The Sisi Trend in Egypt and the United States

If you live in a police state elections are usually just a formality and citizens tend not to vote. Egypt is holding parliamentary elections for the first time since 2011. Official turnout, based on Sunday and Monday voting, probably inflated, is said to be 15-16%, as David Kirkpatrick reports in "Low Voter Turnout Reflects System by Design in Egypt":

Prime Minister Ismail Sherif said Monday that 15 or 16 percent of eligible voters had turned out for the first day of voting the previous day, the state news agency reported. But he did not cite the source of his estimate and the election commission did not disclose its figures. 

Several polling places in the populous areas near Cairo were almost completely empty, except for a handful of elderly voters. Almost every news account indicated a dearth of voters elsewhere as well. 

Alarmed by the low turnout on Sunday, Mr. Sherif gave public employees a half-day holiday on Monday to encourage more voting. The governor of Alexandria dropped the fares for public transportation. Pro-government talk show hosts hectored their audiences to get out and vote.

Other Egyptians, however, traded jokes about the turnout. “I need to sit alone for a while,” many repeated on Facebook. “I am going to a polling station.” 

“No one went today either” was trending on Twitter. 

The low turnout recalled elections for the rubber-stamp parliaments under Mr. Mubarak, although Mr. Mubarak had in fact allowed more competition. In his later years in power, Mr. Mubarak had permitted the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist movement and the largest opposition group, to win as many as 20 percent of the seats in the Parliament. Then a ruling party sweep eliminated the Brotherhood from Parliament completely in 2010, raising widespread allegations of rigging and setting the stage for the uprising a few months later.

Turnout swelled to 55 percent of the voting age population in 2011 for Egypt’s first free parliamentary election in decades. A party list system emphasized policy debate over candidate patronage, and the Brotherhood dominated the vote.

Then a year later a court ordered Parliament’s dissolution over a procedural technicality. The army assumed the legislative powers, and a year after that, in 2013, Mr. Sisi led the military ouster of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood.

Mr. Sisi has ruled without a legislature since 2013. The current election is expected to return lawmakers to the halls of Parliament for the first time in more than three years.

Mr. Sisi’s government has also outlawed the Brotherhood, arrested its leaders and shut down its media outlets, and the police have cracked down on more secular opposition as well.

For this parliamentary vote, Mr. Sisi put three-quarters of the seats up for competition by individual candidates, favoring the prominent and wealthy. In perhaps the most hotly contested district, in Dokki neighborhood of Giza across the Nile from Cairo, the son of a famous soccer team manager was running on the slogan “We Score for You,” with a soccer ball as his logo.

The United States is pretty much in the same situation as Sisi's Egypt. Here the candidate that generates the most interest is a reality television personality and real estate mogul. Donald Trump continues to poll as the clear choice of the "unwashed." Without substantive democracy people will opt for a circus with clowns.

To add some heft to the statement that the U.S. is in Sisi territory, look at the vote totals of the 2014 Congressional elections. Turnout was 36.4%, the lowest since 1942, a year the U.S. was fully mobilized for a world war. And while you might say that 36% is more than double Egypt's 16%, in some areas, like Ohio and New York, turnout was as low as the days before universal male suffrage.

So for the United States, compared with its own history, we are in Sisi country. How else to explain the GOP Congress, broadly derided as one of the most ineffective in the history of the nation, adding to its majority, which now stands at more than 50 seats?

And this is just the way the plutocrats want it -- a demoralized, broken citizenry staying home rather than going to the polls to rubber stamp candidates who only represent concentrated wealth.

That's why I think in a presidential election between Hillary and Trump, Trump wins because clearly more people will have a reason to vote for a circus clown than for an avatar of a failed system.

Cracks in the Washington Consensus

The writings of Thomas Friedman, longtime foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, are a contradictory mishmash of Panglossian optimism (in American hegemony) spiced with paragraphs of accurate assessment. His column on Iran yesterday, "Deal or No Deal," is a good example. After repeating all the old stale thoughts on Iran being a rogue outlier led by an irrational ayatollah committed to mendacity and mayhem -- a more accurate description of Israel and the Gulf monarchies -- Friedman does a somersault and concludes his piece with the following prescient paragraph:

Finally, you have the regional challenge. Iran, with about 80 million people, is simply a more powerful and dynamic state today than most of the Sunni Arab states to its west, half of which have collapsed. Iran, even if it had good intentions, almost can’t help but project its power westward given the vacuum and frailty there. When Nixon opened to China, and helped unleash its economic prowess, China was largely surrounded by strong or economically powerful states to balance it. But an Iran enriched by billions in sanctions relief would be even more powerful vis-à-vis its weak Arab neighbors. Our Gulf Arab allies are deeply worried about this and are looking to the U.S. for both protection and more sophisticated arms. I get that. But unless we can find a way to truly ease tensions between Shiite Persians and Sunni Arabs, we will find ourselves unleashing Iran to the max while arming the Arabs to the teeth. Maintaining that balance will not be easy.

The first point, that Iran is the dynamic state of the Middle East, should be clear by now. I remember reading that during World War Two Goebbels complained that the U.S. was getting more out its population for the war effort than Germany. I am sure there are officials at Langley who are making a similar assessment about Iran.

The point can be expanded to include Russia and China, two nations that seem to be getting more from their people than the West is from theirs. Recently I watched a travel video produced by The New York Times, "36 Hours in Beijing," and I was blown away by how clean and prosperous the megalopolis looked, like San Francisco. I have been mentioning it to coworkers when the discussion veers to the perilous condition of the United States. After recently reading Tariq Ali's "The New World Disorder," I'm starting to repeat his line from that essay, something to the effect that, "A friend asked me what happened to the U.S. working class. I told him it is in China."

Ali downplays American declinism, seeing plenty of testosterone left in the corpus of the global Leviathan. But I am not so sure. There has been a dialectical shift in the U.S. since W.'s presidency; a combination of Citizens United and the abject failure of Obama as a progressive leader has led to precipitous collapse of confidence in the political system which resulted in the record low turnout in the 2014 midterms. Harvard academic Larry Lessig addresses this in a recent talk he gave imploring Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary.

It is going to be hard to overcome people's distrust in reformist politicians after the epic failure of Obama.

Which brings us to the Friedman's final point: Iranian dynamism is being translated into an arms race in the Middle East that will destroy the region and is leading to a new world war. How is that prevented?

Given that the U.S. is a pay-to-play system that the sheikhs and the Israelis seem to have wired, it is difficult to imagine a reformist situation that can change the ongoing addiction to warfare and destruction. What is needed are two things, which might be the same thing: 1) a crack in the Washington Consensus, whether a default by Greece, a Le Pen victory in France, a nativist rebellion in Germany that collapses Merkel's government, and/or 2) the war needs to come home; the leaders of the Western core nations need to feel the death and destruction that they export around the globe -- in Libya and Syria -- lap up on their shores. This is happening already.

Netanyahu's Request to Congress: War on Iran

The frontpage news has a tendency to lurch from one "bell cow" to the next. Recently that bell cow has been Greece's negotiations with the troika in Brussels and the Novorossiya Armed Forces victory in Debaltseve. Islamic State's war crimes have taken on a background white noise quality.

The new bell cow is Netanyahu's speech before Congress tomorrow. The paper is rife with stories -- about Israeli public opinion regarding the rift between Democrats and Likudniks, about Jews in Congress and whether they will attend Netanyahu's speech, about John Kerry's hands-on negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

What doesn't get highlighted in any of the above stories is how unprecedented it is for a House Speaker to invite the leader of a foreign country to address Congress without the consent of the Executive Branch. And it is not as if Netanyahu's address will be some pro forma exercise in praise of the filial bonds between Israel and the United States; rather, it will be a pointed critique of ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran, the failure of which will likely entail some form of attack on Iran.

Basically, Netanyahu is coming to Washington D.C. to request that Congress wage war on Iran. This is what it boils down to. Netanyahu's calculation is that Obama and the Democrats, following the 2014 midterms, are dead politically, and that it is better to risk the optics of a soft coup and a display of overt partisanship than have the United States agree to a deal with Iran which formalizes its right to process uranium.

