I mean, they wanted to keep destroying the environment whilst chanting “drill, baby, drill”, give the finger to labor, escalate wars, keep suspects locked away in Guantanamo, stay in Iraq, use government to help business at the expense of its citizens, and enforce discrimination against gays. You have to keep voting for the Democrats to avoid that shit, am I right guys?
If you’re a Democratic apologist who hates the idea of voting for a third party as part of a longterm strategy to make actual reforms that benefit people instead of business, I would hope that Obama’s current track record is really making you second guess this opinion. The common argument is that, ‘sure, the Democrats aren’t great, but the Republicans are much worse! Not voting Democrat only empowers the GOP.’ But no, the Democrats are doing a good enough job of empowering the GOP themselves:
- We have news today that President Obama has reversed a ban on oil drilling off U.S. shores that, when trying to become president, he was thoroughly against. A procedure that was embodied in Sarah Palin’s exclamation, “Drill, Baby, Drill!”
- Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced this morning that “Cap and Trade” is dead and that future climate legislation will no longer use this concept. If Healthcare Reform is any indication, it will be crafted in such a way to empower polluting industries.
- Obama’s Department of Justice continues to defend the legitimacy of DADT, despite the President’s enthusiasm for speaking out against it. A policy that he loves to speak out against and could end with the flick of his pen, remains in use and is defended and enforced by his administration.
That’s just this week alone. We are sending tens of thousands of more troops to fight a needless unjust war in Afghanistan, our “exit strategy” in Iraq is Orwellian doublethink, we kill hundreds of civilians in a not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan, the EFCA is dead in the water, Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp remains open, and in 2014 we’ll all be mandated customers of private insurance companies. Ask yourselves, progressive Democrats, what are you getting out of this arrangement? You say that Republicans would be worse, but Obama is doing everything he can to enact McCain’s campaign promises and empower GOP ideas.
Since around the summer of 2008, a group of angry people who have currently coalesced under the banner of the Tea Party have been using every opportunity to obstruct much needed progress in our country. They march under demands and vague calls for smaller government, for “real” Americans to “take back” America, a rollback of every aspect of the welfare state, and lower taxes. They endorse mythical conspiracies about Obama’s birth place, his religion, czars, his supposed role in biblical prophesy, “big government”, and a series of other bogeymen they’ve been told to be very scared of.
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A few of the books I’ve read lately have made me wonder how existing power structures could be altered to allow for a more democratic society. True, a lot of the changes our world requires to truly realize democracy can’t be implemented within these structures as they now exist because they are designed to defeat change and enforce the status quo of inequality. But for fun’s sake, things like reality are easily brushed aside. Let’s fix the United Nations.
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Yesterday, despite multiple campaigns to have actual public opinion legislated with regards to healthcare, Washington ultimately decided that our country needs to reward to the private insurance industry that has so ruthlessly broken our health system with a mandate for all Americans to purchase insurance. Uninsured Americans will be criminalized with punitive fines of about 2% of their wages and we will have to start paying for a product that many of us will not be able to afford to use. Let’s be honest about this, this is a tax paid to private corporations who only received this prize because of how badly they have handled their position this far.
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One of the many communities to support candidate Obama only to be left disappointed with their victory is the LGBT community. The community by and large was willing to look aside as he ironically supported the separate but equal notion of “civil unions” over full marriage equality but cheered his declaration that the time was long overdue for a repeal of the discriminatory practice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military. We’ve seen President Obama largely ignore this pledge only to trot it out conveniently with the caveat that Americans just need to wait a little longer.
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When I go on vacation, as I did last week, a curious tradition I have is to always bring a book by Professor Richard Dawkins with me. This time it was Climbing Mount Improbable. I have long enjoyed Dawkins’ elegant and easily accessible approach to the science of darwinian evolution and his prose often make me find a deeper appreciation for the new environments I find myself surrounded by while traveling. The ease with which he marries common ideas and presents them from an evolutionary perspective makes me wonder why Americans have such a hard time understanding this very simple, yet monumentally important concept.
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A recent article on SocialistWorker.org lays out an interesting case for why recent attempts to revive the public option in healthcare reform are misguided and not a strategy progressives should pursue. In the article Dr. Andy Coates of Physicians for a National Health Program argues that by immediately surrendering the single-payer strategy of reforming healthcare that the progressive agenda was lost. So called public options have become so weak and watered down that they are almost assuredly going to fail and discredit progressive reforms in the future. When liberals marched to the chant of “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good” they seemed to disregard any blows to the public option as long as the name still applied. Creating another layer of bureaucracy instead of cleaning house and making a single system for healthcare has gone contrary to what we were fighting for in the first place. Dr. Coates sums it up well in his article when he says:
It is time to let go. All along, adding a feeble public insurance plan to the insurance market has been a lame and withering excuse to support “insurance reform” that will criminalize the uninsured, divert billions of tax dollars to subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums and protect pharmaceutical industry super-profits.
I know that I watched this “reform” effort so closely that I got lost in the emotions of it and couldn’t see how lost it’s become. In the wake of last week’s summit, it really is time to let go.
