Two Tidbits, one quite funny, the other less so. . . .

Republicans Reveal that Entire Presidential Race was a Prank
April Fool’s Day Announcement Brings Practical Joke to an End

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In an April Fool’s Day announcement that took the political world by storm, the Republican Party revealed today that its entire presidential race had been an elaborate prank.

“April Fool!” exclaimed former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum at a press conference in Washington, where they were joined by fellow merrymakers Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.

Moments after revealing that the GOP primary had been one long practical joke, Mr. Santorum explained the rationale behind staging such a complicated and expensive prank.

“A lot of Americans are suffering right now and need a good laugh,” he said. “I think my colleagues and I can be justifiably proud of the entertainment we provided – even if it meant me wearing these ridiculous sweater vests.” See http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/03/31/republicans-reveal-that-entire-presidential-race-was-a-prank/ for rest of a very entertaining post.

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George Galloway: Why I won't condemn attacks on UK soldiers in Afghanistan; If you don't mind my saying so, that's a very silly question. . .

George Galloway (born 16 August 1954) is a British Respect Party politician, author, journalist, and broadcaster, and the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bradford West. He was previously an MP for the Labour Party, for Glasgow Hillhead and then its successor constituency Glasgow Kelvin from 1987 until 2005. He was expelled from the party in October 2003, the same year that he came to national attention for his opposition to the Iraq War.

(From Wikipedia)
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OK, Three Tidbits
Tongue-cutting at Al Jazeera
By Glenn Greenwald

April 05, 2012 "Salon" -- I’m currently conducting interviews as a follow-up to the rather acrimonious debate that erupted this week from my argument that “terrorism expertise” is not an actual discipline, but rather (like the term “terrorism” itself) just another instrument for legitimizing the violence of the U.S. and its allies, delegitimizing the violence of their Muslim adversaries, and dressing up state propaganda with the veneer of academic neutrality (for an example of how this works, see this New York Times article this morning on the different approaches taken by the U.S. and French governments to “fighting terrorism,” by which the article exclusively means: Muslims). One reason I think this discussion is so important is because the manipulation of the term “terrorism” this way permits and bolsters (even if unintentionally) an extremely ugly, destructive, and toxic worldview, one which the Editor-in-Chief of Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz, vividly expressed last night on Twitter when discussing the firing of Keith Olbermann by Current TV: (See LINK for rest.)

It's the Low Tax Payments By Corporations and the Rich, Stupid! Worker Taxes Are Higher, But Our Benefits Are Less, Than Wealthy European Countries

There is a good deal of insightful comparative information in the following article in addition to the excerpts provided below.

Nine Countries That Do It Better: Why Does Europe Take Better Care of Its People Than America?
The world's wealthy democracies have somewhat different priorities, leading to some very different outcomes for their citizens.

Or see also: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28366.htm

. . . .

Taking Care of the Ill: France

If you have access to the best health care in the United States, then you have some of the best care in the world. But that comes with an extremely steep price, and not everyone has that kind of access.

In 2008, the U.S. spent 16 percent of its economic output on health-care and covered 85 percent of its citizens. It was the only OECD country other than Mexico and Turkey to cover less than 90 percent of its people. We have the 37th longest average life expectancy, and a recent study found that American “life expectancy has been stagnant for much of the country and is actually decreasing over much of the Southern portion of the United States.”

France, which has a health-care system ranked number one in the world by the WHO, spent 11.2 percent of its economy to cover everyone.

There are a number of drivers of health-care costs, but one statistic stands out: in the European (and European-style) economies, upwards of 70 percent of the total health-care bill is picked up by the government, meaning that people are insured in large pools with lots of bargaining clout to hold down providers' costs. In the U.S., less than half of our health care is in the public sector, resulting in a patchwork system of private insurers with much higher administrative costs. When you plug what France pays per person for health care into our own government's fiscal projections, you get balanced budgets by around 2014, which then turn into surpluses after 2040.
. . . .

Taxing Corporations Versus Individuals: Luxembourg

The U.S. government collects less in taxes than the other rich countries, on average, but that doesn't tell us who pays what.
It's worth noting that the U.S. is tied for the OECD country that collects the lowest share of the economy in corporate taxes, at 1.8 percent of GDP (in 2008), or about half the group's average.

That means that more of the burden falls on individuals and households. Americans fork over more in personal income taxes than the OECD average as a result – we pay 9.9 percent while the OECD as a whole pays 9 percent.

Denmark leads the world in corporate taxes, and the Slovak Republic has the lowest personal income taxes, but the most “balanced” system (an admittedly arbitrary standard) is arguably Luxembourg's, where corporations were taxed at 5.1 percent and individuals and families at 7.7 percent in 2008.

Aren't They Taxed to Death in General?

What about the “economy-killing” taxes under which those crazy European socialists suffer? Well, in 2007 we paid 7.5 percent of our economic output less in taxes than the average of OECD countries, but citizens of the other wealthy countries got a lot more for their tax dollars than we did – free or very low-cost health care, college educations, better unemployment benefits, job training and the list goes on.

In the United States, we paid the equivalent of 8.2 percent of our economy more in social spending out of our own pockets than the people in other rich countries did that year. So the savings we enjoyed on our tax bills were more than offset by what we paid for those things our counterparts bought with their taxes. When private and public spending on our social welfare are added together, Americans pay just a little bit more than the other citizens of the world's leading economic powers.

But What About the Debt?

Perhaps these countries just ran up piles of debt in the course of taking better care of their people?
That's not the case; among the world's wealthy democracies only six[out of 15] – Japan, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Belgium and Italy – had a higher ratio of debt to GDP than the United States last year.

Denmark's debt level was less than half of our own.

Much has also been made of the Europeans' supposedly slower growth and lower average incomes. It is true that over the last decade, gross domestic product grew by about 1 percentage point more annually in the United States than in the core countries of the EU-15. But when we talk about “growth,” we mean a growing population as well as increasing productivity: more people making stuff means more total stuff.

The differences in population growth between the United States and the EU are stark. Since 1980, the population of the United States has increased by more than a third, compared with 7 percent in the EU (as a whole). Adding people, however, doesn’t necessarily make countries more affluent. A better standard is the growth of GDP per person. As Paul Krugman pointed out, “Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P.—which is what matters for living standards—has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.” That’s essentially a rounding error. . . . .

Was Wall Street Sugar Daddy, Standard & Poor's, Attempting to Use the "Markets" to Influence U.S. Budget Debate? (Of Course!)

On Monday of this week, beginning of Passover, lest you forget, Standard & Poor's issued a credit rating on your government. They wrote something like (or at least that is what the press flooded the information highway with):

"Standard & Poor's cut America's credit outlook to negative on fears U.S. lawmakers may not agree on a long-term plan to reduce the deficit. The move signals a 1-in-3 chance that America could lose its AAA rating within 2 years. A downgrade could mean higher borrowing costs for the U.S. gov't, businesses and consumers, exacerbating America's credit woes."

This was repeated over and over, ad nauseam, in the mainstream press, which includes NPR. Now, we are supposed to understand, I suppose, that Republican, and even Democrat calls, for cutting your heart out are perfectly reasonable.

My bullshit meter needle jumped immediately over to the right side of the bullshit dial, so I kept my eyes open for intelligent commentary.

Here is some of what I found this week on S&P's self-serving attempt at subverting our "democracy:"

Long-time progressive activist, Norman Soloman's BS meter apparently went off the scale immediately, and one day later he wrote in a RootsAction alert::

At a time when extreme budget cuts to Medicare and other vital programs are on the table in Congress, S&P is trying to escalate a deficit-reduction panic along Pennsylvania Avenue. In short, S&P is trying to manipulate Washington for Wall Street's gain.

S&P is the same outfit that rated hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime-backed securities as investment grade.

And S&P "gave Lehman, Bear Stearns and Enron top ratings right up until their collapse," the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains. S&P "has a horrible track record for judging credit worthiness."

In a related article concerning the trashing of the American Middle Class and poor, Robert Scheer wrote:

Published on Wednesday, April 20, 2011 by TruthDig.com
The New Corporate World Order
by Robert Scheer

The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.”

See URL above for rest of article.

And then, yesterday, 4/20/11, William Greider weighed in on S&P:

Published on The Nation
The Credit Rating Hoax
William Greider | April 20, 2011

Standard & Poor’s, the self-righteous credit-rating agency, has a damn lot of nerve. It provoked scary headlines by solemnly threatening to “short” America. That is, downgrade the credit-worthiness of US Treasury bonds unless Congress and the president oblige creditors by punishing the citizenry with severe budget cuts. What a load of crap.

The headline I would like to see is this: “S&P Execs Face Major Fraud Investigation, Takes the Fifth Before Federal Grand Jury.”

News coverage on S&P’s credit warning typically failed to mention that Standard & Poor’s itself is in utter disrepute. It was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Wall Street deceitfulness that brought the nation to financial ruin. During the bubble of inflated housing prices, S&P and other rating agencies blessed the fraud-based mortgage securities issued by Wall Street banks with AAA ratings—deceiving gullible investors around the world and assuring bloated profits (and executive bonuses) for the greedy bankers. S&P provided cover for the massive scam that led to the crisis that sank the national economy.

That story line is the essential reason federal deficits soared in the age of Obama. National wealth was massively destroyed, government tax revenues collapsed, the feds spent trillions bailing out the imperiled financial system. In short, the bankers did it, abetted by see-no-evil accomplices like Standard & Poor’s. . . . .

See URL above for rest of aticle, etc.

