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Who You Callin’ Moderate?
The Senate held a historic vote on health care reform last night at 1 AM. Splitting exactly along party lines-that is, if you call Joe Lieberman a Democrat-the health care bill made it through a cloture vote and is one step away from final passage and the conference committee.
To get so-called moderate Democrat Ben Nelson on board, however, Harry Reid had to agree to a decidedly un-moderate compromise on abortion rights. It's not Stupak language-but it's close.
Stupak's staffers, meanwhile, were sending frantic emails to catholic bishops and top republican staffers asking for their help to keep his amendment in the final bill. If that's bipartisanship, they can keep it.
So who says these guys are so moderate, anyway? Politico, for one. The Washington Post as well. The Wall Street Journal called them "centrists," as did the New York Times. Interesting that moves that would radically alter women's right to choose are moderate.
Maybe the media's idea of moderate has something to do with who they're talking to. Look at the Sunday talk shows, for instance. Meet The Press had not a single woman on to discuss health care. You know it's bad when FOX News Sunday features a pro-choice woman, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and the biggest show on Sunday doesn't. CBS's Face the Nation was the only one to feature two women.
As Ann Friedman pointed out in The American Prospect, white men are the least likely to identify as progressives. So why do Democrats-and the media- continue to act as if their opinions are the only ones that matter?
(This post originally appeared Monday, December 21, 2009 at 5:58 pm.)
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30 Comments so far
Show AllBecause Laura we've all been such good girls. We never make waves, we're afraid to bond with each other once again since the backlash and we favor men as commentators. Because everyone laid down for the great Obama who is either a corporatist or useless. Because women get 4% of philanthropic dollars and yet now vote on whether the anti rape center we set up in the 70's should include men in it's name, they're already in the programs.
Because we care so much for everyone else just like we are conditioned to, that we never take care or ourselves. Because NARAL knew about this and already had comprimised. Because NARAL, Planned Parenthood etc. don't like organizing the rabble, only sending them fundraising letters. They like all the other groups in Washington (the veal pen Jane HAmsher has it) all think access is power. Gee women have thought that for a long time and its worked so well. We need a ferocious women's movement or we will soon enough find ourselves in the position of our African sisters of constant war made cheaper through raping women.
And as much as I do like Grit TV you could be a bit braver about calling for a real women's movement.
Its not who the media invites to the talk shows, its who owns the media that defines terms like centrist or moderate.
Ever since Clinton's 1996 media consolidation legislation, fascist ownership of media continues to grow. Guests who promote a fascist agenda dominate the guest list.
"Ever since Clinton's 1996 media consolidation legislation, fascist ownership of media continues to grow."
Not true.
Most of the media consolidation occurred before Clinton, and the rate of consolidation slowed under Clinton:
http://discuss.epluribusmedia.net/node/548
- Maybe the media's idea of moderate has something to do with who... -
... signs their paychecks.
GENERAL ELECTRIC --(donated 1.1 million to GW Bush for his 2000 election campaign)
* NBC Network News: The Today Show, Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, Meet the Press, Dateline NBC, NBC News at Sunrise.
* CNBC business television; MSNBC
WESTINGHOUSE / CBS INC.
* CBS Network News: 60 minutes, 48 hours, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, CBS Morning News, Up to the Minute.
DISNEY / ABC / CAP (donated 640 thousand to GW's 2000 campaign)
* ABC Network News: Prime Time Live, Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America.
NEWS CORPORATION LTD. / FOX NETWORKS (Rupert Murdoch) (donations to Bush too numerous to mention)
* 132 newspapers (113 in Australia alone) including the New York Post, the London Times and The Australian.
* 25 magazines including TV Guide and The Weekly Standard.
* Fox Television: includes 22 stations, 50% of US households.
* Fox International: extensive worldwide cable and satellite networks.
//la.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/47530.php
Soon to be Comcast in charge of all the NBC stuff.
Well, you can Call ME MADIRATE!
My dictionary defines "Moderate" as "Mediocre"
The progressive caucus can be considered to be the only moderate to left group in Washington. In the Senate, Bernie Sanders is the only thing left of right, with Russ Feingold close by and Al Franken getting his feet wet.
