Once again the Democrats in Congress, led by those two political animals Pelosi and Reid, seem to be determined to undermine the needs of the people and the agenda of the President.

Let’s look first at Pelosi.  She is justifiably angry at the Senate for scuttling health care and now the jobs bill.  The efforts of her followers in the House passed these two bills, despite the special interest inserts in health care that attack a woman’s right to choose and the pandering to Republicans and the insurance industry compromises crafted by her former flunky Rahm Emanuel, and the price tag on the jobs bill.  Now the Senate, with assistance from the WH, crafted a different bill and rejected the House jobs bill.  She should be mad, but she is also a politician first and foremost who stated that she would not be dictated to by this WH.  Her big mouth has gotten her in big trouble, and her lack of addressing the demands of the American public under the Bush Administration has shown that she is really only interested in corporate money and donations from her wine swilling friends in SF and DC.  Now the Senate is not being led well, and she is mad.  Which leads us to Harry Reid…

Harry is without a doubt one of the worst Senate majority leaders in recent history, and that is saying something.  He followed Pelosi’s lead on the impeachment question because he knew he could not get the votes necessary to impeach, but from there on, he has failed to use the power of the majority (not supermajority which is a political and media myth) to pass any meaningful reform.  He has failed to make it clear to certain members of his party (ie Blue Dogs) that they need Democratic money to keep their seats, and if they do not toe the party line, they are on their own and will have to face party supported opposition in their primaries.  You would be amazed at how quickly politicians jump on board when that is threatened.  And if this president has not been so convinced that bipartisanship was necessary, he could have wielded this club as well by threatening to actively campaign against them.   Harry should have also stripped Lieberman of his chairmanship and relegated him to the back bench.  Unfortunately for Harry, this president is being badly advised by his staff of corporate hacks and DNC leaders who are in awe of Lieberman and the corporate money of the Blue Dogs they helped elect.

Now we come to the jobs bill – Nancy is upset because the Senate has rejected the House bill completely, the WH and the Baucus/Grassley crowd are upset because Harry has rejected their bill, and the rest are upset because the Reid bill does not extend something – be it unemployment benefits, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, or their earmark projects.  It is no wonder the American people are disgusted with the lot of them.  As I noted on Politico today, Reid has done something both admirable and despicable all at the same time, and that is quite a feat for Harry.

The jobs bill is suppose to create jobs, not new opportunities for pork or to gouge Americans.  So the bill needs to do three things:  protect people until they return to work and retrain them if necessary to get them employed; it needs to rebuild or expand small businesses that create the majority of jobs in America; and it needs to create jobs at the governmental level, both federal and state, to give people jobs until the private sector decides to do so.

None of these bills currently do much of that significantly.  This first, and notice I said first, jobs bill should only include three things and anything else is pork:

1.  A jobs training program for those who have been unemployed for over 3 months, tied into an apprenticeship program working with  localize small businesses and family agriculture preferably.

2. Extension of unemployment benefits and COBRA assistance for up to 2 years, and expansion of the SBA loan and grants programs administered directly by the SBA again, not microlenders or political groups, to encourage start-ups and expansions of small localized businesses to keep money flowing in communities and encouraging the hiring of people locally.  This is what creates new jobs best, and keeps money flowing in communities to help them rebuild.  It could also expand rural development money from the USDA, with the limitation that it be used only for small family farms, localized agricultural projects, or small rural business development, not for agribusiness expansion or the use of mega-corporations.

3.  Creation of a government jobs programs along the lines of TVA and CCC to create workforce opportunities immediately to address the expansion of rail across this nation; rebuild, refurbish, or build new public buildings like schools, government offices, or other facilities across the country; agricultural programs that replant forests, clean waterways, rebuild canals and deltas, and other environmentally necessary programs; fix the power grid for 21st century needs, as well as building localized mini-grids to carry part of the burden; and finally, use these programs as OJT programs to tie in with the programs in part 1.  These programs will create work across statelines and help out states in rebuilding their economies as well.

This is a simple, easy way to approach this question.  It is common sense, and it will cost money. A bill encompassing these three things, and only these three things, should be passed cleanly and immediately to stop this recovery without jobs, and make it one that has jobs as an integral part of it.   Because the fact is that until we get over 6 million people back to work, we are going to have to have the government spend the money.  Once these people are back to work, they can pay taxes and that, along with fair trade policies that include tariffs, is the only way to get our deficit down and our country growing again.  It is the same as it was in the 1930s when such programs worked well, and as long as the people in DC fail to understand this, there will be no jobs bill, no health care bill, no environmental bill, no nothing.  It is truly an Oh, My! moment for us.