The problem with the Israeli position -- a totally decommissioning of Iran's nuclear program -- is that its only international support comes from the foully corrupt Gulf sheikhdoms, the same countries that are tacitly supporting Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

And herein lies the untenable nature of the U.S. position in the Middle East: It is tacitly working with Iran to beat back Islamic State and Al Qaeda in Iraq, Yemen and Syria while at the same time it is collaborating with the Saudis and Turks to make sure Sunni Salafi interests are preserved in these very regions. It is the dance of perpetual war.

The dance can be maintained because there is no substantive democracy in the United States. The people can vote for a peace candidate but that candidate will do nothing other than deliver up more war. All Netanyahu's appearance tomorrow will do is ram home the obvious -- Americans don't live in a democracy.

AIPAC will praise a Congress that is universally loathed by the people it purports to represent. Yet Samantha Power and Susan Rice will appear before AIPAC today in an act of obeisance.

Israel's elections are March 17. At the end of the month the P5+1 talks are supposed to conclude with the announcement of a framework agreement, the details of which are to be hashed out by summer. My guess is that a framework agreement will be reached. Congress will try to pass more sanctions. The votes are probably there to override a filibuster in the Senate. Then Obama will veto the sanctions. It should be interesting.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 3, "Overpowered by Funk"

Something has been lost. My first year of adulthood, my first year living alone was my freshman year at the university. The year was 1982, the year The Clash released Combat Rock.

Combat Rock is widely accepted today to be the beginning of the end of a great band. Conventional wisdom holds that the album is a radio-friendly sop to commercialism.

What cannot be denied is that Combat Rock is the last record featuring the band's main lineup -- Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Headon. The final studio album of The Clash, the universally panned Cut the Crap (1985), is minus Mick Jones and Topper Headon. The former, sacked by Strummer and Simonon over creative differences; the latter, because of his drug addiction.

I think dismissals of Combat Rock are off the mark. I think appraisals that class the record below the band's eponymous debut or the double album London Calling (1979) are largely due to Combat Rock's massive popularity and crossover appeal. For the most part, smart-set taste-makers eschew anything that has mass-market appeal.

But back to this idea that something has been lost. Last October I wrote about sitting in Dwinelle Plaza next to gridiron star Ron Rivera (now head coach of the Carolina Panthers) at the beginning of the 1982 school year and listening while he sang "Should I Stay or Should I Go" to himself. If one compares the Congressional midterm elections that year, 1982, with the midterms that transpired shortly after the Ron Rivera post, 2014, one sees a country that is no longer a Democratic Party majority.

The Democratic Party swept the 1982 midterms in the popular vote 55% to the Republicans 43% owing to the unpopularity of the Reagan Recession. In 2014 the Republicans won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.9% to the Democrats 45.3%. But the Republicans actually have a greater majority of House seats now -- 247 -- compared to what the Democrats had in 1982 -- 243.

So in the 32 years of my life as a voting, tax-paying adult citizen of the United States, the nation has done a flip. We are no longer an egalitarian-minded, working-class nation, or at least that is what a reading of the poll results tell us.

Another way to look at this loss is by the results of the radical leftist 1960s-spawned Peace and Freedom Party. The Peace and Freedom Party, which was ubiquitous in my lower division years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, a presence I lazily took for granted, won 34,422 votes in 1982 and competed in numerous California Congressional Districts; in 2014, the Peace and Freedom Party polled 9,192 in the midterms.

The Peace and Freedom Party from its inception has been concerned with racial justice. The party planned to support Martin Luther King, Jr. for president in 1968 but chose Eldridge Cleaver instead because of MLK's support for mustering the National Guard to handle the Detroit riots.

The Clash as a band always acknowledged the influence of Black artists, for instance the collaboration with Mikey Dread.

One of the tracks that adds depth to Combat Rock is "Overpowered by Funk," The Clash's homage to early hip hop artists Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five and Sugarhill Gang. Joe Strummer raps "Funk Power" with graffiti artist Futura 2000.

Combat Rock is basically released the same time as Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982). I owned both. Popular music was never the same after "The Message":

To me, listening to "Overpowered by Funk" again, it reminds me less of "The Message" and more of Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood," which preceded Combat Rock by one year. Both showcase Punks (in the case of Tom Tom Club, the husband and wife rhythm section of Talking Heads) taking a stab at hip hop:

There was a lot of sunshine and hope back in the first few years of the 1980s, even with the tentacles of neoliberalism taking hold amid the Reagan Recession.

Undoubtedly we were naive. Look we were are now with money power all but completely victorious.

But for that moment there appeared to be enough time and space where racial harmony was possible.

Democrats are Doomed

For a snapshot that conjures up Jim Jones' Guyana, take a look at "House Democrats, Facing Long Odds, Take Inspiration From the Top" by Emmarie Huettemen and Michael Shear. The story describes a pep rally House Democrats held in Philadelphia yesterday. Obama made a rousing appearance. The message -- please, don't chuckle -- is that the Democratic Party is the shield of the working class, defending the little people from the predatory rich and their rapacious servants in the Republican Party.

A few discreet words were dropped to explain the horrifically poor showing in the 2014 midterms. Democrats in the House apparently forgot to stay on the economic justice message. (If you haven't got around to it yet, take the time to read Thomas Ferguson's masterful assessment of the 2014 midterm election, "Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Is in Worse Shape Than We Though.") But fear not, good citizen. The Party of Jackson is going to redouble its efforts to protect me and you and make sure that we get some of that wealth that has been vacuumed up to the 1% during the Obama years:

As the Democratic lawmakers gathered here Thursday, their leaders did not shy from admitting that their postelection strategies bore a strong resemblance to the emphasis they placed on issues like wage inequality before they lost 13 seats in November’s election.

“It is the same and critically important message,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, said the party did not need to find a new message. Rather, he said, lawmakers and the president need to do a better job focusing that message and motivating turnout of voters next year. “There should have been more unity behind the president’s economic agenda,” Mr. Van Hollen said.

Mr. Obama urged the Democrats in Philadelphia not to be shy in embracing the party’s values, and he promised that he would not relent in pressuring the Republicans.

“We need to stand up and go on offense and not be defensive about what we believe,” Mr. Obama said. “I promise you I’m not going out the last two years sitting on the sidelines. I’m going to be out there making the case every single day.”

This is a picture of an organization that is not in touch with reality; that, or its leaders are lying through their teeth. They must take us for a bunch of witless boobs.

An indication where the Democrats are headed at full speed can be detected in an excellent piece that appears on Naked Capitalism. Hope for Greece, and Perhaps Europe Too, by Mathew D. Rose, an independent journalist living Berlin, encapsulates the situation in Europe that led to Syriza's victory this past Sunday. Obeisance to neoliberal austerity and market fundamentalism has hollowed out Europe's socialist parties:

[Europe’s Social Democrats] are clearly on the decline, as they have lost credibility as a party of the people. Their natural replacement, ergo their most menacing opponent, will be the new parties on the left. The once predominant social democratic party in Greece, PASOK, could not even muster five percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections. The PSOE in Spain is plumbing the 20 percent barrier, things look scarcely better for Germany’s Social Democrats; while in France Hollande and his acolytes seem set on immolating their party. Even in Britain, where the Labour Party was hoping to come out of the upcoming elections as the strongest party, it has not only lost one of its heartlands, Scotland, to the Scottish National Party, but is facing a surge in England by the Greens, who are adopting an ever increasing leftist agenda and brazenly showing solidarity with Syriza and its programme.

One could add Sinn Féin to this list of authentic leftist parties rising to challenging the corrupt neoliberal hegemony.

As it stands now, I think Scott Walker wins the general election in 2016. And then woe unto us all. To prevent this from happening the Democrats will have to reinvent themselves pronto. And nothing points to this happening.

