One thing that’s been true since I’ve been paying attention is that everything The Left does is wrong. By The Left I mean everyone to the left of the basic governing power. Third Parties are bad, sitting out elections are bad, putting pressure on elected reps is bad, protesting is bad, primary campaigns are bad, media criticism might hurt their feefees and is bad, saying mean things about Rush Limbaugh is bad, actually discussing your views honestly is bad, etc. Obviously the failure of The Left to take control and run the country does suggest that it is doing something wrong, but no one ever really offers much constructive advice other than…please STFU.

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

That’s really the only relevant question: how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable — as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still? How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?

The answer, unfortunately, is probably this: a lot longer. And one primary reason is that our media-shaped political discourse is so alternatively distracted and distorted that even shining light on all of this matters little.

Start with his decision to tap Senator Judd Gregg as his new Secretary of Commerce, a guy who voted to abolish the Commerce Department back when Clinton was President.

So, Judd Gregg will become Commerce Secretary, and a Republican will keep Gregg’s seat in the Senate. Gregg’s lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00, and 6.91 “when the chips are down,” should make him a much needed right-wing champion for the Commerce Department. Gregg should also be a useful voice during cabinet meetings, making sure that President Obama and the other radical liberals there don’t over-reach.

Then there’s the stimulus bill, where, despite Obama’s willingness to give the Republicans all sorts of concessions, there apparently still aren’t enough votes to get it through the Senate. The likely solution? More concessions, because that’s the bipartisan way.

If that comes out of spending and not tax cuts – and since Republicans and moderate Democrats are driving the boat on this one I assume it will – then the bill will be completely unable to accomplish its goals on job creation. It may provide a temporary boost, but won’t do what’s needed to stop the bleeding. The recession will continue for years and maybe slip into depression.

Lastly, there’s news that Obama and his administration are working on a bailout plan that will attempt to keep the shambling corpses of the big banks moving around for a while longer by letting the taxpayers guarantee huge amounts of toxic paper. No pesky nationalization for him, despite the many studies that show that’s the way most likely to actually work.

The Obama Administration, if the Washington Post’s latest report is accurate, is about to embark on a hugely expensive “save the banking industry at all costs” experiment that:

1. Has nothing substantive in common with any of the “deemed as successful” financial crisis programs

2. Has key elements that studies of financial crises have recommended against

3. Consumes considerable resources, thus competing with other, in many cases better, uses of fiscal firepower.

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was. We have no new thinking, no willingness to take measures that are completely defensible (in fact not doing them takes some creative positioning) like wiping out shareholders at obviously dud banks (Citi is top of the list), forcing bondholder haircuts and/or equity swaps, replacing management, writing off and/or restructuring bad loans, and deciding whether and how to reorganize and restructure the company. Instead, the banks are now getting the AIG treatment: every demand is being met, no tough questions asked, no probing of the accounts (or more important, the accounting).

Oh, wait, there were also the newly-announced executive compensation restrictions, which couldn’t be more obvious an attempt to appease the proles even as billions more of their dollars are spent trying to save zombie banks.

I was hardly expecting Obama to govern from the left, given the fact that he’s a center-right technocrat and all, but this is getting ridiculous and it’s only February.

The stimulus package just passed the House, with the billions in corporate tax cuts, without the money to re-sod the National Mall, without the money for family planning for poor people, and without one Republican vote. Without one. Final vote was 244-188 as 11 “Democrats” crossed over.

It’s the exact same result Obama (and Pelosi) could have gotten by pushing a better bill through without any concessions at all.

As the Rude Pundit put it:

We don’t know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it’s gonna go, and if you’ve paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they’re gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama has done good work so far when he’s been able to do things directly, like starting the process of closing Guantanamo, lifting the gag rule, and reviewing the idea of letting states set emissions standards that are tougher than the federal governmen’s. Apparently though, everything he learned about how to play things in Congress he learned from the same Democrats who failed to get much done for the past two years. Here’s hoping this episode teaches Obama that the Republicans have no interest in compromising, no matter how much the new President wants this to magically be a post-partisan world. He should do what’s right, rather than responding to Republican hissy fits with concessions.

Andrew’s argument here is the one that Obama loyalists generally are making:    yes, what Obama is doing might appear to be exactly the same as what Democrats have been doing since forever — the accommodationist embrace of the Right, the effort to establish centrist credentials by scorning the Left, running away from cultural issues for fear of being depicted as amoral radicals, surrounding oneself with establishment and conservative figures, etc. etc. (Bill Clinton also had a Republican Defense Secretary).  Yes, that may look exactly like what the capitulating Bush-era Democrats and the triangulating Bill “the Third Way!” Clinton spent years and years and years doing.

But this time, say Obama supporters, everything will be different.  This time, it’s all being done for different — for more noble — purposes.  When Obama does it, it’s not merely a cynical political calculation the way it was when Dick Morris in the 1990s and Rahm Emanuel this decade did it.  Instead, in Obama’s hands, it’s a master strategy for bringing the country together and transforming politics — all to enable Obama to fulfill his authentically-issued promises and achieve his progressive goals.

As I said, it’s certainly possible that will be true — like many people, I hope it is — but I would also hope, particularly in light of how familiar this strategizing seems, that people will demand some actual proof before believing in such lavish claims of transformative and transcendent change.  People are suspicious of this sort of Democratic maneuvering precisely because they’ve seen it so many times in the past and know how it ends.  It seems perfectly rational not to trust it until there is evidence that warrants that trust.