America will always be a centrist-right country as long as elections are bought and paid for by industrialists and capitalists focused on greed. We need public funded elections with a field of greens, independents and even libertarians that have the same voices as the numbnuts that K street puts up for election.
Without public funded elections, we have no democracy. The true progressives will never have a significant voice with our current election process.
The media, well, they are the definition of capitalists aren't they. Does anyone remember Nader, McKinney and Mike Gravel dominating, or even appearing on, the air waves in the 2008 campaign - not bloody likely.
It is amazing to me that Frank Capra, with Mr. Smith, State of the Union, John Doe and other gendre films, was able to capture the trouble with American politics 60-70 years ago, and we still don't get it.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The Dimocratic corporatists inexorably ruining their Party over the last 30 years by turns ignored and aided & abetted Right-wing media domination to the Party's now obvious peril. The 1996 Telecommunications Act pushed by Joe Lieberman, Bill Clinton and Al Gore was a switchblade to the Party's information jugular, though they were too greed blinded by short-term campaign donations to see it at the time. Just one example: Far-Right Clear Channel radio went from 1400 stations to over 40,000 stations in less than four years and by 2002 they were organizing a national series of pro-war rallies to cheer on the unprovoked invasion of Iraq while banning, nationwide, any of their stations from playing anti-war songs by John Lennon (that might have shaken some of the Boomers out of their GOP pod-person indoctrination and back into just a smidgeon of '60s era skepticism). Ever noticed how anti-war songs have vanished from top-40 FM radio? They used to be common from the '60s to the very early '90s. Now? POOF! No artistic dissent allowed.
It takes planning, time and Big Money to buy up, concentrate ownership and subvert the "free press" to the degree the Right and their plutocrat-backed think tanks have now accomplished. Their propaganda strategies now thoroughly encompass entertainment programming as well as what they call "news."
They've got extensive money tentacles in Right-wing Christian fundamentalist sects all over the country as well, disseminating the most scurrilous apocalyptic historical nonsense that, as far as the legions of ignoramuses who read and believe this stuff, SUCCESSFULLY paints every Right-wing corporatist Dimocrat who wins the White House as a far-Left "communist."
Thirty years of Right-wing rant radio, extremist fundamentalist "ministers" and their sermons and pamphlets, culminating in Pox News and low- brow fascist weblogs has got every small "r" Republican and Libertarian goombah in the country convinced that the more money and power the Dimocrats throw at the most powerful corporations in the country the more "communist" they are. But somehow it NEVER has ANYTHING to do with the corporations' fleets of lobbyists, corporate written legislation or the legalized corporate bribery known as campaign finance.
The so-called American Left has failed miserably to counteract this long slow national consumption of mass media by the Right that they should have seen coming when Rush Limbaugh nationally besmirched the term "liberal" while dominating his white male 18 to 35 demographic nearly 25 years ago.
Now we get pitiful remonstrances like this piece by Flanders. DOH! What did you expect, Flanders--corporatist "liberal" media to come to the rescue??
Sander's also got a sweetheart deal of 600 million for Vermont's medicare program just like Nelson. Why is Flanders always selectively spinning these issues?
Yeah, Bernie Sanders, the bribe-taking, immoral communist. Go peddle your nonsense elsewhere.
The only non-sense peddled on this site are the perpetual deniers like yourself:
Here is the truth of the Bill Sanders voted for, and poor little Laura avoids:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/16-2
http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ap/20091222/tbs-us-health-care-concessions-1d79e03.html
Let me see.....hmmmmm...The NRA wants it to be OK to own a gun and abort anyone who intrudes into their properties, yet they do not want someone to choose an abortion if someone has intruded into some woman's property........hmmmmmmm. Good thing it is OK to abort Iraqis and Afghanis.....before and/or after they are either born or conceived. And I wonder - does the NRA think it is OK for Iraqis and Afghanis to own guns?
It's amazing who and what gets termed "moderate" in a country that's been trending fascist for decades.
