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TechnoratiBuying Brand Obama
Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.
What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.
Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand with an experience.
"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."
Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.
While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks before Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs' and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour Hersh. Even his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his single real act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent until the Iraq war became unpopular.
Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama 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.
Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."
An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics, communicates through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated spectacle and manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train wrecks-these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform, universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.
In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good.
In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans," "Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.
Pseudo-events-dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers-however, are very different. They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," the capacity to appear real even though we know they are staged. They are capable, because they can evoke a powerful emotional response, of overwhelming reality and replacing reality with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted truth. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they show the president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops in Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and politicians have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask if the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the brands and pseudo-events that offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art Obama has mastered.
A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or are discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes-the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket-the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits peddling these illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.
The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."
The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for even more potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished open society.
223 Comments so far
Show AllExactly.
I agree with the earlier poster.. we must all try to grow our own organic vegetables now, just like in Cuba..!
Re the second last para..
Maybe some of the wasted cyber space here has to do with the author waxing poetic.. a distinctive change of style.. perhaps his ghostwriter turned up..
I have followed Mr. Hedges writings during the election. Funny, but I don't recall him articulating this "New Boss = Old Boss cum different brand" during Pres. Obama's 'Rope a Dope' campaign strategy.
If he believes in what he says, He'd be a Ron Paul libertarian all the way.
"...consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability."
Lickability?
" Heh! Wanna Lick Obama?"
No he means "Likeability"
It's inspiring to read the cacophony of voices and viewpoints expressed on this and a few other comment boards for CD; as Whitman (I think) might have said, I hear America singing when I read them. Democracy is not dead, for all that so many decry the encroachment of fascism on the land. What so many of the thinkers who express themselves hereon are proclaiming, each in her or his own way, is that "I shall not be branded." Label me if you will as a pessimist or optimist, a realistic or idealist---label me as you will---but I shall speak from the dictates of my heart and leave branding to the image-makers of our "leaders" who in fact are the least free of us all in their captivity in the shells of their brands.
Pelosi most likely needs to be replaced and outvoted.
We have so many issues to deal with in this time frame but back in the '60s our motto during the peace marches was "if you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.." We need to be vocative, communicate daily with our representatives and hold them accountable to all the above concerns. Passive democracy doesn't work, helplessness doesn't work, but an active, involved, vocative electorate means that democracy and decent human values, from which our land was founded, will survive and evolve with lessons of the past always in mind.
Time for workers corps to rebuild America, recruit medical, dental, alternative health graduates and have them staff our public health clinics for 3-5 years in return for repaying their student loans. No American citizen should be without health care, a universal right in any democracy.
Help President Obama find his way through the mire, the obstructionists, the dark selfish minds in our country which Norman Cousins typified beautifully in his last interviews.
We need our old allies who are returning to our sides to help President Obama evolve the most enlightened international policies possible, including the litigation for the horrors of Mr. Cheney and his heathenistic tribe.
Fascism=Serfdom
Of course..............Create a 'tuition bubble' with cheap student loans.
Then make Doctors 'Serfs of the State' to pay back what they 'owe'.
Feudal fascism = 'Progressive' agenda
Maybe you need some Chris Hedges insight to see it.
I am glad someone is finally coming out calling a spade a spade. Obama is just another corporate product marketed to the masses through an ingenious advertising campaign. It's like the "fresh, home-made, hearty, healthful cuisine" in a can.
Bring America Back !!!!.............The Obama Brand of the campaign was truly one to behold==hope, promise, change !! That Brand is now an illusion and it only took 100 Days for Team Obama to back off most of the Dreamy Stuff !!
****The 100 Day Brand of Obama is a Cave-In Brand. Thus, when you finally get inside the Culture of Corruption in DC, you don't change it, you become engulfed by it and melt into it !!!
****The Beast of the Military-Industrial Complex rolls on, and on, and on !
***The best thing about Brand Obama now is that 100 Days really is too soon
to make solid predictions about his overall Term, and what it will bring !
**It is pretty obvious that, if Team Obama keeps going, as is, we will eventually know their brand as the Four Year Obama Brand, NOT the Eight Year Obama Brand !! LBJ learned the hard way; Jimmy Carter learned the hard way;
and Clinton probably spent 4 years wishing he did things differently.
"***The best thing about Brand Obama now is that 100 Days really is too soon
to make solid predictions about his overall Term, and what it will bring !"
"****The Beast of the Military-Industrial Complex rolls on, and on, and on !"
You betcha! And so do the illusions and delusions. Obama is the "Tony Robbins" of the MIC. You can "hold his feet to the fire" and hope all you want, it's not going to get any prettier. We didn't need 100 days to see how this might play out. The New World Order is mostly in place. The emergence of this bio-engineered "swine flu" hoax and a promise of a more seriously deadly "mutation" and recurrence in the fall and winter is one indication. Who knows what other atrocities they'll throw in on top of bioterrorism. Obama is just a good little clicking soldier in the cause of global fascism.
The thing I find remarkable about this site and it's commentary section is that it has no congruency, rhyme or reason. It is thought disorganized, desire scattered, with the enemy always lurking in the shadows. I think when we see congruency, order and light here in the comment section we can expect the same of our government.
yes, while I know my suggestion to return to agrarian life proactively, up to and including a Global Start Date of September 22, 2012 (to foster a spirit of meaningful, shared sacrifice), may appear naive or unrealistic, I would at least expect rational discussion on the pros and cons of such a plan, given the obvious destruction our planet is currently suffering due to our invasive, industrial activity, and the blatant dependence we have allowed ourselves to develop upon corporations for our very water, food and shelter...throw in the sinister sides of surveillance, technology and weaponry, and the future looks very shaky...
Yet, when I propose this action on this site, which is the subject at hand, things quickly veer off into Obama, or Dems vs. Repubs., or elections, or jobs and the economy, or environmental damage, or whatever...I have had very few individuals endorse the idea of reducing and eliminating industry and energy use, including electricity and petroleum, although these seem like eminently logical choices to make...or the idea that we are each individuals, not Americans or anything else, and that we have responsibilities to ourselves and others to be wise and compassionate in our treatment of one another and the other plants and animals around the world...
if one views this site, then, as a general cross-representation of folks, even a population perhaps tilted toward my point of view, yet unwilling to discuss the agrarian suggestion realistically, including supporting other options in return (how do some of you see things moving forward without changing the electricity\petroleum\job\mortgage\groceries\America lifestyle?), then one begins to feel, as Leea has stated, that getting things going on a larger scale will be daunting, at best...
We can't go on destroying the Earth forever...we must stop...I propose we stop together, to ease the way...that we prepare now, in advance, changing the way our housing and land are allocated and financed, allowing us to stop working and begin planting food everywhere...that we, as individuals, leave our jobs and change to an agrarian way of life around the world, culminating on September 22, 2012...the right to water, food and shelter, liberty and free thought and speech are not economic or national in nature, they are inherent rights possessed by each individual on this planet...along with these rights come responsibilities...
Reconnect with your planet, your body, your spirit...define your own natural cycles of sleeping and farming, engaging with your family and neighbors, foraging...the planet will thank you...
If we can't agree to global, basic changes here, then where?
You're talking about agrarian reform which means taking the land from the agri-businesses which originally used the banks to take the land from the farmers. To do that on a certain date would require an armed insurrection.
I would suggest beginning with the land we already have in our possession, then go from there...grass and ornamental vegetation giving way to edibles...driveways and sidewalks disappearing under fruit trees...roads, parking lots, rooftops and alleys reborn as grains, soups and salads...the rise of the individual...effort required...
As to armed conflict, whether termed an insurrection or a crackdown, I'd say that's a factor in, oh, 4 out of the first 5 possible futures I could come up with, moving forward from where we are now...the end result is my concern...I see tribal groups, affiliated around watersheds, working their natural regions to produce sustainable crops, administering their own codes of behavior...trying to thread the needle and arrive there without violence is admirable and challenging, but get there we must...the most appealing non-violent way forward to me appears to be turning privately-owned land into edible gardens, and privately-owned homes into shared shelters...available water and food make everything else possible...without them, the future looks dark, and violent, indeed...even with them, there will be major upheavals around property and resources, I know...I see no way to avoid this, given the depth of our current psychological programming...
After awhile, psychological programming wears off in the face of need. Cuba is a country which has done a lot of what you are talking about, even extensively employing hydroponics and drip irrigation in the cities and towns. In Cuba they make the urban growing competitive among regions or districts with the most accomplished gardeners getting recognition in the papers and being interviewed on their best techniques.
ahh, now there is an excellent example for us to use as a template! thank you...it is very encouraging to me to know that these things are being done successfully, and with enthusiasm, elsewhere...
hopefully, the individual, regaining a sense of control over their 'food' destiny, will begin to re-examine why virtually every other facet of personal daily life (education\defense\law\religion\etc) has been 'outsourced' to others, and will proudly re-assume some, if not most, or all, of them...ultmately, we will, of course, arrive at property rights, ecological stewardship, and the core commonality of the physical planet...
the notion of celebrity, of one being worthy of more than another, of thought deserving mastery over effort...this must transform into the celebration of the self-actualized individual...those who would survive off of the labors of others, whether through manipulation, coercion or direct force, must be recognized and dissuaded from such...each working together toward the common good...
Dream on...dream on...
Your last paragraph is talking of throwing away culture. Perhaps you should start smoking pot.
I am very inline with what you have written here dubet. It is so valid and important, and so it has it's own life. Lucky you, sharing in that larger cosmic heartbeat.
But it is not what is written that I am thinking of, it is how we read what is written and what we choose to focus on of that which is written that I am speaking of, and this does effect ultimately what is then written and read in the circle of exchange. This is in fact very important and probably goes along with the whole re-education idea that is floating around.
If you would like to help pressure the administration and Congress to pass single payer health care please join our voting bloc at:
www.votingbloc.org/Health_Bloc.php
Let's not forget: Obama's people fought dirty and stole the nomination.
Obama was not the voters' first choice. He has no more business being President than did George W. Bush. This may help to explain why his administration is already a complete trainwreck.
What's PUMA for "I told you so"?
There is alot of truth to this article. While people quibble on philosophical differences between Liberal and Conservative, they are blinded and distracted from the facts. Truth is, there is only one party, and that is the CORPORATE party. It doesn't matter if our elected officials are Republicans or Democrats, they are put there by the corporations, for the corporations to serve their interests. Obama's actions within the past 100 days have really opened my eyes to this fact. I was one of the fools who thought that he was actually going to change things for the better. He did change something though, he put trillions more of OUR dollars into the hands of the banks and corporations. I long for the days in generations past when people would stand together against things like this. We are too fat, too greedy and too lazy to do anything about it today. The bubble will burst within the next five years and this country will tailspin into anarchy and chaos. I hope I never see that day.
Sioux Rose
SOLOMON: I'll bet we'll see some major fiscal reverberations THIS autumn... it's not going to take 5 years.
Hey did you see the movie The Doors directed by Oliver Stone. In that biographical movie of Jim Morrison's life, Jim Morrison told Tom Baker: "Do you think that all americans want 2 cars and a house? What Americans really want is something sacred." And that's related with what you said about most people in the USA who feel empty inside and outside, alone, lonely without purpose, without an ideology, without a doctrine that would serve as a motivation and light for their future. Without national identity even since they know that the USA project, has been founded on blood, holocausts and kleptocracy. Unlike the people of the Bolivarian Revolution who are real energized, motivated and there is a true conscious-revolution going there in Venezuela and in Latin America (The Continent of Hope). Hugo Chavez, The Socialism of the 21St Century is a real change that people can believe in.
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Exactly. And now that Rafael Correa has won his second term in Ecuador it is a given that he is going to take Ecuador into ALBA. And when all of Latin America is eventually on the path of Socialism, and when some may even have reached the Humanist plateau alongside Cuba, then Alba will likely spread into Africa and beyond. Without a doubt, ALBA is the organization of the future which will undoubtedly surpass the Non-Aligned Movement as the second largest international body in the world and, conceivably, ALBA could even supplant the UN.
You are so funny! According to Marx it is necessary to have a dictatorship of the proletariat and that can only be supplied and supported by an armed uprising whereby control is wrested from the oligarchy. But Fidel, being much more innovative than previous Socialist thinkers, has virtually won the Revolution with doctors and teachers. A never before conceived of philosophy. A virtually stealth assault on capitalism and those goofy morons were completely oblivious.
