Was I wrong declaring that There is no “new progressive movement” in the U.S.?
A very fine piece by Lambert shows the insight and spirit needed for a progressive movement.
It is mostly directed against Obama’s "reach out" to conservatives and it includes this fine historic description of how the conservatives bought Washington to plunder the U.S. people:
Starting in the 1970s, at about the time of the Lewis Powell memo, an interlocking network of right wing billionaires and theocrats began to fund the institutions whose dominance we take for granted today: The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, the Brookings Institute (over time), and on and on.
…
For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular. At the micro level, for example, if you want to create an aristocracy, then you want to eliminate any taxes on inherited wealth, despite what Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might say about the values entailed by that project. So, the Conservative Movement goes to work, develops and successfully propagates the term “death tax” — which they may even believe in, as if sincerity were the point — and voila!Whoever thought that “family values” would translate to “feudal values” and dynastic wealth? At the macro level, their ROI has been spectacular as well. Real wages have been flat for a generation; unions have been disempowered; the powers of corporations greatly increased; government has become an agent for the corporations, rather than a protector of the people; the safety net has been shredded; and so on and on and on.
Lambert’s correct conclusion – you can not work with these folks. To reach out to them (Obama) is fruitless. To work within their system (Clinton) will never destroy it. To fight it (Edwards) is the only option.
Such insight is the first step to develop a creed.
But I still miss
a clear and broad call to raise taxes on the rich, to dismantle the military-industrial complex – the two most obvious things to do
– and to use the proceeds for universal healthcare and free education.
With regard to foreign policy there is still too much of a tendency to -very selectively- meddle everywhere where ‘human rights’ are not what some ‘progressives’ envision them to be (compare the talk on Darfur and Israel).
The conservative strategy Lambert explains correctly is not only directed against the U.S. people. It is part of a bigger scheme to rule and plunder the world.
On the domestic issues u.S. progressives do get it right. In the foreign policy field, they take part in the right’s machinations.
Seven of ten of Edwards’ foreign policy and security advisers are former generals and admirals. That quota does not point to peace.
Can we please add a bit of Ron Paul isolationism to this?