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There is a enormous and powerful difference between millions of people not voting for a particular party, and millions of people saying loud and clear to that party: “we guarantee we will give you millions of votes, more than enough to tip the scale…… once you have done a or b or c or d or any combination of those things, and as soon as we see that you’ve done that you can relax in the confidence that you have won even before election day arrives, otherwise you’ve already lost and you might as well tell your corporate donors now that their money has been pissed away for absolutely nothing and that you were an utter and pathetic waste of their time, and quit campaigning”.
It takes planning, and it takes a determination to make decisions not out of fear but out of the power and leverage you know you have, but have only if you use it.
The best that can happen with this approach is beyond your wildest dreams, and the worst that can happen with this is that if nobody else does it while you do you won’t be defending yourself after the fact for having voted for people who could have done their jobs but wouldn’t.
Make it a credible threat. Not a bluff.
The democrats won the 2006 midterms effectively by running on an end the Iraq war platform. The first major thing they did afterwards was to betray the voters with the first emergency supplemental war funding bill passed by a democratic congress. The result was a folding of hands by the fake democratic antiwar movement who showed themselves to be really only interested in democratic wins, but not in progressive results.
The democrats have had years to “incrementalize” their way into producing good progressive results. They haven’t done so, and you now have an effectively republican congress and president.
That Democrats are politicians and being politician will do whatever it takes to win the votes they need means that the fear of republicans or the fear of losing ground is a phantom fear if enough people threaten the dems with extreme loss of votes unless and until they do something useful to win those votes back, which they will do because they are politicians and they need those votes to survive politically.
It’s an eyeball to eyeball poker game right down to election day, and it cannot be a bluff from the voters.
People have to be strong enough to say to the dems – “Look, if you’re going to ACT like republicans then we’re going to let republicans have your jobs your fools – now get busy and PRODUCE some useful progressive legislation or you’re history. Come back when you’ve produced, and I guarantee you my vote” – and mean it.
The dems will do it, and if on the off chance they’re too stupid to do it then they aren’t worth your vote anyway.
It’s called voting for results instead of promises.
Obama and the democrats might finally wake up and realize they need the independent and liberal votes they’ve thrown away since inauguration day last year, and that all the corporate donations in the world aren’t going to save them without those votes, and start producing some useful progressive legislation and pass it in time for the midterms.
They could have independents and liberals all across the country rewarding them for results instead of turning their backs on empty promises and the largest landslides in history this November with just a few simple moves.
Creating and passing an actual, real, universal single payer health care bill and rolling back the bailout of the insurance industry for example might do it all by itself, for example.
Although they could probably sew it right up it for themselves by also starting torture and war crimes trials for Bush and Cheney, while withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and breaking up the big Wall Street investment banks and doing Ken Lay numbers on Goldman Sachs‘s Lloyd Blankfein and Magnetar‘s Alec Litowitz, while firing Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Rahm Emanuel, and now Robert Gibbs, too.
They’ve got a whole month, after all.
Dems are smart people, right? They should be at least half as smart as all those independent and progressives who won’t vote for them unless they do those things, right?
After all, Obama and the democrats can’t possibly be stupid enough to actually believe that independents and liberals are stupid enough to to vote to continue being screwed by them, can they?
And really, all they really need to do is just one of those things and the republicans would be history in November.
This is not a sport. It is, however, the future of the country, and a choice of who rules it. Bought and paid for politicians. Or voters.
If Republicans got their way they would arrange for a trojan horse ‘democrat’ to be elected president who would let bush and cheney and most of the previous republican administration of the hook effectively pardoning them for torture and all their other war crimes, expand the number of US troops sent to the overseas occupations the republicans started, give tens of trillions of dollars to wall street and other republican corporate cronies while ensuring the Military Industrial complex remains the most profitable racket in the history of humanity 1, and then fall all over himself bending over backwards to give the republicans anything and everything else they demanded and more while conning the democratic base with an ‘incremental bipartisanship’ fantasy story to coopt that base into supporting republican policies across the board while insulting that base at every opportunity, and generally just screw the working classes every ways possible, while sending out scare letters to that democratic base demanding support and votes because republicans are scary.
All so that he could guarantee himself a lucrative post presidential career continuing to work for his constituents.
I hope republicans never get their way. They’re scary.
1 U.S. War Spending Now Exceeds That Of All States
If Republicans got their way fear would rule, and people would be terrorized into voting only out of fear rather than using their vote as the the only leverage they have to force concessions and progressive legislation out of the democrats.
If Republicans got their way fear would rule, and people would roll over and accept any amount of bipartisan bullshit and lies from Democrats instead of using fear to rule the Democrats and turn them into winners while destroying the Republicans.
If Republicans got their way fear would rule, and people would be bullied into accepting that nothing would ever change, instead of taking control.
That’s kind of how we got in this MESS, in the first place … by letting Republicans GET their Whiny Way … for far TOO Many Years.
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Quit being a Republican. Be a leader for a change.
