Marc Cooper's Blog, page 2

What Debate?

I have to admit that I didn't watch Tuesday night's Republican debate for several reasons. First and foremost, I saw no valid political reason as I already know what ALL the GOP candidates think about foreign policy and national security and they all think exactly the same (except of course for Ron Paul who like a broken clock happens to be better on this subject and Herman Cain who just doesn't bother to think about these things at all). The other reason is that I have developed a very low tolerance for the pompous and farcical way CNN handles these sort of circuses.

Scanning the news reports, it seems I made the right decision (which was to watch Sunday's TiVo'ed episode of the fabulous Boardwalk Empire). Politico found six, count them, six (!) important takeaways from the non-debate. I suppose the folks over there felt compelled to write something Insightful about this piece of kabuki. Bless their hearts.

I was much more amused by the headline in the Guardian which reads: "Newt Gingrich calls for 'humane' policy on illegal immigration."

I don't care whether it is intentional or not but I love the way the word humane is put in quotes when attached to the name Newt Gingrich.  This is, indeed, a wonderful sign of where we have come to in Republican politics. A (temporary) front-runner saying he is "ready to take the heat" for proposing what he thinks but what is not in reality a humane immigration policy.  Newt's right, of course. He is going to take heat from a constituency-gone-mad that applauds mass executions, boos gay Marines and wishes for the death of those too poor to afford health care. Newt Gingich, Fearless Moderate!

With the exception of the invisible Jon Huntsmann, the existence of a moderate Republican Establishment at odds with the Tea Party has become a myth. That GOP Establishment has been pretty much replaced by the Democratic Party and whatever was left over was captured lock, stock and barrel (no pun intended) by the Tea Party.  Look no further than the supposed leading "moderate" alternative to the right-wing fringe, one Willard Mitt Romney.  It's one thing to be a serial shape-changer, an art he has mastered. But Mitt crossed into new territory today when he decided to become a bona fide sewer dweller.

His latest TV spot in New Hampshire is destined to become one of the most damned and notorious, right up there with the Willie Horton garbage. He outright lies about what President Obama said, egregiously quoting him out of context. Take a look at the report below and tell if Lee Atwater isn't grimacing in his grave. At least when Atwater was on his death bed he repented for the sleaze he manufactured. Romney is wallowing in it.  Wake me up, please, when the next "debate" airs.

 

Back With The Blues

Ok, I'm back blogging for the campaign. Lucky you. I could start with tonight's GOP debate but there's going to be three more before Xmas.

Instead, we'll reboot on a lighter note.  Here's how I spent last night, every Monday night, at The Sugar Mill Blues Party in Tarzana, California.

Pleasure before work.

 

 

Flash! BBC Concludes Capitalism MIGHT be Failing

This is really unwittingly silly stuff from the august BBC where John Gray writes an editorial concluding that while Marx was wrong about communism he was right about capitalism — it's failing.

All I can say is: Duh.

The MSM  has always treated socialism (or anti-capitalism) as some sort of aberration and tinker-toy affliction and maybe it would be better if it continued to do so because pieces like this one are actually embarrassing.

The entire piece is devoted to the same single point that capitalism has failed because in Europe and the U.S. it can no longer provide job stability let alone upward mobility.  This is, of course, true.  It's also been true for most of the last 35 years. It's just a little more evident nowadays.

What makes me laugh about this piece is its rather off-putting myopia.  The most dramatic failure of global capitalism is certainly not because Spanish workers will see their pensions cut or even that effective unemployment in the U.S. might be 15 percent.

Much more importantly (and perhaps the subject of a sequel piece by the Beeb) is that capitalism has utterly failed to provide a humane standard of living for way more more than half the global population.  Something like half the world lives on a dollar a day and last time I checked 60 percent … that's right 3 out of 5 human beings– have never even made a telephone call.

Since the advent of Marxism a century and a half ago, about 20 countries, (give or take) have at some point or another self-identified as "Communist." No question they all failed as viable alternatives to capitalism (Let's not get too deep in the weeds but by Marx's actual criteria, and contrary to Mr. Gray's ignorant assertions, none would really be considered socialist let alone communist by the Old Lion. Marx envisioned socialism as a global system built on top of societies of capitalist abundance — not as backward, isolated Third World outposts).

