A New Feudalism

Everywhere jihadis are on the warpath. Iraq is besieged by daily terror bombings. Pakistan and Afghanistan are battlegrounds. Secular politicians are assassinated in Tunisia. Egypt is experimenting with a return to Mubarakism. Syria is being cracked. The United States is fighting a secret war in Somalia. Where is all the funding coming from? One can't help but come to the conclusion that the U.S. is in bed with the imams bankrolled by the Gulf Arab states.

Secularism and social democracy -- transcendent in the 19th and 20th centuries -- are now deemed too expensive and dangerous by Western elites. A new feudalism is coming down the pike. And while religious fundamentalism is too much on the wane in the West to provide a sturdy cage for social control, racial identity and entitlement are ready at hand. The strategy for domination and a continuing rollback of rights will be race based. We're already seeing it with the Supreme Court's scrapping of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Obama might not be a progressive, but he was elected by a progressive majority with impressive margins -- twice. After the first election the Supreme Court served up its Citizens United decision. When that didn't work and Obama was reelected in spite of the unlimited amount of money spent on attack ads the Supreme Court decided to repeal the Voting Rights Act. The idea is to disenfranchise the progressive majority. And if that doesn't work, if citizens still find a way to vote, then I'm sure other repressive measures will be concocted. This is the direction we're headed in.

Democrats Need to Return to the "50-State Strategy"

Eventually Democrats will have to come to the realization that they need to remain constantly mobilized on a national campaign footing; Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy but with resources if not at par at least in the ballpark of a presidential campaign. What are the chances that this will happen? Slim. Obama gets it; in January it was announced that Obama for American would turn into Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy non-profit able to raise unlimited amounts of money. But chances are that it will be another Change To Win -- a reshuffling of chairs on the Titanic.

A reading of today's paper is all one needs to understand why a full-tilt Democratic mobilization is required. First, from Ashley Parker's frontpage story on Boehner's refusal to bargain on the sequester, "Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts, and House G.O.P. Cheers":

“We asked him to commit to us that when the cuts actually came on March 1, that he would stand firm and not give in, and he’s holding to that,” said Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “I think Friday will be an important day that shows we’re finally willing to stand and fight for conservative principles and force Washington to start living within its means. And that will be a big victory.” 

Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican who was elected on the 2010Tea Party wave and has had his differences with the speaker, was similarly complimentary toward Mr. Boehner. 

“He’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and I think it’s working to our favor and to his,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “I get the feeling that our party is probably more unified right now than it has been at any time in the last several months.” 

Mr. Boehner, in some ways, finds himself the leader of the House Republicans with nowhere to actually lead. 

Among those who placed him in his post and could conceivably remove him, the test of his leadership seems to be how little action he takes. In a closed-door meeting and subsequent news conference this week, Mr. Boehner said the House was done negotiating over spending cuts until the Senate “begins to do something.” 

Mr. Boehner began the new Congress on shaky footing, a seemingly chastened man. Speculation swirled that he might not be able to hold on to his speakership (he did), and he was forced to pass two major pieces of legislation — a last-minute New Year’s Eve deal to avert automatic tax increases, and a Hurricane Sandy relief bill — without the support of the majority of his conference through the help of Democratic votes. On Thursday, Mr. Boehner again moved a piece of legislation through the House without majority support from his rank and file — the Violence Against Women Act. 

The result showed that conservatives seem willing to give him some running room on social issues as long as he holds firm on the fiscal front. 

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama, whose political fortitude he questioned publicly and privately.

It's the Tea Party triumphant. The Tea Party is calling the tune and Boehner is dancing the jig. There is where we're at. Birchers run the show. They're safe in gerrymandered districts, districts which could soon be multiplying if the Roberts Court scraps Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Charlie Savage outlines the devastating impact of losing Section 5 in a story, "Decision on Voting Law Could Limit Oversight," that appears alongside the sequester coverage:

J. Gerald Hebert, who formerly handled voting rights litigation for the Justice Department and is now in private practice, said that losing Section Five would be “devastating to protecting voting rights” because the costs of a lawsuit are so steep. Jon Greenbaum, the legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it would mean that the bulk of changes that now receive automatic scrutiny by the federal government could take effect without any review, eliminating a deterrent against mischief.

Minus a full-tilt mobilization this is our present and our future. The nation is run by neo-Dixiecrat, John Birch Society conservatives. Their power base is the House of Representatives, thanks to the gerrymander and corporate cash, which has been and will continue to be augmented by their other base of power, the Supreme Court.

Paul Krugman's column this morning is a good one, "Ben Bernanke, Hippie." In it he compares those who argued against invading Iraq during the Bush-fomented war hysteria in late 2002, early 2003 to those who have been arguing against implementing austerity during a global recession. In both cases critics of elite groupthink were dismissed as Hippies. Krugman's point is that Bernanke's energetic defense, during an appearance before the Senate on Tuesday, of government action to stimulate a depressed economy has turned him into a Hippie.

Is there a better way to wrap things up here on Friday morning than a track off one of my all-time favorite Hippie albums? Here's "The Poor Ditching Boy," from Richard Thompson's Henry the Human Fly (1970):

Neo-Dixiecrat Push to Scrap Section 5

This is the key paragraph from Adam Liptak's story today about Wednesday's arguments on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the Supreme Court:

Should the court strike down the law’s central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states [now covered by a federal preclearance requirement] to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.

The conservative justices indicated by their questions that they were in favor of scrapping Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The problem that they're grappling with is how to turn a neo-Dixiecrat GOP into a majority party. Their first bold move was the fast-tracked Citizens United ruling equating money with speech. Conservatives were frightened by the amount of money Obama raised in small amounts online during the 2008 campaign. But the Super PACs, which resulted from Citizens United, spectacularly underperformed for the neo-Dixiecrat GOP in 2012. Large swaths of the citizenry are immune to attack ads. Certain kinds of people have to be kept from voting. There are various ways to do this -- identification requirements, moving polling locations and limiting their hours of operation -- which were tried by Republican-controlled states. But the Department of Justice intervened in those states covered by Section 5 and told them to stop. This from today's unsigned editorial in the New York Times, Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote:

Congress found that, in general, the problems of voting discrimination were much worse in the covered areas than elsewhere in the United States. A recent study by Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology confirms that: “five-sixths or more of the cases of proven election discrimination from 1957 through 2013 have taken place in jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight.” The Justice Department used Section 5 last year to block and change discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, for example, and to block a discriminatory Florida law that limited early voting.

If the conservative majority votes in a bloc to strike down Section 5 it would do so on the basis that the formula used to determine covered jurisdictions is out of date. Congress would be tasked with updating the formula. This, as Liptak points out, will not happen; hence, a de facto ban:

Should the court strike down the coverage formula when it decides the case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But Congress seems unlikely to be able to agree on a new set of criteria, given the current partisan divide, meaning the part of the law requiring federal pre-approval of election changes would effectively disappear.

This is Republican road map for neo-Dixiecrat domination: massive amounts of corporate cash, a gerrymandered permanent majority in Congress and restrictive voting laws.