In the geopolitical scene today there is Cuba and it's unassailable position, and then there is everybody else in their varying degrees of socialism and capitalism.
It seems Chris Hedges has been reading my Common Dream posts. : )
Everyone seems kind of wowed by this essay, but it's nothing that we haven't heard before. Maybe it just needs to be written by Chris Hedges for people to pay attention.
Some folks posting here still don't believe that they've been had, alas. I hear again and again how Obama's a "good man" or "the best." He's actually your public servant. And he's throwing away the commonwealth and giving it to banksters, insurance companies and the military industrial complex.
Well he smiles when he does that. He looks athletic and confident. But you're getting screwed and further impoverished as we kill people abroad. Please, people, wake up!
-TIA
There is no DEMOCRACY in Amerika. Its a damned CLASS DICTATORSHIP dominated by International Zionist Bankers, Wall street and the Zionist media monopolies. That’s why the US has gone for shit this past Century and degenerating down the river of Capitalism’s history.
Every dollar spent on the military represents energy resources both human labor and material resources. Wasted on extremely harmful activities to humans and the ecology.
Only a truly democratic economy of production for USE, not for the PROFIT of a few. Will set the world on a path to an efficient, rational economy to satisfy all humanities needs.
"Resist or become serfs." Chris Hedges.
Excellent analysis from Chris Hedges. The situation is so terrifying that the temptation to drift into illusion is all too understandable. I like to hope that more and more of us are catching on and approaching a critical mass of sanity and compassion.
Opal: "a critical mass of sanity and compassion." There could be no more succinct expression of the crying need of our time. This is the "hope" that we need to preserve when there's every indication that insanity and brutality are winning the day in our time. But in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome as we strive together to build that "critical mass" without which no meaningful revolution is possible. Thanks to MLK for the inspiration, and thanks to Opal for the reminder.
So what is new here? America's brands are seemingly limitless and are, in fact, what sells the American form of capitalism. Everyone has heard the euphemism, image is everything in American culture, forget about substance. Surely we do not expect that a president of the United States can be elected without particicipating in the very system he expects to lead! An optimist would say Obama has subscribed to many things at this point because they are the lesser of two evils and create time to accomplish his real goals. A pessimist will see more of the same, a continuation of a capitalist policy that believes in "survival of the fittest", more is better, America knows best, and greed is OK. Many of the problems we face today are deeply rooted in the world corporate system that requires expansion as a constant necessity and views conservancy as trivial. It may be that we are witnessing an honest attempt to operate differently within the system, hence the massive public relations campaign to build support for the Obama agenda (which he would call the peoples agenda). A pessimist would argue that in reality the system is fixed and no one can ascend to power without the approval of an elite set of international individuals. Let's be mindful of the issues of our day and give the president a chance without premature criticism.
So what you are really saying is that a pessimist is awake, aware of what is really going on, and expresses his or her disapproval of the excessive corruption and greed that has taken place within the past 100 days (and beyond). An optimist is someone who closes their eyes, clicks their heels together three times and dreams of getting swept away into the Utopia that so many of us thought Obama would create.
"A pessimist would argue that in reality the system is fixed and no one can ascend to power without the approval of an elite set of international individuals. Let's be mindful of the issues of our day and give the president a chance without premature criticism." Perhaps in your book a pessimist; in mine, a realist. Since day #1 when Obama packed his cabinet with the old guard, I have held out hope that he was following the adage: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. But now I'm at the point of accepting that he really is a great scam artist. Too many blatant lies and kicks to the balls of the non-elite. Sorry, but to claim you're going to reverse unemployment by giving the crumbs from the table of his cabinet and their cronies, and to claim he wants peace, when he's about to stick the US into another Vietnam/Iraq quagmire, ... no. You don't keep your enemies THAT close; so close that the masses can no longer distinguish between you and them. YOU can give him a chance to reveal his true colors, and I hope you're right! ME? As a friend of mine from Nigeria used to say: When there are a million flies swarming around it, you can be sure- it's shit!
As Obama would say, you want realism, check out the long-term effects of the latest Bush administration, ultimate result and tally yet unknown. If you are unwilling to reserve judgement and willing to pass judgement on Obama's legacy at this stage, are you suggesting a change in our form of government, an amendment to the Constitution, a recall on instant notice, and risk of chaos? The illusion created by image as discussed above works both ways. It enables fascists to conduct horrific acts and bolsters a president's ability to accomplish good things for the American people.
Granted, it CAN work both ways. However, to screw the common man in order to save him is kind of what GW did to the Iraqis. So, IF Obama IS holding his cards close to his chest he needs to demonstrate at least a modicum of who he really is, nonetheless. I do not have a final judgment of him yet. But if I had to play the odds, at this point I'd take the bet that he's more scam than truth. He simply has too many of the SAME assholes that have been screwing this country and the rest of the world on his team. Not a single true progressive in the lot! Geithner and Summers??? Their sleazeball connections are no less than Cheney's with Halliburton! But in fairness, he's only one person. It's the vast majority of Congress, as well.
"He simply has too many of the SAME assholes that have been screwing this country and the rest of the world on his team. Not a single true progressive in the lot! Geithner and Summers??? Their sleazeball connections are no less than Cheney's with Halliburton! But in fairness, he's only one person. It's the vast majority of Congress, as well."
I beg to differ on the progressive issue. If you know the slightest about American history you would see that Mr Obama's goals and objectives are not only aligned with progressive methodology but he actually is practicing it from the top down which really only began with FDR. Truly this is only the beginning and probably too early to make a call on whether it works or not. And Geithner has studied the CRASH and depression well enough that he is trying insure it doesn't happen again. Quite frankly it is too early to say yea or nea on Obama. He does have his feet on the ground with the needs of the people which is more than we have seen in years. Like Dubya really cared about what was happening in the American trenches of main street or beyond.
Regarding the brand Obama, iconography is the hallmark of capitalism and so to think that the American people could have leaders that do not fall into this theme is actually a bit naive. Honestly, what kind of car do you drive and clothes do you wear? Of course they delineate who you are. We are all brands. We all brand ourselves. Branding is the American way. If you don't believe me read Roland Barthes "Mythologies". Even by not branding we still brand.
Well, if you beg to differ with the quote of mine you refer to , then please DO differ with respect to IT. Please give me some examples of top cabinet members and head honchos who are really for the American people and not for the hands that feed them. Obama talks the talk- some of the time- whereas Bush couldn't utter two words without exposing his idiocy. As for walking the walk? So far, way to much hypocrisy. His focus to this point has been primarily on appeasing powerful lobbies- from finance to health care to military. His administration and Congress have thumbed their noses at the views of the vast majority of Americans on all these items. So please DO give me a history lesson in relation to how well it has worked for presidents to bend over backwards to accommodate the corporations who run the government in order to strengthen the masses.
Current alignment with yesterdays progressive methodology is yesterdays prison for todays' fresh ideas. These fresh ideas will be the only path forward, and the only path they have are with those of us freeing them from the slavery of the old paradigm that President Obama unknowingly has become the master of. We the servants of the way forward open the way forward. It is simple, but you cannot see it, you are a slave to yesterday and a master of it's demise.
I am not really sure what you said here. It sounds like postmodern speak aka jargon.
Lest us not forget that history is accumulative and hopefully we build by learning from out past mistakes and if understood in this framework is anything but a prison.
Finally, a straight shot across the USS Obama-can-do-no-wrong's bow.
CD, Alternet, Buzzflash--virtually all of the "alternative press" (current article excepted) fail to acknowledge the unequivocal diametric opposition of what Obama actually does vs. what most self-described progressives think he's done. Like end torture, rendition, war, extreme-upward wealth redistribution, no universal healthcare, ad infinitum, ad nauseum--
The signs were apparent long before the election, but the media built it up beautifully and the election and inauguration brought about the long yearned-for catharsis, and the fangs of a revolution were effectively pulled.
BHO as president is historic, sure, but for simple reasons of color. He is the first president with significant outward black appearance.
But picture for a moment President Condoleeza Rice.
I submit BHO's presidency is and will continue to be indistinguishable in policy and practice from what we could expect from Ms. Rice.
If there is a God, may S/he save us all.
/sarcasm, not religious, though now I may have to consider it/
Hedges, and the strong discussions his esays evoke, greatly stoke brain activity.
We probably have the most decent man holding the presidency that we have had in decades. The fraud is capitalism.
40 years ago today I was in college, and 4 kids were shot at Kent state. That and Vietnam were my coming of age. I remember that Vietnam ended because soldiers stopped fighting (did not make the headlines, I know). Today kids are going to the military because there are no jobs. They aren't gonna stop fighting. When the financial services sectors get everytning to be had, there will still be no jobs. I don't fault Obama.
In 1934 the longshore and harbor workers started a 3 month general strike (here in my San Francisco) that gave a middle class life. Now EFCA looks dead.
I have no answers.
sansf, I remember that day 40 years ago. It broke my heart. That 14 year old girl wailing over the still bleeding dead body of a boy who was just going to his next class. And the public opinion was "Good. Now maybe they will stop this protesting". And they did. So did I, for awhile. I realized, I'm not making a difference, they just despise me. But of course, I can't keep my mouth shut, so I came back.
And yes, men were refusing to fight and shitass officers were getting shot in the back - that's where the term "fragging" came up. I hadn't heard it before then. But the war ended because the public saw the price getting too steep. They rebelled against inflation and rising taxes to pay for the war. Back then, we were pretty much a pay as you go economy - unlike now when we just dump our profligate spending on future generations.
"We probably have the most decent man holding the presidency that we have had in decades. The fraud is capitalism." I agree. Unfortunately he did what he had to do to get elected. And I know he won't be allowed to upset the apple cart. I figure the masters are throwing him to the peasants as a crumb. He'll do a few good things to mollify the mob which otherwise might get out of control, but I see him as having very little wiggle room. But if you were to read historical reporting of working class efforts to organize, you would see the same story. Anarchists, Communists, troublemakers. Of course now, they don't even report what's happening.
People say we should do this and we should do that, but many of us know it won't change a thing. I think it's going to take a revolution (I'm not necessarily saying violent) and far more people need to realize that than do now. It's possible that by the time they do, the fascist state will have a lock on us. And then people will have to be willing to die for our freedom, as the union workers were 100 years ago.
We squandered away what they died for. Just sat on our soft asses and let it be taken from us.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
In spite of my comment above, I have to agree with you. Now, that doesn't negate my comments above. It only highlights my view of the presidents of the past 40 years. Every one of them have been scam artists- at the beckon call of their masters in the financial/military court. Carter? Oh, you mean the guy who got Saddam going by supplying him with chemical weapons and $$$$. Reagan? Not the brightest bulb, but at least he was honest when he espoused his trickle-down economic agenda. Clinton? The prez who even I thought was good? Boy was I an ignorant dupe! GW? The puppet of the darkest collection of psychopaths in US history. So, yeah, Obama. Mr. Hope? Not likely. His legacy won't come close to GW's in shear insanity. But his Branding of the term HOPE will find him no less reviled, I'm afraid. [I DO so hope I'm wrong. But I will not supplant my reason for hope.]
sansf those men stood up to machine gun nests on the Embarcadero armed by American Military prepared to murder them and some of them got killed. "Scabs" is a word that has long gone out of common derogatory use, much to our great loss. They were fighters. We don't have many of them left, and those that are have been infiltrated by 'stooges' another great word that we've lost, though you'll read some here.
Yes indeed. Bloody Thursday (July 5, 1934) killed relatively few, but many injured. Local police and 'guardsmen' used rifles purchased from the 159th infantry (for one), and your comment helps me know that the troops were on the streets in those times. Now the union building at the Embarcader is target for revamp. I called my supervisor just in case it makes a difference.
B of A is the largest creditor of SEIU. UAW is unrecognizable. Hard to know where to put energy. But hey, happy birthday Pete Seeger.
Chris Hedges'article reveals how deeply perverted our federal elections (and too often state and local too) have become. People are persuaded to accept an image of a candidate, not analyze their voting record for their real positions on issues. They are told that we must accept "the lesser of two evils" because our voting methods leave us no other choice.
Progressives need to regroup and focus on important causes such as electoral reform. We have to push for changes in how elections are funded and how candidates are elected.
We will continue to be back in this very situation of bemoaning the actions of Democratic candidates if we do not change how our federal, state and local candidates are elected.