There's nothing moderate or centrist about the faith-based bipartisan payola. It abuses the separation of church and state to have the Conference of Catholic Bishops writing legislation. Why shouldn't Congress also write a law limiting healthcare access based on race? Maybe African-Americans should only pay a percentage of premium reflecting their national proportion of income. Oops, maybe that should apply to women, too.
Point is, where is a LIBERAL SENATOR to stand up for the separation of church and state and say that no council of clerics of any kind has any place writing special healthcare legislation for women on the grounds that their conscience is of more value than the women's consciences it replaces?
If these clerics care so much for conscience, then why are they not troubled by the 27 children and 13 women we killed in Yemen yesterday? I am. Where is my tax exemption for endless war?
"frantic emails to catholic bishops"
Since when do we let pedophiles and their collaborators write public policy?
Since the dawn of time, I'm afraid.
The USCCB has every right to proclaim that human life is sacred. It is "the foundation of all the principles of our (Catholic)social teaching" and therefore must be articulated to the Church and all nations. Not to do so would be a sin of omission in their duties as shepherds of the flock. Unjust killing, be it war, capital punishment, or abortion are moral issues the Catholic Church will continue to speak out boldly against now and in the future. Our message is the Truth which abides in the wisdom of...
Peace
Under free speech laws. they can proclaim just about anything they want.
Oh, and there is no god.
"As Ann Friedman pointed out in The American Prospect, white men are the least likely to identify as progressives. So why do Democrats-and the media- continue to act as if their opinions are the only ones that matter?"
The answer is all too easy, and all too sad. It's because progressives are not organized, and to the degree to which any of them are, they are small, sectarian, inter-competitive, and oh, so easily triangulated away in campaign seasons.
Look at what's contained in the article. Stupak's people are pulling together support from long and heavily organized power centers with far reaches into substantial voting populations. When those channels exist, getting word out, really out, is easy. That's the bottom line. Until progressives build and maintain those kinds of institutions, the course followed by politicians will remain the same.
One of the few posts on my blog laments the tragedy that campaigning politicians do not schedule stops at any major peace organization conventions or candidate forums. But they all appear before American Legion, VFW, and all manner of pro-war institutional events. God help us, to coin a phrase, even the first Presidential debates this year were held in a megachurch of the Christian Right. It's not a chicken-egg thing -- they don't appear at peace organization events because there are no major, or even minor, peace organization conventions or candidate forums. There are no major peace or progressive institutions at all. There is no influence for us to wield. That's why it was so easy for Obama to appoint only right-wing Democrats and even some Republicans to policy positions, and that's why we have no choice but to go on living with the regressive results. That is, unless we stop all the things we're doing that are not organizing activities (giving up TV should be an easy first step). Then we may not have to go on living with regressive results. It's really up to us.
Organizing is easy. You do it in your own neighborhood. When enough neighborhoods and towns within a 100 mile radius are meeting regularly, you can hold your first regional convention, or even a statewide one for smaller states. There's no reason a statewide convention could not be achieved in under a year even in big states.
"Organizing is easy. You do it in your own neighborhood."
Well, I'm not so sure. Ever tried herding cats? That's what organizing liberals/progressives/leftists is like. Maybe organizing them is possible, but keeping them is not.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe it depends on an organizing issue. I wonder what that would be. What could we all come together to organize around? (Good luck with just that piece).
I know about the herding cats issues. I've been at this a long time. I also have kids, and a cat.
The organizing issue(s) will vary. That's why the organizing has to start small-scale and local. Nobody from outside knows the exact galvanizing issue or mix of issues that will get people together in your town. You also don't always have to herd the same cats. Coalitions can be revolving. For example, you might find that farmers and fisherman might not work together on the issue of toxic chemicals running off farms and into the streams, but they will work together on removing incentives to build out-of-town shopping malls because it will hurt downtown business and because mall restaurants are chains that don't purchase local farm products. So when you're working on cleaning the streams, you'll be making phone calls to the fish and hunt clubs, and not to the farmers. And when you're trying to ban trapping, you call the farmers but not the hunters. And when you're trying to save downtown business and create a walkable commercial zone, you call both. And you'll find plenty of issues where you can call on centrist Democrats, like greening up the school buildings, or creating dedicated funds for park and sidewalk maintenance so those items don't suffer from lean year/fat year mood swings and lose the continuity they need to be effective. Thinking progressively starts out as a developing habit, and when it becomes a habit, it becomes a character trait. You can nurture it even in places with few progressives. Even if the parents never come around, the kids will, and the next decade in your town will be more progressive than the last.