Nevertheless, no self-proclaimed Communist country has prospered as such.

Subtract the 20 that called themselves such and that leaves (give or take) another 175-200 countries in the world, especially if u want to start counting Palau and Grenada.

So, a simple question?

How many of THESE capitalist societies have prospered and functioned to some reasonable degree? Well, there's the G8 — as in eight!  And let's be very, very generous here and toss in the BRIC countries. the Asian tigers, and, just to be be diplomatic, we can marginally add in another handful or two.  Let's really be nice and round it off to, say, 35 countries. That still leaves about 150 or so unaccounted for.  What do folks in Malawi, Mongolia, Haiti, Botswana, Burma and Tunisia and so on and so on think about the efficacy of capitalism to meet their basic needs?

None of this even takes into account the gross inequalities that exist inside the most successful capitalist societies. Didn't Ayn Rand teach us that capitalism is all about getting the other guy before he gets you?  Is there anyone who actually believes that great wealth can be generated without extracting it from the work of others? (Yes, there are tens of millions all around me who partake in this civic religion — as bogus as any other religion).

I cracked up reading Gray's concluding lines which I am sure he thinks were ever so clever:

Capitalism has led to a revolution but not the one that Marx expected. The fiery German thinker hated the bourgeois life and looked to communism to destroy it. And just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed.

But it wasn't communism that did the deed. It's capitalism that has killed off the bourgeoisie.

Um, actually, no. Marx never predicted that something called "communism" would rise up to destroy capitalist society. All of his writing and theorizing is based on the postulate that the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself would eventually make it obsolete and would produce its own collapse. The old world is pregnant with the new and all that stuff, you know.

Coming next from the BBC: Poor people are not rich. A five part series.

 

 

Howl

   Since its inception, this Saturday's Iowa Straw Poll is the first one ever I failed to attend. And it would have been easy for me.  I was speaking at a J-conference in St. Louis Friday morning and I easily could have flown or even driven over to Ames.  But what the hell for?

It was a foregone conclusion that one of the moondoggies was going to win and so it turned out.  Ron Paul, who would pretty much abolish the federal government, came within a whisker of outplacing Michele Bachmann who would do pretty much the same — except she would also ban most of the first ten amendments to the constitution.

Wolfman Jack wasn't running nor was Muamar Kaddafi so they both got beaten by write-in howler Rick Perry, the Pizza Guy, Mr. WhoIsPalenty and Mitt Romney — the latter who has been given the title of front-runner because I guess somebody has to have it so the press has someone to talk about.

Driving in from LAX and toward meeting someone for dinner here in L.A. in the afternoon, I was listening to the post-poll chatter on CNN and it was beyond absurd. Those poor predictable babbling boring pundits had to fill like 90 minutes tut-tutting about what is dead obvious and what can be summed up in about 25 words:

Bachmann and Paul appeal to the fringe of the party, sometimes mistakenly called the base, and while at least the latter MIGHT be able to win the nomination, she would have to go through a brain transplant to be a viable general election candidate.  Ditto with Mystery Man Rick Perry. And, Ron Paul?  You gotta be kidding.

Period. End of analysis. Toss it live to Wolf (Blitzer).

Republicans may be crazy but they are not stupid. The real base of the party knows it needs someone who won't scare little children to confront Obama in any real way. It ain't gonna be Bachmann.

There's really nothing, absolutely nothing else, to be said about the importance of the Iowa Straw Poll.  Stick a fork in it.

Oh… except for one thing. Back in 2008, John McCain didn't even participate in the poll nor even really in the caucuses a half year later. And if I remember correctly he won the nomination of his party.

Small detail.

Beyond Wisconsin

Photo: Natasha Vargas-Cooper

The final results are not all in but the decision appears to be cast.  Democrats have come up one seat short of winning back the state senate in Wisconsin. As of late Tuesday night, it appears that the GOP will hold on to four seats and the Dems will take back two. They needed three to flip the majority in the state senate and really take on Gov. Scott Walker.

We'll know in the next few days if efforts will go ahead to attempt to recall Walker when he becomes eligible for such action in January.

In the next few days we are also bound to hear a lot of scapegoating by Democrats as to why they came up short. There IS some funny business again in delayed vote counting and this will lead to charges of a stolen election. And the GOP SuperPacs pumped literally tens of millions of dollars into these small-time races and that will lead to charges of a purchased election.