Another relevant article by Greider, especially for hopelessly deluded Democrats:

Krugman Gets His History Wrong
Posted on June 1, 2009

Paul Krugman, like many other Democratic partisans, wants to blame Republicans and right-wingers for causing the financial disaster by deregulating the system.  This may be comforting to Dems but, alas, it requires them to falsify the history, as Krugman does in this morning's column. Krugman flogs the notorious Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 and quotes Ronald Reagan's extravagant praise for the measure. [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/opinion/01krugman.html?_r=1&hpw]

What Krugman leaves out is that financial deregulation actually started two years earlier -- before the Gipper got to Washington. A Democratic Congress and Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) enacted the Monetary Control Act of 1980 which removed all remaining controls on interest rates and repealed the federal law prohibiting usury (note that sky-high interest rates and ruinous predatory lending have been with us ever since).  It was the 1980 legislation that took the lid off banking and doomed the savings and loan industry, the mainstay that used to provide housing loans and home mortgages.  The thrifts were able to raise capital because they were allowed to pay a half percent more in interest to depositors. Bankers wanted them out of the way.  The Democratic party obliged.

See URL above for links and rest of article.

Lastly, hopefully, is the following article by Simon Johnson of "Baseline Scenario:"

While I may be accused of a radical left-wing mindset for my views on the environment and Capitalism, and occasionally of being a right winger, racist and xenophobe, for my views on population growth, mass immigration, and etc. (don't listen to me, I am beyond redemption, but do the labels really mean anything these days?), Simon Johnson is in fact an intermediary between "left" and "right," and was once an "International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist)."

Is S&P’s Deficit Warning On Target?

Posted: 21 Apr 2011 05:26 AM PDT
By Simon Johnson

See link for important supporting info.

On Monday Standard & Poor’s announced that its credit rating for the United States was “affirmed” at AAA (the highest level possible), but that it was revising the outlook for this rating to “negative” – in this context specifically meaning “that we could lower our long-term rating on the U.S. within two years” (p.5 of the report).  This news temporarily roiled equity markets around the world, although the bond markets largely shrugged it off.

While S&P’s statement generated considerable media attention, the economics behind their thinking is highly questionable – although, given the random nature of American politics, even this intervention may still end up having a constructive impact on the thinking of both the right and the left.

It is commendable that S&P now wants to talk about the U.S. fiscal deficit – one wonders where they were, for example, during the debate about extending the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of last year.

The main problem is that S&P did not lay out even the most basic numbers or even point readers towards the nonpartisan and definitive Congressional Budget Office analysis of medium- and longer-term budget issues.[1]  This matters, because the CBO numbers definitely do not show debt exploding upwards immediately from today – if you’ll take the time to look at Table 1.1 in the latest CBO report, the line “debt held by the public at the end of the year” (meaning private sector holdings of federal government debt; excluding government agency holding of government debt) makes it clear – debt as a percent of GDP rises to 75.5 percent at the end of 2013 and then increases very little through 2019.

There are two serious budget issues made clear by the CBO’s analysis.  First, the big increase in debt in recent years has been primarily due to the financial crisis.  To see this, compare the January 2011 CBO forecast (cited above) with its view from January 2008 (see page XII, Summary Table 1), before the seriousness of the banking disaster – and ensuing recession – became clear.  At that point, the CBO expected federal government debt relative to GDP to reach only 22.6 percent (compare with 75.3% for the same year, 2018, from the 2011 projections.) 

In other words, the financial crisis will end up causing government debt to increase by more than 50 percent of GDP over a decade.  This is the major fiscal crisis of today and our likely tomorrow (for more on this, see this column).

Again, see link for important supporting info.
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Damn, here is another article:

Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class
18 April 2011

The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a voluminous report last Wednesday on the Wall Street crash of 2008 that documents the fraud and criminality that pervade the entire financial system and its relations with the government.

The 650-page report is the outcome of a two-year investigation that involved over 150 interviews and depositions as well as the examination of subpoenaed emails and internal documents of major banks, government regulatory agencies and credit rating firms. The report, entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse,” establishes that the financial crash and ensuing recession were the result of systemic fraud and deception on the part of the mortgage lenders and banks, carried out with the collusion of the credit rating corporations and the complicity of the government and its bank regulatory agencies. . . .

See link above for rest of this informative article
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For another kind of "balance," don't forget to tune in on occasion to Scott Horton, at Antiwar Radio. I recommend Gareth Porter and Philip Giraldi.

Republicans are Hopeless, Democrats May Have Sold You Out in the Past, But Obama Will Save You? (Take it to the bank!) Absolutely Must See Video

Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy

“Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist democracy”, this film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements”, the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself. 

Original interview footage derives from Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Albert, John Stauber (PR Watch), Sharon Smith (Historian), William I. Robinson (Editor, Critical Globalization Studies), Morris Berman (Author, Dark Ages America), and famed black panther Larry Pinkney.



Non-original interviews/lectures include Michael Hudson, Paul Craig Roberts, Ted Rall, Richard Wolff, Glen Ford, Lewis Black, Glenn Greenwald, George Carlin, Gerald Cliente, Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Wollin and Martin Luther King.

Visit http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php  for more info.

"Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!" - Larry Pinkney - Editorial Board Member & Columnist - The Black Commentator

Viewer discretion advised -  Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war.
Posted March 11, 2011



See Also: http://www.vimeo.com/20355767

Billy Bragg--Between the wars





whatinthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com

Notes About the 2010 Election Debacle

The predicted disaster for Democrats and those who still call themselves "progressives" has occurred. Corporate and special interest money, along with corporate media inspired voter confusion, has helped to defeat two of the last few thoughtful and progressive Congressional voices--Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson--and the "just say no" Republicans have taken over the House of "Representatives."

The only high point for "progressive" Oregonians is that John Kitzhaber has apparently won the Governor's race here.

The message for low income and forgotten Americans is that the Republicans and many Democrats, neighbors, and in some cases friends, simply do not care if you live or die. The "war of all against all" is now upon us. The elites in both parties do not understand and cannot comprehend your situation. They know little about your lives--what you have felt, seen and experienced. This has been especially spelled out in the debate over healthcare, and reinforced by Obama and the rest of Congress in ignoring the plight of the jobless and those being foreclosed upon by the bailed-out banksters.

In thinking about where our country has ended up over the last two years, I am wondering if the only solution for the poor and the abandoned jobless is to find the resources to buy a decent gun, ammunition, and a cleaning kit.

In a recent article concerning the plight of people in England, John Pilger quoted the English poet Percy Shelley. The situation in Britain, you see, is not so different from our own.

See: The Party Game Is Over. Stand And Fight

Shelley wrote:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

In the time of Shelley, or Thomas Jefferson, such thoughts would have been taken seriously, but not in our times of American domestication, when we accept the most subjugating insults and loss of our basic rights, like sheep in an impoverished pasture.

What follows are some thoughts on the election from some of our informed voices in what is left of the "progressive" movement in America:

Michael Moore on Midterm Elections

In the morning, President Obama is going to hold a press conference, and he’s going to take the wrong path. He’s going to say what we really need now is more bipartisanship and more kumbaya. And the other side wants none of that. And I don’t know—I don’t know how much you have to be battered and bruised to understand when the abuser is not going to stop abusing.

Ralph Nader: Dems Face Losses to "Most Craven Republican Party in History"

The corporations now dominate every department and agency in the federal government, from the Department of Defense, Department of Treasury, Department of Agriculture, Interior and other departments. By that I mean, the outside influence on these departments is overwhelmingly corporate, even the Labor Department. Number two, they have something like 9,000 political action committees—auto dealers, insurance companies, banks, drug companies—funneling money into members of Congress and the White House. Number three, they’ve put their executives in high government positions. Now, nobody comes close to that kind of triple control of our government. And when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent a message to Congress in 1938 to set up the national—temporary national commission on corporate concentration—and they did pass that—he said in his message, when government is controlled by private economic power, that’s fascism. That was in 1938. And now, more than ever, we have a corporate government in Washington, DC, corporate-occupied territory, that is destructive of any semblance of democratic process. Voice for the people, voice for labor, a voice for small taxpayers, consumers, they’re shut out. They’re excluded.

Doomsday for Democrats?
By RALPH NADER

The mass media-exaggerated aura of the Tea Party, pumped by Limbaugh, Hannity and the histrionic Glenn Beck, has put the Democrats in a defensive posture. It is giving the puzzled Republicans an offensive image. I say puzzled because they can’t figure out the many disparate strands of the Tea Party eruption which includes turning on the Republicans and George W. Bush for launching this epidemic of deficits, debt, bailouts and unconstitutional military adventures.

Being on the defensive politically becomes a nightmarish self-replicating wave among that 10 percent slice of swing voters who can make the difference between a big win or a big loss. These are also the non-hereditary party voters whose philosophy is to “throw the bums out” again and again until they get themessage.

US Is Not Greatest Country Ever
by Michael Kinsley

The theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters and approximately 100 percent of all U.S. politicians, although there is less and less evidence to support it. A recent Yahoo poll (and I resist the obvious joke here) found that 75 percent of Americans believe that the United States is "the greatest country in the world." Does any other electorate demand such constant reassurance about how wonderful it is - and how wise? Having spent a month to a couple of years and many millions of dollars trying to snooker voters, politicians awaiting poll results Tuesday will declare that they put their faith in "the fundamental wisdom of the American people."

Not me. Democracy requires me to respect the results of the elections. It doesn't require me to agree with them or to admire the process by which voters made up their minds. In my view, anyone who voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008 and now is supporting some tea party madwoman for senator has a bit of explaining to do. But the general view is that the voters, who may be fools individually, are infallibly wise as a collective - that their "anger," their urgent desire, yet again, for "change," is self-validating.

Everybody will be talking in the next few days about the "message" of the elections. They mean, of course, the message from the voters. This is one of the treasured conventions of political journalism. Yesterday, the story was all about artifice and manipulation, the possible effect of the latest attack ad or absurd lie. Today, all that melts away. The election results are deemed to reflect grand historical trends. But my colleague Joe Scarborough got it right in these pages last week when he argued that the 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant.

Nov. 2: The Death Knell of Corporate Liberalism
by Matthew Rothschild


I feel like one of Custer’s relatives after the Little Big Horn.

Except that Tuesday’s slaughter at the polls was not unexpected. It marked the death knell of corporate liberalism, and it signed the death certificate of petty gradualism.

