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Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama

de Eric Alterman

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Alterman asks why President Obama has been unable to deliver on the promise of the 2008 campaign. He argues that while Obama's compromises have disappointed many of his supporters, his failure is primarily due to a political system that stymies democracy when voters choose progressive change.
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definitely a book to read if you are looking for insight into our 21st c. politics. key points: foundations of democracy are being threatened by manipulated information, no unbiased sources for news, disengagement by the public. nothing simple, no one wishing to sort through complicated. change will take more than one person, one politician, one president.
  splinfo | Jun 30, 2011 |
Kabuki Democracy - more to see behind the painted screens

This book is a must read for everyone. We all need to know the details of the rigging of this system we are told everyday is a democracy. We need to memorize these details so we spot them tomorrow in action, and so we stop blaming Obama for not getting done the work we thought we put him there to do.

Alterman sees the phenomenon exceptionally well. He explains why this government can move forward to cut taxes on the rich, spend ever increasing borrowed money on war contractors, and declare war on little countries under any pretense on any side of the world. That agenda is freely advanced, while progress for the Middle Class and working families is routinely and mysteriously thwarted despite Super Majorities in Congress and our man finally in the White House. His view is from the very center of an elaborate chessboard that's been constructed over decades to block legislation before the cameras and our very eyes. He sees every move into the distance up and down the rows and on the diagonals.

The details of the various systems are all things we all need to know to see through this fog of class warfare: senate rules to avoid having a Bill in the first place. Then there are the pinch hits, the last minute additions and deletions that escape press detection sneaked in to gut the Bill's intent. If that has to fail for the cameras, exemptions are the consolation prize. Enforcement is anyway a non-starter since by now for a few decades regulatory agencies have been stacked with "kill the beast" appointees converted into permanent government employees. Agency rules can be suspended anyway by small separate bills nobody notices or has to talk about. The details are myriad and extend as far as the eye can see up and down the chessboard in every direction. I'll leave the rest of the best for the reader to discover.

We need to talk more about the conditions that give rise to this phenomenon, however, while giving him five stars for focusing the conversation. He speaks about the power of culture to seduce and blind. Just like the personal writings of enlightenment thinkers Capernicus or Spinoza are riddled with metaphors for sin and god, desperately searching for words to reach out of the linguistic fog of their times, Alterman's own scrupulous and dutiful "inside progressive media" knowledge doesn't allow him to see behind the painted screens on the sidelines of the kabuki stage. He mentions David Koch and the Koch Brothers as behind so much of the nasty deception. He cites Buckley vs Valeo which most neglect as the quantum attractor factor in all this mess even though that ruling enabled in the first place all this deception of voters, taxpayers, property owners, and retirement savers starting in the 1970s. Most of his peers leave that detail out despite their ad nauseum writings and railings about deception and its results across the heartland all the time.

Beginning to peer behind the painted screens, he cites the TWO taxpayers behind "Concerned Taxpayers of America", and the ONE behind "Taxpayers Against Earmarks". He cites these same types behind Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, American Crossroads, American Action Network, etc. in their game to dominate the political debate "with the demands of the exclusively super-rich". He cites the complicity of the Supreme Court in all of this duplicity since Burger, Rehnquist, Stevens, and Roberts despite Marbury vs Madison and their obligation to overturn anything disproportionate and imbalanced passed by congress that prevents all of us from protecting equally our property against the whims of these Tax-Cutters and Bubble Makers (who do always profit in both cases!). But, isn't Buckley vs Valeo and all these other chessboard moves invented and put in place since the 1970s simply a new rigging to preserve the long-held grip by these families or their predecessors over America that was slipping after the labor movement against FDR (over which he caved but gave them WWI war ships in Pearl Harbor and provocations against Japan) and the Civil Rights movement against Johnston (over which he caved and gave them more Vietnam, but anyway paid with one term)? Somehow an argument about protecting property rights from the capricious redistributing whims of a labor union unified mass democracy merited this ruling in this case brought for his social class by WF Buckley now known as "money as speech".* The minds of dynastic litigators can come up with this stuff. Now they have Roberts!

