Some Views on Obama's State of the Union Address

I want to be a believer. I want to believe that President Obama is a born again progressive populist, who after having tried compromise with the Republicans for three years, and finding out that they aren't interested, is now returning to some core set of principles related to the "hope and change," "yes we can" rhetoric of his first Presidential campaign. I want to believe that the Democratic leadership, both local and national, was, and is correct to support him, despite his record of severely diminishing our civil rights at home while engaging in, and still supporting, probable war crimes abroad, and despite his capitulation to Republicans on important social and economic issues in the name of compromise. I realize that the Republican leadership has cynically opposed most of his efforts to revive the economy in order to get "regime change" at home, and I realize that the Republican candidates represent destructive forces that are at best no better than Obama, and which at worst will likely hammer the hopes and dreams of the American poor and middle classes, while worsening the prospects for peace in the world. Once again, progressive independents and Democrats are left on the horns of a dilemma, as the corporations and power brokers have the radical Republicans as their first choice, and Obama as their slightly less desirable backup, with no reasonable, or at least visible, alternative yet in the "race." Those who feel that Obama sold them out will have to decide whether to sit the election out or to hold their nose and vote for him in the hopes of keeping a Radical Republican out of the executive office.

Will Obama return to his imagined progressive roots and turn things around? I don't know, except that it doesn't look good.

Here, below, are two reactions by progressives to his SOTU speech, and one good suggestion for how he should proceed if he is interested in salvaging a decent place in history for himself.
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"He Says One Thing and Does Another": Ralph Nader Responds to Obama’s State of the Union Address

. . . .
RALPH NADER: Well, I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. I mean, he was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms, force projection in the Pacific, and distorting the whole process of how he explains Iraq and Afghanistan. He talks about Libya and Syria, and then went into the military alliance with Israel and didn’t talk about the peace process or the plight of the Palestinians, who are being so repressed. Leaving Iraq as if it was a victory? Iraq has been destroyed: massive refugees, over a million Iraqis dead, contaminated environment, collapsing infrastructure, sectarian warfare. He should be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries, unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they’ve come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy. So I think it was very, very poor taste to start and end with this kind of massive militarism and the Obama empire. . . . .

But then, when he said to the American people, "no more bailouts, no more handouts, and no more cop-outs" — but that’s what’s been going on. And it’s going on today and it went on last year under his administration. Washington is a bustling bazaar of accounts receivable. They’re bailing out and they’re handing out all kinds of subsidies to corporations—handouts, giveaways, transfer of technology, transfer of medical research to the drug companies without any reasonable price provisions on drugs, giveaway of natural resources on the federal lands. You name it, it’s still going on. And as far as a cop-out, how about his deferred prosecution gimmicks with these corporations under the Justice Department, where they never have to plead guilty, they never have to make themselves vulnerable to civil lawsuits so they pay back the American people what they’ve stolen from them?

So, obviously, State of the Union speeches are full of rhetoric, they’re full of promises, but it’s good to measure them against the past performance of the Obama administration and what his promises were in 2008. They don’t really stand up very well.
. . . .

For rest of article see: "He Says One Thing and Does Another": Ralph Nader Responds to Obama’s State of the Union Address
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Sen. Sanders Reacts to Pres. Obama's State of the Union Address

"The American people are beginning to catch on that there`s something fundamentally wrong in our society when so few have so much and so many have so little," Bernie said after President Obama made economic fairness a key theme in his State of the Union address. The senator also praised the president for stressing the need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels.

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Obama Can Win Big with FDR Formula
by Robert McElvaine

Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t always “Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
. . . .
FDR launched his 1936 reelection campaign by warning against a dictatorship by the over-privileged and declaring that private enterprise had become “too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.”

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” he said, expressing sentiments that could resonate now. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

Running against economic royalists, Roosevelt won reelection in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history. The Democrats, moreover, won 77 percent of the House seats and increased their hold on the Senate to 79 percent.

As 2012 begins, such a resounding victory for Obama and the Democrats looks impossible. Whether it is depends on which past reelection campaign recipe Obama decides to follow. . . . .

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More Views on SOTU:

Money in Politics Groups Mixed on Obama’s Speech

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Can Progressives an Libertarians Find Common Ground on The Budget?