Greece's Syriza Soon to Deliver a Mighty Blow to Empire

The announcement this morning (Niki Kitsantonis, "Greece Heading to Early Elections After Presidential Vote Fails") that Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras failed to force through the election of his candidate, Stavros Dimas, for president means that there will be early general elections by the end of next month. Syriza, the leftist party that for years has been seeking to renegotiate the bloodthirsty debt agreement with the troika -- the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund -- is favored to win:

Opinion polls show the leftists firmly ahead of Mr. Samaras’s conservative New Democracy party, although Syriza’s lead has narrowed in recent weeks as the prospect of protracted political and financial uncertainty has grown. The Athens Stock Exchange fell by 10 percent during the vote, trimming losses to 7.4 percent later in the day.

The yield on 10-year government bonds, which moves in the opposite direction to the price, spiked nearly a full point to 9.3 percent. The outcome of the parliamentary vote also weighed on markets in the overall eurozone, with the Euro Stoxx 50 blue-chip index losing about 1 percent. The euro was little changed at $1.2199. 

In an interview with state television over the weekend, Mr. Samaras pushed opposition legislators to align with the government in Monday’s vote, saying that failing to elect a president would be “political blackmail” and would result in “pointless upheaval” for the country. 

Despite furious lobbying by the government, Mr. Dimas received only 168 votes, the same number as in the second ballot last week and eight more than in the first vote on Dec. 17. [Votes needed: 180]

Mr. Samaras accused Syriza of “foolish bravado,” adding that the leftists’ economic program was “full of unilateral moves” that would upset Greece’s creditors and jeopardize the country’s fragile return to growth.

Mr. Samaras’s coalition government is working with the so-called troika of lenders, which has granted Greece two bailouts worth 240 billion euros, or about $292 billion, since 2010 to keep the country liquid. In return, the troika has demanded an array of austerity measures that has slashed household incomes by a third and pushed unemployment above 25 percent. 

Negotiations with the members of the troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — on a tough economic program have been dragging amid rising opposition in Greece to austerity. But eurozone officials have expressed their readiness to extend Greece a precautionary credit line next year.

The possibility of Syriza coming to power is threatening to upend the economic negotiations. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister and a champion of austerity in Greece and other countries, said in an interview with the German daily Bild on Saturday that any Greek government would have to honor existing agreements. 

“New elections won’t change anything about Greece’s debt,” he said, referring to a debt burden equal to 174 percent of gross domestic product, the highest rate in the eurozone. 

Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the London-based Eurasia Group, said the domestic troubles in Greece had the potential to once again bring broader consequences for Europe. 

“France and Italy will be vulnerable economically, as both have done little to reform since the days of the debt crisis,” he said, adding that the southern periphery would be more immune in economic terms. “They will be at risk politically, given their own troubles with populist parties.” [In other words, "Watch out, neoliberal elites. The people are pissed and aren't going to take it anymore."]

The key to investor confidence, he said, will be the E.C.B. and whether it undertakes bond buying at the turn of the year. “If the E.C.B. does not deliver, this could be the trigger for a major reversal in Europe wide market sentiment,” Mr. Rahman said. 

Mr. Tsipras insisted over the weekend that his party’s program for tackling the “humanitarian crisis” in Greece was “not negotiable,” though Syriza has not explained how the Greek state would pay for the promised benefits.

Here the reporter, Niki Kitsantonis, is either being lazy or disingenuous because Tsipras does explain how Syriza will pay for a return of benefits that have been slashed to feed the austerity beast. ZNet recently published the Syriza program, "What the SYRIZA Government Will Do." Tsipras plans to negotiate a growth clause. Meaning that debt payments will come only after growth has returned to the Greek economy. Funds from the troika will be used to promote growth first:

THE CONTEXT OF NEGOTIATION 

We demand immediate parliamentary elections and a strong negotiation mandate with the goal to: 

• Write-off the greater part of public debt’s nominal value so that it becomes sustainable in the context of a «European Debt Conference». It happened for Germany in 1953. It can also happen for the South of Europe and Greece.

• Include a «growth clause» in the repayment of the remaining part so that it is growth-financed and not budget-financed.

• Include a significant grace period («moratorium») in debt servicing to save funds for growth.

• Exclude public investment from the restrictions of the Stability and Growth Pact.

• A «European New Deal» of public investment financed by the European Investment Bank.

• Quantitative easing by the European Central Bank with direct purchases of sovereign bonds.

• Finally, we declare once again that the issue of the Nazi Occupation forced loan from the Bank of Greece is open for us. Our partners know it. It will become the country’s official position from our first days in power.

On the basis of this plan, we will fight and secure a socially viable solution to Greece’s debt problem so that our country is able to pay off the remaining debt from the creation of new wealth and not from primary surpluses, which deprive society of income.

This is all Econ 101, nothing radical or something to be dismissed as frothing-at-the-mouth lunacy of an atavistic Marxist; it is the kind of reasoning often found in Paul Krugman's column. That's why it is troubling that the Gray Lady's reporter dismisses Syriza's program without comment.

One key predictor of how the Obama administration is going to react to Greece's early election -- and, therefore, how Empire is going to react -- is to see what Krugman says about Syriza. Krugman has been nothing if not consistent in debunking the "austerian" credo. He has written countless columns from the outset of the Great Recession pointing out the devastating consequences of slashing government budgets while the economy is contracting. For Krugman not to endorse Syriza's program for Greece means the fix is in.

But Krugman opposed Scottish independence. And recently he has engaged in pathetic Putin bashing. So it might well be that 1) he either avoids commenting altogether, or 2) he carries water for Obama yet again and bashes Tsipras.

While it is true that the Scots were made to buckle at the polls in September because of threats and scaremongering, it seems to me that Greeks who have lost a third of their household wealth will be more immune to such tactics.

What is certainly true, based on last May's European Parliament elections and the recent U.S. midterm poll, is that there is massive erosion in support of, belief in, allegiance to the large, established, mainstream political parties of the West.  These political formations have been completely captured by a corrupt, disconnected, neoliberal power elite and a majority of people have woken up to this fact.

A clue to the direction of where it will all end will be provided by Syriza in January. The people have reached a level of disgust with the status quo that is going to start manifesting itself positively. The real question is going to be, "How destructive will the Empire be in maintaining the status quo?"

I have to say, "Plenty."

Collapse of the Democratic Party + Obama Embraces Egyptian Police State + Blue Lives Matter Vs. Black Lives Matter

Yesterday in the Gray Lady's Sunday edition Jonathan Martin had a story, "Role for Warren: To Push, if Not Supplant, Clinton," that had the effect of tossing a bucket of cold water on the effort by MoveOn.org to draft Senator Elizabeth Warren (Dem.-Mass.) to run for president. After reading the piece one comes away feeling fairly certain that Warren will not lock horns with Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party; in fact, Martin's article reads as if it had been written by a Hillary press handler, as one can tell from the first few paragraphs:

DES MOINES — Eight years ago this month, then-Senator Barack Obama began his evolution from political phenom to presidential contender with his first-ever trip to New Hampshire, a visit that attracted 2,500 voters, 150 journalists and a comparison by the state’s governor of Mr. Obama to the Rolling Stones. 

Last week, in the side room of Java Joe’s coffee shop here, the liberal group MoveOn.org took the first step to propel Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, on a similar path, holding a rally to encourage her to get into the 2016 race. 

Yet there were only about 75 people present, some of them local political professionals engaging in a bit of reconnaissance and recreation, and just a handful of reporters. The highest-ranking official there was the Iowa Senate president, who carefully avoided stating her support for a Warren candidacy. 

Not that there is such a thing: Ms. Warren herself was not here, and she has repeatedly stated in public that she is not running for president. In private, according to several Democrats who have talked with her, Ms. Warren, 65, has also indicated that she would not challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 Martin goes on to depict the potent force, juggernaut-like, of Hillary's candidacy:

A Des Moines Register-Bloomberg poll in October showed Mrs. Clinton leading Ms. Warren by 43 percentage points. In New Hampshire, where Mrs. Clinton led Mr. Obama in a Granite State Poll at the outset of the 2008 race by 14 points, she was beating Ms. Warren by 49 points last month in a Bloomberg-Saint Anselm College survey. 

