Do the Job Numbers Really Add Up?

The January Employment Boost
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment.

The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups was designed for a normal growing economy, not for a prolonged downturn four years old. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the BLS adds 48,000 new jobs per month to the payroll employment report based on the birth/death model even though the economy has not come out of the deep recession. In other words, over the course of a year, the birth/death model adds about 580,000 jobs to the reported jobs numbers. End of year benchmark revisions quietly take the nonexistent jobs out of the totals, but these revisions do not receive headlines and pass largely unnoticed.

The reported January jobs gains are contradicted by other official reports. For example, The January payroll jobs report shows 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing, but according to the recently released 4th quarter GDP, 81% of the reported growth consisted of undesired inventory accumulation. Normally, companies produce for sales not for inventories. Why would manufacturers be hiring people to produce goods for undesired inventories?

Most of the new reported January jobs are in services. The January jobs report has 24,500 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade and 13,100 in transportation and warehousing. However the data shows that inflation-corrected real retail sales are down. Why does it take more people to sell fewer goods?

The other remaining sizable components of the January jobs number are: professional and technical services (30,000), administrative and waste services (36,700), health care and social assistance (29,700), and leisure and hospitality (44,000) of which the largest component is food services and drinking places (32,800).

The leisure, waitresses and bartender employment numbers seem high for January. Perhaps it was an excellent ski month in the US. However, accommodation (hotels) does not support this conclusion as accommodation lost 3,900 jobs.

The BLS reports 21,000 new jobs in construction. However, the housing report says that housing starts dropped more than forecast in December, falling 4.1 percent. Why does it take more construction workers to produce fewer houses? Building permits, a proxy for future construction, were little changed.

As the adjusted data produce phantom jobs and employment, the BLS should headline the raw unadjusted data. With so many discouraged workers unable to find jobs, dropping discouraged workers out of the measure of unemployment seriously understates the true magnitude of the unemployment problem. If Americans were aware of the double-digit unemployment rate, would they be as tolerant of Washington’s multi-trillion dollar wars? Would Obama be facing a tougher re-election campaign? Would Republicans be pushing to reduce the federal budget deficit at the expense of the social safety net?

The phony data serve many interests, but not those of the American people.

How to Cut Corporate Power

Occupy Corporations
by BILL QUIGLEY

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

– Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions in fines. Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto the devil for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world. Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights. There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood. At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation. Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission. The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back. An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify. This will take real work. But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy. In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision. More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights. Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state level. People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched. It is time for people to again take control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease. Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

Anonymous Takes Down Dept Of Homeland Security Website

Farmers Issue Lawsuit Against Monsanto the devil for Widespread Genetic Manipulation

Farmers Issue Lawsuit Against Monsanto the devil for Widespread Genetic Manipulation
Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post

Farmers are taking a stand against Monsanto the devil, launching a landmark lawsuit against the mega corporation for widespread genetic contamination.

The farmers are concerned that Monsanto the devil’s aggressive agenda to genetically alter the planet will ultimately result in a severe threat to the organic integrity of farms worldwide. It is not hard to believe that many ‘organic’ farms have already been contaminated with GMO crops, as nearly 93% of soybeans are now admittedly genetically modified.

The Public Patent Foundation originally filed the lawsuit in March of 2011 in a case known as Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto the devil.

The organization launched the suit in the name of the very individuals and organizations threatened by Monsanto the devil’s widespread GMO crops: family farmers, farming organizations, and seed businesses.

The intent of the case is to dispute Monsanto the devil’s patents on GMO seeds and ultimately safeguard farmers from Monsanto the devil’s own vicious lawsuits.

In fact, between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto the devil actually filed 144 lawsuits against American family farmers. In addition, another 700 were settled out of court for unknown amounts. Monsanto the devil has an agenda to take out American family farms and dominate the agricultural industry with their own mutant seeds.

