Coldtype's Lair

Always remember that they hate us for our freedoms

2012-01-13T09:59:00.000-08:00

Update: Arthur Silber elaborates further as only he can...

Get your Cry On!

2011-12-26T11:37:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I'm bored.

How charming!

2011-12-13T18:47:00.000-08:00

And to think, US taxpayers directly subsidize this vicious colonial settler state to the tune of 3 billion dollars per year with no strings attached. Hat tip Jews san frontieres.

Why? Because they can.

2011-12-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

PS. Arthur Silber shares a few thoughts on the subject as well...

Some images speak for themselves

2011-11-27T00:43:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to Mike Flugennock

They Hate Us Because of Our Freedoms and Wholesome Goodness Damn it! You Got That?

2011-11-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

Things to make you go, hmmm...

Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.   Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprising some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times — the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines.   "We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.

Don’t believe him? Then check it out for yourself.

Or... you could simply plug your ears and close your eyes to trifles such as counter narratives grounded in empirical evidence like Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation fame who launched into an ankle-biting tirade at GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul for expressing heretical thoughts about the consequences of American foreign policy...

Glenn Greenwald’s extended comments on this performance by one of our finest stenographers to Power is worth reading in full.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

I really mean it...

Rise of the Mighty Technocrats

2011-11-19T17:11:00.000-08:00

Barring popular resistance this obscenity may be coming to the EU (aka testing grounds for the US) quite soon. Here’s the visual Cliff Notes version:

William K. Black at Occupy LA

2011-11-10T00:06:00.000-08:00

Oddly enough this former regulator who gained vast experience in prosecuting the last batch of financial frauds to menace the economy during the S&L crisis of the late 1980's never seems to make any appearances on CNN, MSNBC, et al. Humm, I wonder...

Imagine

2011-10-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

Allow me to preempt the simple-minded before viewing: this is not an endorsement of Ron Paul but merely a thought exercise. Major thanks to Jack Crow to whom my lazy ass is increasingly in debt of late...

Soon There Will Only Be One

2011-10-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

The following comes courtesy of Lenin's Tomb and helps to graphically illustrate the level of Capital's concentration today.

How may we be of service?

2011-09-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

Since the G20 Summit will be coming around these parts soon with plans to hash out the further institutionalization of austerity for the masses, I thought this little ditty would be a nice lullaby for those of us charged with protecting the pampered asses of our guests:

Whew! Thank goodness NATO has saved Libya from itself in the nick of time.

2011-08-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Africa's crown jewel now lays in ruins but then again that's the whole point friends. Now that the most developed nation on the continent with the largest proven oil reserves has been pulled apart someone's got to put it back together again.

Silly Libyans just didn't understand that this sort of shit is for sovereign people... and "we" don't allow that sort of thing bub:

Please don't mistake the posting of this video as an endorsement of Giddafi the man. No, as should be clear to all but the willfully blind, what now awaits the Libyan people left to the tender mercies of NATO and the IMF will be orders of magnitude worse than anything Big G may have dished out.

Blame it on Warren

2011-08-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

Billionaire Warren Buffet's modest proposal in a recent New York Times editorial has set off the mouth pieces of plutocracy like you wouldn't believe. Well, actually what's not to believe given the characters in question? In any event I thought Jon Stewart of The Daily Show had a pretty funny take on it:
Part 1:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Part 2:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Debt Limit "Debate" in Six Panels

2011-07-22T19:45:00.000-07:00

Hat tip: Jesse's Cafe

The Naked Face of Plutocracy, Part Duex

2011-07-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

It is hard to determine what Obama really is, what he stands for, behind the artfully crafted, histrionic façade. He seems at times to be a sort of Herbert Hoover, or even a Neville Chamberlain, consistently giving ground to the bankers' bully boys. Or is he just another power groupie like so many others these days, without principle or character, wishing to 'get his share,' wishing to be accepted?

I suspect that like most of the politicians and bureacrats he is without a moral compass, rationalizing a grotesque selfishness above honor, oath, and duty, despising the many, worshipping at the altar of greed.-JCA

You think?

The Naked Face of Plutocracy

2011-06-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

"A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room. The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit..."-NYT (aka Stenographers of Record)

Yes, I know you're shocked but here's the rest anyway...

You think AT&T saw this coming?

2011-06-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

Big time hat tip to Jack Crow for this one, and yes, Lupe Fiasco does get it:

It's all for the best

2011-06-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

You can rest assured that no one would cheer on such a development here in my home state of Illinois more than the jackass who ran the city of Chicago for more than two decades. Recently, former Chicago mayor-for-life Richard M. Daley cashed in his chips so to speak after 22 years on the throne by accepting a paid advisory position with the law firm of Katten Muchin Rosenman which served an instrumental role in the sell-off of city assets such as the Chicago Skyway (short-cut to northern Indiana, formerly a public highway), the city parking garages, and parking meters. This firm also negotiated the attempted sale of Chicago's Midway Airport (third-world style) that fortunately fell through with the 2008 financial crisis.

For his tireless work in transforming the city into a reliable source of economic rent-extraction for Big Business and major investors Rich Daley can expect to be richly rewarded. This of course is the expected trajectory of those who faithfully serve Capital at the expense of the public (think Bill Clinton). King Richard certainly isn't unique in this regard but his legendary lack of sophistication (no brief stopover in academia for the sake of appearances) brings the practice into unseemly bold relief given the realities of Chicago's cratered economy.

No city embraced the neoliberal model with more fervor than Chi-town and Daley relished his role as the Pied Piper. To pick just one example, under Daley's tutelage Chicago helped pioneer the privatization of public schooling with the charter school scam now being pimped across the country by the Obama administration, tellingly with the same hack as the spearhead: Arnie Duncan. The overall purpose of such schemes being to transform that which the public holds in common, be it railroads, airports, toll roads, forests, or... school systems into privately held entities from which tribute in the form of access fees may be charged to the very public for which these resources were developed at taxpayer expense generations ago. We can expect Daley's successor Rahm Emanuel to accelerate this process as opportunities present themselves. Only committed and organized popular resistance can prevail against the coming onslaught.

Our Loss

2011-05-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Gil Scott-Heron April 1, 1949 - May 27, 2011

What Is To Be Done?

2011-05-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

A common device now being utilized wherever the subject of the economy is discussed in the mainstream media these days is to treat any solution that does not first preference the needs of corporations as unserious and in need of no further pursuit. The most effective methodology is deletion of alternatives by omission--they just... don't enter into the discussion. Therefore, advocates for alternative solutions are, unsurprisingly, absent from this debate on mainstream platforms. So don't look for Michael Hudson, Dean Baker, or Richard D. Wolff on CNN, MSNBC, Faux News, or Meet the Press. Conventional wisdom has it that the solution to the financial crisis caused by Wall Street greed and malfeasance and a thirty year adherence to neoliberal policies that de-industrialized the nation and financialized the economy to the primary benefit the top 1% of "earners" is to introduce austerity measures to the population at large.

The aforementioned Dr. Wolff has illuminated an alternative strategy in his latest essay wherein he challenges the currently received wisdom that only the financial oligarchs can lead us out of the crises:

More and more we hear that nothing can be done to tax major corporations because of the threat of how they would respond. Likewise, we cannot stop their price gouging or even the government subsidies and tax loopholes they enjoy. For example, as the oil majors reap stunning profits from high oil and gas prices, we are told it is impossible to tax their windfall profits or stop the billions they get in government subsidies and tax loopholes. There appears to be no way for the government to secure lower energy prices or seriously impose and enforce environmental protection laws. Likewise, despite high and fast rising drug and medicine prices, we are told that it is impossible to raise taxes on pharmaceutical companies or have the government secure lower pharmaceutical prices. And so on.

Such steps by "our" government are said to be impossible or inadvisable. The reason: corporations would then relocate production abroad or reduce their activities in the US or both. And that would deprive the US of taxes and jobs. In plain English, major corporations are threatening us. We are to knuckle under and cut social programs that benefit millions of people (college loan programs, Medicaid, Medicare, social security, nutrition programs, and so on). We are not to demand higher taxes or lower subsidies or fewer tax loopholes for corporations. We are not to demand government action to lower their soaring prices. And if we do, corporations will punish us...
The rest...

*The art that accompanies this post comes from the pen of political cartoonist Mike Flugennok whose work pulls no punches. The rest of his work can be seen at his web site Sinkers.org. Give him a visit.

Truly Priceless

2011-02-11T20:56:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to As'ad AbuKhalil aka the Angry Arab...

Julian Assange speaks

2010-12-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

It's always important for the accused to be given the opportunity to speak on the charges against them for reasons that should be self-evident. The case of Julian Assange is of particular importance because he and, by extension, the organization he founded, Wikileaks, is under extraordinary pressure from the world's hyper-power and its many client states around the globe. Unless you've been in a coma over the past few weeks you should by now be aware that Wikileaks has snatched the sheets off of indecent activities that the powerful would prefer to remain concealed. Many talk of the importance of "speaking truth to power" which is absurd on its face when one considers the fact that power already knows the truth and certainly doesn't need to hear it from us. No, power much prefers that the truth and its implications be concealed from us and requires only our obedience. Wikileaks, to its credit, explodes this paradigm and therefore must be destroyed. The mission of Wikileaks is to allow the Great Unwashed access to the unfiltered truth of what their governments and other powerful institutions do behind closed doors and without accountability. One cannot hope to make informed decisions without access to accurate information i.e the truth, a fact well understood by those who seek to dominate the many. Wilileaks has defied the world's most powerful institutions and the people who control them in the face of ferocious reaction under the principle that the public has the right to know what decisions are being made in their name---a responsibility long abdicated by a servile, corporate media.

