President Obama and the One-Term Democratic Presidencies - Revisited

For this issue of TPJmagazine, I am revisiting a column that I published in this space a little over two years ago. Mainly historical, it still seems to be apt. I do hope that you will agree.

Entering the White House on January 20, 1976, Jimmy Carter was in the post-Watergate, post-Viet Nam flush of Democratic victory. For the 1976 Presidential election, had it not been for Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy would likely have been the Democratic Party’s nominee (if he had not already been such in 1972). 

If it had not been for his bladder cancer, Sen. Hubert Humphrey might well have overtaken Carter in the later primaries. But Kennedy had Chappaquiddick and Humphrey had cancer and the Democrats had no one but a highly inexperienced, very nice, one-term governor of Georgia.   Nevertheless, the Democrats were riding high. The Nixon dragon had finally been slain. The foreign policy front was relatively quiet, funnily enough due in major part to Nixon. Kissinger’s détente with the Soviet Union was in place. Nixon/Kissinger had opened the door to China. Israel had conquered huge territories in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, but had not yet begun their policy of gradual annexation of the West Bank. 

On the domestic side, again funnily enough, Nixon had actually instituted several very important environmental programs. If it had not been for Watergate, he would very likely have gained the passage of the fairly strong national health insurance program that he had introduced to Congress in the spring of 1973, by none other than Sen. Bob Dole. In this context, Carter was in a position to focus on domestic policy, actually building further on Nixon initiatives in that realm. As a matter of fact I heard Carter, in a speech to the 1976 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, pledge that he would introduce and win passage of a national health insurance program. 

Well, Carter never quite got round to doing that. Nor, with the top of his staff drawn mainly from his Georgia Governor’s office (!!), did he do much else. Jimmy Carter is remembered for two things: the Camp David Accords and the Tehran Hostage Crisis. Why? Primarily because, unlike Republicans when they are in office, Carter chose to try to work with the other side, even though he had majorities in both Houses of Congress. On the domestic side, Nixon’s positive initiatives or no, the GOP was able to bog down any major actions that Carter wanted to undertake. The Goldwater-Reagan right-wing of the party was moving into various positions of power both inside and outside of Washington. Carter did not get along well with the Kennedy/McGovern liberal wing of his own party and was never able to put together a team to get Democratic things done. Furthermore, he was saddled with the inflationary spiral that had begun under Nixon-Ford but which soon came to bear his name. He was able to pull off the Camp David Accords because for different reasons both Israel and Egypt needed to quiet things down. And then came the Hostage Crisis.

Why did that happen? Simple. Carter did not know who his friends were and who his enemies were. On the second most important foreign policy decision of his Presidency, he listened to Republicans, to whom he did not have to listen, with disastrous results. There was a pro-western, secular overthrow of the Shah in 1978. There was a strong Islamist movement lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini, but it was by no means a sure thing that it would eventually take power. The Shah went into exile in 1979, ill with cancer. Kissinger and David Rockefeller, among other top Republicans, pleaded with Carter to admit the Shah to the US for treatment. The US Embassy in Tehran very strongly warned him against doing that, predicting several different very negative outcomes, including something like the one that actually happened. Carter gave in to the Republicans and the outcomes of the resultant Islamist takeover have reverberated negatively both for the Iranian people and of ourselves down to this very day. He was a one-termer, who gave us Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The Clinton Presidency was a one-termer in functional terms. The Republicans made sure of that from the git-go, from Gennifer Flowers (of whom they never let go) to White Water to the White House Travel Office and on and on, with a very well-funded “get Clinton” campaign. (Yes, there was indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” lead by Richard Mellon Scaife.) Clinton’s biggest problem, before Monica Lewinsky, was that he was not a fighter. In fact, he was the classic child of two alcoholic parents: he wanted to please everybody, but especially his enemies. On the health care reform debate I happened to have had the opportunity, as a “Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan,” to have seen this somewhat from the inside. 

He did not fight. Either he did not know what the GOP was out to do or he did not know how to deal with them. Bill Kristol sent around a memo in December, 1993 saying that the GOP must defeat the Clinton Health Plan (CHP), for political reasons (I’ve got a copy in my files. Kristol did the same thing on the Obama initiative). Clinton did not use this memo against his opposition. Bob Dole led the charge against the CHP in the Senate, which had major features in common with the Nixon Health Plan. Funny, but with an excellent speech about everything that was wrong with the US health care system in 1973 (I’ve got a copy of excerpts of that speech in my files too) it was none other than then Republican Minority Leader Bob Dole who had introduced the Nixon Health Plan to the Senate. Clinton did not use the Dole speech either. He sat there and let Dick Morris (he who had formerly worked for Sen. Trent Lott and now is a right-wing shill, one must wonder why Clinton ever hired him) lead him into “triangulation,” of use primarily against the Democrats in the Congress, and lost the health care reform battle.  

Then came Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones perjury trap that was neatly laid by Ken Starr who illegally fed the Lewinsky information to Jones’ legal team, leading to impeachment and the complete crippling of Clinton’s second term. Of course, given the Lewinsky scandal alone, that happened might have happened anyway. But it might well have turned out differently had Clinton been a Republican-fighter instead of a Republican-compromiser from the git-go. After all, the Lewinsky episode and the subsequent impeachment trial was about sex between consenting adults, not quite on the level of cheating one’s way into the Air National Guard or lying the nation into war. But that’s another story.