This is the same kind of practice that Monsanto the devil operates outside of the United States as well, driving thousands of poor farmers to suicide by ruining their family farming practices.

The first phase of the case began yesterday on January 31, 2012. More than 50 farmers and plaintiffs have gone to Manhattan to listen to verbal debates surrounding Monsanto the devil’s attempts to dismiss the lawsuit.

Placebos and Distraction

New Study Shows How to Boost the Power of Pain Relief, Without Drugs

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2012) — Placebos reduce pain by creating an expectation of relief. Distraction -- say, doing a puzzle -- relieves it by keeping the brain busy. But do they use the same brain processes? Neuromaging suggests they do. When applying a placebo, scientists see activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that controls high-level cognitive functions like working memory and attention -- which is what you use to do that distracting puzzle.

Now a new study challenges the theory that the placebo effect is a high-level cognitive function. The authors -- Jason T. Buhle, Bradford L. Stevens, and Jonathan J. Friedman of Columbia University and Tor D. Wager of the University of Colorado Boulder -- reduced pain in two ways -- either by giving them a placebo, or a difficult memory task. lacebo. But when they put the two together, "the level of pain reduction that people experienced added up. There was no interference between them," says Buhle. "That suggests they rely on separate mechanisms." The findings, published inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, could help clinicians maximize pain relief without drugs.

In the study, 33 participants came in for three separate sessions. In the first, experimenters applied heat to the skin with a little metal plate and calibrated each individual's pain perceptions. In the second session, some of the people applied an ordinary skin cream they were told was a powerful but safe analgesic. The others put on what they were told was a regular hand cream. In the placebo-only trials, participants stared at a cross on the screen and rated the pain of numerous applications of heat -- the same level, though they were told it varied. For other trials they performed a tough memory task -- distraction and placebo simultaneously. For the third session, those who'd had the plain cream got the "analgesic" and vice versa. The procedure was the same.

The results: With either the memory task or the placebo alone, participants felt less pain than during the trials when they just stared at the cross. Together, the two effects added up; they didn't interact or interfere with each other. The data suggest that the placebo effect does not require executive attention or working memory.

So what about that neuroimaging? "Neuroimaging is great," says Buhle, "but because each brain region does many things, when you see activation in a particular area, you don't know what cognitive process is driving it." This study tested the theory about how placebos work with direct behavioral observation.

The findings are promising for pain relief. Clinicians use both placebos and distraction -- for instance, virtual reality in burn units. But they weren't sure if one might diminish the other's efficacy. "This study shows you can use them together," says Buhle, "and get the maximum bang for your buck without medications."

Journal Reference:Jason T. Buhle, Bradford L. Stevens, and Jonathan J. Friedman and Tor D. Wager. Distraction and Placebo: Two Separate Routes to Pain Control. Psychological Science, 2012

Unemployment through Jan 2012

Anonymous and Occupy: the Emergence of Counter-Corporations

Builds Upon: The Dark State


There is a single most common complaint I hear about the new wave of protestors that has emerged across America and the world.


“They don’t know what they’re protesting about!”


To the consternation of many, there’s no list of universal demands or theses.


When news reporters ask “Why are you protesting?” the answers they get describe a general feeling of resentment rather than a specific list of individuals or institutions.


This leads many people who would otherwise be sympathetic with the protestors to dismiss them.


So far, many have made the mistake of confusing these protests with past movements.


This time there is no charismatic leadership organizing everything and making speeches for the history books. 


There is no cadre of leaders that constitutes a ‘head’ that can easily be cut off.


It is a spontaneous manifestation of the internet—a continuation of the world wide wave of dissent that broke out earlier this year in Tunisia.


There never will be specific demands, just a brooding cloud of discontent.


And this will be not a weakness, but a great strength.


A concrete agenda might merely narrow a protest’s objectives and needlessly shorten its duration. It opens the protest to more sophisticated attack and criticism from its opponents.


A token concession or empty promise has the potential send everyone home.


