Progressives
have a choice to make in 2012. Some progressives live in districts where a progressive
candidate needs their support in a primary race in which the progressive faces
a tightly contested but winnable race against one or more Blue Dog type
Democrats. For progressives residing in such a state and/or district, their
duty is very clear: support the progressive so he or she can face and defeat the
Republican in the general election next November. We need as many consistent progressives
in local, state and national offices as possible.
For many
progressives their Democratic primary or caucus has no race where a progressive
faces a serious contest with a Blue Dog Democrat. In this scenario, Democrats
have a rare opportunity to do severe damage to a political party which has
blocked nearly every substantial effort that President Obama has made to boost
our economy by creating more jobs than the private sector is prepared to or
willing to create.
This is not
just any party. This is the party that has used racial hatred and fear of human
sexual diversity to get tens of millions of people to vote against their own
economic self interests. This is the party that lied to start a war which has
killed and disabled tens of thousands of American service personnel and
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. This is the party that has whored itself out
to the richest bidders to keep people unemployed or underpaid and scared out of
collective bargaining. This is the party that has feigned piety and patriotism while
shipping millions of jobs overseas to a country that persecutes Christians
along with people of other faiths, steals American technology, and uses slave
labor inside and outside its national borders to produce cheap products of
often questionable quality and safety.
This is the
party that lies about global climate change to subsidize oil from nations that
breed and fund terrorists who kill Americans along with people from every
nation and religion on earth. This is the party that talks about energy
independence in terms of “drill baby drill” and “all of the above” when what they
really mean is “spill at will and give the people the bill” and “oil of the
above.” This is the party that refuses
unemployment benefits and minimum wage increases unless its super rich patrons
can get or keep an unneeded tax cut to invest in overseas quick bucks, garnered
through slave wages and anti-environmental practices.
This is the
party that believes that freedom of speech means that if you have money, you
get the megaphone and if not, you can talk on Rush Limbaugh or blog on the
internet to nobody but those who agree with you. This is the party that loves
to kill criminals and to deny them retrials which might prove their innocence. This
is the party that hates abortion so much they’ll not hesitate to order aerial terminations
of Muslim mothers and their born and unborn children.
This is the
party that believes the fox is the best guardian of the henhouse when it comes
to pension funds and home mortgages. This is the party of oil slurpers and
lying birthers. This is the party of Fox News and countless handsomely funded propagandists.
This is the party that hates science and sex and you and me and anyone else who
gets in the way of their duty to defend and protect the outlandishly opulent
through any means of deceit or dissemblance.
This is the Republican Party and they deserve
to suffer, and for the sake of our nation’s future they need to suffer the pain
of permanent political exile or be divided into legitimately representative
factions.
All that said,
our own Democratic party needs to suffer as well because its leadership has
chosen to ignore the clear intentions and desires of the rank-in-file members
of our party. Instead they have chosen to push our party in the direction of a
kinder, gentler global corporatism. They have chosen to play defense and dish
out piecemeal, toothless and fruitless reforms, inadequate for the task of
decapitating a systemic monster of unrestrained and insatiable greed. What we can do this coming year is to put
Democratic Party leadership on notice by occupying the GOP into total turmoil
in Tampa Bay.
Progressives
have a choice. We can vote in the 2012 Democratic primaries and rarely, if ever,
change the outcome of any race in a progressive direction or nominate any
progressives other than those already predestined for the general election. Or
we can switch parties in closed primary states or register unaffiliated in open
primary states to occupy and vote in the GOP primary for Ron Paul.
Before your
eyes roll out the back of your head, let me state the obvious. Ron Paul is not
a progressive. His economic policies, if enacted in full, would only deepen the depression our economy is still unable to come out of.
However, his nomination would undo the corporate grip on the GOP and send them
running, begging to be let into our Democratic Party. We might choose to use such opportunists next November but that is a choice that the GOP establishment will fight
tooth and nail to prevent us from making.
Progressives
have a choice. We can vote for Obama
again and hope that he really means it this time and that, if he really means
it, he has 60 consistently progressive Senators to help him make it happen. We
can vote for Obama in an uncontested primary to give him our thumbs up for what
he has done or tried to do. We can vote for him because he will certainly know
that with our vote in the primary, he will be empowered to revisit and rewrite
the healthcare law so that we have a universally available public option to purchase
Medicare before retirement and without disability.