Big corporate money, TV ads, and an electoral method that leaves us with only two choices will continue to bring us back to a place where the candidate elected is not the courageous leader for social justice and environmental preservation that we need.
You hit the nail on the head.
Democracy, in it’s current form, is the tyranny of a few cunning circles with controlling and omnipotent lobbies and mass media propaganda, that use the ignorant majority ‘mandate’ of the voting masses for their treacherous agenda. The two-party oligarchy manages the profit and wealth flow for a relatively small elite. Most pivotal parts of this machine are tightly interwoven and are made out of the elite’s cronies and benefactors of this abominable theft and fraud. Their lobby established a two-flavoured (Dems and Reps) system that plays ping-pong with citizens’ votes, draining all chance for a desperately needed radical change of ways (Any denial of the necessity of radical change shows either ignorance or parasitism).
This system has been able to keep the voting masses in a state of acquiescence and convenient ambivalence. Common lifestyle was provided by loan, education is geared around producing useful subjects rather than freethinking individuals, the masses were kept occupied with inane entertainment, silenced by welfare payments and war games, manipulated by corporate controlled mass media, and preoccupied by hope-inducing wishful hogwash that we have a choice under this system.
The system is unsustainable for various reasons and will undergo drastic change. The severity and direction of change depends on the severity of lifestyle destruction, economic depression and public mood.
The circus is still performing but they are running out of new acts. The crowd looks displeased.
Voters appeasement used to be maintained by cleverly appearing to place effort and 'money' at burning issues. The downside is devaluation of the dollar by inflation. The impact of this wealth reduction impacts hardest on low-income families. The obscene elite of banking, corporate fascism and political cronies will maintain exploitation with inflation-adjusted obscenity. For now...
The addicted system just ran out of smokes.
We are still denying addiction.
We have to get to the shop tomorrow.
We've found a nicotine patch in the drawer.
On it it says: 'CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN'.
Just wait until turkey sets in.........
This is what America needs more than anything, a severe critique of American culture and the destructive nature of corporate capitalism. But the mainstream corporate media denies a critique of capitalism.
This month, Rabbi Michael Lerner and his Tikken Magazine did a major critique on capitalism titled "SHOULD CAPITALISM BE SAVED? To bad it wasn't Time Magazine or Newsweek Magazine.
I believe we the people can only get our voices heard by massive non-violent demonstrations, with millions of people lying face down in the streets.
It is time to terrorize the rich and the U.S. Congress.
Barak Obama deserves the critical support of progressives, liberals and people of good conscience. He is a good man, well meaning, talented and has a lot of potential. However, in order for the left to get its way on crucial issues like climate change, ending the war, promoting social justice, etc, it is important the left have no illusions that it will take a lot of hard work to undo the damage wrought by the Bush team.
Obama is a million times better than either Bush or McCain but we must pressure his admininstration to do the right things, if nothing else, to make sure he does not buckle into the pressure from the neoconservatives.
You've just ingested the most potent delusion of the Obama brand, namely that Obama is FDR. This idea was an invention of the Obama campaign, which also suggested he was MLK.
Maybe 60 or so years ago a pressure campaign would have worked, under a different president like Roosevelt. However, we're not in that time now. Back then, socialist revolt in the United States was a strong possibility, which is why pressure worked, along with the obvious crushing depression.
To pressure Obama, you'd have to counter the millions of dollars put up by the banksters who funded Obama's campaign. You'd have to have his popularity rating plunge based on his positions on issues.
Wake me up when the first pressure campaign succeeds. The antiwar campaign should have done it by now. However, Obama, like Bush, just continues to ignore us.
No one who advocates pressure has really explained an effective campaign. The only thing that works is an outside threat, like a strong third party or riots in the streets.
-TIA
He's an Overseer on Master's Slave Plantation and he is here to Kill the $$, Empty the Treasury into the hands of richfilth animals while he Kills SSI/Medicare/UI and while he makes Rapacious Health Care Premiums that never deliver any health care MANDATORY to us so that Americans will be subject to the full force and coercion of the State - so that richfilth animals can live in palatial wealth and privileged immunity from the Muck (that's us). Just ask Larry Summers. He's here to give you a life expectancy of 46 just like he did for the folks in Russia - and of course by 46 you'll be glad to be dead. Master's Paradise.
"...richfilth animals ..."
This is pretty much off-topic, but I stopped calling sociopaths and psychopaths "animals" out of deference to animals. I now call them "monsters."
Just a thought...
¿ Do you know why our children's stories have monsters and dragons in them ?
It is not because kids need to be told that such evil exists,
as they already know that very well.
The stories are to demonstrate to the children
that the monsters and dragons can be killed.
Namaste
Great analysis. From seeing much good and having hope for Obama, I'm seeing little change and his choices with sadness. While one can list accomplishments he's made that count, they are increasingly outweighed by how he "opts in" with the good old boys.
CH's equating of modern political consciousness with a TV mentality is spot on.
TV crawls out of the swamp in about 1960. An actor is elected President a generation later.
And Gangsters thereafter.
I'd hoped BO was an exception but I see that prospect dimming fast.
At about the same rate of speed the rich are getting richer.
"Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state."
Ah, I could have written this, but from an opposite angle.
For me, Obama is not a savior, at least, not my savior. He is merely the best chance in a very rigged game. Plug in anyone else (who, btw, would be _someone's_ savior) and we'd have the same thing...maybe worse.
The corporate state is the problem and our enemy. The corporate state will not allow dissent, even from the White House. The corporate state will do what it has to to survive. That's the deal.
So, what are we going to do about it? Where are the leverage points? What can we do to take back some power? The elections are rigged. DC is a shark tank. The state is against us. No one will come to our rescue. No one. As the late and great George Carlin said shortly before his death: "They don't give a fuck about you!"
The voting is done. Obama is the man in the storefront window. The status quo is happy. We're still outside. What will we do?
"What will we do?" - Allow for the possibility that we are inside, not out.
I'm not sure what you mean, Leea, but what I am doing is living as if no one is coming to my rescue. I am building social relationships that share knowledge, food, support, and in time, wealth, housing, and who knows what else. I am also working to become less dependent on the just-in-time line of products and food.
Is this possible? I don't know. It's certainly not predictable. However, I do know that this wholly unsustainable system cannot be sustained much longer. How things will evolve/devolve is anyone's guess. The thing is, what WE do from this very point forward will dictate what happens. It always has.
What will we do? We will use the land and the brains and bodies we have been given, and stop relying on others to feed and clothe us...we will stop working, share housing, remove pavement and grow food...it will mean changes in material wealth, but will release us from dependence upon those who would keep us disadvantaged...
After the collapse, and after your fellow Americans run out of bullets and gasoline. Call it the Great Shattering. That's where all the lies of a self-deluded tribe of genocidal monsters meet the consequences of their lies. Ugly baby.
lucky,
Don't tell me you're not an American! If so, what's with the word "their?" Shouldn't that be "our?"
And if you're not an American, do you think the US is going down alone? Have we ever? Unless you're sleeping in a hammock with the Yanomami along the Amazon River, you're coming along for the ride.
I am not a flat-earth fixed creation marginally literate worshiper of the genocidal blood god from the ME so I guess I'm not an American, although I was born and raised in segregated red lined Phx Az back when Ozzie & Harriet were American fantasy parents and everybody boo-hooed for Ricky Nelson (first teenage millionaire) because he paid Roosevelt Legacy taxation of 91% on earned income over $1mn. While I would willingly let any such 'artist' live tax free, his travails were part of the campaign to free the richfilth animals even back then from their 'chains'. The large in the small and the small in the large.
Ted - America is going to try to take 6bn humans with them as an "honor guard to Valhalla". You see, on top of everything else, melanin deficient Americans have gone from 87% in '65, to 70% in 2000 and very shortly will be a numeric minority in an ocean of humanity the color of the Earth. They have already begun to go mad and this will multiply into rabid insanity in the coming years. You see, my melanin deficient cousins KNOW they can expect the same expansive Xrstian Charity they have always shown to their subjugated minority populations. Think: "White boys are genetically disposed psychotic predatory animals who should be preemptively castrated and placed in prisons to protect the 'good folks'. Sound familiar?
Along for the ride, Ted? For 25 years the only way I've been able to accept my life here is to compare it to 1885, they did a book on it at the time called, "How the Other Half Lives". Along for the ride? My retirement is two ounces of lead introduced orally through an explosive projectile device - that's because there are worse things in America than being dead. That is also why you read accounts of parents murdering their children, then themselves after they've been thrown under the bus - they know what this monstrous country will do to those children and death is better.
Well, when I say that it is within OUR power to change things, I don't necessarily mean with a bullet to the head. Though, if that's what you decide to do let me know how it goes.
BTW, if you think you're the only one having a rough time living in this culture, you should get out more. The courageous ones are doing things DESPITE their culture shock. They're the ones I look to.
TM, I said that's retirement not a plan to "Change America" although changing policy through assassination IS a proven method for producing particular kinds of change for those who have the "Will". None of your fellows would ever do anything like that of course. And no, millions and millions and millions have gone and are going under the bus and your fellow White Americans will not resist because the alternative is to create a society based on Inclusion which they have rejected with bullets for 50 years and reject to this day. They won't make an equal place for everyone at the table, they won't reject war as the force that gives their lives meaning, and they won't kill off the Oligarchy that they worship with groveling obeisance. They wouldn't 40 years ago. They won't today. And so they descend into hell on earth. Enjoy the ride.
Apart from that save your pussy-mouthed patronizing condescending crap for people who've never "been in the shit" Teddie. Keep looking. Voyeurism is very much in vogue I'm told.
Sounds like you're due for retirement.
Bon voyage!
"...genocidal monsters ..." THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!
Give INDEPENDENTS a chance to take over Congress in 2010 and possibly the White House in 2012. Stop falling for the silly corporate media tricks of duping you into choosing amongst their own corporatists candidates.
On the off chance that independents don't take over Congress in 2010 or the White House in 2012, what do we do? What will you do?
Waiting for our savior just ain't in the cards. Time for a new strategy.
(P.S. A savior is defined as anyone but you.)
Oh Ted, you pulled my skirt on that one. :)
Well? I guess we keep trying ? We'll have to reform the progressive and liberal focus groups. In the meantime, hope the new batch isn't a clutz. I wouldn't mind the Democrats or Republicans but only if they get the issues right. I vote on the issues which is why I end up going independent 9 out of 10 times.
And there's nothing wrong with indies...except that the game is so rigged against them that unless the American people revolt on election day, it's not going to happen.
What I'm getting at, Jennifer, is that we really should start looking to ourselves and each other - the people - as our saviors. And I don't mean the people, writ large, I mean you and me and the guy over there and those reading this. We keep falling for the same ol' pea-in-a-shell trick and expecting the pea to show up under the shell...but it never does. WE, are the pea! WE, are the ones who can change things. WE, are the ones we've been waiting for.
Yeah, let's kick some political ass, but if we only do it from our comfy chairs, ain't nuthin' gonna happen, baby! It's time to really change tactics, not merely rearrange deck chairs. We are the structure that all politics and business rests on. We are the ones holding it up. We have the power to change (at least, for now), and in doing so, we have the power to change everything else. It's time to go local.
(P.S. I hope you're not a minor, 'cause I don't wanna go to prison).
No, I'm 28. :)
Phew...good!
I'm glad you're 28. Gives me a little "hope" (that isn't a dirty word now, is it?) when I see younger folks out there kicking up some dust and getting dirty and fired up. It's a good fight we're in and we're aaaaalll in it!
Thanks for that post Ted.
You betcha! We got some brand new bright and shiney Independents that the Lobbyists have had in development for the last 4 years. They are ESPECIALLY designed to say all the things you want to hear (while doing the opposite), and they're all pretty and clean and well spoken and come in a variety of colors to choose from. They're even working on a Wind-Up Wellstone Doll with prerecorded Populist Sayings. Not quite like the original of course, there were 'design flaws' in the first. This one doesn't fly in single engine aircraft and doesn't mean a word that it says.
Anything outside yourself and the ones you know are likely placed there by the Feds or the boys on K Street. Vilcomin du America.
I refuse to believe that the Independents are what you claim they are. There's got a be a limit somewhere. Of course, if only the Ds and Rs were even somewhat immune to the lobbyists.
