rahm emanuel – dowackado

Are the Dems stupid? Or not?

By timmukyPosted on September 8, 2010Posted in bailout, corporatism, corruption, economy, neoliberalism, plus ca change, politics, populism, prioritiesTagged bob dole, firedoglake, marv albert, rahm emanuel, tom daschle, WITH AUTHORITYNo Comments

Money makes the Democrats stupid is a pretty decent rant by Eli at Firedoglake.

The Republicans, he observes, have a big advantage in terms of money because the ideology of conservatism lines up perfectly with giving rich people and corporations more money and power.

Not because they have more [money], although they usually do. No, it’s because their base is almost completely aligned with their corporate and wealthy big-money donors, while the Democratic base is the complete opposite.

Republicans can deliver their megadonors tax cuts, deregulation, corporate welfare, and protection from prosecution, all cocooned in a conservative narrative of supply-side economics, free enterprise, and independent frontier can-do spirit that their base just loves.

Contrast this with the Dems, who, with a few exceptions, are pretty much on the same level in terms of greed and lack of scruples. But they have this nagging problem with their party’s (purported) ideology, which isn’t a good fit. They have to be sneaky because “there’s simply no way to spin pro-corporate, pro-wealth policies as congruent with progressive values.”

The best they can manage is to play the DLC/Third Way game of pretending that capitulation is really some kind of principled pragmatic centrism which is the only way to win elections or get anything done against the all-powerful GOP and its 55 49 40 41 Senate seats.

Some of the base reluctantly goes along with this because half a loaf is better than the enemy of the good or whatever, but none of us are particularly happy about always settling for a compromise of a compromise of a compromise. Think how much leverage Obama and the Democrats had after two huge electoral landslides, a huge Republican-branded financial crisis, and a huge congressional majority… and how little they did with it. They didn’t deliver on progressive priorities because that wasn’t what their big campaign donors wanted.

And now they’ve failed so miserably, sold out so blatantly, demoralized their base so completely, and ceded the populist ground so thoroughly to the Tea Party, that they’re on the brink of losing the House and maybe even the Senate. All of the Democrats’ kabuki to protect their corporate friends so they could rake in campaign cash and get re-elected will end up costing them their seats instead. Because it is possible to fuck up so badly and so obviously that all the money in the world can’t save you. Just ask the Republicans.

I like this, and I’m down with Eli’s disgust, but wonder if he might be missing something, like maybe the fact that it’s on purpose?

Not sure about this, but I’ll throw it out there and wonder aloud if perhaps we are in for a few decades where control of Congress (and maybe the Presidency) will swing from party to party with every election.

The Party Out of Power promises Change, gets in power, doesn’t change anything, and is sent packing. Or it promises to reverse the Mooslem Socialist Mismanagement of this Once-Great Nation. Until the voters realize they get screwed there too. Rinse and repeat.

Either way the party pros win. If in power, hey, you’re In Power. Out of Power you can make massive amounts of money in the private sector. (Think of Rahm’s waltz with hedge fund Magnetar Capital. Think Tom Daschle. Bob Dole.) Leverage your public service. G’head. You earned it. Take a position with one of the corporations you’ll be in charge of “regulating” when you get back into power. Money’s much better, and you will probably get to spend a little more time with the family.

And don’t worry. You’ll be back in D.C. before you know it. Count on the Other Party not satisfying those pesky voters either. Because there’s no way the non-rich 95 percent can be satisfied–unless legislation happens that actually reverses the flow of wealth. And both parties have shown how firmly they are allied on the issue of wealth distribution.

At the moment, polls indicate voters will throw the current regime out, WITH AUTHORITY as Marv Albert used to say…. To replace it with a regime that makes no bones about its intention to give an ever bigger piece of the pie to the wealthy and powerful.