Which leads us to President Obama. The original version of this column was written about a week in advance of his speech to the Congress on health care scheduled for September 9, 2009. Perhaps, I said back then, “he will surprise us.” But President Obama, like his two Democratic immediate predecessors in the White House, seems not to know who his enemies are. He seems not realize that the GOP has been out to get him since the Electoral College voted in December, 2008, if not before. Mitch McConnell made that very clear back then, when he said that he would filibuster “any bill I don’t like.” They were not interested in “bi-partisanship” back then, and they sure aren’t interested in it now. They were then a minority party in both Houses and still are in the Senate, although through the liberal use of the filibuster they have controlled that House for most of the Obama Presidency. They know that their only way back to power is to wage war, not on the objective elements of the issues, but on the person and with every Big Lie they can dream up. In December 2010, with candor remarkable for a Republican, McConnell announced that his number one goal in the then upcoming Congress was to ensure the defeat of Obama in 2012. As is well-known, that they are now doing this to a fare-thee-well. As is well-known, it seems, to everyone except the President and his staff (that is possibly until very, very recently. We shall have to watch Obama with care to see if he backs up with recent rhetoric with actions. He has done too little of the latter previously.)

A strategic decision was made by the Obama White House to try to “bring the country together.” Well, from Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” statement onwards, it has been clear that to do their very best to make sure that that happens is the central element of the GOP strategy. But the President persists. For example, as of the original writing of this column (Sept. 4, 2009), he was said to have been negotiating with Sen. Olympia Snow (!) for some kind of “compromise” on health care reform, that would put off the absolutely essential public option to some indeterminate date. That is a Republican policy that is a recipe for failure for any health care reform package. And now they have announced as a number one goal were they to win the presidency the repeal of a “reform” package that is indeed not much more than a major Federal subsidy for the private health insurance companies.

But beyond that, combined with buying into Republican recipe for the totally unwinnable (no matter which way you want to define it) Afghan War, President Obama has been quickly paving the road down which he may well travel to being the third one-term Democratic President in a row. Since the Goldwater-Reagan takeover of their party, the Republicans have known, most of the time, how to win: stay Republican, build on their base, cheat and lie a lot. It’s not too late for Obama to learn. He is a very smart man. In dealing with the modern Republican Party he needs to learn just one thing: the modern GOP is the enemy. Hugh Scott, Jacob Javits, and John Chafee are no longer in the Senate. This bunch cannot be dealt with honestly. 

All the President needs to do is, not lie, cheat, and encourage violence, but rather follow the truly Democratic policies that he actually won the election on. He needs to become a real Democratic President doing battle with a real Party of Right-Wing Reaction. Presidents Carter and Clinton have spent their post-Presidential years doing great charitable works both at home and abroad. If President Obama doesn’t wake up to reality, instead of organizing his natural base to support him in full throat and finally turning his back on the disastrous policies and politics of the Democratic Leadership Council now hiding under such mis-leading names as “No Labels” and “The Third Way,” he can always go back teaching constitutional law, instead of putting it into practice against the enemies of Constitutional government, like a certain former Vice-President and every announced candidate for the GOTP Presidential nomination. 

As my readers at BuzzFlash@Truthout and related webmagazines know, I don’t think that there is much of a chance that this will happen. But hey, you never know.

President Obama and the DLC – A Retrospective

Column No. 232

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

Many of us on the Left, whether that’s the Democratic Party Left or the Real Left, are becoming increasingly disturbed, upset, concerned, what-have-you, with the behavior of President in office. We are surely concerned with his Afghanistan policy which is distinguishable from that of Bush-Cheney only in that he is sending more troops. We are concerned with his lack of leadership on the central elements of health policy reform, such as providing for a true public option with teeth, protecting the freedom of religious belief (otherwise known protecting belief as to when life begins and thus abortion rights),  and real regulation of the private, for-profit insurance companies. We are concerned with his giving way to the respective Right-wings on Israel-Palestine and Honduras. We are concerned with the virtual inaction on the sanctifiers of torture. And so on and so forth.

Obama came into office promising to be a different kind of President. Many of us (including myself, I must admit) thought that he would be a different kind of Democratic President, in comparison with Carter and Clinton, although certain of our compatriots were not so easily taken in. To them I must give credit. But there were straws in the wind. I even noted some of them myself. But like so many others, I got caught up in the rhetoric. In this column I am going to undertake a brief review of some of my earlier indeed cautionary thoughts (to which I should have paid more attention myself, as it has turned out). Which brings us to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC is the right-wing organization that has dominated Democratic Party politics and policies since it was founded in the 1980s by the likes of Bill Clinton and Richard Gephardt, joined in the 1990s by the likes of Joe Lieberman. One of its prominent political positions was that in order to win elections Democrats had to look as much like Republicans as possible. This reversed the long-held mantra of Harry Truman that if someone wants to vote for a Republican they will vote for him (or her) not for a Democrat trying to look like one. 

The DLC was the engine behind the “free trade” push of the Clinton Administration, which did nothing but accelerate the export of capital and the jobs that go with it that began under Reagan. The DLC strongly supported Clinton’s “welfare deform” act as well as his repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagal Act that kept separate investment and commercial banking. The latter drive was spearheaded by Obama’s principal economic policy-person, Larry Summers. There were many factors which lead to the Crash of 2008, otherwise known as the Failure of Finance Capitalism. But if one wanted to pick one among many as the most important cause, it was that repeal. Currently, the DLC still clings to the Right. On its website you can find its policy paper on health care reform which says in essence forget about the public option, what we really need is health insurance regulation and “exchanges.” You can find a 2005 paper by Will Marshall calling for “victory” in Iraq. And you can even find a continued devotion to “free trade,” as if enough US manufacturing jobs had not already been sent abroad in search of higher profits.

Back in December of 2007 (in my TPJ column 172) I had this to say in part about Obama and the DLC:

“As they have done in the past, the center-right Democratic Leadership Council is this time around running what in Standard-Breed (trotters and pacers) horse racing terminology is known as an ‘entry.’ In these races, one owner can enter two horses and bettors can bet on the ‘entry,’ so that if either one wins, places, or shows, the bettor collects. In 2004 their entry was John Edwards and Richard Gephardt. . . . This time the DLC has an entry as well, but Edwards ain’t part of it. . . . The DLC entry is ---- yes, indeed, Clinton and Obama. They don’t like each other much, and each does indeed want to be President. But their central philosophy is much the same and many of their policies are rather similar too. The philosophy is better articulated by Obama. But functionally, even though her rhetoric may be a bit harsher, Clinton is woven from the same fabric.  And so, Obama talks about the ‘politics of hope,’ about ‘bringing the country together,’ about ‘crossing the partisan divide,’ as if Ronald Brownstein, author of the mis-named ‘The Second Civil War’ were correct and that the problems facing our nation today are the result of a ‘partisanship’ that both parties are responsible for.” 

