A few posts back one Dredd Blog piece entitled "The Legislative Graveyard Holds" pointed out that pundits have many interpretations for the mid-term election results.That post went on to say that Dredd Blog believes the democrats lost because they did not stop the wars nor the plunder of the Treasury by MOMCOM.
The Dredd Blog hypothesis had been posted over a year before the election in a series of posts entitled "Democrats Pay How Much For War?", as well as several other posts under different titles linked to in the series.
We can test the hypothesis to some degree by noting that the top four heavy weights in seniority on the Armed Services Committee in the House were voted out of office.
Those four were: Ike Skelton, Chairman (D-MO), who had been in office some 32 years, and was a favorite of the Pentagon, John Spratt (D-SC), Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), and Gene Taylor (D-MS), who had all enjoyed a long tenure in the House.
Skelton, as an example, had been re-elected 16 times, usually by well over 60 percent of the vote, until this election.
While there may be no way to prove the Dredd Blog hypothesis conclusively, this is evidence of sorts in that direction.
Obama does not seem to believe the hypothesis, if his op-ed in the NY Times this morning is any indication.
He advocates increasing U.S. exports, but does not mention the wars or the fact that we spend more on WMD, weapons, troops, military bases, wars, which we call "defense", than all the rest of the nations combined.
The fact that the current wars are our longest, have no purpose, are the most costly, are concurrent with our greatest economic disaster in 80 years, and the people want them stopped, does not seem to phase his ruminations about foreign policy impacts on economy.
You decide.
UPDATE (11/7/10): Daily Kos reports:
Democrats suffered serious losses on Tuesday, but no one was hit harder than the corporatist Blue Dogs. Over half their members are gone. Apparently, being the GOP's best friends on issue after issue wasn't the political winner they claimed it was.(11/5/10 email from Chris Bowers @ Daily Kos).
They were also all dems, so I'm not sure that adds up to a vote against war. There does seem to be some small realization of and resentment toward the purely economic costs of war taking hold, but certainly not enough to actually do anything meaningful (like slash budgets, actually totally withdraw, etc.) about it. Increased military spending is never more than another false flag staged terrorist incident away in any case (such as the latest "Al Qaeda" synagogue package bombing incident), which I now believe are probably scheduled regularly to keep us sheep compliant.
ReplyDeleteThe only question left in my mind about Obama - the one pol who was given a mandate to do something about all this silliness - is exactly when did he sell out. Was he himself a "false flag" liberal, planted in the White House to discredit the dems and the left? Or was he simply cajoled to defect sometime during the process, once it became apparent that he was the most electable of a sorry lot of pols in 2008?
Probably doesn't matter at this point, except to realize that he has indeed sold out completely, and that you have to interpret everything that comes out of his mouth according to the political calculation that influenced it. Obama, ever the brilliant and resourceful student, has taken Bill Clinton's politics of triangulation and raised them to the nth degree. Too bad he has none of Clinton's political instinct, never mind a single iota of character or integrity.
Obama has come to define the morally vacuous politics of the age, where every decision is only a negotiation/capitulation away from being watered down or totally neutered to the point of irrelevance. At the end of his ill-begotten term he'll be known as the first truly "invisible" president, the first president of the modern age who stood for absolutely nothing, other than burnishing his "legacy" through elegant speeches and pronouncements. He's the Buddhist's empty vessel. Unfortunately, he's been filled with the vile spew of his MOMCOM corporate masters.
Another factor is the cost of the war which has been hidden from the voters, in terms of a linkage between the wars and the loss of jobs.
ReplyDeleteThe media advanced polls purporting to show that the voters put jobs first, the wars 4th.
I don't know how the questions were asked to come up with the poll figures, but it would take someone who thinks wars are free not to see the link between several billion dollars a week spent on the wars and a lack of jobs here at home.
The federal government spends more on the military than all the rest of the nations put together, which has a severe impact on the economy of the working people.
Noam Chomsky, one of Dredd Blog's favorites, wrote about "the countless disaffected".
ReplyDeleteThe leader of those countless disaffected is our own disaffected, who blogs here at Dredd Blog.
In typical Chomsky style he said: "When the bubble bursts, the risk-takers can flee to the shelter of the nanny state. Bailouts—a kind of government insurance policy—are among many perverse incentives that magnify market inefficiencies.
“There is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle,” economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson wrote in the Financial Times in January. “Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector: Take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” through bailouts and other devices, and the financial system “is thus resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.”
The doomsday metaphor also applies outside the financial world. The American Petroleum Institute, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and the other business lobbies, has intensified its efforts to persuade the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—with considerable success, as polls indicate. Among Republican congressional candidates in the 2010 election, virtually all reject global warming.
The executives behind the propaganda know that global warming is real, and our prospects grim. But the fate of the species is an externality that the executives must ignore, to the extent that market systems prevail. And the public won’t be able to ride to the rescue when the worst-case scenario unfolds." (In These Times).
Well said Noam.
I might add that globalism and the US war machine are symbiotic; two elements of the same overall grand strategy: to impose US imperialist capitalism on the entire world whether they like it or not. US crony capitalists feed the war machine with money, while the war machine returns the favor with newly conquered/pacified markets to exploit.
ReplyDeleteTo that extent, the "War on Terror" simply had to happen, which surely lends even more credence to the "9-11 Truthers," as if they needed any extra boost. It also guarantees that absent a renunciation of globalism - which Obama's Op Ed quoted above clearly signals is not going to happen - that war as big business is here to stay.
It also tells you all you need to know about the jobs situation in the US. Until wages in the US equalize with (sink too) those in the rest of the developing world, they will simply never return! Our capitalist masters simply demand that it be so, since profitability is their only concern, and labor is normally the most expensive component of any production decision. Although higher taxes in the US might also influence the decision, higher labor rates will insure that most jobs are off-shored regardless, and only be replaced by lower paying "service industry" jobs that must be done locally.
And the so-called "knowledge industry?" Please! How many people can you employ sitting at a computer terminal all day essentially producing nothing (but draining oodles of non-renewable energy in the process)? By the way, if your job entails nothing more than manipulating spreadsheets and querying databases as mine does, you ARE NOT a knowledge worker! You are nothing more than a replaceable rat in a cage manipulating the tools that the actual knowledge industry has provided for you.
disaffected,
ReplyDelete"which Obama's Op Ed quoted above"
Did you intend to link to this comment at This Dredd Blog Post?
"rat in a cage"
ReplyDeleteJoin the club.
"despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage"
(Smashing Pumpkins)
Dredd,
ReplyDeleteI was referring to the NY Times Op Ed you linked to (not quoted as I said) in the main post above, in which he pretty effectively parrots most of Globalism's main talking points. Reading that kind of stuff just convinces me all the more that Obama was hand-picked by the capital class explicitly for his ability to obfuscate and lay down a smoke screen to cover their shenanigans. He's certainly been very effective in that role.
disaffected,
ReplyDelete"I was referring to the NY Times Op Ed you linked to"
I forgot that link was in the post ...