There are consequences for this kind of courage. As the face of Wikileaks Assange is a natural target so the rape allegations against him in Sweden have come as little surprise [I'd have bet on child-molestation]. The clumsy "investigation" that led to the charges against him have been well documented and discussed elsewhere so I won't further contribute to what I consider to be a distraction [swallowed whole-hog by much of the Left] from the actions of the US government abroad. Below is, to my knowledge, the only sit-down interview Assange has given since his release. Unsurprisingly, no platform has been offered him in the mainstream media outlets who have spared no expense in moving the conversation away from US power.

Ok, I'll buy it

2010-07-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Let's tighten those screws a bit... there, is that better?

2010-07-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

You may be forgiven if you thought recent events would have convinced Israel to loosen its stranglehold on the 1.5 million Gaza prisoners in the interest of propaganda if nothing else. Ignorance is a kind of bliss I guess, however, in this instance that ignorance would rest on the (unfounded) assumption that Israel's decision makers operate rationally. Consider the following (courtesy of Craig Murray):

By Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza City, Gaza July 4, 2010

Ketchup, mayonnaise, thread and needles are the items that were included last week by Israel on the list of those few goods now allowed into Gaza. Farming tools, spare parts for cars, toys and make-up were added to the list on Tuesday, items we watched being carried into the Strip loaded onto 130 trucks.

Taking into account the decision of the Israeli government to "loosen" the siege of Gaza by allowing the entry of more goods, B'Tselem, the Israeli organisation for human rights commented: "This is a first, tiny step towards the right direction, the direction which'll bring Israeli policy in line with its obligations."

A veritable microscopic step, considering that before the start of the siege, more than ten thousand trucks a month would drive through the Karni pass alone, and even then, these deliveries were miles away from the 500 truckfuls of goods a day (15,000 trucks a month), the minimum decreed by the United Nations to cover the basic needs of one and a half million people.
According to some Palestinian political analysts, this step might even be counterproductive, because it proposes to attempt to legitimise the siege. This is a siege that is a form of collective punishment against a civilian population. As such, it violates Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and is considered illegal by all major human rights organisations, whether governmental or otherwise, as Amnesty International and the International Red Cross have recently decreed.

Cement, iron and any other building material continues to be banned from the Strip, so much so that according to the UN, one year after the Cast Lead bombings, 75% of the damaged buildings still gape open among the rubble.
According to Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestinian refugees), Israel's new policy is an attempt to throw smoke into the eyes of the international community and hide its blatant violation of international law: "The Israeli strategy is that of getting the world to talk about a random bag of cement being let in on one side, and a sponsored project on another. What we really need is complete and free access through all the passes."

All eyes are now turned towards the mirage of the opened Israeli passes. Yet, forgetting to take note of the Egyptian border is a mistake. Rafah continues to remain semi-open, or better still…semi-closed. The Egyptian border authorities refuse to let any type of goods through, including tons of food supplies and medicine collected during the last weeks by the union of Cairo chemists. The bullies of the infamous Egyptian Mubarak, renowned for their rough treatment of Palestinian civilians, including women, children and sick people, have sent back hundreds of travellers with regular passports and visas over the past few weeks.

For internationals in Egypt who plan to come and report on what they see, or support the population of Gaza in any way, entering "the Rafah Pass" remains forbidding. John, a freelance journalist who accompanied us from the International Solidarity Movement to report on the daily harrassment that the farmers face from Israeli snipers at the border, eventually came in through the tunnels when he had grown tired of waiting for a pass that never came at Al Arish.

Italian state television is trying to put through the message that the siege has been loosened as an act of generosity on the part of the Israeli government, but the reality is indeed very different. The siege itself needs to be totally lifted, because the people here certainly don't need potato chips or toothpicks. They need cement, iron, medicine, medical supplies and all the essentials coming in the way they would normally come in…through import and export. Only that means will help boost the economy and make Gaza self-sufficient, besides opening the borders to make it possible for anyone to come into or leave this prison.
All that we have before our eyes these days is the artificial image of a tragic situation, made up to seem like an improvement after the cosmetic surgery of Israeli and Egyptian propaganda. Amid these far-reaching echoes of propaganda, Tony Blair's congratulations to Israel for the alleged "loosening" of its blockade comes across as a strident contradition. Behind the smile of Blair, one the of puppet masters of the Quartet (USA, EU, Russia and UN) who for years has produced nothing but useless press releases, is all the rot of the stone caryatids jointly holding up the current Iraqi genocide, as well as the political laxity of European governments in the face of the Palestinian tragedy.

I'm keen to remind Tony Blair that if two extra bags of flour enter the besieged Strip, it certainly isn't thanks to his work within the castrated quartet, or any other institution in charge of resolving the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It's actually thanks to the sacrifices over many years of thousands of ordinary civilians throughout the world committed to the rights of Palestinians. It's an effort that has culminated in the murder of nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara, much the same way as before them, Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie gave their lives for the good of Gaza.

On the eve of the second Gulf war, the New York Times coined the phrase "second world power", to define the global pacifist movement that filled thousands of squares around the world. These civilians were protesting against a war "that never before in history had been met with as much blatant hostility." Well, that second world power has now joined us on the field and is siding with the Palestinians: it is now Israel that's under siege.

Stay human.

Vittorio Arrigoni from Gaza city
(translated by Daniela Filippin)

Fascinating, it's so ugly up close

2010-06-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Damon Vrabel:

I highly recommend the rest of this series...

Mr. Phillips, a few words if you don't mind...

2010-06-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -
he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor,
I will henceforth cease to work." Hah! You don't have to go to college to
figure these things out, no sir! He said, "I learned when I was young that the
only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real
life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain
to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption
that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?"
Fat chance!

He was old enough to remember the sleigh rods under the boxcars, riding the
rods. Fry Pan Jack; the two bums.

the bum on the rods is hunted down as an enemy of mankind
the other is driven around to his club, is fatted, wined, and dined

and they who curse the bum on the rods as the essence of all that's bad
will greet the other with a winning smile and extend the hand so glad

the bum on the rods is a social flea who gets an occasional bite
the bum on the plush is a social leech, bloodsucking day and night

the bum on the rods is a load so light that his weight we scarcely feel
but it takes the labor of dozens of folks to furnish the other a meal

as long as we sanction the bum on the plush, the other will always be there
but rid ourselves of the bum on the plush, and the other will disappear

and make an intelligent, organized kick: get rid of the wasted crush
don't worry about the bum on the rods - get rid of the bum on the plush
-Utah Phillips (collected stories, songs, & poems)

You know some of my best friends are...

2010-06-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

How odd. Try as I might I couldn't find a single word in the New York Times today about the 100,000 ultra orthodox Jews who marched in Jerusalem in support of segregation. I'm sure it was just an oversight... front page tomorrow you'll see.

(Hat tip: War in Context)

Doh!

2010-06-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

Below is the damning footage that got away as far as the Israelis are concerned for they were no doubt secure in the belief that they had confiscated and destroyed all the embarrassing footage of their Pirates of the Mediterranean escapade. This footage is courtesy of Cultures of Resistance.org (hit tip: War in Context)

It couldn't be helped you see, they attacked us with sticks

2010-05-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

Yes. The Israeli Apartheid State is that venal, not to mention criminally inept:

What's that? You say you object to a commando raid--in international waters--upon a civilian mission to relieve some of the suffering of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants currently under a criminal embargo? Well that will get you this:

this,

and ultimately this,

The young woman in the above images is 21 year old American activist and artist Emily Henochowicz who was protesting the commando assault on relief efforts along with many others at the Qalandiya checkpoint which separates the West Bank from the Usurping Entity. Emily will lose her left eye.

OOOh Yeahh!

2010-05-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

US income inequality in all its graphic glory

2010-04-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

When all of one's fears come to pass

2010-04-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

As we watch the Goldman Sachs con men twist and shout before a suddenly agitated Senate banking committee shocked, shocked! to hear that there's rampant fraud on Wall Street I think it's instructive to revisit a bygone era when similar forces were arrayed against the interests of the general population yet the warnings went unheeded. Courtesy of Jessie's Cafe Americain:

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations; and from their habits and the nature of their pursuits, they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to act together with united force. Such concert of action may sometimes be produced in a single city or in a small district of country by means of personal communications with each other; but they have no regular or active correspondence with those who are engaged in similar pursuits in distant places. They have but little patronage to give the press and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their countenance and favor and who are, therefore, always ready to exercise their wishes.
-Andrew Jackson farewell address
The rest...

Twain Revisited

2010-04-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

I was rummaging through the archives of the Socialist Worker website when I ran across this gem from the great satirist:

Oh Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded...help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the waste of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. -Mark Twain The War Prayer

Isn't it funny how we never had the opportunity to explore this aspect of him in school? The rest...

So... what'd I miss?

2010-04-09T01:29:00.000-07:00

As I slowly ease back into this blogging thing I think it's important that I share with you this little nugget from the incomparable Wikileaks organization. Yes children, it's good to see that Uncle Sam is still winning precious hearts and minds over in Iraq one at a time...

A Soldier's Story

2009-12-24T05:18:00.000-08:00

When cannon fodder become self aware, the Empire has not long to thrive. Let's encourage this trend.

The Power of Money

2009-12-17T14:26:00.000-08:00

The truth is there really is no better argument for publicly funded elections than the Barockstar's triumph. Think about it. Tens of millions raised during the past election cycle by the FIRE sector and viola! The greatest heist of the public purse in recorded human history with the bailouts and the continuation of pay as you go "healthcare" only now with the state acting as a handy coercion mechanism will soon be the new normal. This latter legislation has been accurately described by Arthur Silber as the Fuck You To Death Act by the way for there is no better description.

