.

Even under an accelerated national moon-shot style rebuild program, it would take a decade or more to replace the existing fleet of coal plants. It takes 3-5 years to build a single large complex traditional power plant. Coal plants produced over 2,000,000,000 Megawatt-Hours of energy last year. Let’s break that down. Divide by the number of hours per year (8760) and we get 228,310 Megawatts worth of running coal plants each hour. Figure an average coal plant size of 500 Megawatts and that gives us about 457 plants. But since they all can’t run 24x7x365 we need some extra plants. Using an 85% capacity factor we end up with 537 plants. Published numbers run closer to 600 so we’re in the ball park here. At a nominal replacement cost of $2,000,000 per Megawatt (very optimistic!), we’d need to invest 537x500x2,000,000 which equals roughly $500 billion (half a trillion) dollars.

The real price tag could easily be double or more – say an even $1 trillion.  And since we’d be building all these plants almost simultaneously, the demand for steel, concrete, engineered equipment, contractors, and design/construction labor would skyrocket so figure at least a 50-100% premium so now we’re pushing $3-4 trillion. But maybe clean coal plants aren’t so clean. So let’s say we replaced them with nuclear plants. Ka-ching! Now we’re up to $4-6 trillion and counting. No nukes you say! Ok, then let’s go green and replace those coal plants with a combination of wind and solar. Adjusting for higher costs and lower operational availability puts us somewhere in the land of $6-8 trillion. Add in the obligatory cost overruns and we could see $10 trillion. Now we’re talking real money. About equal to the current national debt! And we haven’t even touched on the cost of upgrading the national electrical grid.

Oh, and let’s not forget that while we’re busy bankrupting the coal business and replacing the existing coal fleet these past 20+ years, our national demand for additional power supplies is projected to increased by 30% so let’s throw another $3 trillion dollar green log on that fire. Warm yet? Does bankrupting the coal business sound realistic? Hardly.

So what was Mr. Obama driving at with his comment? I believe he was simply being realistic by suggesting that building the next conventional coal power plant may prove to be an imprudent investment. Coal plants have been popular amongst utilities because until very recently coal fired power has had the lowest apparent cost. Why apparent cost? Because coal produces low cost electricity provided you ignore what economist refer to as “externalities”. An externality occurs when an economic activity causes external costs or benefits to third party stakeholders (in this case all living organisms) who do not participate in the economic transaction. Global warming has been ranked as the #1 externality of all economic activity in terms of the magnitude of potential harm yet remains largely unmitigated and unaccounted for in consumer electricity prices.

Many, including Mr. Obama, believe that carbon emissions, in the form of either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, will soon become a reality. The Northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that kicks in starting in 2009 is a prime example. And since coal is the most carbon intensive of the three fossil fuels (natural gas, oil & coal), the costs to emit carbon will fall hardest on coal plants. After all, that’s the whole point of climate change regulation; impose a tax (whether directly or indirectly) on the worst offenders in order to change behavior. Those emitting the least carbon pay little or nothing. Properly applied, these regulations will eventually tip the playing field in the favor of greener low/zero carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar and biomass that would otherwise lose out to coal because they are currently more expensive when the cost of externalities are not included. Politically, this is tricky business of the first order because it’s a sure bet the voter will end up paying more for electricity – some would say we’d finally be paying the “real” price.

Moving away from traditionally lower cost electricity derived from coal goes totally against the political grain; especially in coal states. Nevertheless, widespread opposition to new coal plants has become fierce. Even though carbon regulations have barely entered the picture, the belief that such regulations are inevitable, if not imminent, are changing the politics of electricity. Some regulators are already aligned with Obama’s views. Just last month, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission unanimously denied Wisconsin Power and Light’s plan to build a new 300 MW coal-fired electric generation in part because of uncertainty over the costs of complying with future possible carbon dioxide regulations. The fact that the new state-of-the-art coal plant had a nose bleed price tag of $4,200 per kW ($1.25 billion for 300 MW) was no doubt also a big factor. So much for low cost electricity derived from coal.

But even as we begin to wean ourselves off of coal, the question of what to replace it with goes largely unanswered. We need new baseload generation – the kind of power plants that can provide power whenever we need it – day or night. Natural gas is the default solution but T. Boone Pickens says we need to funnel natural gas into transportation fuel. Wind and solar can’t provide baseload power – at least not today or until we have some phenomenal breakthrough in battery/storage technology that could prove as elusive as nuclear fusion. Ironically, as new coal plants are becoming politically radioactive, nuclear power is seeing a potential resurgence; albeit very slowly. Now if can only solve that nasty spent nuclear fuel problem we might get somewhere – in 20 years or so. Meanwhile, coal will be with us for at least another generation, Obama’s statements notwithstanding.

With 19 days left to election day I’ve become obsessed with watching the cable news channels. It’s sucking up all my bandwidth. Yes, I know – nobody is holding a gun to my head and saying “watch this or else”. But what with the economic meltdown, gyrating market, and final campaign stretch, it’s like watching a slow train wreck. You just can’t stop! I do take some small comfort in knowing that my obsession has an end date (I hope). But what I’m really looking forward to is an end to, or more realistically – a big reduction in, the endless spin!

Right spin, left spin, all spin all the time. There is no spin free zone – sorry Fox News, not even close. CNN probably has the least amount of self-generated spin. But as soon as a Dem or GOP spokesperson opens their mouth it’s spin spin spin until you don’t know up from down.  If I had a dollar for each time I’ve heard the phrase “The fact is……” (the surest sign that spin’s on its way ) these past 30 days, I could buy a group of friends dinner at the best restaurant here in Chicago. All paid for by spin!

My friends, the fact is (my turn!), the hardest thing to come by from all the talking heads and their guests is real solid factual information you can believe in.  Small wonder the average voter doesn’t trust politicians. You’re wrong! That’s not true! I didn’t say that! Yes, you did! The fact is…..

I had a summer job painting a house while I was in college. The house was owned by a writer. He told me the title of his then recent book was “Claim Everything, Concede Nothing & If Defeated Allege Fraud”.  I don’t remember what the book was about, but if ever there was a phrase that captures the inane rhetoric of our election politics and the skewed advocates for either camp, that’s it!  If you can’t win on the facts, then just wind that baby up and……spiiiiiiiiinnnnnnn!  Facts? What facts?  The fact is…..