“There is only a very small segment of the party this time around that’s looking for an alternative,” said Jim Demers, a New Hampshire Democrat who backed Mr. Obama in 2008 and is now supporting Mrs. Clinton.

The bold red quote above by Jim Demers is absurd. It is not a "very small segment of the party" that does not want Hillary; it is the activist base, the ones who volunteer to knock on doors and who pay attention to current events. As I see it, Elizabeth Warren is the only politician who has enough legitimacy on issues of Main Street vs, Wall Street to keep enough of the Obama coalition -- Latinos, blacks, youth, women -- engaged and on the reservation to secure a presidential victory for the Dems in 2016. Democrat strategists have said they plan to win by having Hillary turn out the Obama coalition.

It is possible that Hillary Clinton could muddle through if the GOP nominates Scott Walker, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. But at this point I think Jeb Bush, if he can weather the storm of the Republican primaries, beats Hillary in a general election. At this point I won't even rule out the possibility that Mitt Romney could triumph over Hillary.

To get a sense of just how bad things are -- for both parties -- a must-read article is "Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Is in Worse Shape Than We Thought" by academics Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson. Burnham and Ferguson describe a Democratic Party in denial of how historic -- historically poor -- its performance was in the 2014 midterms:

[O]ur cautious guess is that turnout in this year’s Congressional races will finally weigh in at around 36 percent of the potential electorate that had legal rights to cast a ballot. 

That’s a shocking statistic. Put aside for a moment all talk of 1942 and absolute levels of turnout. Instead focus on changes in turnout between presidential elections and the next off-year election. Across the whole sweep of American history, the momentous dimensions of what has just happened stand out in bold relief. The drop off in voting turnout from the presidential election of 2012 to 2014 is the second largest of all time – 24 percentage points. Only 1942’s decline from 1940 was bigger – 29 percentage points. But then there was an excuse. Millions of Americans were hurriedly fanning out across the globe to wage total war. (World War I showed a similar pattern – turnout in the off year elections of 1918 fell 22 points from 1916’s presidential race, marking the fourth largest decline ever. Which leads naturally to the question of the third largest. Read on.)

Now cast a glance at the actual levels to which turnout in many states sank this year. In the last generation, turnouts in the many formerly industrialized states in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic region, and parts of the Midwest have bounced around, with one or another state sometimes touching historic lows in a particular election. But this year the decline is broad and to levels that boggle the mind – rates of voting that recall the earliest days of the 19th century, before the Jacksonian Revolution swept away property suffrage and other devices that held down turnout. Turnout in Ohio, for example, fell to 34 percent — a level the state last touched in 1814, when political parties on a modern model did not exist and it had just recently entered the Union. New York trumped even this: turnout in the Empire State plunged to 30 percent, almost back to where it was in 1798, when property suffrage laws disenfranchised some 40 percent of the citizenry. New Jersey managed a little better: turnout fell to 31 percent, back to levels of the 1820s. Delaware turnout fell to 35 percent, well below some elections of the 1790s. In the west, by contrast, turnout declined to levels almost without precedent: California’s 33 percent turnout appears to be the lowest recorded since the state entered the union in 1850. Nevada also hit a record low (28 percent), as did Utah at 26 percent (for elections to the House).

We are witnessing levels of voter participation that go back two-hundred years to the days when suffrage was synonymous with property ownership. This is a collapse the size of which is truly sublime.

And what is the Democratic Party -- the party nominally committed to the "little guy," to working men and women -- doing about this crisis of legitimacy? They are telling us to line up behind Hillary Clinton, the spouse of the man who brought us NATO expansion and the war against Yugoslavia as well as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall.

This will not end well. People can no longer stomach the lies. Voters made their way to the polls in two consecutive presidential elections, giving Obama huge margins of victory in both 2008 and 2012, and for what? The benefits of the economic recovery, what of it there is, have all gone to the wealthy. Unions and pensions are less secure. We do have a new market-based system of health insurance that can count the expansion of Medicaid as an achievement. But we also have a new iteration of the Cold War and war in Iraq and Syria, both of which are largely due to the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

A recent example of an indigestible lie: USG has cleared the way for the delivery of military helicopters to Egypt, helicopters that have been put on hold since the Egyptian military ousted the elected president Mohamed Morsi in a coup the summer of 2013. Morsi is in prison along with more than 10,000 imprisoned this year alone. Egypt is a massive police state. Yet neither the USG nor Congress will sanction the generals of Egypt and Thailand like it has sanctioned Venezuela and Russia.

And right on cue there is evidence of the U.S. police state kicking back against the Black Lives Matter protest movement by waving the bloody tunics of two police officers murdered in their squad car this past Saturday in Brooklyn. As Liz Robbins and Nikita Stewart report in "At Demonstrations, a Change in Tone After Officers Are Killed": "After the killings on Saturday, the protest motto of 'Black Lives Matter' was joined by a chorus of 'Blue Lives Matter' on social media, in support of officers."

This was all predictable. As soon as police died in the line of duty their deaths would be used as a political cudgel to beat down the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been maintaining its momentum. There are Black Lives Matter actions all over the country all the time. The precedent here is when CIA agent Richard Welch was murdered in Greece at the height of the Church Committee revelations of national security state lawlessness, his death was used to kill off calls for sunlighting the Deep State.

The police are going to be called on in short order to maintain control as the political parties continue to lose the allegiance of the people.

Get Ready for a Scott Walker Presidential Run

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. One of the best sources of information for what is going on nationally in politics is Thomas Edsall's online opinion column for the Gray Lady. Appearing every Wednesday, Edsall paints a picture of an America steadily pauperizing while an aggressive Republican Party fights to stovepipe more wealth up to the 1% at the same time it is beating back the revanchist, volatile Tea Partiers in its ranks; the Democrats meanwhile dither and play pat-a-cake with their own super-rich, pissing away the electoral advantage provided by the huge demographic shift underway (colored youth) in the U.S.

For his first opinion piece after the midterm election results have fully settled, "Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions," the sagacious Edsall highlights the curious contradiction of the GOP preoccupation with organized labor versus the predilection of Democrats to institutionally ignore unions.

I say curious, but one could also label it neurotic or psychotic. Without organized labor the Democratic Party isn't credibly competitive. Yet year after year the Democratic Party delivers nothing to the unions; it takes their money and uses union volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls, while at the same time it pursues free-trade deals and Wall-Street-friendly tax policies and bailouts.

The current GOP strategy to weaken organized labor and eviscerate the Democrats centers around going after public-sector unions. Elect hard-charging Republican governors who, acting in concert with GOP-controlled legislatures, rescind collective-bargaining rights for government employees. Call it the Scott Walker phenomenon. It worked to wonderful effect in Wisconsin:

A paradox of American politics is that Republicans take organized labor more seriously than Democrats do. 

The right sees unions as a mainstay of the left, a crucial source of cash, campaign manpower and votes. 

“Unions are the largest player in American politics and they will be for some time,” Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, declared in March at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Fourteen million Americans have to pay union dues. If they average $500, and that is a low estimate, that’s a $7 billion slush fund for the left.” 

Democrats are happy to get labor’s votes and money, but they have done little to revitalize the besieged movement. 

“The unions basically have become an A.T.M. for Democrats,” Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., told me in a phone conversation. “There is a sense of taking unions for granted, no place else to go, don’t need to do much for them.” 

Republicans are willing to go to great lengths to weaken the union movement, especially at the state level. Even as the strength of organized labor as a whole declines, conservatives view unions that represent public sector employees, in particular, as anathema. They are desperate to gut the power of the 7.2 million organized government workers — who range from teachers, to clerks in the Department of Motor Vehicles, to social workers, public hospital employees, meat and poultry inspectors, road workers, property tax auditors and civil servants in general. These are the employees who populate the extensive bureaucracies that the right loathes.

Unions the right has targeted include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, appearing at the same C.P.A.C. event as Norquist, boasted that in Wisconsin the successful drive to render public sector unions impotent was the result of a coordinated effort between the party and the conservative movement: "We had total and complete unity between the state party, Americans for Prosperity, the tea party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty, the 9-12ers were involved. It was a total and compete agreement that nobody got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the track together."