"When 'free-market' Republicans vote to support milk subsidies or sugar tariffs, or when 'pro-consumer' Democrats vote to exempt used car dealers from consumer financial protection legislation, it is easy to understand the mistrust and hard to believe that the influence of money hasn't weakened the ability of members to serve the principles, or even the interests, they were elected to represent."

What else is hard to believe here? Other writers who study declassified State Department and CIA papers call this phenomenon Alterman so well begins to deconstruct 'permanent government': an assortment of banking, academic, and clandestine alphabet agency operatives working the revolving agency doors in plain view on the chessboard squares no matter which party is "in power", and behind the scenes in clandestine operations to advance the interests of this small group of hidden super-rich. They are always in place to make their moves once all the front of screen Kabuki theater chessboard moves have been exhausted.

Anyone with any knowledge of any of these families and their money can see that sanctions against Cuba are now clearly linked to New York and New England banking interests who owned sugar plantations in that country for 300 years. Add to them expatriated dynastic land-owning Cuban families, who were always their peers and collaborators, perhaps suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome common in colonized countries. The sanctions against Iran are clearly linked to the losses of Rockefeller Chase Bank interests, designed as sanctions are, to undermine the 'respectable elements' and push an economically degraded and desperate populace of common people toward a belligerent reactionary right-wing with which we and our other puppet allies can more easily pick fights for the cameras, and for more right-wing votes here and everywhere. Add to that the money and property interests of powerful collaborator Iranians now expatriated across the USA. They are playing on all our post Powell political chessboards. And of all religions, they are active even in AIPAC. All these conflicts are called something else of course for public consumption, aided by media details Alterman covers superbly, but also Buckley vs Valeo, and now Citizens United. That something else sells to a gullible and misled American people whose property and wages are being systematically redistributed upward advancing only the interests of the super-rich. The real details of the sordid back-story behind those painted screens evades even the writers inside progressive media.

Despite mounting evidence like the Loyd Jowers civil case won by the Martin Luther King Jr Family in Memphis and other investigations into scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Drugs, and 9/11, independently funded, independently acting 'permanent government' to advance interests of the chessboard and outside the Kabuki theater is an idea Alterman mentions not at all. Nor is the idea of clandestine operations against American people committed right here in sovereign territory. But, one step at a time is good. Whistle-blowers are increasingly coming forward to talk about it.

Alterman closes the books as if new awareness of the Kabuki moves and new self-organization by people like us alone can unite Americans to withstand this phenomenon once enough of us know about it. He can suggest this only perhaps because he doesn't know what other writers covered about CIA study programs starting in the 1970s that deconstructed the genesis of labor and civil rights movements with Phd students using complexity theory, so they could be permanently blocked. Deconstructing the Kabuki theater notwithstanding, the questions remain unanswered: blocking moves authorized by whom? paid for by whom? in the interests of whom?

Alterman's book is a great start. From the mere category of 'interesting if true', committed readers should now revisit the inconclusive conclusions of Church and Warren commissions to fully understand the extent to the rigging of this government off the chessboard of legislating, and behind the painted screens on the sidelines out-of-view of audiences and media insiders. Evidence without a doubt will be hard to come by because clandestine operatives are trained to avoid detection and arrest. Is Alterman's culture of peer review at university or inside progressive media a barrier to investigating such 'interesting if true' leads? Is the power of culture in academia and progressive media so severe, is the object lesson of others like Pierre Salinger who ventured in too far, or an anthrax package at ABC News, too much of a specter?

"The problem, moreover, can only worsen, as the big American banks become increasingly global in their orientation and thereby put the entire world economic system at risk with their irresponsible investments, undertaken outside the authority of any US or even West European regulatory agency."

Irresponsible for whom? It only takes knowledge and insight of the whys and wherefores of the players in the Napoleonic Era to know just how lucrative is putting the "entire world economic system at risk." Bankers in that era made their fortunes seducing Kings and their Courtesans into costly expansionary war, borrowing money, blowing up nations in asset bubble and debt crises, and then enforcing austerity on the working families while cleaning up in "distressed asset" markets. Distressed by whom? Such good fortune became the basis for "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" and reused again in "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the next century. When another King and his entourage of money men and war industrialists needed a cover-up, his secret police and conservative media tools of a different era obliged!

