* Supported Joe Lieberman for President
* Supported the Iraq War
* Consistently supported the corporatizing of the Democratic Party
* Publishes the hate tracts of Marty Peretz
* Is wrong on everything

So it should come as no surprise that TNR opposes Occupy Wall Street. It’s main argument is along the lines of the traditional TNR argument, that some elements are just too radical, too left-wing for a mainstream liberal to be in favor of.

Much like Fox News’ opposition to Occupy Wall Street, this should be seen as a well-earned endorsement by the protest movement. TNR is almost always wrong on everything as an institution (they do have the occasional smart writer who breaks out of its DLC-neocon box, but that’s the exception to the norm).

The left, and specifically the Democratic Party, failed America when it adopted Republican-lite economic policy. The New Republic was one of the chief cheerleaders of that folly. Consider the source.

The people that caused our recent economic crisis and the economic disparity that preceded it are right out there on Wall Street. They are the 1% who have lorded over the rest of us for way too long. In America you ought to have a decent shot at moving up, and increasingly that avenue is being cut off. Their message may be varied, but I know many of those occupying Wall Street would like to see a return to the American dream. I’m all for that.

The other, less substantive reason I know that Occupy Wall Street is on the right path is due to the intensifying attacks from the right-wing cheerleaders who helped lead America to the brink. When Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Glenn Beck are pounding their fists — the opposing side is almost always in the right. The team that brought you the Iraq War, the Financial Crisis and the Lost Decade is not to be trusted.

If they’re against Occupy Wall Street, I’m for it.

You Want to Change the World? Dress with Some Fucking Dignity.
“Right here is some sincere guidance to US protesters: dress much better. I’m not kidding. You may possibly think you are paying homage to the peace-loving hippies, but the masses of America–the people whose help you’re going to need–fucking hate hippies. Take a lesson from the protesters of the 20s and 30s. Dress cleanly and neatly. Hell, wear a tie. Bear in mind, our great-grandparents have been the ones who effected true social change, e.g, the forty hour function week. Our pot-smoking mother and father failed in which our suit wearing excellent-grandparents succeeded.”–Some guy on Youtube

I present some pictures from the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protest:

Now, let us compare this to Civil Rights protesters in the 1960s, who actually accomplished something:

If you dress up like a dope-smoking hobo, expect to be treated like one and not be taken seriously. Get a haircut. Wear a nice shirt. Carry a sign with a message that makes some kind of sense to an average American.

It might work.

But first, let’s go back and look at what worked and what hasn’t worked.

There are, for my purposes here, three distinct progressive movements in the last century worth looking at that had long-term effects.

The Original Progressive Movement. This movement, at the turn of the century and extending into the 1920s has a huge legacy – including but not limited to worker’s rights, environmental conservation, and most importantly women’s suffrage.

The Civil Rights Movement. The most successful progressive movement of the last century, this changed the face of America and the world.

The Vietnam War Protest Movement. In my view, this is the most problematic movement. It was undoubtedly a mass movement, but I believe its legacy is one of more failure than success. The popular conception is that people massed against the war and it ended. In fact, the war raged on for years while the protesters continually upped the ante. It didn’t work. The war didn’t end until casualties began to mount.

The perceived success of the Vietnam War protest movement has, I believe, hobbled a lot of progressive movement in the 20th and 21st century. People believe the idea that you a mass of people will simply convince those in power to concede. This doesn’t work in America.
While mass protest movements are unusual in the Middle East and had success, they are – as currently constructed – practically useless in America where corporate clients can just as easily assemble a “protest” as Code Pink. To the average American, they are “priced in.” Someone is always protesting about something and no matter the inherent value, the impact is negligible.

The protest movement faced a test in the war on Iraq and it failed, miserably so. The protests against the war did not change public opinion; they did not create a threat for elected officials to be afraid of. The protests against the Iraq war were a failure.

