Roy Casagranda teach-in

Occupy Austin teach-in on Monday, Oct. 31 featured Roy Casagranda, Political Science Professor, Austin Community College, on "Major Changes Are Necessary"

Produced for Austin Indymedia by Jeff Zavala

via zgraphix

and But I did everything right, "Law School's a Complete Waste of Time and Money"


Ok, this is pretty long, relative to our being accustomed to video clips embedded at blogs being 5 to 10 minutes tops, but when you can I encourage you to watch the whole thing. (His characterization of American liberalism is particularly interesting. Also, I think he's right that FDR was trying to save capitalism, and about why Warren Buffet wants his taxes to go up.)

I do have one minor quibble: Casagranda suggests it was the same group of people he characterizes as left-wing Christian activists in the '50s and early '60s who subsequently morphed into folks like the Moral Majority, et al, in the '80s, and I don't think that's correct. Even in the earlier era we had various right-wing social conservatives, although there's no question that the political impact of the Christian right is much stronger today. But as I said it's a minor point, and you should definitely watch this.


see also

Constitutional Daily, Cruel and Unusual Soy Beans

John Caruso, "Israel's Other Airline"

No Caption Needed, "Seeing Beyond American Exceptionalism"

Cüneyt, "Ethos"


...

BHO is not MLK

Linh Dinh, March 2011(via John Caruso):

Suave, articulate and personable, Obama is proving to be just as deadly as Bush, but clearly more cynical. A great, loyal tool of the establishment, Obama has dampened protest from American liberals. Though they know he has betrayed them, they’re reluctant to show appropriate outrage because, not that long ago, they have cheered and wept for him so openly.

Ian Welsh,

1.December 2010, "Obama isn’t about compromise"

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

and 2, October 2010, "Repudiating Liberalism or Obama"



***

Virtually every day there is something in the news that reminds me of my revulsion for Barach Obama's administration, and how he has come to personify for me the sense that we live in Upside Down World. The age of Obama is an age in which a president can

1.announce the expansion of a war on a backward and essentially defenseless country (and subsequently be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize),

2. obligate millions of poor people to buy healthcare coverage, as a gift to the private insurance companies,

3.make plans to strip-mine social security,

and have besotted and hoodwinked millions hail him as their Great Liberal Hope while millions of others are convinced he's a socialist, secretly African, and possibly even the Antichrist.

As far as I can see both groups of millions are deluded and easily fooled, not necessarily because of stupidity per se, so much as a hunger to believe convenient things that square with their fears and prior beliefs, and don't require much work to sort out. OK, a dose of stupidity also helps.

While I see Obama as a champion con man and a right wing corporate stooge much as Ian Welsh, John Caruso, and Linh Dinh (and many others) do, I sometimes wonder if I have lost my objectivity. I have wondered in the past if Obama's apparent fondness for deliberately ironic bad timing was just a product of my imagination. For example, in late 2009 I wondered if he delayed announcing whether or not he would approve a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan until just before he was due in Norway to accept his peace prize partly in order to pair the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli of the two events, like Pavlov's warmongering dog, hoping to encourage people to associate Obamawar, his own special brand, with peace and humanitarianism. War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc. Was I being too harsh, and seeing links that weren't there? I wasn't sure.

Strictly speaking, the fact that Obama decided to formally announce his 2012 reelection bid today, on the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King jr's assassination, doesn't necessarily corroborate my suspicion, nor does it prove BHO's narcissism, or even that he takes black people for granted. But it does disgust me.

(I note also that in terms of linking events deliberately, the administration chose today to announce that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would get a military trial.)

Not your friends

Clintonism is dead, killed by Bill Clinton of all people. In the world of strong and simple narratives that the popular press favors, the strongest argument against the disgusting tax deal cobbled together by Obama and the GOP was Clintonism, that under Bill Clinton and the democrats in 1993 marginal tax rates on wealthier Americans were raised from a maximum of 31% under Bush senior to as much as 39.6%, and eventually this led to the boom and balanced budgets of the late 1990s.

But as you are likely to have heard, Clinton himself decided to go to bat for this horrific tax deal, prostituting his liberal cred, such as it is, for tax cuts and a future economic bust. I imagine now that the Fed will do everything they can to float Obama to reelection, because if the economy appears to revive, the ghost of Clintonism can be killed, once and for all, gutted by supply-side Obama-ism-- at least according to the DC "villager" types and the popular news media, who will look everywhere for silver linings that demonstrate the supposed wisdom and fairness of tax cuts for everybody.

