Part of the Solution

Here's a large snippet from Ian Welsh posted on OpEdNews. I urge you to follow the link to read the whole article. While I do agree with the general thrust of the article, I do not agree that trying to reform and/or push the Democrat Party to the left is doable. People have been trying to accomplish this for the past 30 years or so and it simply doesn't work.

We need a new political party, one not beholden to the elite!!

The 2010 electoral massacre is over and Democrats are licking their wounds.

Let me put it simply, what went wrong went wrong from the very top of the party. In both political and policy terms, the President of the United States, the head of the Democratic party, created this disaster.

Nothing tracks electoral success better than the economy. Barack Obama did not do what it took to pull the economy out of the doldrums. This is true both with regards to the stimulus , which was too small, too larded up with tax cuts and too ineffective and with regards to the Federal Reserve, where Obama's chosen chairman Ben Bernanke is about to drop stimulus (nicknamed Quantitative easing 2) on the economy after the election instead of doing it before the election. There was no economic reason not to do it months ago, when it would have helped both struggling Americans and Democrats.

Barack Obama took pains to let down or gratuitously harm virtually every major Democratic constituency. Whether it was increasing deportations of Hispanics , whether it was putting in a Presidential order against Federal money being used for abortions which was more restrictive than Rep. Stupak had demanded, whether it was wholesale violation of civil rights climaxing with the claim that he had the right to assassinate American citizens, whether it was trading away the public option to corporate interests then insisting for months he hadn't, whether it was not moving aggressively on card check (EFCA) for unions, or whether it was constantly stymying attempts to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Barack Obama was there making sure that whatever could be done to demoralize the base was done.

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans think that the policies Obama pursued were socialistic, progressive or liberal. They think this is what left-wing governance looks like. In 2 years Obama has managed to discredit the left , possibly for a generation.

Oh no, Republicans!
The argument against running a 2012 primary challenger against Obama should be familiar to all of us. It is the argument of fear. The argument of the lesser evil. Primarying Obama makes a Republican win more likely, and if a Republican president gets in, it will be so much worse for you! No matter how bad Obama is, President Teabag will be worse.

That's the truth. The stone cold truth. Republicans will be worse and a primary makes it more likely that Republicans will win.

Here's another stone cold truth. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Obama and Democrats had a historic chance to fix America. The rich who run America, whom the Supreme Court in Citizens United gave permission to outright buy elections, could have been broken when Obama took power. All that was necessary was to force them to take their losses. Contrary to what apologists for wealth have told you, this would not have meant disaster for the economy, there were ways to protect regular Americans while making the rich take their losses.

Instead Barack Obama, as in so many other ways, continued Bush's policies, and kept the rich bailed out. The end result has not only been the tsunami of foreclosure issues which still threaten to swamp the banks, has not only been trillions in dollars of taxpayer money being used to keep rich people rich (much more money than was spent on the stimulus), it has been the wholesale transfer of money from poor to rich : an absolute decline in total wages, average wages and median wages of ordinary Americans, while Wall Street pays themselves even higher bonuses than before, gives record money to Republicans and the rich pay themselves more...