(On the last point, as I have said many times, both parties are NOT responsible for partisanship in Washington. For it is ultra-partisanship, as in “we don’t care what you propose, even if it is our policy (as in the current tax-rebate-centered so-called 2^nd stimulus package) we are going to be against it” that is at the center GOP electoral politics and has been ever since Gingrich took over the House. After all, the GOP can hardly run on their polices, the ones that created the mess we are presently in and cannot presently see the end of. Actually many of us would be oh-so-happy if the Democratic leadership could become even a bit more partisan in promoting what is best for our nation overall.) 

In the Summer of 2008 I ran two Commentaries over at BuzzFlash.com (July 2 and 8) entitled “No Obamallusions, I and II.” I noted that after he won the nomination, Obama seemed to be veering toward the Hillary Clinton positions on a number of issues and that he was drawing a number of Clintonistas into his campaign, like Madeleine Albright, protégés of Robert Rubin, and even the old right-wing Democratic warhorse Zbigniew Brzezinski.   But then last April on BuzzFlash.com (April 9, in fact) I revealed that I had been sucked in by Obama. In that column I wrote: “It is overwhelmingly obvious that I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. He is the most traditionally ‘Democratic’ President since the pre-Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson.”   Ooops!

There were several comments on that Commentary that took me apart on the above statement. Well, I have come to the conclusion that they were right then and I, agreeing with them back then, was right the first time around. At the beginning of his Administration Obama seemed to be or at least seemed to be becoming a “different kind of Democrat,” different that is from the Clinton-DLC type. But there are now too many DLC-type policies in place. He is not entirely consistent, of course. EPA has taken a major position on carbon dioxide as a green-house gas. Some good (and not-so-good) things are going on over at Interior. But there are the major foreign policies outlined above. And does it not seem that on Afghanistan the major presenters of Administration policy are Hillary Clinton, a prime DLCer and Bob Gates, who would be a DLCer were he not a Republican. Obama spoke about a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. But either he is speaking with a forked tongue or he is not in charge.

Then there is the back-down on going after our homegrown torturers and their enablers. In fact, the Administration has entered an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the Prince of the Torture-enablers, John Yoo. Yes, Administrations don’t like to be subject to civil law suits over decisions they have made. But Yoo’s policies enabled crimes against the US Constitution which, in Article VI classifies treaties, like the Geneva Conventions, as the Supreme Law of the Land. One of the monstrous ironies in this case is that during the Bush-Cheney years Attorney General Holder was a Board Member of the American Constitution Society. It is an organization primarily of attorneys (full disclosure: I am a non-attorney long-time member) that strongly opposed the torture policies, the military commissions, the suspension of habeas corpus in “terrorism” cases, and the uses to which Guantanamo was put.

Yes indeed, the DLC is back in the saddle or were never out of it. Unless Obama reverses course soon, he is going to face a serious challenge in the Democratic primaries in 2012, just as Carter did in 1980. Hopefully his opponent will not be someone as hobbled by personal conduct issues as Ted Kennedy was back then. Do I have someone in mind? Well, yes, but I ain’t saying who quite yet. If Obama does retain the nomination, then he will face a serious third-party candidate and I am not talking about Ralph Nader or someone from the Green Party. I am talking about someone who would be well-funded and would stand a chance of winning, just as Abraham Lincoln did in a three-way race in 1860. Of course taking that tack could pave the way for Sarah Palin who right now is the odds-on favorite for Republican nomination no matter how many lies she tells. But I believe that is a chance we have to take. Do I have someone in mind for that third-party nomination? Well, no. But he/she better be a grand candidate and better be able to raise lots of money. Otherwise one way or the other we will really be in for it, worse than we already are.

A Note on “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” and Modern Germany’s Disavowal of Nazism

Column No. 231

Two weeks ago my dear friend Dr. Don Ardell, otherwise known as “The Well Infidel,” published on these pages an essay on the German song “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” and the role that it played for the German intra-war anti-Nazi resistance movement known as The White Rose Society. 

Don’s essay celebrates the song, the White Rose Society, and its young leadership, among whom were Sophie Scholl and her brothers, the “Geschwistern Scholl.” I sent a comment to Don on his essay, which originally appeared in his weekly “Ardell Wellness Report.” I am sharing a significantly expanded version of that comment with you here. In discussing the historical significance of The White Rose Society, I noted that unlike many other countries that were combatants or otherwise participants in World War II, Modern Germany has both recognized its responsibilities for the indescribable horrors that the Nazis turned loose upon the world and completely turned its back on the political ideology that created them.  I have had several personal experiences that attest to this reality. 

First, I was privileged to attend the 1999 Frankfurt Buch Messe (book fair) as a guest of my academic publisher, Ursula Springer. She is a German who emigrated to the United States after World War II. Here she met and married Bernhard Springer, one of the sons of the Jewish owner of the large German Publishing Company, Springer Verlag. When the Nazis stole the company in 1938, Bernhard managed to make his escape to the Untied States. After the war he remained here and eventually established the Springer Publishing Co. Upon his death in 1971, Ursula inherited the company. I was lucky enough to become one of her author/editors, first for a book entitled “Health Care Delivery in the United States.” Published in 1977 it was the first textbook of its kind. Ursula had taken a flier on me and the equally youthful team that I had put together, and the book became a success, both for us and for Springer. The invitation to join her at the Buch Messe was a result of that success. 