In This edition:

- Judge Napolitano Interviews Ron Paul & Ralph Nader Together

- Democracy Now! on Obama's Budget

- Tell Congress: Don't pull the plug on NPR and PBS! (Added 2/16/11)

- Alan Simpson On NPR's Morning Edition (Added 2/16/11)

- Liberty Radio's Scott Horton (Libertarian) Interviews Chris Hedges (Progressive)

- More on Obama's Budget

- Wolf Articles
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Judge Napolitano Interviews Ron Paul & Ralph Nader Together


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Democracy Now! on Obama's Budget

AMY GOODMAN: Obama’s plan includes two modest tax hikes for banks and oil companies. It also calls for ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in 2013 and returning the estate tax to its higher 2009 levels. But it comes less than two months after Obama signed into law a measure that temporarily extended the tax cuts and reduced the estate tax, adding over $500 billion to the federal deficit. According to the White House, the deficit will reach a record $1.6 trillion next year.

The Pentagon meanwhile will see its first spending reduction since the 9/11 attacks, but only at modest levels. The budget allots $553 billion for the Pentagon’s regular spending—$12 billion less than what the military expected, but still three percent higher over fiscal year 2011. Another $118 billion is earmarked for war-time spending.
. . . .

JOHN NICHOLS:

And the important thing is, here you have President Obama saying that they’ve gotten down to the lowest level of domestic spending, domestic discretionary spending, since the Eisenhower era. That certainly sounds good as a sound bite, but understand what that means. It means that now Pentagon spending, defense spending, is a dramatically higher level of what our budget goes to. And I wish President Obama would remember what Dwight Eisenhower said about defense spending versus domestic spending. Dwight Eisenhower said, every time you buy a bomb, every time you pay for a bullet, that’s money that comes out of building a school or putting a roof on a house. I just think the President is making a lot of wrong choices here.

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Tell Congress: Don't pull the plug on NPR and PBS!


Your Voice Matters-Defend Federal Funding for Public Broadcasting and Call Today



David Wu, Oregon 1st (202-225-0855)
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Senator Patty Murray, Washington (202-224-2621)
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Alan Simpson On NPR's Morning Edition (Added 2/16/11)

Alan Simpson: Cut Entitlements, Defense; Not Aid To Poor

"STEVE: Do you think that it is possible, however you figure out the numbers, to balance the budget or move it close to balance while preserving what we call the social safety net that has grown up in this country across many decades?

SIMPSON: Heating. That Leap group.

STEVE: LIHEAP.

SIMPSON: Yup, that's a critically important thing. That shouldn't even be touched.

You don't need to touch that, you need to go get rid of 250,000 contractors in the Defense Department where you can really pick up some small change.

STEVE: So you think the safety net can be preserved – that's not really where the big money is anyway."

On Defense related spending:

"SIMPSON: Without any question. We have a defense budget now which is larger than all 14 other countries (with the largest economies.) That ought to get you somewhere.

SIMPSON: Yes, except China, of course, and now they're gearing up.

We found stuff in the Defense Department that you can't believe. Here's one for ya. There's a DOD health system, its separate from the Veterans Administration, its separate from Obamacare. It affects 2.2 million military retirees.

Their premium is $460 a year and no co-pay and includes their dependents and the cost to the U.S. is $53 billion a year.

STEVE: So maybe people ought to pay in a little more that's what you're saying...

SIMPSON: And, I'll tell you what, you mention that, here come the reserve officers, here comes the VA, the veterans groups and they'll rain boulders on your head.

That's how you pass or kill something in this country, you use emotion, fear, guilt or racism, and I've been in them all – I did immigration, nuclear, Social Security, ageing – I learned where the long knives are.

And as long as people are buffaloed by that, and fogged by that on the basis of protecting their hide from any peril, as H.L. Mencken once said, we're in deep trouble."

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Antiwar Radio's Scott Horton (Libertarian) Interviews Chris Hedges (Progressive)

February 14, 2011| Democrats, Left, Republicans, Tyranny | Scott Horton

Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, discusses the present state of affairs, best described as a convergence of the fictional dystopias in 1984 and Brave New World; the language of tyranny, ranging from soft seduction to overt threats, depending on the audience; how working class outrage is diverted away from the entrenched elite, and focused on scapegoats and fantastic conspiracies; the destruction and co-option of traditional Leftist institutions; and how federal debt is currently serviced by issuing more debt, a problem of sustainability that neither party will address.

MP3 here. (20:10)

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. In 2009 the Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year and granting him the Best Online Column award for his Truthdig essay “Party to Murder,” about the December 2008-January 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza.

