OBAMA is CORPORATIST reprise

[FOR “FUNNY STUDENT QUOTES” SCROLL TO END OF POST].

“Play it again, Sam!”

TRUTH WILL OUT

So, it’s pretty clear.  Obama is not Progressive.  He’s not a moderate either, but a corporatist similar to Bill Clinton.  Obama favors corporatist policy in every significant decision.  Three recent examples illustrate the point:

A Bomber Jacket Doesn’t Cover the Blood by Norman Solomon

President Obama has taken a further plunge into the kind of war abyss that consumed predecessors named Johnson, Nixon and Bush.  READ MORE:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/29

Obama Puts Pesticide Pusher in Charge of Agricultural Trade Relations the Center for Biological Diversity

WASHINGTON- Sidestepping a stalled Senate confirmation vote, yesterday President Obama recess-appointed Islam Siddiqui to be chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative. Dr. Siddiqui’s nomination was held up in the Senate and was opposed by the Center for Biological Diversity and more than 80 other environmental, small-farm, and consumer groups. More than 90,000 concerned citizens contacted the White House and Senate to oppose the nomination. Siddiqui is a former pesticide lobbyist and is currently vice president of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, a biotech and pesticide trade group that lobbies to weaken environmental laws. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/29-0

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters

 Obama has filled his new ‘debt commission’ with Wall Street insiders determined to gut Social Security.

The most generous bank bailout in history has amplified Wall Street’s considerable political influence, and the economic implications of this democratic calamity go well beyond bloated bonuses. Over the past year, the financial propaganda machine has set its sights on Social Security, launching a massive assault on one of the nation’s most important economic programs. But rather than push back against the flawed economic assumptions of the nation’s financial elite, President Barack Obama appears to be advancing their arguments, and is now poised to repeat George W. Bush’s politically perilous efforts to gut Social Security.  READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/economy/146183/obama_packs_debt_commission_with_social_security_looters

MY TWO-BITS

Obama’s pretty much off on the wrong course.  He appears to sprinkle “public goodies” up to and including the health care insurance act, which achieve limited but not system change, while shoving our government ever more firmly into corporatist pockets.  He listens to Robert Rubin, Ben Bernowski, and Timothy Geithner, the corporate tools who crafted and executed the big rip-off that plunged our country into near-receivership for Bush Jr..  Obama is using the same old tools to craft and execute a brand new disaster.

No special foresight or vision is necessary to see the probable outcome of Obama’s already failed – before even implemented, in some cases – policies and programs.  Perhaps our asses will be held up a short while longer to get Obama safely through his presidency and out of office, before we fall on them.  His actions are, however, without future, and there is no posterity in them.  He plays for the moment, walking with increasing stiffness.  He doesn’t bend much any more and turns his whole body and not just his head.  Perhaps the candidate of change has been replaced by a corporate android, and the real Obama is locked up in the Whitehouse basement.  Perhaps.

Obama’s corporatist allegiance is more significant now because of the time in our history.  We are experiencing massive change that we cannot control, but only modify and ameliorate, if possible.  In the midst of crisis, he is throwing buckets of gasoline onto the fire.  If he capitulates to the worst corporatist thieves every time, we’re screwed blue and tattooed.  We might as well give up, but “I hope for the best,” as Jacques Cousteau once said, “although I can’t say why.”

What must be done?  Three signs are in my office: “Persevere;” taped to a nearby bookshelf;  the phrase “Eschew Surplusage,” Mark Twain’s advice for successful writing – also life as it turns out; and, “Plan your work; work your plan,” self-explanatory: choose a direction and go there.

All sorts of suck-swampwater things need immediate attention.  How should we grapple with them?  First we list them, then we figure out what to do about them.  We will call this our Progressive Agenda.  Let’s tell everybody what we’re all about.  Let’s come together on a Platform statement that really means something, then develop the legalese and workplans needed to implement it.  We must also raise a Progressive Party the likes of which cannot be stopped by the tricked voting machines of the corporatist economic elite who would be our new aristocracy.  They may be surprised to know this, but there are a lot of us who despise and will actively resist the Corporate State of America.