I had several experiences at Frankfurt which were highly instructive about the nature of modern Germany.  That year the Buch Messe celebrated the most important books of the 20th century (that's important, not greatest).  For 1926 it was Hitler's Mein Kampf.  On the cover of the original was the Nazi version of the swastika (that is the Hackenkreutz, the Crooked Cross, the reverse of the original symbol that goes back millennia appearing in art as diverse as that of Native Americans and Hindus).  While the book could be displayed at the Buch Messe, its original cover could not be.  Germany has a law that forbids the display of Nazi symbols. 

At the event by simultaneous translation I heard a speech by the then Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer of the Green Party.  Each year at the Fair there is a designated “guest country.” It is given its own pavilion with all kinds of special displays and presentation. That year the Guest Country was Poland. The first third of Herr Fischer’s speech was devoted to welcoming Poland as the "Guest Country" and celebrating the century’s long cultural connections between the two countries, going back to the Middle Ages.  The middle third took a different, and for me (and for many other listeners from outside Germany too I am sure) a totally unexpected turn. It was devoted to an impassioned apology for the Nazi invasion of Poland and the subsequent WW II. In the speech Minister Fischer stated that modern Germany, while recognizing the responsibility of the German nation as a whole for the Nazi period, regards it, as well as Nazism, as a totally unacceptable anomaly of German history. 

I should note that I may have mis-heard or now mis-remember the use of the word “anomaly” by Minister Fischer. The fact is that in terms of German history, Nazism did not, like Athena, spring full-grown from the brow of Zeus (or in the German case, Wotan). With a credit to my good friend Michael Faulkner a political scientist/historian of modern Europe with a specialty in Germany from 1919, who writes the “Letter from the UK” for TPJmagazine, it should be noted that: 1. The seeds of Nazism go back into the 19th century. First planting their poisonous roots in the early 19th century, the elements of aggressive chauvinism, racism and anti-Semitism were very evident by the late 1800s. 2. Nazism represented the most extreme and aggressive aspect of modern German imperialism that can be dated from the 1870s. 3. Nazism can only be properly understood against the background of the defeat of German imperialism's first bid to become a major world power (in World War I) and a subsequent failed socialist revolution (1918-19) that terrified the capitalist ruling class in Germany. With the subsequent failure to provide a stable bourgeois democratic government under the Weimar Constitution, Nazism essentially was the German form of a triumph of monopoly capitalism over what was a totally divided working class movement. This was done both to secure their profits and to enable a second attempt at becoming a major imperialist power (in World War II).

Returning to Minister Fischer’s speech, the latter third was devoted to an apology for the Holocaust, as impassioned as his apology for World War II.  Oh my. The speech just blew me away. Could one, I thought, just imagine a US Secretary of State making a similar speech about, say, slavery, or the atomic bombing of Japan, or the killing of 2,000,000 Vietnamese, to say nothing of the firebombing of Hamburg in July, 1943 that killed up to 100,000 civilians (more than were killed at Hiroshima), or the Dresden Raid of January, 1945, or etc.? No, I could not.

As for the second instructive experience concerning how modern Germany regards its past, in 2007 (following the 2007 International Triathlon Union Age-Group World Championships held in a totally rebuilt Hamburg as it happened) I had the chance to visit Berlin.  All over the city there are World War II memorials --- to both pre-war and intra-war resisters to Nazism.  One of the most impressive of those is right outside of the old Reichstag building. That is the one whose fire in February, 1993, just after Hitler’s ascension to be German Chancellor (Prime Minister), almost certainly set by Goering and his henchmen, gave Hitler the justification for establishing his dictatorship.  (9/11, intentionally set or not, anyone?)  There is not one memorial anywhere to the Wehrmacht and etc.  (Not that I was everywhere in Berlin, but I was with Mike Faulkner. He knows Berlin inside out. He fully supported that statement.) Compare that to the situation in the US South, where there are memorials to Confederate (that is traitors to the Constitution) "heroes" all over the place, especially on battlefield memorials celebrating Confederate States of America forces’ victories over the forces of Constitutionalism, otherwise known as the Union Army.

Then there is the massive Holocaust memorial in the center of the city.  A field of square columns, it appears from street, where you first see it, as a simple field of those squares. But then you can descend into the field, onto a floor of widely varying heights and all of a sudden you are in a maze. Without the signage pointing to the exits, one could easily get lost in it. A marvelous visual rendering of the Holocaust itself which, after all, was begun publicly as the innocuous sounding “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and quickly became a maze of death. The memorial takes up several square blocks. It can never become inapparent. Then there is the Jewish Museum, also a massive, and most elegant, structure, celebrating German Jewish history going back to the Middle Ages.  It also covers the Holocaust, both directly and indirectly. There, among many other things of interest, I found an exhibit on the first female Rabbi ever.  Her name was Rachel Jonas.  She came from Breslau (Wroclaw in Polish), the same city that my great grandfather came from.  She was thus very possibly a relative.  She was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1942.  And I found out about this in Berlin.

Finally for this note, I would like to note how the Germans now refer to what outside of the country is called “Kristallnacht,” loosely translated into English as “The Night of the broken glass.” As the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says in part:

“On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. . . . Encouraged by the Nazi regime, the rioters burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized or looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 Jewish people. They also damaged many Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes as police and fire brigades stood aside.”

Indeed, since the Gestapo, the SS, and the SA (the Sturmabteilung, the Nazis’ private militia) took an active part in the events, one can say that the events were more than “encouraged” by the regime. Indeed too, “Kristallnacht” is the name that the Nazis gave to the events. However, in Germany now they are referred to as “the government pogrom of Nov., 1938,” placing the responsibility for the horror fully where it belongs.