Go ahead and refuse Jennifer - it's the policy of "The Gold or the Bullet" developed and implemented in the mid to late '70's. No, there doesn't have to be a limit, hell on earth is the only limit, take a look at day-to day life for ordinary folks in Columbia, that's your future. Maybe we could inoculate them...
But the way you're framing it all, it sounds like you're telling us to shut up and accept the status quo. No, changing parties isn't a bad idea. And if the Indies screw up, throw them out as well and keep replacing the pols until we get the correct representation. You have to keep kicking their butts so hard until they actually pay attention. :)
rfloh, thanks for validating my statement.
unbelievable.
I totally concur with those many posters here who see this essay as one of the finest ever pieces of Obama analysis: it locates the problem just where it belongs which is the "culture" in which we live and which, difficult as it may be, will have to be addressed at the level of civic re-education of our population: a No Citizen Left Behind kind of education. From this perspective, I disagree with those who thought the 2nd to last paragraph "sucked": in fact it brings out a perspective on a cultural shift in our time from character to personality, a distinction captured long ago in David Reismen's The Lonely Crowd description of the emergence in our culture of an "other-directed" mentality.
If anyone mentioned this in this string I didn't see it: There's a very nice companion-piece of Obama 100 day analysis offered by John Pilger: http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=530 He as well notes the "branding" nature of Obama's popularity and, while he doesn't quite cover the "buyer's remorse" aspect of the "purchase" of that brand as well as does Hedges, he goes into some detail and "names names" of the mass media entities that have provided the "market" in which that brand has been promoted.
Here is a piece of civic re-education that will leave you stunned: The ‘culture’ at work is the culture of sedition and terrorism.
America is hijacked by a handful of ‘Good Men’. The US dollar is ransacked, Democracy is perverted, treason and subversion are committed. Read the links below and you will see who’s behind the curtain. The two documents are NOT just another conspiracy theory. They are lengthy, in parts hard to follow but very well referenced. They will change the way you look at history, politics, finance, war and terrorism. You will find out about real terrorism. Many persons in these documents are well known; many are right now in pivotal positions of politics and finance. These people do shape YOUR life and that of our children right now. The details are researched and referenced. The consequences are beyond belief.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9442970/Collateral-Damage-US-Covert-Operations-and-the-Terrorist-Attacks-on-...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9421535/Collateral-Damage-Part-2-The-Subprime-Crisis-and-the-Terrorist-Attac...
Yachtie, thanks for these proposed additions to a syllabus for Civic Re-education 101. Your links provide me with my first exposure to the seemingly valuable works of E.P. Heidner, though I've scarcely been able to do anything so far but skim them quickly. My reading list has mostly been from writings of Peter Dale Scott and, more recently, Lost History by Dave Perry, Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer and the current works of William Blum especially Freeing the World to Death. And speaking of losing history, we're not only "losing" it but never "making it" because the alternative media like CD are marginalized and any really critical "journalism" is practcally gone from any main stream media for reporting the news of the day, busy as they are in promoting "brands" of Obama and others.
There is a lot of angst and anger in these CD postings in which people propose lines of action for the malaise of our times and others throw at them "sure, like that's going to work" when someone proposes calling or writing letters to Obama or Congress, joining in street demonstrations or boycotts, "pressuring" Obama to make him more progressive, developing 3rd parties to counter the corporate duopoly, whatever. And in a way the critics of critics are right, and none of these actions is going to be "the" solution, but any one may be a "a" solution that, cumulatively with other approaches, may move us in a progressive direction. Me, I've cast my public career on the pillars of public education and journalistic advocacy; and my little bit is a way-little-bit given my age (75), my health (average) and my desire to maintain a "life" with my family and my other extra-curricular interest, play acting and directing. Within those limitations I seek to publish my daily "progressive headline news" for my website, to blog my views for the like-minded and post on these CD articles, with an occasional Letter to the Editor or Op-Ed column. The "education" thing finds me searching for an outlet; there's no Civic Re-Education 101 in any college, high school or middle school that I know of but I have to believe there are still-active educators in "social studies" or still active political clubs of students. Having spent my active career as a college sociology professor, I know that universities at least have (or did have) some holes in the cracks of orthodox curricula into which serious academic efforts to deal with unofficial and critical history and current events discussion could be crammed; if only we could find where those holes are. Any suggestions?
Sure. Community centers provide space you can reserve to present civics courses. Promotion via hand flyers and street mags and internet. Let the air out of the elites' tires via such grass roots projects, heh heh. Soon enough, O'Bamba will be left stranded with his makeup artist.
rtdrury: Great ideas, thanks! Maybe we'll actually get around (as they did for Viet Nam war "teach-ins") to think again of educational efforts as "actions". (We did one at Gainesville FL as a re-enactment of the Downing Street Memos, it went pretty well.)
You are right, there's no civic re-education 101 in any college, high school or middle school and it’s ‘unhealthy’ to be too political at universities or even student clubs.
Obama will not be a savior. “Obama, after all, was faculty at the University of Chicago Law School. They don't hire liberals; at best they hire go-along to get-along corporate tools (see the two links) or people so immersed in their subjects they are apolitical and leave the structures of power alone. A liberal might sneak into a totally non-threatening field like art history, but not in the key areas of law, economics and business. The Board of Trustees of the University consists mostly of financiers and business executives, including the president of Goldman, Sachs & Co. - see http://trustees.uchicago.edu/ They don't want anyone using the prestige of their position at U of C to advocate 'dangerous' ideas. These are the people whom the chairs of departments have to please. Professors may have tenure, but otherwise the power of the trustees to set university policy has changed little since Upton Sinclair wrote The Goose-step circa 1921’.
It is great to see that people like you gain dynamic and momentum. And THIS is our only chance. Shout out loud. The country needs re-education and that can happen only through the freedom and the power of the Net. History has to be re-written, democracy has to be enabled with thinking citizens, and the monetary system has to be designed for the people and not the elite.
Suggestions how to get there?
Don’t ask me, ‘cause I don’t have a happy picture. I see lots of pitchforks.
Marshall McCluan "The Medium is the Message" was functioning on a prohetic level - note he was marginalized. One of his observations was that it is necessary to recognize a pattern and intercede in time.
One of the most heinously banal outputs of the current system is that it both depends on and results in a marginalization pattern. It is no accident that profit is based on a differential commonly referred to a profit margin. What needs to come front and center is the fact that this paradimatic cabal has marginalized life/existance in its entirety and is incapable of seeing the insanity of regarding itself as benign. It is not benign it is narcissitically banal, which means it defines what is beyond itself as itself. It cannot do otherwise, it is the nature of the beast. Nature/the planet, people and balances must feed it according to its own appetite. Thus it's environment (which it deigns to 'share' in some cases) is being poisoned, raped, used, abused, altered polluted with impunity - and it claims to be "in charge".
The cycle of marginalization and the singularity of projection is based on a child/adult power/infantilization polarity.
It has been noted that when Descartes came up with his much celebrated phrase 'cogito ergo sum'- it could have been 'cogito ergo est'. The difference between the two is the recognition that knowledge implies a learning process hence being incomplete. The "I" of cogito ergo est, implies that it recognizes 'being' as existing within the greater whole/unity - otherwise referred to that which cannot be named, or God.
As the Tao te Ching notes - if you can name its name, its not it's name.
What happens to perspective when a distinction like this considered?
Yes, well said O L D _ G O A T,
Besides marginalization, we have complicit sins of externalization ( of costs ) and normalization of skewed and toxic morality choices.
Our lives are set upon by apparently unrelenting compromising forces, which cinches our open perceptions and then perforates them with constraints, only to send them into the obilette of discernment, to exit at the end -- as shredded shards of what reality really is.
To me that is exactly "What happens to perspective when a distinction like this considered"
Beauty ____ IN
Garbage __ OUT
And then we wonder why it looks like shit.
Namaste
ideally if millions of people understand the distinctions you note, a paradigm shift would occur (maybe is occurring).
similar to the rather sudden (although the signs were obvious to the soviet people that their physical/social infrastructure was in trouble) tsunami of consciousness in the late 1980's that swept the former soviet elites out of power in russia.
it can happen here.
...peace...
This change is not something we are authors of it is a change already authorized that we are/will be the living proof of.
What Obama represents is the implementation of the Shock Doctrine (read Naomi Klein if you haven't yet: it is central to understanding our culture) on the West. Those who engineered the boom and are riding out the bust on tax payers' money have their sights on just one target: bankrupting the state. They want public services to collapse, the government to shrink to the department of trade and the war office, and the remnants of Rooseveldt's New Deal and the Welfare State (in the UK) to be finally torn up and discarded. That is what this is about: destroying social democracy. That those who did not cause and did not participate in the boom are having to foot the bill is bad enough. That they will be robbed of their public services to foot the bill of the next one is even worse. And that no one is pointing this out and nobody seems to care that public services are being wrecked and rubbed out of existance is worst of all.
Reality? The sun shines on the turning Earth, warming the facing side as the dark side cools, creating the motions of the winds and seas...plants and animals are born, grow, reproduce and die, nurturing each other along the way...
Unplug...return to the planet...feed yourself...touch the Earth with your bare fingers and toes, plant a seed, help it grow, harvest and eat...repeat...work with neighbors, share the bounty...share shelter...
So many things we don't need, so few things we do...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...
And forward we go...
About "Global Start Date: Sept. 22, 2012"--I hadn't heard of this, so I looked it up, and it refers to a NASA-funded report issued by the US National Academy of Sciences that was issued in January. According to the report, we may be facing a huge global catastrophe in 2012, when activity on the sun will cause long-term disruption of electrical grids around the world.
This is a very sobering; read about it the link below. (You have to put the two lines together in your browser; for some reason, commondreams.org doesn't allow long links to be printed on one line.)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-
space-storm-alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html?full=true
Thank you, Dubet, for mentioning this.
I didn't know about that...I pulled that date out of the ether because I wanted a date that was pretty close, as I feel immediate action is warranted, and procrastination deadly, but not too close, as I want people to have time to prepare, mentally and physically, without freaking out...I also liked the idea of it being the Autumnal equinox, and the latter part of a growing season, so that the bountiful harvest ahead might bolster weakening resolves...
Now, I'm going to go look at what you're talking about...
I wholeheartedly believe that whatever humans are going to do to survive must be done soon, must be global, and must rest on the individual and the growing of local food...
Wow, petrkrop...certainly, this study about the sun's wreaking havoc on our electrical grids provides yet another powerful incentive to 'switch' to an acoustic, agrarian way of life...sun, soil, wind, water, the other plants and animals...we're set...let's get growing, and 'switch' on September 22, 2012!
Mr. Hedges, THANK YOU for beautifully summing up what Obama has been about since 2005. The sad fact though is that just like the Dubya dittoheads, I had to face the rise of the Obamabots ever since that man ran. Every time he flip-flopped position after position, I was completely pissed off and yet when politics was to be discussed, if I or anyone brought these flip-flops up, we were to be mistreated. Well, I took my chances and did not mind putting up with all the hissing and frothing from the Obamabots as I knew them as much as I knew the Dubya dittoheads. I even had my Nader T-shirt ripped apart twice when I stumbled across a black neighborhood and accidently at a pro-Obama gathering last year. I guess I should have purchased a concealed weapon for self-defense back then instead of let a life-threatening situation convince me to do so.
Despite last year being the worst election year with 99% of the voters strongly favoring status quo, I decided that at this point, I'll forgive those who reluctantly voted for Obama because they really felt helpless and powerless and had been used to the feeling that a third party candidate was not electable. If someone can find some way to bring Obama back to his pre 2005 self, then I'll be eternally grateful. So far though, aside from the minor and trivial progressive victories, Obama's turned out to be just as sloppy on the major issues just like Dubya so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Jennifer, Yes and no, about Obama. I wasn't fooled for one second over "Obamamania" like so many liberals were, because after 8 dreaded years of the Bush Republican Crime Family, (and the Democrats who collaborated with them), most in the progressive community longed for a hero to champion their beliefs. Some of us on the left were engaged in verbal duels on CD and elsewhere, because we supported Kucinich, Nader, and McKinney. "None of them have a chance," we were told, as our fellow Common Dreamers, friends, and family told us, because they believed the hype from big corporate media. Had even 30 % of the people who voted for Obama, voted for Nader or McKinney (Kucinich dropped out of the race, stabbed in the back by his own party who would not support him because of his progressive and humanitarian platform), then we would have had something better to look forward to.