The anti-union alliance between the Republican Party and movement conservatives got a big boost on Nov. 4. The heroes of this anti-union drive, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, and Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, were re-elected in states with a long history of strong labor movements. Prospects for the enactment of additional anti-labor legislation also improved as Republicans made substantial gains in legislatures and governor’s races across the country.

After the 2010 election, Republicans had complete control (governor and both legislative branches) in 21 states, almost double the 11 states with complete Democatic control. Now, 24 states are fully in Republican hands; Democrats dominate in just 7.

 The 2014 election was “a major political defeat for the unions, particularly state-wide public sector unions, because it shows how much the voting public sees unions as part of the problem of persistent unemployment and underemployment, rather than being part of the solution,” Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, replied in response to my email. Chaison’s assessment: "The election of Republicans is indicative of the degree to which the voters have turned on the unions. There was once a time, two decades ago, when candidates to the governor’s officer sought the endorsement of major unions in his or her state; now they run on being anti-union crusaders. Quite a reversal of fortunes. The public sector was, for fifty years, the engine of union growth in America. This will happen no more. The brake on union decline is gone. The victory of Republican governors shows how much unions have lost their political power – now they are vulnerable to attempts to strip them of their power at the state level. Every new governor seems to be a Chris Christie, ready for a fight."

By 2013, 11.3 percent of wage and salary workers were covered by unions, down from 23.4 percent in 1983.

Republicans have good reason to target public sector unions. Without them, the share of the work force represented by unions would be even smaller than it is now. By last year, union coverage of private sector workers had fallen to 7.5 percent, from a high of roughly 35 percent in the mid-1950s. Government workers today make up 15.8 percent of the total work force, but union representation of this sliver has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1950s to 35.3 percent.

Norquist told the C.P.A.C. conference that conservatives hadn’t taken on public employee unions in the mistaken belief that “you can’t do anything about the public sector. The rules are set, and they elect the guys who set the rules.” But Walker’s success in winning a recall election, and in getting re-elected, has permanently changed thinking on the right, Norquist declared. By this reasoning, Walker’s survival and ultimate triumph demonstrates that changing the rules to make it more difficult to organize public workers, to collect dues and to bargain over wages and fringe benefits is politically viable, even in a Northern state.

In 2011, when Walker first took office, 37 percent of the nation’s 21-plus million public sector employees were union members; by 2012, this droppedto 35.9 percent; and last year, it fell to 35.3 percent.

So that's the formula for 2016: Continue the frontal assault on public-sector unions because that is where the union density is; get overall union density down to where it is in the private sector, below 8%, and choke out what is left in the bathtub; oh, yes, and elect Scott Walker as POTUS.

Edsall goes on to describe why the Democratic Party is not only not doing anything to fight back against this assault, it is actually attacking unions itself. As Edsall explains,

If Republicans and conservatives place a top priority on eviscerating labor unions, what is the Democratic Party doing to protect this core constituency? Not much. 

In fact, the Obama administration has undermined the bargaining leverage of the most successful unions by imposing a 40 percent excise tax, which takes effect in 2018, on health insurance premiums in excess of $10,200 annually for individuals, and $27,500 for families, in order to finance Obamacare. The provision, which covers what many of labor’s enemies call “Cadillac plans,” has provoked an angry response from labor leaders. They see the tax as threatening the continued survival of key health insurance benefits that unions have won as part of total employee compensation packages.

In an email to me, Joel Parker, national vice president of the merged Transportation Communications International Union and International Association of Machinists, wrote about the consequences of the new excise tax:

The result is a nightmare for union workers at large companies, and even worse for non-union workers. For the latter, companies will simply unilaterally cut benefits and/or shift to high-deductible plans. Institutionally, the bill weakens unions, one of the remaining core groups in the Democratic coalition. Private sector unions’ main selling point to non-union workers was superior health and pension plans. The health insurance advantage, if the excise tax is allowed to survive, will gradually disappear. 

Democrats neglect the union movement at their peril. Not only does organized labor provide millions of dollars – the Center for Responsive Politics reports that unions spent $116.5 million on politics in 2013-14 – but union members are a loyal Democratic constituency. On Nov. 4, the 17 percent of voters who come from union households supported Democratic House candidates by a margin of 22 points, 60-38, while the remaining 83 percent from non-union households supported Republicans 54-44.

I know something about unions. I've worked for various union locals, central labor councils and Taft-Hartley trusts for 15 years. Unions are dying. No question about it. And, yes, Obamacare is hastening the process because it is helping to drive out the "blue chip" medical, full-maintenance-of-benefits type plan in favor of these 80-20/70-30 co-insurance, high out-of-pocket limit plans.

Mostly though unions are dying because there is a lack of class consciousness in leadership. Union chiefs see themselves closely aligned with plutocrat-friendly Dem politicians; they fancy themselves executives in a corner offices with a shiny nameplates. And that kind of thinking is a serious problem.

Why This Pervasive Sense of Doom?

On the train home from work last night, reading an article on the collapse of honeybee colonies (Dady Chery, The Bee’s Vanishing Act), I realized why it is there is this pervasive sense of doom that shrouds everything these days. No longer as a society do we structure in -- acknowledge the merit of -- repose.

Formerly in the United States there was a widely shared cultural vision of the importance -- the justice and fairness -- of a secure retirement. One would toil his or her heart and soul away, kissing youth goodbye, at a job(s), usually dehumanizing, with the promise that eventually one would get to relax for maybe a decade or two of dotage.

At the beginning of this year when the Boeing Machinists approved, following threats by the employer (backed by politicians elected by means of union support), an end to their defined-benefit pension, a line was crossed. The palm at the end of the American mind -- retirement with a good defined-benefit pension -- has been chopped down.

The Great Recession knocked my union's pension plan into the red. One of the moves the plan trustees made to get back into the black was to abolish "the rule of 80." The rule of 80 states that once a plan participant hits age 55, any years of credited service in the plan plus the participant's age that add up to 80 or more allows the participant to retire early with full benefits. In other words, the "gold standard."

My idea was to be done with the rat race by 59. That is what it would take me under the rule of 80. I would retire to California and spend the remainder of my days reading books I want to read -- on ancient Egypt, Big Foot, Robert Caro's LBJ opus -- and jogging beneath an orange sun.

But shortly after the Lehman meltdown, the rule of 80 was rescinded and so was the daydream of freeing myself at 59.

It is war all the time. That is what it is. And that is what I realized sitting on the train last night. The Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all, which supposedly motivates us to come together and form a society, is actually the basis of our culture now. And no better representative of this is the Grand Old Party, an absolutely contrived diabolical corporate machination designed solely to expand the prerogatives of the super-rich. That the Democrats have been beaten repeatedly by these soulless ghouls proves that they are no better.

Bear this in mind next week or next month when Obama announces his immigration plan. That plan was rolled out by the Gray Lady yesterday, "Obama Plan May Allow Millions of Immigrants to Stay and Work in U.S.," as part of the post-midterm debacle counterattack that the administration has skillfully put forth -- along with net neutrality and the China carbon-reduction accord -- to mobilize its broader base of support.

Republican leadership is talking tough, even going so far as to mention the possibility of a government shutdown if Obama extends protections to millions of undocumented immigrants. The Tea Party will be stirred up. No doubt there will be angry rallies of white people with rifles held aloft.

The optics favor the Democrats. It's a good political move by Obama. It empowers the knuckle-draggers in the GOP and accentuates the fissure with the Chamber of Commerce Rovian brain trust, who favor an immigration deal.

In the end, if past iterations of Potomac Armaggedon are a guide, a deal will be cut, and that deal will likely be one which sells the undocumented down the river.

But maybe the GOP's pandering to Dixiecrat nativism will finally bust the seams of the party. We can only hope. It is doubtful though.

Which leaves us only the repose offered by the mind. For me, now, it is the idea that this weekend I will watch football on television while eating an entire bag of clementine oranges.