That always fascinating interplay between the money of the owning classes and the elected officials alleged to be working in our interest is by far the surest method of maintaining--and in the case with the Wall Street giveaway--"improving" the status quo. Since so much has already been written about the successful heist of the US Treasury by the Wall Street hustlers I thought I'd draw some attention to an essay by Louis Proyect where he details how the process works on a smaller, perhaps more digestible scale. In this example we follow the exploits of local southern California titans Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of Paramount Farms which is the largest grower of almonds and pistachio nuts in the world and also, among other things, the Franklin Mint which should be familiar to insomniacs across the American landscape.

Bonus:
This story may be the most humorous of 2009 as we witness a hapless entrepreneur suffer the unintended consequences of greed and exploitation when Kung Fu monkeys attack. (hat tip to Elaine Supkis at Culture of Life News)

Negotiation Not Imposition

2009-12-16T21:10:00.000-08:00

So say the workers of British Airways. Management at BA hoped to use the recession/depression as an opportunity to rape-stomp the workforce but have now run into a bit of a snag. Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb fills in the details of this superb worker action.

Pardon the detour...

2009-12-09T22:57:00.000-08:00

... but she's back:

Goodness gracious how that boosts my spirits! Back to regularly scheduled bitching a bit later.

War Is Peace

2009-12-09T05:06:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the long absence but I really needed the rest for I found myself in something of a rut creatively. Perhaps it was a case of Obama fatigue what with the Prince of Peace predictably delivering the goods for his primary constituents on Wall Street, the war profiteers feeding at the Pentagon trough, and the "healthcare" industry vampires. In any event, the Barockstar has officially taken ownership of the "good" war in Af/Pak with his major escalation speech at West Point so I may as well deal with it in this little space of mine. That's the plan at least. I've had the outlines of a few essays on this theme rolling around in my head for quite awhile now and I think it's about time they saw the light of day. In the meantime I'd like to leave you with a few words from Chris Floyd for whom it can never be said, "the guy just doesn't get it".

The Killing Business

2009-11-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

Why again is it that they hate us so? Oh yes, for our freedoms.

Wall falls but myths endure

2009-11-01T16:35:00.000-08:00

Though the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is nearly upon us I've noticed that celebratory gestures commemorating this event from the usual quarters seem a bit strained. Why the long faces? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the crumbling facade of capitalism, of which Margaret Thatcher famously declared There Is No Alternative, lay somewhere near the reason. Two years into its worst crisis since the Great Depression has exposed "capitalism" as practiced over the past 30 years in the US and among its acolytes as a ponzi scheme and cruel hoax on the overwhelming majority of people. Kind of spoils the party I guess.

Conventional wisdom encourages the belief that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the "defeat of socialism" as a practical ideology. This popular fiction rests on the central conceit that socialism was the really existing system of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites and not a form of state capitalism. Phil Gasper explores this theme in the following essay published in Socialist Worker.
An excerpt:

The collapse of Communism--or, more accurately, Stalinism--in the Eastern bloc did result in triumphalism among supporters of Western-style capitalism, and it led to widespread demoralization among large sections of the left because they shared the belief that these regimes were in some sense socialist or "workers' states."

But this characterization of the Eastern European countries was based on the assumption that socialism can be defined in terms of state ownership of the economy. Since in all of them, the economy had been largely state-run since the late 1940s, it followed that they were socialist, no matter what their other imperfections.

The rest...

Meanwhile on the Wall Street fraud front...

2009-10-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

Commercial real estate is the next shoe to drop in our ongoing financial crisis and in order to protect the reckless the (alleged) regulatory agencies who did such a bang up job as the underlying conditions for the present debacle developed, have relaxed the accounting requirements for banks holding the notes on those underwater shopping malls littering the country. And in whose face are these time-bombs set to blow up in the not too distant future? You guested it, the taxpayer.

Dirty Laundry

2009-10-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

Every once in a great while a member of the ruling class or, more often than not, one of its lackeys will find themselves grappling with their conscience and succumb to its influence. John Perkins faithfully served his masters for decades as an economist for a US based consulting and engineering firm that specialized in convincing the ruling elites of developing nations to take on massive debt in the form of World Bank and/or IMF loans for construction projects of negligible indigenous economic benefit but a source of windfall profits for western corporations and their investors. Perkins lays out all of the sordid details in his memoir Confessions of an Economic Hit-man but provides a handy Cliff-Notes version in this interview:

Big Government

2009-10-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

I’m always amused when I hear complaints about “big government” (wink to Rue St. Michael) and how if only it would stop hampering “innovation” with its incessant meddling we’d all be on Peach Street for damn sure. When will this myth die the bloody death it so richly deserves? Oh well, maybe this little nugget courtesy of Naked Capitalism will help clear the air for those who still, even after Big Government was last seen shoveling tax dollars like a son-of-a-bitch into the coffers of the insolvent financial institutions primarily responsible for destroying the world economy, think Big Government serves anything but the ruling elite:

Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps — insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations….

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.

The rest...

The Dog -&-(dead)Pony-Show

2009-10-20T01:57:00.000-07:00

Joe Bagent checks in with an amusing update on the state of Obama's America. An excerpt:

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage [of the US economy] lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.
-Joe Bagent

The rest...

Do yourself a solid

2009-10-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

... and read Ladypoverty.

Happy Genocide Appreciation Day!

2009-10-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

A must read (for The Children of course):

Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James W. Loewen

(Notes on above title by Colby Glass)

Columbus discovered America and proved that the earth was not flat... Right?
We tend to "underplay previous explorers" (39). There were probably 15 or more individuals and groups that "discovered" and settled America before Columbus.
"Even if Columbus had never sailed, other Europeans would have soon reached the Americas... Columbus's voyage.. was epoch-making because of the way in which Europe responded" (39).

"The changes in Europe not only prompted Columbus's voyage.. they also paved the way for Europe's domination of the world for the next five hundred years. Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential development in human history" (41-2).
"..new and more deadly forms of smallpox and bubonic plague had arisen in Europe.. Passed on to those the Europeans met, these diseases helped Europe conquer the Americas and, later, the islands of the Pacific" (44).

"Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the indians was inevitable if not natural" (44).
"Most important, [Columbus's] prupose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale. If textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently about why the West dominates the world today" (45).

Washington Irving created the lie that people thought the earth was flat until Columbus proved that it was round (57).

What is the real significance of Columbus's reaching the Americas? What made his trip different than the fifteen discoverers who preceded him?
"Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass" (60).

"When Columbus and his men returned to Haiti in 1493, they demanded food, gold, spun cotton--whatever the Indians had that they wanted, including sex with their women. To ensure cooperation, Columbus used punishment by example. When an Indian committed even a minor offense, the Spanish cut off his ears or nose" (61).
"..attempts at resistance gave Columbus an excuse to make war... For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 cavalry, with many crossbows and small cannon, lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon against the Indians, in addition to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned loose and immediately tore the Indians apart" (61).

"Columbus.. initiated a great slave raid. They rounded up 1,500 Arawaks, then selected the 500 best specimines (of whom 200 would die en route to Spain. Another 500 were chosen as slaves for the Spaniards staying on the island" (62).
"Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system... The Indians all promised to pay tribute.. every three months... With a fresh token, an Indian was safe for three months, much of which time would be devoted to collecting more gold... the Spanish punished those whose tokens had expired: they cut off their hands" (62).

"Columbus installed the encomienda system, in which he granted or "commended" entire Indian villages to individual colonists or groups of colonists... On Haiti the colonists made the Indians mine gold for them, raise Spanish food, and even carry them everywhere they went" (63). An Spanish observer wrote that "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured [under this virtual slavery], the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery"" (63).

"Estimates of Haiti's pre-Columbian population range as high as 8,000,000 people... a census of Indian adults in 1496.. came up with 1,100,000... "By 1516," according to Benjamin Keen, "thanks to the sinister Indian slave trade and labor policies initiated by Columbus, only some 12,000 remained." Las Casas tells us that fewer than 200 Indians were alive in 1542. By 1555, they were all gone" (63).

".. one of the primary instances of genocide in all human history" (64).
"Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves--about five thousand--than any other individual... other nations rushed to emulate Columbus" (64).

"As soon as the 1493 expedition got to the Caribbean, before it even reached Haiti, Columbus was rewarding his lieutenants with native women to rape. On Haiti, sex slaves were one more perquisite that the Spaniards enjoyed. Columbus wrote a friend in 1500, "... it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand"" (65).

"Columbus is not a hero in Mexico... Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. "No sensible Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of Columbus." Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history" (70).

"The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus in our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism... the Columbus myth allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than a historical product issuing from a process that began with Columbus's first voyage" (70).

I'd like to thank the Academy...

2009-10-09T14:41:00.000-07:00

The Nobel committee issued a clarification explaining that Obama was actually awarded the "Rest In Peace Prize", in recognition of becoming the most prolific active killer on the planet and thereby ushering so many human beings beyond this vale of tears to their eternal rest. "By helping thousands of men, women, and children achieve ultimate peace, and showing every sign that he intends to do the same for thousands more, Barack Obama has truly earned this prestigious award."-John Caruso (A Distant Ocean)

Sur-Prize, Sur-Prize!!

A Nobel, who’d a thunk it? For peace! So... let me get this straight, Obomba whose administration is now contemplating the delivery of an additional 40,000 troops to the Af/Pak war of conquest while garrisoning thousands more in permanent mega bases surrounding the cites of illegally occupied Iraq... is deserving of a Nobel? For peace?