You might even find support from your town boards on resolutions advocating an end to the war(s), because all of them, even Republican boards, are being forced to raise local taxes due to federal and state cutbacks. Nobody wants to be responsible for raising taxes. So get a few people together that understand your locale, and start brainstorming where you need to go and how you'll reach out to people to help you get there. The main thing is to actually be an organization. You have to physically meet on a regular basis. Every second Tuesday at the library community room, or whatever you pick. People have to know how to find you.
Oh, that stuff.
Yeah, I've done some of that already. I've organized a permaculture group in my town. Started with a few people a little over a year ago - we are not over 90 people. I'm also a member of the local Transition Towns group.
And that's the issue. These are specific issues/interests, as are those you described. But organizing a continuing, stable force of progressives is nigh impossible. Unless, of course, there is a bigger unifying cause. Like...the end of life as we know it...? Perhaps.
Good thoughts, though.
Just curious...what organizing have you done?
It goes on forever. I wish it didn't, but because of the era in which I came of age, the needs have been great, and the larger victories few, but the smaller, local ones many, so this is how I spend my life, even though it's not by design, but by necessity, and helped greatly by the fact that I have no interest in TV, which statistics show opens up around five hours of my day.
I "woke up" with a slap in the face the night Jimmy Carter announced draft registration during the break of my college jazz band rehearsal. I got together with some friends and formed the "Ad Hoc Committee Against The Draft" and started tabling, organizing large-scale rallies on campus and in other Manhattan locales, including confronting all the rich alumni going to Harold Brown's award ceremony. After the immediacy of our response passed, we changed our name to "Students Against Militarism" and interestingly, the only public record that Barack Obama actually was in attendance while I was in school was the article he penned for the campus newsmagazine "Sundial" in which he wrote about the group, recently unearthed by the New York Times, archived here: http://documents.nytimes.com/obama-s-1983-college-magazine-article#p=1 When you log onto this, you'll note from the photo that organizers are out in a heavily trafficked area organizing face-to-face, and that their sign says exactly where and when they meet every week. The article was written the year after I graduated. As an alumnus, I worked with other alumni coordinating with students in the Coalition for a Free South Africa movement to divest the endowment of stock in companies that did business in South Africa. That included sleeping out at the blockade and entertaining the blockaders with my band, which was very popular with students at Columbia that year. http://www.jstor.org/pss/466611
Following the burning of my building by an insurance-hungry landlord in the last week of 1985, I got into tenant organizing, and got a thousands of building repairs made through rent strikes and civil filings, as well as settlement money for abused tenants. Then there were a few years of lull in my work due to heavy work-related travel. At the end of the travel period I formed an organization to protect the rights of musicians to play for money in public spaces in NYC, which succeeded, and coordinated with many other groups in fighting Giuliani in general over his first amendment and public spaces clampdowns. There were at least three arrests and two police misconduct settlements during that period. But with most of my work opportunities disappearing, and with a new marriage, pregnancy, and a tiny walk-up apartment in the equation, we moved to New Paltz, NY, in Jan. 2001 to relax our way (we thought) through a tepid middle aged life. But as soon as I got here, since I was looking to make friends in a new place and had been a Nader voter, I found myself seeking out the company of the New Paltz Green Party, and the rest just happened out of continuing and expanding necessity. We won history-making elections in 2003 (google Jason West for details), were among the first in America to get municipal anti-war and anti-Patriot Act resolutions out of our local governments, got significant environmental regulations passed, and protected student voting rights. In 2004 I organized and trained the local civil disobedience team that went to the Republican convention in NYC, and I got jailed for that. I left the Green Party in late 2005 and became non-enrolled, but remained part of our area's progressive organizing coalition. We turned the Republicans into the third party, won elections to the School Board (including my own), and just turned out an 8 year incumbent from Highway Superintendent in favor of an environmental progressive.