Most importantly, the lack of a list of grievances sends an important implicit message: the onus is no longer on the people to formulate specific objections and argue for the legitimacy of their discontent.


They are no longer on the defensive as they always have been before.


The very open-endedness of these protests allows the protesters to take the initiative.


All that matters is that they are discontent. Until someone does something that makes them not discontent or simply shoots them all, they will do whatever it is they deem suitable to address the matter.


This approach allows no room for excuses. Either something is done to make people happy or the protests continue.


Elites suddenly find themselves in the situation of the typical employee: do your job in a way we like or you’re fired.


This is not primarily a statement of principle or a polite request and this is where many people are confused.
It is an ultimatum.


Just a few years ago, there was a primordial soup brewing on some imageboards.


The topics of discussion tended to focus on anime, porn, and anime-porn, but somehow this soup began to spontaneously evolve until there was a community that could act on collective goals without formal organization or leadership. In fact, none of these people even knew each other and it did not matter. They were all Anonymous.


What started out as one nameless person inviting an entire faceless community to prank call an asshole boss developed over the next couple of years into an untraceable internet military that’s capable of taking on corporations, governments, and religions.


There is an important principle that Anonymous shares with the current protests.


A school of fish coordinates its movement to strategically reduce risk for each individual. Thus, the school can behave in ways that would be far too risky for each individual, for the benefit of all.


Until widespread, reliable, high speed internet, people did not have the ability to pull off this level of group coordination and individual people, unless truly desperate, do not often risk themselves for a better society they will not live to see.


However, this ‘school’ form of organization has reduced individual risk while increasing individual effectiveness in collective action to the point where participation is far more attractive than it once was.
Result: society’s established powers can’t ask as much or get away with as much as they used to. The balance of power is shifting towards the ruled and the rulers, understandably are reluctant to accept this.


For a few hundred years now, elites have had their own version of Anonymous that has helped them to accomplish their goals. It’s called a corporation.


Shareholders come together to in order to mitigate risk and allow them do things that would ordinarily be too risky. By acting collectively, they can do away with individual accountability.


These elites failed to understand what would happen if technology sufficiently improved the ability of the peasantry to communicate and coordinate their actions.


The result is effectively a counter-corporation.


The incarnation of these protests as of the writing of this article is known as ‘Occupy.’ These particular public actions may soon cease or they may not. It does not matter.


Authorities do not yet understand that an intelligent collective of peasants, just like a corporation of the wealthy is extremely resourceful and adaptable.


Sending some campers home from public parks accomplishes little. New forms of opposition will soon emerge taking advantage of every possible systemic weakness. The game has changed.

Is democracy all it is cracked up to be?

Statistical analysis can reveal election fraud, a paper says. But the problems with democracy go deeper, argues Philip Ball.
27 January 2012

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing,” Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” A paper uploaded to a preprint server this month suggests that little has changed in Russia.

Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1.

This is not a new accusation. Some, such as Russian physicist Sergey Shpilkin, have claimed that Russian voting statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5% or 10%, as though ballot officials have simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet predetermined figures. And last December, The Wall Street Journal conducted its own analysis of the election statistics, which led political scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago to concur that the data showed potential signs of fraud.

Naturally, Putin denies this. But for those who suspect that neither he nor The Wall Street Journal is exactly the most neutral of sources on Russian politics, Klimek and his colleagues offer a welcome alternative. They say that the statistical distribution of votes in the Duma election diverges from a normal (bell-curve or Gaussian) distribution — the expected outcome of a set of independent choices — by over one hundred times more than would be expected for an unbiased election.

The same is true for the Ugandan presidential election of February 2011. Both of these statistical distributions are, even at a glance, profoundly different from those of recent elections in, say, Austria, Switzerland or Spain (see Figure, below).

