Where's the Class Warfare?

I just finished the first chapter of Chris Hedge's new book. Before I talk about it, here are some links from the past couple of days.

Joan Walsh writes here about the failure of the Democrats to fight for the rights of the people who elect them. Also great in that article (about midway down, read the bullet points) is that she addresses rising inequality in this country.

Since, alas, Russ Feingold is gone, the search for another senator who doesn't bend over for special interests continues. Even though Bernie Sanders will always have my heart (also Patrick Leahy is awesome - really wish I lived in Vermont), Jim Webb looks like a Democrat who actually has balls. I posted recently about Sirota's wonderful exclamation to the Blue Dog Democrats who betrayed the public option and voted against extending unemployment insurance. Maybe there should be a purging of these 'liberals' from the party? The Left has to take back the anger that historically belongs to them. What happened?

Democrats, like their Republican counterparts (if you can even call them that, doesn't it feel like they don't have any real differences?), have betrayed the working class. And now, the middle class as well. They are subservient and will only pay attention to the banking class. Well? Where is the revolt? The blood and the guns? The Revolution?

Where are these so-called Progressives? Environmental groups have still struggled to condemn the Obama administration for the Gulf disaster. Liberal legal groups are not talking about habeas corpus not being reinstated. We still have extraordinary rendition. We still have two illegal occupations. We still have lobbyists with this insane amount of influence. Capitalism has failed yet we still go day-to-day pretending that it hasn't. People are losing their homes. No one is finding decent work. What the hell?

Hedge's dissects these questions and proclaims that the Liberal Class is Dead. Those old institutions (the universities, labor unions, the media, the arts, the Democrats) that used to promote civil rights, woman's rights, economic rights are gone. They have all sold out to corporate money and now, well, now we have no one who is fighting for us. That is how the Tea Party got to co-opt the rage over the bailouts. An extremists right-wing group got to take all of the political capital from the past two years because we have no liberal voice in this country who could articulate the underclass's frustrations.

Instead, in the saddest irony imaginable, we elected candidates who are fighting this phantom 'Socialism' that Obama has been supporting. The anger of the unemployed has been stolen from the Left by Republicans, from the same fucking billionaires who ruined the country.

I can't articulate my frustration and rage. It seems like most of the Tea Party cannot either, which is why they have voted for their own destruction. We, America the Sinking Ship, are about to enter another era of tax-cuts for the Masters and starvation for the Serfs.

Social Security will be attacked. Obama, the corporate bitch that he is, will vote for the Bush Tax Cuts in exchange for something small and negligible. In the same way that financial reform, health-care reform and the stimulus failed by not going far enough, he will sell us out the same way the Democrats have sold us out for the past thirty years.

(Caveat: right now I wish I lived in France because they seem to actually have a fucking class consciousness. I would rather be rioting in the streets that sitting in my apartment impotently writing in some stupid blog no one reads. But what are my options? How do I protest? How do I affect real change? How do I fight for real democracy? Real justice? Real ethics?)

As always, I have no answers.

To end on a lighter note, our friend Tom Tomorrow has another dissection of modern politics.