I’ll tell you the truth, I’m far more amused by the nervous twitter from the war profiteers and their media mouthpieces who fear the Obomb’s hands may be tied by the rising expectations of a peace dividend from those around the world living in the vain hope that the US will no longer behave as a rogue state. They needn’t have worried. Take this from Obomba’s Nobel acceptance speech:

“I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.
Now, these challenges can't be met by any one leader or any one nation. And that's why my administration's worked to establish a new era of engagement in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek. We cannot tolerate a world in which nuclear weapons spread to more nations and in which the terror of a nuclear holocaust endangers more people”

As John Caruso of The Distant Ocean points out the Barockstar used his ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE to reiterate his administration’s threats against Iran. Threats by the way which include the possibility of a nuclear strike against this non-nuclear power. Imagine it, 10 million or more dead Neda’s.

Speechify'in

2009-10-02T02:29:00.000-07:00

Could you imagine a declaration such as this from a modern American politician?

From here on out the U.S. exists for the sole purpose of making you the people's life as healthy and meaningless-toil free as possible, with as much true leisure as can be accomplished, so that you may have time to grow, and think and come to know what sages know before their time is over. The government exists solely to ensure that you can be as straight, queer, or transgender or as deviant as you so choose, so long as no one is harmed. And to be as idle as you choose, yet be guaranteed the minimum entitlement of all human beings, food, shelter and civil liberty. To be as much or as little as you choose to be, and to be educated enough to make that choice.

I hereby announce that this government exists so as to preserve the earth, not so it can serve us longer, but so that we may serve the earth longer, better and with complete humility for the only mother we ever had or will have. Let us now wage peace against every war making entity on the planet. Tomorrow morning at 8 AM I will cancel the space program and its interstellar wastefulness and reassign those resources to the hungriest people not just here in America, but across the world. I herein declare the American era of material prosperity officially closed for business, which I admit is no great accomplishment, given that it is already over and dead...

All citizen debts are canceled and banks as we know them are abolished. Money is abolished, to be replaced with a system of social credits based upon planetary sustainability, meaningful and useful human productivity and an economy of human labor and art. I order the elites who have held captive the people's medium of exchange, then rented it back to them creating a nation of debt slaves, immediately to prison without any trials by the judicial commissariat who have always served their interests....

Ahhh yes, one can dream can’t he? Ramble on Joe, ramble on.

Awesome

2009-09-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

I have no words for this:

Winning hearts and minds one at a time

2009-09-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

"I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn't let his children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son."
Yes we can!

We've got that good shit!

2009-09-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

What was the name of that damn movie where the Nicolas Cage character observes that the President of the United States is, hands down, the most prolific arms dealer on earth?

Oops I did again!

2009-09-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

[To the theme of Brittany Spears' hit from nine years ago] The man just can't help himself. That's right, the Barockstar tosses another brother under the bus. It would appear that Van Jones, the Obama administration's Green Jobs "czar", spoke some uncomfortable truths in the past that has made his position in the timid, accommodationist regime untenable so, in the tradition of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he had to go. What, were you expecting a different outcome? Puleeze! Chris Floyd explores the parallels between the present "controversy" and the events involving Rev. Wright last year.

News you can use...

2009-09-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

... but won't see or hear in the US. Yep, they're gassing journalists now who dare to report and bear witness to Apartheid Israel's policies in and around the illegally Occupied Territories:

The Billion-Dollar-Gram

2009-09-05T05:57:00.000-07:00

I recently found this helpful diagram over in the comments section of Lenin's Tomb and it perfectly encapsulates the priorities of our erstwhile rulers as they navigate the current crisis of their own making.

Pilger on Obama and Empire

2009-09-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Znet:

[Author, journalist, film maker John Pilger speaks at Socialism 2009 www.socialistworker.org; wwwhaymarketbooks.org Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Womens Building in San Francisco 7-4-09. Text from talk below...]

Two years ago, at Socialism in Chicago, I spoke about an "invisible government", a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented "public relations" as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation; he called cigarettes "torches of freedom".

The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together the power of all media - PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising. It was the power of form: of branding and image-making over substance and truth - and I would like to talk today about this invisible government's most recent achievement: the rise of Barack Obama and the silencing of the left.
First, I would like to go back some 40 years to a sultry day in Vietnam.

I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a company of US Marines who had been sent to this village to win hearts and minds.

"My orders", said the Marine sergeant, "are to sell the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86." Page 86 was headed WHAM: Winning Hearts and Minds. The marine unit was a Combined Action Company which, explained the sergeant, "means that we attack these folks on Mondays and win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays". He was joking, though not quite.

The sergeant, who didn't speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up in a jeep and said through a bullhorn: "Come on out everybody, we got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you!..."
There was silence.

"Now listen, either you gooks come on out, or we're going to come right in there and get you!"
The people of Tuylon finally came out, and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben's Miracle Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.

And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned, and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and produced a hand-written speech.
"Mr. District Chief and all you nice people," he said, "what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there's no place on earth like America. It's the land where miracles happen. It's a guiding light for me, and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune."

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background.
Of course, the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about. When the Marines clapped, they clapped. When the colonel waved, the children waved. As he departed, the colonel shook the sergeant's hand and said : "You've got plenty of hearts and minds here. Carry on, Sergeant."
"Yessir."

In Vietnam, I witnessed many spectacles like that. I had grown up in faraway Australia on a steady cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, the Three Stooges and Ronald Reagan. The American Way of Liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook.
I learned that the United States had won World War Two on its own and now led the "free world" as the "chosen" society. It was only much latter when I read Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion that I understood something of the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad history.

Historians call this "exceptionalism" - the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls liberty to the rest of humanity. Of course, this is a very old refrain; the French and British created and celebrated their own "civilising mission" while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties.
However, the power of the American message is different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to rule Nicaragua, American text books referred to an "age of innocence". American motives were well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said. There was no ideology, they said; and this is still the received wisdom. Indeed, Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main element is its denial that it is an ideology. It is both conservative and liberal, both right and left. All else is heresy.

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this "ism". Since Obama was elected, leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as a "nation of moral ideals" - the words of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that "spiritually advanced people regard the new president as 'a Lightworker'... who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet".

Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama's bombs, or a Pakistani child whose family are among the 700 civilians killed by Obama's drones. Or Tell it to a child in the carnage of Gaza caused by American smart weapons which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter "only after the Obama team let it be known it would not object". The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
Obama's is the myth that is America's last taboo. His most consistent theme was never change; it was power. The United States, he said, "leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good ... We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people." And there is this remarkable statement: "At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that a we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders." At the National Archives on May 21, he said: "From Europe to the Pacific, we've been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law."

Since 1945, "by deed and by example", the United States has overthrown fifty governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements, and supported tyrannies and set up torture chambers from Egypt to Guatemala. Countless men, women and children have been bombed to death. Bombing is apple pie. And yet, here is the 44th President of the United States, having stacked his government with warmongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, teasing us while promising more of the same.

Here is the House of Representatives, controlled by Obama's Democrats, voting to approve $16 billion for three wars and a coming presidential military budget which, in 2009, will exceed any year since the end of World War Two, including the spending peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars. And here is a peace movement, not all of it but much of it, prepared to look the other way and believe or hope that Obama will restore, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, the "nation of moral ideals".

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa's grotto of war and conquest, where messages about their nation's "great mission" were lit up. These included tributes to the quote "exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives" in Vietnam where they were quote "determined to stop communist expansion". In Iraq, other brave Americans quote "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision".
What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times but the sheer routine scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have much in common. The wars of both presidents, and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy, are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America - a myth the late Harold Pinter described as "a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis".
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is so extraordinary to see an African-American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race - together with gender and even class -- can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what matters, above race and gender, is the class one serves.

George Bush's inner circle - from the State Department to the Supreme Court - was perhaps the most multi racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.
To many, Obama's very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Beneton, he is a brand that promises something special - something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He's post-modern man with no political baggage.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting house to multinational corporations". For some reason, he does not say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions and the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia.
Obama does not say what he did at Business International; and there may be nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of enquiry, and debate, surely, as a clue to whom the man is.

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single-payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority and has not. Instead, he has excused the perpetrators of torture, re-instated the infamous military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact and opposed habeus corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg was right when he said that, under Bush, a military coup had taken place in the United States, giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates, a Bush family crony and George W. Bush's secretary of defence, and by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In Colombia, Obama is planning to spend $46 million on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington's intervention in Latin America.
In a pseudo-event staged in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China.

In a pseudo-event at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that the troops were coming home. The head of the army, General George Casey, says America will be in Iraq for up to a decade; other generals say fifteen years. Units will be re-labelled as trainers; mercenaries will take their place. That is how the Vietnam war endured past the American "withdrawal".

Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion puts it well. "President Obama," he wrote, "does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel." And so you are kept in "a perpetual state of childishness". He calls this "junk politics".
The tragedy is that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the anti war movement, the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand against Obama's and Nancy Pelosi's war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 billion for more war.

In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its members can't even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, says her people aren't turning up because, "it's enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction". And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in February, MoveOn's executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?
Yes, a lot of good people mobilised for Obama. But what did they demand of him - apart from the amorphous "change"? That isn't activism.
Activism doesn't give up. Activism is not about identity politics. Activism doesn't wait to be told. Activism doesn't rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, "I felt a lot better when I gave up hope". Real activism has little time for identity politics, a distraction that confuses and suckers good people everywhere.

I write for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February, I sent the foreign editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why? I asked. "For the moment," wrote the editor, "we prefer to maintain a more 'positive' approach to the novelty presented by Obama... we will take on specific issues... but we would not like to say that he will make no difference."
In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history is ordained and de-politicised by the left. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that the so-called radical left has never been more aware, more conscious, of the iniquities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions of people, so that almost every child knows something about global warming; and yet there is a resistance within the green movement to the notion of power as a military project. Similar observations can be made of the gay and feminist movements; as for the labour movement, is it still breathing?