But keep your fingers crossed and let's hope for positive change.
I haven't even graded Obama on his first 100 days. Well, I gave him an incomplete since I still think that 100 days out of 4 years is too small to measure. The first 1000 days would be more like it but I think I know why no president after JFK wanted to do that. I'm slowly getting back to realizing that there are some things even Obama cannot completely control.
Mr. Hedges:
This is the most brilliant take on the Obama Administration I have read so far. You have hit the nail on the head and I compliment you for it. I voted for Obama and now term him a "fraud," on a grand scale. The composition of his Cabinet and his blatant favortism towards the financial houses on Wall Street, say it all.
Because of the sheer sophistication and intellect reflected in what you have written will, I am afraid, relegate it only to a cursory review by most who happen across it. That is a sad commentary on our collective intelligence, our intellectual curiosity and discipline, and the will to know the truth.
Thank you for your insightful words. I shall read them again, many times.
The Sagebrush Philosopher.
This is a great essay. It penetrates through the corporate propaganda.
To read more of such analysis, in much more detail, read Paul Street's superb book about President Obama, published shortly after the election. It is called Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics.
A fine essay, Mr. Hedges. This is the kind of clarity that causes a few light bulbs to go on. I particularly liked this line: "The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud." Yes, it is a citizen fraud and not at all what the founding of this country was meant to be. Of course, Obama is not alone in that fraud.
Stereotypes are absolutely necessary to manage the unbounded complexity of experience, of one's perceptions of the "out there" which has no limits on its complexity, and to create models of the "out there" to communicate with others. They are universal and timeless (Lincoln was "the rail-splitter" and even "the ape") and we cannot avoid them, but we do often shift them. I am sure Lippman understood that. Certain stereotypes become disfavored over time, while others grow in strength.
A scholar or expert certainly does not deal in stereotypes with regard to the field of scholarship of expertise, though like anyone else the scholar/expert may use them for other subjects, to keep the complexity at some manageable level in order to maneuver through the obstacles in life. We could use more information sources which provide commentary at great depth on political issues from a wide range of scholars and experts on the subject matter underlying the issues. We also could use a universal highschool curriculum that includes a course or courses which inform the students of the importance of seeking out such in-depth and sophisticated analyses of political issues so that they may actually make use of such resources. Then maybe we would have an informed electorate. Then again, the kleptocratic oligarchs would never let that happen.
Kivals, Excellent post! "Then again, the kleptocratic oligarchs would never let that happen." Julius Caesar tried and the oligarchs turned on him.
"The Assassination of Julius Caesar," by Dr. Michael Parenti.
"We also could use a universal highschool curriculum that includes a course or courses which inform the students of the importance of seeking out such in-depth and sophisticated analyses of political issues so that they may actually make use of such resources."
well stated kivals, i agree w/ hedges critique of obama - that he's just a political brand - but until the american public is willing or even capable of listening and deciphering the the barrage of political messages bombarding them (in a historical context) - nothing will change - we should not be surprised by the outcome.
amercians expect coke or pepsi (blue sky is not on the table).
also if obama is a brand of the dem party (dem party being 1/2 of corporate america) how would hedges characterize s palin or j mccain or how would he characterize their respective brands of republicanism ?
it's a given that the occupants of america's corporate boardrooms, better business bureaus and chamber of commerces will never tolerate a viable socialist party in this country. even if the government were to expropriate the banks, insurance companies and auto companies - the corporate parties will find ways for their friends to profit at the expense of taxpayers.
which begs the question - if meaningful social/economic justice and peace cannot be cultivated through the electoral process, when is the time to examine another course of action, perhaps a more revolutionary approach ?
...peace...
iowablackbird, You've brought up some very good points. I think the last paragraph sums it up. Thanks!
A great number of Americans percieve reality just fine. Why do you think gun and ammo sales have gone through the roof?
Excellent question. When people get fed up with the pols betraying them and providing no real security whatsoever, I wouldn't blame them for choosing to take matters or even the law into their own hands. I used to be a strong gun control advocate until I witnessed the worst of Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater, and even a horror hell experience I did not anticipate. When people feel let down and are too poor to even donate to one another, then buying guns cheap to protect oneself first like a vigilante is all they got. When the pols actually address and tackle poverty and terrorism and not resort to the same old short term quickies for what's left of the middle class and bomb-bomb-bomb on foreign policy, people will actually trust government and gun sales might even drop like a rock.
RedTide,
Someone on CD recently criticized you, saying you were the Rush Limbaugh (or perhaps it was "the Glenn Beck") of CD. That person was exactly right.
I pointed out Friday that in your vicious smear of former Col. Ann Wright, you'd actually confused her with former Gen. Janis Karpinski (both being former or present high-ranking female officers of the US military). You admitted I was quite correct about that.
I've also seen you attack Amy Goodman. Here you attack Chris Hedges, calling him a fakir who never exposes the illusions of liberal capitalism, & whose main concern is staying a celebrity by stopping short of criticizing capitalism. Actually, Hedges wrote an article that appeared here a few months ago, explaining why he's a socialist. He OFTEN criticizes liberal capitalism, & does so far more insightfully & persuasively than YOU do.
I'm a leftist & a critic of capitalism, as you purport to be. Yet your tirades seem no better to me than those of a Limbaugh or a Beck. You're completely irresponsible. You think being a leftist is mostly a matter of denouncing figures on the left -- people deserving of respect & admiration. Your kind of "leftism" seems mainly a self-righteous excuse to be nasty & slashing. If you really care about the Left, you should quit making these kinds of ill-founded & poorly-reasoned wrongheaded attacks. You even alienate people (like me) who already know that capitalism is at the root of most of today's ills.
"What the world needs....is a global dictatorship of the proletarian..."
Maybe you could resurrect another Stalin to help cleanse the planet of your brand of undesirables.
The rise of Stalin and his ilk, as well as the rise of Mao, and the Gang of Four in China, validates Bakunin's criticism of Marx's call for a ruling proletarian elite to enforce a communist world order. Bakunin's prediction was that such a ruling elite would turn into a tyrannical authoritarian class that would be worse than the capitalist's they replaced. His point being that ANY ruling elite will consolidate more and more power unto itself at the expense of those it purports to be benefiting.
There again you are not acknowledging that a crucial stage in the development of Socialism has occurred which obviates the need for an armed takeover of every state. This new development, which Marx could not predict, shows that only one state needs to rise by Revolution and that once they are successful it is their example by accomplishment which is the template for achieving Socialism.
And, of course, if that was Bakunin's prediction then he obviously was not able to fathom all of the possibilities. When Fortune magazine printed a similar belief in such tripe, in accusing Fidel of having accumulated a fortune of $600 million dollars, Fidel did a national broadcast where he stated that if they could find one foreign bank account in his name with even one dollar in it, then he would resign. And you can be absolutely sure that the U.s. would have spent at least half that much in trying to find any such fictitious accounts. What did Fortune magazine offer as proof of their calumny when Fidel challenged them in front of the world? You guessed it.
Well, you continue to call for something that is not pertinent, so I can only believe that you refuse to spend any time learning of the reality as it is occurring in the world today and therefore you must be living in the past ideology of a surpassed age. Of all the countries which are actively embracing socialism in the new era in Latin America, none of them are Communist. All of them have achieved ruling status at the voting booth and none of them obtained power from an armed insurrection. Therefore, the capitalist camp is shrinking markedly and will have to continue to do so in conjunction with the current rise of Socialism. And by that very definition capitalism is headed for extinction. Plain and simple. The only variables are how fast certain areas will take to realize the new paradigm and adjust their national policies to reflect that new reality.
Your childish display does no good to the cause, reveals your ignorance of geopolitical reality, and causes all Socialists to wonder about your veracity. You are beginning to sound like a mole of the secret services, sort of like those masked agents that are usually sent into peaceful demonstrations so they can attack their own police forces and give them the plausible reason to attack with sticks and pepper spray.
Compared to Fidel Castro, Karl Marx is a student. The Cuban society is way beyond anything Marx imagined and if you cannot fathom that the Cuban Revolution has taken a quantum leap over Communism and has reached Humanism, then you are lost.
Hunhh?
What is needed is not a Leninist party but a Castroist party or, to be more historically accurate, a Cubanist party. Whatever Lenin's true intentions were, the ultimate barometer is the creation and sustention of a viable socialist system and the only one of those in modern history occurred in Cuba. Fortunately for everybody, the Cuban example of an advanced socialist, that is; Humanist, society precludes the need for armed uprisings in most instances. That is because the fantastic successes of the Cuban system make themselves known to the peoples almost by osmosis and they can then build their parties knowing absolutely, and not only theoretically, that the socialist model is the future for everybody.
RedTide,
Speaking for myself, It is likely that I embrace socialism and economic justice today only because I was taught the christian gospels - notably the Sermon on the Mount -by my parents and various nuns at school.
I like how you think Red, it's refreshing.
Under his observations I believe we would all be liars and would non of us celebrities be if we weren't.
In this observation made by Chris I find that the verdict arrived at of who is the victim and who is the perpetrator is incorrect. The massive psyche driven reality we live in is at root one of humanity and the masses, not of the recent manipulation of that same phenomenon by the few masters of the stages. The shift away for status quo, if we expect one to be made in reality, must be of the collective psychic desires and beliefs of the masses, not of those who manipulate the same.
We are the beast, they the blood sucking parasite.
Thanks for your input Red. I don't really know what the scientific solution is, but I agree that it must be so, and not some 'cosmic thunderbolt'. I don't think it will be a 'shift' I think it will be an education of perception which will lead to a shift. But if we think we already know, and I don't, we can't educate ourselves of this new perception and get to the shift. I think this perception will be totally new in addition to what we already know, not something we already know but lost or forgot that is being hidden from us by the parasites. Yes, our beastliness calls to the parasites and they abound in numbers that are leaving us sick and falling. But the blood they relish is not the blood of universal peace, sustainability, equality and affluence. So their route upon our backs will find it's limit in our shift to those desirable qualities.
What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis.
This is the viper that will get Obama, as well as the rest of us. From Lyndon Baines Johnson to George Wanker Bush, all presidents have had a favorite fantasy that devours them in the end. This is Obama's.
The best article so far written about President Obaminable.
And to all those tragic people in that freezing cold of Jan 20 2009 witnessing one war criminal transfer power to the next: what fools you are.
i believe, rush, that there was no mention of a used car salesman. along with the disappearance of hard work and integrity and courage we can throw in common sense. in their proper place in a decent society came the con men with their hype and their shrill hysteria and their get rich quick schemes and their backstabbing techniques, and of course their following of believing non-believers.
nor do i believe that anyone here is "romanticizing the past." i believe that the "larger society" you reference as being racist and sexist and homophobic and militaristic and insanely greedy and violent is not limited to your romantic past, but is present today in even greater and more hysteric and more shrill numbers.
additionally, i also believe the word used in the paragraph that you have a problem with is "character," something i've yet to see in any car salesman, new or used. it would obviously do you a bit of good to reflect upon that. or go back and re-evaluate the paragraph.
"i believe that the "larger society" you reference as being racist and sexist and homophobic and militaristic and insanely greedy and violent is not limited to your romantic past, but is present today in even greater and more hysteric and more shrill numbers."
This is ridiculous. You are romanticising the past here. Ask a gay, or a lesbian, or a transgendered person about homophobia in your golden past. Ask a gay, or a lesbian, or a transgendred person about just how "good" life was in your beloved past. Homophobia is much more prevalent among the older generation, and tolerance and acceptance of equality much more prevalent among the young.
Ask a woman about sexism in your beloved glorious past. Not to mention non white people.
Or do some reading.
- I can hardly believe you'd waste your time arguing with 'rush limbaughs taint' about this. Basically, you & he are in total agreement about Hedges' brilliant article, except for the next-to-last paragraph.
His point is that US society never really attained any lofty moral peak, so that to some extent, that one paragraph over-romanticizes the past. Your point is that there is some substance to the moral decline Hedges so powerfully depicts -- ie, that the US has rotted in recent decades, so that one can argue truthfully that in some sense, it used to be better than it is.
So you're both right. You both have a point. Now kiss and make up. You're both on the same side.
Excellent points all! Of course I'm a bit more on the positive side of your positive comments than you are of course.
