What to Expect in the Year of the Dragon

++Chris Hayes rejoices in the "mini-golden age of radical criticism and polemics". I happen to agree with him. The revival of what in former days would be leftist criticism and political thought has been invigorating.

++The opposite is very depressing--the total collapse of a very wealthy but morally and intellectually bankrupt Right. 

++The difference is that the Right can retain its fading power to blackmail and to obstruct. The Left may be revived intellectually but it has not managed to find a way to influence policy.

++The main winners of this year are gays, who have won marriage rights in more states, the Latinos, who broke their past lethargy and voted in huge numbers, and the African Americans, who voted at a higher rate than whites for the first time in history. Women fought back but the war on women escalated after the election with Michigan passing more restrictions on abortion clinics. 

++For one group of winners--the Latinos--this coming year could see all not-so comprehensive but better law on immigration reform. The reason is that Republicans are desperate to win favor with Latinos.

++While the President has come forward for sensible gun control, the NRA and their corporate masters will thwart all moves in this direction. The Newtown event just pushed the Right closer to fascism with calls of arming teachers and schools.

++When I started this blog, I said that President Obama might be our last democratically elected President. I stand by that. We escaped the bullet twice now but already measures are being taken to prevent 2012 every occurring again through new voter suppression measures only days after the votes were counted.

++We may see 2013 usher in a Republican caused recession again because of their fooling around with the Fiscal Cliff and the debt ceiling. This is a sign that Republicans have not become radicals but nihilists. Since the GOP campaigned on American exceptionalism,with their loss they are into hyper-declinism of the United States and seem committed to  a self-fulfilling prophecy.

++What can we see abroad?
I think Hugo Chavez will pass from the scene.
I think you will see Assad in Syria vacate to Russia.
I think you will see Fidel pass by the end of Obama's second term.
I think you will see President Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea step aside for his son Theodorin.
I think you will see a rash of terrorism through the Gulf states.
I think Mookie al-Sadar will make a move in Iraq when Iran has lost influence in Syria. 
I think the Arab Spring will start morphing into more repressive regimes and other more liberal regimes. The transition from dictatorship to more open societies will experience more setbacks.
I think you will see more American military actions in Mali and the larger areas around.
I think you will see efforts of unrest in Algeria since they are to have presidential elections this year.

++War with Iran?
Today,I don't think there will be war either by Israel or the United States. But remember you and I will have absolutely no say in the matter.
Iran will have a desultory election this coming month, which will be slightly better than other Middle Eastern states recently. It will not affect the real powers in the country--the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard. But it will buy them time. The economic sanctions are crippling the economy and you may actually have some type of a negotiated deal. A negotiated deal with Tehran will provoke a backlash by Republicans in the United States.

++President Obama has only two years for any effective action on the domestic front before the by-elections. And remember this is the time that openings on the Supreme Court should occur. If the Democrats can reform the filibuster rules in the Senate, we are likely to see a rush of Obama appointees finally make it to the court. 

++The time of the inauguration should let Obama define for himself what the next issues of the second term will be. It should give him a temporary lift and evaporate the rancor and toxic atmosphere that has enveloped the country after the election.

++Same Sex marriage at SCOTUS. Here I am for a half full set of decisions. I have to expect after two Reagan appointed judges ruled DOMA unconstitutional that the right-wing court would have to lean that way. On Prop 8, the California decision, I expect a more ambiguous decision. The questions the Court has asked is who has stature to arguing the case in California? The state refused to defend the law and only NOM argued it. I expect the Court might just toss it back or at least make a very specific ruling that  only pertains to California.

++As I have written, the FIRE economy is dead and is unlikely to revive much. The problem that now exists is a total lack of trust in Wall Street, the banks, our political system and our institutions as a whole. This is a very dangerous situation. If the economy can not break out because of political gridlock, we may face another decade of slow growth and not make the policy decisions to move to a new economy.