With our primary
vote, President Obama will know that he can demand that Congress send him a 3
trillion dollar investment package to build all the elements of a peaceful
green economy, including an interstate and truly high speed rail system, and a
state of the art, high efficiency fiber optic cable grid connecting every home,
business and not-for-profit organization to super high speed internet service
and cleanly produced electricity. We can vote for him in the primary so that he
will make sure that teachers get paid like lawyers, and doctors and nurses get
to treat patients rather than fight insurance companies. We could vote for him
in an uncontested primary for exactly the same reasons we voted for him the
last time and get exactly the same results in his second term.
Progressives
have a choice. We can choose to occupy and vote in the Republican primaries and
caucuses for candidates who, like Ron Paul, will work and vote to dismantle the
military industrial catastrophe and all its cash sucking empire building and
maintenance. We can vote for a candidate who will stand opposite President
Obama and ask him why he will not completely de-fund drug and other endless and
senseless wars and occupations. We can vote for a candidate who is proposing to
cut the Pentagon by 600 billion dollars below what President Obama plans to
spend on and through it.
We can
choose to occupy and vote in a primary for a candidate who rejects NAFTA and
CAFTA and most favored nation status for China. We can vote in a primary for a
candidate who wants to scrap the Patriot Act, end torture and close Gitmo at
least as much as Obama wanted to do when he ran for president in 2008. We can
vote for a candidate who wants to end no bid contracts for Cheney’s gang, and who
plans as president to remove all American funded military contractors from Iraq
and Afghanistan. We can choose to vote
for a candidate who will not decrease Social Security and Medicare benefits for
seniors.
Admittedly,
Ron Paul wants to cut all these things we progressives despise so that he can
reduce debt (something we want to do as well over the long run) and cut taxes
on everybody (something we think needs to be done for almost everybody). He
also proposes to use half of the savings from reduced militarism spending to
shore up entitlements (a laudable goal) and to enable people under 25 years of
age to “opt out” of the entitlement system entirely (a myopic plan which would boost consumer spending in the short term and
impoverish millions of seniors in the long term). Fortunately and ironically, our
dysfunctional upper chamber will do the right thing and reject this “opt out”
the way they nuked the public option, inspiring some clever combo to propose a
good trade of “opt out for opt in,” a better idea which will also never see the
light of day.
When the “opt
out” is put out of commission (the sooner the better), a President Paul would
have to make a deal to do something different with that money. He ought to do (and
could be persuaded to do with enough progressives coming to his side) a politically
astute deal right now: agree to send all of that money to the states
exclusively according to each state’s population to do with it as each state
chooses. Progressive states like California could invest that money into building
high speed rail and modernized schools with well compensated teachers. Conservative
states like Texas could choose to give billionaire oil slurpers another tax
credit to “drill baby drill.” This would
not be the ideal deal but it would empower depression defunded states to choose
to do what the federal government will not do. It’s a choice that will not
bring us all that we need to build the peaceful green economy right away, but it
will set up an interstate contest which proves once and for all that
progressive governance produces more and higher paying and safer jobs than does
laissez-faire economic permissivism.
Progressives
have a choice to help replace neo-cons with libertarians in the leadership of
the Republican Party. Progressives can choose to occupy and vote in primaries for libertarians to face
down Blue Dogs in the general election. Progressive can choose to vote in
primaries to send unelectable extremists up against solid progressives in the
general election. In short, progressives can choose to turn the Republican
Party into a libertarian party while setting up an election that puts a
coalition of libertarians and progressives in charge of congress. This would
include 60 Senators who will vote together to free up trillions of dollars to
pay down debt and empower states and individuals to make better choices than
they can now.
If
progressives make the right choice to jump ship and infiltrate the GOP
primaries and caucuses, we will turn a major party upside down and set our
country on the road toward peace and, its younger sibling, prosperity. But this
good decision would have the added benefit of giving us other choices. For once
we can have a Democratic presidential candidate facing an opponent who does not
demand the Democrat prove he is not weak on defense by agreeing to put the Pentagon
on more budgetary steroids. For once, we can have a Democratic presidential
nominee debating how much to cut the Pentagon and how to use the money saved from
ending endless drug wars and other deadly, forever self-defeating wars.
Progressives have a choice of punishing Blue Dogs by voting for libertarian
opponents or of letting Blue Dogs lie and Democratic progressivism die.
Progressives have a choice of making life a little bit better over four years
or letting life go on with the same old song and dance, bait and switch routine
of rhetorical flourishes covering legislative flushes.
Progressive
have a choice that can lead to better choices. We can waste our primary votes
affirming half measures and premature capitulations or make them count for
something for a change. God help us if we don’t make the choice we need to make
now!
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