In the wake of the July 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration insisted that the only way to resist communist influence in the Western Hemisphere was to bolster the militaries in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, while squeezing America’s ideological enemies in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Grenada. In 1982, at the time of General Montt’s military assault on the central highlands in Guatemala his actions were part of a wider set of U.S. strategic goals in Central America.

Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, was not exaggerating when she informed a group of conservative fundraisers that Central America had become “the most important place in the world for us.” The Administration designated the region the “front line” against communism and poured more money into Central America in a period of three years than it had over the previous thirty. Military assistance to El Salvador, for example, went from $5.9 million in fiscal year 1980 to $35.5 million in 1981, to $82 million the following year. During this same period, economic assistance went from $58.3 million in 1980 to $114 million in 1981, to $182.2 million in 1982. (Palermo, The Eighties, p. 37).

Long festering social and economic injustices had cultivated the conditions for the popular rebellions in Central America. For decades the concentration of wealth and land ownership, coexisting alongside pervasive rural poverty, had scarred these societies. In Rios Montt’s Guatemala, the top quarter of the population earned 67 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom quarter accounted for only 7 percent, and less than ten percent of farm workers owned any land.

In March 1982, El Salvador held national elections that the Reagan Administration praised as “free and fair.” Some international observers were less persuaded, however, because the organized left and center-left had been effectively barred from participating. In Guatemala, the same month as the elections in El Salvador, General Montt came to power in a military coup. The most populated of the Central American states, Guatemala had also experienced a historic upswing in political opposition and armed resistance to oligarchic rule. General Montt sought to eliminate the base of support for the insurgency by wiping out as many as 400 Mayan villages in the country’s highlands and forcing people to relocate into areas of greater government control. As Montt’s “Victory 82″ scorched-earth campaign generated tens of thousands of refugees, international human rights organizations denounced the military assault. That’s when President Reagan told the press he believed human rights monitors had given General Montt “a bum rap.”

In Honduras, the U.S. supported a thinly veiled military dictatorship under General Gustavo Alvarez who established a new constitution in 1982. Honduras became the linchpin of the Administration’s Central America policies because it was the staging ground for the Contra war. Reagan appointed the career diplomat, John Negroponte, who had extensive counterinsurgency experience in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, to be his ambassador in Tegucigalpa. (Negroponte later served in the George W. Bush Administration as United Nations Ambassador, Ambassador to Iraq, and the first Director of National Intelligence.) General Alvarez worked closely with Negroponte to assist the Nicaraguan Contras, and like General Montt in Guatemala and the U.S.-backed government in El Salvador, was dedicated to ensuring that Honduras did not follow the path of Nicaragua.

Although human rights and church groups reported that the Salvadoran government was working hand-in-glove with the death squads, the idea that “extremists” on both sides were equally responsible for the repression continued to dominate the mainstream debate in the United States. In late 1981, when reports surfaced that the U.S.-backed “Atlacatl Battalion” of the Salvadoran Army massacred peasants near the village of El Mozote, both the Salvadoran government and the Reagan Administration denied it happened. The “El Mozote massacre” had left 767 men, women, and children dead and human rights groups and church representatives gave an account of the atrocity relatively quickly. Reagan’s foreign policy officials did not want reports of human rights abuses by El Salvador’s security forces to move Congress to change course and discontinue aid to the Salvadoran military as it had done with Nicaragua when the Somoza regime clung to life.(Palermo, The Eighties, pp. 36-37)

At the time, of course, General Montt wasn’t doing anything all that different from what the death squads and paramilitaries were doing in El Salvador, or what the Nicaraguan contras (the remnants of Somoza’s National Guard) were doing on the border of Honduras and Nicaragua. Montt’s crimes were just one part of a larger counterinsurgency effort directed, financed, and implemented by the United States.

In early 1983, Reagan told a joint session of Congress: “El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts [and] Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are from Washington,” implying that geographical proximity could determine the power of Central American nations vis-à-vis the United States. Reagan further warned that if the United States could not defend its interests in Central America, “we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere. Our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy.”

The common purpose of “protecting” the U.S. “homeland” from the spread of communism in the hemisphere was why Reagan said he believed Montt had gotten a “bum rap” after international bodies, including Amnesty International and the United Nations, condemned his abysmal human rights record. I wonder what the Gipper would say today upon hearing the news that Montt has now been sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide?

At the time he perpetrated his crimes, Montt was well known for being a right-wing Christian evangelical. He was known to go on television in Guatemala where he would talk about God and his providential mission to eliminate atheistic communism in Guatemala by any means necessary. Now that a Guatemalan court has convicted him of genocide we have a better idea what those means were.

Even a minimal “vision” of an America that can still accomplish something would appear to be far more uplifting than the austerity snake oil the current crop of Republican politicians keep pushing. The more austerity becomes a “bi-partisan” project the more it undermines not only President Obama’s “brand” but the Democrats’ ability to draw contrasts between their party and the Mitch McConnells, Paul Ryans, and John Boehners of this world.

On Fox News and right-wing talk radio there’s often commentary about President Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Right-wingers revere the Gipper for what is often a mythological set of accomplishments. But one thing that Reagan had that the current crop of Republican sourpusses don’t have is an outlook that exuded confidence in America’s future. He ceaselessly drilled home the idea that America’s best days lay ahead.

Back in July 1979, President Jimmy Carter went on national television and gave America a pessimistic view of itself. He outlined the problems confronting the nation: “It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” The press dubbed it Carter’s “malaise” speech (though he never used the word), and it was an unmitigated political disaster. He seemed dour and tendentious while his language exuded an air of hopelessness.

A month later, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Board who implemented a series of sharp increases in the federal funds interest rate, which is the rate the central banks charge other financial institutions. By the spring of 1980, this rate stood at 17.6 percent, and thirty-year mortgage rates climbed to 13.7 percent. Carter was seeking reelection in a year when the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had a -0.3 percent growth rate and inflation stood at 12.5 percent. The severity of the crisis led Volcker to put the economy through shock therapy. The collapse of the consumer economy dovetailed perfectly to wreak maximum political damage on Carter and the Democrats. And the President seemed incapable of giving the American people even the symbolic sense things would improve.

Carter’s lurch rightward in 1979 in domestic and foreign policy demoralized Democratic voters and even sparked a brief challenge in the primaries from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy representing the progressive wing of the party. (The 50.7 percent voter turnout in 1980 was the lowest in thirty-two years.)

Contrast this dreary set of circumstances with what the Republican candidate for president, Ronald Reagan, said upon receiving his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit: “The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.”

After the election nearly 40 percent of voters told pollsters they would have voted for any challenger simply because he wasn’t Carter. Reagan won with 51 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 44 percent, and handily whipped him in the Electoral College, 489 to forty-nine. (A third party candidate, John Anderson, whose efforts tended to help Reagan, took 7 percent of the popular vote but no electoral votes.) The Reagan-Bush team won by 8,423,115 votes, and carried forty-four states. (Palermo, p. 10)

The purpose of this little history lesson is to show that when a national politician comes off as defeatist there arises an opening for an opponent that sets forth a more optimistic vision. This political phenomenon can work with either party playing the role of Debbie Downer.

The Republicans today, with their dreary Hobbesian messaging and lack of imagination, have become the Jimmy Carters to the Democrats’ Reagan (if they choose to take advantage of the growing Positivity Gap). The leaders of the contemporary Republican Party claim to have learned from Reagan, yet they’ve missed the most important aspect of his political success: exuberant optimism in the face of terrible economic conditions.

Sometimes I think American society is like a stubborn mule that won’t move until it’s struck with a blunt object on the nose; a big dumb animal that refuses to budge until something inherently shocking and alarming hits it on the head like a two-by-four. The Sandy Hook Elementary School murders of twenty 6-year-old children opened up a “conversation” about the carnage wrought by guns in America; and the arrest of the U.S. military’s top sexual assault officer for sexual assault (along with the miraculous freeing of the three women held as sex slaves in Cleveland), opened another “conversation” on rape and sexual predation in American society. At some point must we have a serious “conversation” about whether tearing apart every federal program that helps working people while funneling endless taxpayer cash into the pockets of the very rich and corporations is the direction we want to go as a country.