I just wonder if in our country, if it succumbs to the very real threat of fascism that seems to be becoming more real every day (see my 1996 book published under the pseudonym "Jonathan Westminster," The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022) and then somehow recovers, will be able to come to terms with it as modern Germany has been able to come to terms with, and turn its back on, the most dreadful black mark on its history.  I also wonder just how many Geschwistern Scholl there will be, fighting back against Cheney and his Savagely Beckoning Le-vinitating O'RHannibaugh Republican Scream Machine, their competing political leadership from Palin on down (or up depending upon your perspective), and their hating, hateful acolytes, as they pull us down into a fascist pit that armed with nuclear weapons might even outdo that of the Nazis in the horrors it perpetrates upon mankind and the world. If the American fascist repression is not as successful as it was in Germany, if there are many more resisters than there were in Germany, and if Constitutional Democracy eventually returns to our beloved land without it having been totally destroyed, in one way or another, by the US fascists, still will that future truly United States be able to do what modern Germany has done in terms of turning its back on its past. I wonder.

The Extinction Distinction

Column No. 230

There have been five Great Extinctions in the history of Earth. And yes, all you creationists out there, according to a great deal of scientific evidence, that is evidence that is based on observation, experimentation and reproducibility, the history of Earth does extend back just a bit more than 4-6000 years. 

There have also been about 20 others, big but not so big. The first of the Big Ones occurred at the end of what is called the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago. The last Big One, the one that knocked off the dinosaurs and put the mammals on the road to dominance, occurred about 65 million years ago. Now, it seems, we are all of a sudden facing the Sixth Big One.  What is the evidence for this?

For one thing, there is global warming and the massive climate change that will result from it. This is a fairly recent event, although the pace of global warming, as is well known, is accelerating. Some societal elements, like the carbon-extract-it-and-burn-it-now-and-forever industries like to tell us that global warming/climate change is all a myth. They have much in common with the folks at the creation Museum outside of Hebron (great name for its location, no?) Kentucky, who tell us that wearing saddles our forebears rode on dinosaurs and that Noah loaded dinosaurs on the Ark (baby ones to be sure, to keep the weight down). They don’t tell us what happened to them after the Flood, but that’s another story. 

Mythology can be such fun, but Creationist mythology is highly damaging on a variety of levels, beginning with its undermining of science, such as the science we will need if we somehow to survive global warming. And then too the carbon-extractive-industries mythology is highly damaging because it seems to be leading us down the primrose path to non-reversibility. Of course these industries also ignore that fact that the way they are burning the stuff up ensures that it will eventually run out. For no matter how much more is discovered, if we continue to burn it up it has to get used up eventually if for no other reason than that, those pesky Creationists to the contrary notwithstanding, all those dinosaurs which made it haven’t been around since their own extinction, about 65,000,000 years ago. And we do like to use fossil carbon for so many other purposes besides burning it. For example, no oil no plastic wrap, and that’s just for starters. But that’s another story. 

It happens that as virtually all of the readers of TPJmagazine know, the evidence is overwhelming that if nothing very serious is done about carbon pollution of both the atmosphere and the oceans, very soon it will overwhelm us along with a whole bunch of other species. According to The Millennium Project, which happened to be sponsored by such radical agencies as the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO, “an effort on the scale of the Apollo Mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to stand a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change.” (In my view, it will take something much greater than the Apollo Project. If we do get one, let’s just hope that Tom Hanks is still around to star in the movie.) I cannot recall seeing any mention of their report, “2009 State of the Future,” published on August 1, 2009, in the US media. But maybe I just wasn’t looking. I knew about it from a pre-release article in London’s “The Independent” by Jonathan Owen that appeared on July 13, 2009. I happened to be on a private circulation list which carried it.

Among the individual scientists concerned, James Hansen, Ph.D., Director of NASA’s Godard Institute for Space Studies who the Georgites tried everso hard to muzzle, has said that “partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken --- including shutdown of all the world’s coal-fired plants within the next two decades ---- the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with.”

So our species could go very quickly, it seems. And, as noted, we could take bunches of others with us. In fact, we began doing that about 50,000 years ago, in Australia. The disappearance of a whole group of fantastic animals, like a land tortoise about the size of a VW beetle, coincided with the arrival of humans from Southeast Asia. Similar things happened more recently in North America and New Zealand. It is also likely that the humanoid species we call “Neanderthals” (actually the name comes from the German valley, the Neander thal, in which the first fossil remains of it were discovered), which happened to have larger brains than ours, was wiped out by us, Homo Sapiens. Currently frogs, toads, and coral among others are succumbing to malign human influence even without climate change. And of course the latter could kill bunches of others, indeed possibly leading to that Sixth Great Extinction. 

Add to climate change other human threats to the biosphere, such as over-population, nuclear war (of course Nuclear Winter would be one way to combat global warming --- I could see some NeoCon like Bill Kristol proposing that one if they haven’t done so already with the by-product of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons themselves), the rapidly declining supply of pure water, to say nothing of the availability of sanitary sewage disposal, as well as massive pollution of the oceans both directly (detritus, as in that Texas-plus sized “plastic island” in the middle of the Pacific) and indirectly (acidification from excess carbon in the atmosphere), and there we have it. The Extinction Distinction: the first one to be caused by one particular species, in this case Homo Sapiens, rather than one or more external (asteroid) or other physical factors (massive volcanic explosions).

So why is this happening, one might ask. Not too many people do. Why is our species on its way to creating the Sixth Extinction. It goes back to that element of our nature and what we need to do to survive, both as individuals and as a species, which distinguishes us from all of the other species currently on Earth. (Presumably we did share this characteristic with other humanoid species, like the Neanderthals, but they are all long gone.) That is that in order to survive we need to take resources that we find in our environment and convert them to something else, like cooked food and woven clothing for openers. Every other species just uses what it does use from its environment directly, without modification, except in very simple ways, like nest building for birds and dam building for beavers. But in those cases either individuals or small teams do the conversion for themselves. 