I have a different takeaway.  The Democrats, apparently, did a great job and they lost fair and square because there's a sizable portion of the Wisconsin –and national– electorate who actually believe in the bullcrap put forward by the Republicans.

Wisconsin Democrats and their union allies did everything right in this case.  Everything that some pwogressives demand that Dems and Obama need to do at the national level. They pushed back real hard on Walker's conservative agenda.  They organized, mobilized and protested en masse for weeks and months on end. The union-backed protests forced Wisconsin Democrats to take militant and tough positions they probably ordinarily wouldn't have dreamed of.

After the GOP ramrodded Walker's budget bill through a rump legislature, unions and Democrats pulled out all the stops to get these recalls on the ballot.  A small army of volunteers ran a tough ground game for weeks leading up to Tuesday's voting. And while they were outspent on the other side, unions opened up their treasuries and helped fuel the six Democratic challengers.

So, in short, this was the sort of Democratic faction of the Democratic Party movement that so many have been calling for.

In the end, they performed honorably but they still lost. Yes, these were all Republican districts so some succor can be had in winning in two of them. But four of the challenges were unsuccessful.

Conclusion: Republicans also have grass-roots support.  They also can produce impressive GOTV. They are not all mindless robots responding to Koch brothers backed advertising.  They actually have agency.

My point, then, is not to blame Democrats for failing. Instead, this should be a wake-up call that even when you do things right, even when you have worked the ground as was done in Wisconsin, even when your electoral push is fueled by an authentic social movement, you don't necessarily win. You don't because there are still tens of millions of Americans out there who believe in all sorts of rubbish… and who vote.  Many of them are unreachable and, in fact, might as well be robots.  But many others, excuse my jargon, need to have their consciousness raised.

It means PART of the work of those who consider themselves on the Left includes having to find effective ways to actually convince and persuade these folks to think more clearly.

Simply demonizing them won't make them disappear.

The long ground-level reporting piece my daughter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, wrote for Slake is now online.  It's a good and prescient read written back in late April but just published last week.

She's all for the unions but in no way predicted any sort of easy victory as we saw tonight.

 

The Visible Hand Of The Market

I guess we no longer have to speculate how the Almighty Market will react to the recent credit downgrade.

Let me clearly state that I am NOT an economist, thank heavens, but this was not hard to see coming. Indeed, even though I am someone who started saving relatively late in life and I was, therefore, invested 100 percent in securities, I took all my retirement funds out of the market three months ago and put it in cash.

I had no formal financial advice. I did no research. I merely looked at the macro indicators all around me and the decision was easy. No way could I see that we were in for any period of recovery, let alone prosperity.  Both parties had taken a course of austerity at a time when we actually need a new WPA.  Democrats had retreated into Reaganism. Republicans took shelter in the economic wisdom of Herbert Hoover.  One out of six Americans have no real job. And little prospects. Manufacturing has disappeared.  Corporate management has acquired a taste for keeping things as lean as possible. Credit is still stiff. Consumer spending as portion of the GDP is at an all time low, reducing driver demand to impotency.  Spending on the military was to remain at an all time high and there was no chance of taxing the wealthy.

The market was OBVIOUSLY over-valued and it was only a matter of time that it would crash.  The perfect storm of the manufactured debt ceiling crisis, the tottering economies of Europe (punctuated by various riots here and there) and the credit downgrade all converged to break the back of the Dow.

One can play a guessing game, as one will, whether or not the plunge will continue, level out or even slightly reverse itself. One thing I am certainly sure of is that there is not going to be any sustained upswing any time soon. And those who talk of a "lost decade" may be understating things.

I was grimly entertained today by the flood of re-assuring advice on what to do about the market spewing forth by business editorialists, brokers and financial analysts.  I had to chuckle when I got a mass email from my Ameriprise brokerage urging me not to panic, encouraging me to see its counsel, and trying to soothe me by saying their experts were "closely monitoring" the situation.

LMAO.

If they had been monitoring closely enough, they might have forewarned their clients about the disaster in the making.

I also got forwarded an email that a friend received from his very, very respected fund manager.  This friend, already past retirement age, was advised to NOT even think about pulling out of the market as investments should be made in a way that they could weather a variety of different scenarios.

