It’s been nearly 35 years since we’ve had a “tax and spend” political party. During the 1970s, the Democrats gave up fighting the Republicans about the “tax and spend” label, and the Carter Administration tried to escape from that charge by making very serious attempts to balance the budget. During the 1980s, more and more Democrats emphasized their concern for reducing deficits and balancing budgets as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Reagan Administration’s unprecedented peacetime deficits. This didn’t work for them during Reagan’s time, but they finally were able to use the balanced budget old-time religion game to get George Bush to violate his no new taxes pledge, which both contributed to the Bush recession and, as a further consequence, was a big reason why Bill Clinton was elected.

We think most people agree that money has corrupted our politics. Some even think that we now live in a Plutocracy, and not in a Democracy, and that both parties are corrupted and now represent only the financial oligarchy. So, the central issue of our time is how can we break its hold? How can we overcome the influence of money in politics and make our political system more responsive to most Americans once again?

The progressive counter-attack against the President’s emerging “austerity” political strategy and program is beginning to emerge. In the last few days, we’ve seen posts by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson of Social Security Works, Jane Hamsher, Robert Kuttner, and Dean Baker writing against the thrust by the Administration, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and its network of related organizations, and the deficit hawks in the Congress, seemingly aimed at Social Security. These posts make or imply a number of points sometimes in the form of questions. They are:

— The commission is unaccountable.

— It meets in secret.

— Its members will keep their recommendations secret until after the election, and then will present them to a lame duck Congress that is itself unaccountable.

In a CNBC debate with James Galbraith, Peter Schiff came out in favor of private interests having complete control of our currency. That’s a recipe for pure Plutocracy.

Call it a payback, or pre-bribe work, it makes no difference. It’s just more evidence of a Republican plot to form their idea of a more perfect union; a Plutocracy. The audacity of the Republican Party in demanding more contributions for standing in the way of reform that could help AMERICA avoid another economic collapse is astounding. Yes, Astounding audacity. The Audacity of Nope.

When contemplating American politics today, it’s hard not to think of Yeats’s line from the Second Coming:

”The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In the health care reform legislative process, the progressives held true to the slogan that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they forgot the maxim that “if you stand for nothing, you’ll end up with nothing.” So, here we are with worse than nothing, with two immoral bills, that do more harm than good, and with every prospect that an equally bad compromise between them will be presented to both Houses for final ratification.

That immoral compromise needs to be defeated. Health Care Reform must be sent back to the Leadership for further work. If Congress is not immediately ready for true health care reform ending the fatalities, bankruptcies and foreclosures within a years’ implementation time, then, at least, a bill must be passed that ends rescissions, denials of coverage or price discrimination based on preconditions, and that limits insurance premium increases to the annual rate of inflation, effective immediately.

Here are nine reasons the Senate health care reform bill should be killed:

1) The bill gives almost no real help ’til 2014. In the short term, the bill does nothing about the fatalities, bankruptcies, and foreclosures that come from lack of insurance. Therefore, the very title of the bill — “The Affordable Health Choices Act” –is a lie, despite band-aids for children and young adults, because the bill doesn’t get people care in the short run at an affordable price that will protect them from financial ruin.

If the Obama Administration and the progressive movement continue to stand between the pitchforks and the interests, the change we were promised will never occur, because in a Democracy, the driving force for change has to come from the bottom. It cannot come from the top, simply because an elitist movement of progressives doing nothing to mobilize its potential populist support is no match for an elitist movement of plutocrats constantly riding the wave of inchoate populist anger to block any change that would bring the theft of the plutocrats under control.

You can’t ignore widespread populist anger and rage arising out of real underlying grievances. You can only learn to use it, or you will lose to it. It’s up to the President to decide what he will do. Let’s hope he decides to be a real Democrat and to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson

Chris Matthews asks: “What happened to the Obama message machine.” And Dee Dee Myers and Tony Blankley dutiful provide various off the mark answers about fear and insecurity. But, also, it’s clear to all three that Obama’s message on health care doesn’t have the same clarity as his message during the campaign, and they attribute that to his vagueness in the absence of a specific proposal for reform that he is advocating. In short, the failure of “the Obama messaging machine” is not due to a deterioration in the messaging machine, but to an absence of specific content that people can understand and organize around, and that Obama can deliver and repeat again and again. That content must be something that people can easily understand and that is resistant to the Republican lying machine.