As a graduate student I had the good fortune to study with William E. Leuchtenburg, who is a thoughtful historian of 20th Century America. My take away from his book of essays on presidential administrations, In the Shadow of FDR, (which he updates each time a new president arrives), is that Democratic presidents should tread carefully when it comes to straying too far away from the path that Franklin D. Roosevelt set the party on 80 years ago. Being duplicitous in undermining bedrock New Deal programs such as Social Security never serves the Democrats well politically. The lesson for President Obama is to stop moving in the direction that the austerity mongers want him to go.

Every time Obama embraces the false premises of austerity, such as the “chained-CPI” for Social Security or talks about limitations and stasis he undermines the most compelling part of what he ran on in 2008 and 2012: a sense of hopefulness for the future and the idea that we can make progress on improving the lives of ordinary people.

In 1980 and 1984, Reagan won the majority of new voters, people 18-24, computer users, and students; the same demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008 and 2012. How could the oldest President ever to be elected, a staunch right-wing conservative, become the candidate of choice for the nation’s young people? It relates to what President George Herbert Walker Bush famously called “the vision thing.”

The last two years of Carter’s presidency was a total letdown. He spoke about America’s shortcomings, lower living standards, belt tightening, and even a “crisis of the spirit.” Reagan, in contrast, promised a better set of options. With him at the helm, he assured us, it would be “morning in America.” Reagan’s rhetoric could be hypocritical and corny but it seemed a lot more encouraging than the dour future Carter was dishing out.

Each time Obama and other Democrats move towards the GOP on budget priorities they bring the party down, and make it more difficult to draw distinctions between the Republican austerity freaks and those of us who still believe this nation has a chance of building a brighter future.

President Obama must stop handing out “sweeteners” to Republicans, such as a “chained” consumer price index for Social Security and Medicaid cuts, in an attempt to lure them into a “grand bargain,” that is neither “grand” nor a “bargain.” Let the wholly unappealing faces of the Republican Party, the Debbie Downer caucus, spout off like Jimmy Carter did in 1979 about “limitations” and what we cannot do as a nation. Let them talk up Pete Peterson’s wet dream and Simpson-Bowles (the poster boys for the sourpuss crowd). Let Paul Ryan wave around his next phony budget pamphlet and Mitch McConnell block everything in the Senate that might move the country forward. Over the course of the next few election cycles we will see if the country is willing to choose the party of grumpy old men over a party with a more hopeful vision for the future.

On May 1st, 2003, Rove apparently believed that a victory lap with Bush donning a “Top Gun” costume and prancing around the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln would be political gold for 2004. Bush could burnish his “wartime president” bona fides and thwart any Democratic attempts to talk about anything other than the “War on Terror.” When the U.S. occupation of Iraq soon degenerated into the totally predictable ethnic and sectarian bloodbath it became, Rove dropped the idea of running the images and even used surrogates to blame the sailors for erecting the “Mission Accomplished” banner.

In U.S.-occupied Iraq, every car bomb, every I.E.D., every suicide bomber, and every sectarian killing that followed that sunny day in May off the San Diego coast made a mockery of Bush’s premature spiking of the proverbial football and brought deserved derision from the rest of the world. “[M]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush proclaimed. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” This news might come as a surprise to the families of the 3,424 Americans who died in combat in Iraq over the course of the next eight years.

With all the warmongering we’ve heard lately regarding Syria from the usual suspects and the anti-Muslim bigotry following the Boston Marathon bombings I wonder if we’ve learned anything over the past ten years.

Below is a Huffington Post blog (with a few revisions) I first posted on May 2, 2006, “Bush Semiotics,” marking the third anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” where I interpreted some of the imagery:

Karl Rove once said that he ran television campaigns as if the people watching had the sound turned off on their TV monitors. In other words, only the visuals matter. Three years ago [now ten], on May 1, 2003, the Bush production company devoured some of America’s most powerful national and cultural signifiers, not just for crass political gain, but to inspire and enthrall the populi. It was a circus without the bread. Here are a few examples:

1). The aircraft carrier. This mighty vessel evokes the surrender of the Japanese on September 14, 1945 to General Douglas MacArthur. The USS Abraham Lincoln is named after the first GOP president, and Bush sought to capture some of the earthy glow of the Great Emancipator. (The USS John F. Kennedy need not apply.) The enormous ship is also a symbol of America’s projection of power in the world, with its connotations of conquering oceans, tackling the frontier, and technological innovation.

2). The flight suit. Bush donned the one-piece jump suit instead of the business suit he normally wears to symbolize adventure, danger, “Top Gun” masculinity, and virility. Benito Mussolini wore similar get-ups for the same effect. The helmet and the codpiece, the parachute and the dog tags, cast Bush in a Bonapartist light: the General who mixes with his troops, inspiring them with his charismatic leadership. Past presidents who began their careers in the military, such as the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, made it a point never to wear their uniforms out of respect for the civilian nature of the presidency.

3). Bush as the flier. As the pilot (or co-pilot) Bush is part of the mission, risking his life for the cause. It’s tricky business landing a jet aircraft on such a thin floating platform filled with explosive ordnance. He’s our military commander. The costume evokes the patriot, helmet stuffed under his arm, returning from a dangerous mission. He’s in charge. He’s the Commander-in-Chief. Il Duce also flew planes. This spectacle was not Michael Dukakis in a tank!

4). The jet aircraft. This technological marvel harkens back to the Wright Brothers, and fulfills the dream of flight humans had pondered for centuries. Our leader was soaring like a bird in the sky with the help of American technological know-how. He conquered the air. Most people don’t get the opportunity to do that; he must be a hero, a risk-taker. After all, the flyboys are the most glamorous in all of the U.S. military.

5). The adoring crowd. The smiling, waving, hugging, ethnically and racially diverse U.S. sailors aboard the aircraft carrier told America: “Our brave men and women protecting our nation obviously adore Bush, so should we!” Team Bush used these military personnel as cheesy, but effective, stage props.

6). The “Mission Accomplished” banner. Spelling out “Mission Accomplished” behind the President gave America what it loves most: Winners! Bush declared himself a winner. He was a winner over the Congress, over the weak-kneed Democrats, over the “liberal” media, over his doubters from the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Islamic Conference, the Arab League, the Organization of African Unity, the Non-Aligned Nations, China, Russia, Germany, France, Pope John Paul II, and 15 million protesters worldwide. Bush Wins! We are Winners!
(Later, when we learned the “mission” was not “accomplished,” the Bush spinmeisters claimed that it was those stupid, over-excited sailors who were responsible for putting up the banner. The White House subsequently rescinded this false story, but not before the passing of many news cycles.)

7). The deep blue sea background. The watery horizon stretched out over the distance on a stunning California day. The cameras faced out to sea so viewers wouldn’t see the San Diego coastline. Adventure and danger loom out in the vast oceans. It takes a strong, courageous man to explore them. (Even though the ship was only about 30 miles away from the shore.) “There’s our Leader out at sea with the boys!”

8). The invocation of great war presidents of the past. Bush declared: “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” He claimed his “preventive” war on Iraq was akin to the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War Two, and that it “affirmed” Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, “asserted” the Truman Doctrine, and evoked “Ronald Reagan’s challenge to an evil empire.” Not only had the Bush TV producers hijacked the nation’s dominant symbols of patriotic duty and sacrifice, but they also wrapped them up in a semiotic package with moments of presidential greatness from our history. The implication was clear: Bush embodied Roosevelt, Truman, and Reagan.

9). The linkage of everything back to 9-11. In his “Mission Accomplished” speech, Bush exploited, as he always does, the trauma the nation experienced with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He tapped into the memory of this generation’s Pearl Harbor and the solidarity Americans felt following that day of infamy.

