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01.13 Hawaii, the Unique State

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01.24 Can Apple “Rescue” US Education? (Graphics)

01.23 What You (Really) Need to Know

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02.10 LET’S REMAKE THE WAY WE MAKE THINGS

02.09 Obama shouldn’t compromise on birth control with GOP, religious leaders or an unpopular Congress - video

02.09 Cancer rates triple among New York police officers who responded to 9/11

02.08 The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy

02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering

02.04 Your Day at the Beach Could Soon Lead to a Night at the Hospital

02.03 Obama Won't Touch Climate With a 10-Foot Pole

02.03 Komen reverses decision to cut Planned Parenthood funding

02.03 Reforming EU Deep-Sea Fisheries Management

02.02 Obama’s Support for Natural Gas Drilling "A Painful Moment" for Communities Exposed to Fracking- video

02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women

02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid

01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video

01.30 Report: Small planes still pour lead into skies

01.30 Scientists Call on Obama Administration to Use Science as Guide for Arctic

01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate

01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills

01.25 Solar Cheaper Than Diesel Making India’s Mittal Believer: Energy

01.24 Sounding an Alarm on Birds and Mercury

01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science

01.22 The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care

01.22 Looking Inside the Twinkie

Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians

Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics

Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators

Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here)

Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries

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02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics

02.03 Media Watch: CNN's Erin Burnett regurgitates right-wing talking points to scare retired people - video

02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda

02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal

01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower

01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president'

01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video

Daily The Daily Howler

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02.05 Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

02.04 THE CAGING OF AMERICA

02.03 Senate Votes To Ban Its Members From Insider Trading... Kind Of

01.31 Senate clears way for vote on insider-trading ban

01.25 Why all the robo-signing? Shedding light on the shadow banking system

01.25 In Iraq, Haditha case is reminder of justice denied

01.22 Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations

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02.10 The Cancer in Occupy

02.10 How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum

02.10 People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force

02.09 Obama, Explained

02.09 OPED: The White Underclass

02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill

02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS

02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals?

02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State

02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics

02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football???

02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video

02.02 Secrecy Shrouds ‘Super PAC’ Funds in Latest Filings

02.02 Steve Israel condemns GOP Keystone XL ‘stunt,’ cheers Democratic Drive to 25 to reclaim the House - video

02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash

01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

01.30 The Truth About the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty

01.30 Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable

01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades

01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video

01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide

01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...???

01.24 Science Bulletins: Whales Give Dolphins a Lift - video

01.24 Buffett On Why Romney Should Pay Higher Taxes: He’s Just ‘Shoving Around Money,’ Not ‘Straining His Back’

01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS

01.22 Three Takeaways From South Carolina

01.21 Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right's Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election

High Crimes?

Economics, Gov't. & Business

02.10 This is no bailout for Main Street America

02.10 Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All

02.10 Matt Taibbi assesses the $26 billion settlement designed to aid victims of foreclosure fraud - video

02.10 Foreclosure Deal to Spur U.S. Home Seizures

02.08 Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures

02.07 App Stores Create 500,000 U.S. Jobs

02.07 The Payroll Tax Fight

02.07 Obama super PAC decision: President blesses fundraising for Priorities USA Action

02.06 How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy

02.05 We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income

02.03 PRIVATE INEQUITY

02.02 The New American Divide

02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans

02.01 Economics 101

01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget

01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing

01.29 Made in the World

01.28 Matt Taibbi ponders whether Obama’s embrace of populist rhetoric is already impacting Wall Street - video

01.28 Sugar daddy Adelson could save $500 million in taxes if his boy Gingrich wins - video

01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’

01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%

01.27 Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots

01.27 Details Emerge of New Financial Fraud Unit

01.27 Not all jobs are equal

01.27 The Shift from Manufacturing to Service Economy - Graphic

01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality

01.24 Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted

01.23 State Capitalism: The visible hand

01.22 How Big Money Bought Our Democracy, Corrupted Both Parties, and Set Us Up for Another Financial Crisis - video

01.22 How U.S. lost out on Apple's iPhone work

International

02.03 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance

02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul

01.31 TABLE TALK

01.30 With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war

01.30 UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing'

01.26 Iran is ready to return to nuclear talks

01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

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The Unrequited Promise of America

COMMENTARY:

The Unrequited Promise of America

by J. Russell Tyldesley

Conservatives have co-opted the language of freedom and liberty to serve the cause of concentrated power. The Democratic Party will not be able to effectively argue against this unless they abandon the shared consensus.

Writer Robert Parry's analysis of why Democrats continue to lose elections is very good, but I think the solutions suggested will not be effective. It makes a concession to the theory that you must fight fire with fire and descend to the tactics of your opposition—in effect, beat them at their own game.

I doubt that Democrats can secure a fair deal with the mainstream media. The reason is that a new consensus has emerged since the beginning of the Reagan years. It was made possible by the extraordinary economic expansion of the U.S. after the end of WW II. By 1960 it was indisputable that almost all citizens had participated in this economic expansion, particularly the highly extolled (if mostly mythical) “middle class.” World War II pulled us out of the depression that persisted through the 1930s, and the Cold War that followed extended the gains and made the GDP into the almost universally accepted measure of progress. The ancient debate between capital and labor was, seemingly, a thing of the past. Labor unions still gave most of their support to Democrats, but unions became increasingly domesticated and “reasonable” in their demands. Labor leaders often took stances that made it difficult to tell what side they were on.