Right.

The only scenario that is never considered is that there just might be some tectonic shifts in the global economy and that the next 25 or 50 or 75 years could possibly be different than the previous. Really?  Typical of this religious faith in the perpetuity of stable global capitalism is this doggerel from today's New York Times. Economics writer Ron Lieber offers this nonsense:

So ask yourself this: Why are you investing in stocks in the first place? The answer should give you a sense of whether you should stay or you should sell.

If you need the money soon, for a down payment on a house or living expenses in retirement, you shouldn't have had much of that money in stocks in the first place. Selling now means locking in your losses, which will not feel so good if stock prices go up again in the next couple of months. Still, having most of your money in a savings account now would be better than having your stocks fall another 10 or 20 percent and then losing your cool and bailing out then.

If you can't sleep at night or concentrate during the day, then that's a sure sign that you did not belong in stocks in the first place. There is nothing like a quick market decline to provide a real-world test of risk tolerance. But so far, this is nowhere near as bad as what we experienced in late 2008 and early 2009. If you survived that, then you'll probably endure whatever happens next.

You can read the other 300 words if you like but I can save you some time. Here's the one sentence translation:  Keep putting money in the market so long as you have no interest in what happens to your money.

Meanwhile, the riots continue in Great Britain. The ECB is trying to shore up Italy and Spain. Moody's is considering its own downgrade of U.S. Treasuries. Gold crossed the $1700 mark. Barack Obama said he has a plan but didn't say what it was. And Eric Cantor wrote to his colleagues telling them not to cave into any post-crash pressure to raise taxes.

But don't worry. You'll probably endure whatever happens next.

Dark Ages

Here's some video from The Great Rick Perry Texas Fundamentalist Prayer Rally on Saturday.

These people desperately need some sort of hobby — or some very strong medication.  In the meantime, I respectfully ask them to stop praying for me. Send cash instead!

Let's start with the notion that ONLY Christianity is a valid religion. Sick sonsovbitches.

Chaos: The New Normal

It could be a very interesting morning on Monday.  We will find out if the S&P downgrade was already priced into the Thursday crash of the Dow …or…if we can fall another 500 points or so by noon.  Aww, that mysterious market that rules our lives and dwells at the center of our civic religion is, well, so mysterious that nobody has a clue.

Early indications are not so great, however.  The Israeli market, which functions on Sundays, delayed it's opening by 45 minutes to avoid a panic but everyone still went misshugah.  When we last looked, it was down about 7%.  In the next couple of hours we will see how the Asian markets fare on their Monday morning.

The Dow, of course, is only one very unreliable indicator of how the real-world economy is doing.  It's been booming this last year as most Americans kept skipping ever backward, as growth sputtered and real unemployment stayed put at about 16 percent. The price of guard dogs for the rich went up to $320,000, however. Maybe that was market driver!

The deeper problem we face is not the rather sterile debate over whether Barack Obama has any backbone or not. It rather should be a debate, a challenge, amongst and to the American people over whether we want to continue living in a society of gross economic inequality and simply waltz into the abyss or if we want to come to our senses and fight for basic social justice and a future for our children.

In this regard, I am delighted to welcome back to the blogging community my USC Annenberg colleaague Jon Taplin who has unleashed a rip-roaring essay on this topic. I urge you to give it a full reading.  Here's a bit of teaser:

After Thursday's stock market crash, we find ourselves staring into the abyss of a potential double-dip recession. Republican's, having ignored the history lesson of the business lobby 1937 Austerity Push, which managed to push America back into depression, seem to be clueless to the fate of most Americans. Of course, As the New York Times reports, their financial base is doing very well and luxury spending is reaching new highs. But America's economy lives and dies on the confidence of the average consumer. In the go-go years of the late 1990's the concept of "mass affluence" and "affordable luxury" dazzled marketers into believing that "aspirational marketing" was the path to the streets of gold in which the majority of citizens would have 60" inch flat screen TV's running 500 channels of cable TV and 100 MBPS Broadband services, even if they had to hock their house to get it. But, as a new White Paper from Ad Age entitled, "The New Wave of Affluence" points out, "In 2011 however, in the wake of a massive reset, it appears that mass affluence may be a thing of the past." Ad Age goes on to suggest that marketers concentrate their attention on the 3% of the American population earning more than $200,000 per year, "who account for almost 50% of consumer spending." The esteemed Telecom analyst Craig Moffett, in a report titled "How the Other Half Lives" chose to look at the darker side of this picture. "After paying for food, shelter, and transportation, the average bottom-40% family is left with…. wait for it…. just $1,215 per year, or $100 a month, for everything else.  That's $100 per month for all discretionary purchases, telecom services, cable or satellite TV, movies…  and everything else.  Indeed, after Healthcare, the number drops below zero." A recent report on consumer discretionary spending from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows "this time is different." Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