++This coming year I will start posting more reviews of the books I have read. January is a book bonanza month including a new Ian Rankin. For my piece of mine, I am reading all of D.T.Suzuki on Zen Buddhism.

++As we head into the Year of the Dragon,let's take note that the current Congress is the less productive in American history--no mean feat. It is several times worse than Harry Truman's "Do Nothing Congress."

Reader's Choice

If you're tired of the flood of rightwing books that portray President Obama as a third-worlder, closet Muslim,a post-American President who wants us weak because of some ideology borrowed from Saul Alinsky,the hero of the teabaggers, I have just the book for you. If you are a leftist, you might even agree with the author. Fidel Castro enters into the Obama book fad with his small book of essays, "Obama and the Empire" (Ocean Books, 2011 (first book of the New Year)). Fidel says that after the white males of the United States screwed up so badly and capitalism went into a global crisis,the powerbrokers needed to find someone who did not match the usual profile of the white male patriarch in order to salvage the political-economic system. In a racist society, such a man was found in Barack Obama, who could then be used to deceive the world and restore America's fading prestige. Castro claims it was a cruel joke to play on those who struggled in the African-American liberation struggle--which normal people call the civil rights movement. Castro gets in his usual jibes and pet themes in the book. He says that Barack Obama received the Nobel prize for having won the presidential election in a racist society--which is true-- but then nominates Evo Morales for the Prize. He criticizes Obama's relationship with the new generation of anti-Castro Cubans and blasts the virtual annexation of Colombia by the United States. And Castro comes through on the issue of climate change and uses this theme to taunt the industrialized countries. Probably Bill Ayers would agree.

If you endured the revisionist history of the Pilgrims put out by Fox News over Thanksgiving--that the Pilgrims abandoned socialism for capitalism in order to survive, you might treat yourself to a superb new history of the Pilgrims by British author Nick Bunker (Knopf). "Making Haste from Babylon:the Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World" explores extensive new materials discovered in England and New England to draw a new portrait of the Pilgrims' religious and political experiment and the creation of a little new empire in New England based on the extensive trading of beaver pelts to England. Beaver pelts were considered the equivalent of the gold in El Dorado and assisted the Pilgrims' rise in political fortunes. As for John Winthrop's "City on the Hill", he warned that the greatest threat to it was Greed, something true today and then.

If you have read the extensive critiques of coal mining and listened to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s environmentalism,the counter-intuitive response is James Fallows' "Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal: It's the only way to stop Global Warming."(Atlantic, December 2010). Fallows examines the joint U.S.-China Clean Coal Project led by our Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. The project is due to open its first plant in China next year and then come to the States in 2014. Stephen Chu said this past week that the advances by China in the area of alternative energy should be this generation's "Sputnik" moment. Fat chance that our political system will seize the moment. That's why the stimulus package had billions in seed money for these clean energy sources. Fallows' article is fascinating how international cooperation works away from the media limelight. The China-U.S.team has been working constantly for several years and have developed a productive working method and a sense of camaraderie among the participants.

Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson believe the United States must develop new approaches to engage the world and can not rely on hegemony. Free-market capitaism, hegemony, Western culture, peace and democracy--the ideas that shaped world politics in the twentieth century have lost a great deal of their strength and political and cultural authority is now more contested and power more diffuse than ever. The United States must now see itself as competing in the world of ideas instead of waging a war of ideas. Now ideas and influence are the critical currency, even more than military might. Weber and Jentleson have written a small but dense book "The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas" (Harvard, 2010).