Our people must really galvanize, recruit and organize.  We are fighting a desperate struggle for our republic.  It has been battered, watered down, sullied and insulted, corrupted and trashed, but it is ours and we must do what we can to save it and make it whole and free again.  What is a higher long-term priority?

No short-term priority is higher than freeing our airwaves and stopping the rightwing blitz on our democratic debate.  The rightist S.O.B.s are moving faster now, spinning ever closer to violence.   This is a tricky patch for the republic and the corporatists and tea partiers.  According to the old Nazi play book, the rightists need to kill someone to stir the base to an eruption of righteous rage and revenge.  Once the magic wall is breached, more blood can and will be shed.  The Economic Elite assume they can control this mob.  They assume they can control Sarah Palin – she is stupid and probably insane, but they don’t weigh her radical religious zealotry.  This bunch of elitists is no wiser about such things than the corporatists who appointed Adolph Hitler Chancellor of Germany seventy-seven years ago.  There is an old Chinese saying: “Once every two hundred years, an irate mob shows up on the steps of the Forbidden City.”

That whole Nazi thing?  The military-industrial complex of the “Greatest Generation” brought it back home with them after the Second World War; it has been festering and spreading throughout America’s system ever since.  Robert Woodward’s book Veil about the CIA clearly shows the progression of “ends justify means” thinking.

Which brings back Obama’s unfortunate corporatism.  The corporatist agenda does not favor human survival any more than it does the rest of creation.  It is by its very nature “consuming,” and once having consumed without having sufficiently conserved or reserved, it will eat itself out of house and home, and starve to death in the wasteland.  End of species.  We’ve also changed the planet so much that the scientists are going to declare a new geological epoch; we shall pass from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity is a major factor in changing the planet’s climate and geology.  Humanity as a terrestrial disease is about to climax like a great festering boil on the face of the earth, yet the president appoints a leading pesticide lobbyist and opponent of environmental regulation to chief agriculture negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative.

Not to worry, we’ve got the problem in the new Toyota fixed.  Bio-diesel too.

Climate change is accelerating.  The outlook is grim.  Oh, look who’s on the Kardashians!  Pass the Muscatel.

A “HAPPIER” NOTE:

Who says our teenagers aren’t creative?

Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a Guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the danger of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
• The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
• The little boat drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
• McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
• From the attic came an unearthly howl.  The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
•  Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m., traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
• They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
• John and Mary had never met.  They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.  He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
• The plan was simple, like my bother-in-law Phil.  But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• He was as lame as a duck.  Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame.  Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

We must do something about education.  Catch ya later, j

Empire Building and Trust-Busting

A NEW ANKLE

Not in Kansas

No posts for bit – having a total ankle replacement.  The pain meds make for poor compositional whatevers – really.  Thanks for checking in – look at some of the archives and top posts.  Also check out ThePen.org spooky stuff, but my own observations and career experiences are much the same.  j cousteau said ” I hope for the best, but I can’t say why.”  this alert declares a crisis need to shift to a loud progressive party movement – I say sooner rather than later.  pls share with  those you think should see it.  best, j 

—– Original Message —–

From: The Pen

Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2010 4:04 PM

Subject: Dead Political Party Walking

The first shipment of beautiful embroidered caps for the full length feature movie we are producing on indicting Cheney for torture, entitled “The Last War Crime”, are in the first class mail, and if you have already requested one it should arrive any day. Call it a fantasy film if you like, but sometimes life imitates art. If you would like to read the first part of the script, or request your own cap to support the production, here is the page for that.

The Last War Crime movie caps: http://www.peaceteam.net/last_war_crime.php

And now, tonight’s alert.

Of all the commentary we have heard in the aftermath of this week’s election debacle, we have heard not one pundit yet who actually has a clue about what is really going on. So you will have to hear it from us. Of course, if you have been on our list any length of time you already have, but maybe you did not believe us the first time.

We must respectfully remind you that we told you that all this is exactly what would happen unless we took stronger action to demand a REAL health care reform bill in particular, instead of that groaning load of corporate special interest dictated and favoring rubbish we ended up with. And by the way, if we were official prophets you would owe us a new pair of sandals right about now.