There's  a lot more. One point Jon makes, in passing, is the level of mass consciousness around this core issue.  He has touched on one of my favorites themes: the two conflicting visions of a totalitarian society. Orwell's 1984 where Big Brother watches you and Huxley's Brave New World where you spend most of your time voluntarily watching Big Brother and putting yourself and your kids on Prozac.

It's this last option that really ought to be of concern to us, way beyond a Marxist fart-sniffing salon on whether or not Obama is a neo-con or a neo-liberal.  I want to know where the American people are as our society gets stripped and looted.

One uplifting note is to watch what is happening in Israel, of all places. Some 90% of the country is backing the largest street protests in national history — protests against basic austerity and in favor of basic social justice.

What a concept!

 

Room Service, Please

Sorry but true. The overwhelming percentage of Americans relate to politics the same way hotel guests relate to room service (not an original thought. Lewis Lapham came up with it about 20 years ago in an essay I can't find).  We vote for politicians the same way we choose a hotel room and then we wait to be waited on.

If service isn't up to snuff, if our needs are not attended to with the deference we expect, we lodge a complaint at the front desk and then next time we choose a different place to stay.  Unlike two decades ago when Lapham wrote the piece I have in mind, one thing has changed.

After our respective disappointment, just as hotel guests write a nasty Yelp review, we  can now also write a derogatory post: We have been gypped, dissed, betrayed, sold a bill of goods. Horrors!

Now, there are truly bad hotels and even worse politicians. And both room guests and and voters have a sacred right to bitch.  But, folks, there's a world of difference between a consumer and a citizen.

I am not offloading the weakness of our political leadership onto the shoulders of an already burdened citizenry. Yet, the republic is ours, if only we can keep it.

There are some, few, Americans who get actively involved in politics. Too few. And some of them, I fear, are engaged more for therapeutic reasons rather than in any real attempt to build organization and constituencies.

So among all of our disappointments, let's not please relieve the masses of their own responsibilities.  If the Kardashians or the Patriots really are more important in their lives than medical care and a dignified retirement, then why should any politician stick his or her neck out to show real and courageous leadership? Just exactly to which powerful constituency would he or she be responding?

It's very easy to get on the Web and post a negative review of this or that elected leader. "Hey, I voted for this guy based on the brochure he offered but then he really screwed me. The bed was uncomfortable, the wall were too thin, the meals were over-priced and the glass was half-empty. I am one real dissatisfied customer and I recommend that none of you ever vote for this guy in the future. Spend your money elsewhere."

OK, now consider this… consider WHO actually got up off the sofa last week and actually mobilized to participate, albeit minimally, in the national debt "debate."  The Pew Center has all the stats.  A friend writes with a quick summary of them:

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press offers a clue today into why the battle in Washington to raise the debt ceiling ended up with a deficit-reduction deal that would just cut spending with no increase in taxes. Those who wanted budget cuts paid the most attention. In the last week in July, the story accounted for 47% of the news coverage in newspapers, TV, radio and the Internet; that was appropriate at a time when 41% of all adults considered it the most riveting development according to Pew's weekly survey of public interest in the news. But if you look more closely, you'll find that 66% of Republicans and supporters of the Tea Party closely tracked the budget negotiations vs 34% of those who held different views or had no opinion. What's more, about 20% of the Tea Party supporters contacted an elected official. Only 5% of those who disagreed with the group did so. Interestingly, young people — who had the most at stake in the debate — were least motivated to try to influence the outcome. Only 19% of adults between 18 and 29 followed the story closely and 1% contacted an elected official. By contrast, about 54% of people over 50 kept up with the budget debate with 16% contacting an official. Pew's findings come from a telephone poll of about 1,000 adults (including both landline and cell customers) and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

What does that tell you? A lot, IMHO.