I’m tired of the Democratic Party’s excuses, and Barack Obama’s apologists.

Yes, Bush and Cheney trashed the place like a couple of crazed heavy metal bands in a hotel room.

Yes, they left an exploding economy on Obama’s desk.

Yes, the Republicans in Congress obstructed Obama at every turn and conspired to stop him at all costs.

Yes, the Republican rabble did everything in their power to discredit him, from concocting the birther controversy to spreading the “Is he a Muslim” nonsense.

And yes, the Supreme Court opened the corporate floodgates with its execrable decision in the Citizens United case. As a result, spending by undisclosed outside groups mushroomed by more than 500 percent from the 2006 midterm elections.

Those were the objective conditions, and they were about as nasty as they come.

But Obama didn’t help himself by trying to placate the Republicans and by muddling his messaging.

He didn’t help himself by lowballing the stimulus and by rejecting a moratorium on foreclosures.

He didn’t help himself by playing a Washington insider game, by trying to buy off a couple of Republicans in Congress and by playing footsie with huge industries, like the banks and the pharmaceutical companies.

This was timid corporate liberalism, RIP.

Obama was given a mandate for change, and he squandered it.

He never mobilized the base to take on the vested interests.

Example: health care. He didn’t call people to march on Washington for universal health care, or at least Medicare for all who want it. So a few tea party hucksters were able to hijack the debate. He didn’t even push Harry Reid to give the health care bill to Senator Tom Harkin’s committee, throwing it instead into the untrustworthy arms of Max Baucus.

As a result, an inferior law came on the books with some important insurance reforms in it, but it didn’t threaten the private health care providers or the pharmaceutical companies. And it didn’t deliver the immediate relief that most Americans needed.

On the jobs front, he refused to follow the lead of Christina Romer, head of his Council of Economic Advisers, or the recommendations of Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. All three said he needed a stimulus package that was at least 50 percent larger than the one he proposed. Nor did he propose a new WPA, like FDR did when the country faced a similar, if not quite so staggering, free fall. Obama was afraid to come on too strong. So he came on too weak.

Same on the banking front. Obama could have, and should have, nationalized Bank of America and Citibank, or at the very least, compelled them to halt foreclosures and write down the principal on all their mortgages by 25 or 30 percent. But Obama didn’t get anything from the banks in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars the Treasury doled out, and the trillions in guarantees. And so the bankers laughed all the way to the vault, and even some Republicans scored by running commercials against Democrats who voted for the [Bush/Republican inspired - Chris] bailout.

Same on the environment. Obama sold out the cause at Copenhagen, and with amazingly bad timing he came out for offshore drilling just weeks before the BP disaster, in hopes, again, of getting concessions from Republicans and from industry.

His messaging was as poor as his governing. First he blamed the Wall Street CEOs for their obscene bonuses; then he called them “very savvy businessmen,” adding: “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

Similarly, on the budget, first he argued for deficit spending; then he said we need to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term.

This was confusing to millions of Americans, dispiriting to the base, and diverting to his enemies.

But basically, he didn’t give people enough tangible benefits to say, OK, I’m with him. He’s helped me. I’ll vote for Democrats again.

You can’t tell an unemployed person that you’d have been twice as unemployed without my help. You need to give that person a job now.

You can’t tell an elderly person you’re closing the donut hole on prescription drugs—by the year 2020. You need to close it now.

You can’t tell an adult with a pre-existing condition that you’ll force insurance companies to cover you—by the year 2014, when you may be dead. You need to cover people now.

You can’t tell families being foreclosed upon that you’re trying hard to keep them in their homes. You need to keep them in their homes now.

But to do any of that, Obama would have had to confront corporate power head on. But he, and Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner were unwilling to do so and ideologically unprepared to even consider it.

They lived by corporate liberalism. And Democrats around the country died by it.

The Tragedy of Under-Reaching
After the Election Disaster: Back to Basics
by Norman Solomon

The mass-media echo chamber now insists that Republicans have triumphed because President Obama was guilty of overreach. But since its first days, the administration has undermined itself -- and the country -- with tragic under-reach.

It's all about priorities. The Obama presidency has given low priority to reducing unemployment, stopping home foreclosures or following through with lofty pledges to make sure that Main Street recovers along with Wall Street.

Far from constraining the power of the Republican Party, the administration's approach has fundamentally empowered it. The ostensibly shrewd political strategists in the White House have provided explosive fuel for right-wing "populism" while doing their best to tamp down progressive populism. Tweaks aside, the Obama presidency has aligned itself with the status quo -- a formula for further social disintegration and political catastrophe.

Payback at the Polls
by Robert Scheer

Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes. But it is not the fault of tea party Republicans that they responded to the rage out there over lost jobs and homes while the president remained indifferent to the many who are suffering.

At a time when, as a Washington Post poll reported last week, 53 percent of Americans fear they can't make next month's mortgage or rent payment, the president chirped inanely to Jon Stewart that his top economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, who was paid $8 million by Wall Street firms while advising candidate Obama, had done a "heckuva job" in helping avoid another Great Depression. What kind of consolation is that for the 50 million Americans who have lost their homes or are struggling to pay off mortgages that are "underwater"? The banks have been made whole by the Fed, providing virtually interest-free money while purchasing trillions of dollars of the banks' toxic assets. Yet the financial industry response has been what Paul Volcker has called a "liquidity trap"-denying loans for business investment or the refinancing necessary to keep people in their homes.

Instead of meeting that crisis head-on with a temporary moratorium on housing foreclosures, as more than half of those surveyed by the Post wanted, the president summarily turned down that sensible proposal. Instead he attempted to shift the focus to his tepid health care reform and was surprised that many voters didn't think he did them a favor by locking them into insurance programs not governed by cost controls. Health care reform was viewed by many voters with the same disdain with which they reacted to the underfunded and unfocused stimulus program. Neither seems relevant to turning around an economy that a huge majority feels is getting worse, according to Election Day exit polls.

That is a problem that is not obvious to the power elites whom the leaders of both political parties serve or to the high-paid media pundits who cheer them on. The tea party revolt, ragged as it is, fed on a massive populist outrage that so-called progressives had failed to respond to because of their allegiance to Obama. As a result the Democrats squandered the hopes of their base, which rewarded the party with a paltry turnout at polling stations.

Election 2010: A Disaster for Peace
Posted By Justin Raimondo On November 2, 2010

The expected Election Day Republican “wave” that broke over our heads is a disaster for the anti-interventionist cause in the immediate sense – but there may be a silver lining.

The disaster is embodied in the various GOP warmongers who will be placed in key positions in Congress, and a good case could be made that among the worst of the worst will be the probable majority leader in the House: Eric Cantor.

Cantor is a walking, breathing stereotype, a neocon through and through, who pays lip service to the “tea party”-ish idea of limiting government spending, but is in reality committed to lavishing tax dollars on any project as long as it can be somehow construed as contributing to US security. Thus, ForeignPolicy.com references his views on “foreign aid” and the budget:

“Cantor told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the president’s proposed budget might have to be rejected outright if Republicans take power – after separating out U.S. aid for Israel, of course.”

Cantor is a big fan of Israel’s, and has gone so far as to say that, in the context of tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv over the settlements and other issues, “Israel is not the problem” – leaving unspoken the presumption the US is at fault. In line with the Israel lobby’s campaign to goad us into war with Iran, he demands that the US cease negotiations with Tehran, impose draconian sanctions unilaterally, and openly threaten the use of force. . . . .

Far worse than anyone I have yet mentioned is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, who never saw a war she didn’t salivate at the prospect of and has called for the assassination of Fidel Castro. She is a militant supporter of Israel, constantly criticizes the US for not kowtowing quickly enough to Tel Aviv, and is a vocal supporter of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a Marxist terrorist organization that has provided much of the phony “intelligence” purporting to show Iran is developing nuclear weapons. She will be chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when the GOP takes the House.

The big problem with a Republican-dominated House is that those GOPers who take an interest in foreign policy issues are invariably hawks: these are the committed neocons, like Cantor and Kyl. The tea partiers, for their part, avoid the issue, focused exclusively as they are deficits, taxes, and budget-cutting.

There is, however, a silver lining to all this: the Empire is going bankrupt. Our invasion of Iraq is estimated by economist Joseph Stiglitz to cost some 3 trillion dollars, when all is said and done. Neocons Bill Kristol and the heads of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation came out with an op ed warning the tea party types not to go near their precious “defense” budget with the cost-cutter’s knife. But the tea partiers are unlikely to listen to Kristol & Co., or, indeed, any members of the Republican establishment, who, after all, presided over the spendthrift Bush administration all the while proclaiming their support for what they called “big government conservatism.”

Objectively, the momentum for cost-cutting will run up against the neocons’ militarism, and a conflict seems inevitable. Yet nothing is inevitable when it comes to human affairs, so we’ll just have to see what happens.

Another discouraging aspect of the GOP’s triumph is that it will give Obama very little room to maneuver on domestic matters – and he’ll have little choice but to concentrate more of his attention on foreign policy. This is not good, from an anti-interventionist viewpoint, because the President will no doubt use foreign policy issues to gain Republican support for his domestic initiatives. This increases the influence of the McCain-Cantor-Petraeus more-troops-to-Afghanistan lobby – but it gets worse….

US Voters Drink Reaganism's Kool-Aid

By Robert Parry

Obama’s Mistakes

Obama’s core political mistake may have been trying to stabilize a very sick patient – the U.S. economy – rather than applying more radical remedies. His stabilization approach largely worked, at least for those heavily invested in the stock markets which have rebounded to two-year highs.

Obama’s stimulus plan and auto bailout also saved many jobs that would have been lost if he had adopted a laissez-faire approach.

His other option would have been to shake up an already badly shaken system by, say, nationalizing ailing Wall Street banks. He also could have challenged the Washington power structure by ordering investigations of Bush-43’s war crimes and bringing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to prompt conclusions.

