Deconstructing DeGraw

Like other pseudo-leftists, 9-11-conspiranoiacists, and Green Partiers, David DeGraw is a tool of the plutocracy who shouts useless and distracting ideas at his followers.

WRT 9-11, much evidence suggests that the Bush administration showed willful neglect of the impending and happening danger.  At best, they were not doing their primary job of protecting US citizens very well, and it appears that protecting citizens was not actually their highest priority.  Their highest priority, of course, was advancing the causes of the most regressive capitalists in the US, including their cronies.  IMO Bush and his administration should have been impeached immediately thereafter (and there would be many future crimes that would call for that even more).

But that is not the same as making the useless argument that planes did not or could not have taken down the towers.  The latter argument has been disproven by leading professional engineers with endorsement from the leading professional engineering societies.  By getting people to focus on and talk about the bogus argument, 9-11-conspiranoicists distract from the real argument and make it look to others like all the people who ask questions are nuts.  It is quite plausible to believe that 9-11-conspiranoicists were in some ways themselves backed by the plutocracy.  From personal experience, I found them worse than distracting in every political context I found them and all of my comrades had almost the exact same experience.  They were like an army of ants, and there was no way to argue with or work with them, they could only stick to their lines like talking dolls.

This is similar to the way it goes with all the pseudo-leftists.

Let's look at his recent post-election rant.

The Obama referendum came in and he got what he deserved.

 From the outset, you can see this is not about the working class, it is an attack on Obama-the-man and by extension all Democrats and ultimately democracy itself.  From the standpoint of the working class, we don't care if Obama got or didn't get what he personally deserves, or in what timeframe he gets it.  What we care about is our class interests.  Objectively Obama is a very poor representative of our interests.  But he is a much better representative of our interests than the President we had previously, and any other president we had any chance of electing.  Now that he is elected, we can expect he will bow down to the true center of power in capitalist society, and that is Finance Capital, the great virtual casino in which all capitalists play to gain even more power over everyone else.

But at the same time, Obama is playing both sides a little, and he can advance our interests a little if we can use him correctly.  By objective measures, Obama actually has brought us more positive reform in two years than we've had in quite awhile, going back, peculairly enough, to the Nixon administration who brought us the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered species protection, the EPA, and OSHA.  Now no one argues that Nixon was not mainly a tool of corporatocracy.  But he also brought us some serious reforms.  And that was primarily made possible by the continued (though by then quickly fading) existance of a strong New Deal Democratic Party.

You have to understand what makes reform possible.  It is a union between the most progressive elements of the business class and progressive movements represented by progressive organizations.  It can be no other way in a capitalist democracy.  They need us (progressive businesses don't hate regulation, they depend on it to keep unscrupulous competitors at bay) and we need then (there is no possibility of "overthrowing" capitalism in a positive way in the forseeable future; any kind of violent "revolution" now is far more likely to further empower the most regressive elements of the business class as represented by the thinking of Tea Partiers).