He has written nine books, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, I Don’t Believe in Atheists and the best-selling American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

[ See also “Death of the Liberal Class.”]
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In case you missed the link above to Chris Hedges' article, Recognizing the Language of Tyranny, here are two excerpts:

"Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda—become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.

. . . .

All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place."

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Obama’s Budget and the Rot of American Capitalism

By Patrick Martin

February 15, 2011

Excerpt:

"Behind the “debate” in Washington and the media over the budget is a massive lie—the claim that the budget deficits are a product of excessive social spending. Obama’s budget director Jacob Lew summed up this grotesque falsification an op-ed column published in the New York Times February 6, under the headline, “The Easy Cuts Are Behind Us.” Lew claimed that the causes of the projected budget deficits were “decisions to make two large tax cuts without offsetting them and to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it, combined with the effects of the recession…”

This list is notable for what it leaves out: the cost of two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, which runs into the trillions; and the bank bailouts, where more trillions in public funds were placed at the disposal of the financial aristocracy, with no questions asked. The military budget by itself accounts for the lion’s share of the ten-year deficit: more than $7 trillion of the projected $10 trillion."

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Wolf Articles (From Wally Sykes)

OPB (ran on hourly news)

Ecotrope

East Oregonian

AP article was picked up broadly

Oregon Wild blog article



GOP budget bill lifts wolf protections
Seattle Times
February 14, 2011
BILLINGS, Mont. — A Republican budget bill would strip gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protections across most of the Northern Rockies.
A provision tucked into the continuing budget resolution directs Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to reissue a 2009 rule that took wolves off the endangered list in Montana, Idaho and parts of Oregon, Washington and Utah.

Rocky Barker: Are wolves still “non-essential” in the West?
Idaho Statesman
February 14, 2011
When U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy placed wolves in the Rocky Mountains back on the endangered species list in 2010, the main impact was on hunting.
Ranchers have still been able to have wolves that attack their livestock killed —with little argument.

Montana pols could imperil wolves
Arizona Republic - Opinion
February 14, 2011
Montana's 2012 Senate race could doom wolves in Arizona. It's politics. And it stinks. The long-fought effort to restore endangered Mexican gray wolves to the wilds of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico is threatened by posturing between two politicians. Montana's Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg, who intends to run for Senate, are each trying to look more appealing to anti-wolf factions in that state. Wolves are pawns.

Inflammatory words inflame
Helena Independent Record – Opinion - from Judge Molloy’s children
February 13, 2011
We are writing to express our disappointment and voice our concerns over the comments that Congressman Rehberg recently made at a joint session of the Montana Legislature. Although Congressman Rehberg didn’t identify by name U.S. District Judge Don Molloy — our dad — it was clear to whom he referred.
For the benefit of those not there, here is what was said: When referring to a recent federal court decision about wolves and the Endangered Species Act, Rehberg stated, “When I first heard his decision, like many of you I wanted to take action immediately. I asked: ‘How can we put some of these judicial activists on the endangered species list.’ I am still working on that!”

The great wolf debate: hunt them down or let them flourish
The Ecologist (includes NYT video)
February 15, 2011
Long a symbol of the US wilderness - and a totem for the environmental movement - wolves are now the focus of a bitter conflict between those who want to increase the species' numbers and those that want to kill them.
[Link may require subscription]

Hedges: Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24889.htm

Posted on Mar 1, 2010

By Chris Hedges

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

Your "Hope and Change"

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.

“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”

The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be. If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that is already gaining huge ground among the permanently unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we have failed to articulate a credible alternative.

A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We will again be told by the Democrats that the least-worse candidate they select for office is better than the Republican troll trotted out as an alternative. We will be bombarded with slick commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian corporate state. Isolation and ridicule—ask Nader or McKinney—is the cost of defying power, speaking truth and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love. And it is vital that this anger become our own. We have historical precedents to fall back upon.

“Here in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name,” the late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. “Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism, organizing and mobilization that empower groups to confront the hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite. The longer socialism is identified with the corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become. The right-wing mantra of “Obama the socialist,” repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker of the House, is discrediting socialism itself. Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called Obama the “most radical president” the country had seen in decades. “By any standard of government control of the economy, he is a socialist,” Gingrich said. If only the critique were true.

The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become, in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and fight back. This means refusing to support the Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of building a viable socialist movement. It is the only alternative left to save our embattled open society. We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer alone.