47% Redux

The election is three weeks in the past, and Republican strategists remain defiant in the face of loss.

Stuart Stevens, a Romney campaign advisor, said this week that while Barack Obama may have won a majority of the popular vote Mitt Romney received a majority of votes among those earning $50,000 or more a year.  Stevens claimed this was a victory for Romney, as it demonstrated that the Republican Party retains the support of the middle class.

Romney won the majority of voters making over $50,000, but lost the popular vote, so obviously the majority of Americans make less than $50,000.  What does that tell you?  Among other things, it shows that the American middle class of yore is shrinking in the face of a three-decade effort of conservatives to shift a greater share of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a few. 

Another inference one can make is that a good number of the fifty-grand-and-up club probably aren’t making too much more than that.  Ignoring the crass pronouncements of GOP bigwigs, Republican voters just a layoff away from falling into the bottom 47% or worse continue to quaff the Kool-Aid. 

It’s a matter of time before cognitive dissonance sets in.  On the other hand, perhaps not.  Americans rarely accept realities that do not comport with their worldview.  The conservative myth is seductive, entrancing even those who stand little or no chance of benefitting from its promises.

Until the electorate wakes up and votes in its true interests, we can’t expect anything besides more of the same.   

Status Quo

The voters have decided and chosen the lesser evil.

The Obama victory last night, as with that of any major party presidential candidate, means very little in the long run for the American people and the world at large.  It is good news for us who care about preserving the remaining shreds of civil liberties we still possess or who wish to extend civil rights protections for women, same sex couples, and immigrants. 

But in every other social arena, particularly in the workplace, a second Obama administration will have the same impact as a Romney administration would have had.  The demands of the global capitalist economy, untethered to any bedrock of morality, presided over by sociopathic profit seekers, will continue to dictate U.S. policy as it has for the past generation.  Expect more of the same—more industry-funded union-busting efforts, more state right-to-work legislation, and the steady erosion of personal economic security as the American working class is sacrificed in the race to the bottom.    

If you find you’re worse off four years hence, don’t blame it on your vote.  The only option you ever had was the status quo. 

Vox Populi

Here is an interesting tidbit culled from YouTube.  It’s footage from a Romney campaign rally in Ohio this week.

There’s a saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God.  If that is the case, then God help God.

Home Stretch

October is drawing to a close, the debates are over, and we are little more than a week away from the end of the 2012 presidential race.

The closer November 6^th draws, the shriller the rhetoric gets.  Both candidates are hurling jabs at each other’s record and respective economic programs, while their acolytes in the chattering classes argue bitterly over everything from tax policy to healthcare to whether the administration acted appropriately on intelligence related to the Benghazi consulate attack. There has also been the inevitable pop culture spillover: Conservatives are up in arms over enfant auteur Lena Dunham’s suggestive pro-Obama video, and a clutch of concertgoers walked out on Madonna after she urged them to vote for the president during a performance.

The polls show we are just as divided as we’ve been for the past dozen years…Obama and Romney are tied at 48% among registered voters according to Gallup.  Ideologues aside, most of us will vote for the perceived lesser evil.  The other major contest, however, is the one most people aren’t paying attention to: the race for control of both houses of Congress.  But 468 separate races—for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and the 33 Class I seats in the Senate—don’t hold nearly the media sway as the personality-driven choice we make every four years for the top job. 

We ignore the congressional elections because they seem irrelevant to daily concerns.  Perhaps they are in the larger scheme.  One could argue the same of the presidential race; we only believe it significant because of the attendant media saturation.  Our apathy is literally systemic.  The reason we don’t participate in politics, save to vote, is because we are effectively cut out of the policy making process.  At the national level (and at the state level too), the “iron triangle” of interest groups, bureaucrats, and legislators forms policy.  The things that affect us most directly—public school quality, whether there are enough cops on the street, and how soon the potholes on your street get fixed—are governed by largely anonymous local officials whose names we either skip on the ballot or vote for blindly without recognition.   

All the same, if voting is our only role within the existing system we should make the most of it.  As an engaged citizen, I’ll devote my efforts over the next few days to urging my neighbors and coworkers to take charge of their future and cast their ballot.  Starting now.  Let’s see, let me bring up my friends’ numbers on my phone here and…hmmm, it’s Sunday, I shouldn’t really bother them…oh, who am I kidding?  Game 4 of the World Series is on…can’t miss that.  I’ll make my calls tomorrow, sometime, maybe. 

Go Giants!   