One of my favourite quotations is from Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy. Long ago, Bernays's invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The American Way of Life began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today, we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity, thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity is to recognise a stirring in America that is unfamiliar to many on the left, but is related to a great popular movement growing all over the world.

In Latin America, less than 20 years ago, there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. There is now a people's movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and a history of popular and revolutionary struggle less affected by ideological distortions than anywhere else.
The recent, amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. These successes are expressed perversely in the overthrow of the government of Honduras, for the smaller the country the greater the threat that the contagion of emancipation will follow.

Across the world, social movements and grass-roots organisations have emerged to fight free market dogma. They have educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem rather than a solution to global poverty. They have politicised ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. An authentic globalization is growing as never before, and this is exciting.

Consider the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign - BDS for short - aimed at Israel, that is sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to built a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities have begun to sever ties with Israel, and students are active for the first time in a generation. Thanks to them, Israel's South Africa moment is approaching, for this is, partly, how apartheid was defeated.

In the 1950s, we never expected the great wind of the 1960s to blow. Feel the breeze today. In the last eight months millions of angry emails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. This has not happened before. People are outraged as their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the massive mass presented by the media.
Look at the polls that are seldom reported. More than two thirds of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves; 64 per cent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone; 59 per cent are favourable towards unions; 70 per cent want nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US completely out of Iraq; and so on.
For too long, ordinary Americans have been cast in stereotypes that are contemptuous. That is why the progressive attitudes of ordinary people are seldom reported in the media. They are not ignorant. They are subversive. They are informed. And they are "anti-American".

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian, Martha Gellhorn, to explain "anti-American" to me. "I'll tell you what 'anti-American' is," she said. "It's what governments and their vested interested call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America's citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional."

A certain populism is once again growing in America and which has a proud, if forgotten past. In the nineteenth century, an authentic grass-roots Americanism was expressed in populism's achievements: women's suffrage, the campaign for an eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership of railways and communications, and breaking the power of corporate lobbyists.

The American populists were far from perfect; at times they would keep bad company, but they spoke from the ground up, not from the top down. They were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. Does that sound familiar?

What Obama and the bankers and the generals, and the IMF and the CIA and CNN fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It is a fear as old as democracy: a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action and are guided by the truth. "At a time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth a revolutionary act."
www.johnpilger.com

Paul Street answers a silly question

2009-08-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

At a recent debate here in Chicago with John Wilson, a former student of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law school, left historian Paul Street explored the question of whether or not Obama is actually progressive:

Is Barack Obama a progressive? John Wilson says "yes," I say "no." But how much does the question really matter at the end of the day? Obama wasn't selected to head the United Way or the White Sox. He's chief executive of the American Empire. He is a politician above all - one who was selected to sit atop and, I think, to re-brand what the left-liberal political scientist Sheldon Wolin rightly calls "Democracy, Incorporated."

Every four years millions of American voters are induced to put their political hats on, to hope a bit, and then to go back to sleep. To hope that a savior or at least a more effective manager can be installed in the White House to raise wages, roll back war and militarism, provide universal and adequate health care, rebuild infrastructure, fix the environmental crisis, reduce inequality, and generally make life more livable.
-the rest...

The Future

2009-08-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

In tomorrow's America, the "free-trade" Nirvana in which the republic's last native industry has finally bitten the dust (along with the last unionized workforce) and where the concept of value added labor and the production of things of public utility are as passe as the dodo bird one cannot but marvel at the inextinguishable American ingenuity that manages to bubble to surface and exploit the silver lining in bad situation:

Just a reminder

2009-08-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

Do read Ladypoverty...

In the event you'd forgotten...

2009-08-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Given for what passes for journalism in the US you can be forgiven. In any event there's a place in the world where the population reacts to the usurpation of their rights with more than a shrug of the shoulders and a yawn [sound like someplace familiar?]. Hondurans and those throughout the region who support them in their struggle against the US-backed coup continue to demonstrate what fighting for democracy actually looks like.

[Hat tip to American Leftist]

Flailing, Failing, and Wailing

2009-08-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

It's not easy these uphill battles. I'm certainly not the only one around trying to keep a positive outlook in the face of overwhelming odds but there are times (given how atomized we are) where you begin to wonder. Does anyone else notice how fucked we are? I'm not just talking about the mindless droning one finds in the mainstream media since mass distraction is its primary function. No, I'm referring to those whom I encounter during the course of a day, a week, over the last 9 months. Few seem to have a fucking clue that the party of credit-fueled mass consumerism is over. I cannot bear to count the number of conversations I've had with people in which they conclude that "recovery is around the corner" or "things will turn around". Really? Turn around to what? Can a return to the previous status quo of "free trade" madness in which the rapid deindustrialization of the US (and thus living-wage jobs) coupled with massive trade deficits with trade rivals continue unabated be really considered a "recovery" by thinking people? Recovery is the return to consumerism as 70% of GDP while producing virtually nothing of social utility? I'm stumped.

The one great "innovation" of the last thirty years, essentially the financialization of the US economy, leading directly to the unregulated alphabet soup derivative market (MBS, CDS, SIV...) has been revealed in all of its naked glory as a world-encompassing fraud while its engineers are bailed out and STILL motherfuckers believe "recovery" is just around the corner!

None grasp that their new hero in the White House works tirelessly to ensure that the war criminals of the Bush administration who made a mockery of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the UN Charter in route to looting Iraq at the cost of over a million lives as well as tens of thousands more in decimated Afghanistan never stand before a grand jury. It's the apathy I'm having trouble dealing with these days though given the fact that Americans are perhaps the most de-politicized population in the world I shouldn't be surprised and yet there it is. The bastards seem to be winning and I don't see anywhere near enough people irritated enough to give a damn much less take collective action against the fact. About those bastards who rule us Joe Bageant had this to say...

Choices, Choices

2009-08-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

What's the O-Bomb gonna do? Folks are hurting everywhere but folks aren't all the same you see. On the one hand are millions of Americans who have been or soon will be tossed out of their places of residence but on the other hand there's the folks who rule the roost and now find themselves short of cash. Oh the agony of command!

Obama vs. Obama

2009-07-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

The following public service announcement comes courtesy of Mark Fiore:

Big thanks to Dennis Perrin for introducing me to both Fiore above and Dwayne Monroe who authored the following message to disappointed Obamaniacs:

I know you're unhappy.

You tell me, via email, text messages, tweets, listserv posts and maybe even tachyon bursts I'm not yet equipped to receive.

You tell me -- and the world -- you're disheartened by Obama's velvet gloved treatment of ibanks, his failure to "take advantage of a good crisis." His inability to speak to any group of black people without yammering on about "personal responsibility" (a theme conspicuously absent from his speeches before mostly white audiences).

His escalation of the Afghan war. His supposedly groundbreaking national medical insurance plan which, once closely examined, looks an awful lot like a funds transfer program for the pharma and private insurance sectors.

His continuation of Bush era surveillance programs. His backtracking on same sex unions. His... by the gods, I could go on, but why?

Listen mates, I have some bad news for you and your ruined dreams...

You should have paid closer attention during the campaign. You should've spent a little less time shouting about new, "post-racial" politics, the excitement of "young people" and Obama's polished, upper management style of presentation and more time thinking through the totally predictable implications of the things he said.

What the hell did you think he meant when he said he was going to "step up" US efforts in Afghanistan? Air drop delicious snake cakes and DVDs? When a potential or sitting POTUS announces a "renewed effort" he (and one day soon, she) means only one thing: bombs, blood and blasting.

I know, that's three things.

Months ago, when you read stories about Obama's popularity among our well-fed hedge funders, what did you think that meant? Wall Street loves "diversity"? It meant those mercenaries were pointing their mojo wands towards the guy they felt would produce superior ROI.

And so on.

During the campaign months, many of you wankers (and yes, I love you but...) accused me of being cynical. Why didn't I open my heart and believe in change? Change! My black and tan amigos y amigas were dismayed I wasn't happy to see the ultimate example of a black face in a high place. Dreams, no longer deferred!

Well-intentioned pink skins scratched their heads, puzzled by my lack of glee at their non-racist action: voting for a black chief exec. Look at us!

To be cynical however, you have to be a disappointed romantic. Within each cynic's skull throbs a mind longing to believe with the fervency of a "Twilight" fan. My objections weren't cynical. I simply took Mr. Obama at his word and factored in the history of the office he sought.

So there you are, upset and worried. You're upset by how things have turned out. You're worried that unless Obama does this or does that -- zigs instead of zags, kerpluks instead of plukeriking -- his presidency will fail. Which is hella odd: what presidencies have succeeded and by whose criteria?

I recommend spending no more than five, maybe ten minutes being disappointed. And perhaps an extra half hour musing on the various things the President should do to save his historic legacy.

Pretty pictures will do

2009-07-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I found myself in a rather long and tedious discussion with my brother over the state of the US and its relation to the rest of the world in general. For what seemed like hours he tried to convince me (and perhaps himself) that the sainted Obama administration was really, despite all evidence to the contrary, a force for change in the world. For example, when I mentioned the contrast in the Obama administration's response to the disputed elections in Iran to the coup in the one nation upon which the US exerts the most influence in Latin America, Honduras, he dissolved into to a cloud of semantics, disparately grasping at anything that would explain away the clear hypocrisy. Nuance aside, there's little difference between the Obama administration's handling of the Honduran crisis and what could have been expected of the Bush II regime that preceded it.