But that course of action would have risked a wider economic collapse, even worse joblessness and bitter conflicts between Obama and potent political/media interests in the power centers of Washington and New York. He would have faced even more accusations of overreaching.

Plus, the weak American Left would have provided little meaningful political support. More than likely, it would have continued to find something to criticize.

The media reality that Obama faced was what I encountered last month when I was driving late at night from upstate New York back to Washington. To stay awake, I sampled what was available on the AM dial and was stunned to discover how many different right-wing voices there were sneering at Obama and the liberals. I could find no channel that offered an alternative.

Even decades into this dangerous media imbalance, the Left mostly continues to ignore its messaging gap. Wealthy progressives spend some money on tracking what the Right is up to (i.e. Media Matters) and subsidizing non-controversial investigative journalism (i.e. ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity), but they still do little to support real independent journalism that examines systemic problems or high-level crimes.

After Obama’s election in 2008, the Left’s most promising – though flawed – media effort, Air America Radio, was deemed expendable by wealthy progressives. Rather than spend the money and provide the management skills to improve Air America, they pulled the plug in January 2010, the same week of the Supreme Court’s ruling on corporate donations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “US Democracy’s End of the Road.”]

Today’s other progressive media operations remain fragile or limited.

MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric pending a sale to Comcast, has experimented with a liberal evening line-up (only after failing at everything else, including trying to out-fox Fox). But MSNBC could easily shut down its experiment if it senses a risk to the interests of its corporate parent, whether GE, a charter member of the military-industrial complex, or Comcast.

Faced with this paucity of independent or left-leaning media, many rank-and-file progressives have turned to the liberal-oriented irony of Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who sponsored a massive rally for sanity on the National Mall last Saturday.

However, as many progressive writers have noted, Stewart and Colbert are primarily entertainers, not activists committed to changing the political/economic system.

So, Tuesday’s congressional elections represented the latest wake-up call to American progressives that they must make a much bigger commitment to building media. However, they have shown a remarkable tenacity to hit the snooze button no matter how loud the alarm.

Instead of action, one can expect a number of articles from the Left about how Obama and the Democrats failed because they weren’t leftist enough. Despite all the evidence, the Left remains obstinate against the need to reconsider what it’s been doing for the past several decades.

The bottom line is that the Left has a fanciful view of its own influence, or perhaps its problem is an unshakeable faith that the working class will somehow naturally understand its own interests.

However, a near-voiceless progressive movement and a noisy Right telling fearful Americans that they should again follow in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps make a dangerous combination, only likely to get worse when Reagan’s centennial birthday is lavishly celebrated in 2011.

Based on Tuesday’s elections, the American people appear eager to march down the old road marked by Reaganism, even if the path leads to vats of Kool-Aid laced with arsenic.

Darker Economic Days Likely Ahead

By Danny Schechter

Here are the key issues we will still be facing – and many may still be in denial about.

l. There has been no real recovery. Unemployment is up and so are foreclosures. The mortgage mess is only getting worse, and the relationship between these two issues has been confirmed by a new report by the International Monetary Fund.

If there is no progress on foreclosures, there will be no progress on jobs.

AP explains, “A growth rate of 5 percent or higher is needed to put a major dent in the nation's 9.6 percent unemployment rate.” They cite reasons why that's unlikely well into next year and maybe beyond.

The Economic Policy Institute reports: “‘Never since World War Two has it taken so long to recover to pre-recession levels of GDP,’ said Economist Josh Bivens.

“Although the pace of growth in the third quarter marks a modest increase from the 1.5 percent annualized rate of growth in the second quarter, it is a sharp deceleration from the 3.7 percent annualized growth rate show in the first quarter.”

2. Millions of Americans are facing the end of all benefits. What will they do then?

Some will turn to despair and slide into poverty, others, perhaps to crime. And many more to more radicalized politics on the left and right. Mao’s axiom that revolutions are not tea parties may be relevant, even prophetic in this context of continuing economic decline.

3. While some banks and individual banksters, thanks to the bailouts, have done well, hundreds of banks are facing insolvency. The Credit Writedowns site reports: “The U.S. Banking Crisis Has a Long Way to Go.”

The “Calculated Risk website maintains an unofficial problem bank list compiled from publicly available records. The list has now reached 894. The FDIC has an official list of troubled banks and the number of troubled banks was last released August 31 when the total was 829. The FDIC does not make the names of troubled banks on their list public.”

The Guardian in the United Kingdom has even published a map of failing American banks at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/02/failed-banks-map-us .

3. The Federal Reserve Bank is moving slowly and sluggishly. Fed Head Ben Bernanke, a Republican, reportedly wants more stimulus money pumped into the economy but has been too frightened to antagonize members of his own party. Many economic wise men fear his plan will fail.

Notes Dean Baker: “A Washington Post article discussing the risks associated with another round of quantitative easing raised the possibility that the Fed could lose its credibility if the program does not lead to the intended growth. It implies that the loss of credibility would be a major harm.

“It is worth noting that the whole economic collapse came about because of the Fed's failure to notice and/or do anything about an $8 trillion housing bubble. Given this enormous failure, it is not clear how much credibility it currently enjoys among people who follow the economy.”

4. The gap between the very rich and what was once the middle class continues to grow, according to Holly Sklar who explains, “Before Wall Street drove our economy off a cliff, bullish Citigroup strategists dubbed the United States a ‘plutonomy.’ They said, ‘There are rich consumers, few
in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich,” the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.’"

Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California at Berkeley argue that “over the last generation, more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich. The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind.”

The number of Americans making $50 million or more has increased five fold.

And so it goes. . . .

The Phantom Left

[Edited 11/2/10]
There is the Obama as effective, if hollow, speaker for the Democratic party, and yet a seemingly sincere human being that I want to love and believe in, and also the Obama and his Democrat friends of pathetic inaction, who, like Republicans, take massive amounts of money from drug & insurance companies, not to mention Wall Street, while abandoning any thought of providing us with the medical care experienced in most European countries.They literally shut out progressive voices in the prior debate on that subject. Like Republicans, they give almost wholesale support to Wall Street and the Federal Reserve elites who created our current problems (by denying effective regulation), and almost invariably support the powerful corporations.

Like the prior Bush administration, the "Democratic" Obama administration promotes most of our wars, expands and/or continues the killing of innocents with drones, is silent on defense spending (etc. ad nauseum) while implying that it is not politically expedient to lead strongly, to seize the high ground and to fight the good fight. Perhaps he and the Dems surround themselves with familiar, but way too politically savvy and out of touch advisors? Of course there is the corporate media which somebody is going to be forced to take on at some point. (Where is FDR when you need him?) How much difference would it have made if he and the Democrats had done the right thing and fought strongly for the progressive ideals we perhaps used to believe in?

At least they could have have given voice (and hope) to more progressive ways of managing human affairs, a vision of how things could be. The Dems are likely to go down in flames tomorrow anyway because of the the absence of real leadership during the last two years.

I read recently that a "conservative" is likely to win in one of the European countries, Sweden if I remember correctly, but it was pointed out that even that Swedish candidate is far more progressive than the Obama administration.

In the following article, Chris Hedges, once again, tells us the unpalatable truths that we need to hear.
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The Phantom Left

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/

Posted on Oct 31, 2010

By Chris Hedges

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists [and now "socialists" e.g.: Carl Kostol's laughable LTE--"Socialists posing as Democrats" in the Herald - Chris], post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

The phantom left took a central role on the mall this weekend in Washington. It had performed admirably for Glenn Beck, who used it in his own rally as a lightning rod to instill anger and fear. And the phantom left proved equally useful for the comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who spoke to the crowd wearing red-white-and-blue costumes. The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.

“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”

The rally delivered a political message devoid of reality or content. The corruption of electoral politics by corporate funds and lobbyists, the naive belief that we can somehow vote ourselves back to democracy, was ignored for emotional catharsis. The right hates. The liberals laugh. And the country is taken hostage.

The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall, was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree. It ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate. It made fun of the buffoons who are rising up out of moral swamps to take over the Republican Party without accepting that their supporters were sold out by a liberal class, and especially a Democratic Party, which turned its back on the working class for corporate money.

Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.

Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian ["war of all against all" - Chris] world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.

The liberal class wants to inhabit a political center to remain morally and politically disengaged. As long as there is a phantom left, one that is as ridiculous and stunted as the right wing, the liberal class can remain uncommitted. If the liberal class concedes that power has been wrested from us it will be forced, if it wants to act, to build movements outside the political system. This would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state. But this type of political activity, as costly as it is difficult, is too unpalatable to a bankrupt liberal establishment that has sold its soul to corporate interests. And so the phantom left will be with us for a long time.

Politics in America has become spectacle. It is another form of show business. The crowd in Washington, well trained by television, was conditioned to play its role before the cameras. The signs —“The Rant [Making fun of Jimmy McMillan's statement that the The rent is too damn high! - Chris] is Too Damn High,” “Real Patriots Can Handle a Difference of Opinion” or “I Masturbate and I Vote”—reflected the hollowness of current political discourse and television’s perverse epistemology. The rally spoke exclusively in the impoverished iconography and language of television. It was filled with meaningless political pieties, music and jokes. It was like any television variety program. Personalities were being sold, not political platforms. And this is what the society of spectacle is about.

The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives. The spectacle diverts anger toward phantoms and away from the perpetrators of exploitation and injustice. It manufactures feelings of euphoria. It allows participants to confuse the spectacle itself with political action.

The celebrities from Comedy Central and the trash talk show hosts on Fox are in the same business. They are entertainers. They provide the empty, emotionally laden material that propels endless chatter back and forth on supposed left- and right-wing television programs. It is a national Punch and Judy show. But don’t be fooled. It is not politics. It is entertainment. It is spectacle. All national debate on the airwaves is driven by the same empty gossip, the same absurd trivia, the same celebrity meltdowns and the same ridiculous posturing. It is presented with a different spin. But none of it is about ideas or truth. None of it is about being informed. It caters to emotions. It makes us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. And in the end, for those who serve up this drivel, the game is about money in the form of ratings and advertising. Beck, Colbert and Stewart all serve the same masters. And it is not us.

