Bloomberg - who needs him?

The Republicans have decided that John McCain is going to be their candidate, and they hope that he can pull the fractured elements of their party together for long enough to at least conduct a credible campaign for the November general election. The Democrats are working hard to deal with their embarrassment of riches in which there seem to be too many good candidates to make a decision among them an easy one.

So who in Hell needs a Mike Bloomberg run for the Presidency? David Sirota writes about the Bloomberg idiocy.

Our media love to tell us just how much Americans are pining for an independent presidential candidacy, and specifically, just how much potential support there is for a Mike Bloomberg for President campaign. But as I show in my new nationally syndicated newspaper column out today, both assertions are fiction. That begs a simple question - one that ties into my upcoming book: Why is the Establishment so adamant about jamming a candidacy down our throat that we so clearly do not want? Why is the political elite so insistent on crushing what has become a full-fledged uprising in 2008?

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that Bloomberg is extremely unpopular on the national stage. Gallup reports that "the American public does not appear to believe it is important or necessary for an independent candidate outside of the traditional two major parties to step into the race in order to save the nation." And America clearly isn't interested in an independent candidacy who, as Glenn Greenwald notes, holds extremist views on major issues like Iraq (sidenote: As part of my ongoing efforts to use the column to promote fellow progressives, Glenn is featured in the column).

And yet the Bloomberg bandwagon in the media continues to grow ever larger. Barely a day goes by without some fawning story speculating about Bloomberg's potential run for president - implying that he has some sort of huge mass constituency and political monopoly on so-called "competence" and "bipartisanship."

The disconnect between what Americans actually want and what the Establishment wants America to want reflects just how petrified the elite are right now. They look at both parties' potential nominees and realize that they each potentially represent some form of fundamental change - and that scares them. And so they are desperate for someone - anyone! - to suppress what Alexander Hamilton called the "popular passions" and champion the status quo's "permanent will."

So we have the Republicans who are the party of fear and war, and the Democrats who think that the demonstrated incompetence of the Republicans are sufficient justification for replacing the Republicans in the White House and regaining control of Congress.

So who is Bloomberg's constituency besides a few media voices? Billionaires for Bloomberg? What is that? A constituency of one very large ego and a massive pocket book?

We don't need him here in Texas, and he offers nothing apparent that Washington needs. He needs to be satisfied with buying the job of Mayor of New York and forget buying the Presidency. Or perhaps he merely wants to see how much money he can waste on votes, the way Mitt Romney, Phil Gramm, and John Connelly all have done.

Business reacts to the populism from Huckabee and Edwards

We have heard from both John Edwards and Mike Huckabee how the corporations are making life more difficult for average Americans, and the corporations are reacting. They are going to sit down with the populist candidates and work with individuals who are having problems to make life better for the average Americans who are facing problems caused by Corporate mistakes and malfeasance.

And now that you have reacted by asking what Universe I'm living in, here is the Los Angeles Times news report on what the real reaction from the business community is.

Washington - Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said.

The warning from the nation's largest trade association came against a background of mounting popular concern over the condition of the economy. A weak record of job creation, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, declining home values and other problems have all helped make the economy a major campaign issue.

Presidential candidates in particular have responded to the public concern. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has been the bluntest populist voice, but other front-running Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, have also called for change on behalf of middle-class voters.

On the Republican side, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee - emerging as an unexpected front-runner after winning the Iowa caucuses - has used populist themes in his effort to woo independent voters, blasting bonus pay for corporate chief executives and the effect of unfettered globalization on workers.

Reacting to what it sees as a potentially hostile political climate, Donohue said, the chamber will seek to punish candidates who target business interests with their rhetoric or policy proposals, including congressional and state-level candidates.

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions.

Chamber President Tom Donohue understands who owns America, and he is going to spend as much money as he needs in order to make that clear to mere uppity voters and politicians!

Did you really expect a bipartisan reaction from our corporate masters? Really?

How do you think that the members of the yesterday's "Bloomberg for President with a bipartisan cabinet" meeting or the master pundit of Bipartisanship, David Broder will deal with this?

Maybe they'll ask Donohue to compromise and only spend $30 million to defeat populists. Hey! Donohue might even deign to take their phone calls.

America the unrecognizable

This editorial was published today:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

For all my complaints with the dying newspaper, the New York Times, this time they got it right.

This is a reflection of George W. Bush, write large in the administration over which he presides. But Bush is a reflection of the panic and anger that is movement conservatism. It's not like the Democrats are going to be the nation's saviors, either. Nancy Pelosi has taken impeachment off the table, and she represents the Democrats in Congress who have seniority. Don't rock the boat. Protect the establishment at all costs.

The pundits, led by David Broder the (senile?) Dean of the Press Corps, are touting the bipartisan administration by New York City's billionaire Mayor Bloomberg. Salon's Glenn Greenwald explains what a travesty of establishmentarianism that is.