The same of course applies the Obama's handling of the financial crisis foisted upon us by the Wall Street hustlers and their bankrupt free-trade ideology. This is the part that really gets to the heart of my frustration with Obamaniacs such as my brother. Like most Americans, if he is not directly effected by an issue he just can't be bothered by the matter. So when it comes to our illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation or the material support for ethnic cleansing on the other side of the globe well... that stuff's so out of the way and we're very busy. Well at least we used to be before half a million of us per month were losing our jobs as the Obama administration endeavors to move heaven and earth to save the very malefactors who decimated the economy (such as it is). Unlike the remote controlled, robot bombing of wedding parties the economic meltdown is something most American's can feel directly yet still there is a sizable number of people (my brother among them) who refuse to connect the dots to the policies of an administration filled to the brim with Goldman Sachs alums. Yes, cracks are starting to appear in Obama's polling numbers but we still have a long way to go before the financial oligarchy he serves starts to feel the heat.

Mad Max

2009-07-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

Max Keiser (my new favorite financial analyst) takes it to Goldman Sachs below. When's he going to get a platform on CNBC I wonder?

Part 2:

Update: Elaine Supkis fleshes this matter out in a very good post recently.

US torture revisited

2009-06-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

Here's the part the neo-con apologists for US torture never emphasize (hat tip "David" at EMS News):

"Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps 'the party began…They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.'...Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood 'all over my feet' through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes."
–Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact
The rest

Change in the air

2009-06-24T00:42:00.001-07:00

What? Can't you feel that? Ok, don't take my word for it then, just check the record...

The beautiful lies we tell

2009-06-18T23:57:00.000-07:00

It's funny how no matter what your instincts seem to tell you about the current economic crisis, punditry-land can't wait to direct your attention to the latest signs of "green shoots" making their way through the cracks thus signaling the imminent return of the go-go recent past. Sure, the economy is shedding jobs at the rate of 600,000 per month and the American auto industry has been allowed to sink beneath the waves (those parts not wholly owned by foreign competitors) while trillions in taxpayer funds have been shoveled to the insolvent financial institutions that drove us over the cliff, but ignore all that if you will. You see, this time the very economists who missed the dangerous growth of the largest asset bubble in history and clapped like circus seals as the deregulated financial sector "innovated" the Derivative Beast into existence which now exceeds the combined GDP of the entire world in notational value are now on the case and ask that you trust their sober judgement on this.

Dmitry Orlov neatly splashes cold water on this nonsense in his latest speech. An excerpt:

Economics is not directly lethal, and economists never get sent to jail for criminal negligence or gross incompetence even when their theories do fail. Finance is about the promises we make to each other, and to ourselves. And if the promises turn out to be unrealistic, then economics and finance turn out to be about the lies we tell each other. We want to continue believing these lies, because there is a certain loss of face if we don't, and the economists are there to help us. We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

I highly recommend you read the speech in full. Sobering indeed.

Boo Hoo

2009-06-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

The hand wringing and tear jerking over the outcome of the presidential election in Iran continues unabated in the west. Is anyone really surprised? If it seems as though there was but a fraction of this distress among the western punditry over the suspicious outcome of the contest in Mexico where the neoliberal standard bearer Felipe Calderon "won" you aren't imagining things. The following is a handy guide for easy referral the next time a foreign election turns out the "wrong way" and elicits the kind of media hysterics we're suffering through at the moment. This courtesy of the "Angry Arab", As'ad AbuKhalil:

Western Primer on Elections in Developing Countries

Some Western principles in assessing elections in developing countries:

1) When the favored candidates win, the elections are free and fair. And when they lose, elections are certainly unfree and stolen.

2) Violent protests against elections that produce winners favored by the West, are to be strictly condemned and protesters are to be called terrorists, hooligans and mobs (can you imagine if Lebanese opposition supporters were to engage in violent protests against the election results in Lebanon), while violent protests against enemies of the US when they win elections (like in Moldova) are to be admired (and the protesters in those cases are called "democracy activists".

3) It is not against free elections to have Western governments interfere in elections and in funding candidates through Western groups for the promotion of democracy.

4) Candidates (or even dictators) who serve Western interests are automatically labeled as "reform candidates" (even the Saudi tyrant is referred to as "reform-minded"), while candidates who oppose Western economic and political interests are to be labeled enemies of reform....

6) Western observers of elections are always on hand to declare an election unfair and rigged if the favored candidates lose.

7) The corruption of pro-US candidates (like the March 14 bunch in Lebanon) is preferred to the corruption of, say, Mugabe.

8) The democratic credentials of dictators immediately improve if they change their policies toward the US and if they express willingness to serve US economic and political interests.

9) Countries where dictators do a good job in serving US economic and political interests need not hold elections.

10) If favored candidates can't guarantee electoral victory (like the Palestinian Authority's Abu Mazen, whose term has expired months ago), they don't need to hold elections and will be treated as if they won an election anyway.

11) It is just not logical to assume that people in developing countries can freely ever decide to make choices that are not consistent with political and economic interests of the US....
-As'ad AbuKhalil

Bear in mind as you read the following analysis from Paul Craig Roberts over the events in Iran that outside of the opposition's assertions there is no evidence whatsoever of election fraud on the scale alleged. This from Middle East specialists Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett provides an important overview as well.

What does a 3 billion dollar per year subsidy without strings attached get you?

2009-06-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

Gratitude and an immense sense of entitlement for starters.

There was once a time...

2009-06-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

...when impermissible thoughts could see the light of day.

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. Warfare is also useful in keying up the morale to the necessary pitch.

War hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centers of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance.

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival. War not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war."
-George Orwell

and...

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people ... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

I found these remarkable quotes courtesy of some posters over at ATR. Can you imagine words such as these coming from any important political figure today? Neither can I, but it is essential that this become part of the national dialogue if we there is ever to be change we can believe in.

Ghosts of Reason

2009-05-16T02:56:00.000-07:00

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.

In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
-James Madison

Brand Obama

2009-05-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

Its been a spell since I've really sat down and gave our new President any serious thought. I know that seems rather odd coming as it does from one who's take on Barockstar has been decidedly negative almost from day one, but the truth is he was so transparently not the agent of change he professed to be that I haven't experienced the deflating letdown that some on the left are now suffering as their hero reveals his inner Imperial Centrist. My hopes just weren't high enough to be let down in the first place. Having said this I must admit that, like most Americans, the swiftness and severity of the economic collapse has taken me by surprise but Obama's reaction to it has been a true revelation.

Let's bury any illusions that he has merely inherited this mess from the Bush administration since he was instrumental in twisting congressional arms last October in order to pass the 700 billion dollar TARP blank check for the reckless speculators now looting the Treasury with the help of his key appointments from the financial sector like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Bush appointee to the Federal Reserve Ben Barneke. No, Obama owns this now and his policies thus far have demonstrated unequivocally that Wall Street represents his primary constituency. 13 trillion in taxpayer obligations thus far have been committed to the very insolvent institutions who's greed and recklessness cratered the world economy yet still there are those who remain entranced by what Chris Hedges calls the Obama Brand.

When you add to this Team Obama's escalation of the Af-Pak War and commitment to indefinitely occupy Iraq one wonders what more will it take to break the "change" spell that's got so many "progressives" swooning this late in the game.

Who's minding the store?

2009-05-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

Not to worry folks, though nine trillion dollars (so far) in taxpayer loot has disappeared into the coffers of insolvent banks declared "too big to fail" your highly motivated federal "regulators" are on the case:

So much forgotten

2009-04-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

[T]he point of attack in the political struggle lies, not in the legislative bodies, but in the people. Political rights do not originate in parliaments, they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security.

Just as the employers always try to nullify every concession they had made to labour as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments also are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. Even in those countries where such things as freedom of the press, right of assembly, right of combination, and the like, have long existed governments are constantly trying to restrict those rights or to reinterpret them by judicial hair-splitting.

Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life, it has always been the same in political life as well.
-Rudolph Rocker

Amen.

The Greater Fool

2009-04-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

A quick and easy how-to guide on fucking the next 3 generations of Americans

2009-04-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

I managed to find this while cruising Mish's Economic Trend Analysis, a very good site for insight to the latest Wall Street shenanigans. Here, in all of its diabolical glory, is the latest Team Obama/Geithner plan to save the bondholders of insolvent financial institutions at taxpayer expense:

Oddly familiar

2009-03-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

The President of the Incorporated Estates of Earth got along with everyone, as if he wanted to. I found this odd, him odd, which is no matter. I am not the president and could never be. I am too opinionated. Too impatient. Too blunt, in my own mind if no way else.

The topic the President wished to discuss: the rebel insurgency deep in the heart of the Incorporated Estates of Earth.

Typically we ignore the rebels, the best strategy: First you ignore them, then you blast them, then you agree with them if need be - or plausibly pretend to agree - what cost a bit of rhetoric? - then you win. Again.

What I found most distressing and yet daunting and daring about the President is that he does not seem interested in winning. He assumes it. He is a winner. He wins. He gets along with everyone, not least those who fund him into power. This strikes me as terribly indiscriminate. He is willing to get along with anyone, even the rebels so long as playing nice does not cost him his job, or his funders - the banks and the incorporated estates, the class of the IEE - their power.

So the President plays nice and wins and called me in to deal with the rebels. He tells me it is my job to play nice with the rebels. Not in so many words, but I get it. He wants me to give the rebels the velvet glove covering the iron fist, via the brilliant tongue. He wants me to cut the rebels to size as if making love to them with a rock. First you ignore them, then you blast them, then you pretend to agree with them (if need be), then you win. "Do you understand?"
"I understand, sir."

"The rebels are IEEans like us. Only poorer, or disenchanted, or just cantankerous. We need them to love the IEE. They need to love the IEE. For their own good. For our own good. For the good. You see?"
"I think I know exactly what you mean, sir."