Chris Hedges, who writes every Monday for Truthdig, is the author of the new book “Death of the Liberal Class.”
__

I can only say, why is it that we would look to corporate comedians to guide us? The answer, perhaps, is that we have lost the ability to study, and think for ourselves. Look to your educational institutions and your culture for why that is so.

Challenging the "True Believers" and the Failure of "Democrats" is Not "Childish"

A recent letter to the editor of the Baker City Herald offered the following:

October 20, 2010
Be patient with our president

To the editor:

What has happened to our national character? We could take lessons from our Chilean neighbors. We, too, got stuck in a deep hole that was long in the making. They, however, showed supreme patience during days of darkness and again when the tiniest improvements were made. Rescue efforts were slow but steady with laser-like focus on bringing every last man up alive and well.

Patience, endurance, and focus on the common good is in short supply now in America. Rather than support those leaders trying to dig us out of a hole after the bubble we created, we nitpick, whine, blame, fabricate and obstruct. Then we heap on abuse for not fixing things already. Forgetting how we got into this mess, we even act as though our helpers created our problem in the first place.

In children, we call this behavior “childish.” That some call it “patriotic” is alarming. Taking our “hurting” out on our leaders as though they could “fix” a recession if they wanted to is naive at best, and manipulative at worst. It makes matters worse by chipping away at the hope and confidence we need to recover.

While I don't disagree that "Patience, endurance, and focus on the common good is in short supply now in America", I think the writer entirely misses the point, which is that it is also the President too who has failed to focus on "patience, endurance, . . . [and] the common good." [It should also be noted that it wasn't just the Bush administration who got us into this fix--the Clinton administration contributed heartily as well.]

Obama failed to capitalize on the "Yes we can," "hope and change" sentiments of the Americans who propelled him into office. Through his actions and appointments, it is clear that even he seemed to forget "how we got into this mess."[eg. Summers, Rubin, and Geithner] In stating that "we even act as though our helpers created our problem in the first place," the writer ignores that Obama, while taking huge amounts of money from the people who created the problem, has not really helped the victims of that problem very much. In assessing the "national character," we need to address the reality of our two bankrupt political parties and the power that they use to ignore that "national character."

The Democrats, in their failure to seize the momentum that was evident in Obama's victory, and in the vacuousness of their business as usual approach to rebellious stirrings in the electorate, have created, or at least encouraged, the frustration that is evident in the backlash that is now upon us, in the form of destructive reaction from some independents, and ill-informed Tea Party folks, financed largely by the Republicans and corporate money. My take is that ignoring the reality of the Obama administration's behavior in favor of wishful belief is more "childish" than pointing out the credible faults.

I pointed out the problems inherent in the Obama appointments even before the election to the dismay of some, but I too was taken in by the fear of a McCain victory. This is of course the old ploy of the Democrats, to bring in the progressives and leftists by raising the specter of a victory by even more reactionary "right wing" candidates.

The first article below articulates the damage done by Obama's policies and the Democratic leadership to any "hope and change" agenda that many Obama supporters may have envisioned prior to his election. Articles following simply punctuate the points made. The possible coming disaster for progressive ideals is not the fault of "childish" behavior by conservatives, progressives or leftists, although the latter two groups may have been remarkably passive, but is the fault of the Obama administration, particularly his close political advisors, who did not pursue the ideas of "hope and change" that were held by those who elected a President who allegedly espoused those ideals.

[None of the above rant implies that I will be voting Republican or Tea Party (I'll vote for Kitzhaber for sure), it is just that I'll vote independently, as we all should.]
_____

The Real Reason Obama Has Let Us All Down
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26691.htm

On the night he won, I too shed a little tear; but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed

By Johann Hari

October 26, 2010 "The Independent" - Is Barack Obama a politician whose actions should be judged soberly, or a figure from a feel-good fairytale to be revered from afar?

For two years now, most of the good and honorable people who desperately wanted him to beat John McCain – as I did –have watched his actions through a distorting haze of hoping for the best. So when Obama set us all up for another global crash by refusing to reregulate the banks or stop even their riskiest practices, we looked away. When Obama set us all up for more terror attacks by trebling the troops in Afghanistan and launching a vicious air war on Pakistan that is swelling the ranks of jihadis, we didn’t want to hear it. When Obama set us all up for environmental disaster by refusing to put the brakes on his country’s unprecedented and unmatched emissions of climate-destabilizing gases, we switched over to watch will.i.am’s YouTube rejig of the President’s “yes, we can” speech. And when a week from now he is beaten at the mid-term elections – after having so little to show the American people – by a group of even more irrational Republicans, we will weep for him.

As Rober D. Hodge writes in his excellent new book ‘The Mendacity of Hope’, “Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past.” Our longing for him to be Martin Luther King reborn has meant good people have not pushed and pressured and opposed him, even as he endangered us.

But if you choose to see this as another fairytale – of how one man who seemed like a Good Prince turned out to be a Traitor – you will miss the point, and the real need for change. This is not primarily a question of individual failings, but of the endemic corruption at the core of American politics. The facts are not hidden. If you want to run for national office in the US, you have to raise huge sums of money from corporations and very rich people to pay for the adverts and the mailings that get you on the ballot and into office. These corporations will only give you money if you persuade them that you will serve their interests once you are in power. If you say instead that you want to prevent anything destructive they are doing to ordinary people, or tax and regulate them, you will get no money, and can’t run.

As the Wisconsin politician Ed Garvey puts it: “Even candidates who get into politics with the best of intentions start thinking they can’t get re-elected without money. Senators get so reliant on the money that they reflect it; they stop thinking for themselves, stop thinking like the people who elected them. They just worry about getting the money.”

Barack Obama knows this. In 2006, he said that taking money from the rich is “the original sin of anyone who’s ever run for office” in the US, and it ensures that “Washington is only open to those with the most cash.” There’s a term for this: legalized bribery. It is so naked that corporations routinely give to both sides in an election: Goldman Sachs, to name just one, gave to both Obama and McCain to ensure whoever became President was indebted to them.

In the Land of the Fee, Obama was brought to power by the “donations” – actually investments – of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, IBM, Morgan Stanley, General Electric, and others. So it is unsurprising that his Presidency has largely served their interests, which are very different from our interests. His first act after the election was to appoint an economics team headed by the people who caused the crash: the Clinton-era deregulators and the former heads of Goldman. They proceeded to ensure that any reregulation to prevent another crash was gutted, while the bankers’ bonuses continued to flow. In his official report to Congress, Treasury Department Inspector General Neil Barofsky warned this year: “It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date? We are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.”

The corporations are getting massive returns on their investment in Obama. Two-thirds of them pay no federal tax on their income. These corporations get to veto any law that would eat into their short-term profits, like a freeze on kicking Americans out of their homes while the banks’ dodgy and probably illegal boom-time mortgages contracts are clarified, or a transition away from climate-destabilising oil and coal. And they rake in a fortune from the reality that 44 percent of the entire federal budget is spent on a largely unnecessary war machine – a figure that is growing rapidly on Obama’s watch.

The fact that corporations have this power over what the US government can do means Obama – or any other President – is unable to approach a problem by asking: how do I fix this? Instead he has to ask: how can we get corporations to consent to a small cosmetic gesture that will, for a while, appease public anxiety and anger about this problem?

The healthcare “reform” trumpeted as Obama’s greatest achievement illustrates how this works. The biggest problem with US healthcare is that squatting between a doctor and his patient are the bloated insurance companies whose job is to turn down any claim from a sick person they possibly can, in order to maximize their profits. Some 45,000 Americans die every year as a result. Obama had within his grasp a way of taming these corporations and saving the lives of all these people. It was called the public option: a government-run healthcare insurance programme that would guarantee affordable care to all American citizens. It was supported by 61 percent of Americans. But it would cut into corporate profits – so Obama’s outgoing chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said its defenders were “fucking retards,” and the administration killed it.

Instead, Obama pursued the polar opposite approach. He guaranteed the healthcare companies that he would never use the bargaining power of the government to force their prices down. His “reform” has been simply to force millions more Americans to buy from the insurance companies – without any mechanism for making that care more affordable. There were a few brilliant tweaks, like making it illegal for the corporations to refuse insurance to people with “pre-existing conditions” – but their share-prices jumped after the package was announced for a reason: Obama overwhelmingly served their interests, not the patients’. At the end of this, millions will be still left uncovered, and others financially broken, so a tiny number of corporations can profit. If Obama can’t stand up to corporations in a situation where Americans are demonstrably being killed in huge numbers and a majority is behind him, isn’t his subservience almost complete?

All this corruption means Obama has very few achievements to show the American people. He is left presenting pitiful corporate-fattening tweaks as the best he could do. They aren’t nothing – but they aren’t much. His inadequate stimulus was slightly bigger than McCain’s would have been, so unemployment is about 2 percent lower. He has restored federal funding for stem cell research, and for abortions abroad. He hasn’t bombed Iran. These make a real difference: they’re reason enough to vote Democratic over Republican. But we have to be honest: the continuities with Bush are far more pronounced than the differences.

There are Democrats who refuse to be corporate shills – and they deserve to be defended with every ounce of your energy. If you’re an American and you have time over the next week, phone bank or donate to Representative Alan Grayson, or Senator Russ Feingold, to name two of the best who do it the hard way, run their campaigns by collecting small donations, and actually defend the American people. But they are, alas, a minority in the Democratic Party.