Continuing his excellent writing on torture, Scott Horton in Harper's analyzes the Wikileaks Cable dated February 6, 2007, which covers the American efforts to stop Germany from indicting CIA officers who renditioned and tortured a German citizen and green grocer Khaled El-Masri, who was mistaken as an Al Qaeda agent from the Hamburg cell. El-Masri was travelling by bus to Skopje, Macedona to visit his family. He was seized by the CIA and protested he was innocent of anything. He was beaten, stripped naked, shot full of drugs, given an enema and put into a diaper and sent to the CIA "snake pit" in Afghanistan where they conducted harsh interrogation. Despite the insistence of Washington on El-Masri's guilt, CIA on the ground were convinced he was the wrong man and that he had been right all along. Deciding that he knew too much he was held incommunicado. Later he was bundled up and left off alone miles from his Macedonian home. After walking to the village where his wife and family were supposed to be , he found out from neighbors that they thought he had abandoned them so they moved to Lebanon. Horton deals with Condi Rice and Jeff Ballinger's attempt to get the Germans off the case of persecuting the CIA agents. What's clear from the exchange was that the decision to seize El-Masri was made in Washington and probably by Condi Rice herself.

Following that up is Horton's interpretation of the Wikileaks Cable that showed that the Obama Administration and former Bush officials interferred with the Spanish courts so that they didn't bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney, Richard Addington,Yoo and others for condoning torture. Revelations of this interference have fueled outrage among the American Left. It was bad enough, they reasoned, that Obama just wanted to move forward and not look back but here he's interferring with another country's judicial system, perverting both their justice system and our own.

Bummer Friday

Beautiful weather but the zeitgeist is getting funky.

Dana Milbank doesn't take kindly to Glenn Beck showing up in town. The early videos of his arrival show the short-sleeved munchkin surrounded by security dressed as secret service types and white women reaching out to shake his hand. But Milbank is writing a book about Beck and doesn't think highly of the new messiah. He reminds readers that it has just been over a year since Beck called the first-African-American president a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Beck says that Obama is "moving all of us to slavery". He accused Obama of seeking "reparations" from white America, seeking to "settle old racial scores". This is also a chronic theme of Rush Limbaugh's rantings.

Beck has spoken about "radical black nationalism" in the White House and "Marxist black liberation theology" influencing Obama. He has also determined that the New Black Panthers have "ties to the White House in a myriad of ways" and are part of Obama's "army of thugs". Where do I join? Beck choose the date of his rally because of "divine providence". Like Sharron Angle running for Senate. Like Jan Brewer running for Arizona. Does God now have alzheimer's?

Beck now believes the civil rights movement was distorted by civil rights leaders, who may have known King personally but purposely distorted his ideas. Over the last century, Beck says, "no man has been free,because we've been progressive." He argues the anti-tax conservatives are the "real civil rights movement." Well done, Dana.

Ken Mehlman, the man who ran George W.'s 2004 campaign, has discovered he is gay. This is a man who presided over the Republican Party when it ran anti-gay referenda in every state to boost the turnout and encouraged the passage of DOMA in Congress. He is now saying he was quietly trying to persuade Republicans to go easy on the Gay. It's simply not believable. Now he wants to support the cause of same-sex marriage. He is in a long line of gay conservatives beginning with Roy Cohn, who run the Republican Party. There is a wonderful book there or else a piece for a psychology journal.

Nate "The Great" Silver is making me nervous. Do you remember when he was "poblano" over at the Daily Kos? Nate appeared on Hardball and started talking about "wave" elections and mentioned Speaker Boehner. This coming week, we'll see what Nate has produced.

Chris Van Hollen , who is handling the Democratic House elections, claimed this morning that the Democrats will hold both houses of Congress.

But Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien , all reputable political scientists, have done their preliminary House predictions by running a 1,000 computer simulations. They predict Republicans will take back the House with a majority of 229 seats to 206 for Democrats. They do include all the necessary scholarly caveats. But still...

If Republicans win back the House, they plan to do what I wrote about before--investigate the Obama Administration from soup to nuts. Politico reports today that Republican staffers are already researching the areas of these probes. Of course, a major one will be the DOJ's handling of the so-called New Black Panther voting intimidation case. You see white people are being intimidated now from voting like with ACORN. So we will have several investigations to prove Barack Obama is an African American and to link him to the more ephemera of African American culture.