I, too, have some hope that what Obama seems to be intending to do is indeed going to be transformative, but until there’s actual proof, I remain cynical. In light of some of the incoming administration’s recent moves, various statements from the Senate Republicans, and the way the traditional media seems to want to turn the Blagojevich scandal into Obama’s very own Whitewater, I’m finding it hard to believe that it can work, no matter how hard Obama might like it to be otherwise.

I’m not voting for Obama because I agree with all of his positions on the issues, or because I believe he is truly a progressive candidate, or because I’ve become part of his sometimes disturbing cult of personality. I’m voting for him because he’s not John McCain, a man who apparently wants to do everything G.W. Bush has done, only moreso. Since I’m going down to my local polling station to vote for my Congressman and vote against Connecticut ballot question 1, I’ve decided that I may as well do my part to push up the popular vote for Obama. If he’s elected to office with a landslide victory, and with both the House and the Senate even more firmly in the hands of his fellow Democrats, maybe the next four years will prove once and for all whether or not the Democrats are really capable of keeping even the modest promises they make to the American voters. The pathetic performance by the Democratically controlled Congress over the last two years leads me to believe that the answer will be that they aren’t, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Oh, wait, no, my mistake, you made this speech, in which you said the current bill isn’t perfect, but you’re going to vote for it anyway, and maybe someday down the road you’ll work to make sure this bailout for Wall Street doesn’t screw over everyone else in the country.

I think everyone who reads this blog who’s American, first thing on Monday morning, needs to call their Representatives and Senators and say: No. Blank. Checks. For. Crooks.

The current bailout plan, as presented, is a farce. Does something need to be done to keep the current financial system from collapsing under the weight of the failed gambles of the ridiculously greedy financial titans? Probably, yes. You can read more about how we got to this point here (the key phrase is “Gramm-Leach-Bliley”).

That doesn’t mean that the Bush plan is the right plan. In fact, if the events of the last 7+ years have taught us anything, it’s that any plan invented by the Bush administration is almost certainly the wrong plan. As the details of the bailout are released, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current plan is exceedingly flawed. As Paul Krugman says:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

Calculated Risk notes:

We definitely do not want the Treasury to buy RMBS and CDOs at anywhere near the value on the bank’s books. Buying at those prices would help keep the banks lending, but it would also severely impact the taxpayers, it would be a transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and it would also encourage future excessive risk taking.

The bailout plan as currently written would apparently have the government taking on the financial institution’s bad bets (what Atrios refers to as “The Big Shitpile”) at the ridiculously inflated values currently on their spreadsheets, which is nowhere near any sort of fair market value. And it’s now looking like the Treasury would be covering bad bets made up through this past Wednesday (long after it was apparent that the house of cards was collapsing) and possibly those made by foreign banks and even foreign governments.

Glenn sums it all up pretty well (as he so often does):

I don’t pretend to know anywhere near enough — in terms of either raw information or expertise — in order to opine on the necessity or lack thereof of The Latest Plan in terms of whether the alternatives are worse. But what I do know is that an injustice so grave and extreme that it defies words is taking place; that the greatest beneficiaries are those who are most culpable; and that the same hopelessly broken and deeply rotted institutions and elite class that gave rise to all of this (and so much more) are the very ones that are — yet again — being blindly entrusted to solve this.

He also explains why, once again, the Democratic leadership in Congress is more than likely to prove that they are either willfully complicit in the worst of the Bush administration’s crimes or are simply a bunch of little sheep that will barely even bleat when the Republicans push them around. I recommend that you read the entire post for Glenn’s insight into the whole mess.

William Greider adds this:

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

As much as I would love to see a major transformation in American politics, bailing out the rich at the expense of everyone else seems like a bad way to get there, so any help the Democrats can get at maybe stiffening their spines is a welcome thing.

I actually think that an Obama victory would be substantially better than any of the other main candidates. I do think his antiwar position on Iraq is important, even if I’m not convinced that he is a principled ‘antiwar’ candidate – one recalls his statements on Iran before the NIE, and notes his various pro-Israel statements, which are kind of obligatory. And actually, yes, of course it does matter that he is the only black candidate and the first one to have had a serious chance of winning. It counts, even if it doesn’t count for all that much. And it counts that he isn’t an outright neocon, whereas I think the neoconservative faction would actually do very well under both McCain and Clinton, who are the two other serious candidates. His campaign seems to be promising, though he will not deliver, an end to the nightmare. I personally hope Nader’s campaign does something more than implode on the first few steps – if nothing else because by raising a serious radical campaign, it will drive the agenda further to the Left. If Democrats want to whinge about this, as they can always be relied upon to do, they have to be able to make a case to would-be Nader voters why should not vote for a radical left-wing campaign, and it should be something better than ‘you’re ruining it!’ But Obama, while he doesn’t differ on a lot of principle with Clinton and McCain, is different enough that it matters.

Which is sort of the whole thing in a nutshell. I would prefer a candidate whose actual positions were further (a lot further) to the left, but when the other choices are Hillary Clinton and John McCain, it’s really no choice at all. Plus Obama is definitely a better candidate than either Kerry or Gore (2000 version) were.