Romanticised yes, but more true than not for the next-to-last paragraph. Anyone can see however that we are as a country not as good as we once were. That is just fact. Hopefully we can reject the slime from all quarters that has brought us to this weakened state and be better in the end.
"So you're both right. You both have a point. Now kiss and make up. You're both on the same side."
The truth.
Hedges sez: "And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus."
***
No false advertising on this one. It was a campaign promise. (See FISA Act, 2008)
This article is as accurate and as clear as anything Chris Hedges has written in recent memory. And he is brilliant at what he does. Writing like this makes as much a contribution as anything does for it stands on its own as an anchor to reality, a source we can believe in as we search for solid ground to stand on. We are an undereducated society. We have been miseducated, cheated, and disinformed. Until we straighten out our thinking and our ability to see things as they are, nothing we do will change paradigm. What we need is an understanding and commitment to intellectual integrity. And this writing is a good example and demonstration of what we should be looking for. It is one good pillar we can use as a template on which to build something better.
http://www.gpln.com
Sioux Rose
MARK: I agree with all your points and think this is one of the most important articles ever posted on CD by Chris Hedges. It is LUCID and in many ways a validation of all the incisive analyses offered by DAVE BRONSTEIN.
As for this writing being a model of integrity, we could find that integrity in Kucinich and Ralph Nader and others; but it is precisely THAT truth-telling which would pull the curtain back that media spends a fortune on maintaining. Without smoke and mirrors there'd be no commercial version of the capitalist Wizard of Oz, no basis for the grand set of inducements and the razzle dazzle of bamboozles that keeps the engine of "more, bigger, faster, better" driving. The template exists, also reflected in the works of Chalmers Johnson and Naomi Klein (to name a few evident luminaries), but these highly intelligent soothsayers are marginalized and generally only read by those with a THIRST for enduring Truth, as opposed to the many convenient fictions that drive our world off course.
Before I turned off my cable TV, I used to enjoy watching C-span discussions in the morning. It bothered me that MOST guests took a pro-status quo view of events, and that it seemed to me more Republican line calls were taken, than opponents or voices ready to challenge the abundant lies du jour. Media is very careful to keep insights and integrity OFF the radar, with the possible exception of some of the comedians, as related in several posts.
Siouxrose: Right on the money! I do agree with all of the points you made. I hardly watch C-Span anymore for those very reasons.
I admire your astute observations.
Sioux Rose
PEACEMAN: You are very kind and I notice that you live up to your screen name. Seems when you post you go out of your way to be affirmative and complimentary to persons that post here, particularly if their views resonate with ideals of social justice. Thank you for your even-tempered feedback and contributions to C.D.
Siouxrose:
I try very hard to live up to it but it's not easy. Thank you for your kind compliment
Looks like Obama is secretly continuing to stir things up in Georgia, just as McCain/Bush did...
Obama Continues Bush Policy on Weapons to Georgia
from Bruce Gagnon, Organizing Notes, May 3, 2009
President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have announced that they intend to keep the promise of former president George W. Bush to send $242 million in military aid to Georgia in the 2010 budget.
This comes at the very time that NATO war games are being prepared in Georgia, right on Russia's southern border. Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev sounded the alarm about the NATO military operations saying, "“Military exercises can’t be conducted where the war has been recently unleashed. Those who took a decision to conduct them will bear responsibility for their negative consequences."
Unedited:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/42246
Cygnus-X1-isaHole: I doubt if Obama will go that far. And I have great respect for Bruce Gagnon. The Russians fully well understand American/NATO hegemony in the region, and have been preparing for a showdown, just in case.
Yes, this is an incisive article which exposes Obama as being a faux progressive. As Chris Hedges notes, people certainly should not be fooled by the marketing efforts that have been done to make Obama appear to be an antidote to Bush and McCain. But it appears that a liberal such as Jon Stewart has been taken in by Obama, as indicated by an interview that he did last week with a prominent conservative named Cliff May. Stewart told May that on the issue of torture, this practice is most heinous and should never be done and allowed by Americans against prisoners and foreign combatants. But while justifiably deploring torture Stewart then assured May that, like Obama, it is time for the country to "move forward."
It would appear that Stewart, the idol of so many liberals, is doing his best to be just as hypocritical as Obama while forsaking the necessary criticism that should be necessary to point out to his audience the fatal flaws in Obama's militant and less than humane [and illegal and ineffective] way of thinking.
The Jon Stewart phenomenon is definitely worthy of some analysis. On the one hand, there are good reasons for Stewart's popularity. He's bright, perceptive, terrifically talented, & hilarious. As with Steven Colbert & Bill Maher, his show is attractive because at some level, the public senses that it's been betrayed & lied to by traditional news sources. The public hungers for at least some degree of truth, which these "left-ish" comedians offer. As was once the case with court jesters, our ruling apparatus permits comedians to approach the "terrible truths" about our society in ways that wouldn't be tolerated from "serious" news shows.
On the other hand, Stewart is basically "just a liberal." His perspective means he inescapably has many of the limitations that are intrinsically part of liberalism. This leads him to make some very serious mistakes, such as the one you mentioned with Cliff May. // Similarly, a few years ago, he had Colin Powell on as a guest. He was completely bamboozled by Powell's personal charm, & within minutes, Powell practically had Stewart waving pom-poms for the Afghan War (the "good war").
Now matter how clever the individual liberal, liberalism itself is a flawed perspective. Since it only recommends slight tweaks in the status quo (as opposed to fundamental reorganization), it can only work in a society that's close to being decent. It's incapable of providing truthful guidance in a society that's become fundamentally intolerable.
Stewart himself is to some extent the entertainment world's version of "bipartisanship." He's incredibly accepting of right-wing monsters, which is why they like to come on his show. I've often marvelled at his ability to chat comfortably & respectfully with these hoodlums, many of whom are essentially modern-day Nazis.
Dave Bronstein: A most excellent post of Jon Stewart and your take on certain parts of liberalism, but especially the interview segment. Too many times have I left the room or switched channels when the guest was, as you say, a hoodlum or essentially, a modern-day Nazi. That liberal, I ain't!
Stewart's job is to make the odious seem palatable so regular people will think them human. They all know that he's really working for them so they take the jokes in stride, knowing as they do that the masses will briefly see them as ordinary folks and not as the cretins that they really are and, for them, that is a net plus.
Brand Obama. Brand Stewart. Is there really a difference?
Bingo!
Similarly, Thom Hartmann really knows how to 'go after' obvious right-wing, low-level nut-jobs, but listen to him interview someone like Richard Perle, and he becomes downright contrite, suddenly speaking in respectful 'hushed' tones.
You're right: This is what liberalism looks like in a system that is fundamentally flawed --- which is the main point of Hedges' article.
Old Peculiar: Bingo is right! I think the world of Hartmann, but faulted him for not supporting Kucinich early on, and for not supporting Cindy Sheehan in her bid against the Bush "protector," "impeachment's off the table" Pelosi. Thom has a big influence on his listening audience, and I think he was disingenuous for not supporting those two progressives early on in their campaigns.
Dave, as intelligent and well meaning as you pursue to be, I think there is a huge piece of possibility missing from your bank reality.
the idea being that we are mislead to a pre-existing truth and suspect that it is being kept from us, assumes that this is a previously established truth that humanity, lost, had stolen or has forgotten. The possibility that it is a truth that is yet unformed but soon to be is not considered. Our suspicions of what we could be that we can become rather than what we were and are prevented from are just as likely of a driver for our enjoyment of the comedian/joker archetype that points to that same elusive thing that is like a missing hand,leg or eye to our deeper knowing selves.
this is perhaps the most brilliant essay to appear on common dreams in many months. many of the sentences, separated from paragraphs, stand alone in their harsh truth and brutal honesty.
perhaps some of you here aren't yet old enough to remember "... hard work, integrity and courage." or how a man's handshake was worn like a badge of honor. or perhaps some of you here are too young to recognize the harsh truth in what mr. hedges says here about the current consumption-oriented culture that "... honors charm, fascination and likability."
perhaps my monitor doesn't show the same second-to-last paragraph that you non-believers are referencing.
"when opinions cannot be distinguished from facts..." - chris hedges
"this is perhaps the most brilliant essay to appear on common dreams in many months. "
Agreed.
Easily the best essay on Obama that I've read thus far. And I've read several hundred articles.
Thank you Chris Hedges!
romanticizing the past is not gonna help us. the US is not in decline from some lofty moral peak. pt barnum, medicine men and huckster elmer gantries didn't emerge w/the internet.
and what does it really matter if you & your used car dealer could agree by a handshake and stand by it when your larger society is racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, and insanely greedy & violent? such private morality makes day to day life easier, in some cases, but can hardly be called "courage" in its willful blindness to larger issues of injustice.
like i said, excellent article, except that stupid paragraph.
Lino
Well said.
Well, Chris, i am in full agreement! Excellent post, although much of it has been said before. But it is a great addition to the 100 day assessment obsession.
And indeed our performer culture is our reality tv. And of course, personal narrative, such as 2lovely, fiesty daughters plus new puppy, etc....All to make us feel part of the first family.
Personally, i believe he is actually and finally feeling that he is in over his head. Hubris notwithstanding. Wisdom should be the ultimate quality we look for in a leader. He shows no real evidence of this, to me. He is witty and calculated and intelligent. But no true wisdom. He seems young on many levels.....
readytotransform
Nice comment by both you and the angry old fella.
Youth is the excuse. I vote for complicity. And naivete is an excuse and his lack of true wisdom supports this.
The Mark of the Beast~
Branded, tattooed and now, or soon-to-be, implanted. Hormones and radio frequency monitors just like the sick cattle some of you who are vegetarians so depise to eat. Well, hell bell's vegetarians, you're cattle yourselves now.
Amerika!
C'mon wimps reading this, fight back...
FIGHT BACK HARD.
Then we can talk about cattle, regular cattle, and people, regular people, again...
Who is he alternative to Obama who is ELECTABLE? He will not torture. He wll close Guantanamo. He is trying to get us better heath care for all. He is committed to a two state solution in the middle east. He is not perfect. Let us help him stay progressive. If he fails the extreme right could prevail.
"He will not torture. "
Given Obama's furious efforts to rebrand Bush policies while still supporting them, it's not surprising that you missed this:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12041
Remember when Bush said "The US does not torture people"?
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3334258n
Well, he meant it about as much as Obama does.
"He wll close Guantanamo. "
He might close it within a year. It has not been closed yet. Bahgram Air Base holds more prisoners than Guantanamo and will not be closed down. In addition, the prisoners held at Guantanamo will not be released or allowed to stand trial in US civilian courts. All Obama has done is rebranded them from "enemy combatants" to "detainees" although this affords them no additional rights. Also, our policy of extraordinary rendition is still in effect.
"He is trying to get us better heath care for all. "
Just like Bush said! How's that coming? Didn't Pelosi just comment that single payer is not part of this discussion? You sound as excited about this as the insurance companies are. I know why they are excited, but why are you?
"He is committed to a two state solution in the middle east."
Right. An economically nonviable trash heap for the Palestinians and a militaristic "Jewish State" for Israel. Have you forgotten that Bush was also promoting a "two state solution in the middle east"? Short memory? Have you forgotten Obama's total support for Israel most recent wars against Gaza and Lebanon?
"He is not perfect. Let us help him stay progressive."
The "perfect" comment is a lame straw man argument, and it's getting old. For example, did you know Cheney is also "not perfect." So what? As for being a "progressive" my question is when did progressives become the standard bearers for war and corporatism?
"If he fails the extreme right could prevail."
Are you trying to scare us into supporting him? Again? Can't you at least wait another four years to unleash that load of crap? Again? I believe that technically what you are suggesting is called vote extortion.
sach 8:46 I rather have the present situation than O's mandatory healthcare.
Even Bush was committed to a two state solution. Torture is allowable by his command. One man has been released from Gitmo and they might go back to kangeroo military courts.
The point of the article was if you keep buying the Brand we will never correct the reality and the catastrophe will be of such an order as to usher in an even more stringent facist regime.
It's ironic that every one of your claims about Obama ("will not torture," etc) is actually false, & shows that you've been duped by the very image of pseudo-politics Hedges has so vividly described. You are unable to distinguish between the advertising for Obama & the actual product beneath the packaging.
You write "If he fails the extreme right could prevail." Actually, in terms of policy, Obama IS the extreme right. It's only at the level of his advertising campaign that he appears to be "progressive."