I don’t believe all mass protests are a lost cause; they just have to work differently. The protests in Wisconsin got national attention because they were not rote and they involved organized labor. It isn’t an everyday occurrence for people to occupy a state capital. That said, they didn’t break the back of Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on labor. Conservatives got the laws they wanted on the books.

We have to throw away the idea that simply protesting – the simple act of “getting out into the streets” without a real message or plan of action — will effect change or should be the central organizing activity in a progressive outreach effort. It doesn’t work, it probably never really work, and it won’t work.

We need to go back to what worked, the early progressive movement and the civil rights movement, and refine what did work and combine it with 21st century persuasion and engagement techniques.

There has to be a core idea, most important of all. I think the left has failed at this, partly because liberalism has often gone with what I deride as the “cumbaya” approach: the idea that if everyone has input, ideas can be rolled up together into something that can be sold.

That doesn’t work. There is a reason why past progressive movements solidified around leaders with defined ideas and goals. You had Mother Jones organizing labor and against child labor. You had Martin Luther King arguing for passage of the civil rights act. You even had the President, Theodore Roosevelt, agitating against the trusts and in favor of federalizing massive tracts of land in order to protect them.

There are some current progressive campaigns that have their hearts in the right places, but insist on asking everyone for input and produce a laundry list without a core.

We need goals, and we need targeted measures of success. It isn’t about what “feels right” or “feels good” but rather “what is accomplished?”

There is also the idea about what it is to be a progressive. I think it means we believe in forward thinking solutions that make life better for the most possible people. I don’t think it means being opposed to profit or personal enrichment, nor do I believe it is solely about one’s pet causes.

For myself, a Progressive America means one in which everyone has a decent shot at the American dream, that we can enrich ourselves and our communities without engaging in practices that suppress others or harm the world around us.

This seems to me an idea – with possible modifications — that a political movement could coalesce around and enact as a litmus test for leaders on multiple levels. I believe the way to get there is to integrate what has worked in the past, and bury what didn’t work – despite a collective belief otherwise – while constantly adding on new technologies and techniques as their success is proven.

A football analogy.

You’re down by four points. You get the ball to the 50-yard line. There’s time for one more play. The way Obama has operated, you just take the knee. The justification is that the odds are against a hail mary pass and they could intercept it and run up the score. Plus, its only one game and not that big of a deal in the standings. He figures, based on the way you’re playing you could go 9-7 and qualify for a wild card spot in the playoffs.

What I and many others are arguing is this: Go for it. Try for the long bomb, try the pass that seems improbable. Sure, you could lose, but you could also win!

And when you go for it, you tell the fans and your team that you don’t quit, that even when you lose — you were trying to win big.

President Obama has repeatedly offered concessions to the right which have often resulted in the passage of important legislation. It has certainly advanced the ball down the field. But the touchdowns have been far too infrequent.

But we don’t have the votes for a progressive wonderland, comes the counterargument.

No kidding.

Right now on issues like taxation, America plays on GOP turf despite poll after poll saying Americans believe the rich should be paying more. Why? Because the right decided some time ago to be the anti-tax party. They passed legislation with no chance of success that cut taxes. They primaried Republicans that were insufficiently anti-tax. They elected Republicans at the county, state, and federal level that supported their core tax-cut ideology.

Then, after taking over the House, Senate, and the Presidency they were able to cow Democrats into passing tax cuts. What seemed to be tilting at windmills became the reality we deal with today.

So it isn’t that I expect President Obama to have been able to pass health care reform with a public option, or allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire, or pass a debt ceiling bill that actually raised some revenue. But I would like him to fight for those things. Progressive politics do not end with Barack Obama’s presidency. He’s part of a movement far larger than his 4-8 years in office.

If he wants to help create an atmosphere where the big, important issues can be addressed he has to stand up for the right solutions even when the cause is unlikely to win for the moment.

This is what Obama told me to my face when I met him in the White House:

“There are some core principles that I think are important for not just me to stick with but for the country to stick with. So if the Republicans say we need to cut our investments in education, at a time when we know that our success as a nation is largely going to depend on how well trained our workforce is, I’m going to say no. And there are going to be areas where, after working very hard, we just can’t find compromise and I’m going to be standing my ground, then essentially we debate it before the American people.”