We certainly saw John Boehner capitulate to the pressure from the tea-baggers. To what pressure were the Democrats exposed?

I understand quite well the alienation that Americans and, especially, young people feel about the political process.  That's not a good enough excuse, however, to let the country go to hell in a handbasket.

In the meantime, Please Do Not  Disturb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ransom

The rhetoric and framing of the debt deal is much worse than it's already objectionable content. The actual cuts made to social programs are very small and the cuts made in defense, while also small, are somewhat larger than expected.

What's noxious is that the Republicans got their way in forcing a manufactured crisis and in watching the whole political and chattering class play along with them.   That we are even talking about social spending cuts when economic growth appears to be brink on a double dip recession is nothing short of obscene.  That Democrats have capitulated to Republicans by expunging the word "taxes" from the political lexicon and replacing it with the obscure term of "revenue" is equally obscene. That ANY cuts whatsoever, needed or not, all fall on the lower income and tax categories while the wealthy continue to have a chuckle is nothing short of revolting.

What are the takeaways?

Doom and Gloom.

This horrid side show goes right into the record books as one of the most stunning displays to date of an entire political system rotten and corrupt and unresponsive to the core.

I am not going to defend Obama's posture and position in this crisis as it seems rather obvious he could have done a lot better.  He certainly could have framed this whole issue properly from the beginning, he could have called out the Tea Party for the blackmailers they are, and — perhaps– he could have recurred to the 14th amendment and told the House to go fuck itself.

It certainly would have FELT better.  I cannot, however, in good faith affirm in any way that it would have worked out any better.  I know what the polls say. I also knew what the polls said about Reagan's policies (and they no real-life effect).  I don't know that an American president remains viable by being a tribune for higher taxes and and by telling the country the truth about deficits i.e. at this point in history they should not be our primary concern.  Is there a majority constituency for all that?  Could Obama have built one? Well, go ask Don Rumsfeld, the expert on Unknowables because I sure as hell don't know.

I do know there is plenty of guilt to go around here, enough to make this whole episode a national shame.  It goes way, way beyond Obama.

We can look at the large financial houses that have become the primary funders of the Democratic Party.  We can look at House Democrats who, in majority, are actually OK with this bill. We can look at Harry Reid who authored a measure not terribly different than this one.  We can look at a Democratic congress who, until 2010, didn't have the fight to to the mat over repealing Bush tax cuts and kept on gorging the Pentagon budget.

I wouldn't exactly look at the Republicans in this case. More fitting is to take a dump on them.  A truly lunatical fringe grouped together in the Tea Party first took the rest of their feckless party hostage and then went on to hold the entire country as captive.  John Boehner could have stopped this cold, but then again he probably would have lost his job.  So he willingly joined his captors in highjacking the government and using the GOP hold on the House as a cudgel to beat up Obama and everybody else in sight.  I am not convinced he had any more room for political maneuver than Obama did.

This is a morally bankrupt party that holds no concerns whatsoever except for serving the wealthiest one percent of the country (and, yes, opposing abortion clinics).  That's about it as far as I can tell. And I think Michelle Bachmann would be the nominee that best embodies the current soul of the GOP.

A special  dose of onus must be reserved for the MSM which, in my view, has performed as miserably during this crisis as any time in recent history including during its squalid performance during the run up to the war in Iraq.  The simple fact is that the media never reported the underlying story i.e. that this was a stick-up by the Republican Party which purposely confused two separate issues. This story was consistently reported as some sort of tennis match between the two parties with detailed descriptions of every lob, serve and spin of the ball. Nice color. No substance.  I come out of this episode with the firm desire that more networks and newspapers close down as we will be missing nothing when they do.

A few words about the American people:  They are certainly the hapless victims in this horror show.  But, heaven knows, they are an easy mark.  Try and raise the retirement age by 2 years or cut medical services by 3% in France or Italy and all I have to say is, stand back!  Many have tried and many have died. Within hours this is a general strike with 5 million citizens in the streets.

I have read of NO popular mobilizations to defend our own social welfare programs in these last few months.

Use them or lose them.

We are all losing something this week. Maybe not as much as some feared — or in perverse ways hoped for.  But we're most definitely on the slippery slope.