10). The control of images. The event itself had more planning than a Super Bowl half-time show. The former ABC television producer, Andrew Sforza, who had become Bush’s Leni Riefenstahl, arranged all of the details: the multiple camera angles, the lighting, the staging of the sailors, the direction of each shot, the mise en scène, nothing was left to chance. Sforza had a team of nearly one hundred production technicians on the ship preparing (or “advancing”) for the President’s triumphal landing. Sforza, who is famous for contracting expensive lighting rigs from Europe set on barges that bathed the Statue of Liberty in light as a backdrop for one of Bush’s photo-ops, hired associate producers, set builders, grips, lighting and sound specialists, assistant directors, and managers who worked with the major television networks to provide direct feeds and other accommodations. Sforza’s set designers dictated the positioning of the lines of sailors, the colors of the air deck smoke, the monumental music played. They also made sure there were plenty of black, Latino, and female faces in the frame.

Naturally, the corporate media swooned over their leader’s performance. Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball held forth breathless fawning commentary of the event while the caption shot across the screen: “Why are the Democrats raining on Bush’s parade?” Said Matthews: “We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as a president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical . . . Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president.” Matthews’ comments were consistent with other media commentators’ enthusiasm across the board. The astute political observer, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, referred to Bush as “a great man” a half dozen times during the aircraft carrier stunt. Wolf Blitzer, Brian Williams, Bob Schieffer, Joe Klein, David Sanger, and the other dominant voices of the esteemed worlds of mainstream journalism and punditry fell over themselves to honor our hero-leader, Bush the Younger, (Bush the Magnificent!), in his most heroic hour. The right-wing shock jock and convicted felon, G. Gordon Liddy, waxed longingly about the impressive girth of Bush’s codpiece. “It makes the best of his manly characteristic,” he said.

I leave you with a quotation from Joe Scarborough that captures the élan of those heady days so long ago when the Iraq war smelled like victory to the mightiest minds of our political discourse. On April 10, 2003, the day after the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, Scarborough remarked: “I’m waiting to hear the words, ‘I was wrong,’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types. . . . Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like [Tom] Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”

When considering the condition of the nation’s public colleges and universities these days the “shock” has already occurred in the form of defunding and manufactured budget “crises.” Now the vultures are circling with ready-made “solutions” that also seek to turn a quick profit for private technology companies.

Depending on who’s doing the promo, Silicon Valley venture capitalists promise to “rescue,” “reform,” or “save” public higher education with a hodgepodge of “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) and other computer-driven academic offerings. Of late, they have even been championing automated grading software that can evaluate the merits of students’ essays with a click of a mouse. Throwing around a lot of liberal sounding buzzwords like “access” and “innovation,” these academic entrepreneurs seek to dismantle what’s left of the public university sector and replace it with a loose, but highly profitable, collection of business enterprises.

Don’t get me wrong. The Internet is the greatest tool humans have yet invented. Fighting off restrictive legislation like SOPA and PIPA and other attempts to censor or control Internet content and delivery is the free speech cause of our era. It’s imperative to keep up the pressure on the FCC to maintain a free and open Internet. The Anonymous hacktivists, along with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, and the work of the late Aaron Swartz and the political prisoner, Jeremy Hammond, show there are people who have literally given their lives and put their freedom on the line to maintain their commitment to Internet openness. The Internet’s social media have enabled the organizing of mass movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, and has kept those connections at the ready for the next giant protest action. These are all achievements that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago.

But when private tech corporations, no matter how “visionary” they claim to be, begin to pilfer tax dollars earmarked for public higher education or meddle in faculty governance and make curriculum decisions detrimental to the mission, the amazing technological achievement that is the Internet, like any technology, can be deployed in a way that hinders rather than helps the wider society.

As is the case with many other issues that David Brooks and Thomas Friedman champion in the paper of record, they choose to ignore the tough questions their certitude won’t allow them to raise. Can students really be taught critical thinking, civics, and citizenship skills in a standardized format that values conformity? Will relying on MOOCs and automation in the long term turn professors into “delivery managers” and students into automatons and passive consumers rather than citizens? Why are the ideals that have long been associated with public higher education being scrapped in favor of private special interests that stand to profit from these changes? Just because something is found online, whether it’s a dating service or a comments board, does not, ipso facto, mean that it’s “better” than other more organic discursive options available to humans. (As the journalist, Aaron Brady, points out, most people might want to see a real doctor instead of going to WebMD.)

If you’re a 50-something unemployed person who is seeking the cheapest, fastest, way to earn a certificate showing you know something about accounting or business, then online education is fine. But if you’re a college-age person, especially one who is from one of the “under-represented” student groups in American society or the first person in one’s family to attend college, then online education is a rip-off. Part of getting a college education is showing up for classes, learning discipline, meeting deadlines, studying with your peers.

All of the cheerleading for MOOCs and automated grading software might not be that much of a concern if it weren’t taking place in the current context of the systematic drying up of public funding for education generally. The enthusiasm for new technology as a panacea for the public universities’ ills seems either naïve or inconsistent coming at a time when all things with the word “public” in front of it are under coordinated assault. Add to this scenario the wider context of enfeebled labor unions, flat real wages for most workers, right-wing billionaires drenching our politics in money, and a Supreme Court that believes corporations are “people,” and the “idealism” associated with diverting scarce public resources to experiments in privatized online education may seem a little fanciful and suspect.

In more affluent times, when public higher education was fully funded this discussion about the merits of MOOCs and automated grading software might make more sense, but in the current era of scarcity and contrived “shocks” to the system with the aim of privatizing everything possible we might want to slow down a bit before charging down the path that Very Serious People are dragging us down.

Public Education/Private Profit

Public colleges and universities across the country have been under aggressive budgetary assault. For decades now student services have been increasingly privatized to fill the gaps left by the defunding of these schools. As corporate money looking for a return on investment has flooded the system, corporate-minded presidents and administrators have ascended to places of power. Corporations are undemocratic and hierarchical institutions designed to pay off shareholders and exploit the skills and knowledge of a docile workforce. Colleges and universities have a very different mission. They’re charged with passing on to the next generation critical thinking skills consistent with the needs of democracy. As public colleges and universities become more dependent on corporate cash business prerogatives have metastasized and with them has come a wholesale devaluing of the humanities and liberal arts.

College courses that might contribute to a deeper understanding of American civics have been brushed aside or dumped outright in favor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and Business courses, which promise to produce obedient workers. Forget about the high ideals of the “Freedom Schools” during the civil rights movement in the South, or Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”; we now appear to be entering the era of “Pedagogy of the Depressed.”

One of the key virtues of colleges and universities is that they are among the only places in American society where humans can congregate where commercial values do not dominate the discourse. Inside the classroom, students can join together in an environment unmediated by market forces or commercial advertising to engage the big ideas and issues and contemplate their place in the world. If you can’t ask the big questions when you’re between the ages of 18 and 21 when can you?

Today, commercial values are splashed all over our public colleges and universities. Private for-profit companies promote textbooks and other products, test kits, even credit cards, and other student “services” that are sold as vital to their careers. Udacity, Coursera, and EdX are the newcomers to this old commercialization story. But unlike book suppliers or other private vendors that contract with public schools these Silicon Valley venture capitalists are moving into controlling the curriculum. Taking a page from the “University” of Phoenix script, they seek to run the “delivery” and “management” of course materials, stripping these vital functions from faculty, undermining the tradition of shared governance, and putting more power in the hands of unqualified administrators and managers.