Truth and Fiction

A couple of items from the Web today underscore the increasingly surreal blurring of truth and fiction in public affairs.

The Onion, almost always good for a morning chuckle, describes a purported speech by Obama that slightly, but only slightly, reflects the apocalyptic fears of suburban tract-house sheep concerning the President.

Meanwhile, Salon, which is marginally more serious than The Onion, features a short article which reports that 15% of Republicans in Ohio, a crucial swing state in the presidential race, actually believe Mitt Romney had more to do with Osama bin Laden’s death than President Obama.

Finally, to cap off the absurdity of this post-convention week, ABC News posted a piece  with a photo showing Joe Biden apparently snuggling against a woman biker in a diner, a real-life scene truly worthy of The Onion’s long-running parody series depicting Biden’s vice presidency.

The first Tuesday in November can’t get here fast enough.        

...And They're Off!

The conventions are over.  Finally.  After the quadrennial dog and pony shows from each party, we now face eight weeks of media bombardment running up to Election Day while we indulge the delusion we have something resembling a real choice.

In one corner, we have the vapid animatron and his Stepford wife whose smiles thinly veil the threat of a return to a relentless pursuit of failed supply side policies and the accelerated immiseration of American workers.

In the other corner, we have the slightly tarnished incumbent whose occasional oratorical passion helps belie the impression ice water flows in his veins and whose victory will mean only a slightly less vicious pursuit of the self-same policies.    

And if you’re already tired of it all, you still have another fifty-nine days to endure.  Just don’t forget to vote on November 6^th.

Promises to Keep

Mitt Romney’s overseas tour this past week has provided glimpses at how he might perform as diplomat-in-chief if elected.

Some of the stories are merely interesting anecdotes, such as Romney’s complaint that Britain was too crowded or his amicable meeting with former Polish president Lech Walesa.  The most telling highlight of the trip, however, was his fundraising speech in Tel Aviv concerning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Romney’s address was a cringe-inducing string of verbal missteps.  In short order, he endorsed a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran, supported Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its national capital, and strongly implied that the reason the Palestinians were poor compared to the Israelis was due to Arab cultural inferiority.  While the speech undoubtedly played well for certain audiences, on the balance it was an embarrassment.  Its most grating element was Romney’s use of the pronouns “we” and “us” for the United States, as if he had already won the election and had the right to speak on behalf of the American people.  Most irksome of all, however, was the underlying assumption that the U.S. will unconditionally support Israeli foreign policy regardless of Israel’s actions.  Coming on the heels of the Obama administration’s $3.1 billion military aid guarantee for the coming year, Romney’s latest foot-in-mouth episode merely points up a long-running syndrome in U.S. foreign policy.

The alliance with Israel has proven an expensive and counterproductive one for the United States.  Simply put, many of Israel’s hostile Muslim neighbors supply us with oil.  However negatively Arabs, Persians, and other Muslim peoples are perceived in this country, a negativity which taps into the American view that certain cultures are superior or inferior, we are heavily dependent upon the strategic natural resource they control.  One cause of this state of affairs is that American policy toward Israel is formed by the confluence of powerful lobbying groups such as AIPAC, the political preferences of frightfully ignorant red state Evangelicals who believe Israel’s reestablishment fulfills biblical prophecies of the Second Coming, and neoconservative policymakers who still believe the U.S. can remake the Middle East in its own image.  An added dimension is the mirroring of Israeli and Americans' respective self-images.  Israeli exceptionalism is a first cousin to American exceptionalism, at least in practice.  When you are building a city on a hill, you don’t concern yourself with the rights of people who get in your way. 

It's not hard to see, then, why the story of Israel resonates with American conservatives.  European settlers, fleeing religious persecution, convinced they are on a divine mission, land on a foreign shore believing they have arrived in the promised land.  Driving out the indigenous population, sometimes by guile, more often by force, the settlers come to consider any real or perceived opposition as further justification of the righteousness of their cause.  The new nation’s self-identity becomes an ideology, any criticism of which, no matter how justified, brands the critic as disloyal or worse.