He [Bloomberg] also is as enamored of government control, police powers and surveillance as anyone in the Bush administration. He is an unrestrained advocate and enforcer of the War on Drugs (despite his own acknowledged use of marijuana, of course) and advocates the creation of "a DNA or fingerprint database to track and verify all legal U.S. workers," about which the NY Civil Liberties Union said, with extreme understatement: "It doesn't sound like the free society we think we're living in. It will inevitably be used not just by employers but by law enforcement, government agencies, schools and all over the private sector."

Clearly, this is just exactly what our country desperately needs, what it is missing most -- a neoconservative, combat-avoiding, Bush-supporting, Middle-East-warmonger who sees U.S. and Israeli interests as indistinguishable and inextricably linked, with a fetish for ever-increasing government control and surveillance, and a background as a Wall St. billionaire. We just haven't had enough of those in our political culture. Our political system, more than anything, is missing the influence of people like that. That's why it's broken: not enough of those.

Bloomberg is basically just Rudy Giuliani with a billion or two dollars to spend to alter the election. When it comes to foreign policy, war-making and government power, he offers absolutely nothing that isn't found in destructive abundance among the most extremist precincts in the Republican Party, while his moderate to liberal stance on social issues would prevent him from actually winning the support of his natural GOP base.

In fact -- despite his steadfast neoconservatism -- it's hard to see how the candidacy of a divorced, unmarried, stridently pro-gun-control, pro-choice, socially liberal New York City billionaire would accomplish anything other than offering the Republicans their best hope of winning in 2008. All of this seems to be intended as punishment meted out by the Establishment to the Democrats -- using Bloomberg's billions as the weapon -- for not repudiating their loudmouth, restless liberal base strongly enough. That, more than anything, seems to be the oh-so-noble and trans-partisan purpose of David Broder, David Boren and Sam Nunn: to find a way to stifle the populist anger at our political establishment after 8 years of unrestrained Bush-Cheney devastation, increasingly represented (on the Democratic side) by the Scary, Angry, Intemperate John Edwards campaign.

A Bloomberg candidacy would have no purpose other than satisfy his bottomless personal lust for attention and bestow the wise old men threatening the country with his candidacy with some fleeting sense of rejuvenated relevance and wisdom. His political views are conventional in every way and he's little more than an establishment-enabling figurehead. The whole attraction to his candidacy has nothing to do with any issues or substance and everything to do with an empty addiction to vapid notions of Establishment harmony and a desire to exert control, whereby our Seriousness guardians devote themselves to a candidate for reasons largely unrelated to his policies or political views, thus proving themselves, as usual, to be the exact antithesis of actual seriousness.

So the Bush administration consists of out and out reactionary loonies, so find someone just like Bush to replace him. and if David Broder puts his fingers in his ears and whistles real loudly he won't hear any Partisan complaints at the sloppy job he is doing as he tries thinking and writing about what is wrong with America.

Whatever happens, the Bush administration is incompetent and down-right scary, but the Democratic leadership does not want to rock the boat any more than David Broder and the pundits do. So they are all shrieking about the horrible Populists who are popping up in both parties (sounds suspiciously like people who are facing similar problems and finding similar solutions when it happens in both parties.) In the Republican Party it is first Huckabee, and to some extent also Ron Paul. In the Democratic Party it is the Dirty Hippy Bloggers who are doing all the complaining. David Sirota discusses the situation:

A pretty reliable gauge of Establishment fear is how far away from factual reality its chief spokesmen stray at election time. With economic populism now driving both the Democratic and Republican presidential contests, professional political pontificators in Washington are attacking candidates for being crazed and angry - when in fact their own rhetoric shows it is the pundits who are the angriest of all. An uprising is on - one against the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests. And inside the walls of the Washington palace, the elite are freaking out.

America is coming up against major changes, and the establishment is freaking out. George W. Bush himself represents an effort by movement conservatives and evangelical fundamentalists to deal with the changes that have been pounding more and more Americans for a generation, but Bush has been a solution driven by fear and ignorance and trying to apply military power and authoritarianism to solve the problems. The problems are real, but the Bush-led solutions have made the problems much worse.

Well, centralization of power, militarism, authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism have all failed, so we are seeing a rise in populism. The establishment is all cozy in financially protected ghettos with security guards, and they are getting panicked by "the rise of the masses." The pundit's solution is just ignore the problems and they will go away. That's the solution of the well-to-do geriatric set like David Broder.

It's time to try something new, and whatever it is, should embody the dream of Liberty that created America in 1776 and that established the U.S. Constitution. Those are two very powerful forces, and they can deal with the economic and social changes that are causing so much disruption in America today. Maybe we can remind Broder and the Establishment what they are?

They'll be better for it.

[See also The last stages of American world dominance have arrived for an explanation of what is causing all the problems that the conservatives and populists are reacting to, and that the establishment pundits and Wall Street want to ignore.]