BruceMcF wins Karita Hummer's Golden Pen Award for Excerpt from "Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy"

Winner of Karita Hummer's Golden Pen Award



Re-posted with the permission of BruceMCF

Excerpted from: Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy Hotlist
by BruceMcF, Sat Mar 01, 2008 at 09:09:25 PM PST
Midnight Thought

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/2/0925/71795/758/467064

The core of the progressive populist coalition change strategy is the Blue-Green coalition. That must be the core, for many reasons, some of which I've mentioned, and some of which, good lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll get to.

However, while that is a necessary part of the coalition change strategy, it is by no means sufficient. A coalition change strategy must be broad based. Working in the interest of the coalition must be a dominant political strategy, with the extra time and trouble of working out differences with coalition partners clearly worth the trouble.

And that means that everyone in the coalition must see the benefits of being part of the group ... and that means that the coalition is far more robust if it has more than two main members.

And now I run into a tremendous problem, which is that the radical right reactionaries that captured the Republican Party have so soiled and muddled the public discourse that I have no name I can come up with for the third member of the progressive populist coalition strategy for change.

I want to say "Republican Nationalist", except that the phrase "Republican Nationalist" brings to mind policies of sacrificing the national interests of the United States to the selfish interests of the Militarism Industry and of transnational corporations working as rapidly as they can to ensure that they are economically independent of the United States.

That is, if you say "Republican Nationalist", it brings to mind the policies of destroying the Republic and undermining the future prospects of the Nation.

However, as a proxy for that, there is a term that we have been using. This is the term for those who see that the people claiming that Fighting Wars Makes a Country Strong are the same people who see nothing troubling about the United States being Energy Dependent for the first time since British Colonists first starts occupying the eastern seaboard of North America.

That is, when we say "Energy Independence", it is far more than just a way for Greens to say to Blue Collar Workers, "here's a growth industry for you where you can make things that do things". It is far more than just a way for Blue Collar Workers to say to Greens, "If you support the development of a New Energy Economy, we are certainly willing to support it being a Sustainable Energy Economy".

Its more than an ploy to get ecologically sustainable jobs.

Its also a Nationalist policy in the most progressive possible sense of the word ... in the sense of taking care of our nation, and seeing to it that we are not staking our future on decades of War for Oil.

Step back and look where the current Resident's policy have placed us: they are trying to build a police station on top of the second largest supply of oil in the world. Given what they are and what they stand for, trying to build a police station on top of the second largest supply of oil in the world is just about all they can do.

But its not for us that they are doing that. They are doing it for the transnational corporations, because exploiting more and more natural resources to make more and more cheap, pointless crap to sell to more and more jaded customers is what they know how to do. Its how they make money.

And that is, after all, what a transnational corporation is ... a large group of people spread across multiple countries all pledging allegiance to a pile of money.

And our nation?

Our national economy outside the top 10% has been stagnant, in terms of income, for the entire Bush "recovery" ... and since we will lose ground during the recession, that means that we will start the next "recovery" from a lower point than we started the last one.

That stagnant income has been pursued as deliberate policy, under the heading of "fighting inflation", which means fighting wage increases ... and that is not wage-cost increases, which is wage increases faster than productivity growth, but any wage increase at all ... because if all wage increases can be suppressed, then corporations can snare all of the productivity increase for themselves, instead of sharing it roughly 50/50 as in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies.

And to cover up for that stagnation, while still generating additional market demand, we had a process of encouraging people to borrow against equity ... and, of course, in that process, the deeper we were, in effect, borrowing on one credit card to pay off another, the more it became necessary to "loosen standards" to rationalize more and more reckless lending ... and now our financial system faces a massive meltdown, which has only just started, and which could mire us in recession for years, rather than months.

And one consequence of that stagnation was to create an "economic draft" for the Volunteer Armed Forces, and those economic draftees are now sacrificing their blood in defense of the interests of transnational corporations and against the interests of their own nation.

Don't read this wrong ... a bulwark of Political Liberty in a Democratic Republic is an Army that does not pass judgment on the strategic decisions of the political leadership. So I am not suggesting anything about the honor of the service of Soldiers and Sailors and Marines and Airmen - all blame lies squarely with those in the political leadership who betray the interests of those they were elected to serve in the interests of the corporations who elect to be the high bidders.

But that is a dissonant policy. There is no helping it. True Patriots must see the folly of staking our nation's strategic future on an exposed salient, lying between a federalizing Europe, a Russian oligarchy riding high on rising oil revenue and an ascendant China. It is very much as if Hancock had arrived on the first day of fighting at Gettysburg and decided that Barlow's Knoll must be taken and held at any cost.

And so Energy Independence is the flag we raise to rally those who see their nation's treasure ... worse, their nation's interest ... and, of course, worst of all their nation's fighting men and women, sacrificed to corporate greed, and corporate inertia.

The leaders of government are anxious. They were sent by Captains of Yesterday's Industries to keep watch over the institutions of government, and make sure that the people do not interfere.

But the tide of history is running against them, and it becomes harder and harder to hide the canyon dividing their noisy boasts of a jingoistic patriotism and the craven betrayals required by their vain efforts to turn back that tide.


Midnight Oil - Bedlam Bridge
In this city with no footpath
there's a building with no people
There is crime and gun decisions
There's a street of heat and hawkers,
there's a house of hope drifters
There's a gang that shoots then listens
There's a place that knows no poverty,
a town without pollution
There's a soul with good intentions
There are canyons full of movie stars,
churches made of metal
There are mountains made of muscle
We have leaders who are anxious,
we have captains not courageous
Captains tumbling into madness
...