Expand

Plots of voter turnout versus number of votes for the winner clearly show something fishy is going on in Russia and Uganda, with many districts reporting 100% turnout and 100% of votes going to the winner (red circles).
REF. 1

Breaking down the numbers into scatter plots, with the voter turnout plotted against the number of votes for the winner in each voting district, lays the problems bare. Most countries show a single, broad peak, but both Russia and Uganda also have an extra, smaller peak. For both countries, distortion in the main peak suggests ballot rigging — for Russia, this afflicts about 64% of districts.

But the smaller peaks suggest much cruder fraud. They correspond to districts showing both 100% turnout and 100% votes for the winning party. As if.

No perfect system

It is good to see science expose these corruptions of democracy. Yet science also hints that, in general, democracy isn’t quite what it is popularly sold as. Take the choice of voting system. One of the most celebrated results of the branch of economics known as social choice theory is that there can be no perfectly fair means of deciding the outcome of a democratic vote. Possible voting schemes are manifold — first-past-the-post (used in the United Kingdom), proportional representation (Scandinavian countries), schemes for ranking candidates rather than simply selecting one, and so on — and their relative merits are hotly debated.

But as Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 economics Nobel prize, showed in the 1950s, none of these systems can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic that one might demand2 — for example, that a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative. Arrow's ‘impossibility theorem’ implies that societies must either accept that democratic majority rule has some undesirable consequences, or find fairer alternatives — which none has.

Other considerations can also undermine the democratic principle: for example, bipartisan votes may fall within the margin of statistical error. As demonstrated in the US presidential election of 2000, between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the result is then not democratic but legalistic.

Furthermore, analysis of voting statistics suggests that, regardless of the voting system, political choices are not free and independent (as most definitions of democracy pretend), but partly the collective result of peer influence. That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law3, 4. Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections1. They assume that some of these deviations result from collective effects such as voter mobilization: targeted, often single-issue campaigns to sway votes.

In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions. On the one hand, you could say that this is just how democratic societies work. On the other, it makes voting a nonlinear process in which small effects (media bias or party budgets, say) can have disproportionately big consequences. At the very least, it makes voting a more complex and less transparent process than is normally assumed.

This isn’t to invalidate Winston Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the least bad political system. But let us not fool ourselves about what it entails.


References

1. Klimek, P., Yegorov, Y., Hanel, R. & Thurner, S. http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3087 (2012).
   
   
2. Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1… in article


3. … Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections^1… in article


4. Arrow, K. J. Social Choice and Individual Values (Yale University Press, 1951).
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   • But as Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 economics Nobel prize, showed in the 1950s, none of these systems can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic that one might demand² — for example, that a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative… in article
5. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Andrade Jr, J. S. & Moreira, J. E. Phys. Rev. E 60, 1067–1068(1999).
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   • … That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law^3, 4… in article
6. Costa Filho, R. N., Almeida, M. P., Moreira, J. E. & Andrade Jr, J. S. Physica A 322, 698–700 (2003).
   • Article
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   • … That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law^3, 4… in article
7. Fortunato, S. & Castellano, C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 138701 (2007).
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   • PubMed
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   • In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation^5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions… in article
8. Stauffer, D. in Encyclopedia of Complexity & System Science (ed. Meyers, R. A.) 6380–6388 (Springer, 2009).
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   • In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation^5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions… in article

The tyranny of tiny minds and big money

SUNDAY, FEB 5, 2012
After three years, its time for Obama to deliver on his promise to curb money in politics

BY LAWRENCE LESSIG

Four years ago, Sen. Barack Obama, candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, began to draw into focus a meme that for many of us defined what was different about his campaign, and what made his election critical. As he said in Columbia, S.C., on Jan. 26, 2008,

We are up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government — that they are just part of the system in Washington. But we know that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem, and this election is our chance to say that we’re not going to let them stand in our way anymore.

On April 2, he told an audience in Philadelphia:

If we’re not willing to take up that fight, then real change — change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans — will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.