I’m just asking him to live up to that.

It is a massive failure, not only of progressive politics, but of American politics. The legislation will hobble the economic recovery while hurting the poor and middle class. Anybody who believes in progress for America should loudly vote against this monstrosity.

Everybody should share the blame here.

The Republican Party, for its dogged dedication to policies that enrich the already rich at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Congressional Democrats, for being listless and directionless and spineless at practically every opportunity. Given the reigns of power by the American people, they dithered and dithered and watered legislation down. While in the majority, they allowed the GOP to wield far too much influence, while also making the party’s own conservative wing overly influential. Those choices helped lead to a loss of power in 2010, and even weaker leadership in 2011.

President Obama, who has now shown himself to be a terrible negotiator of epic proportions. With just the House, he gave the Republicans the least terrible of their demands. The right demanded no revenue and all-cuts, and Obama gave them just what they wanted. Sure, they would have rather had even deeper cuts — but Obama played the entire game on GOP territory.

I wish someone would show the President a thesaurus and explain that “capitulation” is not a synonym of “compromise.”

In 2010, Democrats ran on a platform of “the Republicans are worse” and as a result suffered at the midterm elections. You cannot run a strong campaign on that kind of message. People need a reason to vote for you, not just against the other guy.

Democrats have now compounded their 2010 problem. If the bill passes, a Democratic president, along with a Democratic senate, will be enshrining conservative policy as law. While overall it’s still better to have Democrats in power — the Democrats themselves have undercut progressive policy. That’s a crappy way to motivate your progressive base.

And again, besides the politics and the optics, the deal is just bad for America. It is wrong for our country. It hurts an already bleeding nation. And the Democrats helped.

In the past progressives like myself said we needed “more and better” Democrats, please. Now we truly realize that its far better to get better Democrats because a majority with a Democratic president simply unwilling to push forward and do the right thing clearly isn’t getting the job done.

This is a massive failure.

The problem with that is that increasingly the rewards are being limited to a few, yet more of us are taking on the risk. It simply isn’t sustainable.

We need a system that duplicates the best ideas from around the world for the safety net, in addition to a system that still has many of the rewards of traditional American capitalism. Right now we operate in a patchwork system that has effectively seized up. It isn’t going to all collapse overnight, but instead the gears are grinding against each other and production is slowly going down.

In some ways, it transcends party. From where I’m standing there seem to be two camps: The conservatives, who seek to protect the fortunes a few have been able to hoard from the system, and the establishment Democrats (including President Obama) who make changes but begin from a position of weakness. I’d rather Democrats (or, liberals) started out shooting for the moon, and it would make the eventual agreement seem like it at least began life without corrupting influence. Instead, Democrats/Liberals are so cowed by the way things are (and the media’s reinforcement of these ideas) that they begin with a slightly positive, yet bland product which eventually becomes even more watered down.

I think liberals have to stop settling for gruel.

Some unpolished thoughts/proposals:

1. Tax Code Reform This means a return to higher taxes for the ultra-wealthy. Somehow during the economic booms of the 1940s, 1980s, and 1990s, a higher tax rate for the very rich didn’t impede economic growth. Over the course of the Bush Recession, the ultra-rich have had historically low taxes, yet this hasn’t helped the broader economic picture at all. If we can raise needed revenue, and we know it won’t hurt growth, we should do it.

This also means an end to corporate loopholes, like offshore havens, and the elimination of loopholes that allow megacorporations to pay far less in taxes (as a percentage) than many of us.

2. Single Payer Health Care In America, you shouldn’t have to strike some sort of grand bargain in order to get decent health care. The Health Care Reform law was a great step forward, but there is much to be done here. There are also economic benefits to be gained — if we take the cost of health care off the business ledger, it provides safety and security for businesses.