Administrators today, even at public universities, often resemble corporate CEOs more than they do educators. Our nation’s dismal long-term high unemployment rate has only accelerated this trend that existed prior to the financial crash of 2008. Privatizers have aggressively swooped into the public universities (as they have with K-12 education) because they stand to make a fortune. They’ve shown little concern about the possible negative long-term consequences of their actions. As long as the profits are flowing through siphoning off public dollars their changes to the teaching profession or the professoriate matter little. One of the only other domains in American life, outside of colleges and universities, where commercial values might still be subordinated are in churches and synagogues. Think how “efficient” the “delivery” of spiritual guidance could be if clerics had “access” to Udacity’s software or could reach out to their flocks through MOOCs?

Pedagogical Concerns

While the profiteers and technological determinists extol the virtues of online education and lace their sales pitch with slogans about “access” and “deliverability,” they ignore the “lateral learning” that takes place inside a classroom. “Access” to a computer program cannot replace interactions with real life professors and students inside a supportive setting where dialogue, critical thinking, and learning take place.

Participant observation, gazing around at other students taking notes and interacting with them, seeing who asks good questions and who doesn’t, taking the leap to build your own point based on someone else’s question or comment, understanding which professor or learning exercise works for you and which one doesn’t. These collective student activities are all part of the learning process that no online course or computer program can come close to simulating regardless of its complexity or “interactivity.”

The exchanges between students and professors online are nothing more than glorified emails or message board chat rooms. It’s linear, written, compartmentalized, and slow. There are no nonverbal cues or signifiers coming from professors or students. It’s a lot of rote learning measured by standardized questions that require homogeneous answers. No matter how many times those who stand to profit from selling their software to public schools claim there is no difference between what they offer and the real deal, the fact remains that cookie-cutter teaching methodology cannot promote critical thinking or give young people seeking a college education anything close to the classroom experience. Regarding the liberal language about “access” that permeates the discussion students from “under-represented” groups or the first in their families to go to college have a much better chance of succeeding if real human interactions with students and professors are nurtured.

The online boosters have yet to show us the data that proves computer courses work for college-age students better or are as good when compared to the long established classroom setting. Technophiles always claim to value data yet when it comes to whether or not students actually benefit from online courses or automated grading systems they are surprisingly mute.

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement. One of the leaders of the FSM, Mario Savio, throughout his life held up an ideal for public higher education both as a Cal student and a member of the faculty of CSU, Sonoma. This push toward privatization, standardization, and automation of the university experience represents everything Savio identified as being wrong with higher education. It’s as if the baby boomers, having gotten their own quality schooling for a fraction of the price students pay today, are kicking the ladder out from under their children and grandchildren and substituting it with a shoddy, privatized product to which they, in their youth, never would have succumbed.

I don’t find MOOCs and automated online education as exciting as David Brooks and Thomas Friedman do. Even the sound of the acronym “MOOC” is kind of unappealing, something akin to the sound a cow makes fused with the word “muck.” And “Udacity” and “EdX” sound to me more like the brand names of erectile dysfunction pills than anything associated with a university.

The futurists have imbued their call for radically restructuring public higher education with an air of inevitability, as if it’s predetermined. They suggest that technology drives human affairs instead of the other way around. And that it must be good. Trendy ideas like MOOCs and new automated grading software and online course offerings managed by private corporations are all the rage among the self-appointed education “reformers.” But I know for a fact that the last thing so-called under-represented students need is less direct contact with their professors.

Once in a while someone lets the cat out of the bag. For example, at the end of the journalist John Markoff’s above-the-fold, front-page article in the New York Times, (“Software Subs for Professors on Essay Test, Grading by Computers Debated on Campus” — as it appeared in the paper), he quotes a University of Akron professor, Mark D. Shermis, who “supervised” a contest on automated essay scoring and came away excited about its possibilities. Shermis noted that “critics” of the new automatic essay grading technology come mostly from “the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than most schools.” These critics, (among whom I include myself), Shermis says “often . . . come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could. There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.” This line of reasoning scraps the ideal of public higher education as being “unrealistic.” But we’ve never had a real debate about why this seems to be the case; why America has abandoned these schools leaving them vulnerable to the vulture capitalists who now want to pick at the carcass. Why have we decided to accept as a fait accompli the lowering of the quality of our public colleges and universities?

The professor’s remarks illustrate just how far in recent years we’ve moved away from the ideals associated with public higher education (like those presented in California’s Master Plan for Higher Education). It used to be a source of pride for many states to pursue the goal of building schools that aspire to the quality of the more “prestigious” institutions. With the GI Bill and investments in education even the daughters and sons of the working class had the opportunity of getting an education on par with America’s best colleges and universities. How does it serve student aspirations to put online courses in the hands of under-qualified managers where students can log on, click a mouse, and download their college educations?

Most infuriating is the false dichotomy enthusiasts of online education and automation construct whenever anyone raises criticism about their aggressive push toward dismantling traditional higher education: They call us “Luddites” who just don’t “get it.” But you can rest assured that David Brooks’s children and Thomas Friedman’s children aren’t going to be downloading their college educations from a MOOC or Udacity.

The late Steve Jobs is one person who understood the role of technology in society. He didn’t see it as something to deskill professors and give college students a lazy computer program where they act essentially as autodidacts. The enthusiasts for online courses, MOOCs, and automated test scoring fail to see what Steve Jobs could see: The point of your whiz-bang technological innovations is not to bend humans to fit the machines, but design the machines to enhance the human experience.

Many college presidents today like to talk about “outcome metrics” and “game-changing” technologies, while faculty members struggle to piece together a living with multiple part-time jobs, and students suffer under crushing student loan debt. The “new normal” is a long-term unemployment rate we haven’t seen in this country for 70 years. This level of joblessness puts downward pressure on wages and presents young people with a dismal outlook for the future. In this context of economic depression, forgive us if we fail to get excited about MOOCs, online courses, and automated grading as “new” innovations that will “enhance” the learning experience.

In the current social environment of lost opportunities and lost lives this virtual college push comes at a time when there has been not only a defunding of public colleges and universities but a general watering down of the curriculum to move students through quicker. Little attention, if any, has been paid to the quality of education these new “delivery” systems offer. Our current social context is not conducive to triumphalist technological fixes, especially when they come from people who stand to make a buck on them, or elite voices like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman, who both never met a terrible public policy option they didn’t like.

So if “everybody got it wrong” why did the intelligence agencies report to Blair that the WMD story was being “fixed?” And if getting it “wrong” mattered so much to U.S. policy makers why did most journalists in the United States greet the Downing Street revelations with a collective yawn when in the U.K. and throughout Europe it was a major scandal?

It’s worth remembering that the New York Times subsequently dumped Judith Miller, who was the Bush Administration’s chief stenographer at the Times, and in early 2004 even offered the unprecedented gesture of a mea culpa for its terrible reportage on the WMD controversy. The Washington Post followed with its own acknowledgement of its flawed coverage of the WMD story and even had its media reporter, Howard Kurtz, pen a lengthy critique of the Post’s coverage. Official sources lied repeatedly and some of the most prestigious members of the Fourth Estate eagerly lapped it up. That phenomenon is a far cry from “getting it wrong.”

Judith Miller then offered these immortal words that should be required reading for journalism students:

“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

Miller has since found her rightful place inside the stable of right-wing pundits at Fox News. “[P]olitical language,” George Orwell observed, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) surveyed the nightly news during the first three weeks of the invasion in March and April 2003 and found that on NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and Fox, pro-war U.S. sources outnumbered antiwar sources by twenty-five to one. With a 25 to 1 ratio of warmongers versus critical voices on the nation’s dominant news shows it’s no surprise that people came to believe the Bush Administration’s hype about WMDs. These news sources also assiduously avoided giving much coverage to the massive anti-war demonstrations that took place across the United States in the lead up to the war, including the 15 million strong global rally for peace on February 15, 2003.