I do not know who got kicked off Dancing With The Stars this week. Much is possible if we follow the known successful models and stop watching TV.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Put out enough cat food and the cats will come. Read Nader's latest book.
We need a national summit of progressive organization leaders, a new umbrella Party to unite with, a set of
policy platform planks to unite around, an annual membership donation plan that costs about $60/month,
and to reach out to wealthy liberals and progressives and explain to them that the multiple crises we face means
they need to put their money where their mouths are to successfully organize and maintain the scale of
organized progressive movement necessary to effectively confront our corporatist fascist enemies.
There's a little goodie for the NRA tucked into the health care bill, but women's health care takes a beating. You really can't make this up. There must be some way to get these clowns out of the House and Senate - and White House. If women had enough courage not to cave it would help a lot.
Since the medieval pedophile enablers are now helping to write our legislation, isn't it about time they complied with the law and paid taxes? Their tax-free status is only valid if they don't get involved in politics.
Tax the churches! We can certainly use the money.
Organize in my neighborhood? You mean I can recruit my Bushite-Palinite or Baucus type decmocrats that surround me as neighbors?
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Do "Baucus type" Democrats actually exist outside of Congress, the White House and K Street? You should make an anthropological study of these beasts in their hatchery environment as well as paying particular attention to their initial post-adolescent phase of development whenever possible. There's got to be a movie script in it for you at least. Tragi-comedy.
>>>metal wrote: There's got to be a movie script in it for you at least.
Or enough material for a Ph.D. thesis?
Yes, I mean your right wing neighborhood or town. Any and every neighborhood or town. You have to do it even if you don't end up with a huge organization.
My town, like most of upstate NY, was in Republican control until the mid 1990's, when due to slow demographic changes involving summertime people becoming year-rounders and other gradual factors, Clintonite Democrats became equal and slowly surpassed the number of Republicans. If the local Democratic Party had not been organized, these new people coming in would have had nothing to join, and their party wouldn't have had credible candidates for whom they could vote. But the next thing that happened is the good part. In mid 2001, one or two new people moved in who wanted to be part of progressive organizing, and by 2003 not only did the first Green Party candidates in NY State history get elected, but three of them got elected, giving them control of the Village Board. Every Democrat candidate has been forced to take progressive positions or risk losing, and the Republicans don't even run here any more. Entire transformation from Republican to progressive in less than a decade. Only because a handful of recent college graduates and a couple of older progressives who'd recently moved in got together to organize.
It's worth organizing and practicing your work even if you don't ever have more than two people. One day a progressive candidate just an hour away from you is going to be just two door-knockers short of victory, and the organizers in that town are going to know you, because as part of your organizing you've been in communication with regional organizers, and they're going to call, and you're going to go, and that candidate is going to win by one vote, and it's going to be because of you. Or maybe ten people you who aren't into weekly meetings but want to attend a regional peace action are going to be looking for rides to share, and you and your one other member are going to provide them, and you'll be 12 instead of 2 on that day.
But you're going to be creative, and realize that even Bushies can be reached. I got plenty of Republican votes in my winning race for School Board last year because I framed my pitch for investment in environmentally sound building upgrades in financial terms that added up to tax savings. In some cases it was because I advocated renovating an old school rather than moving it to a new property out of the center of town, and that meant keeping customers close to their businesses. In just about every town there are Republican small business owners who will favor zoning that keeps chain stores off Main Street, because it's in their financial interest. You may find right-wing farmers who know that all the incentives are to Monsanto, ADM, and General Foods-affiliated operations, and want agricultural policy that favors local farms for local markets. There are plenty of right wingers, if you reach out gently and look for them, that are against the wars, if for no reason other than being old-school isolationist, or because they're worried about the debt. It's up to you to get together with your one friend, and then work on ideas for what to do next.
No excuses -- especially that your town is too right-wing. That will actually help, because at least you know right from the start that the lesser-evilists won't take over or try to crush your operation, which is what happens in liberal areas. Get to work!
Steve