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by Christopher Blair, PHIMG.org
The Democratic party hacks -- from top tomato Rahm Emmanuel, down to "good Democrat" Sherrod Brown -- all know that the Senate health care bill is garbage. But no matter. Message will save the day. They already are speaking with one voice -"this is a good bill", "it's not a mansion but it's a house we can build on." They are going to "capitulate the propaganda" until low information voters buy it, hook line and sinker.
But as Howard Dean, Wendell Potter, and PNHP have all pointed out, the senate bill is nothing more than an expensive giveaway to big insurance. Beyond that, it is a huge f**k you to the Progressive base. Progressives - you know them - they are the people who helped Obama win the Democratic nomination and got him elected President. This is part of Rahm Emmanuel's "f**k the base" strategy for 2010 - water down the bill at the behest of industry, but do it in a way that really spits in the eyes of Progressives, and then blame them for the predictable negative electoral outcomes. We've seen this play out before. Soon enough history will repeat itself and anonymous high ranking White House officials will be quoted in the press blasting the damned "progressive purists" for the Midterm losses.
This is the modus operandi of the conservative DLC - a political machine no less fearsome than Tammany Hall, that has been in control the Democratic party nationally for decades. For the DLC it's never about good policy or the public interest, it is not even about electoral results. The goal is to abuse the progressive base so much that they give up any remaining control they have in the party and run off to the welcoming arms of hopeless third party candidates.
In summation, it's Clinton all over again. Maybe now is a good time for progressive Democrats to apologize to their annoying Nader "Progressive purist" friends.
In the single payer movement, we know the truth about all of this, even the fact that the DLC has deep roots in the big progressive sounding unions and leftists groups. We must spread this truth far and wide as an act of "tough love" towards the Democratic party.
We need to target low-information Generation Obama types. To wake them up, and to get them to realize as soon as possible the inconvenient truth -- they may have voted for a "Hope" and "Change" Obama but the White House is controlled by the DLC Rahm Emmanuel. It's Clinton 2.0 - a presidential administration that leaves big business stronger, Progressives fuming, and the middle class left out in the cold.
Need proof? Despite all the Internet $10 and $15 dollar donations from his groupies (myself included), the Obama campaign gobbled up corporate and Wall Street street money with gusto especially early on when he was a nobody. DLC luminaries like Rahm's Emanuel's and Terry McLauliff were pioneers in getting the Democratic Party addicted to mainlining corporate cash. If you want to know who these guys are playing for, all you need to do is follow the money.
Sometimes you need a purism tests. There are some lines a party must not cross. Paul Wellstone taught us what a legitimate purity test for the people's party should look like. It means not a dollar of corporate cash. Not from PACS and not from individual executives.
Beyond the power of money in politics, the very structure of our two-party political system was engineered to give the elite ultimate control. Since the Progressive (third-party) scare, the elite have used the power of the two major parties to eliminate any party not under thier control. One of the two parties can co-opt the agenda of the emerging third party. If that is not possible then use your control of the media. A third party candidate that fails the billionaire test is ignored by the media unless being marginalize in a coordinated fashion.
Third party candidates are now prohibited by the two major parties from participating in debates. This is why I hope that Ralph Nader runs in the Democratic primary (where he can not be excluded from debate). He doesn't have a chance at the nomination, but if he runs in the primary, a la Mike Gravel, he will be on TV and can explain very plainly to the American people that Big Money owns the Democratic Party and We the People must steal it back.
The elite who pull Obama's strings are executing a plan to create a Democratic version of Reagan and forever transform the Democratic Party into the party of compassionate conservatism. But in my eyes, Obama is now a lame duck president. His handlers so botched the healthcare reform bill that he has been exposed, he's damaged goods and I think he could be replaced.
How could they have made such a huge mistake? Because they are arrogant, but most of all they failed to understand the impact of the Internet on American politics.
Rahm and the rest of the DLC elite do not enjoy the media monopoly they once had. They are no longer unopposed in their efforts to craft the conventional wisdom via their million-dollar elite opinion "journalists". Nobody reads the New Republic in 2009, we read Democratic Underground and Fire Dog Lake, and countless other non-corporate independent opinion makers.
The DLC mistakenly think it will take 8 or more years for the cult of personality haze that surrounds Obama to fade as it took took with Clinton. But politics does not develop as it did in the late 1990s, on a 24-hour news cycle created by FOX News and CNN. Disillusionment now happens on Internet time.
Every Democrat that I talk to about politics now falls into one of three camps. The first camp is so frazzled and stressed out that they are burying their head in the sand, avoiding politics broadly, to protect their view of Obama as the White Knight. The second camp are hacks with partisan derangement syndrome who blindly repeat what the Dem electeds are saying on the boob tube. Then there is the majority -- people coming around to the fact that the Obama administration is Clinton 2.0, especially in the sense that every opportunity to piss on the base is seized upon with glee.
Politics in the internet age is an information war, and luckily for us all, it is an asymmetrical war that Progressives are fighting with increasing success. Long banished from the corporate media stage, traditional progressive values are spreading like wildfire on the internet. The internet is David's slingshot. The genie is out of the bottle and the elite are taking the threat with utmost seriousness.
Obama is evidence of this. The elite went out and found an anti-war Progressive to groom as the "the spare" because they worried that Clinton could not win, and feared a new Dean-style insurgency. A lot of us had, I'll say it, HOPE that Obama was going to be a Dean-like candidate, which is to say independent from the DLC machine. Sadly we were mistaken. Obama is nothing more then a big phony. Worst than that he's not even really President.
No I'm not a "birther", I just feel deeply in my gut that Rahm is Obama's Cheney and pulls the strings. Our success lies in drawing back the curtain to expose the machine that groomed Obama and who marches him ever rightward, soon enough right off the cliff of electoral failure.
This is a very dark view of American politics. Despite this, I have never been more optimistic that REAL CHANGE is around the corner. The conventional wisdom says that a sitting President can not be beaten in the primary. This will be challenged, and history must show that the conventional wisdom was bunk. The stakes are too great right now -- we must take our country back.
Medicare for All is STEP ONE, and insurance companies, and the banksters, and the economic royalists all know it. We must all find a way today, tomorrow, over the weekend to individually and collectively propel the popular "Medicare for All" movement into a force that the elite must reckon with.
We must also ensure that we run a viable Medicare for All candidate in the 2012 primary, beyond just Kucinich and Nader. Someone who can speak frankly about the DLC cancer. It corrupted the Democratic party beyond recognition and it prevents the enactment of Medicare for All. Medicare for All will unleash the Progressive flood gates. Onward to victory!
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