We also hear the “argument” that Saddam Hussein was such a bad guy we had no choice but to invade and occupy Iraq, kill over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, and send over 4,400 American soldiers to their deaths. But at the time the world had plenty of human rights violators, including many, like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who were for decades considered faithful U.S. allies. The warmongers ten years ago brushed off the observation that the United States armed and aided Saddam Hussein’s government throughout the 1980s in his war of aggression against Iran, which was the period when he committed some his most heinous acts. (Remember the 1983 footage of Donald Rumsfeld warmly shaking the tyrant’s hand?) To this day, on occasion, we hear Condi Rice or Ari Fleischer or some other defender citing the litany of villainy that Saddam Hussein was responsible for as an ex post facto justification for Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq.

Even if human rights were an issue (or WMDs) there were plenty of alternative paths to take that didn’t involve invading and occupying the country for eight years. And if it was Saddam’s treatment of his own people that was such a motivating factor for the U.S. war why did the Pentagon, the Bush Administration, and most mainstream American journalists become so dismissive and uninterested in reporting the Iraqi death toll after the war began?

Neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and Douglas Feith got what they wanted: The elimination of a potentially strong Arab state that could cause problems down the road for Israel. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld got what they wanted: A further privatizing of the military (begun under George H.W. Bush), and the fat profits on the government’s dime that flowed to Cheney’s old company, Halliburton/KBR and the hundreds of other well-connected parts of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about in 1961.

Karl Rove got he wanted. His pet political project, George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote in 2000 would run for reelection in 2004 as a “wartime” president pushing the idea that switching horses midstream during a war would be bad for “national security.” (He also used the war scare in October 2002 to limit the losses of House Republicans in the midterm election.) John Bolton and the United Nations bashers got what they wanted. By defying the U.N. Charter in favor of unilateral military action they further cemented the precedent for the United States to go it alone.

The authoritarians and “unitary executive” enthusiasts, like John Yoo, got what they wanted. The drawn out “War on Terror” (of which the Iraq War was a key component) gave President Bush sweeping new powers. The war prolonged the crisis atmosphere of 9/11 and allowed for the further eroding of civil liberties as well as the strengthening of the Executive Branch vis-à-vis the Congress. As James Madison pointed out in 1793: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Fox News loved the Iraq War because it allowed the network to beat the war drums, shout down any opposition to a Republican Congress and Administration, and boost ratings in the grand tradition of the “Yellow Press” in America.

And whenever a rational voice managed to emerge out of the ether, (like Phil Donahue whose MSNBC television show was canceled for being “anti-Bush” and “anti-war”), calling for restraint the mainstream news media would drown it in a deafening blare of martial reportage and commentary.

In the superb documentary, Leading to War, there is a series of public statements made by Bush Administration officials beginning with Bush’s State of the Union Address in January 2002 where he denounces Iraq as part of an “Axis of Evil” (thank you David Frum). The documentary is effective because of its starkness. These officials weren’t saying they had “suspicions” that Iraq had WMDs, and they weren’t saying they had an “interpretation of the data” that suggested there might be WMDs in Iraq. They were pulling specific numbers of barrels of botulism toxin and warheads filled with nerve agent straight out of their asses all the while assuring us there was “no doubt.” Amidst the WMD hype there was no room to have an adult conversation about the wisdom of invading and occupying a large Arab state in the heart of the Middle East.

What’s done cannot be undone. We cannot hit “rewind.” Who knows what forms the “blowback” will take from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Today, Iraq’s Shia-dominated government is far more allied with Iran than would have been possible had the Sunnis remained in power. The sectarian bloodletting the U.S. unleashed in Iraq continues and has spread into Bahrain and Syria. Even without an occupying power Iraq is as unstable and fractured as it ever was in the post-World War Two period.

Ten years ago our “leaders” in the government, the corporate media, and the “national security” establishment assured us that invading Iraq was in our national interest. They promised us everything from “democracy” breaking out in the Middle East, to progress in ending the Israel-Palestine conflict, to the reduction of “terrorism” and having access to cheap oil. The American people, we were told, if they bore this burden would be rewarded in the long run with a safer world. Most of all they assured us that Iraq wouldn’t become another Vietnam. An all-volunteer military force could meet the challenge, they promised, for relatively little cost in human lives and U.S. treasure.

But the whole thing was a very Big Lie.

And after throwing away so many lives and so much money we’re now being told (by many of the same people who sold us the Iraq War) that we have no resources left to ensure that our children get a good education, or that our elderly can retire in dignity, or our poor people are given hope for a better future.

Hugo Chavez was singled out for the white-hot hatred of the American Right (and much of the “mainstream” media) primarily because he was the first Venezuelan president to try to address the crying needs of the impoverished majority of people in his country. After decades of failed “neo-liberal” economic policies imposed from outside that produced more poverty than development the people elected him to try something new. He was a nationalist leader who made it abundantly clear that he sought to break out of the U.S. system of control of the Western Hemisphere that dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 (and he became immensely popular throughout Latin America for it).

One of the biggest “mega-slums” on Earth is located in Caracas, which resembles more a slum with a city in the middle of it than a city with a slum around it. With so many desperately poor people in Venezuela, compounded by the disastrous “neo-liberalism” the U.S. rammed downed the throat of Latin America, the only surprising thing about the hemisphere turning toward socialism when it had the chance was that it didn’t do it earlier. This turn toward a New Deal, where the votes of the majority and the wellbeing of the poor actually matter to the government, is what enraged U.S. elites from the moment Chavez was elected in 1998.

The dominant frame in the corporate media of Hugo Chavez and Venezuela predictably reflected the class priorities of the tiny ruling elites of both countries. Like the wealthiest Venezuelans, American elites seemed to be aghast that a Venezuelan government could come to power that instead of serving the interests of large landowners, industrialists, oil tycoons, and big banks, would actually implement successful “socialist” reforms to lower the poverty rate.

During the George W. Bush years people like Michael Ignatieff and others were telling us, in the wake of 9/11, we had to “get used” to “the burden” of the United States being an aggressive imperialist power. Hugo Chavez became a potent symbol against this neo-con project for a “new American century.” And that symbolic stand against U.S. imperialism is why Chavez got under the skin of the ruling elites so badly.

In fact, the elites in the United States, the CIA and people like Otto Reich in the State Department, working hand-in-glove with their allies among the .01 percent of the wealthiest Venezuelans, were so upset by the idea of an oil rich nation to the south turning toward socialism that in 2002 the George W. Bush administration assisted right-wing elites in Venezuela in an attempt to oust Chavez in an illegal and unconstitutional power grab reminiscent of an uglier era.

The 2002 coup attempt had more in common with the actions of the United States in Latin America back in the 1960s and 1970s than it did in the modern era. (There are exceptions, however, to this modern trend, such as Haiti where the U.S. helped oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, and Honduras, where the U.S. played a role in keeping Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of power in 2009.)

The attempted coup d’etat against Chavez, which the Bush Administration pretended to have nothing to do with, like the Iraq War and the current drone strikes, underscores America’s rogue behavior internationally. It’s strange to hear the full-throated denunciations of Chavez, who gave free heating oil to low-income people in the northeast and never lifted a finger against the people of the United States.

Like the Nixon Administration claiming it had nothing to do with the coup in Chile in 1973 or the Eisenhower Administration pretending to be unaware of the coup in Iran in 1953, there was no reason to believe Bush officials when they said they had nothing to do with the 2002 coup in Venezuela.

Condi Rice and Ari Fleischer were sure quick to offer their congratulations to the coup plotters after they seized power. They even promised to help the new government. Then, in an Orwellian twist, they blamed Chavez for usurping the Venezuelan Constitution. Watch the documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, for Bush officials and the corporate media’s response. How thin their commitment to “democracy” really was when the people doing the ousting were aligned with the right U.S. banks and corporations.