3. Radical Education Reform The biggest danger to America’s leading role isn’t the military or the economy. If America wants to have a shot, let alone the human capital to lead the world, our entire education system must be torn down and reformed. This means overhauling school curriculums from coast to coast, employing and engaging the best and brightest to be educators. And it means throwing out ideas that fail to deliver a return on education for children. In this area, more than any other, we have to get rid of the sacred cows.

4. Energy We have to find an alternative to fossil-based fuel. We can’t just throw our hands up and say it’s too hard. It has to be done. We need to follow the path of the Apollo project or the Manhattan project and come up with a viable, environmental, cost-effective fuel source. And in the process, begin working with the technology we have now to create massive projects that pay off in the long term.

5. Civil Rights We have to always err on the side of freedom. America’s civil rights movements – women’s suffrage, minority rights, gay rights – have never been about “waiting” until your turn, or putting constitutionally guaranteed freedoms up to a popular vote (“Brown vs. Board Of Education” wouldn’t have passed a vote in many states, but the Supreme Court decided it correctly).

6. National Security We need to stop being the country that supports oppressive regimes out of a need for global stability and cheap oil. Being a trusted superpower gives us more power than a superpower everyone is skeptical and cynical about.

7. Real Regulation Industries cannot be trusted to voluntarily police themselves. It simply doesn’t work. Megabusiness will almost always find a way to collude and manipulate, putting their own profits far ahead of the well-being and health of their customers and communities.

I probably forgot something, but this is just a scratchpad for what I was thinking about.

Gray embodied the snark so many associate with the internet, a brand of unseriousness that causes the web to still not be taken seriously. This was best embodied in her admonition to Pfeiffer that “we” are “tired” of hearing about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Somehow I doubt the women whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation are tired of hearing about this civil rights extension.

There are a lot of serious issues that the White House deserves to be chided on. From capitulation on tax cuts and the way health care reform was handled, to its policies on Wall Street and unemployment.

But you don’t get there by being a jerk about it. I don’t believe that progressives should simply be a rubber stamp for a Democratic president, but at the same time can you imagine a Bush staffer going to CPAC and getting treated like a complete enemy?

Doubtful.

In America we have a two-party system of government. Progressives can either position themselves on the outside, carping about the injustice of it all without effecting any real change, or they can work within the more receptive of the two parties – the Democratic Party – and change it, and by extension America, from within.

The ideal way to do this is to push the party to do the right thing, and to shame them when they do wrong, but there’s a way to do that without being so drunk on snark you come across like a whiny child asking for justification as to why we can’t have ice cream for dinner.

While I don’t believe the cancers on the progressive movement represent a majority opinion either within the Democratic Party or on the left in America, their voices get amplified at unfortunate encounters like this.

Things like this are why I often can’t stand liberals. Or, to be more precise, a very narrow, tiny sliver of liberalism that always has its head up its own rear. Since the killing of Bin Laden has been revealed, there have been two ridiculous reactions to it from people on that shelf of ice floating way off the coast of mainstream liberalism in America.

First, the bedwetting over whether we had the right to kill Bin Laden, as detailed in this article. Of course we did. Bin Laden was an international criminal, wanted for crimes against multiple states (the US for 9/11, England for 7/7 and Kenya for the embassy bombings). This isn’t the kind of man you just let go. You find him, you kill him. This is black and white morality 101.

Secondly, should we rejoice at his death? Yes. A million times yes. This is the man directly responsible for the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. 2,977 innocent lives were lost. In addition, Americans lost a sense of security that we’ve had, the idea that our two oceans could protect us. It wasn’t a loss of innocence, but it was something taken away from our collective psyche.

When the man directly responsible for this is killed, it is a moment to rejoice. The serially stupid David Sirota, writing in Salon, compared this to those who cheered on the September 11 terrorists (unsurprisingly, Glenn Greenwald similarly spent a whole lot of overwritten paragraphs expressing a similar sentiment). In addition to just blatantly whoring for traffic, Sirota’s moral equivalence smells to high heaven. Those people were cheering on the killing of innocent people. Sunday night, Americans were celebrating a mass murderer’s moment with justice. The two are not remotely equivalent. Not even close.