A Snapshot of the Clinton Psychosis

This morning I had to stop my audit of the newspaper abruptly. Once I had completed Amy Chozick's "Midterms, for Clinton Team, Aren’t All Gloom" I had to comment.

It was entirely predictable that the big-money players who control the Democratic Party were going to respond to the midterm debacle by banging the drum for Hillary's presidential candidacy rather than address obvious voter concerns, foremost of which is an economy that is as unequal as any going back to the 19th-century era of the Robber Barons.

"Psychosis" is a general psychiatric term signifying "a loss of contact with reality," and this is what is on full display in Amy Chozick's frontpage story.

Chozick provides an insider account of  the "Hillary for President" campaign readying to launch from the smoking rubble of the Democratic Party's collapse. The Hillary exploratory committee will wait until after Mary Landrieu's political corpse is ushered to the charnel house on December 6, the date of the runoff election in Louisiana against Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.

The first passage from the Chozick piece that has to be mentioned regards the staging of a "listening tour" as a way for Hillary to reintroduce herself to a miserable, sullen electorate that now consistently polls at super-majority levels of disapproval for government and concern over the economy:

But before any campaigning begins, Mrs. Clinton will first embark on a listening tour that echoes what she did first as a candidate for the Senate in New York and then as a freshman senator, gathering ideas and advice from a cross-section of influential people about their concerns.

“She’ll slow down a bit, get off the radar, get ready for this, and ready includes being a good freshman senator, with a legal pad and lots of conversations,” said one person with direct knowledge of her plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have not been made public. 

Meanwhile, the people around Mrs. Clinton will speed up their efforts to vet potential campaign aides, casually connect with donors and begin to help Mrs. Clinton craft a clearer message, especially on the economy. Although Mrs. Clinton’s midterm campaigning schedule took her to Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina and other important 2016 states, she did not spend much time getting to know the specific concerns of voters, something she would need to do ahead of a presidential campaign.

So what we are to understand is that Hillary, who has been barnstorming across the country for candidates during the midterms, is unaware what "specific concerns of voters" are. It is hard to take seriously. In fact, it can't be taken seriously. It is all just part of the dramaturgy of repackaging a bloated, tired, wealthy, famous defender of the Deep State as somehow concerned with what voters think. Hillary knows what voters want. They want jobs, and they want an end to interminable foreign wars. But Hillary has no intention of giving the people what they want; hence, the necessity of the listening tour to create the impression, the optics of a leader solicitous of the governed.

The next absurdity immediately follows from where the last quote leaves off:

Exit polls from Tuesday are being pored over for signs about what voters’ opinions could mean for Mrs. Clinton’s message and approach. Midterm voters expressed frustration with government, but also economic unease. 

“One of the questions for 2016 is: Which of those will 2016 be about? Will it be about the size and cost of government, or will it be about who the economy works for?” Mr. Garin asked. “If it’s an election about who the economy works for, then the Democratic nominee will be in a much better position to win,” he added.

Really? I thought that's what Obama's low approval rating was all about. People have given up believing he is going to do anything about economic inequality. "Obama bamboozled us for two elections. He ain't gonna bamboozle us anymore," the thinking goes. How is Hillary going to make people believe that she -- a rich old mean white lady -- is going to be any better?

Then, to return to the underlying theme of pychosis, what was Clinton's track record during the midterms? As highlighted in the first quote block, Hillary actively campaigned in bellwether states of Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, not to mention Arkansas and Kentucky. In Kentucky she worked for Clinton family friend Alison Lundergran Grimes in her attempt to unseat the ghoulish Mitch McConnell; in Arkansas, for Clinton family friend Senator Mark Pryor. All Hillary had to show for her effort was failure, not a clarion call for 2016:

During the midterm campaign, Mrs. Clinton raised more than $10 million for Democrats, and she and former President Bill Clinton attended at least 75 events on behalf of more than 30 candidates, building and rebuilding the relationships she and her husband are known for. 

The Clintons worked hard on behalf of Alison Lundergan Grimes, a candidate for Senate in Kentucky, and Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and were somewhat startled by their double-digit losses. But it was former Gov. Charlie Crist’s loss to Gov. Rick Scott of Florida that carried the biggest implications for a 2016 presidential campaign, as the Clintons had hoped for Democratic leadership in a critical battleground state.

Chozick, a smart cookie who used to cover the media industry for the Gray Lady prior to receiving the assignment of exclusively reporting on Hillary, no doubt relished writing this story; intended by Hillary backers as a whetting of the public appetite, it comes off, thanks to Chozick's skillful construction, as a study in perverse delusion.

Take Chozick's last paragraph. (A few paragraphs prior she had described Sean Wilentz's assistance to Hillary. The odious faux-left academic historian was deployed during Hillary's 2008 presidential run to accuse Obama of race-baiting, and he is now helping her to craft her stump speech.)

As the outline for a campaign is drawn, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters describe what they envision as a “New Clinton Map” that they believe could create a winning coalition for 2016, drawing on the white working-class women who have long supported Mrs. Clinton and the young voters and African-Americans who helped elect Mr. Obama.

Yes, that's right. The Clintons, as guilty of playing the "negrophobia" card as any other politician (think Sister Soulja), are relying on black people and students to turnout in 2016. (Remember, it was Hillary who shepherded through the favorable EIS on Keystone XL when she was head of the State Dept.) That's chutzpah.

If Democrats buy this load of malarkey there might be some substance to the thought that the party of Jackson will crater sooner rather than later, an outcome favorable to the future of the planet.

Gary Chaison Announces the Death of Union Political Power

Judged by the amount of post-election coverage in the Gray Lady today -- day #2 following the GOP blowout of the Dems -- I think it is dawning on liberals that the 2014 midterms are a turning point.

For some shallow handwringing from a Deep State liberal, there is Nicholas Kristof's "America's Broken Politics." The Gray Lady actually features a helpful unsigned editorial, "In Red and Blue States, Good Ideas Prevail: From Marijuana to Gun Control, Liberal Initiatives Passed," which provides a rundown of progressive ballot measures that passed on Election Day.

The elephant in the room isn't the GOP mascot. The elephant in the room is the failure of Democratic Party and organized labor to represent the interests of working people. Gary Chaison, a labor academic who is frequently quoted by the mainstream media, sums it all up in a letter that appears in today's paper.

To the Editor: 

Re “Walker Wins Re-election, and Keeps Hope for 2016” (news article, Nov. 5):
Can there be a more glaring sign of the loss of union political power than the election success of Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin? Here is a man who thumbed his nose at the unions in 2012, when he led his Republican state legislature to pass a law that greatly curtailed the activities of Wisconsin’s public worker unions. Mr. Walker survived a recall election and has just won a second term, which might lead to his running for president in 2016. 

In the future, when someone asks, “When did the unions finally lose their political clout?,” the answer will be: “In the 2014 midterm elections, when the unions’ nemesis, Scott Walker, won re-election.”

GARY CHAISON
Worcester, Mass., Nov. 5, 2014 

The writer is a professor of industrial relations at Clark University.

What needs to be done -- clearly -- is a move to a new electoral vehicle. Dump the party of Jackson. After two hundreds years it is time for it to collapse; it is too infested with bankers and stockjobbers and warpigs. Unions should lead the way, but they won't. That is why change is going to have to come from the environmental crowd and socialists. It looks like Obama might soon sign off on Keystone XL. Once he does that there will be a golden opportunity for a large bloc of progressive voters to vacate the Democratic Party. It is something that Bill McKibben should consider in addition to organizing marchers and sit-ins -- a new national political party that can field credible candidates.

NFL Week Nine: Tannehill Transcends

The blog is a strange format. It is at once disposable -- a toss off -- and always accessible, retrievable, semi-permanent. That's why I began this page: as a way to organize my random thoughts. I live alone; my time away from the job -- what of it there is -- is my own. I carry on a dialogue with myself in solitude, Vita contemplativa. The blog helps.

NFL Week 9 put me in mind of a post I wrote about NFL Week 13 of the 2012 season. The topic was the bumper crop of rookie QBs: Luck, RG3, Tannehill, Weeden and Wilson. This past Sunday I watched games featuring three-fifths of said quarterbacks, now in their third year.