Does that makes sense? Not so much. Will it work for a few more election cycles? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Margaret Flowers evokes memories of another Margaret

By timmukyPosted on February 8, 2010Posted in corporatism, health, health reform, politics, prioritiesTagged bill moyers, health care reform, mad as hell doctors, margaret flowers, max baucus, obama, physicians for a national health program, rahm emanuel, single payerNo Comments

A terrific, informative Bill Moyers interview with Dr. Margaret Flowers of Mad as Hell Doctors and Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Flowers presents her case for Medicare for All/Single Payer in a calm, resolute, persuasive manner.

Dr. Flowers and Dr. Carol Paris have spoken before Congress, and were arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings on HCR for daring to speak up for single payer after the solution favored by most Americans was yanked off the table.

More recently, Drs. Flowers and Paris took Obama up on his “Let me know” spiel at the State of the Union address–and were again arrested for their troubles. (“If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.” Does ANYONE in America believe that?)

The tale Dr. Flowers tells is not a pretty one, and it may be surprising, if you still harbor the delusion that the Obama Administration is a force for positive change.

I loved the Moyers comment:

When I saw pictures of Margaret Flowers being led away, I remembered those famous words attributed to another Margaret, the anthropologist Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Against all the evidence, I find Dr. Flowers’ resolve to be a reason for optimism. And I am grateful for Moyers, who has given her air time on his program (which, sadly, is in its last season on television).

more about “Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen …“, posted with vodpod

Paying too much attention to Rahm “f*#king retarded” Emanuel?

By timmukyPosted on January 26, 2010Posted in politicsTagged blue dogs, Common Purpose, jane hamsher, obama, peter wallsten, progressive, rahm emanuel, veal pen, wall street journal, white houseNo Comments

OB-FJ167_rahm01_G_20100125194318 — Getty images

Jane Hamsher on today’s WSJ profile of Rahm Emanuel:

Most amusing to me was the fact that [Peter Wallsten] finally got the goods about Rahm’s famous Veal Pen tirade, when Rahm showed up at the Common Purpose meeting and lambasted the liberal interest groups because MoveOn was running radio ads against Blue Dogs. Previously it had been reported that Rahm called them “f*#king stupid,” even though the scuttlebut was that Rahm said they were “f*#king retards.” It’s a tight-lipped crowd to penetrate, and nobody wants to get zapped from the meetings for talking to the press. But Wallsten managed to get the story:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants. He warned them not to alienate lawmakers whose votes would be needed on health care and other top legislative items.

Jane goes on to retell Rahm’s self-mythologizing knife story, about his Blutarsky-like reciting of his enemies’ names and then shouting “dead” while stabbing a table with a steak knife, just after Clinton was elected president. Jane rightly refuses to accept the purported point of the tale, that it shows how tough a guy Rahm is.

That’s not “tough.”

“Tough” is knowing you’re going to take massive shit for standing up to powerful interests and then doing it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do — that’s what Obama told people he would do when he was running for President.

You’re not a tough guy if your first thought upon assuming the power of the Presidency is to use it to punish your enemies. You’re a cowardly, petty, small-minded thug.

You know, I agree with every word. BUT Rahm is not the President. I would welcome seeing the backside of the little shite, or even better, his backside in an orange jumpsuit, and I am all for Jane’s push to (re-)appoint an Inspector General to look into Rahm’s shenanigans while he was at Freddie Mac. But at the moment, with Obama under all sorts of pressure, you could make the case that Rahm is doing his job, and serving as a lightning rod for his boss. With whom all responsibility ultimately lies.

Rahm sez: “NAFTA = Good Times!”

By timmukyPosted on December 26, 2009Posted in bailout, corporatism, corruption, health reform, politics, populism, UncategorizedTagged health care reform, nafta, obama, politics, rahm emanuelNo Comments

1107-obama — Easy credit ripoffs. Good times!

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.

–Wall Street Journal, “Democrats pin 2010 hopes on bill”

In an only slightly different context a wise person said, “It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country.”

More on Jane, Grover and Rahm

By timmukyPosted on December 26, 2009Posted in bailout, corporatism, corruption, obama, politics, populismTagged bipartisan, cenk uygur, corruption, Freddie Mac, grover norquist, insider vs. outsider, jane hamsher, populism politics, rahm emanuelNo Comments

All I know is the Hamsher/Norquist joint venture caused many Obama loyalists to pee their pants, and got a lot of positive comments on Jane’s own site. Not exactly surprising.