Two weeks later, Washington, D.C.:

But let me be clear — this isn’t just about ending the failed policies of the Bush years; it’s about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those policies. For far too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has allowed Wall Street to use lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system and get its way, no matter what it costs ordinary Americans

One week later, Indianapolis:

Unless we’re willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change.

And just as he had said in Pittsburgh the week before, he repeated in Indiana again:

The reason I am running for president is to challenge that system.

This “challenge” was an essential element in Obama’s argument. Without such reform, the aspirations of his campaign — from healthcare reform, to global warming legislation, to reform of the banks, to an overhaul of the tax system — would not just have been audacious. They would have been insane. All the money in the world was not simply going to be lulled to sleep by Obama, the great speechifier. Only by effecting a real change of its power within the system of our government would the Obama agenda be even possible.
That’s because the system of government that we have now is corrupt. Not corrupt in the traditional Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. Our Congress is not filled with crooks. Quid pro quo bribery is not its central crime. Instead, corrupt in the sense that the attention of Congress is constantly drawn away from where it would be focused if it were an institution, as the Framers intended, “dependent upon the people alone.”

It is not. As members spend more and more of their time raising money (estimates range between 30 and 70 percent), Congress becomes an institution dependent upon its Funders, too. And as “the Funders” are not “the people”— .26 percent give more than $200 in a congressional campaign, .05 percent give the max to any individual candidate, and just .01 percent of Americans, 1 out of every 10,000, give more than $10,000 in an election cycle — that dependency corrupts Congress. Seventy-five percent of Americans believe “campaign contributions buy results in Congress.” Barely 10 percent have confidence in Congress. This institution, the core of our democracy, is politically bankrupt. And it was therefore appropriate, indeed, essential, that the president make its reform the catalyst for any real “change.” If this indeed was to be “change you could believe in,” changing Congress had to be part of the plan.

Yet three years into this administration, we have yet to see the plan. In Obama’s first year as president, reform of Congress was nowhere on his agenda. Then a year (and a day) after his inauguration, the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, gave birth to the age of the super PAC. Yet his State of the Union address in response proposed little more than disclosure as a remedy — as if seeing the corruption more clearly was going to make Americans more trusting. And then, after his shellacking in the midterms, Obama said this:

We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done. And I think that frustrated people.

Yet still, there was no plan. Nothing in the reforms that Obama even hinted at would have changed the fact that it is the tiniest slice of America that funds the largest chunk of the costs of America’s campaigns.

And then there is this year’s State of the Union address. “I’ve talked tonight,” Obama told us, “about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street.”

“But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad — and it seems to get worse every year. Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics. So together, let’s take some steps to fix that.”

Here, I confess, my heart skipped. Obama, I thought, was back. Obama, the reformer, the candidate talking about the change that would make change believable. Here I thought was the obvious lead in to a plan for change that would make it possible for sane souls to believe that the substantive changes that he promised were even possible.

So what were these “steps to fix” it? What is the plan?

Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa — an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.

Seriously, Mr. President? These are the “steps to fix” the divide between Washington and the rest of the country? This would end the “corrosive influence of money in politics”?

Don’t get me wrong: Obviously, these changes would be good. The insider trading issue looks bad, no doubt, though there’s a real debate about whether there is any there there. Serious scholars crunching the numbers have yet to find a systemic advantage, even if a selective view might suggest something different.

But no one credible believes that the dysfunction of Congress comes from day trading on the floor of the House. And no one credible could believe that the core corruption that is our government would end if members of Congress were banned from owning stock.

Likewise with the ban on bundlers lobbying Congress “and vice versa” (though notice, nothing is said about bundlers lobbying the executive): It is certainly true that one core dynamic of the corruption of this government comes through the influence of “lobbyists.” But no one even seems to know any more who a “lobbyist” is. Former Sen. Tom Daschle tells us he is not “a lobbyist.”  He’s merely an “advisor.” Former Speaker Newt Gingrich promises he was not “a lobbyist.” He sold his advice and access, he tells us, as “an historian.” Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) promised Connecticut he wouldn’t lobby after leaving Congress. And he didn’t: He merely took over Hollywood’s chief lobbying association, the Motion Picture Association of America.