The events of the past decade have only served to further muddle the issue of human rights in Palestine.  American politicians of all but the most progressive stripe accept without question the premise that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is a bulwark against Islamist militancy in the Middle East.  Support for Israel has transposed the culture wars at home on the Middle East.  One argument used by cultural conservatives to bolster their advocacy of stronger U.S.-Israeli ties is that Israel is essentially a European nation, an outpost of a culture much like ours sited in hostile territory.  In other words, the courageous Israelis are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

Arguments centered on cultural essentialism are risky at best.  And by no means is U.S. support for Israel the sole reason for anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.  American backing of corrupt, oppressive regimes in the the Arab states, Iran, and Central Asia during the Cold War contributed heavily to Islamist militancy, along with decades of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern petroleum resources.  The rest of the world does not share America’s historical amnesia, least of all in this most contentious of the world’s regions.  When Romney accuses Iran of testing America’s “moral defenses” (whatever that means), he is pandering as much to the prejudices of Republican voters at home as he is trying to rally Israeli sentiment for a new Mideast war in furtherance of corporate interests. 

The past record of the more extreme elements of the Palestinian independence movement often overshadow legitimate discourse over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.  While American memories are short, we can always count upon Israel and its advocates to refresh them.  The decision last week to not include a commemoration of the 1972 Munich massacre in the opening of the London Olympic games stirred up a welter of controversy over whether we have forgotten this and sundry other anti-Israeli atrocities at Palestinian hands.  However, history is used to further subjective, collective ends.  Consequently, in the West Palestinian history is ignored while the heroic Zionists are lauded.  Valorization of the Israeli experiment pushes aside fundamental questions concerning the nature of the experiment.   

Israel faces an existential dilemma.  It can be any two of the following but not all three: A Jewish state, a democracy, and Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel encompassing all of the Levant as defined in Israel’s declaration of independence).  A solely Jewish democracy excludes non-Jews by definition.  Likewise, so does a solely Jewish Eretz Israel.  A democratic Ertez Israel would have to extend equal rights to its Arab majority, thereby obviating its Jewish character.  The frequent claims of Israeli leaders that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy fully equal social and political rights fail on the premise that Israel is the Jewish homeland.  By definition, a non-Jew must be a second class citizen in a Jewish state. 

Bearing in mind this last premise, of the numerous solutions proposed for the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the least-worst outcome is the two-state solution.  Even this course of action has multiple variants depending upon the political proclivities of the advocate.  The one that would provide a rough approximation of fairness is an Israel within its pre-1967 borders, a Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, and Jerusalem as a neutral corpus separatum as originally set out in the 1947 UN partition plan.  A rough approximation of fairness, however, in no way translates into justice for displaced Palestinians after more than sixty years of being deprived a national homeland.

In any case, prospects for a fully sovereign Palestine are chancy if not unlikely.  Any two-state plan accepted by Israel and the U.S. would surely place restrictions on the Palestinian entity’s ability to trade freely and provide for its self defense, essentially rendering it an Israeli dependency.  Furthermore, it’s not as if the Israelis haven’t considered the two-state solution on their own.  According to Tom Segev in his history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli leadership at one point considered a preemptive declaration of a Palestinian state led by hand-picked Arab notables.  Under the right conditions, the United States and Israel could achieve a significant propaganda coup while preserving the status quo via creation of a dependent, co-opted Palestinian state.

It is unlikely any kind of equitable solution is viable in Palestine because, frankly, the two most influential players don’t want one.  The long-term undercurrent of Israeli policy, particularly that of Netanyahu’s and of previous Likud governments, has been to marginalize and remove any vestige of Arab self-determination in the remaining Palestinian territories.  This is a process that has been supported, albeit incrementally, by successive U.S. presidential administrations.  Israel has been a third-rail issue in American politics for decades and any politician on the national stage must step carefully so as to avoid causing offense to the constellation of interest groups which advocate for Israel.  It’s important for a non-incumbent presidential candidate to establish his or her positions early on while avoiding the appearance of policymaking from the rostrum.  With this in mind, Mitt should keep any further promises to foreign leaders to himself until after he’s won the election. 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

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Mitt got it half right: The GOP is the party of the rich.  It just happens also to be the party of the greedy from all walks of life...

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Not Concerned

It seems Mitt Romney has suffered another slip of the tongue. 

This week he told an audience that he was "not concerned" about the very poor because they had a social safety net to rely on.  Apparently he meant to emphasize his commitment to making things better for the middle class. 

All the same, his infelicitous choice of words was quite telling...and perhaps even calculated.  Romney's utterance reflects the long-held bias of American voters against the impoversished.  The Puritan belief that the poor somehow deserve their plight because of their moral unworthiness is alive and well, and Romney is simply walking the well-trod path followed by Republican politicians since Reagan.  Brace yourselves for more of the usual right-wing drivel of how we should help the less fortunate by cutting the programs that keep them afloat...