Contrary to the glib stereotype, Americans aren’t stupid, and they can see what is happening: a recent CNN poll found 60 percent of Americans said Obama “has paid more attention to the problems faced by banks and other financial institutions than to the problems faced by middle class Americans.” They’re right. It’s not that they want him to be “more liberal” or “more conservative”: few think in these terms. No. They are asking – is my job more secure? Is my home more secure? Is my healthcare more affordable? And the answer is no, not really. They know the people who caused the crash are fatter than ever, while the people who had nothing to do with it take the pain, and Obama is left calling this farce progress. In the absence of a liberal populism that would have actually fixed these problems, all the oxygen goes to the fake populism of the Tea Party. US politics has ended up as a battle between the mostly corrupt and the entirely corrupt.

I’m sure Obama believes he is doing the best he can in a corrupt system – but it’s not true. There is another way. Imagine if, when he came to office, he had articulated the real solutions – and, when he was blocked, named the corrupt corporations and the corrupt Senators stopping him getting healthcare for sick children or preventing another crash. Explain that it is time to drive the money-lenders out of the temple of American democracy. Tell the American people they will always be screwed over until they end this corruption and pay for the democratic process themselves, and propose serious measures to achieve it. Call for a mass movement to back him, just as Franklin Roosevelt did – and succeeded. At least then there would be a possibility of real progress. Would the outcome conceivably have been worse than this – being beaten by the foaming Tea Party Republicans with almost nothing to show for it?

At moments, there have been flickers of what this alternative Obama Presidency would have looked like. His huge government bailout of the auto industry kept millions of people in work, was hugely popular – and is already making a profit for the government. In the final days of this election campaign, he is railing against the massive corporate donations to the Republicans – a hypocrisy, for sure, but a popular one, pointing to a better path he might have chosen, and still could, if enough sane Americans shake themselves awake and pressure him hard.

Yes, on the night Obama won, I too felt that great global ripple of hope, and shed a little tear – but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed in the Rust Belt and their homes blown to pieces in the SWAT Valley as a direct result of Obama’s decisions. They are the ones who deserve our empathy now, not the most powerful man in the world, who has chosen to settle into and defend a profoundly corrupt system, rather than challenge and change it. It’s long past time to put away your Obama t-shirt that and take out your protest banner.

Copyright 2010 Independent Print Limited
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October 1st, 2010 10:07 AM
Five Ways the Democrats Can Avoid a Catastrophe and Pull Off the Mother of All Upsets


By Michael Moore

The election is one month from tomorrow and, yes, it looks hopeless. November 2nd -- the day the Dems are expected to crash and burn.

Sadly, it's a situation the Democrats have brought upon themselves -- even though the majority of them didn't create the mess we're in. But they've had over a year and a half to start getting the job done to fix it. Instead, they've run scared ever since they took power. To many, the shellacking they're about to receive is one they deserve.

But if you're of a mindset that believes a return to 2001-2008 would be sheer insanity, then you probably agree we've got no choice but to save the Democrats from themselves.

Memo To: President Obama and the Democratic Party Leadership

From: Michael Moore

Subject: 5 Things Dems Can Do to Turn It Around by November 2nd

1. Immediate Wall-to-Wall TV Ads, Internet Videos, and Appearances Hammering Who the Hell Put Us in the Misery We're In.
We Americans have very short attention spans (Quick: Who Won the Oscar for Best Picture last year? The World Series? Exactly.). People need to be reminded over and over that it was the REPUBLICANS who concocted and led the unnecessary invasion of two countries, putting us in our longest war ever, wars that will eventually cost us over $3 trillion. Bush and Co. also caused the biggest collapse of our economy since the Great Depression. I don't know a single person in Hollywood who wouldn't shoot and produce those spots for you for FREE. Dems: Do not pull a single punch on this. Quit being a bunch of wusses and let the bastards have it! The public will be astonished that you've found your courage and your spine. We expect you to be Muhammad Ali, not Ally McBeal.

2. Indict the Criminals.
Announce that the Justice Department will seek indictments against both those who caused the economic collapse and those who became war profiteers. Call it for what it is: organized crime. Use the RICO statutes. Use the basic laws that make fraud of any kind a crime. Get in the face of those who stole the billions, make them pay for it -- and the people will love you. We want Dirty Harry, not Dirty Dancing.

3. Announce a Moratorium on All Family Home Foreclosures.
Last month (August) there were more home foreclosures than in any month in U.S. history. Worse than any month in the worst year ever, 2009. The bleeding hasn't stopped -- it's only gotten worse. And now, this week, two of the largest crime organizations who are throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes (GMAC and JPMorgan Chase) have been forced to momentarily stop doing this. It turns out, they don't really have the paperwork to prove they actually own these houses! It's madness. So if you do one thing for the middle class this week, do this. It will take an hour of your time to draw up the decree and issue it. We'd rather watch "It's a Wonderful Life" than "Poltergeist."

4. Announce a New 21st Century WPA.
"Who's hiring? THE GOVERNMENT IS HIRING!" Put together a simple plan to hire enough people to repair our roads, fix up our aging schools, and rebuild our infrastructure. Fund this by taxing the richest 1% who have more financial wealth than 95% of Americans combined! Unemployment will drop to 5%. Can you pass it? Well, you sure can't unless you try! And as you're trying, announce that you will force the Republican senators (who until now simply have had to say they "intended" to filibuster in order to kill a bill) to have to actually filibuster! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and read from the phone book 24/7. They won't last a day. And America will see them for who they really are.

5. Declare That No Democrat Will Accept ANY Wall Street Money in the Next Election Cycle.
Pick a day in the coming week. Have all your fellow Democrats in Congress stand in front of the Capitol (with President Obama) and pledge that if America allows you to retain control of Congress, none of you will take a penny from Wall Street for the 2012 election. Instead, promise to accept donations of only $2, $5 and $10. You will also pledge not to take a job as a lobbyist or lawyer for ANY corporation for ten years after you leave Congress. The message will be a powerful one to the average American fed up with corrupt political hacks. Act like Honest Abe, not Fast Freddie -- and see what happens.

And here are two bonus suggestions: Use what sense of humor you have and go after these candidates and their agenda with all the hilarious ridicule they deserve. And quit complaining about "the base" not doing enough to help you. You want help? Do something this week to earn it. I've offered five suggestions. I'm sure the rest of "the base" has a few more.

UPDATE [Friday, October 1st, 8:52 PM]: The crime syndicate continues to crumble. Today we learned that Bank of America is joining JPMorgan Chase and GMAC in suspending foreclosures in 23 states after a BoA executive admitted she signed up to 8,000 documents -- in one month -- without even reading them. And on top of that, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has halted ALL foreclosures by ALL banks for 60 days in what the Washington Post calls "the most radical action taken by a state on issue of document irregularities." As Rep. Marcy Kaptur said in 'Capitalism: A Love Story,' "Don't leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don't have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can't find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don't you leave." President Obama: Now do what Blumenthal has done.
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Six Reasons behind the Debacle

Obama’s first mistake was to take responsibility for the economic crisis. In his quixotic quest for a bipartisan solution, he made George W. Bush’s problem his own. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan never made this mistake. They took no responsibility for the economic problems of the 1970s, heaping the blame entirely on their liberal predecessors and eschewing any bipartisan alliance with those they considered their ideological enemies. Roosevelt, too, slammed – and slammed hard –his ideological foes, those he termed “economic royalists.”

Insofar as Obama and his lieutenants identified villains, this was Wall Street. Yet saying the financial elite brought on the crisis, while bailing out key Wall Street financial institutions such as Citigroup and AIG on the grounds that they were “too big to fail,” involved Obama in a terrible contradiction. The least that he could have done was to remove the existing boards and top managers of these organizations as a condition for government funds. Instead, unlike the case of General Motors, the top dogs stayed on board and continued to collect sky-high bonuses to boot.

The strong sense of disconnect between word and deed was exacerbated rather than alleviated by the Democrats’ financial reform. The measure did not have the minimum conditions for a reform with real teeth: the banning of derivatives, a Glass-Steagall provision preventing commercial banks from doubling as investment banks; the imposition of a financial transactions tax or Tobin tax; and a strong lid on executive pay, bonuses, and stock options.

Third, Obama had a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people against the neoliberal or market fundamentalist approach that deregulated the financial sector and caused the crisis. Although Obama did allude to unregulated financial markets as the key problem during the campaign, he refrained from demonizing neoliberalism after he took office, thus presenting an ideological vacuum that the resurgent neoliberals did not hesitate to fill. No doubt he failed to launch a full-scale ideological offensive because his key lieutenants for economic policy, National Economic Council head Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, had not broken with neoliberal thinking.

Fourth, the stimulus package of $787 billion was simply too small to bring down or hold the line on unemployment. Here, Obama cannot say he lacked good advice. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate, and a whole host of Keynesian economists were telling him this from the very start. For comparison, the Chinese stimulus package of $580 billion was much bigger relative to the size of the economy than the Obama package. For the White House now to say that the employment situation would now be worse had it not been for the stimulus is, to say the least, politically naïve. People operate not with wishful counterfactual scenarios but with the facts on the ground, and the facts have been rising unemployment with no relief in sight.

Politics in a time of crisis is not for the fainthearted. The middle-of-the road approach represented by the size of the stimulus was the wrong response to a crisis that called for a political gamble: the deployment of the massive fiscal firepower of the government against the predictable howls of anger from the right.

Fifth, Obama and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke deployed mainly Keynesian technocratic tools—deficit spending and monetary easing—to deal with the consequences of the massive failure of market fundamentalism. During a normal downturn these countercyclical tools may suffice to reverse the downturn. But standard Keynesianism could address such a serious collapse only in a very limited way. Besides, people were looking not only for relief in the short term but for a new direction that would enable them to master their fears and insecurities and give them reason to hope.

In other words, Obama failed to locate his Keynesian technocratic initiatives within a larger political and economic agenda that could have fired up a fairly large section of American society. Such a larger agenda could have had three pillars: the democratization of economic decision-making, from the enterprise level to the heights of macro-policymaking; an income and asset redistribution strategy that went beyond increasing taxes on the top two percent of the population; and the promotion of a more cooperative rather than competitive approach to production, distribution, and the management of resources. This agenda of social transformation, which was not too left, could have been accommodated within a classical social democratic framework. People were simply looking for an alternative to the Brave New Dog-Eat-Dog World that neo-liberalism had bequeathed them. Instead, Obama offered a bloodless technocratic approach to cure a political and ideological debacle.