Many of the same “conservatives” in North America who can’t wait to denounce Hugo Chavez and everything he stood for, not long ago, were just fine with the U.S.-backed juntas that dominated Latin America for decades. From Generals Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Rios Montt in Guatemala, to the “Dirty Warriors” in Argentina, the Duvaliers in Haiti, and the murderous junta during the Reagan era in El Salvador — these same right-wingers who condemn Chavez’s record were awfully quiet (or supportive) back then. These types of pro-U.S. regimes to the south could do anything they wanted to their own people so long as they were anti-communist or on the “right” side of the “war on drugs.” They could practice all manner of human rights abuses, including torture, political imprisonment, “disappearances” of labor leaders and other community activists, or take part in CIA-backed coups. So long as the targets were labor leaders or poor people death squads could roam wild, many of them receiving training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, (since rebranded the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”).

And amidst the noise and static around Hugo Chavez’s legacy, will anyone stop to remember the murder in November 1989 of six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America in San Salvador? Father Ignacio Ellacuria, the Spanish-born rector of the university, the housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her 16-year-old daughter, and five other priests were marched into a back garden, ordered to lie face down, and shot in the back of the head. The Far Right in El Salvador despised Father Ellacuria for trying to broker a peace settlement between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Members of a Salvadoran Army unit, including an officer who later became El Salvador’s Defense Minister, covered up the military’s role. Some of the soldiers had attended the School of the Americas. The atrocity touched off a long-standing, largely Catholic protest movement, “SOA Watch,” which organizes annual vigils and demonstrations at Fort Benning each November commemorating the 1989 killings.

Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan Administration and its Blue Dog Democratic allies in Congress had argued that the contra war in Nicaragua, the U.S. military aid to El Salvador and Honduras, and the invasion of Grenada, were all vital steps in countering Soviet power in the region. President Reagan had painted a dire picture of the threat:

“Using Nicaragua as a base, the Soviets and Cubans, can become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America. Established there, they will be in a position to threaten the Panama Canal, interdict our vital Caribbean Sea lanes and, ultimately, move against Mexico.”

In one of his State of the Union addresses Reagan called Nicaragua a “Soviet ally on the American mainland” and asked: “Could there be any greater tragedy than for us to sit back and permit this cancer to spread?”

Today, it’s pretty dumb to hear spokespeople of the Right throw around the term “communist” to smear Hugo Chavez. What does that term mean in 2013 more than 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and when Maoist China manufactures just about everything we buy?

Long before the Russian Revolution of 1917 the United States was treating Latin America like its “backyard.” In the 1850s, William Walker inserted himself briefly as the dictator of Nicaragua. The Spanish-American War of 1898 secured U.S. dominance of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in 1903 Panama became a de facto U.S. protectorate after President Theodore Roosevelt seized the country “and let Congress debate.” The “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine institutionalized U.S. military power in the region; and President William Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy” sealed its finances in the hands of U.S. investors. President Woodrow Wilson’s 1915 invasion of Haiti set the stage for a string of pro-U.S. governments there. Historians have noted dozens of U.S. military and CIA interventions in Latin America in the post-World War Two period. But in the years following the 1959 Cuban uprising that swept Hugo Chavez’s friend Fidel Castro into power the stated purpose of U.S. policy — from the Bay of Pigs and the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, to the contra war in Nicaragua and the intervention in Grenada — had been justified to “contain” or “roll back” Soviet influence.

But in December 1989, when President George Herbert Walker Bush invaded Panama to oust General Manuel Noriega (who had been trained at the SOA and on the CIA payroll), the intervention harkened back to a day before their existed a “communist threat.” The United States would not hesitate to protect its interests in its “backyard” with or without the justification of fighting international communism. The drug war accommodated a new rationale well suited for the post-Cold War environment. The “New World Order” that replaced the Cold War, at least as far as Latin America was concerned, looked a lot like the older world order where U.S. military imperatives would be decisive with or without a Soviet “menace” in the hemisphere.

Hugo Chavez defied this history of power relations in the hemisphere. And for that defiance elite voices will vilify him, but a far larger number of people will see him as a hero.

When fiscal crises become the “new normal” the public begins to remember that they elected politicians to do a job. And part of their job description is to take care of the public purse and not to create problems where none exist.

With the latest Republican-manufactured “sequester” looming the nation might learn from the California experience under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The California Republican Party sent the state hurling down one “fiscal cliff” after another. Budget “crises” were a dime a dozen, brought on by an archaic two-thirds rule in the state legislature, (which gave the GOP minority veto power over budgets), and a governor who was willing to do whatever his political Svengalis told him to do.

For years the California GOP normalized “fiscal Armageddon.” After all the dire warnings, partisan finger pointing, and doomsday scenarios, along with heartless cuts to social programs, furloughed state workers, and public employee unions blamed for the state’s woes, the whole enterprise lost it luster, and with it any political advantage the Republicans sought from it.

The diminishing return on hyping “crisis” was evident when the state’s economy went into free-fall after the Wall Street mortgage bubble burst. Schwarzenegger and his fellow Republicans tried their best to take advantage of the economic collapse to ram through tax cuts for corporations and a wholesale denuding public sector institutions.

When the next electoral opportunity arose Californians threw all the Republicans out of state office and elected large Democratic majorities to both chambers of the legislature. The people were fed up with the Republicans’ annual game of budgetary chicken. They wanted politicians to start doing their jobs. There are limits to the number of times you can play the “budget crisis” card.

And with the “sequester” it seems that the originality of these artificial “crises” is wearing thin. In the long term playing politics with the nation’s purse strings isn’t going to be popular because it shows the electorate that the politicians they sent to Washington are failing in their basic responsibilities.

This crisis fatigue is setting in despite the Beltway Bubble media framing the “sequester” as if President Obama is equally to blame. Journalists such as Bob Woodward and Jackie Calmes and others stand above politics and stridently enforce a false balance. Mainstream press reports claim the sequester was a “bipartisan” deal.

But saying Obama reached an “agreement” on the sequester and therefore is equally culpable is like saying a guy who had a gun stuck in his face reached an “agreement” with the robber to hand over his wallet.

Many of the same Washington “journalists” who ten years ago failed us miserably in their foreign policy reportage leading up to the Iraq war by serving as stenographers for those who hyped the WMD scare are now failing to report accurately on domestic policy. Now they’ve become stenographers for the deficit scolds, most of whom are Republicans.

Outside the Beltway, support for an increase in the minimum wage among Americans is off the chart, but you wouldn’t know it. The Bubble Boys and Girls who cover domestic policy write about budget cutting as if it were a virtuous end in itself. They do not put the slightest pressure on the Republicans to articulate a vision for the future other than slashing social programs they never liked in the first place. This frame explains their love affair with Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

In recent years there have been too many “days of reckoning” regarding government budgets at the municipal, state, and federal levels, and the economy is still so terrible people have more immediate problems to worry about than the latest Republican trick. Gerrymandering and voter suppression might work for the GOP for a while, maybe even until 2022 (after the next census), but it’s a dead end. Perennial budget “crises” are like foreign wars that drag on and on, they just get old and the public becomes numbed to them.

Too bad in 2002 neither of them were willing to risk their political standing as U.S. Senators to vote against the congressional resolution that gave George W. Bush carte blanche to do whatever he pleased in Iraq. Kerry and Hagel (like Colin Powell) missed their historical moment. Had they opposed Bush’s war they might have made a difference. Now perhaps they can use their cabinet posts to implement a policy or two of atonement.

During the John F. Kennedy Administration, Republicans and Democrats among that era’s leadership class had shared the experience of World War Two. Nearly everybody served in some capacity and their common understanding carried into their style of governance. There were intense disagreements over foreign policy, civil rights, and a thousand other issues, but there wasn’t the gridlock and brinkmanship we see today. Despite their wrangling, in the years after Joe McCarthy’s downfall, there was a consensus that governing mattered and after the campaigns were over they had a responsibility to run the country.

