As it is darned near every year, the proposed ’11 WA state budget contains a plan to completely eliminate the Basic Health program for the working poor.

This must not stand. Even if it takes bipartisan supermajorities in the Legislature.

We need a society where we give a damn about one another–and not just when it’s convenient or when it’s “good for business.”

So there I was Tuesday evening as I am many Tuesday evenings, at Drinking Liberally. People in whose opinion and progressive zeal I had long trusted were whining and moping. One or two of them even declared the Obama era to have died, and any hope for this troubled land along with it.

“He could have been another FDR,” one sighed. But now, this critic inveighed, Obama was bound to go down in history “worse than Carter.”

All on the basis of one particular, poorly timed and poorly justified, cave to Republican intransigence on bonuses for billionaires, as part of a big give n’ take in which the GOPpers actually did a little bit of givin’.

Look: This guy’s been counted out before. He’ll come back.

And as for progressivism in general, it’s just getting started.

There is, and will continue to be, a lot of work to be done, on both the macro and the micro levels, on getting this country’s course corrected.

It would help if we had a federal government that was with us on this.

But it needs doing anyway, with or without their participation.

Not only does next Monday bring the televised return of Conan O’Brien, but it brings an end to Seattle’s original all sleaze-talk station. Fisher Broadcasting is switching KVI-AM from conservatalk to oldies music.

Insert your joke about but-they’ve-been-mired-in-the-past-all-this-time here.

We’ve got our part to do to keep the right wing sleaze machine from controlling the Senate. That part is the re-defeat of Dino Rossi.

Want another reason? Rossi’s been holding seminars on how to profit from the foreclosure crisis. Call it financial schadenfreude, or just call it cynical hustling. Whatever you call it, it ain’t what I call the sort of character we need in DC right now.

At Crosscut, ex-UW prof Dick Morrill laments the disappearance of the pre-Vietnam, class-struggle-conscious radical left in America and specifically in Seattle.

Morrill offers a sophisticated whatthehellhappened analysis. So do many of the page’s commenters.

Like some of the commenters, I see two reasons why it all occurred:

1. The Cold War-era blacklists, purges of labor union leadership, and general scare tactics against anybody or anything more liberal than John Foster Dulles.
2. The subsequent New Left’s preppy disdain for working-class squares, which repeated itself in later decades of identity politics, semiotics, and neo-bohemian “alt” culture.

Is there a way out of this recursive trap?

I believe I’ve already seen part of it.

I’ve seen it at the immigrants’-rights protests.

I’ve seen it among the grassroots and netroots groups striving to turn Obamamania from a singular event into a permanent force for progress.

And I hope to see it at the Stewart/Colbert rallies later this month.

Confused about all the initiatives on this year’s Wash. state ballot?

You’re not alone.

Fortunately, there’s a handy dandy “Living Voters Guide” now online, to help you match the number to the proposal.

I’m relisting the measures here, with my own endorsements (which are based around the concept that we do need public services, and we need ways to pay for them in-this-economic-blah-blah-blah):

• Referendum 52: The Legislature should have simply passed this instead of referring it to voters. Schools need energy efficiency retrofitting. Bottled water might was well have the same taxation as pop. YEP.
• Initiative 1053: Tim Eyman’s latest sounds-good-on-talk-radio, is-disastrous-in-real-life measure. No, we’re not stupid. No, we don’t want Calif.-style legislative gridlock. Yes, the state needs to plug budget holes, even with spit and hairpins and bailing wire if need be, and without regard to arbitrary “caps.” NOPE.
• Initiative 1082: The Building Industry Association of Washington’s attempt to gut worker’s compensation by turning it over to the private insurance industry (not exactly my favorite group O’ guys these days). NOPE.
• Initiative 1098: The new state income tax, only on the rich. Endorsed by Bill Gates Sr. (who used to call himself Bill Gates Jr., but that’s beside the point). By itself, it won’t cure Washington’s status as the most regressive tax system (or at least close to the most regressive) in the nation. But it’s a start. YEP.
• Initiative 1100: Two very different schemes to privatize liquor sales made the ballot. This is the one that has TV spots with bar owners Linda Dershang and Tom Douglas endorsing it. It’s also the Costco-funded initiative. It’s the one that would get the state out of both the wholesale and the retail liquor biz, and would allow outfits like Costco to buy beer and wine as well as spirits direct from their makers, instead of through wholesale intermediaries. It would lower liquor prices but at a too-high cost to state coffers. NOPE.
• Initiative 1105: The less radical liquor privatization scheme. This is the one promoted by alcohol wholesalers, whose existence is threatened by the rival I-1100. If you really insist on putting hard booze into the supermarkets, pick this one instead. Otherwise, NOPE.
• Initiative 1107: The Coca-Cola initiative, to end the temporary sales tax on pop and junk food. The tax itself is a cumbersome mess of inclusions and exclusions, but this would just gut the whole thing. NOPE.

I thought this department was perhaps due for retirement. After all, the SeaTimes hasn’t run a 24- or 26-page minipaper in several weeks. Even Monday and Tuesday editions regularly run to 32-36 pages, with 8-12 pages of paid advertising.

However, as Goldy at HorsesAss points out, these looks can be deceiving.

The paper’s offering drastically discounted ad rates for in-state political advertisers.

And some of the SeaTimes‘ other ads, particularly in Mon.-Thurs. issues, seem to be for mail-order merchandisers of the type you’d normally see in late night TV infomercials. I don’t know what rates these firms are being charged, but I suspect they might also be less than they used to be.