The two I didn't see, the two broadly considered the standout quarterbacks of the draft and the ones who garnered the most media attention in 2012, Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III, are a study in contrasts. Luck's Colts are a perennial playoff contender; his play has been stellar. For a moment there this season, prior to a demolition meted out by the Steelers in NFL Week 8, Indianapolis looked good enough to contend for the AFC Championship. RG3 and his Redskins are the exact opposite. The team and the player, since their wildcard playoff elimination by the Seahawks in the 2012 season, a game that ended with RG3 suffering a catastrophic knee injury, seem to be constantly on the brink of collapse. At this point, it is not clear the Griffin will ever return to the form he displayed his rookie year, which is tragic, worthy of the talents of some modern-day Euripides.

But, quickly, to the games I televisually witnessed: I bounced back and forth between the two early Sunday match-ups: Cardinals vs. Cowboys; Chargers vs. Dolphins. Brandon Weeden, cast off from Cleveland, was filling in for an injured Tony Romo. Weeden played abominably. If Dallas still had Kyle Orton as its backup quarterback instead of allowing him to depart to Buffalo, the Cowboys would have beat Arizona. Without a passer who can complete throws to wideouts Dez Bryant and Terrance Williams, an opposing defense can isolate on the Herculean DeMarco Murray and limit his impact. And that's what happened last Sunday.

The most impressive performance I saw in NFL Week 9 was that of Ryan Tannehill. Granted, San Diego is in the midst of another mid-season crisis of confidence, something the Chargers seem to experience every year regardless of who the head coach is; nonetheless, the show that Tannehill put on -- 24 of 34 for 288 yards and three TDs; four rushes for 47 yards -- in Miami's 37-0 blowout of a team that dominated the Super Bowl Champion Seahawks in NFL Week 2 is a highlight of the season.

Russell Wilson, to conclude this "where are they now?" snapshot of the rookie QB standouts of 2012, played poorly against the Raiders. The Seahawks had to hold on at the end of the fourth quarter, narrowly averting disaster when Cooper Helfet botched the handling of an onside kick. Fortunately, Jermaine Kearse was right there to fall on the ball and Wilson took a knee to bleed the clock out.

Throughout the entire game Wilson threw high to his receivers. And it became apparent to me that he was unable to see the middle of the field. The Raiders blitzed the center of Seattle's line all day long, which is how most teams deal with Wilson. The word is out and it has been for a year now: Russell Wilson can't see downfield in the face of pressure. He can see the sideline routes, and he can pick up receivers over the middle if the pocket breaks down and he is able to scramble around for a couple of seconds.

Given the realities of poor play by the Seahawks offensive line one wonders what the rest of this year holds for the defending champs. I think there is some hope if Seattle goes all in with a Bill Walsh West Coast offense of an early vintage -- late '70s/early '80s. If you recall those teams they lived and died on the swing-out dump-off pass to a runner out of the backfield. You can tell that Darrell Bevell is trying to incorporate this into the offensive game plan with Marshawn Lynch. He needs to try harder.

****

To conclude, a few brief thoughts about Tuesday's election. Yesterday I was thinking that I should write more about work. My workplace is a gold mine of dysfunction, as is every workplace. People are penned in together year after year, day in and day out, and made to perform the same barren routines. Most people don't read, don't think, don't aspire to anything other than the satisfaction of their own petty comforts. For the most part there is nothing grand or noble on display in the modern office.

I work for a union local, You would think that after Tuesday's huge victory by an anti-labor GOP -- Davis-Bacon is in the party's crosshairs -- there would be a sense of urgency, of renewed purpose. There was nothing of the sort. It was as if the home team Seahawks sustained a bad beating, and that was it. Nothing really was at stake; it was just another event in the media stream directly unrelated to our everyday lives.

The prevalence of this type of thinking is what guarantees more woe ahead for working people. As Bob Dylan sings, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Democrats Routed: No Indication They Understand Why

The extent of last night's rout of the foundering Democratic Party is captured in the fact that the race for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia has yet to be called. That a threadbare corporate mannequin GOP apparatchik like Ed Gillespie is neck and neck with incumbent Mark Warner is a huge statement. This is a Republican midterm tsunami. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker report in "Riding Wave of Discontent, G.O.P. Takes Senate":

Democratic midterm losses during the Obama presidency now rival those of both Richard M. Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1994 as the most destructive to his party’s political standing in Congress in the post-World War II era. It was a stunning reversal for the president, who was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win a majority of the national vote.

Democratic losses run the gamut. Kay Hagan, Democrat incumbent Senator from North Carolina, was predicted early in the evening to be the victor over Republican challenger Thom Tillis. She lost. Liberal stalwart Mark Udall lost in Colorado (Democratic Gov. Hickenlooper appears to be holding on ). Michelle Nunn was blown away in Georgia. Conservative Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida both won.

The loss has to be laid at the White House doorstep. According to a story by Peter Baker, "President Obama Left Fighting for His Own Relevance":

Just two years after Mr. Obama’s re-election, the midterm results underscored just how far he has fallen in the public mind. Nearly six out of 10 voters on Tuesday expressed negative feelings about his administration, according to exit polls. For every two voters who said they had cast ballots to support Mr. Obama, three said they were voting to express their opposition to him. 

The electorate was deeply pessimistic about the country, with seven out of 10 describing the economy as not so good or poor and eight out of 10 expressing worry about the direction of the economy in the next year.

The most interesting part of Baker article is the picture it paints of Obama. The president -- incredibly -- doesn't think he is to blame:

WASHINGTON — Two things were clear long before the votes were counted on Tuesday night: President Obama would face a Congress with more Republicans for his final two years in office, and the results would be seen as a repudiation of his leadership. 

But that was not the way Mr. Obama saw it. The electoral map was stacked against him, he argued, making Democrats underdogs from the start. And his own party kept him off the trail, meaning he never really got the chance to make his case. “You’re in the Final Four,” as one aide put it, “and you’re on the bench with a walking boot and you don’t get to play.” 

The Republican capture of the Senate culminated a season of discontent for the president — and may yet open a period of even deeper frustration. Sagging in the polls and unwelcome in most competitive races across the country, Mr. Obama bristled as the last campaign that would influence his presidency played out while he sat largely on the sidelines. He privately complained that it should not be a judgment on him. “He doesn’t feel repudiated,” the aide said Tuesday night.

But the Republican tide was stronger than projected, sweeping away Democrats even in some of those few blue states where the president did campaign. Mr. Obama now faces a daunting challenge in reasserting his relevance in a capital where he will be perceived as a lame duck. If the hope-and-change phase of his presidency is long over, he wants at least to produce a period of progress and consolidation to complete his time in the White House. 

After making congratulatory telephone calls from the White House on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama will kick off that final phase on Wednesday with a news conference seeking bipartisan accommodation on issues of mutual interest, and he invited Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House on Friday. At the same time, aides said, Mr. Obama is eager to throw off the constraints of a campaign that he did not direct and begin to defend his record in a more robust way again. 

“He’s going to be aggressive. He’s ready to go,” said another senior official, who like others did not want to be identified discussing plans before the election results were tabulated. “We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the lame duck. He’ll talk about that tomorrow. We’ve got a lot of important stuff to get done in the last two years. He’s anxious to get going on that.”

This should concern Democrats. It is a portrait of leadership walled off from reality, ready to cut deals on corporate taxation and trade that will accelerate the pauperization of a working class already savaged by the Great Recession.

There is no indication that the Democrats accurately discern the dire straits of the party. They are banking on demographics, that as younger and more non-white voters take to the polls they will vote Democratic. Jonathan Martin, "Voters’ Second Thoughts on Hope and Change," quotes Obama campaign guru David Plouffe as saying:

“We’re on a demographic march that is going to put more states in play,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, citing Arizona, Georgia and Texas. Such raw political projections are, of course, far removed from the hopeful rhetoric that vaulted Mr. Obama to stardom 10 years ago.