Disabusing people of the common-sense notion that you increase tax revenue by increasing taxes may be even more valuable to the oligarchy than for the GOP to retake the White House in 2012. I wonder what will actually happen, although I have to believe much of that upper-income tax cut money will go towards investment in Asian economies, and the US economy will continue its downward slide for at least another two years.

Meanwhile, will there be anybody left debating whether Obama and the democratic leadership is inept or deliberately selling out? I'm glad more people are noticing the malignant effect of the payroll tax cut, supposedly just for one year. The GWB tax cuts were supposedly just for this decade, through 12/31/2010, and if the democrats really wanted to win in the mid-terms they could have voted on the tax cuts this summer, forcing a real fillibuster just before the election-- but Harry Reid didn't want that, any more than BHO did.

Reid and Pelosi and Hoyer got re-elected, but people like Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold were not so lucky, and neither were most of the so-called Blue Dog dems. I tend to assume this was partly by design, funding-wise, that one of the unusual traits of Obama-ism is he wants to be able to run against democratic policies, and do so without any strong voices of opposition to ruffle his feathers. The presence of both the Blue Dogs, stealing his thunder and making BHO's pronouncements seem more generic and less 'bold', and potential critics within the party from the left, interfere with Obama selling himself as a leader. Why would the GOP want to get rid of him? Might as well run Sarah Palin, to help build a database of far-right supporters for 2016. And if she actually wins, all the better. The only possible value I can see in voting for Obama at this point is if it prevents a war with Iran, although I am by no means convinced that BHO wouldn't attack Iran. He may even do so to distract people from the sour jobs outlook.

The other day Digby wrote:

I am usually fairly skeptical of the idea that the Democrats are always screwing up and losing debates because they are consciously conspiring with the Republicans to reach certain goals.

After such a promising beginning she dismisses the conspiracy angle and insists, in a pained way("I'm not defending them, but...") that the democrats know what they're doing, and their motives are just. Thank goodness for that! Were you holding your breath?

As you may know, the guys at Stop Me Before I Vote Again have subtitled their blog, "If you're a Lefty like us, the Democrats are not your friends". You don't even have to be a lefty, just have some common sense, to recognize the duplicity of the GOP, who initially insisted that they were holding out on renewing unemployment benefits because of deficit worries. And the duplicity of Obama, and Bill Clinton, and the rest of the democratic leadership.


Nancy Altman, via Jonathan Schwarz, "The end of social security"
Rob Payne, "Obama destroys social security all on his own"

The increasingly rightward drifting Christian Science Monitor:

"How tax cut revolt helps Obama: It's a page from Clinton playbook,"and

"Obama tax deal could start an era like Reagan's"



Tony Wikrent(via Avedon): "Why the Obama Tax Deal is Insane"

"This 2 percent payroll tax cut is the beginning of the end of Social Security as we know it," said the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which is led by former Rep. Barbara B. Kennelly, D-Conn.

The Wilderness

update below.

In “Can’t argue with that” Jonathan Schwarz quotes Chris Hedges, thus:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

I wrote in the comments:

Although I think Chris Hedges is generally on the right side, his habit of making sweeping pronouncements at the expense of discussing "prim and proper" policy specifics has always rankled me.
[...]
I'd have more sympathy with his thesis if he was willing to more specifically criticize Obama and distinguish between the democratic party leadership and the concept of liberalism. My guess is that Hedges would respond that a critique of Obama and the dem leadership is implicit in his comments, but it isn't, and Hedges' conflation lets obedient dem voters off the hook for their sheepish loyalty to the party.

Mike Meyer used to write in ATR comments about the need for a viable 3rd party. Well the creation of a viable 3rd party will never happen if its regarded as something that needs to be put off, perpetually, until one more election in which you back the dems. It's like that one more cigarette before you quit. There is nothing that Obama would willingly do with 230 or 240 house members sworn in on 1/2011 that he wouldn't be able to do with just 210 or 205, because he is a phony-baloney democrat and merely a bag man for the finance industry.

Their decision, for example, to avoid voting on repealing tax cuts just means they're hoping to be "forced" to save the rich man's tax cuts next year, like a drunk who threatens the other guy while he's being held back by his more sober friends.

...

I reworded the comment above slightly, see below.* Of course I should have added that most democrats that are higher up the dem food chain are phony-baloney democrats now.