While both Republicans and Democrats affirmed the triumph of capitalism—the Soviet Union would soon be defeated and all socialist movements were pronounced as failures—they did not capture the fundamental competitive (albeit selfish) nature of mankind and channel greed, envy and hypocrisy in positive ways. No need to break up “trusts” when corporations were (presumably) a way that every American could participate in prosperity through stock ownership. If corporate behavior was sometimes harmful to community values, who cared if they were personally rewarded? So, capitalism has been effectively “un-demonized” and in it now resides the expectation that an ever-expanding economy will supply the juice to resolve social conflicts and class warfare.

There is hardly an economist that will contest the truism that an expanding GDP will provide the financial muscle to improve the lives of all citizens. Even the answer for under-developed countries becomes to raise financial capital through exports which will (so it is supposed) raise the standard of living for all. The fact that almost half the citizens of the world survive on less than $2 a day does not seem to undermine this assumption, and various non-economic reasons suffice to explain away the continuing impoverishment of most of the world. So too, the apparent accelerating increase in the gap between rich and poor in America is still evaluated through a lens that will not see any deficiencies in the economic system as the culprit. The "common wisdom" is that it is laziness, wars, world events, natural disasters, government regulation and a social welfare mentality that prevents our economy from really humming and creating wealth for all.

Labor unrest has been successfully equated with various “red scares” that have been concocted in our history. These have been sufficient to demonize the liberal and democratic arguments for a more just and egalitarian social compact. The consensus includes the myth that the U.S. defeated communism because of our exceptional system and our charitable inclinations to make our system available to the rest of the world. Our economic system and our mainstream religions continue to portray the American character as something special and unique in history—surely a clear example of having earned God’s favor for all time. In fact, even some of our churches have come to understand the capitalist theory that it is not a good thing to help people or other countries with monetary aid. Instead, we justify acquiring precious natural resources, minerals, oil, gems etc. at cheap prices and the countries who happen to have these scarce materials will benefit from free trade. That the resources may be effectively owned by a criminal class can be overlooked if they purport to be trying to work on democracy and reforms. Meanwhile we can supply those countries with modern weapons of war to subdue their populations.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have been complicit in the articulation of this new "New Deal" that concedes to corporate domination and a government just large enough to provide a welfare system sufficient to keep the greatest number alive to be able to subsist on low wages, and regulate this privatized system through fiscal policies designed to encourage growth, maintain full employment (or nearly so—but not too full to spike inflation through higher wages). At the same time corporations will be free to channel investment, but must accept at least the concept of collective bargaining. Workers, in turn, may negotiate wages and benefits through unions, but must defer to management’s total authority to make decisions in all areas. When management mismanages and workers lose pensions and take drastic pay cuts as their employer teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, this is seen as only inevitable in a private competitive system.

It is quite amazing that in political campaigns, politicians of all stripes will tell how they will strengthen the middle class, but never make mention of a lower class or, for that matter, an upper class.

The concept of the inevitability of conflict in order to move the cause of democracy and equal rights forward has given way to the conservative assumptions that the liberation of labor can only lead to either communism or fascism. All good Americans must flock to the center and maintain the stability that supports realism and give up idealistic illusions that there is another way to help the underclasses. In fact, it is quite amazing that in political campaigns, politicians of all stripes will tell how they will strengthen the middle class, but never make mention of a lower class or, for that matter, an upper class—as though it is possible to have a middle without ends on either side.

It has become completely gauche to even allude to the language of class conflict, and this is why the Democratic Party seems to have lost its compass and cannot speak a language that resonates with yearnings that are still inherent (if lying dormant) in this great American experiment with a democracy of the people.

The salvation, if there is to be one, will begin at the grass roots, in local small communities where political labels and mass media are less important

Given this shared consensus against the people and in favor of capital and profits, I see little salvation in Democratic politics, at least at the national level. The salvation, if there is to be one, will begin at the grass roots, in local small communities where political labels and mass media are less important. Perhaps, then, the American people can have a long-deferred and long-postponed resumption of our primal conversation about who and what we want to be as a people; and will determine whether the spirit of our nation best reflects Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln; or Edmund Burke, John Q. Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Ronald Reagan.

The old Federalist-Republican debate was never resolved 200 years ago for once and all—it has always been whether Americans will have an expanded suffrage and live up to its “Declared” principles that all men (and now women) are created equal and endowed with natural rights. Conservatives have co-opted the language of freedom and liberty to serve the cause of concentrated power. The Democratic Party will not be able to effectively argue against this unless they abandon the shared consensus. I’m betting they do not have the guts to do it, and they themselves do not understand or believe what America could be. That’s why I am still placing my bets on the emergence of a credible third party—it may take a thousand years, but I think it could happen in less than a hundred. Global warming and an endless war on terror may be two of the dynamic forcing issues that will change the course of history and bring about a much-needed second American Revolution.

J. Russell Tyldesley, an insurance executive and real estate developer, resides in New Mexico.

The author acknowledges the ideas expressed in Harvey Kaye's book, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America as an inspiration for this article.

Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on June 14, 2006.

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