The Republican Right has been very good in recent years at exploiting the legacy of the Vietnam War for political gain in a way that would have seemed strange to the World War Two generation. By the time Richard Nixon was inaugurated the unpopularity of that war led official Washington to become concerned about the public’s new skepticism regarding foreign policy. In the Cold War context the nation’s elite sought a cure for what they called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and think tanks and policy makers set out to find ways to counteract the American people’s war weariness.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan called the Vietnam War a “noble cause” that had been lost in Washington through a “lack of will.” This line of attack allowed Reagan Republicans to smear Democrats as “weak” on defense while at the same time pointing to the general incompetence of the federal government. In 1991, after the conclusion of the First Persian Gulf War, President George Herbert Walker Bush proclaimed: “By golly, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” The elder Bush seemed to rejoice in the idea that he and future U.S. presidents would once again be able to send the Marines wherever they wanted.

In the 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and other congressional Republicans, most of whom avoided serving in Vietnam, denounced President Bill Clinton as a “draft dodger” for using student deferments to get out of a war he didn’t believe in. They questioned his “patriotism” for stating the obvious about Vietnam even though most Americans agreed with him. And then they took it a step further (as they always do) by implying he was a “traitor” for participating in anti-war demonstrations (on “foreign soil”) while studying in Great Britain as a Rhodes scholar. (Apparently, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Ted Nugent, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, and the thousands of other right-wingers who also evaded service in Vietnam, unlike Clinton, were ducking out in a way that was consistent with the highest ideals of our national creed).

In 2004, the Democrats nominated a decorated Vietnam War hero to take on George W. Bush to blunt the neo-cons’ use of their “strength” in the War on Terror as a cudgel with which to beat down opponents. John Kerry’s Ivy League pedigree meant that he could have easily escaped the war, but instead he enlisted in the Navy. He was in Vietnam at a particularly “hot” time (1968) and he risked his life on small and vulnerable naval vessels that were often likened to targets in a shooting gallery. Three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star Medal later, the Democrats thought Kerry impervious to the kind of slander that had been aimed at Clinton.

But they were wrong. Pulling a page from Lee Atwater’s book, Karl Rove got a front group to impugn Kerry for not really being a “hero” at all, charging that the U.S. Navy was either duped or duplicitous in awarding him his “undeserved” medals. (Jerome Corsi, of “birther” fame, co-wrote the fabricated Regnery “book” airing the Swift Boat claims.) The Vietnam War became a backdrop for smearing the Democratic nominee based on vile lies. They dug up a gaggle of crusty right-wing hypocrites to pretend they had intimate details of his service. Then they raked him over the coals in TV ads and on talk shows. For the first time in modern history political allies of an incumbent president’s reelection campaign urinated all over the military record of the opposing candidate.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the launching of the war in Iraq the car bombings, political killings, and sectarian bloodletting unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation continue. The strategic geniuses among Bush’s neo-con dream team — Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Donald Rumsfeld — ended up strengthening Iran’s hand in Iraq and cementing bonds between Iranians and Iraqis that would have been highly unlikely without the American intervention. Add to this disaster the grim tally of well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed and 4,487 dead American soldiers, the hundreds of thousands of wounded people, the PTSD, high suicide rates, alcoholism, and other maladies afflicting veterans, and the $3 trillion charged to the national credit card to pay for it, and it begs the question: What was the point?

In the fall of 2002, when Karl Rove orchestrated his grand symphony of war drums they reached their crescendo right before the mid-term elections. Bucking historical trends he herded the hapless Democrats into a position where they didn’t want to look “soft” on “defense” after 9/11. It took some effort but Rove and the neo-cons had the enthusiastic assistance of “journalists,” like Judy Miller and Michael Gordon, who screeched in New York Times headlines tales about Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction. They also had the help of think-tankers, like Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who assured us strategic “victory” was just around the corner; and pundits, like Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff, and Christopher Hitchens, who magnanimously shared their boundless sagacity with us in fomenting war.

One of Rove’s aims was clearly to transform Bush into a “wartime” president in time for his reelection campaign. The May 1, 2003 “Mission Accomplished” stunt aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which corporate media types like Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, and Joe Scarborough lapped up, had as much to do with burnishing Bush’s Commander-in-Chief bona fides to milk the war for political advantage in 2004 as it did with any grand neo-con objectives in the Middle East.

The whole sordid episode, in hindsight, looks like a national disgrace made possible by the failure of the Democratic Party to act like an “opposition” party. Kerry, Hagel, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Charles Schumer, and all the other Democratic “leaders” who voted for Bush and Cheney’s war gave bipartisan sheen to what was a highly partisan project. They all owe the nation something (although I don’t know what) for their cowardice when the times called for courage.

The “we all got it wrong” argument we hear often enough from people who seem to regret their role in pushing the war, like Colin Powell and Lawrence Wilkerson, is absolute self-serving bullshit. When that fateful vote took place in October 2002 what was largely missed in the councils of government and in the corporate media was that before voting to give the president the “option” of taking the nation to war any responsible representative must first take into account exactly who that president is and what he or she stands for. No politician or pundit who supported giving Bush the war powers should be allowed to hide behind the notion they had “no idea” he would launch the war and commit the nation to a lengthy occupation of Iraq. In the case of Bush it was abundantly clear that it was in his nature to use those powers once they were granted to him. One hundred and thirty-three House members and 23 Senators voted against Bush’s war, which shows that even in the Congress not everyone “got it wrong.”

Often overlooked is that outside of Washington there were millions of people who also didn’t “get it wrong.” The 15 million people who marched all over the world on February 15th, 2003 against the war didn’t “get it wrong.” For the first time millions of people mobilized and demonstrated against a war before it had even been launched. The United Nations refused to vote for a resolution authorizing the use of military force, which in terms of international law makes the Iraq War a war of aggression (just like Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait). The governments of France, Germany, China, and Russia, along with the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, and Pope John Paul II, all openly opposed going to war. And the millions of people who participated in anti-war demonstrations in cities across America throughout the fall and winter of 2002-2003 didn’t “get it wrong.”

What the Iraq War showed was how little those in power — in government, in think tanks, and in the mainstream media — have changed since the Vietnam era. Like Vietnam, there were mass protests and solid critiques of the motives and characteristics of the war and occupation, but like Vietnam, the power elite just blew them off. It took many years for the peace movement to influence elite opinion. When you see people like Dick Cheney telling a rapt Charlie Rose about his views on war and peace, it remains to be seen whether the elites will acknowledge their responsibility for the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq at all.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of some key events of the civil rights movement where thousands of activists often risked their lives to end Jim Crow racial segregation in the South and bring the United States into the 20th Century. In a six-month period in 1963 the nation experienced the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama (and “Bull” Connor’s repressive tactics); Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; President John F. Kennedy’s decision to send a civil rights bill to Congress; the integration of the University of Alabama (requiring federal authorities to remove Governor George Wallace from the “schoolhouse door”); the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. King delivered his iconic speech; and the bombing just over two weeks later of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

When I saw Desiline Victor sitting in the first lady’s box I thought of Jo Ann Robinson, Rosa Parks, and other African-American women in Montgomery, Alabama who organized the Women’s Political Council and later formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). I thought about the bus boycott and the week-long Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change sponsored by the MIA in December 1956 where Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham learned about the efficacy of nonviolent civil disobedience. I thought about the southern black women who were the heart and soul of Shuttleworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), which brought the principles of the Montgomery bus boycott to the local struggle in Birmingham.

I also thought about the cross fertilization of ideas that arose from the direct action and their serendipitous nature; how new nonviolent methods and tactics were improvised to fit local contingencies. (Historians often impose too much order on their narratives portraying this dance between thought and action. The civil rights movement was made up of thousands of ordinary people like Desiline Victor who just wanted to exercise their basic rights of citizenship.)

When I saw Desiline Victor I thought of Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) who early on recognized the potential of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as a force that could propel the movement forward. I thought of Diane Nash and all of the other brave young people who came forward to show their elders the level of their commitment and the huge cohort of courageous young people willing to go to jail and endure great hardships to bring down Jim Crow.