Hedges’s main point, that the tea partiers exist because supposedly liberal constituencies have sold out liberalism is at least partly correct. I think it’s more accurate to say that the democrats have been selling out the New Deal as a rear guard action to hold on to power without having to do the presumably riskier task of directly confronting Reaganism. (Ian Welsh suggests this process is nearly complete, and it’s difficult to argue with his darker assessment.)

Hedges also seems to accept the GOP rhetorical trap of falling for the distinction between the working class and "snooty liberal elites" when in fact most tea partiers are middle class types who have health insurance and jobs or pensions and are afraid that they'll have to pay for subsidizing the growing ranks of poor people, all the while that they stupidly hector for tax cuts and against deficit spending. What’s particularly maddening about the ascent of Obama is the crisis of the fall of 2008 was the best opportunity for an ideological counter-strike against Reaganism that our society has had in 15 or 20 years, and instead we got a phony health care reform that is set up from the start to be gutted later except for it’s most noxious aspect, the individual mandates that will force people to go to the private sector and will eventually destroy medicare as well. At least we have our distractions.

(In fact the tea partiers are quite correct to object to the individual mandates; it may even be their only salient aspect. Just as, ironically, it will most likely be the one plank of Obama-ism they will never be able to dislodge.)

Chris Hedges, Truthout, “The World Liberal Opportunists Made”

Ian Welsh,"How the next 4 years will play out"


*update: originally I quote Hedges briefly, thus:

"The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky."

Later in the essay he criticizes liberals for shutting out and marginalizing Chomsky. OK, which is it?

Ian in the comments as well as a commenter at ATR have convinced me this is not correct.-JV

Friday, 18 June 2010

above, Dean Baker on The Real News:"Decades of high unemployment likely"



Guernica Magazine,"Obama’s War"
by Tariq Ali, June 2010

I talk about “the surge” because this is something new. This was President Obama’s policy to differentiate himself from the Bush/Cheney Administration. The Iraq war was bad and we were going to pull out. That’s what we were told. But the pullout is not going to happen, in my opinion. They are going to be in Iraq now in these huge crusader-style fortresses for eternity, as they promise us, unless the Iraqis drive us out. The British did it in the forties and fifties and were finally driven out. So whether that happens, we’ll see. But that’s another story. There’s been no withdrawal from Iraq either, except a withdrawal from these towns to these big bases. But that was what was promised—withdrawal from Iraq but escalation in Afghanistan and religious language was used, citing the Cold War rhetoric of Reinhold Niebuhr, of fighting evil, “good versus evil,” that’s how it started. That’s what we are in Afghanistan for, to “fight evil” and of course we can’t leave. That is why we have to send more troops, to stabilize the situation so we can leave. If you want a particularly contorted defense of this position written, I hate to say this, but really written for idiots who know nothing about Afghanistan, I would recommend the article of the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the New York Review of Books. It is truly appalling, without understanding what’s going on in the country, bland, one cliché dripping onto the pages after another, but at least saying one thing which is of interest: that we can’t stay there.

Even General Eikenberry has said we can’t stay here forever because the big difference between the situation now and when the U.S. landed is that the occupation itself has made the country angry. You read between the lines or in the lines even, of what the people who go to Afghanistan from the United States say, intelligence, non-intelligence, intelligent journalists, unintelligent journalists, they all come back with one story that no one challenges: the bulk of the people don’t want us there; we have antagonized them. And that is why Eikenberry opposed the surge, because he said if you send in more troops, you kill more civilians, and if you kill more civilians, you antagonize whole new swathes of Pashtuns who join the insurgents and the resistance.

The emphases in red are mine. It's a longish article but well worth reading.[via John Emerson's facebook page.]

John Cole defends Obama from the likes of us; at Balloon Juice


via "Blckdgrd"


Sam Smith, "Liberals in denial"


Beverly Mann, "Oh, but Justice Souter, these days Judging is VERY easy"


via
Rdan at Angry Bear



Reason.com: "Feds: Fatty Meat Is Bad for You. Now Shut Up and Eat Your Government-Provided Fatty Meat"
via Charlie Davis.

[Tim the commenter: Thousands of years from now they will ponder how we constructed those idiotic food pyramids.]

31 January 2010

The above video is from the summer of 2007, when undoubtedly many people shared Lori Harfenist's sentiment that a magical political solution to all that ails us was around the corner. While it seems to me we've run out of magic I imagine for many, more corners are around the corner.