For humans, as we became more sophisticated, means of production became common and more sophisticated themselves, like flour mills and cloth factories. With means of production came private ownership of them. With private ownership came employment of others to do the work, by the owners. And with employment of others to do the work came profit resulting from their labor. The same thing happened of course with the ownership of the natural resources used to both run and supply the raw materials for the conversion processes of the means of production. Profits were made from those activities too. Private profit, that is. And where, you might ask, does the resistance to doing anything significant about global warming, climate change, and species elimination come from? Well, just look at what is going on in the United States Congress over doing something really very minimal about climate change. The answer is obvious. 

As one liberal-sounding observer said recently: “The consumer societies and the wastage of material resources are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet. The unlimited waste of non-renewable natural resources --- especially oil and gas accumulated throughout hundreds of millions of years and depleted in barely two centuries at the current rate of consumption — has been the major cause of climate change. Even if the unfriendly emissions of the industrialized nations were reduced, which would be commendable, it is a reality that 5.2 billion people on planet Earth, that is, three-fourth of the population, live in countries that are still in various stages of development and will therefore demand an enormous input of coal, oil, natural gas and other non-renewable resources that, according to the consumption patterns created by the capitalist economies, are incompatible with the objective of saving the human species."

Liberal sounding, but it did happen to be Fidel Castro, commenting on President Obama’s Sept., 2009 UN address. But it surely could have been a liberal. Trouble is, socialist or liberal, or even concerned capitalist, as at the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, the profit-makers are going to simply ignore them, use every opportunity to obfuscate what they say, and continue on their merry way. After all, most of them will be dead anyway before the worst happens, or they think they will be. So why bother, when right now, for them life with lots of money is so much fun.

This is a theme to which I will be returning periodically in this space.

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(A partial list of resources for this column includes the abovementioned “2009 State of the Future;” the Owen article on it mentioned above; “The Sixth Extinction?” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 25, 2009; “The Catastrophist,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, June 29, 2009; “Getting Serious About Global Warming,” The Progress Report, Sept. 23, 2209; EC-CCDS @ yahoo.groups.org   Sept. 26, 2009 for the Castro quote; “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast of 6.3-Degree (F.) Temperature Increase,” Juliet Eilperin, Wash. Post, Sept. 25, 2009; “Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America,” a book by Susan J. Marks; and “Idiot America,” a book by Charles P. Pierce (yes, that aptly-named book is where I found the dinosaurs-into-the-ark story.)

President Obama and the One-Term Democratic Presidencies

Column No. 229

Jimmy Carter was in the post-Watergate, post-Viet Nam flush of Democratic victory. For the 1976 Presidential election, it had not been for Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy would likely have been the Democratic Party’s nominee (if he had not already been such in 1972). 

If it had not been for his bladder cancer, Sen. Hubert Humphrey might well have overtaken Carter in the later primaries. But Kennedy had Chappaquiddick and Humphrey had cancer and the Democrats had no one but a highly inexperienced, very nice, one-term governor of Georgia (the last Democrat to hold that position, I believe).   Nevertheless, the Democrats were riding high. The Nixon dragon had finally been slain. The foreign policy front was relatively quiet, funnily enough due in major part to Nixon. Kissinger’s détente with the Soviet Union was in place. Nixon/Kissinger had opened the door to China. Israel had conquered huge territories in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, but had not yet begun their policy of gradual annexation of the West Bank. 

On the domestic side, again funnily enough, Nixon had actually instituted several very important environmental programs. If it had not been for Watergate, he would very likely have gained the passage of the fairly strong national health insurance program that he had introduced to Congress in the spring of 1973. In this context, Carter was in a position to focus on domestic policy, actually building further on Nixon initiatives in that realm. As a matter of fact I heard Carter, in a speech to the 1976 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, pledge that he would introduce and win passage of a national health insurance program. Well, Carter never quite got round to doing that. Nor, with the top of his staff drawn mainly from his Georgia Governor’s office (!!), did he do much else. Jimmy Carter is remembered for two things: the Camp David Accords and the Tehran Hostage Crisis. Why?

Primarily because, unlike Republicans when they are in office, Carter chose to try to work with the other side, even though he had majorities in both Houses of Congress. On the domestic side, Nixon’s positive initiatives or no, the GOP was able to bog down any major actions that Carter wanted to undertake. The Goldwater-Reagan right-wing of the party was moving into various positions of power both inside and outside of Washington. Carter did not get along well with the Kennedy/McGovern liberal wing of his own party and was never able to put together a team to get Democratic things done. Furthermore, he was saddled with the inflationary spiral that had begun under Nixon-Ford but which soon came to bear his name. (See any similarities there?) He was able to pull off the Camp David Accords because for different reasons both Israel and Egypt needed to quiet things down. And then came the Hostage Crisis.

Why did that happen? Simple. Carter did not know who his friends were and who his enemies were. On the second most important foreign policy decision of his Presidency, he listened to Republicans, to whom he did not have to listen, with disastrous results. There was a pro-western, secular overthrow of the Shah in 1978. There was a strong Islamist movement lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini, but it was by no means a sure thing that it would eventually take power. The Shah went into exile in 1979, ill with cancer. Kissinger and David Rockefeller, among other top Republicans, pleaded with Carter to admit the Shah to the US for treatment. The US Embassy in Tehran warned his very strongly against doing that, predicting several different very negative outcomes, including something like the one that actually happened. Carter gave in to the Republicans and the outcomes of the resultant Islamist takeover have reverberated negatively both for the Iranian people and of ourselves down to this very day. 

Going in to the 1980 elections, as is well-known, Carter was saddled with the hostage crisis, one that he very likely would not have had to deal with he not gone along with leading Republicans, instead of listening to his own State Department, and leading Democrats as well, who had no use for the Shah. Because he was so inactive on the domestic Democratic agenda, he might have lost anyway. But he was a one-termer, who gave us Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The Clinton Presidency was a one-termer in functional terms. The Republicans made sure of that from the git-go, from Gennifer Flowers (of whom they never let go) to White Water to the White House Travel Office and on and on, with a very well-funded “get Clinton” campaign. (Yes, there was indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” lead by Richard Mellon Scaife.) Clinton’s biggest problem, before Monica Lewinsky, was that he was not a fighter. In fact, he was the classic child of two alcoholic parents: he wanted to please everybody, but especially his enemies. On the health care reform debate I happened to have had the opportunity, as a Designated Speaker for the Clinton Health Plan, to have seen this somewhat from the inside. 