This has been another edition of “that was stupid, quit it” with Oliver Willis.

The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of ‘guerrilla warfare and sabotage’ aimed at the Fox News Channel.

The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the ‘nerve center’ of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.

I don’t know if I would describe the rows as “neat,” but I digress.

You can also check out the numerous conservative blogs here explaining just how irrelevant Media Matters is. Think about it.

On the pages of the right’s house organ, the Wall Street Journal no less:

As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans’ 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future. Liberalism R.I.P.

Remember this obituary for liberalism when Obama is re-elected, and/or Dems have majorities in the House and the Senate again before the decade is out.

Anyone who writes off either of the 2 major political movements/parties after watching the events of the past 25 years is a hell of a fool.

FLASHBACK: The Death Of Liberalism 74+ Years And Counting

It may shock you, but Sean is right. Sort of. You see, the nations cited by Hannity are all making austerity cuts of various types.

BUT.

Those states all have something we don’t have here in America: A wide and far reaching social welfare state. We have a patchwork quilt here in America, but outside of the extremes of society we don’t have things like the NHS here in America.

So while the cuts are causing chaos in some European countries, they’re mostly not going to radically alter the European social welfare state. For goodness sake, France is upset the retirement age is rising to… 62 (from 60). By comparison the retirement age in the USA is 66. And again, our social welfare state is paltry compared to France’s.

So, Sean Hannity is right. We should follow in the footsteps of Europe. We should have a well-designed social welfare system that allows us to take the costs off of business to unlock capitalism. Then, we can have similar austerity measures to our European friends.

Of course, this isn’t want Hannity thinks. He thinks we have something comparable to a European social welfare state because it says so right here on the GOP talking points.

According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 22 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday. Notable losses included Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), the coalition’s co-chair for administration, and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), the co-chair for policy. Two members were running for higher office (both lost), four were retiring and three races were still too close to call.

The Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House, have consistently frustrated their more progressive colleagues and activists within the party, especially during the health care debate. Blue Dog members pushed to limit the scope and the cost of the legislation and resisted some of the mandates of the bill. Last summer, seven of the eight Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee even threatened to block health care reform unless it met their cost requirements.

Media Matters, the liberal activist group that wages a rhetorical war against Fox News Channel and others in the conservative press, will announce today that it has received a $1 million donation from the philanthropist George Soros.

In a statement obtained by The Caucus, the organization says it plans to use the money to intensify its efforts to hold the Fox host Glenn Beck and others on the cable news channel accountable for their statements.

“Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 G.O.P. attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends,” according to the group’s statement, which will be released this afternoon.

In an accompanying statement, Mr. Soros, a billionaire who has a history of supporting liberal politicians and causes, accused Fox News hosts of “incendiary rhetoric” and said he hoped that his money would be used “in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”

Yes, that is a poll from 1936, which turned out like this:

So, right before the most sweeping, liberal presidency we’ve probably ever seen in America, “conservative” outpolled “liberal.”

In June, Wall Street short-seller Steve Eisman, who was made famous by Michael Lewis’ book about the financial crisis, The Big Short, testified about the rule in front of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee. ‘I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry,’ Eisman said. ‘I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.’ He argued that students will default on up to $275 billion in loans during the next 10 years.

Matzzie, a veteran progressive activist with experience at both MoveOn and the AFL-CIO, pounced on Eisman’s testimony. Despite his reputation as a bold progressive who goes for the corporate jugular, Matzzie wrote an op-ed attacking Eisman’s testimony against for-profit schools. The op-ed deployed talking points similar to those used by former Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis in a defense of the industry the day before. Both claimed that Eisman should not be allowed to testify because, as a short-seller, he stood to profit if the price of stock in private colleges dropped — the likely result of the new regulations.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), another prominent watchdog that normally focuses on the unsavory relationships between members of Congress and their funders, also joined the attack, filing a complaint with the Senate HELP Committee criticizing Eisman’s testimony — the first time the organization has intervened in a policy dispute like this.