As you may know Howard Zinn died this past week. Avedon Carol notes that his Peoples' History of the US is available online, here.


One of Zinn's last public writings was a brief essay, published recently in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration:

via

"I've been searching hard for a highlight," he wrote, adding that he wasn't disappointed because he never expected a lot from Obama.


"I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in our time, a dangerous president - unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."

If Zinn were alive I wonder if he would be troubled by the rush to adopt Haitian kids. Undoubtedly many of them have become orphaned, but surely securing everybody's safety and health is more important right now, and fit prospective parents aren't the sort who will get bored waiting to see if infant x is really orphaned, and decide not to adopt and get new kitchen appliances instead. It's as if small children are Haiti's last natural resource to be appropriated by Americans looking to make a buck.

Sam Smith of The Progressive Review is not a new writer, but he's new to me. Here's an essay seemingly calculated to give Bob from Pacifica vertigo:

"Friends in High Places: Obama and the American Oligarchy" Longish but worthwhile.


TV reporter/newsreader Melissa Francis of MSNBC says she's "all for small government"(video, 1:45-1:47) in this odd exchange [video link] with Judd Gregg. I thought reporters weren't supposed to weigh in like that, but I guess with Obama praising Reagan at every opportunity and generally kneeling before conservative bromides wherever they are offered, it's OK to say things like that now, and they are no longer "political."


Susie Madrak, "Balancing Budgets on the Backs of The Poor"

Over at Hugo Zoom I'm mainly posting different content nowadays, including this short documentary from UC Santa Cruz, "Dos Americas: The Reconstruction of New Orleans"

Democracy at work

this just in, like they used to say...

• 
• 
  
• AP sources: Dems reach deal to drop gov't-run plan (AP)

  AP - After days of secret talks, Senate Democrats tentatively agreed Tuesday night to drop a full-blown government-run insurance option from sweeping health care legislation, several officials said, a concession to party moderates whose votes are critical to passage of President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

• McChrystal backs Afghan plan to skeptical Congress (AP)
• Militants strike Baghdad govt targets, 127 dead (AP)
• Obama urges major new stimulus, jobs spending (AP)
• Gate-crashers to take the Fifth if subpoenaed (AP)
• Fierce winter storm hits Midwest with snow, wind (AP)

Sanjay Gupta, et al

Recently Avedon Carol wrote, in "Another revolting development:"

I gotta agree with Krugman about the appointment of Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. Anyone who can utter that many conservative lies and talking points about single-payer/"socialized" medicine is, to put it generously, the wrong choice - and looks an awful lot like a signal from Obama that he doesn't give a damn about one of the most vital issues facing us. It's not bad enough that he said before that he doesn't support single-payer, but he clearly hasn't learned anything of value in his long period of running for president. Another "Up yours!" to the people who voted for him thinking he had to be better than this.
[...]
This is the thing that always worries me about Obama - he seems very much a part of that subgroup of people in his age group who fell hook, line, and sinker for the "libertarian" excuses to oppose liberalism, because he doesn't know any better. And unlike a lot of other people in that group, he hasn't learned anything from the last eight years. I have a friend who seems convinced that Obama is the Real Deal because he spoke to him back during his Senate race and learned that Obama really doesn't like Bush - but, really, despising Bush is a pretty low threshold. Not many people ever really liked Bush, anyway. What's important is understanding why the policies are bad, and listening to Obama talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, I get the feeling he doesn't really know what was wrong with Iraq, either. Same with healthcare.

[emphases mine.-JV]

This was around the time that Rob Payne and I had a brief discussion in comments about whether or not Obama is a smart fellow. I argued that he was, taking the implicit position that he did know better, i.e., that his hawkish foreign policy related appointments, advocacy of expanding the military and recent wishy-washiness about raising taxes on the wealthy were deliberate choices of easy political choices trumping sound policy. Now I'm thinking I could be wrong and that Rob and Avedon, approaching it from somewhat different angles, could be right.

I want to believe-- hey, who doesn't?

As Rob very correctly pointed out in the previous post, "Hollow Victory,"
I responded to Mimi's question in the comments but did not really address it. Later I was looking for visual aids using the image search of "Obama+gestalt" when I came across this NYU survey regarding the '08 election, which might interest you. I will post more regarding Mimi's question shortly.



it's clickable...