In this country we have a system of government that was designed to allow majority rule without adversely being dominated by the minority or stepping on the minority of the opposition party.  This has certain advantages in that the minority party still has a say, but in the end the will of the majority is what should be enacted, even if it is adjusted to insure parity for the minority.  Unfortunately, for the last few decades, that ideal has failed to work, and now with cowards like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid leading in the way in Congress, we have, or rather the President has a dilemma:  he can continue to pander to these leaders, actively campaign against them in favor of other progressive Democrats, or he can just sit  back and see what happens in November and watch his hope of changing DC go up in flames.

Let’s examine these choices.  In my husband’s class they are talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is simply this:

Two people are arrested for a very horrible crime.  They have three choices:  they stay silent and each get one year in jail; one confesses and goes free, the other goes to jail for 10 years; or they both confess and each gets 5 years. The question is what should they do?  For the President, in a bi-election year, this is his Prisoner’s Dilemma, and he will not have much of a say in the end, November, unless he makes a choice now.

His first choice:  He can continue to pander to the GOP, the Blue Dogs, and the Congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle.  He can campaign for the current Democratic incumbents, and watch them continue to cower to the Republicans in Congress when they lose because the public is so angry at them for failing to do what they were elected to do in 2006 and 2008.  He ties his future to theirs, and watches it fail for two more years before he is voted out of office.

His second choice:  He can actively campaign against them this summer, working through the Progressives in the Democratic Party and tweaking his message to insure that Progressive drive out the old school DNC and corporate crowd.  In other words, he confesses he was wrong to trust his party leaders and their advice, and throw them under the bus in favor of people who will not be beholden to corporations, who will work to get in place policies that actually help Americans, and he shows he means it by cleaning house in the WH and in his Cabinet, starting with a clean, progressive Congress in January 2011 and advisers who are better qualified to help fix this economy and who are not beholden to corporations.

His third choice: He can remain above the political fray this summer, letting the incumbents take their chances, and by so doing, take him and the Dems both down.    He will get a Congress that accomplishes nothing more because it allows all the good policy ideas to be stopped by special interests and corporations and the GOP.  If he fails to help Pelosi and Reid, and they win re-election, they will do political payback.  We are already seeing some of it with Pelosi’s comments and Reid’s turning the jobs bill over to Baucus like he did health care.  If things remain unchanged in Congress, the President will have a lame duck presidency not because he did not want to create change, but because most Americans do not understand that he cannot legislate, only propose and enforce what is legislated and the legislature does not want to change the status quo.

In the first and third choices, this President loses and loses big time.  But so do the American People.  Unfortunately, with the Supreme Court decision last month, corporations will play very large part in this coming election cycle and all the ones in the future.  This President must decide what to do and how to do it.  Americans, the majority of them, voted for him to lead them in a new progessive direction believing rather naively that his party would follow him.  We were wrong, and we are paying a very heavy price for it. Sadly, anyone who has worked in Democratic Party politics in the last few election cycles will tell you that the Progressives, the real Progressive Democrats, have been marginalized by the corporate Democrats, and seldom have much input that is significant.  That is why it was progressive independents who were the swing margins in the last election – the Clinton corporate Democrats drove them out of the state parties, so they voted for the outsider of the party.

It is sad that the future of a Presidency derives not from his actions, or lack of them, but rather from the actions of Congress and his advisers.  If Americans want change,  then we better start finding a better way than depending on one man to do it alone.  If we want change, this President needs help:  he needs his staff appointments approved so that he is not having to wear the hats of others in his Administration to get things done;  he needs people in Congress who will vote for clean bills and not let Blue dogs or the GOP block what needs to be done; he needs people who can advise him well and are not in the pay of corporations; and he needs us to take action at the local level because he cannot get action in DC.  And therein lies the crux of the solution:  we must change at the local level to force change at the federal level.

We can all take action outside of the political party system, and if we want to address the environment, energy, small business development, housing, jobs – then we do it locally and we downscale our communities so that we can withstand economic devastation or other crises.  If Congress will not protect us, the President cannot help us – That is just a fact.  He told us during the campaign and during the State of the Union that it was up to us to create the change that Washington would not.  We can do so – but we first need to stop assuming that the Fed will save us, or that this President will be advised to make the right choice to free us all from corporate control.  We need to create what in Briatin are called Transition Towns.  There are hundreds of them here in the States even now, but this must be a national effort and it must start at the grassroots.  It starts with education and it moves on to setting up the necessary plans to protect each community’s independence politically and economically.  If we do this, then corporate control fades away and so do their Congressional lackeys, lobbyists, and the corporate WH staff.  Then this President might be able to keep his campaign promises, and we can create real change at the federal level.  (Checkout Transitionculture.org for what they are doing in Britain, and TransitionUS.org for what is happening near you and across the US)

His choice should be the second one, but until we show him that we will change at the local level in great numbers, it will not matter if he chooses it because the GOP, the Tea Partiers, and the corporate Democrats will destroy him and us by 2012.  It is time for us to act, and not just vote, and if we do not, then we cannot blame this President for lack of leadership, only ourselves for allowing the Congress to continue to sell us out.