CREW concedes that it did not consult any experts about short-sellers’ role in the financial system, nor did it look at Eisman’s track record; the complaint merely cited Davis’ op-ed and a Politico article that quoted Matzzie and the head of the for-profit schools’ front group, The Career Colleges Association. Sloan, CREW’s director, would make the same argument in The Huffington Post, suggesting that the new regulations would benefit financial speculators more than students. She, like Matzzie and Davis, did not mention that another person with a financial conflict of interest — Sharon Thomas Parrot of DeVry University (a for-profit school) — testified that same day.

From an interview with Frances Fox Piven:

JGP. What do you think is behind this and other right-wing attacks on your work and attempts to link it to the economic strategy of the Obama administration?

FFP. This is the aspect that isn’t funny. Quite simply, they are telling a story that, riddled with wild errors though it may be, makes a kind of sense to many people. It makes sense because it creates a palpable villain and a narrative about what the villain did to cause changes in the US that discomfit many Americans.

JGP. You and Richard Cloward wrote an article for The Nation in 1966 titled ‘A Strategy to End Poverty’2 which has become, as Peter Dreier notes, the ‘centerpiece of a right-wing conspiracy theory.’3 Could you describe what you were trying to do in that article in the context of the struggles of the 1960s? How have the arguments and claims in that article been characterized and put to work in contemporary right-wing demonology?

FFP. The article proposed a campaign to enroll eligible people in the welfare program. We knew from our work with Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side in New York City that the welfare department was turning many eligible people away, sometimes giving them bus tickets to go back south. We also knew from our research that this was a widespread practice, with the consequence that less than half of those who were eligible for welfare benefits were receiving them. So we tried to think through the consequences of a campaign for full coverage, including the fiscal and political troubles it would cause in the cities, and the policy responses of a Democratic federal government that depended on its big city base, including the increasingly militant poor minorities in its urban base. We thought there was a good chance that such a welfare ‘crisis’ would prompt a Democratic administration to federalize the program, and improve it. In fact some of the categorical assistance programs were federalized with the creation of the Supplemental Security Income program in 1974. Moreover, there was no downside to the strategy because along the way desperately poor people got welfare, food stamp and Medicaid benefits. But this was a considerably more modest strategy for reform than Glenn Beck and his ilk perceive.”

It’s also worth noting that a Breitbart foot soldier – Kyle Olson – went to Piven’s house and interviewed her, pretending he was working on a report for school but was actually working for one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites.

There’s really nothing politically to be gained from seriously tampering with social security. If you want any evidence of that, just ask George W. Bush how his plan to privatize the system with the capital he earned upon re-election worked out. And that was from a Republican president, pre-disposed to dislike the social security system despite its success and popularity.

Does the system need repair? Sure. The best solution I can think of is to simply raise the caps on the income threshold from which social security is derived (currently $106,000). My guess is the eventual changes Obama makes to the system will probably be along these lines.

But the larger issue is liberals who just assume Obama is going to do the worst thing possible here. I certainly don’t think the president is uber-perfect, but I think he pushes what he thinks is right and do-able. I prefer to not condemn him for what I think he might do and rather, oppose something if I really do think his policy prescription is wrong-headed.

There are legitimate problems with some of the things Obama has done, but there is a small but vocal bunch who simply expected the worst from before he was ever sworn in. For whatever reason. Give me a break.

Quit adopting conservative ideas. Again, this is easiest the biggest failing by President Obama over his presidency to date: giving ground to conservative ideas in the futile hope that they care more about helping America than the fortunes of the Republican party. This is an epic pipe dream.

I was in favor of Obama in large part because I think he did and does have the temperament necessary to bring America together, but conceding to a failed political movement like conservatism on important issues won’t accomplish that goal.