It was March of earlier this year and the title of our alert was “The Democratic Party’s Plan To Throw The Next Couple Elections”. Look it up, the text was published on OpEdNews.com and is still there.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Democratic-Party-s-Pla-by-thepen-100307-583.html

For those with short attention spans (from corporate media conditioning) who think our alerts are too long, we suggest you knuckle down and actually read our words this time and see if they start to make sense to you. And please take particular note we said “The Next Couple Elections” PLURAL. Because this is just round one of the dynamic we foretold.

As we predicted then, in round two the Republicans will use their electoral gains to push to repeal the almost universally despised health care bill, despised by the right because it does anything even cosmetically good, and despised by the left because it was fundamentally just a total sell out.

If the Republicans fall short on repeal this time, they will campaign in 2012 on the platform that they need to take over the Senate and the White House so that the bill can be repealed, and they will win in ANOTHER landslide of historic proportions.

Alternatively, if the Democrats set a new Guiness world record in the publicly perceived as wet noodles department, they will all lose their seats anyway so the result will be the same.

Either way, the Democratic party as a viable political power force is finished for at least the next election cycle. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. We see no scenario of possible recovery from this. It’s over. The only reason they did not lose back the Senate in round one is because only a third of the seats were in play. The rest they will lose the next time for sure.

We are skeptical that primary challenges are even a productive option anymore. The Democratic party has so totally betrayed the people who voted for them, who had faith in them, who believed in them, we must confront the real possibility that nobody will believe a word coming out of the mouth of anyone running AS a Democrat ever again.

And the thing that really aggravates us the most about all this are people still whining that the Democrats need to get a spine. Democrats have plenty of spine when they are arresting people calling for single payer and dragging them out of hearing rooms. They have plenty of spine when they are refusing to allow a vote on even the most feeble of public options. They have plenty of spine when they are calling us bleepity-bleep retards.

Rather, Democrats tolerate being PERCEIVED as cowards. Because if people thought for one nanosecond that they were not cowards, then people would have to confront the stark truth that the Democrats are IN ON IT.

They are in on the corporate corruption. They are nothing but enablers, all of them, from top to bottom, front to back, ESPECIALLY the so-called progressives, without exception. They are willingly and knowingly playing the role of Judy in this Punch and Judy show, and NOTHING is going to change about that for them, for ever and ever, end of story, period.

We told you after the final health care vote what needed to be done about it. We told you that we needed to build a massive Independent Voters movement, with greater numbers than either the Democratic or Republican parties. We asked you to go to a Facebook page we created for this purpose and just become a fan, that’s all, just become a fan. Here is that page.

Independent Voters page: http://www.facebook.com/IndependentVoters

Something shy of 7,000 of you did then. Obviously it was not enough. So we ask you again. Go the page above and just become a fan. Talk among yourselves. When we see 100,000 over there we will know there is some chance for real change. Until then, we are fooling nobody but ourselves.

And we close with an exact quote from an even earlier alert, from September of 2009, which again you can still reading in its entirety on OpEdNews.com, where we warned you that the whole health care reform debate was a total fraud and that no “public option” of any kind would survive in the final bill.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Obama-s-New-Improved-Lee-by-thepen-090913-493.html

Here is the quote from the conclusion of the alert documented on the page above.

“And THAT is Obama’s REAL plan, the one he won’t talk about in a public speech, to let the weakest possible ‘public option’ hang around for a little while as an illusory sop for the terminally gullible, only to bleed it to death before it can actually go into effect. Yes, THIS is Obama’s new ‘improved’ leech therapy.”

Lord, the hate mail we got about that one. People yelling at us telling us we were full of it. Calling us racists. Read the words again. And now ask yourself in all candor, “Ain’t it the truth?”

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm

Corporations are not persons

PROGRESSIVE DISILLUSIONMENT

True Progressives

VIDEO: Progressives and Obama: From Wall Street to the war, this isn’t what Progressive Democrats voted for, Norman Solomon, July 10, 2010 by The Real News Network

STATE-OF-THE-ART

LINK: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/10

2^nd Great Republican Depression: U.S. Experiencing Worst Episode of Prolonged Unemployment Since Great Depression.  Adjusting for demographic factors, current labor market downturn steeper than ’82-’83 recession. Published on Friday, July 2, 2010 by Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

Washington, D.C. – As the nation contends with a long and sustained labor market recession, a new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research demonstrates that the current unemployment rate is higher than the conventional measure shows.