Too many Americans have little awareness of the past struggles for racial justice in this country and without this knowledge they have little chance to grasp the historic nature of Barack Obama’s two-term presidency. Historical illiteracy might go a long way in explaining why there has been so much hostility, obstructionism, and ridicule of this president, not based on overt racism, but on a total lack of awareness of the humiliation black people endured for decades in the Jim Crow South with its attendant beatings, lynchings, bombings, murders, and mutilations.

From 1947 to 1965, there were fifty “unsolved” bombings in Birmingham alone, including the September 15, 1963 bombing that killed four young girls and injured twenty-two others at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Reverend Shuttlesworth was nearly killed when his house was bombed on Christmas Day 1956. In December 1962, his Bethel Church was bombed blowing out its stain glass windows. At the local level, faith, hard work, and courage drove the movement. Each time there was an attack on Shuttlesworth’s life he and many of his followers in the ACMHR saw his survival as being the result of divine intervention.

Desiline Victor’s travails in trying to vote last November bring to mind Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964 when white vigilantes tortured and killed Micky Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney who had volunteered to register black voters. I also thought about the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It’s fitting that Desiline Victor is from Florida. Back in 2000, when voting “irregularities” in that state gave the presidency to George W. Bush there was a mountain of evidence indicating that Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State (and Bush campaign chair) Katherine Harris had suppressed the black vote through phony “felon” lists and other tricks reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. The United States Supreme Court, even with an African-American Associate Justice filling the same seat once held by Thurgood Marshall, failed to look into the prospects of racially discriminatory and politically motivated restrictions on voting. President Obama highlighting Desiline Victor’s story about the difficulties she faced trying to vote could go a long way to educate the public about the seriousness of voter suppression and show those clever Republican governors and state officials that they’re not going to get away with it.

If the history of the struggle for civil rights in this country, which had voting rights as a central component, is excised from our contemporary discussion in favor of propaganda about “voter fraud” then those who are attempting to rig the democratic process through dirty tricks and chicanery will have won.

Reid’s handshake deal with McConnell means there’ll be no “talking filibuster” like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and he also caved on the idea of requiring a 41-vote threshold to filibuster. Senators can still saunter over to the floor followed by a text message from a staffer and tie up any piece of legislation that doesn’t meet their fancy. And without a formal vote on altering the filibuster we don’t even know all of the Democratic Senators who sided with McConnell and the Republicans to hold them accountable.

This flaccid filibuster “reform” will prove to be one of the biggest political errors of the Obama years. For the U.S. Senate, after a hard-fought election where a Democratic president won re-election and Democrats picked up seats, this cloakroom deal (coupled with the GOP’s control of the House) ensures that Obama will be forced to govern like a lame duck.

Senator McConnell knows that people don’t generally understand or care about arcane parliamentary procedures and will simply blame the majority party for the failures to get anything done that might have a positive impact on their lives. Dysfunction is not popular. The people do not vote for politicians so they can sit on their duffs and block progress on the vital issues confronting the nation. (This aversion to a do-nothing Congress is why opinion polls show many Americans like the idea of not paying politicians until they do their jobs, like pass fair budgets.)

What a sweet deal for Republicans: They trash the government for being dysfunctional while behind the scenes doing everything they can with their overblown minority power to ensure that the government is dysfunctional.

We won’t be seeing Vice President Joe Biden breaking any 50-50 ties in the Senate like Dick Cheney did because they’re ain’t gonna be any tie votes. The Republicans in the Senate, through their historic abuse of the filibuster, unilaterally altered the majority-rule clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

People might argue that the Dems will need the filibuster when they’re in the minority. But when they were the minority party Senate Democrats never had the guts to exploit the filibuster like the GOP has done in recent years. And when did a Democratic Minority Leader ever say publicly that his number one goal was to see that a sitting Republican president became a one-term president?

In a period when Republicans have gerrymandered their control of the House of Representatives probably until 2022; when Republican legislatures (such as in Virginia) have moved aggressively to draw safe districts and even push changing the rules for proportionally allotting electoral votes in presidential elections; and where Republicans at the state level employed every kind of voter suppression trick in the book, we now see another example of Democratic acquiescence to GOP power.

With public opinion of Congress at a historic low, failing to strip the minority of veto power over legislation will only lead to more gridlock, more brinkmanship, and lower poll ratings for the institution the Senators claim to love.

In California, for years we watched this same scenario play out. The Republican minority ruthlessly enforced its control over just enough votes in the legislature to block any budget from being passed that it disapproved of. Despite election after election where Californians sent to Sacramento good people to solve the state’s problems in the form of solid Democratic majorities in both chambers, the Democrats couldn’t govern or do much of anything over the ferocious obstruction of the Republican minority. At a time when California’s economy was reeling from the worst recession since the Great Depression members of the Republican minority took advantage of the crisis to push their tired agenda of tax cuts for the rich and gutting social programs and environmental regulations. The California legislature earned a 9 percent approval rating.

In California no progress could be made while the Republican minority held veto power over the state’s budgets. The state reached a breaking point economically between 2007 and 2011 and the Golden State’s Republican politicians became even more recalcitrant. The 2012 spectacle of Governor Jerry Brown touring the state, north and south, to pass Proposition 30 was because the extremist Republican minority wouldn’t match Governor Brown’s $26 billion in budget cuts with one penny of new revenues. The governor had no choice but to take it to the people after six months of “moving heaven and earth” to try to secure four Republican votes in the legislature, not to raise taxes, but simply to allow Californians to vote on whether they wanted to raise taxes. Thankfully the voters snatched the destiny of the state from the clutches of the Republican minority.

The wider narrative of Democratic spinelessness at a time when they should be showing backbone has just been reinforced. The Democratic politicians, including President Obama, talk a big game, but when exercising power, such as mustering the 51 votes needed to change the filibuster, you can count on them to fail.

Republican obstructionism, “leverage,” brinkmanship, and political jockeying at the expense of thoughtful governance, will continue as it did during Obama’s first term. The Democratic cave-ins on key issues will also continue. How can we do anything about climate change when climate science deniers among Senate Republicans will filibuster? Or help the poor and labor unions when anti-labor Republicans will filibuster? It’s bad enough that states like Idaho have the same number of Senators as New York or California, but to add injury to insult the Senate is full of corporate shills who enforce their will on the rest of us.

Obama’s second term now is probably going to look a lot like Bill Clinton’s second term. He’ll be persuaded to shelve the “audacity” to secure his “legacy” by passing abysmal legislation that Republicans (and the Beltway press) love. He’ll be lauded in the corporate media for his willingness to “compromise” and for striking a “Grand Bargain” while we watch the ball continue to bounce in the Republicans’ direction.

Watching a Democratic Senate and administration succumb to Republican policy prerogatives (even while winning elections and campaigning against them) is a spectacle that will further erode their credibility. It will probably become more obvious that the Democrats sup at the same corporate trough as their opponents.

Harry Reid runs the Senate like a gentlemen’s country club always believing that his Republican colleagues will “do the right thing.” But they never do. Being detached from political reality means peril for the Democrats because we’re in the “Obama era.” Politically, the administration is a target rich environment.

Retaining the meat of the filibuster is a win-win situation for the Republicans: They get to block Obama’s agenda; and they get to blame Democrats for failing to improve people’s lives while they position themselves for the 2014 and 2016 elections.

The day after the November election I wrote a blog urging Senator Reid to dispense with the filibuster. Although I remained hopeful, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” was in the back of my mind. And, lo and behold, the Democrats, true to form, refused to fight McConnell straight away and chose the path that will only encourage the Republicans to continue to pretend that Obama’s reelection never took place.

We’re off to a wobbly start. Obama talked tough about letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning $250,000 a year or more, only to immediately back down to change it to $400,000. He didn’t have to do that just like Reid didn’t have to move in McConnell’s direction on the filibuster.

The Democrats should try something new: Stand up for what you believe in, have a public fight about it, and then if you lose you still look like you have principles and a backbone. Reid’s filibuster deal with McConnell makes the Democrats look like they have neither principles nor backbone.