Related to this absence of a program of transformation was the sixth reason for the Obama debacle: his failure to mobilize the grassroots base that brought him to power. This base was diverse in terms of class, generation, and ethnicity. But it was united by palpable enthusiasm, which was so evident in Washington, DC, and the rest of the country on Inauguration Day in 2009. With his preference for a technocratic approach and a bipartisan solution to the crisis, Obama allowed this base to wither away instead of exploiting the explosive momentum it possessed in the aftermath of the elections.

At the eleventh hour, Obama and the Democrats are talking about firing up and resurrecting this base. But the dispirited and skeptical troops that have long been disbanded and left by the wayside rightfully ask: around what?

The Right Makes the Right Moves

In contrast to Obama, the right wing understood the demands and dynamics of politics at a time of crisis, as opposed to politics in normal times. While Obama persisted in his quest for bipartisanship, the Republicans adopted a posture of hard-line opposition to practically all of his initiatives.

Unlike Obama and the Democrats, the right posed the conflict in stark political and ideological terms: between left and right, between “socialism” and “freedom,” between the oppressive state and the liberating market. The Republican opposition used all the catchwords and mantras they could dredge up from bourgeois U.S. ideology.

Finally, in contrast to Obama’s neglect of the Democratic base, the right eschewed Republican interest-group politics. Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the tea party movement stirred up the right-wing base to challenge the Republican Party elite and drive a no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics. To understand what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few weeks with the string of tea party successes in the primaries, historian Arno Mayer’s distinction among conservatives, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries is useful. In Mayer’s terms, the counterrevolutionaries, with their populist, anti-insider, and grassroots-driven politics are displacing the conservative elites that have long held sway in the Republican Party.

With their anti-spending platform, the Republicans and tea partiers that might capture the House and the Senate in November will probably bring about a worse situation than today. As such, Obama and the Democrats might repeat Bill Clinton’s political trajectory when he scored a victory at the polls in 1996 because the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich overreached politically after their triumph in the midterm elections of 1994. But this is a desperate illusion. The current counterrevolutionaries and their backers are skilled in the politics of blame, and they will likely be successful in painting the worsening situation as a result of Obama’s “socialist policies,” not of drastic cuts in government spending.

Lessons for the Left

The problem lies not so much in our lack of a strategic alternative as in our failure to translate our strategic vision or paradigm into a credible and viable political program. Politics in a period of crisis is different from politics in a period of normality, being more fluid and marked by the volatility of class, political, and intellectual attachments. We should remember that politics is the art of creating and sustaining a political movement from diverse class and social forces through a flexible but principled political program that can adapt to changing circumstances.

Finally, there is no such thing as an objectively determined situation. The art of politics is using the contradictions, spaces, and ambiguities of the current moment to shape structures and institutions and create a critical mass for change. Class, economic, and political structures may condition political outcomes; they do not determine them. Who will ultimately emerge the victor from this period of prolonged capitalist crisis will depend on smart and skilled political leadership.
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News Dissector Danny Schechter: Saturday’s "One Nation" March on Washington Was "More Movie than Movement"

"Sadly, the One Nation that came together in Washington was not there to be organized into an ongoing force," writes longtime media analyst Danny Schechter. "No follow-up program was announced, no emails collected, no vision on how to turn all that energy on the Mall into a powerful progressive alternative to the tea party was offered. No longer march strategy was announced. It was a moment in itself not for anything more." [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Danny Schechter, investigative journalist, filmmaker and author. He is the director of the film Plunder and author of the book The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by investigative journalist, filmmaker, author, Danny Schechter, director of the film Plunder and author of the book The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail.
Danny, you attended Saturday’s rally, wrote a very interesting piece on your blog. Talk about the effectiveness of it, and talk about it in the context of labor protests around the world.
DANNY SCHECHTER: You know, but personally, it was sort of a déjà vu all over for me. I was there in 1963 at the March on Washington with Dr. King. And the spirit of it, you know, was still present. It was very invigorating. There was a lot of inspirational speakers. There was a lot of appeals for people to get out the vote, and all the rest of it.
But, what was missing, it seemed to me, were one of two things: first, trying to educate the audience. Here they had a big television audience. They were speaking not just to themselves, but to America. And in doing that, instead of speaking to the base, they missed an opportunity, I believe, to offer their analysis to the American people, who don’t get it in the media, specifically, what Wall Street has been doing to our country and what actually has happened so that 14 million families face foreclosure. This was the week that all the big banks stopped foreclosing in twenty-three states because they had been illegally taking people’s homes with phony signatures and the like. And that wasn’t even referenced. It wasn’t even mentioned. There was no, really, appeal to all these homeowners. There was very little appeal to unemployed people and young people who have been unable to get jobs, which is really a core constituency.
And there was very little offered about what to do about all of this, except voting in November. And we all know that voting in November to return to Congress even people who are supposedly, you know, trying to do the right thing is very probematic, because we know that—how badly they’ve done. You know, even the Democrats are saying, you know, "Even if you don’t like us, vote for us, because we’re better than the other guys." That’s not much of an appeal.
So, where was the strategy? Where was the plan for the future? Where was the organizational vision for how to bring these people to stay together to work together to move for change? That was sort of missing, and I think it became, in a way, more of an event, more of a movie than a movement. And that was bad, I think, you know, and disappointing at the end, when you really thought about it. What did we accomplish? And I’m not sure.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, as I stood talking to people out on the Mall, I had a very different sense from the people on the grass—I guess you could say the "grassroots"—and the people up by the Lincoln Memorial who were speaking. And it was about how careful they were not to criticize the administration, and that might go to your point about, you know, it was the Obama stimulus package that bailed out the big banks and didn’t stop the foreclosures of people on the ground. People, I think, on the Mall, who bused in from all over—and we’re talking about more than 100,000 people—were more critical than the message from the stage.
DANNY SCHECHTER: I don’t know why somebody couldn’t get up, even if they love President Obama, and say, "We love you, but what about this? Why Larry Summers? Why an economic program that’s failed? Why not help for homeowners? Why not real help for unemployed people? Why did you, you know, go halfway with the stimulus when so much more was needed? Why these wars in Afghanistan and Iran—and Iraq, rather, that are—and the threat of war with Iran, you know, that are costing us trillions of dollars that should be available to invest in our economy?" None of those questions were being raised. It’s almost as if, you know, there was a radar, an internal radar, in every speaker. You know, go so far, but no further.
That’s why Harry Belafonte’s speech that you played earlier was so significant. He sort of flipped the script a little bit and spoke from his heart and from his lifetime experience. Other speakers, while good, while invigorating, while inspirational, didn’t really cut very deep. And I think that’s part of the problem. So when people who were listening at home were watching this, what were they learning? What were they coming away with? And this is, you know, my frustration. My film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, I offered it to the organizers. I said, "Let’s screen this. Let’s educate people to come to the march to support this." Michael Moore has issued a call to indict Wall Street criminals and to have a—
AMY GOODMAN: But this is where the money comes from for both parties in the midterm elections. They’re hardly—the Democrats—going to take this on. And this rally was not about opposing the administration or the Democrats.
DANNY SCHECHTER: Right, but you don’t have to oppose them. You can try to sort of kick them in the butt a little bit, and that’s what was missing. In other words, if there’s pressure on the right and no pressure on the left, the left is not going to be taken seriously, as it has not been, because the administration feels they can take people like us, at large, for granted. You know, they don’t have to be responsive and accountable to the people who worked for them so hard to get Obama elected. And so, it’s not a question of just being in opposition to Obama. He’s under terrible attack from, you know, various corners. There’s nothing he can do to please any of them. He’s a terrorist. He’s a Socialist. He’s a Communist. He’s a Martian. It doesn’t seem to matter what they call him; the facts are immaterial. But the people who want to see this administration really push forward a progressive agenda have to do more than just rally on the Mall. They have to organize. They have to try to build support for a program for change. And that, so far, has been missing.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, there wasn’t a criticism of Wall Street in that way, and there wasn’t much discussion of the war in Afghanistan.
DANNY SCHECHTER: No, not at all. In other words, the challenges, the contradictions of this administration—
AMY GOODMAN: Though Harry Belafonte did talk about peace.
DANNY SCHECHTER: Yeah, he did.
AMY GOODMAN: And he did say—he was the only one, really, who talked about $33 billion—
DANNY SCHECHTER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —going to the war that could pay for 600,000 green jobs in this country.
DANNY SCHECHTER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, Jesse mentioned the military budget, but he didn’t really explain it. And the assumption is, rhetoric—you know, just the kind of our language, you know, we often assume that when we use a buzzword, people know what it is. Not necessarily. I think you have to really explain this. You can’t assume knowledge. The media is not covering these issues thoroughly, and we have to. And we have to try to educate the base, as well as motivate the base.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Danny Schechter—
DANNY SCHECHTER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: —author of The Crime of Our Time. The book is—that’s his book. Plunder is the name of his film. He blogs at newsdissector.com.
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Obama Signalled His Complete Surrender To Zionism

Obama Signalled His Complete Surrender To Zionism

By Alan Hart

September 07, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- - -He did it with seven words. “Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution.”

He was speaking at the White House the day before the start of the new round of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, after he had met with them and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. (In my last post I anticipated Obama saying at the point of his complete surrender that “America can’t want peace more than the parties.” He also said that - ahead of schedule!)

Today there is a growing number of seriously well informed people of all faiths and none (including me) who believe there will only be peace if it is imposed.

Today there is a growing number of seriously well informed people of all faiths and none (including me) who believe there will only be peace if it is imposed.