Or else…
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to make that “threat” credible is massive, deep and broad grassroots organizing and established relationship-building which hasn’t even begun to be done. I don’t even know if in a society as saturated with “me-first” hyperindividualism, atomization, alienation and a culture that is actively hostile toward concepts like solidarity whether it is even possible to do such organizing an more even under the most favorable conditions. (Conditions which will not exist for any effort that challenges the authority of the existing power structure.)
presidency very early on by granting the bankers and generals all they wanted: END
As I’ve observed before, no nation or empire can survive if it spends over 50% of its budget on its military. There is no snowball’s chance in hell. It will collapse like the USSR: GUARANTEED
680 bill in budget + cost overruns galore + Nuclear arsenal maintenance in Dept of Energy + 16 separate payments for spy agencies + Military Pensions + payments on all sorts of war debt + all sorts of other stuff most likely hidden in other budgets. And labor, shareholders, management, wall street, banks, state and local governments and the entire economy are totally DEPENDENT on this never ending public supported war stimulus.
This ain’t no 800 pound gorilla, it is the night of the living dead, the nightmare of history revisited. The addiction to power and hatred is insatiable. This is 2010, can you believe it, 2010! The only votes I will cast this November will be for local issues. And I believe it’s only 50/50 that Obama even runs again. And if he did run, you know it would be pro forma just like his presidency.
I find it hard to believe I’m even saying this. Surreal-
election if the Republicans take the house.
No doubt there will be massive punditry on television talking about how if only Obama had been more conservative and cautious, he would not now be facing a Republican house. This in the face of no evidence whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects will be talking about Naderites and traitorous Democrats.
And then, some of the very same people who said, you better vote Democratic or you will be responsible for Republican rule, will realize what they’ve done and start saying, no, the Democrats didn’t do a good enough job.
America will fill with the sound of coins flipping, and fun will be had by all.
Time to start playing hardball before the baseball season ends.
I’m impressed.
is essential.
Their excellence at reporting what can only be described as a dogfight is the result of their intense competition with each other, not unlike the dog fight itself.
Like in a dogfight, The R’s and D’s are enemies in the same way that fighting dogs are enemies and for the same reasons.
The status quo of class disparity, conservatism, empire, militarism and the indifference to illegal immigrants in is to be expected in a senile democracy. That elected officials are minor players compared to non elected power and money establishments which are the government is the story. Yet these situations are reported as if they are isolated shameful cases. Not so.
In providing permanent space for these often contradictory institutions, politicians have given up their own space. That is where they once did the only thing that makes them democratic politicians; compromise.
What they call reform is always a restructuring, rendered free of
charge, to these perverse powers. What they call compromise is a face saving electoral gambit but the parameters of their agreements are pre-determined.
Frequently heard, “Why do Democrats back down?”
“Hmm, I wonder that myself”, answers the journalist, furrowing his or her brow.
Meanwhile, the blogger is quick to label them cowards.
This is the price politicians pay for premeditated governance.
While I don’t think journalists, on the whole, behave as they do in
direct response to remuneration for their reporting, I do believe that their relatively modest but secure life style is the result of a conventional, outdated paradigm, and I think, that is a shameful disservice to the American people.
Yes, there is hugely intense competition in their field but it is competition based on wriitng skills and sophistry mistaken for analysis,
By the same token, partisan and independent voters proceed with their beliefs, dissatisfactions and protests as if elections or political organizing can or will change this. These attempts at new movements will only achieve a voice in an overall larger structure that forces the smaller structure to change more than the larger.
Small apolitical organizations that coalesce around temporary, discrete economic issues are progressive. All of others are ‘progressive’ political marketers out to garner a share of barter power. It is all in black and white for the world not to see.
If only it were a conspiracy, at least it would probably fail.
I am often called difficult by people I otherwise admire for their forthright hearts, However, a forthright heart that is not informed by a soul unhindered by denial is a heart damaged by anger.
however, many seem to forget that he had nominal, but not actual Democratic majorities in both houses. Out of 57 Dems in the Senate, thirteen are from states that voted for McCain in 2008.
When presented with beneficial legislation while at the same time knowing that there weren’t sufficient votes for passage, FDR famously told the activists from his own party who’d approached him, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Does anyone really believe there are currently enough real, not just nominal, Democrats in the Senate to “make him do it”?
Many clamor for the Dems to scuttle the filibuster in the Senate, however, given the likelihood that the Republicans will take control in the near future, once that safeguard (which can cut both ways) has been destroyed, the Republicans would be wielding an additional weapon to be used by the corporatists against the people. And anything the Dems could pass with a 50-vote majority now could be undone in January, or failing that, the funding would simply not be approved for implementation.
When the Republicans vote as a monolithic block, and are joined by the likes of Baucus, Tester, Conrad, Dorgan, Johnson, Nelson, Landreau, Lincoln, Pryor, Begich, McCaskill, Goodwin and Rockefeller, and don’t forget “Independent” Holy Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, you don’t have fifty votes, and even before Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts, every single Democrat, including those previously mentioned all had to agree to overturn a filibuster.
If I were a politician who truly wanted to be re-elected and not just be in office for one term, under the current system, I’d need to gain sufficient corporate financial support (and hopefully, not become any dirtier than necessary in the process) to have any hope of serving a second term.
There are very few exceptions to this rule, and those who are are too rare to make a difference. And, perhaps even more importantly, I’d need to carefully consider those who vote during each and every election, not just those who vote once in a generation, and when they don’t get as much as they want, disappear for another twenty years.