Contrary to what the nostalgia industry and PBS pledge-drive specials will claim, the era commonly known as “The Sixties” involved a lot more than just a bunch of upscale white kids getting stoned and laid and calling it a “revolution.”

A lot of people performed a lot of hard work, against real opposition, to help make this a better place for a lot of different folks.

One of the premier examples of this was Roberto Maestas, who died today.

To call Maestas a professional political organizer is to oversimplify the many activities and crusades in which he participated over the years.

But his living legacy is, and will be, El Centro de la Raza. Founded during the early ’70s “Boeing Bust” recession at an abandoned elementary school building, it’s a community and advocacy group devoted to the practical improvement of people’s lives.

The NY Times claims Russian authorities have found a new foolproof way to crack down on just about all forms of poiltical opposition—confiscate their computers, claiming the dissidents are pirated Microsoft software. Strangely, pro-government groups are never the targets of such investigations. The NYT sez Microsoft is going along fully with the seizures, perhaps out of fear of losing Russian gov’t business.

US socialist historian Lance Selfa asks, “Is America a right-wing country?”

His answer: Not really.

Selfa proposes, and I agree, that today’s pseudo-populist right is a marketing gimmick devised and/or exploited by big corporate funders. The object: To channel some traditionalists’ fear of social change into a rage against “government,” which would lead to weaker governance all around, especially toward corporate regulation/taxation.

A deeper look, Selfa argues, would see a nation steadily adopting more progressive views on health care reform, gay rights, race/gender issues, et al.

So why do leftists buy into the far right fringe’s claims to universal popularity—when they KNOW those dorks are LYING about everything else?

I’ve always guessed it’s because defeatism can be so comfortable. It’s so easy to just retreat into your boho tribes and exchange sneers against Evil Mainstream America.

Actually persuading people to your point of view is harder.

Actually organizing a movement is harder.

Actually organizing a movement for positive change, instead of merely protesting, is harder still.

But we saw in ’08 that it could be done.

Our task, in this midterm election and beyond, is not to retrieve that spirit but to move beyond it, to make working for change an everyday thing. To evolve from an ecstatic affair with activism into a marriage.

A ramble today about the miserable economy and potential alternatives thereto.

I begin with recent remarks by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. He has a book out in the UK, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.

Plugging the book in the Brit daily The Independent, Chang’s alleged that the current global corporate system has turned us all into Matrix drones, sleepwalking through a fantasy world and incapable of imagining any other.

This is the ol’ Plato’s cave allegory, refitted to modern pop-culture references.

And I believe it’s only half true, at most.

Eleven years ago, thousands swarmed Seattle’s streets protesting just that system.

Today, you sure don’t have to be a political radical to see a lot of dysfunction in the way things currently are.

But what to do about it?

In this country, the Republicans only offer a return to the lobbyist-whoring ways of the Bush years. The corporate Democrats offer watered down Clintonian half measures, then dilute them further.

I’ve talked and corresponded with a lot of people who desperately want something better.

But what?

Third-world style dictatorship works at keeping a small elite in power, but it’s lousy for most everybody else. Central-state Communism sometimes worked a little better in regard to social services; but it could be brutally inefficient, where dictatorships were simply brutally efficient.

Besides, excessive centralization of capital and wealth is a lot of what’s wrong with the present system. We need more economic diversity and democracy, not less.

So I hereby introduce my own formula for a better, more prosperous tomorrow:

Economic MISCosity.

The elevator-pitch description: Try whatever works.

To hell with pure socialism, pure capitalism, pure anything.

Decentralize businesses and business units. More authority to those in the field. More co-op and worker-controlled enterprises.

Use public financing and/or administration for those social goods that often aren’t best serviced by the profit motive. I’d nominate health care as just such a sector.

Promote more and different metrics of economic success, other than just the Almighty Stock Price.

To my alt-culture pals: Can the square-bashing, the rural-bashing, and the working-class-bashing. We’re all in this thing together.

To my baby-boomer pals: This ain’t gonna be pretty, or laid back, or mellow. Be prepared for some heavy lifting.

To my NPR-fan pals: This ain’t gonna be easy to understand, let alone simple to accomplish. Beware of easy answers, no matter what they are. Our future is a messy, complex, complicated place, full of twists and seeming contradictions. Live with it.

So: I was walking back from the street scene outside the Obama fundraiser for Patty Murray at the Westin. 

Near the Dahlia Lounge, I received a “Hey” from a parked Jaguar.

From within the luxury car, a mature woman with flashy mall-teen fake fingernails smiled and started to chat me up with the typical small talk stuff.

Then she quickly segued the conversation. She asked if she could come back to my place, or at least join her in the car.

I hemmed and hawed my way out of the conversation, without the topic of money ever emerging.

What this might mean: On an 80 degree day in Seattle, even the instigators of “street” commerce prefer to stay out of the sun.

You know that Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, the anti-gay demagogue mysteriously loved monetarily by Target Stores? We now know who’s going to be his Democratic rival. It’s an ex-US Senator who happens to be a descendent of Target’s founding family.

There are many threads of influence beneath today’s extreme right wing faux-populism. Here’s one: the religious, political, and sales cult that is Amway.

Costco’s Washington liquor privatization initiative: Good for chain stores, bad for microbrewers? That’s what the Washington Brewers Guild claims.