Among those who have dared to say so in public is one of the most eminent Jewish gentlemen of our time, Henry Siegman. A former national director of the American Jewish Congress, he is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, which was part of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 until 2006 when it was established as an independent policy institute. He is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. During his more than 30 years of involvement in the Middle East peace process, he has published extensively on the subject and has been consulted by governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations involved in the peace process. In a comment piece for the Financial Times on 23 February 2010, (quoted in Conflict Without End? the Epilogue to Volume 3 of the American edition of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews), he wrote this:

“The Middle East peace process and its quest for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that got under way nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo accords has undergone two fundamental transformations. It is now on the brink of a third.

“The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank; there is no longer any prospect of its removal by this or any future Israeli government, which was the precise goal of the settlements’ relentless expansion all along. The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw ‘from most, if not all’ of the occupied territories, ‘including East Jerusalem,’ was unable even to remove any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly promised to dismantle.

“A two-state solution could therefore come about only if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967 border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli government could not defy – the US. The assumption has always been that at the point where Israel’s colonial ambitions collide with critical US national interests, an American president would draw on the massive credit the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US administrations held to be the main obstacle to a peace accord.

“The second transformation resulted from the shattering of that assumption when President Barack Obama – who took a more forceful stand against Israel’s settlements than any of his predecessors, and did so at a time when the damage this unending conflict was causing American interests could not have been more obvious – backed off ignominiously in the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state accord dead in the water.”

On 16 August in a piece for the Huffington Post which was originally published by Ha’aretz in Hebrew, Siegman added this:

“Most Israelis, particularly the present government, have been blithely indifferent to repeated international condemnations of Israel’s systematic theft of Palestinian territory on which it has been settling its own Jewish population in blatant violation of international law. Yet their reaction to what they see as an attack on the “legitimacy” of the State of Israel, a concept foreign to international law, seems to bring them to the edge of hysteria.

“In fact, Israel’s legitimacy within its 1967 borders has never been challenged by the international community. It is its behavior on territory beyond its own borders to which the international community – including every U.S. administration – has objected. To construe the condemnation of violations of international law as anti-Semitism is absurd.

“It was not an anti-Semite seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state, but Theodore Meron, an internationally respected jurist and the legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who following the war of 1967 conveyed the following legal opinion to Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban: ‘Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention,’ to which Israel is a signatory. That Convention’s ban on population transfer is ‘categorical and not conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its objectives. The Convention’s purpose is to prevent settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the occupying state.’”

So yes, Israel’s leaders knew that settlements on Arab land occupied in 1967 are illegal. They simply didn’t give (and still today don’t give) a damn about international law. But this attitude, a mixture of extreme arrogance and insufferable self-righteousness, does not make them the main villains in the story of what happened after June 1967. The main villains were (and still are) the governments of the major powers and the one in Washington DC above all.

What they should have said to Israel in the immediate aftermarth of the 1967 war is: “You are not to build any settlements on occupied Arab land. If you do, you’ll be demonstrating your contempt for international law. In this event the international community will declare Israel to be an outlaw state and subject it to sanctions.”

If something like that riot act had been read to Israel there would have been peace many, many years ago. The pragmatic Arafat was reluctantly reconciled to the reality of Israel’s existence inside its pre-1967 borders as far back as 1968. In his gun and olive branch address to the UN General Assembly on 13 November 1974 he said so by obvious implication. Thereafter he put his credibility with his leadership colleagues and his people, and his life, on the line to get a mandate for unthinkable compromise with Israel. He got it at the end of 1979 when the Palestine National Council voted by 296 votes to 4 to endorse his two-state policy. What he needed thereafter was an Israeli partner for peace. He eventually got a probable one, Yitzhak Rabin, but he was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic. The more it became clear that Israel’s leaders were not interested in a genuine two-state solution for which Arafat had prepared the ground on his side, the more his credibility with his own people suffered.

It is in the context briefly sketched above that Obama’s seven words have their real meaning.

At the time of writing it seems reasonably clear that Obama is hoping that Abbas and his equally discredited Fatah leadership colleagues can be bribed and bullied into accepting what Netanyahu will eventually offer – crumbs from Zionism’s table. (My guess is that Abbas at a point will resign rather than trigger a Palestinian civil war). THE question is what will Obama do when Israel refuses to give enough to satisfy the demands and needs of the Palestinian people for a just about acceptable measure of justice?

We already know the answer. “Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution.”

Effectively those seven words tell Israel’s leaders that they can go on imposing their will on the occupied and oppressed Palestinians with the comfort of knowing that Obama is not going to use the leverage he has, and every American president has had, to cause them, or try to cause them, to be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, and which a rational Israeli government and people would accept with relief.

Put another way, those seven words are effectively a green light for Zionism alone to determine the future of the Palestinians, a future which at some point will most likely see the final ethnic cleansing of Palestine, followed by another great turning against the Jews (provoked by the Zionist state’s behaviour) and a Clash of Civilizations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic.

In his analysis on the day Obama delivered his seven words, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s admirable Middle East Editor, offered this thought. “There might not be room for many more failures. The conflict is changing. A religious war is now being grafted on what used to be fundamentally a competition for territory between two national movements. You can make deals with nationalists. It’s much harder with people who believe they’re doing God’s work.”

The next question asks itself. Why won’t Obama be the president to call and hold the Zionist state to account for its crimes, even when doing so is necessary for the best protection of America’s own interests?

Part of the answer is, of course, that he is no more willing than any of his predecessors to have a showdown with the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress and the mainstream media.

But there might be more to it.

In the privacy of his own mind Obama probably understands better than any of his predecessors how the conflict was created and what has sustained it. If that is the case, he will also know there’s no guarantee that real American-led pressure on Israel to be serious about peace would work and that it could be counter-productive.

I am a supporter in principle of the case and the need for the Zionist state of Israel to be totally isolated, boycotted and sanctioned as Apartheid South Africa was, eventually. But… The danger is that even the credible threat of a real boycott and sanctions could play into the hands of those Israeli leaders – Netanyahu has long been their standard bearer – who have brainwashed Israelis, most if not quite all, into believing that the world hates Jews, always has and always will, and that Israeli Jews have no choice but to tell the world to go to hell. In this context (and as I note in the Epilogue of the American edition of my book), I think it could and should be said that Zionism succeeded, probably beyond its own best expectations, in transforming the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust from a lesson against racism and fascism and all the evils associated with them into an ideology that seeks to justify anything and everything the Zionist state does. War crimes and all.

So it could be that in the privacy of his own mind, Obama knows it is already too late (not to mention too dangerous) to try to push Israel’s leaders much further than they are willing to go.

What, I wonder, will honest historians of the future make of what is happening right now? My guess is that they will conclude that when Obama launched his push for peace, the Zionist state was already a monster beyond control.

Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle East and their global consequences and terrifying implications – the possibility of a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, and, along the way, another great turning against the Jews – for nearly 40 years.
______

A Note From John Walker Lindh

The Ballad Of The Fleas


By John Walker Lindh

September 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --
It’s said that black death spread by fleas
On backs of rats they rode
One fateful autumn thus they came
With vengeance as their code
Like blight they spread from crags to plains
To hilly dusty turf
To rocky lunar landscapes ‘neath
The rooftop of the earth
 
They hid behind the highest clouds
To fly as swift as sound
With daisy cutters cluster bombs
And spies upon the ground
 
*
 
Their leader stepped out swaggering
Declaring a crusade
He called the world to follow him
And most of them obeyed
 
For wolves may foam and bark and bite
And gnash and gnaw and hiss
But if a sheep should dare bite back
He’d be a terrorist
 
The knights of Malta raised their spears
The knights Templars came next
The rabble cheered them in the streets
Priests quoted Bible texts
 
*
 
Their quislings all crawled out to them
Each kneeled to give his oath
They squealed and cried “Islam is peace”
But disbelieved in both
 
They ushered ashen donkeys forth
Jackasses bearing scrolls
They brayed in fervent fever pitch
For dollar bills in rolls
 
The words they spoke those days were such
That had he known their name
Old Abdullah Ibnu Ubayy
Would cringe and blush in shame
 
*
 
They send their drones to level homes
And blow up wedding feasts
They heap more arms in warlords’ hands
To spread democracy
 
They roam at night to break down doors
To search and strip and rape
To bind and kidnap anyone
To shoot those who escape
 
With muzzles full of lofty talk
Free speech and human rights
They drive out millions from their land
And say it’s worth the price
 
*
 
An aid worker clerk or farmer
Sold like a modern slave
Gets beaten by their boots and guns
And thrown into a cage
 
He’s sat upon and spat upon
Broke by the brave and free
By brave crusaders brave and bold
As brave as brave can be
 
If they but knew that with each act
Of torture and abuse
Around the neck of Uncle Sam
They tighten up the noose
 
*
 
Mirages in the distance glow
Lads line up in the queue
As one more body bag comes back
Hid from the public view
 
A blistered bloated jarhead face
Deep purple findernails
A smell seeps out that’s foul enough
To cleanse a man’s entrails
 
Their rulers lurch and boast and strut
But keep far from the fray
They swoon and quake from fear to tread
Where lurking lions lay
 
*
 
As tawheed’s caravan moves on
And marches in the dusk
The crimson wound of one of them
Emits the scent of musk
 
To rule God’s earth by God’s own law
They sacrifice their lives
They spill their lifeblood willingly
Until God’s help arrives
 
Although victory entices them
What soothes them even more
Is hope to enter gardens lush
With honey milk and hur
 
*
 
Where stars and stripes and Union Jacks
And NATO flags once flew
Black banners rise in Khurasan
In hands of every hue
 
Just as how warsteeds’ coats are cleaned
And purged of lice and fleas
The cavalcade of martyrs fights
An empire to its knees
 
All praise and thanks are due to God
To Him alone they bowed
And peace be on His messenger
Whose face beams in his shroud
 
Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi
Detainee #001
Ramadan 1431
This item was first posted at http://www.cageprisoners.com