The point is not just about the individuals who find a way to skirt regulations. The point is about the obvious consequence of any plan that focuses exclusively upon limits. If you ban “lobbyists” from bundling, there will be fewer “lobbyists” and many more historians. If you ban advisors and historians from bundling, there will be fewer advisors and historians, but more CEO’s of lobbying associations. It is just an elaborate game of Whac-A-Mole, each suppression creating a new bubble, in an endless and futile game of reform.

The problem here is obvious: Obama has surrounded himself with tiny minds. “Audacity” has been banished from their dictionary. The most they can timidly suggest is the smallest step that has any chance of passing. Let’s get what we can, declare victory and move on. As if the battle was about making Obama a successful and popular president, as opposed to the battle to make this democracy work again.

The corruption of this government is a cancer. And you don’t launch an attack on cancer by prescribing good eating and exercise. Nor can you make change believable by pushing for reforms that won’t change anything in that corruption. What Obama must do if he is to make American democracy possible again is to speak boldly, not practically, about reform. He has to give us the big ideas that would actually have an effect, not the pathetic tinkering that only makes the lobbyists laugh. He needs to begin the process of persuading the nation that fundamental reform is necessary and possible. He must “take up that fight,” for unless he does, then “real change — change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans — will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo.” He must stop, by his silence, defending the status quo. He must begin again the fight to change it.

This is the point that Andrew Sullivan’s repeated defense of the president misses. If Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Obama, and if she had achieved precisely as much as Obama has achieved — which obviously is significant and important — liberals would certainly be “deluded,” as Sullivan calls us, for criticizing her. But Obama promised something more than Clinton did, and if there is delusion here, it is the thought that he could achieve even a tiny fraction of what he promised without this reform. Reform is an essential part of making the Obama agenda even possible. And so it is both fair to criticize the president for forgetting this essential step, and right to urge that he “take up that fight” again.

How? The clue is the throwaway line at the end of his supposed plan for reform: “an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.” For as much as the chatterati love to set the left side against the right, the real divide in American politics today is between the inside and the outside. There is a politics within the beltway of D.C. Within that politics, nothing real is possible. And then there is a politics outside the beltway of D.C. — where on the left and on the right there is cross-partisan support for the sort of reforms that would really change Washington.

Outside Washington, in the grassroots of American politics,  Democrats, independents and Republicans all support a radical change in how we fund campaigns. The bloated and bureaucratic “public funding” of the 1970s is despised, and rightly so. But a system of small-dollar, citizen-funded elections, either through matching funds or tax rebated vouchers, is supported across the political spectrum. Likewise with the mother of Super PACs — Citizens United: While there is a strong division among Americans about whether any one group should be silenced, there is overwhelming support for the idea of limiting the role of independent expenditures in political campaigns.

The president needs to appeal to this cross-partisan outsiders movement. He needs to inspire them to dream about the real reform that they could make possible, if only they would organize and demand the way they organized and stopped SOPA/PIPA. This president and this Congress are not going to change the economy of influence of D.C. But this president and the next Congress could — if Obama made this issue the focus of this campaign.

And if not Obama, then some other candidate.

And if not some other candidate, then us.

For the critical insight that more and more are coming to see is that the critical force in politics today, not just in America, but across the world, comes from the amateur, not the professional. From the outside, not the inside. That’s what MoveOn taught us 14 years ago. That’s what the Tea Party showed us 2 years ago. That was what Occupy Wall Street proved just last fall.

It is time we recognize the potential of these outsiders and celebrate it. The inside might be able to inspire them. But it will be they, or us, the outsiders, who will determine whether the cancer that is Washington gets cured.