Today, January 26, 2010, is all about political speculation.  Pundits and bloggers are speculating about the State of the Union Address.  Politicians are speculating about the effects of corporate money in the elections of our futures.  Americans are just speculating about whether they will have such mundane things as food, jobs, and homes next week.

But for some of us, speculation is just a hobby, and for politicians it is left to their campaign managers to draw conclusions from such speculations.  For pollsters, it is their bread-and-butter, and they generate the polling numbers for people to use to confirm or refute their decisions or opinions.

But for me and many others, speculation is just that speculation.  No one has all the facts sufficiently to make anything other than a guess as to what the entire State of the Union address will contain.  After all, one of George W. Bush’s include one paragraph about a Civilian Security Corps force to protect this nation, and suddenly Xe is doing security work for our police departments, local groups, and God only knows who else here in the US, not just for foreign governments or the US military.  Their work in New Orleans is just a specter of things to come.

There has been talk of a spending freeze on programs non-military, and discretionary, that would essentially stop any hope of protecting the people of this nation from slipping further into poverty or an inability to be educated or trained for new jobs in a different economy.  There is discussion of fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit when anyone with any lick of economic understanding knows that when you have a depression (and yes, that is what it is) with no jobs as part of the recovery, you need to spend money and create larger deficits, because the only entity that can create new jobs is the government.  But you also need to offset this spending by taxing those people and corporations who have avoided the payment of taxes for decades now, and if you do, you will not stop recovery, you will reduce the deficit, and you can create new jobs and better education and protect the weakest of our society, while balancing  the budget.

But, of course, those ignorant fools of the GOP and Fox News and Tea Party Movement shills for corporations will not tell you that.  They will cling to their failed policies and rant and rave about socialism and fascism as the dangers of such policies as universal health care or free public education, while supporting the very structure that destroyed this nation and for which none of them have been held accountable.  If you want to speculate – speculate about these two things:

1. What if Reid and Pelosi had had the guts to impeach Bush and Cheney?  Would we have had the collapse of our economy in 2008 or the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who just handed over our democracy to the corporations?

and

2.  What will happen to this country when the GOP takes back Congress and the White House because of the influence of corporate money this year and in 2012?  How long before we are the target of every nation in the world because we return the policies embraced by corporate America and the Cheney GOP?

How this nation moves forward will not be determined by the State of the Union address or the Supreme Court decision of last week.  It will, it must be determined by the people of this nation.  President Obama reminded us when he was elected and when he was inaugurated that he could not do the job alone – that we the American people must help him.  I only just realized, as I wrote these same words for the umpteenth time, just what he meant. <b> He was telling us that he could not make the changes, and that we must embrace what we voted for and do it without him.</b>

He could not tell us that the DNC and the Clintons would run the nation because he had agreed to their help, something he was only beginning to realize was a deal with the devil as he considered the transition team and what potential appointees he would have to use.  He told us that it was up to us to change the country, and to hold him accountable when he failed.  He did not count on being held a prisoner, bereft of information from the people, by his own staff and Rahm Emanuel.  He hoped that Pelosi and Reid, who supposedly were his allies, would work to see that the mandate we gave them was handled properly, not realizing that they were no better than the Clintons.

People, as I look back on the speeches of the last year, and the one that will be given this week, I realize that this President is asking us to help him.  To become active and aggressive so that he can know that he can become aggressive, throw out his promises to the DNC and the Clintons, and take back this government from the corporate hacks.  Do not take too seriously this man’s speech, but rather listen to it while watching his body language.  The key is not in the words, but in the body, and then realize that the media will vilify him as the stereotypical angry black man if he holds Congress accountable for their failures and the GOP for their obstructionism.  Watch the GOP as they are disrespectful to the President once again, and realize that we elected this man, and we have failed him by allowing the Tea Partiers and Fox News and corporations to dictate to us what we, the People of these United States, can or shall have.

You may not like this President because of the color of his skin, his policy ideas, or his party.  BUT, he is the President of the United States and he has asked us all to change this nation into one that represents the people – not religions, not corporations, not special interests -  but all the People.  It is time we started to do so, and stopped speculating about what is in a speech or how a decision that gave away our democratic electoral process is going to affect us.  WE determine what will affect us and this nation, and it is time WE started to act to insure that our liberties and our rights are not trampled by those who would undermine this President.  It is time to ACT and act we must, or our nation “will perish form this Earth”, as Lincolm so aptly coined the phrase at Gettysburg after our Forefathers fought to save it.  But, we will go with only a whimper, not with a roar, if we do nothing to help each other create the change we seek!