He did not fight. Either he did not know what the GOP was out to do or he did not know how to deal with them. Bill Kristol sent around a memo in December, 1993 saying that the GOP must defeat the Clinton Health Plan (CHP), for political reasons (I’ve got a copy in my files). (Kristol has done the same thing now on the Obama initiative. Clinton did not use this. Bob Dole led the charge against the CHP in the Senate, which had major features in common with the Nixon Health Plan. Funny, but with an excellent speech about everything that was wrong with the US health care system in 1973 (I’ve got a copy of excerpts of that speech in my files too) it was none other than then Republican Minority Leader Bob Dole who had introduced the Nixon Health Plan to the Senate. Clinton did not use it either. He sat there and let Dick Morris (he who had formerly worked for Sen. Trent Lott and now is a right-wing shill, was likely a GOP agent) lead him into “triangulation,” of use primarily against the Democrats in the Congress.  

Then came Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones perjury trap that was neatly laid by Ken Starr who illegally fed the Lewinsky information to Jones’ legal team, leading to impeachment and the complete crippling of Clinton’s second. Of course, given the Lewinsky scandal what happened might have happened anyway, but it might well have turned out differently had Clinton been a Republican-fighter instead of a Republican-compromiser from the git-go. After all, the Lewinsky episode and the subsequent impeachment trial was about sex between consenting adults, not quite on the level of cheating one’s way into the Air National Guard or lying the nation into war. But that’s another story.

Which leads us to President Obama. This column is being written about a week in advance of his speech to the Congress on health care scheduled for September 9. Perhaps he will surprise us. But President Obama, like his two Democratic immediate predecessors in the White House, seems not to know who his enemies are. He seems not realize that the GOP has been out to get him since the Electoral College voted in December, 2008, if not before. They are not interested in “bi-partisanship.” They are a minority party. On the issue alone, they are destined to remain that way. After all, it is Republican polices that have put the nation into the mess it currently faces. They know that their only way back to power is to wage war, not on the objective elements of the issues, but on the person and with every Big Lie they can dream up. As is well-known, that they are now doing this to a fare-thee-well. As is well-known, it seems, to everyone except the President and his staff.

A strategic decision was made to try to “bring the country together.”  Well, from Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” statement onwards, it has been clear that to do their very best to make sure that that happens is the central element of the GOP strategy.  But the President persists. As of this writing (Sept. 4), he is said to be negotiating with Sen. Olympia Snow (!) for some kind of “compromise” on health care reform, that would put off the absolutely essential public option to some indeterminate date. That is a Republican policy that is a recipe for failure for any health care reform package. 

But beyond that, combined with buying into Republican recipe for the totally unwinnable (no matter which way you want to define it) Afghan War, President Obama is quickly paving the road down which he will travel to being the third one-term Democratic President in a row. Since the Goldwater-Reagan takeover of their party, the Republicans have known, most of the time, how to win: stay Republican, build on their base, cheat and lie a lot. It’s not too late for Obama to learn. He is a very smart man. He needs to learn just one thing: the modern GOP is the enemy. Hugh Scott, Jacob Javits, and John Chafee are no longer in the Senate. This bunch cannot be dealt with honestly. All President needs to do is, not lie, cheat, and encourage violence, but rather follow the truly Democratic policies that he actually won the election on.  He needs to become a real Democratic President doing battle with a real Party of Right-Wing Reaction. President Carter and Clinton have spent their post-Presidential years doing great charitable works both at home and abroad. If President Obama doesn’t wake up to reality, he can always go back to community organizing on the South Side of Chicago, instead of organizing his natural base to support him in full throat, and teaching constitutional law, instead of putting it into practice against the enemies of Constitutional government, like a certain former Vice-President.

Health Care Reform and the Fascist Response: Why?

Column No. 228

The GOP is in trouble. The Obama Administration has generally referred to that fact only in passing, although now is now doing that with a bit more frequency. However, (well-known to our readers here) it is the Bush/Cheney policies that for the most part have lead our nation into the fix in which it presently finds itself.

Some of these policies, such as the matter of “free trade,” in reality nothing more than the free export of capital that has lead to the massive de-industrialization that we have experienced over the last 20 years, were unfortunately presaged by Bill Clinton. But for the most part they are Republican-type policies, whether implemented by the Democrats or not. Indeed there were many policies, foreign and domestic, and I do not have to review them here, which have lead to very bad outcomes all around. In fact, it is hard to find one Bush/Cheney policy that has lead to a good outcome.

So what is the GOP to do? Obviously it cannot promote Bush/Cheney policy as the solution to the problems those policies created. Thus certain leaders, from time-to-time, have said "we have to come up with new solutions." The problem for them is that their ideology doesn't permit them to do that. This is because, as again is well-known to TPJmagazine readers, none of the necessary solutions, some (but not all) of which are being pursued by the Obama Administration, fit at all into the GOP playbook.

OK. So they can't come up with anything new that present alternatives to present Obama/Democratic Party policies that might actually solve problems. And so, as is well-known to everyone, they have become the Party of NO to any Obama/Democratic proposals. On the stimulus package: their solution, tax cuts for the rich and the big corporations. It happens that they didn't work for the original Bush Recession in 2001-02, so why should they work now? Bush got the nation out of that one by the classic right-wing stimulus package: military and tax-cuts-for-the-rich deficit spending. On global warming and climate change, their solution is again NO. Either there is no global warming and resultant climate change, or there is and let's do a bunch of things that are known either not to work or make things worse, like "drill, baby, drill." And then there is health care reform, for which they have offered no alternatives to any of the package of plans that various Democrats have been offering. So they have been attacking that package with increasing vigor and with an increasing separation from reality, with "just say NO," and nothing else.

They lie through their teeth, in multiple examples. It is not just their non-Congressional leadership, such as Savagely O'RHannibaugh, that does it. Their Congressional leadership, to say nothing of the likes of Newt Gingrich, is piling on with the lies. A couple of weeks ago it was, for example, Sen. Grassley, until recently one of Pres. Obama's favorite Republicans on health care, who was echoing Palin's looneyness and more importantly the use of the Big Lie Technique (right out of Mein Kampf) on the "death panels." Of course Savagely O'RHannibaugh fires up the violent protestors. But the Republican Congressional leadership, current, such as Boehner and McConnell, and former, such as Dick Armey, do it too. (Armey is in fact one of those who has been actively organzing them, to the extent taht that activity became too embarrassing even for the lobby firm that has his intials in its name.) And now some of those angry right-wingers are carrying guns into town hall meetings, or trying to. So what is really going on here?

What is really going on here is that the GOP has given up planning to win elections by contesting on policy. What is really going on here is that the GOP has recognized that its rock-solid far right-wing base, the Palin Faithful and then some, will never amount to much more than about 35% of the electorate (which is about the same number as the Nazis got in the last free election in Germany before their takeover). What is really going on here is that the GOP has recognized that the racism, which has carried it to so many election victories since Nixon initiated the Southern Strategy in 1968, is also running out of steam as a way to win national elections. It totally failed them in the recent one, obviously. So they have begun to think of other routes back to power. 

Racism is still a major part of their strategy, but now it’s a major tool for organzing their minority, not for winning over a majority. What is working extremely well for them now is the classic fascist tool of the Big Lie Technique: tell the same lie over and over again, as loudly as possible, and people will come to believe it. The massive drop in Pres. Obama’s poll numbers over the totally false claims that the GOP is screaming about with increasing ferocity is a testament to their success in using it. They have always used it, of course, from Reagan’s anti-Medicare ads in the 60s (it will lead directly to Communism) to the Swift-boating of Kerry, but now it is absolutely at the center of what they are doing on health care.

The word "fascism" has been given many definitions. My short one (and I've got a really long one too!) is: "Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology and mob actions to achieve political and economic ends; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy." Of course one thinks immediately of Bush/Cheney, but that is old news.

Total fascism has never come to a country peacefully. Violent repression of dissent is always at its center. In addition to organized armed force, it always relies on a loosely organized mob of one kind or another to take advantage of crisis situations and set the stage for the armed takeover of the pillars of the state. Thus what is going on now, most likely not yet consciously organized for that end in too many quarters, is the beginning of the setting of the stage and the training of the civilian troops.

Underlain by race, of course, is a total rejection of President Obama's leadership, a total rejection of the results of the election a little more than six months ago, the encouragement of violence and not just by some lunatic fringe. Lou Dobbs called for the execution, by a "stake through the heart," of former DNC Chair and Governor of Vermont, Dr. Howard Dean. (One notes with irony that Don Imus lost his job at CBS for calling the members of a women's basketball team "nappy headed ho's." Dobbs calls for the murder of a leader of the other side and that is met by a screaming silence at CNN corporate.) And that's just one example. Is a fascist revolution being actively plotted now? Except on the Far Right (currently) fringe, I doubt it. But as the Southern Poverty Law Center has just reported the Far Right militia movement is growing by leaps and bounds, fueled by racism and hate. But if the GOP keeps going in the direction it is currently goping, there is the armed force for a potential fascist takeover, at the right time. Rihgt now, on the side of Constitutional government, who and what would oppose that armed force, should it come to that?

The GOP is of course against health care reform because it would severely hurt the profit-making prospects of the sickness care insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital supply industries. But there are Democrats who hold to that opposition to reform or the same reasons. (And for the time-being, at least, the Obama Administration has been able to buy off Big Pharma.) So that's not the only reason that the GOP is desperate to prevent reform, at least a reform that is meaningful. If Obama manages to get something passed with a public option and a couple of other critical elements, the GOP's electoral prospects go into the toilet for a number of elections to come. They know it and people such as Sen. Jim ("Gay Teachers Should be Banned from the Classroom" [yes, he took that position as a candidate]) DeMint and Bill Kristol (who took exactly the same position in opposing the Clinton Health Plan) know it. And what does that mean? Why the interests of their major corporate supporters (see my BuzzFlash Commentary "Who Does the GOP Serve?") are significantly damaged.

What does that leave? Why some crisis of which they could take advantage (sound familiar?), of course. And they are beginning to prepare for that possibility (and in some quarters may be preparing the crisis itself as well), even if only subconsciously so far. What better way, then, to prepare their potential civilian troops than the current battle over the very complex and highly personal, emotional issue of health care reform?

The German people had an excuse for letting a minority party, enabled by a splintered opposition, hell-bent on establishing a fascist dictatorship unlike anything the world had ever seen, succeed: the world had never seen anything like it.  In the United States, facing a splintered opposition, there is a minority party that certainly seems to be hell-bent on (eventually) doing the same thing.  If that event does come to pass, the US population will, however, have no similar excuse.  Oh yes, the advance title for the forthcoming book from that Hitler-in-heels with a smiley face, the ex-governor of Alaska?  "My Struggle," which translates into German as "Mein Kampf." 

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This column is based in part on a Commentary of mine that appeared on Buzzflash.com on August 14, 2009. A commentator on that article said: “Your assessment is extremely insightful. BUT, WHAT TO DO??? How much time do we have to respond? What should our response look like? How do we avoid the failures of 1930's "sane" Germans? Please, surely action is required of us. What? When? How? Who?” I will be addressing that central question over time in this space and on BuzzFlash, where my Commentaries appear for the most part three weeks of every four.