"Lewis Powell laid out the ambitions of the wealthy conservatives in a now infamous 1971 memo to director of the US Chamber of Commerce to use their financial power to transform American political culture into one in which wealth and power could be unleashed upon the rest of us without the need for stealth or even explanation. Powell...identified the enemy...sought to undermine the 'respectable elements of society' whom he intended to replace with people like themselves." Those respectable elements of society are clearly the decent hard working honest Middle Class families who were always the majority here.

ACORN, Sherrod, covered by Alterman, and now Arizona are all "first strikes". It doesn't matter what happens afterward with a criminal charge let's say against Sarah Palin for speech to incite violence. The useful damage is already done. The Tipping Point toward destabilization is one more step toward reached. First strikes show not only to us but to the perpetrators themselves the power they possess over us at each turn where they are not stopped by States Attorneys or Courts. They already know their power over the chessboard and all the players on it so aptly defined by Alterman. That they designed themselves. They already know what their other powers are behind the painted screens to undermine 'respectable elements'. That is what we now need to know!

The construction of the elaborate chessboard of blocking moves would only be required in society that must keep up the appearance of a constitutional democracy. Only as the public grew in education and money making skill did it learn to challenge long held authority and become a threat. This is the same story for a rising French Protestant Middle Class in a similar gambit started against them 500 years ago. Reading between the lines and into the future we see how the system distorts and manipulates our minds, but also how it easily advanced "no child left behind" with the aim of enforcing multiple choice tests in place of critical thinking.

Preferences of one centralized Board of Education in one state of Texas can easily purge the nation's textbooks of any heroic references to the struggle for democracy, or even the European or Athenian Enlightenments. They can easily find a way to redact Thomas Paine to suit them. No need for enlightenment in Texas. Profits are good and the desperate workers from an "economic system put at risk" are coming despite the lowest % for healthcare coverage, lowest % of college education, and highest % of illegal NAFTA refugees(speaking of economic systems south of the border put at risk) to keep wages preternaturally low. They'll have more pawns on our chessboard soon. With the systematic dumbing down of Americans, even this expensive elaborate chessboard constructed since the 1970s will soon be obsolete! We'll be back as they always wished it had remained, in the 1880s!

It lets software billionaires decide that small class size (and therefore higher unit cost and tax assessment) doesn't matter, "good teachers do". But, that is nothing new. JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie formed education foundations to re-design education systems and shape the American mind the way they wanted it shaped. Rockefeller very successfully introduced petrochemicals into medicine with a philanthropy in medical education program that "unleashed wealth and power without the need for stealth or explanation". That is old hat around here that Powell only wanted to re-up. Being a law firm partner, he was always well paid to advance his secretive clients' interests as agent.

This book is an excellent start to a story that has to continue, get bolder, and step out of insider cultures and comfort zones! In "power of culture", we also need to identify the Stockholm Syndrome that keeps this whole system going. It replenishes the ranks every generation, decade, and mid-term election with dutiful tools to undermine the 'respectable elements'. They are the people who are not us, will never be us, will never marry our daughters, but who do want to be us! It can even keep the respectable elements themselves in line, evidently! Great book to spread around!

*In light of the lengthy discussion in the book about this SCOTUS genetic predisposition toward advancing Corporate personhood and "money as speech", since Corporations are people, effectively serving the same unifying function for unearned income dividend earners as labor unions once did for wage earning working families, can't the case be made on the same property protection precedent that labor unions should now be people too? To give working families the equal collective protection corporate shareholders get disproportionately to protect their property from redistribution? Redistribution up or down should be irrelevant. The property of the masses has clearly been disproportionately pillaged from Bubble Bust and Deficit Spending whims of those over-protected by the Supreme Court, and who are really in power. We'd better hurry to get the cases up, before Roberts guts the precedent for use of statistical evidence to show systemic injustice! He's working on it, according to Fortune this week!
  brett_in_nyc | Jan 15, 2011 |
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Alterman asks why President Obama has been unable to deliver on the promise of the 2008 campaign. He argues that while Obama's compromises have disappointed many of his supporters, his failure is primarily due to a political system that stymies democracy when voters choose progressive change.

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