“An unemployment rate that has hovered above 9 percent for several months is striking, but the jobs picture is even worse than it looks,” said report author and CEPR Economist David Rosnick.

The study, “The Adult Recession: Age-Adjusted Unemployment at Post-War Highs,” adjusts the current unemployment rate to account for demographic differences and finds that the unemployment rate has not fallen below 10.8 percent in the last 12 months. During the worst episode of the recession of the 1980s — the second half of 1982 and the first half of 1983 — unemployment passed 10 percent for 7 months.

The analysis notes that the population is older today than it was in the 1980s, which has the effect of lowering today’s unemployment rate relative to the past. Since they change jobs more frequently and are more likely to move in and out of the labor market, Young people have a higher unemployment rate than older workers. Adjusting for this older workforce shows that the United States is experiencing the weakest labor market since the Great Depression.

The severity of the current unemployment situation suggests that policy makers should consider measures that would slow or reverse this trend. Additional stimulus such as work sharing or the extension of unemployment benefits by Congress would go far in addressing the plight of the millions of unemployed Americans suffering as a result of this downturn.

FULL ANALYSIS can be found here.

READ MORE:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/02-5

Wealthy Reap Rewards While Those Who Work Lose

TOTAL RECALL.  Abstract:   15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance By Dennis Rahkonen, The Smirking Chimp.

The political instrument of moneyed elites, and a retrograde societal force, the GOP today is more negative than ever. Its agenda, if fully implemented, would prove catastrophic. Here’s what an unfettered Republican Party would do “for” America:

1)  Greatly reduce or entirely eliminate taxes on the rich, forcing working families to make up revenue shortfalls.

2)  Bust labor unions, and prevent collective bargaining for wages and benefits.

3)  Stubbornly deny the climate change while pumping more pollutants into the environment from dirty industries and practices.

4)  Remove regulations on investment banks and credit card companies eroding consumer protections.

5)  Continue to criticize and under fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, to dumb workers down.

6)  Outlaw abortion, under a moral guise, impelling thousands of functioning females to perish because of sexist denials of their basic rights.

7)  Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while harrassing homosexual citizens.

8)  Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a host of Patriot Act sins against the U. S. Constitution in the name of “national security.”

9)  Bully the world with US aggressions on foreign soil, kill countless thousands of innocents, waste billions of badly-needed dollars, and make us hated around the planet.

10)  Generally drive down the income levels of America’s working-class majority, as a cost-saving corporate measure, dooming society to economic ruin!

11)  Lie about affordable health care for all, creating a national security threat by fooling some Americans into thinking that public health care is a godless socialist attack on basic American freedoms.

12)  Unleash de facto ethnic cleansing against 12 million immigrant men, women, and children, blaming them for hardships experienced due to capitalist excess.

13)  Shamefully try to lend credence to their avarice and social irresponsibility by revising the Bible to obscure passages that place human need before abject greed as one conservative group is really trying to do!

14)  Support intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals.

15)  Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

While there are certainly Democrats who’ve yet to show spine in furtherance of vital change, let’s be absolutely clear about the unmitigated disaster that would follow if Republicans, in their present ultra-rightist incarnation, ruled our country exactly as they wickedly wished.  READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/story/143917/15_awful_things_republicans_would_do_if_they_had_the_chance

Leave ‘Em Laughing.  Open ltr to CNN:

FOX regularly pushes distorted stories, and uses them to whip up racial fear.  It is unacceptable for CNN, which positions itself as a credible source of news and analysis, to uncritically echo FOX’s dishonest race-baiting.

What the hell’s the matter with you?  Do you want this country to disintegrate?  Report the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or quit pretending to be journalists.  Call yourselves racist corporatist shills instead.

Sincerely, with rapidly diminishing respect,  j 

READ MORE:  FOX NEWS, HOLY LAND, SUPERMAN