Try to get this: Bush was a clumsy inept salesman for US imperialism, militarism, & corporatism. Obama is a polished & slick salesman for the same exact thing.
How much does it matter (when governing) what this 1 man actually believes, when he's had to compromise/agree to so many powerfull just to get into his position?
Are there actually initiatives, directives and bills being spread around by the White House that try to correct/improve situations- even at a slow Democratic pace?
Meaning, I'd like to see examples of the president's (community organizer) shining through- or was the moral of co's a kickass campaign?
any candidate going thru the hoops necessary to reach the national political stage is already a thoroughly debased and compromised human being, esp. obama, the moral turd.
the system cannot produce a "progressive" candidate, not at the national level.
"Stay" progressive?
Are we talking about the same Obama? "Progressive"? Since when?
· Yr Obd't Servant
Maybe for a few minutes when he was a 'community organizer'.
if he is genuine, he will re-open an investigation of 9/11. Personally, I am not holding my breath.....The truth of 9/11 will set us all free. Can we handle that?
Doubtful.
I thought I had a good idea about 9/11. But I came to a very dark place when I tried to handle the real truth behind 9/11.
See for yourself: www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner
Read Collateral Damage part I and II.
It will change the way you look at history, politics, finance, war and terrorism. You will find out about real terrorism. Many persons in these documents are well known; many are right now in pivotal positions of politics and finance. These people do shape YOUR life and that of our children right now. The details are researched and referenced. The consequences are beyond belief.
You don't know the truth of 9/11?
The CIA's motto is the "truth will set you free". But they almost always hide the truth.
Truth must be proven.... What can you prove that will set us free?
There is more to 9/11 than what you might think you know. Read the link. I'm not sure if that will set you free, but it sure as hell will make you sick.
We the people ARE the alternative to Obama. And, we the people, don't need to be elected. We are here. We are. We.
Now go out and do something today to reflect that...
v.purto
Very true, RedTide. We the We is apotheos of dellusion. I + Waren Buffet = We. How smart! We the People always defend our Property. I with my bare hands while Warren Buffet with the little help of 12 aircraft carrier groups. And Buffet is the best of Us. Or Them? Explain me pls.
I'm talking to people here on CD, not to people 'in general', who the times (current events) demonstrate, are worse than idiots. I'm talking to you. Are you worse than an idiot? I don't think so...
So see, I'm talking to you.
A Good point and I woke up this morning and thought that it is such a waste of energy to have to tell Obama how to do what is "right" when he is supposed to be so brilliant and morally uncorrupted.He is smart and that means that he is culpable and knows what he is doing and wont change and "we the people" better start looking else where.The lesser of 2 evils is getting to be a no choice at all.If we do nothing in 2010 when we get a chance to blunt his agenda then we will contiue our slide into that pit.Tony
Excellent nedlud!
thanks, Leea :)
I did something today to reflect that. I called the local credit union and found that it will work wonderfully for me to switch all my bankster accounts to the credit union. Bye bye banksters! While the banksters will contribute to O'Bamba's re-election campaign, my credit union will not. Spoiler?
excellent article (except for the 2nd to last paragraph, which has probably never been true.)
obamatards, read it and grow up.
i remember a couple of years ago esquire magazine had an issue with 50 influential people offering their insights into life and how to get the most from it
norman mailer did a 60 pages (just kidding but it was long) on how boxing makes you a man
other smart folks offered their glimpses
the one i remember was frank gifford's peice - normally i don't think of frank as a go to guy for anything but his point was short and thoughtful
he related life to his football career and his simple point was - keep your eye on the ball - which belies itself in simplicity but......
it would behoove us all to keep our eyes, not on the ball in this case, but on the money
obama, charming bastard that he is, graceful and delicate with a phrase, is a nwo shill
that is fact not ad hominem
look at his career
kissinger stated a few weeks ago the the nwo has a whole new opportunity in this crisis to further their adgenda and as far as he is concerned obama is the man
as chris says - to live in illusion is dangerous
as machiavelli says - to prefer what seems rather than what is
selling the illusional world view of nwo is the job of the corporate media
turn off the tv - hug your kids
you do have options
I agree...Second to last paragraph.....Yes.
Also sounds like reminiscing about the good old days of 'leave it to beaver', etc...I never found those sentiments to have any kind of creative power. Insipid.
Regardless of the second to last paragraph, it's the second from the top that matters. Everyone needs the to read and re-read that paragraph, because I get the feeling a lot of people on this site (and much more in the general population) don't realize that this is what Obama has been doing. It's nice to see Common Dreams running articles like this instead of apologist crap like Mark Morford or Juan Cole.
Sorry to shatter the "more cyncal than thou" style of kids today, but things WERE different up to about 25 years ago. I am old enough to remember the old days, and substance did triumph over style.
We had a president that warned us of military-industrial complex; another vowed a "war on poverty" - try to even find the words "poverty" or "the poor" in the news today. Another warned us of a maliase of overconsumption and crass consumerism - knowing it would destroy his chances for re-election.
Pete Seeger sung antiwar songs on the Smother's Brothers - the most popular prime time TV show. Saturday night live skits were filled with real incicive political satire - nothing like the heavily sanitized and censored stuff on SNL today.
Top 40 radio was filled with rock and folk songs decrying war, militarism and imperialism, and advocating socialism, anarchism and tuning out capitailst society -from the Byrd's to John Lennon (Can you even imagine "Imagine" being a hit today???) to at the end of the era, Burce Cockburn praising the Sandinistas of Nicaragua and describing his moral outrage at the US sponsorship of central American thugs and sung: "If I has a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die". not only didn't he gat a ticket to a secret prison, his song went to the top of the charts!
In the "good old days", under Eisenhower (yes, the "president that warned us of military-industrial complex"), our CIA overturned the democratic governments of Iran and Guatemala, and started our involvement in Viet Nam, to name but a few atrocities. (And if you think Eisenhower was ignorant of this, or even resistant to it, you've got some homework to do.) If you want to go pre-WWII, we have WWI, a war of, by, and for the rich (the millions of soldiers were just a commodity, as they are now), robber barons, brutal suppression of organize labor... etc, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think the disease that the top 0.1% have always had -- summed up in the word, "vanity" -- has indeed spread to the masses. But we've been sold a bill of goods by our overlords for a long, long time.
The solution: the destruction of the two-party duopoly. A parliamentary system would get people involved in their government again, because they could feel that their interests were being represented, as opposed to having to choose from the two narrowly-differing "options" offered by the corporate parties.
Thanks for the reality check.
AMERICANS ARE sleeping a long dream, not even The Doors could wakeup US citizens
I give up on warning people about the US financial oligarchie and its coup de etat against US citizens.
I am tired of politizising with american people, who are too argumentative, too hard headed and not too much into change, i will move to Venezuela, or to The Caribbean soon !!
Leftist, you are remembering a Fantasy America that never was. We had everything you mention, everything but the American People and we FAILED UTTERLY. By '68, after White America murdered the 39yo Black Preacher for calling White America the greatest purveyor of Violence in the World and for calling the US a nation that made beggars - the tide had already turned. White America shot it's load with a freebie that cost them NOTHING - the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts and after that it was "Shut the fuck up and leave me alone."
In '68 49 States in a nation with a White Majority of 87% overwhelming voted for RMN to, "...put those fucking niggers, those filthy fucking cunts, and those long haired god damned filthy fucking anti-war protesters in their fucking place." Nixon took the purple and Hoover took the call. Hoover, graduate of the Palmer Raids and Anslinger's protege, dusted off programs for Ritual Defamation, False Imprisonment, & Extra Judicial Execution that he'd been developing back to '24 when he was politically appointed head of the "Bureau of Investigation" under Treasury. His enemies were Reds, NAACP, Wobblies, Union Organizers et al. He used the Klan for his wet work and he supplied them humint until the Klan killed the White kids, you remember the White kids; Goodwin, & Schwerner. And then there was the Black kid, Chaney - they had segregated burials. In the course of the FBI "search they found over 60 dead Black men in the swamps - none of their deaths were even investigated. But there's more...
Within a decade of Nixon's ascendancy there were NO leaders and NO mass movements for economic and social justice, there have been none since and White America CHEERED every Ritual Defamation, False Imprisonment, and Extra Judicial Execution. That's HOW it was done. Now for the WHY...
By '64 we had the greatest distribution of wealth in 7000 years of human history. The END of poverty forever in this country was in sight and LIFETIME stable employment was on the horizon. It was the natural trajectory of the Roosevelt Legacy - BUT - to get those we had to reject White Male Supremacy; Gender Slavery; Human Slavery; Constant War and the Rights of Conquest as the only force that gave our lives meaning; and we had to let the (nearly moribund) Oligarchy DIE as a social class. We had to make an equal place for everyone at the table, and we had to let Authoritarian Patriarchy die. It was a bridge too far. White America panicked. Hysterical violence was in the air. The core Identity of White People was threatened. That's why we killed them all or falsely imprisoned them or hounded them into silence and suicide.
We were founded as a mirror of the Roman Slave Republic before Sulla. EXCLUSION is the core of every system of Authoritarian Patriarchy. We still demand White Supremacy; We still demand constant war as the force that gives our lives meaning; and our Oligarchy, like a vampire given a fresh infusion of human blood now reigns supreme.
All the degradation and debasement White America fears is preferable to the demands of Freedom that White America still runs from like a disease.
They wanted to be saved from the Black People, the Women, and the Protesters. Now they want that AND they want their "Insulated White Privilege" returned to them as it was in "the good old days".
Brandeis said it in the '30's, you can have Democracy or richfilth Oligarchy, you don't get both. He could have added Authoritarian Patriarchy and Male Supremacy but his made a tighter quote.
Sioux Rose
LUCKY: You make a lot of sense. I didn't see you on a thread a week ago Sunday, done by Frank Rich on "The Banality of Evil." I would be interested in YOUR take on the growth of an extremely degrading form of pornography and what you say about the rescinding of women's reproductive rights. These films demand that the female actresses (no doubt on drugs, victims of early sexual molestation, and/or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome) refer to themselves as whores and allow themselves EXTREME humiliation and the subtext is a conveyed message that THIS is how women want to be treated. I wouldn't make an issue of this if it was a fringe thing, but the researcher said porn out-sells Hollywood movies and he specified which titles/subjects were selling most "hot"ly. At a time when real caring is becoming less present in our society, as torture becomes just another protocol, and human beings are everywhere being watched, the concept of private space/privacy invaded, all the things that make us HUMAN beings are being washed away. You see as prime motive the urge on the part of the "rich filth" to once again lay claim to it all. I see an insidious dark force that eats away at the spiritual essence of human life. The interests of these "parties" dovetails in that the ultimate outcomes are war, depraved indifference to human life, and an all-out degradation not only of society, but of the entire natural world which human life (along with its counterparts in the other phyla) depends upon. Tragic does NOT begin to define it.
Sioux Rose, I often find myself incapable of responding anymore. I listened to Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzales for their first 10 years every morning and while I do read them, I can't listen anymore. Something about her voice going straight into my heart - agony - the interviews of the tortured, the mangled, the damned. Just too much horror to withstand. Read yes, listen no. Self-preservation.
To your point, porn first made the video industry (way back in the days of Beta Max) and then made the internet a reality (only profitable business on the web for at least the first decade). Male supremacy/gender slavery - 'females' as disposable meat - core to American culture, like their RC priests attending a childbirth and telling the father to "let the bitch die, save the boy child, you can always get another breeding female", or even better; America's worship of a kiddie raping slave holder like Tommy J: "Cooomme heeere Sallly! Daddy's got something gooood for you. Don't make me come find you! Don't make me beat you again!" Males degrade and enslave what they fear, to control "it". And yes, it runs to the core of White American 'culture', as was.
This society has been a cannibalistic blood feast for some time now. The only rules are the table etiquette and the only question is whether you're on the menu or one of the diners. Nothing even remotely human or humane about any aspect of this society. Real humans could not do the horrific things we do to each other.
The real torture for me was that we had a real chance to create a truly egalitarian society 40+ years ago and White America refused with a bullet - and they refuse to this day. We are anti-biotic and the bios will eat us for it. That's what choosing Exclusion as the foundation of our society has done to us.
You are right, "Tragic does NOT begin to define it." HORROR is more than a word.
Peace.
Leftist: Good observations! I used to look forward each week to what the Smothers Brothers were going to say.
