| LIBertea | Date: Saturday, 2014/03/22, 8:46 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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 The Mirror
Group: Administrators
Messages: 2142
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By Alexander Reed Kelly
 The night before I met Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson in Washington, D.C., in late February, I spent a few minutes listening
to a young man in a tailored suit list the virtues of a “bipartisan
political movement” known as “No Labels.” The group at one time boasted,
and might still, no fewer than 70 members of Congress among its ranks.
My new friend may well have been quoting propaganda directly off the
organization’s website. The nonprofit, which was formed in 2010 and is
not required to name its donors, bills itself as “a citizens’ movement
of Democrats, Republicans and independents dedicated to a new politics
of problem solving.”
The following morning, as my brother, our videographer, was pinning
microphones to our lapels, Grayson told me he had heard of the group. He
was friendly with some of its Democratic members. One day, in
anticipation of demonstrating her commitment to the group’s professed
ideals, one of his colleagues expressed to him her plan to sit on the
Republican side of the chamber during the president’s State of the Union
address.
“You’re really gonna regret that,” he cautioned her. The member
didn’t listen. But “she regretted it,” he told me. “Every time anyone
among the Republicans stood up and applauded, she sat down. And every
time she stood up and applauded no one else did. So much for ‘No
labels.’ ”
The power to parse bullshit is an honored prize among truth seekers, and it was this power of Grayson’s that drew me to him when he was
attacking House Republicans during the Obamacare clashes of 2009. “It’s
my duty and pride tonight to be able to announce exactly what the
Republicans plan to do for health care in America,” he said in one of
the House’s most memorable performances that year. “It’s this: Very
simply … don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
Some of the larger left’s more genteel members take issue with this
kind of treatment of politicians on the right-hand side of the aisle. I
asked Grayson about the incompetence of those he targeted. He didn’t see
it that way. “I don’t think that Congress is incompetent,” he said. “I
think that the people in charge here in the House are serving their
corporate masters and are doing so quite effectively and are doing it as
effectively as they possibly can. They’re doing everything they can to
defeat any sort of progress in the country, whether you’re talking about
inequality or health care, or whether you’re talking about jobs or
education. They’re very good at it, and my hat is off to them, except
for the fact that I think of all the suffering that entails in the lives
of ordinary people all around America, which they seem to be utterly
inured to. They just don’t care. They’re calloused, bigoted tools and
they’re acting for the benefit of their corporate patrons who are the
real owners of the Republican Party. The fact is that Congress is
gridlocked because that’s the way corporate interests want it.”
Criticism has followed the congressman’s inflammatory style from the
start, but anyone mildly acquainted with the facts knows his assessment
corresponds with the truth. Throughout the legislative battles of the
early Obama years, the corporate-owned, right-wing media carefully
painted the whole of the party to which Grayson belongs as inflexible
and constitutionally unwilling to compromise with their more
conservative peers. Little could be further from the truth. But even if
it were true, standing alone, that account ignores the history of the
death of congeniality in Congress at large. It was killed by Republicans
themselves, by Newt Gingrich in particular during the conservative
revival of the 1980s and early ’90s.
Much like the successes of the right, it is impossible to deny that
Grayson’s tactics have worked, and done so to the clear benefit of the
public. After hounding Republicans joyfully during his first term, he
was named the most effective member of the House by Slate magazine
midway through his second term in 2013 for passing more amendments than
any of his colleagues—not a small achievement in a chamber dominated by
the opposing party. His bills included a corporate death penalty for contractors who broke the law, a prohibition on law enforcement’s
purchase of weaponized drones and a 50 percent increase in financial
assistance for non-English speakers who are unable to negotiate housing
agreements without the help of a translator. These were “not bills to
rename post offices,” he told me, but “important amendments that were
actually progressive values expressed and embodied.”
If his reputation as a populist champion and adversary of predatory corporations is to be doubted, those doing the doubting have to explain
the attacks laid against him by the right’s most powerful leaders. The
multibillionaire Koch brothers, who have turned their antisocial
interests into policy around the country, are sufficiently convinced of
his threat to their agenda that they began attacking him on television
in November, a full year before he was up for re-election. To defend
himself from the assault, Grayson relies overwhelmingly on small
donations made by people throughout the U.S. This season he’ll have the
added problem of an accusation of physical assault leveled in early
March by his wife, from whom he is separated. Though investigators found
the claim to be groundless on the basis of video evidence, we can be
sure that those who want him gone will tarnish his reputation in the
public mind with any means at their disposal.
“Some people believe it,” he told me. “Other people don’t, but they
are appalled by what they see on their TV screen and they get turned off
to the whole system entirely. It’s a very effective way for them to
suppress the votes on the Democratic side.”
And why should his opponents behave any differently? Grayson’s not
one of them. They can’t rely on his observing their codes of silence. He
entered politics after age 50, and thus received none of the
socializing experiences that shape the personalities of people who
embark on a career in politics in their early 20s. His glory is to be
gained by causing as much trouble in the public interest as he possibly
can. And he begins, as all heroes do, by naming the things the villains
want.
“They want deregulation and privatization to give them more monopoly
opportunities,” he recognized. “They want a low taxation on the rich and
low taxation on corporations, and what they want above all is cheap
labor.
“Wall Street is running our economic policies,” he continued. “The big
oil companies have been running our energy and environmental policies.
The military-industrial complex runs our foreign policies. It doesn’t
have to be that way,” he urged. “People simply have to wake up and take
back control. The tools are available to do that. We are still a
functioning democracy. Someone like me can still win a congressional
campaign. If we actually had a serious antitrust law, if we had a
serious system of progressive taxation, if we had a serious system that
put human needs first instead of the needs of monopolies and
multinational corporations, then we’d have bliss. We’d have heaven on
earth. And it is actually attainable.”
His plan for rebuilding paradise is classically liberal, involving
regulations that allow capitalism to serve society as a whole. “All we
need really is the traditional goals of full employment and a
well-managed economy including full aggregate demand,” he told me,
meaning enough money in the hands of the public to buy goods and
services at a rate that keeps the economy from shrinking. These are
precisely the principles that built the middle class during the most
prosperous decades of the 20th century.
Borne along by current trends, the alternative is an apocalyptic
dream. “Things will simply get worse and worse,” Grayson explained.
“We’ll have more unemployment. The economy will get shakier and shakier.
We’ll have a huge and growing trade deficit. All the wealth will be
sucked out of this country. And in the end one person will own
everything. … We’re headed toward a future of wage slavery and debt
slavery that’s pervasive and almost universal.”
For reasons that must be respected, politicians are among the kinds
of people least trusted by the American public. My elder friends tell me
it wasn’t always this way. A politics of joy once reigned, in which
giant personalities like FDR and Ronald Reagan did not tiptoe around
issues in careers choreographed by political consultants, but rather
brawled across the national stage with their own bodies and voices, for
evil or for good.
Near the end of our hour together, Grayson told me “the best thing
about this job is all the good you can do for people.” After reading
many articles written by and about him and studying his actions in
Congress, I see no reason to disbelieve him. On the contrary, I think
the prevailing alliance of money and power want him gone precisely
because his career sets an example that threatens to raise the
expectations Americans have of all of their leaders. For this, we honor
Rep. Alan Grayson as our Truthdigger of the Week.
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| TrumanTown | Date: Wednesday, 2014/03/26, 1:16 PM | Message # 2 | DMCA |
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Grayson ALL the Way to the Speakership
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