One of the heroes of New Orleans is back in the news. "Brownie", the former head of FEMA and horse breeder, told the press that President Bush hid how horrible Katrina was from the American people. Brownie is heading to New Orleans to "celebrate" the five-anniversary of the disaster. The crime of the Government's response to Katrina was that FEMA for several consecutive years ran practice sessions on exactly this precise level Hurricane striking this precise city. The plans for this particular disaster were upgraded nearly every year beginning in the Clinton Administration. And yet nothing suggested by these run-throughs was ever carried out on the days it happened or weeks afterward.

Richard Trumpka, the AFL-CIO's President blasted Sarah Palin at a union gathering in Alaska. Not to be outdone, Palin called union leaders "thugs", the new refrain from the Republicans, and said that union members were better off supporting conservatives. Because you know, they would be better off if the auto industry had failed and the rest of their homes would face foreclosure. The good news this year is that all the unions are coordinating to raise their stake in the mid-terms to $100 million. While it can't outgun the some $400 million being pledged by conservative groups, the money comes with people to organize and get out the vote. Apparently, the Democrats' ability this year to run an effective get-out-the-vote campaign has caused Karl Rove to panic and he's scrambling to raise significant funds for a GOTV effort of his own since the RNC's effort is bankrupt.

So far, I've been impressed by how prepared the Democrats have been in blunting GOP attacks. They seem to be playing more offense at this stage than defense and have so far neutralized the negative ads run by Republicans. The Republican candidates provide a target rich environment for the Democrats to hang them by their radical right-wing agendas.

Some of the candidates are truly astonishing for both their character and their ideas. Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor of Florida, had the honor of paying a $1.5 billion fine for Medicare fraud by his hospitals. Several candidates openly support banning abortion even in the case of rape and incest. Sharron Angle said that teenage women just have to make lemonade out of lemons. One of the best candidates is running against Russ Feingold. He claims he is a self-made millionaire, who started in business after graduating from high school. Turns out he married a very wealthy woman, was given a department of the family business to run, and also never graduated from high school. Rick Miller in Alaska may have won as a teabagger with Sarah Plain's endorsement and has the most anti-Alaskan campaign of them all. He wants to stop the pork from going to Alaska. They get roughly $2 for every $1 they contribute to the national economy. He could really run on "Vote for Me and You will Die."

The Congressional Budget Office is preparing for a war if Republicans win in November. They announced that any repeal of the Medicare provisions in the healthcare bill will cause about $450 billion in additional deficit. This raises the issue about pay-go rules. For instance, if the Republicans actually want to keep the tax cuts for the rich, Congress this time--unlike last time--has to pay for them. The actual cost of the tax cuts for the rich is roughly twice the cost of the healthcare reform bill for all of America. Now, we know Republicans will not cut defense so the tax cuts for the wealthy have to be paid for by cuts in anything the lower or middle classes might get. If you analyze this, Pat Ryan in his "Blueprint for the Future" actually gave the game away. His plan called for cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising them for everyone else. He also listed entitlement programs that would have to be cut. That's what the end-game of the GOP tax-cuts for the rich actually means. And I believe that's why the GOP leadership is trying to push Ryan off to the side for now. They are afraid that their whole gig will be up.

An idea for Democrats: Make the real cost of the tax-cuts for the rich explicit. They have to be paid for and the rest of America must subsidize the wealthy. It is true that the deficit would increase but I don't think that's how it would play out this time with pay-go. Of course, all the tax cuts, including for the Middle Class, have to be paid for through pay-go rules. So watch this space for what actually goes next year.

Fidel Castro wants you to know that Bin Laden is a bought and paid for CIA agent.

Our anti-corruption effort in Afghanistan seems to have run into a few roadblocks. It seems that all the corrupt Afghan officials that need to be removed are paid CIA agents.