"I need a speech. Soon. I plan to address the rebels personally, visit their camp. I need real face-to-face words. Words that go beyond the teleprompter. Words that are easy to memorize. Easy to take deep into the heart. From my heart to their heart. Can you write that for me? I know you can. Yes, you can."
"You write it now for me, sir. You have a knack, that gift. You touch their hearts. You solace the vassals of the IEE."
-Lesson 15, The Vassal's Handbook--"first you ignore them"

Eliot Spitzer returns

2009-03-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

Back from his "fall from grace"--no doubt greased by the Wall Street titans whom he terrorized, the former governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has been hired by Slate magazine to put his opinions to pen and paper. His latest effort reflects upon the distracting hue and cry being raised over the millions of taxpayer dollars funneled to AIG employees who helped loot the company while largely ignoring the billions shipped to AIG counter-parties with names like Goldman Sachs, HBS, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays... you get the picture.

How much for that drink?

2009-03-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

What follows is courtesy of "Angela", a commenter at Elaine Supkis' blog which presents the current economic crisis in a refreshing new way:

Thank goodness there’s the occasional humor in all of this- making the rounds on the net…

THE FINANCIAL CRISIS EXPLAINED IN SIMPLE TERMS:

· Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Berlin.
· In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later.
· She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
· Word gets around, and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood Into Heidi’s bar.
· Taking advantage of her customers’ freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages.
Her sales volume increases massively.
· A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit.
· He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.

· At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS.
· These securities are then traded on markets worldwide.
· No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed.
· Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.

· One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager (subsequently, of course, fired due to his negativity) of the bank decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar.
· However they cannot pay back the debts.
· Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy. DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95%.
· PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80%.

· The suppliers of Heidi’s bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation.
· Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor.
· The bank is saved by the government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties.
· The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the non-drinkers.

· Finally, an explanation we understand.

-"Angela"

A voice of sanity

2009-03-07T17:44:00.000-08:00

... and one you will never hear on CNBC
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For more like this check out The Renegade Economist whom I've added to my blog roll.

PS: Speaking of my blog roll feel free to use the 'Lair as a way station to these other sites during my frequent absences.

Hey, where'd my job go?

2009-03-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

Curious? Well here's Kathy Sanborn with something you should know.

We The People...

2009-02-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

It's been fascinating of late to watch Team Obama struggle to put the proper spin on the latest attempt to unburden Wall Street of its troubles at taxpayer expense. Ever wonder why all the efforts of "our" elected representatives are so focused on the travails of insolvent banks and the reckless speculators who ran them into the ground? Well this little ditty by Bernard Chazelle should answer any remaining questions you may have:

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., said banks were acting stupid and making it harder for lawmakers to defend them.
You may wonder if it's a congressman's job to be defending banks. Shouldn't the Congress be defending "We the people," instead?

If you're wondering, it's because you don't understand the modern incarnation of representative democracy. Yes, you know your Electoral College; sure, you've mastered your chads, pregnant, dimpled, hanging or otherwise, but still, perhaps just perhaps, you're missing the point. Indirect representation works like this:

A empowers B to elect C to serve A.
With a little diagram to highlight the subtleties:

A---------> B --------> C
|------<----------<-------|

Now one common mistake is to think that you're A. Nope, you're B. Who's A then? Corporate America is A. Goldman Sachs, GE, WalMart, etc; they're A. You're B. They empower you (B) to elect a government (C) whose sole purpose is to serve them (A). This leads us to the fundamental equation of indirect representation:

Corporate America empowers you to elect a government to serve Corporate America.
How does Corporate America empower you? They outsource the job to an entity called "the media." The media's mission is to brainwash you so you believe you are A. But you are B. You are the empowered delegate ("empowered" in the sense of "authorized," not "made powerful.") Why are you even needed in that equation? What's wrong with

A empowers C to serve A ?
Somewhere in that loop, someone's pocket needs to be picked and that someone is you. That's why A needs you. There's a second reason for your presence, which distinguishes representative democracy from oligarchy. It's called "legitimacy," which is just a fancy way of saying "anything that keeps the people away from their pitchforks." But let's not get too technical and, mostly it's just that: a technicality.

A few days later, the liberal Barney Frank uttered stern, harsh words. I paraphrase:

The bankers won't get extra resources unless there's a radical change in their behavior.
Notice the conditionality. Let's follow Frank's logic. Suppose the bankers don't change their behavior (which behavior is left unspecified but you can be sure that does not include "being A.") Then what? If Frank denies them the money, then who is he punishing? If he is punishing the American people, then my point is proven. The guy works for the bankers. If he is punishing the bankers but not the American people, then the money was obviously not needed in the first place, except to please the bankers. In other words, if Americans don't notice the difference whether the money is given out to the banks or not, then why give it? And if they suffer from the money being withheld, then why is Frank making their happiness conditional on the bankers' behavior? He could have the bankers fired. He could have reversed the conditionality and said: "The bankers won't get a penny until a million demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue demanding "More Bonuses to Bankers!"

But he did not. Why? Because Frank (hardly the worst of the bunch) was elected by you to work for them! (Go back to earlier diagram if this point hasn't sunken in yet.) Why isn't Frank working for you the people? Because you the people are the delegates, and who in the world works for delegates?

Why do we need the media? Because my observations are trivial. That's why. You need communications experts, backed by deep scientists called "economists," to convince you that 2+2=5. That's hard work. That's why those people are paid lots of money and only the brightest succeed. Take "trickle down economics" for example. That's not even 2+2=5. It's more like 2+2=36376472828363828. But they pulled it off! And this very minute they're convincing you that the only way to deal with a thief who steals your money is to reward him with more of your money.

Barney Frank had more to say:

“People really hate you,” he said, imploring banks to do everything possible to avoid offending people.
When is the last time you "implored" someone to stop being offensive by stealing money from the very people they're offending and giving it to the offenders?

— Bernard Chazelle

The Imponderable

2009-02-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

In truth the time to kill the Federal Reserve banking system was over half a century ago but I'm willing to take what I can get. So now is as good a time as any to kill this bitch, a fact made clear in this fine essay by Doug Page over at Dissident Voice a few days ago.

Update:

Here's a crucial essay by economist Michael Hudson on Team Obama's Bailout 2.0 that answers all the important questions one may have about how the banksters intend to fuck us. This is a must-read so pass it on.

Something for your book list

2009-02-06T00:02:00.000-08:00

Do yourself a solid and run out and pick up The Liberal Defense of Murder by Richard Seymour whose blog Lenin's Tomb is required reading for any serious progressive. This remarkable book will serve as a critical point of reference as Team Obama cranks up the killing machine liberal style (with better graphics and production values). Here Richard sits with George Galloway for a chat about some of the justifications liberals have utilized throughout the centuries when going about the unfortunate but necessary business of killing savages... for the greater good of course.

Oh no, fooled again!

2009-01-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

What was that neat little trick Nancy always pulled on Charlie Brown with the football? Well here's the political equivalent... right on schedule.

Chomsky on Israeli war crimes in Gaza

2009-01-26T14:06:00.000-08:00

Naturally one shouldn't expect to see this issue explored anywhere in the American mainstream media hologram so, once again, Znet to the rescue.

The Boondocks checking in

2009-01-24T21:56:00.000-08:00

Hat tip to Dennis Perrin for this one:

"I did say I was cautiously pessimistic about Obama's Presidency - but this is simply acknowledging the reality of an American Empire that is out of control and on the verge of collapse. Let us not forget that on the eve of the election, we witnessed a near-trillion dollar robbery of the US treasury. That robbery is still taking place. I do not blame President Obama, but I do not believe the financial and corporate interests that own and control this country will fold so easily. I do not question the integrity of the man as much as the power of his office - which I believe has greatly diminished over the years. I believe the Federal Reserve Bank, the Military Industrial Complex, and the massive corporate interests that run this country have more power than our new President. I hope I am wrong.

"After 9/11, I witnessed most of this country become obsessed with squashing dissent and silencing critics. I hope this election does not turn Black America towards this same, fascist mind state; but already I am starting to see it, and it saddens me greatly. I absolutely wish our new President and his family success and safety. But after all I have witnessed in my lifetime, and especially in the last eight years, I am not ready to lay down my skepticism or my outrage for this government. To do so would be unwise and, ironically enough, anti-American."

-Aaron McGruder ("Boondocks" comic creator)

Boom, boom, bada-boom...

2009-01-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

... so begins Team Obama's march to war on Iran. The following time-line is courtesy of Don Bacon over at ATR:

Mar 2, 2007. . .Obama: The world must work to stop Iran’s uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons

National Intelligence Estimate, Dec 4, 2007 . . .. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program

IAEA Report, May 26, 2008: "The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran."

July 25, 2008 . .Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, nearing the end of a fast-paced international campaign trip, warned Iran today, "don't wait for the next president" to take office before yielding to Western demands to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. . .Iran poses "an extraordinarily grave situation." He said the world must send "a clear message to Iran to end its illicit nuclear program."

NPT: "Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty."

Sep 6, 2008 ...Iran is a “major threat” and it would be “unacceptable” for the rogue nation to develop a nuclear weapon, Barack Obama said

IAEA Report, September 15, 2008: "The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and has provided the required nuclear material accounting reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities."

Oct 2, 2008 . . .Obama: "The American people weren't just failed by a President - they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. . .I will always tell the American people the truth."

Nov 7, 2008 ... U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said in Chicago on Friday that Iran's development of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

IAEA Report on Iran, Nov 19, 2008 -- "The Agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and has provided the required nuclear material accounting reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities."

