Category Archives: Social values

It’s bad enough that what passes for the left has been kneecapped by the Obama Administration. The ambiguous campaign promise “Change you can believe in” has turned out to be a Nixon-goes-to-China series of moves to the right that would have been well nigh impossible for a Republican to execute without incurring significant costs. Remarkably, Obama has increased both the number and scope of wars, used deficit scaremongering to cut Medicare and Social Security, and passed a health care “reform” bill that made overly expensive American health care even more uneconomical by enriching Big Pharma and health care insurers. And this is only a starter list in his campaign against average Americans.

Those visible moves have been accompanied by a largely stealth operation to neuter what were once called progressive organizations (“progressive” has been rendered meaningless by being adopted by pretty much everyone to the left of Attila the Hun). Groups truly committed to a left-leaning anti-corporate platform quickly learned the cost of crossing Team Obama: in their so-called veal pen, the Administration would get big company backers to yank their funding. This process has now moved up the food chain, but with bigger groups, it is less clear whether the Administration is the driver or whether like minded operatives are acting on their own initiative. Regardless, there is increasingly a vacuum to the left of Obama, which eases his continuing move to the right, as think tanks that are perceived to be reasonably independent, like the Economic Policy Institute, mysteriously lose the backing of significant, established funders.

But what is worse are the self-inflicted wounds. What little remains of the left seems to be rallying around Elizabeth Warren, which given the dearth of prominent figures who are serious about standing up for middle class Americans, as opposed to pandering to them and then selling them out, isn’t a bad impulse per se. But they are deploying their energies in quixotic missions or worse, falling completely in line with the Administration’s plans, which has been to subject Warren to a high end version of the veal pen treatment, to box her in and render her incapable of independent operation. And in case you wonder what I am talking about, I mean the plan, concocted by the Democratic party hackocracy, for her to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Scott Brown.