Someone asked about it on the President’s plane and was met with a predictably smug reply, that the Chief of Staff’s job was “very safe”.

And also: over the Christmas weekend the White House announced that the caps on Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac losses would be lifted. There was talk that they would be raised from $400 billion to $800 billion, but no. They have been raised, to, uh, infinity.

Did Jane Hamsher really whack Rahm Emanuel upside the head, as Cenk Uygur claims? If so, was it with a Nerf bat, or a 2 by 4 with a nail sticking out of it? Is he PISSED? Just mildly annoyed? More important, Will this be enough to shame the White House into taking any real judicial/investigative action with regard to Freddie Mac, like letting Inspector General Ed Kelley get back on the job? You know, 6 trillion dollars is a lot of money.

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odd couple: jane and grover join forces against rahm

By timmukyPosted on December 23, 2009Posted in corporatism, corruption, politics, populismTagged bipartisan, corruption, Freddie Mac, grover norquist, insider vs. outsider, jane hamsher, politics, rahm emanuel1 Comment

Hugely unlikely bedfellas Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist have teamed together to demand Rahm Emanuel’s resignation, over the White House Chief of Staff’s “activities at Freddie Mac, and the White House’s blocking of an Inspector General who would look into it.”

This is sure to raise the hackles of lefties who despise Norquist and of conservative-identified folks for whom Hamsher is the SheDevil incarnate. But after that settles down, what will it mean? Will a coalition of ideologically opposed outsiders be able to gain any traction at making life difficult for America’s Number One insider political figure? And will it change anything about the corporate ownership of the political process?

Honestly, I have no idea. My hope is that it will. And I’ve become comfortable with this for some time. As a longtime reader of antiwar.com, whose masthead bears the names of both Pat Buchanan and John Pilger, and represents an alliance of libertarian, paleocon, and old-school lefty antiwar sentiment. Sometimes it gets weird.

Eventually, the corruption of the Washington D.C. political/corporate united front will collapse in on itself, and the two-party system will have a hard time containing the fallout. This move by Hamsher and Norquist might still be too early, or it might be perfectly timed. It remains to be seen. But the contempt of the political class for what used to be called democracy has never been greater. Whatever her motivations may be, I’m glad to see Jane rolling the dice on this one.

Update: Didn’t take long for the firestorm of reaction, hurt feelings, and name-calling to break out (read the comments to this post), nor did it take long for Jane to issue what is sure to be the first of many apologia (I am not entirely sure what the plural for apologia is, sorry):

Rahm Emanuel is destroying not only the Democratic majority but the Democratic Party. There isn’t enough pork in the world to hold his “Blue Dogs” in office with the legacy of bailouts that he has engineered, and that’s why his “big tent” is now collapsing in his wake. Parker Griffin, and now (possibly) Chris Carney, may blame Nancy Pelosi for their defections to the GOP, but that’s pure demagogurery. The mess they are fleeing — the corrupt back-room deals, the endless bailouts — belong to Rahm.

The ground is shifting. You can feel it. And the Rahm dead-enders have become no different than the Bush dead-enders, completely unaware that the President whose malfeasance they are defending on the basis that one must not “consort with Republicans” is the one who ran on — consorting with Republicans. It is knee-jerk authoritarianism in the extreme. Rick Warren is okay because Obama says so. Principles? Who needs them.

If Obama/Rahm want to triangulate against progressives (and they do), they’re not the only ones who can make cause with people on the other side of the aisle. If that’s what it takes to shake up the corporate domination of our political system, we’ve done it before and we can do it again. Because working within the traditional political order to support “progressives” whose conviction lasts only as long as it doesn’t matter just doesn’t seem to be working.

She’s good. And she’s got my vote.

“It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country”

By timmukyPosted on December 19, 2009Posted in corporatism, health reform, politics, populismTagged coporatism, glenn greenwald, health care, insider vs. outsider, jane hamsher, matt taibbi, populism, progressivism, rahm emanuel, transpartisan consensus1 Comment

corporate_flag — a flag you can actually buy at adbusters.com

Glenn Greenwald has a pretty much spot-on look at the deepest underlying issue in the health care debacle, the blurring of the lines between the corporate and public sectors. With the exception of party loyalists (both Republican and Democrat), it’s pissing off just about everyone in a major way, both those who identify as conservatives and as progressives. Each group has a different name for the problem:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s. It’s true that the people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their grievances about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it’s dependent upon and supportive of that corporatist model. That’s why they turn to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist anger?

He’s not the only one to notice. See here and here and here. And just ‘cos it made me spit up my coffee a little bit, this little priceless observation from Jane Hamsher:

Rahm Emanuel has managed to convince enough of the people that any inadequacies in this bill will be forgotten if the Dems can claim a “w” and pass any piece of shit health care bill. And that if Congress just spends 2010 naming post offices, any objections that Americans might have to paying 8% of their incomes to private corporations who will use the IRS as their collection agencies will just disappear.

It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country. All the while, the painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.

Blame everyone but the big guy

By timmukyPosted on December 15, 2009Posted in obama, politicsTagged glenn greenwald, harry reid, health reform, jane hamsher, joe lieberman, karl rove, obama, politics, rahm emanuel, russ feingold1 Comment

Updated below.

And again.

I am not going to defend Rahm Emanuel. He’s never been more than a corrupt, self-interested, low-life would-be hard guy who’s not even really that hard. His role model, that pudgy lump o’ Rove, is the real deal, a completely psychotic fire-breather who would do anything for his party. Rahm has convinced many that he puts the party’s fortunes above everything. Leaving aside the larger question of whether that’s a good thing, lately even those who think he’s a necessary evil have had to reappraise a. his commitment to his party, and/or b. his competence.

Firedoglake blogger TBogg:

So all I really wanted for Christmas was a Karl Rove of our own who would make all of our Obama wishes come true, even if he had to kick Evan Bayh’s mushy skull in to accomplish them. Someone who, I had hoped, would make Joe Lieberman’s life something akin to a hemorrhoidectomy gone horribly terribly wrong.

Such is not the case:

The White House wants Reid to hand Joe Lieberman the farm.

An aide briefed on discussions with the White House says that there would be no story if Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel hadn’t interceded. The aide confirmed an account, reported by Huffington Post, that Emanuel visited Reid personally, telling him to cut a deal with Lieberman.

Then the aide provided more detail.

Emanuel didn’t just leave it to Reid to find a solution. Emanuel specifically suggested Reid give Lieberman the concessions he seeks on issues like the Medicare buy-in and triggers.

“It was all about ‘do what you’ve got to do to get it done. Drop whatever you’ve got to drop to get it done,” the aide said. All of Emanuel’s prescriptions, the source said, were aimed at appeasing Lieberman–not twisting his arm.

If Rahm Emmanuel is all he was supposed to be, we can safely assume that the Obama White House either never gave a shit about health care reform, or they managed health care reform so horrifically and incompetently that they are now willing to settle for a “win”, no matter how meager.

For more of the same, see “Rahm’s making the White House look terrible,” especially the impassioned comments section. So many former true believers think this is the last straw, but so many are still acting like Rahm’s a maverick operative acting against the wishes of his benign boss, who really does have the best interests of the country at heart.

I don’t know what it will take to convince the Obamamaniacs.

Update. Well, as Jane Hamsher points out, at least Russ Feingold isn’t afraid to finger the Prez:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold.

Update 2 Glenn Greenwald says everything I’ve just said, and says it better.

In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored …. Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as “centrist,” the noblest Beltway value.

And, in an update, he comes up with this classic dissection of Obama/Emanuel excuse-making:

It’s also worth noting how completely antithetical claims are advanced to defend and excuse Obama. We’ve long heard — from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself — that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he’s playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it’s not his fault because he’s totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn’t possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he’s instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.