Dec 7, 2008 . . .Obama: "We need to ratchet up tough but direct diplomacy with Iran, making very clear to them that their development of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable"

Jan 11, 2009 . . .Obama: "[Iran is] pursuing a nuclear weapon that could potentially trigger a nuclear arms race."

I don't know about any of you but I'm so loving the Prince of Hope and Change.

An Ernest Attempt

2009-01-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

Israel tried to bump-off Cynthia Mckinney the other day in the event you hadn't heard about it... but then again how could you have heard about this incident and its proper context if the MSM is you source for "news"? Silly me.

The MSM, where the truth comes to die

2008-12-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

Have you tired yet of the bullshit spin in the US MSM regarding Israel's ongoing war crimes in Gaza? I thought so. So without further ado let's get a peek at the straight dope from (as usual) Chris Floyd. Bare in mind that much of what you read in Floyd's piece is available from mainstream sources within Israel itself such as the leading daily Ha'aretz but not in the US. Another critical source of analysis on the wholly US-sponsored atrocity is from the Angry Arab.

Mere weeks to bliss

2008-12-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

The inauguration is but a few short weeks away and all will be well again in the land of milk and honey. President Barack Obama will make it so, just you wait and see. American Leftist offers a brief refresher course for those who weren't following along closely as Team Obama worked their magic this past spring in this repost from July 10th of this year:

Thursday, July 10, 2008
Election Ennui

Nothing is more enervating for people that actually care about the substance of political and social issues than a presidential campaign year. During the primaries, the candidates, like circus magicians, purvey the illusion that the campaign is really about issues of importance, that we face electoral decisions of grave importance, even as they creatively repackage predictable positions.

Once the nominees become apparent, however, the dialogue, such as it was, is even more circumscribed. Recognizing the power of the corporate media in regard to framing the issues and defining the candidates for a credulous public, any pretense of engaging the public about fundamental questions that affect our lives is abandoned. After all, a presidential campaign is primarily a media driven exercise in mythology. It is more important to present oneself to the media as innocuous, as yet another in a line of safe, conformist political figures, so that the media can, paradoxically, present the candidate as larger than life, capable of forging a profound emotional bound with the public so that he can comfortably assumes powers of near omnipotence.

This is what we observe transpiring on a daily basis with Barack Obama. He's getting tougher on Iran, he's signalling a willingness to be flexible about how he will withdraw US troops from Iraq, he's now for the death penalty even in instances without the loss of life and he wasn't willing to fight to prevent Congress from granting immunity to telecommunications companies that illegally wiretapped US citizens at the direction of the White House. It's all about showing how reasonable he is, you see. It's a long way from working as a community organizer in Chicago, but Obama probably draws upon similar skills to effectively disarm his media critics.

Obama closed the deal as they say when he willingly played the game of stigmatizing black men for social dysfunctionality found across the racial spectrum. Whites are allowed to have children out of wedlock without comment, but blacks are not, and Obama displayed his knowledge of this double standard, and the essential role that it plays in justifying racial bias towards African Americans. Tim Russert and his mentor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would have been proud.

For a brief period, there was an opening that suggested that this stale politics could be shattered, but Obama's defeat in Texas and Ohio, primarily at the hand of working class whites, closed it. It did not deny him the nomination, as I thought it would, but it did force him to abandon any radical notions that he may have had about transforming the US political system. Since then, Obama has scrupulously followed the rules, as he will do when he enters the White House. Obama recognizes that he cannot pursue even a palled progressive agenda of demilitarization, an agenda that is an unavoidable precondition to confronting the declining standard of living for middle income, lower middle income and poor Americans, if it is opposed by the proletarian base of the Democratic Party.

As for the rest of us, it means millions of more American foreclosed out of their houses, driven to the unemployment lines and pushed to the margins of this credit dependent economy, with an increasing likelihood that Obama will be just as willing to attack Iran as McCain to divert attention from this catastrophe. Because, having left the forces within this country dictating these interrelated outcomes unexposed and untouched, Obama will soon discover that he is just as much a prisoner of them as you and I. Like Bush, he will govern symbolically instead of realistically, because the alternative is politically suicidal in the absence of a social movement to support it.

-Richard Estes (American Leftist)

Feeling Like It

2008-12-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

Just got through a rather busy stretch of my life that's taken me away from the blog as you may have noticed. On top of that the kids have both been under the weather a bit lately but I'm finally noticing shades of light at the other end of the tunnel so there'll be some interesting posts around here soon. Happy Holidays.

"What the Hell Bitch?"

2008-12-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

Damn I wish I could write like this dude.

Coming Soon to an Economy Near You...

2008-11-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

The Paulson Gang!

Obama Watch

2008-11-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

Right on schedule Team Obama, right on schedule. Jeremy Scahill has compiled a superb reference list of The One's new team of Clintonistas and other assorted DLC hacks and it's all in accord with an agenda the President-Elect has been signaling since he wrapped up the nomination: to the center-right we go. Change? Silly chumps.

But, but those damn auto CEOs and their private jets...

2008-11-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

Gotta love the spectacle of our congress critters and the MSM getting their shorts in a bunch over the auto chieftains having the nerve to use company jets for the purpose in which they were intended, namely to carry executives swiftly and safely to their destinations (presumably having to do with company business). Don't get me wrong, the Big Three need to address some structural issues with their business model but few can deny that they are integral to the real economy. Unlike Wall Street the US auto industry creates something of tangible value and utility as well as providing millions of American workers with living-wage jobs which then enables them to pay their mortgages, send their children to college, or otherwise participate in the economy. Losing the nation's most important domestic manufacturing component in the face of a quarter century of off-shoring that has all but de-industrialized what was once an industrial powerhouse is a systemic threat to our well-being as a nation.

One would be hard pressed to get this impression from MSM coverage of the proposed 25 billion dollar bridge loan to the US auto industry. Instead we get theater about private jets. Did it occur to anyone in Congress or the MSM to ask the same question of the Wall Street banksters who lined up one month ago for 700 billion in taxpayer obligations with no strings attached? I wonder what the odds are that the heads of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, or Bank of New York Mellon fly commercial?

For those of us who are still curious about what Hank Paulson and his merry band of Wall Street thieves have been up to while the MSM performs its primary function of distracting the public from issues of importance, Glen Ford has this gem to help us keep things in perspective:

The rule of law has been cast aside in the mad frenzy to loot the wealth of a nation before George Bush leaves office. "Wall Street has succeeded in establishing a kind of privatized martial law economic regime," in which trillions of dollars are secretly transferred to unnamed corporations.

Lawless Capital, Rushing to Armageddon

The fundamental law of capital - the system's need to extract by any means possible ever increasing returns on investment, or die - brought the world to the current catastrophe. Inevitably, despite all the noise about the need for transparency and tightening of regulations on the behavior of capital, the system's response to its crisis is to descend into even greater depths of lawlessness.

The frenzy of unchecked illegality pulsates outward from the chaotic center of crisis and criminality: Wall Street, which has succeeded in establishing a kind of privatized martial law economic regime in the waning months of the Bush kleptocracy. The $700 billion "bailout" is revealed as a brazen bait-and-switch bamboozlement, in which Goldman Sachs Family Don Hank Paulson, under color-of-law as Treasury Secretary, ignores the terms of congressional legislation to dispense mountains of public wealth to his bankster friends as he sees fit. In return for their cut of the loot, the banking mafia give the public - nothing! No recycling of the billions into loans to small business or college-bound students or any of the intended beneficiaries. Instead, the Lords of Capital hijack the people's money to expand their territory, buying up the turf of smaller banksters in order to make themselves more indispensable, more untouchable, more removed from the elementary rule of law. Paulson attaches no strings of public obligations to his gifts, demands no voting stakeholder position in the banks.

Then, the master criminal, in secrecy and with total contempt for a spineless and utterly compromised Congress, rewrites the laws of the land, to forgive $140 billion in taxes due from the banks' merger deals, accomplished with the public's money. But Congress fails to protest this theft of its core legislative duty: to make the laws that govern society. Paulson and his banksters are above the law - mega-thieves operating with total impunity.

Meanwhile, Paulson's partner in crime at the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has distributed two trillion dollars in "loans" to a list of corporations whose identities are secret, for purposes that are also secret. Even the billionaire Michael Bloomberg's news agency is in the dark, and has sued to find out where the two thousand billion dollars has gone. Few lawmakers on Capitol Hill seem to even want to know, fearing they would be blamed for the panic that might break out if the public were aware of who had pocketed their trillions.

If there is one person who possesses the moral capital to demand an accounting from the conspirators, it is Barack Obama. But the president-elect behaves as if it is none of his business if the Bush gang loots the national wealth on its way out. But then, Obama fought for the bailout, has had the kindest words for Paulson, and gets his economic advice from Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs Godfather and Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers, another former Treasury chief who teamed with Rubin during the Clinton administration to cast a cloak of silence over questions surrounding derivatives, the exotic financial instruments that finally wrecked the global system. Obama says he wants a "smooth transition." But his silence on the lawlessness at the heart of the transition calls his own motives, competence and integrity into question.

-Glen Ford

A time for selflessness & sacrifice

2008-11-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

Now that President-Elect Barack Obama has done away with Maverick and the Snow Queen, he and his rapidly forming team can go about the important business of tamping down the expectations of his base. Yes, the poor suckers who've been drinking the O'laid for the past 21 months are in for a very rude awakening quite soon. The One hinted as much during his victory speech in Grant Park on Tuesday night, but for those not paying close attention the selection of brass-knuckle Zionist partisan and corporate-centrist Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff should have put them on notice. Sorry folks but given these difficult economic times it's critical that we accept that every promise made during the campaign, no matter how seemingly sincere, cannot possibly be met. It really does come down to addressing the right priorities.

Studs

2008-11-03T00:51:00.000-08:00

Let's never forget him.