The shrewd Thomas Edsall notes, "‘Making the President Small’," problems with the "demographic wave" line of thinking prevalent in Dem circles, at least in terms of the 2016 presidential election:

Democrats counting on favorable demographic trends to carry their party to victory in 2016 should consider three significant developments reflected in the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. 

The first is that the Republican establishment, at least for the moment, has wrested control back from the Tea Party wing. This will make it more difficult for Democrats to portray their opponents as dangerous extremists. 

The second, and more important, development was the success of Republican candidates in defusing accusations that their party is conducting a “war on women.” The effectiveness of Republican tactics on this front is sure to influence strategy in two years, threatening to undermine a line of attack that has generated a gender gap and has been crucial to past Democratic victories.

The third was the powerful showing of Republican gubernatorial candidates in two Midwestern states important to Democrats in presidential elections: Wisconsin and Michigan.

All indications are that Democrats are clueless as to their lack of popular support. It as if they don't understand that their maintenance of a neoliberal Deep State of permanent warfare and endemic joblessness is not something to which voters will actively rush out to the polls register their approval.

Obama occupying the White House for the next two years means that the Democrats will continue to be yoked to a failed, brutal, unpopular Deep State. The GOP was able to remake itself in a jiffy after the 2008 Obama landslide because it was out of power; the Dems controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. There will be no clean break for the Democratic Party.

Hillary's run in 2016 will begin in earnest in a few months. There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Dems will continue to hemorrhage despite all their demographic advantages because it remains a corporate party. Absent some form of makeover to convince voters in the rising demographic -- young people of color -- that the Democratic Party isn't primarily a vehicle for Deep State prerogatives -- war and the concentration of wealth -- losses will continue to mount.

U.S. Election Day: Democrats Headed for Defeat, Hopefully Some GOP Governors Too

Election Day dawns in the United States. "Beacon of democracy" according to the press release but "Great Satan" to parts of the planet, there are some interesting trends of which to take note today in the land of Lucifer.

The conventional wisdom as blared by loudspeaker in the media monopoly is that today the GOP will roll. I think the conventional wisdom is on the money this time around. The death knell for the Democrats began sounding last year. At first, at the end of the summer 2013, Obama dodged a bullet when he aborted his bombing run on Damascus by clutching at the Russian-sponsored proposal to have Syria get rid of its chemical weapons. Peace Prize winner Obama's move to initiate a war seriously undermined his credibility among the progressive, anti-war wing of his party, which is the informed, activist wing you need come election time.

Then there was the golden opportunity of tarring Republicans for their government shutdown in October 2013 squandered by the disastrous premiere of Obamacare. It has basically been all downhill since last fall --  from ISIS to Ebola to anemic job growth.

For a rundown on the election check out "What to Watch For as G.O.P. Expects Big Night at Polls" by Jonathan Martin and Nate Cohn.

Colorado is a designated bellwether:

Republicans are closely watching Colorado, where Senator Mark Udall and Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, both Democrats, are in danger of losing. Mr. Obama won the state twice, and with a younger, increasingly progressive population, Colorado has been trending Democratic. If Representative Cory Gardner can defeat Mr. Udall, who made his campaign almost exclusively about abortion rights and contraception, it will demonstrate that Republicans still have strength in a state that could be essential to regaining the presidency.

Colorado passed gun control legislation post-Sandy Hook and legalized cannabis in a 2012 vote, both under Gov. Hickenlooper. For the Republicans to take him out, as well as a Udall, a name synonymous with liberal Democratic politics in the U.S., would be a significant victory.

On the other hand, The GOP is walking the wire with its union-busting governors in the industrial heartland:

The polls also show up-in-the-air races in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the Republican incumbents, Rick Snyder and Scott Walker, appear to hold nominal leads. 

If the Republicans lose one or two of these races, it will complicate what might otherwise be an impressive performance for them in governors’ contests nationwide. Republican governors in competitive states have no business losing in what should be a good year for the party.

The wounded Dems are relying, once again, on the Obama coalition -- blacks, women, Latinos, students -- to hold on:

Every vote counts, of course, but some constituencies — especially those that made up Mr. Obama’s victories — will play a crucial role in shaping the outcomes on Tuesday. 

Democrats will need to counter a strong Republican advantage with men by winning women by nearly as much. That might require an even larger gender gap in some states than the 18-point one in the 2012 presidential election. Democrats will also need a much stronger turnout among nonwhite voters than they received in 2010. Black turnout in Georgia and North Carolina will be especially important: Follow whether the black share of the electorate approaches or exceeds 2012, when blacks represented 23 percent of North Carolina voters and 30 percent in Georgia.

I don't see students, women and Latinos strongly motivated to turnout this polling season; blacks on the other hand might very well show up in numbers greatly exceeding the last midterm. The reason? All the Republican-sponsored restrictive voting laws requiring photo identification and doing away with same-day registration are clearly aimed at diminishing the black vote.

Read Erik Eckholm's excellent synopsis of the GOP's voter suppression efforts, "Election Tests New Rules on Voting":

New rules to limit same-day registration or require photo identification will be in effect in some states, even as their constitutionality is argued in the courts. Most of the changes were adopted by Republican legislatures in the name of electoral integrity, even though evidence of voter fraud was negligible. They are opposed by Democrats who say tighter rules are aimed at discouraging minorities, poor people and college students from voting. All those groups tend to prefer Democrats.

“A significant number of changes are going into effect that will make it harder for millions of Americans to participate,” said Wendy R. Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “In close races, the impact might be larger than the margin of victory.” 

But Republicans say such concerns are overblown. 

“We believe these claims are made for partisan purposes to rile up the Democrat Party base,” said Michael B. Thielen, executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association in Washington. 

Numerous reports of voters facing obstacles have emerged from early voting in Texas and Georgia, among other states. But quantifying the impact of the altered rules is challenging, especially in a midterm election expected to have low turnout. In states like North Carolina, liberal groups hope that public anger over curbed voting opportunities will provoke a backlash that motivates Democratic voters, offsetting possible losses.

Another tactic Dems use to juice turnout is by placing minimum-wage increases on the ballot. Labor reporter Steven Greenhouse weighs in this morning with the informative "Little Opposition Seen in Some Votes to Raise State Minimum Wages":

In Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, binding referendums would raise the state minimum wage above the $7.25 an hour mandated by the federal government. 

These measures are so overwhelmingly popular in some states, notably Alaska and Arkansas, that the opposition has hardly put up a fight.

“These groups have noticed that minimum-wage increases can easily pass — they have seen this in the past few years,” said John G. Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. “They can’t get it through the legislatures in these red states, so they do it this way.”

Some Republicans say that the main reason for these initiatives is to mobilize low-income voters to help re-elect embattled Democrats, like Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska. But supporters deny this, saying they are pushing to raise the minimum because so many workers are struggling and because the minimum wage has trailed inflation. 

The measures in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota would set the minimum wage lower than the $10.10 an hour that President Obama has asked Congress to pass, to no avail. The ballot initiatives in Arkansas and South Dakota call for a minimum of $8.50 an hour, while Nebraska’s would go to $9 and Alaska’s to $9.75.

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Seattle has adopted a measure that will raise its minimum wage to $15 in several stages, while San Franciscans will vote on Tuesday whether to approve a $15 minimum wage. Residents in nearby Oakland will vote on a $12.25 wage.

In a surprising twist, hardly any business groups in San Francisco are opposing the $15 proposal, which is expected to pass easily.

Seattle, where I reside, has one interesting race. Jess Spear, a young climate scientist running as a socialist who was Kshama Sawant's campaign manager (Sawant's victory in 2013 paved the way for increased minimum-wage measures nationally), is taking on Speaker of the House Frank Chopp, an entrenched corporate-friendly Democrat, in the 43rd Legislative District. Spear won't win. But she has run a good campaign, and she has hit Chopp hard and repeatedly, forcing the moribund machine pol to actually defend himself and campaign this time, touting his accomplishments for the district. It is what democracy is supposed to look like and sound like and be like. Going forward, we need more vibrant, youth-oriented third party campaigns.