I'm with you, Leftist. I grew up in the 40s and 50s, and yes, there was much wrong, most especially about race. But people valued character and honesty. Companies met their pension obligations, people left their doors unlocked and kids' bikes spent the night on front lawns. People looked out for each others' kids. And reported to parents when they saw a kid misbehaving. There's something to be said for having a parent at home raising kids. Those days are gone, they are not coming back. Our society makes it almost impossibly stressful for parents to do their primary job, which is raising their kids. I remember what a nightmare it was for me to find safe reliable childcare, never mind quality. Europe has us beat on that, in spades. Besides state subsidized quality childcare, they have long summer vacations, generous paid time off for family needs. They have their priorities straight. We don't.
But what is most troubling - appalling in fact - is the dumbing down in this country. I believe that is what is sinking us. It's like there is something in the water that shuts off critical thinking skills. Actually it is our educational system. I hear they don't even teach civics anymore. Even if it wasn't being practiced, at least it was being taught. I remember being taught about lobbyists. They were there to inform Congress about the needs of their clients, and it was illegal for them to give anything of any value to members of Congress. Not any more. Now they can finance their elections. But even outlawing that would not solve the money problem. What we need to solve is the flow of information problem. So we have a country of voters who are uninformed and can't see through anything. Perfect. If you're a corporation.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
BeForKids
"But what is most troubling - appalling in fact - is the dumbing down in this country. I believe that is what is sinking us. It's like there is something in the water that shuts off critical thinking skills. Actually it is our educational system. I hear they don't even teach civics anymore"
By golly, you are so right. I'm afraid it may be on purpose by mistake.
Your hero was raping a 14yo Black Girl in the basement of Monticello in between lines of the Declaration. This man's ticket to wealth, power, and private law over the "Muck" consisted of 200 human slaves forced to work from before daylight well into the light of the full moon under daily threat BY HIM of torture mutilation and death. He got all this for taking possession of a white breeding gender slave from a richfilth VA slaveholder. Before that, Tommy J. was a bright (not to say genius) kid with nothing and going nowhere. His family had only 60-70 slaves. They were NOTHING. He was an ambitious man who wrote to his friend John Adams (author of the Alien Sedition Acts) that he "prayed there was not a just god", as well he might.
Of course you could just say that he was a man of his times. We could say the same for any monster and we have an entire pantheon we call "Heroes". Like a people who perpetrate deliberate organized genocide and then name athletic teams, automobiles, and weapon systems after the people we first destroyed and then degraded the survivors. Victor's Justice.
BeForKids: Beautifully said! I agree wholeheartedly with everything, thinking how it was then, compared to now, except for the last paragraph. And yes, the Europeans are ahead of us in what you mentioned, but when I was in Amsterdam, a middle-aged Dutch couple sadly told me that they are 5 years behind us. (Importing our bad habits and ideas) True, they don't teach civics (social studies) anymore, but there is a plethora of information out there...no need to be dumbed down. Otherwise, thanks for your comments.
Hard to find time for Civics when NCLB emphasized test scores, primarily Reading and Math. Yes, these are important (and we are lagging behind other nations) but not at the expense of history, science, civics, and the arts.
"People looked out for each others' kids. And reported to parents when they saw a kid misbehaving. There's something to be said for having a parent at home raising kids. Those days are gone, they are not coming back."
Maybe not now especially in the urban cities but there are some honest attempts even in the rural depopulating areas to bring back some of it. Of course I'm single so I could care less but often don't mind helping to babysit a neighbor's child on a weekend when I'm asked and often gladly volunteer.
"Europe has us beat on that, in spades. Besides state subsidized quality childcare, they have long summer vacations, generous paid time off for family needs. They have their priorities straight. We don't."
But Europe has its set of issues. By closing their businesses too early during the day and keeping closed on the weekends, productivity that could have proven helpful is lost. Don't get me wrong. I love the way they generally do single payer and public transportation but their vacation timing can be a bit too long.
"But what is most troubling - appalling in fact - is the dumbing down in this country. I believe that is what is sinking us. It's like there is something in the water that shuts off critical thinking skills. Actually it is our educational system. I hear they don't even teach civics anymore. Even if it wasn't being practiced, at least it was being taught. I remember being taught about lobbyists. They were there to inform Congress about the needs of their clients, and it was illegal for them to give anything of any value to members of Congress. Not any more. Now they can finance their elections. But even outlawing that would not solve the money problem. What we need to solve is the flow of information problem. So we have a country of voters who are uninformed and can't see through anything. Perfect. If you're a corporation."
Yes, we must solve the educational system and I wouldn't mind seeing a rise in homeschooling since public and private schools have fallen apart in the last two decades and it's all about getting grades and not learning anything. You can teach your kids civics and lobbying for a change. As for saying that changing the laws won't solve the money problem, that depends on exactly how the laws are changed. 9 out of 10 times, it's always swiss cheese loopholes that win the day. Maybe the pols need to preemptively figure out how to stop those loopholes from making it to laws. After all, they have all the time in the world to go on the television and blogosphere so why not sit down and take that same time to think about the laws and loopholes?
JenniferBedingfield you're fantasizing that "Ozzie & Harriet" was real, that "Father Knows Best" was real, and that Mary Tyler Moore was a real human being. The women of that time were drugged to the nines just to tolerate their empty vapid lives and they would exchange pills at their Bridge Parties. Oh yeah darlin' I was there. Then the 'Females' started to get divorce settlements, child support, and alimony and the "Males" went nuts. Next they were getting the pill and finally the "right" to terminate a pregnancy and the 'culture' wars went 24/7. All the appurtenances of Gender Slavery were under assault and YOU are about to go right back into it again -- full blown Gender Slavery - no pill, no right to terminate a pregnancy, no rights that any Male need respect or consider. If you have daughters their only existence will be as the property of a Male. That's the America you pine for. "The good old days" when the fucking bitches and niggers knew their place. You know, the picture of the 'Female' with one black eye, and the caption reads, "Would you like me to explain it to you again?" America, the land of Freedom (kinda sorta), for Males. That's the monster that is coming to eat you....
Well, I'm not saying that those days were perfect either. However, there's got to be a way to take the best of those days and incorporate them into today's days. I'm not worried about Roe v Wade getting overturned because I know that will never happen. It is being made irrelevant as far as I can tell. Casey vs Planned Parenthood already replaced Roe v Wade since 1992 and affirmative action is supported by both sides. Monster coming to eat me? Nah, I can take it on. Besides, I thrice avoided conceding to being a potential slave house wife. However, I still believe in equally gender access and opportunities if you get my drift.
With all due respect Jennifer, I was here in the 50's - it was bone ugly with the greatest white male distribution of wealth ever seen - compliance, conformity, and obedience to Authoritarian Patriarchy was the rule of Law and custom side by side with 100 years of Jim Crow. We were segregated by race, gender, class, and religion and they would do everything from social ostracism to murder to silence a dissident.
They don't have to overturn Roe v. Wade. You cannot terminate a pregnancy in 85% of the counties in America for love or money and haven't been able to for some time. The pill is deliberately being priced out of the reach of working class women and the glass ceiling is as thick as it ever was.
Affirmative action is NOT supported in this country and never has been - not for women, not for Black people, not for anybody but White Males.
As for the rest, no, you can't "take it on". I invite you to contemplate the image of roving bands of fundamentalists dragging female professors from their classrooms into the quad, stripping them naked, beating them with clubs, and cutting off their heads in full view of the male police officers who are laughing and smirking while they rub their crotches. This movement culminates in the mass murder of every female who wears glasses because, "wearing glasses means she can read". I fear you are too civilized to even contemplate that happening here, yet...that is how you maintain gender slavery for 6000 years - gross, barbaric violence - the core of a slave society, like us.
And I am glad you refused to allow anyone to own your life. That requires great courage in a slave state.
OK, the fifties had a lot of problems, I would never want to return to them. However, there were some good points and these need to be remembered so that people know that things CAN BE DIFFERENT and better.
No one is actually addresses my point. For the most part, I'm not talking about the 1950's I'm talking about the 1960's and 70's. Would any broadcaster play anything like "Imagine" or "If I had a rocket launcher" or "Four Dead on Ohio" or today? But in those days, not only did they play it - they were smash hits!
Or recall the SNL skit where an Arab was depicted as a Jed Clampett-type character - and intro the song went:
".. a poor Beduin, barely kept his fam'ly fed,
but then one day he was shootin at some Jooos,
and up from the ground come-a-bubblin crooode...
oil, that is...
Can you imagine NBC allowing such a skit like this on the air today?
To really see how things have changed - the Kent State newspaper had a current day take on the events there 39 years ago. Go here: http://tinyurl.com/cngb4d
Each time period has its good and bad sides.
Yes, but change was sure easier when even US presidents told the citizens to turn the heat down, wear sweaters, reduce their car use and take the bus.
...and the mass media allowed pop singers to express ideological viewpoints in their songs.
And no, the internet and I-pods are not a substitute for radio play.
Sorry to shatter the "get off my lawn" style of older people over the ages, but things were NOT better in the past. Different, certainly.
The president who warned you about the MIC, what did he do about it when he was president, instead of making a nice speech when he no longer could do anything? What did he do to prevent the US entering the morass that was Vietnam? What did his successors do to prevent that?
And nice job ignoring the rights of women, non white people, and GLBT people in your glorious past.
Also, people have been whinging and whining and moaning about how things were better in the past, since the days of the Ancient Greeks, and the Chinese.
And what are you doing in your piece, what with all the whinging and whining? As an "old" adage goes, looks like the skillet is calling the kettle black. Seems as though everyone has his or her own agenda, not the least of whom is you.
Get real and get a life. We are all in this together.
Sagebrush Philo: You beat me to the punch! Thanks a lot!
BTW, my cousin and I talked about things like BeForKids said (we're in our early 60's) last year, and she said, "if there was a time machine and I could go back to the 50's, I would!" My reply was, "take me with you!" BFK never said it was perfect back then.
A little misunderstanding from the reader.
Peaceman
I wanna go with you guys too. BFK is quite correct and she knows it wasn't perfect. But I could get a loan with a handshake and not get cheated.
A little misunderstanding from the reader indeed.
Thomas,
You're on board, brother! We're in that same age group to remember. And yes, you could get a loan with a handshake and not be cheated. When 411 calls for telephone numbers were free, and you didn't have "service charges" for everything under the sun, laws against usury were enforced, and nobody even talked about health care costs or affordable housing. We saw two movies for $.25, remember?
But yes, it was still tough for black people, bright women were frustrated because our gender preferred them in the kitchen, rather than letting them work in the field or profession they wanted to, and progressive ideas were considered "communist thinking." The capitalist ruling class labeled liberals as "reds" and that slime ball Joe McCarthy had his infamous list that the chameleons in Congress never questioned beyond lip service, but through HUAC, many lives were ruined and many families broke up because of the blacklist. The Ku Kluxers were still burning crosses and lynching Negroes, but at least Ike, the last decent Republican, saw the value of labor unions (32% during the 50's) which helped establish a middle class. (It's all going down the tubes, now. Welcome to Serfdom, USA) Greetings, militarists, torturers, swindlers, shysters, and the "investor class."
And except for occasional Mafia "hits" or the KKK crimes, people did get along, for the most part, and were neighborly. Almost everyday, somewhere in our nation, somebody is killing their family members or coworkers. And the mass murders!
I may be wrong, but up until the Whitman shootings at the U. of Texas, the Guinness Book of Records listed "The St. Valentines Day Massacre" in Chicago in 1927 or 29, as the bloodiest crime for decades. (7 against the wall) These high school kids make the gangsters in the 20's look like pikers. A Greek Tragedy is like a comedy today, unfortunately.
You at least know what BFK means.
It was "tough" for black people?! "Bright" women were frustrated?!
Nah, let the kid vent...s/he has a point.
We all like to think back on our "glory" days, which in reality weren't all that glorious. Not to say that we tried to do bad, just that we were as human and flawed as every other generation and had our own screw-ups. It's what we do now, from this point onward, that counts. All of us. Every generation.
Going to HS in the early 50's in S.F.CA could not have been better.Did not really understand race problems until going into the military in 54 and got a quick introduction but there was no turning back.My little oasis was just that because my city,state and country had already started to go into the "me" society.At 73 it is a wish and a hope for today and the future because yesterday was not that good as a whole for "we the people".This is not obama hope but a we hope.Tony