Capitulate to Austerians? Invoke the 14th? Or Time for New 3rd Party Movement?

July 27, 2011 in 2012 Election, Barack Obama, Great Budget Battles of 2011

By JC

Many people, myself included, believe that the current turn of democratic party ideals to one of austerity in the face of crippling unemployment and vastly widening wealth inequity represents a capitulation to right-wing hysteria over the deficit.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi puts the cap on most dem’s credibility in Congress by appeasing the clarion calls for austerity:

“It is clear we must enter an era of austerity; to reduce the deficit through shared sacrifice.

The arguments against austerity in the time of crippling high unemployment are legion. But our Congress continues to fall victim to hostage negotiations over the kidnapping of the economy by right-wing ideologues. And Congress is willing to submerge the country in an economic ideology that has no basics in reality–that is that our country suffers from a crisis in confidence due to the level of its debt, instead of focusing on the real crux of our economic crisis, which is lack of consumer demand and it’s companion raging high unemployment levels.

But it isn’t my intent here to derail my post with “peripheral” economic arguments. It is to raise the question: is President Obama ready to man up to the right and invoke the 14th Amendment clause intended to prevent the country from defaulting on its debt? Or is it game over? And if it is game over, what are lefties going to do in a political era that has left them no mainstream representation?

While some Democratic party leaders are signaling their capitulation, as both Obama and Pelosi have done, others like Sen. Clyburn:

If Congress can’t reach a deal on a long-term debt limit increase by August 2, Obama should “sign an executive order invoking the 14th Amendment,” said Assistant Minority Leader James Clyburn (D-S.C.).

and Bill Clinton are calling on Obama to invoke the 14th:

Former President Bill Clinton says that he would invoke the so-called constitutional option to raise the nation’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me” in order to prevent a default, should Congress and the President fail to achieve agreement before the August 2 deadline.

FWIW, I’d rather our president have threatened the right by invoking the 14th, instead of distancing himself from progressives by putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the table and showing his true conservative creds.

Then again, I think that historians will view the Lesser Depression as a time of consolidation between mainstream republican and democratic ideology. As evidence, we have the democratic party’s main economic policy achievement under Obama being the passage of a health insurance reform bill conceived by the Heritage Foundation, implemented in Massachusetts by a republican governor, and written by the health insurance industry.

Plunging the country into a misguided era of austerity dictated by a tyranny of minority tea partiers when alternatives like the 14th Amendment exist just cements the consolidation of a conservative political movement in America. Republicans have won–it’s just that the tea party won’t let them celebrate just yet, until more damage is done.

Robert Borosage gives us a nice view of this:

“[on]…money politics and the passivity of the Democratic base: As campaigns grow more expensive, and labor grows weaker, big money plays a greater role in the Democratic Party. A whole New Democrat ideology has been developed to marry corporate economic policies — financial deregulation, corporate trade, privatization and more — to social liberalism. When Pete Peterson and others used the crisis to drive a new focus on deficit reduction, corporate Democrats saluted. The president moved to deficit reduction — and established his deficit commission — long before the Tea Party made its presence known. With Republicans captured by the far right, the President could embrace a conservative agenda on economics, confident that his own base had no place else to go [emphasis added].

Yep, “no place else to go.” Well, that assumes that a good chunk of the president’s base weren’t somewhere else to begin with–that they came out of the woodwork in an attempt to sweep Bush era policies aside in ’08.

And lefty independents still have hope that a third party movement can challenge the consolidation of American politics around corporatism, crony capitalism, financialization of our banking system,  and a campaign finance system increasingly dominated by corporate “personhood” provided via a politicized Supreme Court and its attendant monetarized “electoral” politics.

Borasage continues:

Progressives need to learn not so much from the Tea Party as from their own history and build an independent movement to stand with working Americans. Unlike the Tea Party fringe, a progressive movement has the advantage of mobilizing Americans around values and the policy priorities that are supported by a broad majority. It can organize to hold legislators in both parties accountable, demanding that they stand up for the many, not the privileged few…

There is much talk about new centrist third parties, about the need for bipartisan compromise to get things done. But when the Democratic position is to embrace $2.7 trillion in cuts from discretionary spending, divorced from any demand for progressive tax reform or any growth strategy that will rebuild the middle class, the “center” has been wrenched so far to the right that it is at odds with the common sense of most Americans. We need a citizen’s movement willing to challenge money politics, clean out the corrupt stables in Washington, and demand a politics that works for working people. [emphasis added]

What about that 14th Amendment solution? Eh, Mr. President?

And I’ll leave this post with a nice little ditty from my youth: