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Published on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Healthcare: First They Came for the Banksters
With apologies to Pastor Niemöller:
First they came for the banksters, and showered them with money and put them in the Administration in a way that was not change we could believe in.
Then they came for the military industrial complex, and sent more and more of our children to die in faraway lands that had never attacked us in a way that was not change we could believe in.
And now they’ve sold out our hope for a national health care system not run by millionaire gangsters in suits. And who is left to speak for us?
President Obama is playing the Bill Clinton game of throwing people a bone and telling them it’s steak. Perhaps he’s doing it because he thinks it’s his only choice; perhaps it’s because he’s surrounded himself with Bill Clinton advisors (and Hillary as Secretary of State); whatever the reason, while it worked for Clinton, it won’t work for Obama.
It worked for Reagan, and for the first Bush, and even worked somewhat for George W. Bush.
But it won’t work anymore. Here’s why.
From 1929 until the 1980s, most Americans were “high information voters.” They were paying attention to politics. The Republican Great Depression of 1929-1938, World War II, the Korean War, Kennedy’s election, and the War in Vietnam were all Big Events that caused Americans to pay attention. Americans of that era needed to know what was up in Washington, DC, because they felt the consequences directly.
This is why in November of 1954, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter to his John Bircher brother Edgar, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
The voters knew. Even as late as 1977, when George W. Bush ran for Congress from Texas on a nearly singular platform of privatizing Social Security, he lost badly. The voters knew.
Then came Reagan. He seemed so nice. He talked friendly. At the very minute – to the second – that he put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, those nasty Iranians let go the hostages they’d been holding (a kidnapping that had so humiliated the Carter administration that Carter lost the election).
America was once again a “shining city on the hill” and even though there were a few small invasions, Panama and Grenada and all, and a small recession, and a few S&L bank failures, mostly people lost interest in politics. TV was going big, home entertainment was huge, blockbuster movies were coming onto the big screen, and America was prosperous. Americans partied on cheap debt. We went to sleep. It was the beginning of the era of the “low information voter.”
During the 1980s, the right wing was working hard. Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and most of the media Americans consumed was consolidated in the hands of about a dozen very conservative-leaning corporations. Top tax rates were cut from over 70 percent to around 30 percent, so salaries at the top exploded, including those of the stars on TV…including the “news” stars.
The newly-rich TV news people began to hang out with the becoming-fabulously-rich business people, never again criticizing them because they now worked and played together and were members of the same clubs and their kids went to the same best schools. Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous became our new religion, “greed is good” our new mantra.
Conservatives began a war on textbooks, stripping from them references to the labor movement, so that anybody who went to middle school or high school during or after the mid-1980s can’t today tell you why phrases like “Pullman Porter” or “Haymarket Square” or “Great Flint Sit Down” have any meaning.
Reagan, and then Clinton, serially deregulated the media so it came into fewer hands still, while right-wing voices exploded across the landscape. By the mid 1990s there was virtually no corner of America, not even the smallest town, where a person couldn’t hear Rush Limbaugh. After Rupert Murdoch lost $100 million a year for a half-decade, finally around Y2K Sean Hannity and Fox News began to turn a profit and became equally ubiquitous. They all made sure that voters were “low information” or “wrong information.” The labor sections of the newspapers had vanished; NPR and 60 Minutes no longer did corporate-expose investigative reporting.
Reagan used our collective somnambulance to cut taxes for his rich buddies and throw trillions their way in defense contracts. George HW did more of the same, albeit without the elegance of Reagan. Bill Clinton smiled nice and raised taxes a few tiny points – from 33 to 36 percent on the most wealthy – and just that was enough to balance the budget, and during all those years it seemed like peace and prosperity were here. Politically, people stayed asleep.
The attacks of 9/11 woke a lot of Americans up, but they didn’t know what to believe. Retired generals taking million-dollar payoffs from defense contractors were wall-to-wall on the corporate news, telling us we needed more wars and more contractors and more military toys. The two dissenting voices – Bill Maher and Phil Donahue – were immediately silenced. Keep the people asleep. Other than a few old lefties from the 60s who showed up for anti-Iraq-war protests, it mostly worked.
Then came Barack Obama. People were sick of Bush, and Obama’s campaign for the presidency reminded the oldsters of what it meant to be politically active, while it taught the same lesson to the first generation to really involve itself in politics since the Vietnam War. Weeks before the election, the Bush crew had to admit that the phony-baloney Reaganonics games played by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush while we were all asleep were collapsing. The economy was about to disintegrate. A wave of foreclosures, followed almost immediately by layoffs, swept the land.
People woke up, just like they had in 1929. They began to pay attention. And they had more than just Limbaugh and Fox to learn from; this new thing called the internet proliferated information without corporate control; Air America was birthed and liberal talk radio is now heard coast-to-coast; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann caught fire (followed by Rachel Maddow); and even the normally cynical and innocuous Jack Cafferty at CNN began to go off on screeds worthy of the movie “Network.”
The Great Depression of 2008 – or what was billed as such – and the election of an African American president who used a ground-up instead of a top-down campaign caused high information voters to emerge again for the first time in 30 years.
Many, of course, were high with the wrong information. They showed up at tea parties and Palin rallies. But their passion is real, and their grievances are mostly legitimate. Thirty years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics has destroyed the labor movement, hollowed out our industrial sector, put us on a permanent war footing, wiped out the equity of the middle class, and created an entire generation of college-loan-indentured-servants. Who are now fully awake and seriously pissed.
We slept while Clinton’s boys Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the whole gang, Republicans and Democrats together, signed us up for NAFTA and GATT; created the WTO; moved our jobs to China; sold off our airwaves; and “financialized” our economy (fully a quarter of all corporate profits in 2007 were from the “financial services industry” – an “industry” that creates nothing whatever that can be used or eaten or has any other real-wealth value). We slept through the explosion of the private prison industry and the wars in the Balkans (who knows where Kosovo is, anyway?). Seinfeld was far more interesting.
But now both the Vietnam oldsters and the Hip Hop youngsters are awake. Even the Reagan generation is awakening, but confused, as they’ve grown up on Limbaugh and Fox, and didn’t learn much in school about politics after Reagan’s guys stripped most classes of in-depth civics requirements. (It’s interesting – when Michael Medved and I debated in Chicago last year in front of 1000 people, 500 tickets sold by each of our radio stations, my side of the room was mostly people over 50 or under 30. His side of the room was almost entirely 30- and 40-somethings.)
And that’s why Obama is heading for a disaster.
He’s betting that he can do like Bill Clinton did to us with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization – hand us a turd and tell us it’s gonna blossom beautifully if we’ll just wait a year or three or five. Rahm’s betting that if he can “deliver health care reform” – even if the fundamental system of gangster corporations standing between us and our doctors while skimming 40 percent off the top for their mansions and private jets is intact – we’ll be all excited at his “victory” and elect more Democrats in 2010 and reelect Obama in 2012.
Ditto for cosmetic repairs of the banks, which is really just trickle-down Reaganomics on steroids. Rahm and his DLC buddies truly believe that this “change” brought to us by Bush’s man Tim Geithner or Clinton’s man Larry Summers is something we’ll “believe in.”
We don’t.
We oldsters of the Vietnam era, and the youngsters coming up who see how college loan banksters are screwing them as badly as their Clinton-era parents were screwed by the mortgage scammers, are all now fully awake.
President Obama, sir: Meet what is in large part your own creation – the High Information Voters of 2009/2010.
We’re awake, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more. Natalie Portman to Matt Taibbi to Arianna Huffington to Bill Moyers represent the span of our four awakened generations; generations who have figured out how the game is played. And don’t like it.
First Obama continued Bush’s policy of giving the banksters money, and we protested feebly.
Then he expanded Bush’s wars, and we protested more loudly.
Now he’s going to force us to give trillions to the gangsters who run the “health insurance” companies (while they promise to behave nicely in return) and thinks we’re going to go along with it and it’ll get him re-elected.
He’s wrong.
Please, President Obama, step up and lead. We’d like some that “change we can believe in” that’s actually the real thing.
Kill the bill.
First they came for the banksters, and showered them with money and put them in the Administration in a way that was not change we could believe in.
Then they came for the military industrial complex, and sent more and more of our children to die in faraway lands that had never attacked us in a way that was not change we could believe in.
And now they’ve sold out our hope for a national health care system not run by millionaire gangsters in suits. And who is left to speak for us?
President Obama is playing the Bill Clinton game of throwing people a bone and telling them it’s steak. Perhaps he’s doing it because he thinks it’s his only choice; perhaps it’s because he’s surrounded himself with Bill Clinton advisors (and Hillary as Secretary of State); whatever the reason, while it worked for Clinton, it won’t work for Obama.
It worked for Reagan, and for the first Bush, and even worked somewhat for George W. Bush.
But it won’t work anymore. Here’s why.
From 1929 until the 1980s, most Americans were “high information voters.” They were paying attention to politics. The Republican Great Depression of 1929-1938, World War II, the Korean War, Kennedy’s election, and the War in Vietnam were all Big Events that caused Americans to pay attention. Americans of that era needed to know what was up in Washington, DC, because they felt the consequences directly.
This is why in November of 1954, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter to his John Bircher brother Edgar, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
The voters knew. Even as late as 1977, when George W. Bush ran for Congress from Texas on a nearly singular platform of privatizing Social Security, he lost badly. The voters knew.
Then came Reagan. He seemed so nice. He talked friendly. At the very minute – to the second – that he put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, those nasty Iranians let go the hostages they’d been holding (a kidnapping that had so humiliated the Carter administration that Carter lost the election).
America was once again a “shining city on the hill” and even though there were a few small invasions, Panama and Grenada and all, and a small recession, and a few S&L bank failures, mostly people lost interest in politics. TV was going big, home entertainment was huge, blockbuster movies were coming onto the big screen, and America was prosperous. Americans partied on cheap debt. We went to sleep. It was the beginning of the era of the “low information voter.”
During the 1980s, the right wing was working hard. Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and most of the media Americans consumed was consolidated in the hands of about a dozen very conservative-leaning corporations. Top tax rates were cut from over 70 percent to around 30 percent, so salaries at the top exploded, including those of the stars on TV…including the “news” stars.
The newly-rich TV news people began to hang out with the becoming-fabulously-rich business people, never again criticizing them because they now worked and played together and were members of the same clubs and their kids went to the same best schools. Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous became our new religion, “greed is good” our new mantra.
Conservatives began a war on textbooks, stripping from them references to the labor movement, so that anybody who went to middle school or high school during or after the mid-1980s can’t today tell you why phrases like “Pullman Porter” or “Haymarket Square” or “Great Flint Sit Down” have any meaning.
Reagan, and then Clinton, serially deregulated the media so it came into fewer hands still, while right-wing voices exploded across the landscape. By the mid 1990s there was virtually no corner of America, not even the smallest town, where a person couldn’t hear Rush Limbaugh. After Rupert Murdoch lost $100 million a year for a half-decade, finally around Y2K Sean Hannity and Fox News began to turn a profit and became equally ubiquitous. They all made sure that voters were “low information” or “wrong information.” The labor sections of the newspapers had vanished; NPR and 60 Minutes no longer did corporate-expose investigative reporting.
Reagan used our collective somnambulance to cut taxes for his rich buddies and throw trillions their way in defense contracts. George HW did more of the same, albeit without the elegance of Reagan. Bill Clinton smiled nice and raised taxes a few tiny points – from 33 to 36 percent on the most wealthy – and just that was enough to balance the budget, and during all those years it seemed like peace and prosperity were here. Politically, people stayed asleep.
The attacks of 9/11 woke a lot of Americans up, but they didn’t know what to believe. Retired generals taking million-dollar payoffs from defense contractors were wall-to-wall on the corporate news, telling us we needed more wars and more contractors and more military toys. The two dissenting voices – Bill Maher and Phil Donahue – were immediately silenced. Keep the people asleep. Other than a few old lefties from the 60s who showed up for anti-Iraq-war protests, it mostly worked.
Then came Barack Obama. People were sick of Bush, and Obama’s campaign for the presidency reminded the oldsters of what it meant to be politically active, while it taught the same lesson to the first generation to really involve itself in politics since the Vietnam War. Weeks before the election, the Bush crew had to admit that the phony-baloney Reaganonics games played by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush while we were all asleep were collapsing. The economy was about to disintegrate. A wave of foreclosures, followed almost immediately by layoffs, swept the land.
People woke up, just like they had in 1929. They began to pay attention. And they had more than just Limbaugh and Fox to learn from; this new thing called the internet proliferated information without corporate control; Air America was birthed and liberal talk radio is now heard coast-to-coast; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann caught fire (followed by Rachel Maddow); and even the normally cynical and innocuous Jack Cafferty at CNN began to go off on screeds worthy of the movie “Network.”
The Great Depression of 2008 – or what was billed as such – and the election of an African American president who used a ground-up instead of a top-down campaign caused high information voters to emerge again for the first time in 30 years.
Many, of course, were high with the wrong information. They showed up at tea parties and Palin rallies. But their passion is real, and their grievances are mostly legitimate. Thirty years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics has destroyed the labor movement, hollowed out our industrial sector, put us on a permanent war footing, wiped out the equity of the middle class, and created an entire generation of college-loan-indentured-servants. Who are now fully awake and seriously pissed.
We slept while Clinton’s boys Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the whole gang, Republicans and Democrats together, signed us up for NAFTA and GATT; created the WTO; moved our jobs to China; sold off our airwaves; and “financialized” our economy (fully a quarter of all corporate profits in 2007 were from the “financial services industry” – an “industry” that creates nothing whatever that can be used or eaten or has any other real-wealth value). We slept through the explosion of the private prison industry and the wars in the Balkans (who knows where Kosovo is, anyway?). Seinfeld was far more interesting.
But now both the Vietnam oldsters and the Hip Hop youngsters are awake. Even the Reagan generation is awakening, but confused, as they’ve grown up on Limbaugh and Fox, and didn’t learn much in school about politics after Reagan’s guys stripped most classes of in-depth civics requirements. (It’s interesting – when Michael Medved and I debated in Chicago last year in front of 1000 people, 500 tickets sold by each of our radio stations, my side of the room was mostly people over 50 or under 30. His side of the room was almost entirely 30- and 40-somethings.)
And that’s why Obama is heading for a disaster.
He’s betting that he can do like Bill Clinton did to us with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization – hand us a turd and tell us it’s gonna blossom beautifully if we’ll just wait a year or three or five. Rahm’s betting that if he can “deliver health care reform” – even if the fundamental system of gangster corporations standing between us and our doctors while skimming 40 percent off the top for their mansions and private jets is intact – we’ll be all excited at his “victory” and elect more Democrats in 2010 and reelect Obama in 2012.
Ditto for cosmetic repairs of the banks, which is really just trickle-down Reaganomics on steroids. Rahm and his DLC buddies truly believe that this “change” brought to us by Bush’s man Tim Geithner or Clinton’s man Larry Summers is something we’ll “believe in.”
We don’t.
We oldsters of the Vietnam era, and the youngsters coming up who see how college loan banksters are screwing them as badly as their Clinton-era parents were screwed by the mortgage scammers, are all now fully awake.
President Obama, sir: Meet what is in large part your own creation – the High Information Voters of 2009/2010.
We’re awake, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more. Natalie Portman to Matt Taibbi to Arianna Huffington to Bill Moyers represent the span of our four awakened generations; generations who have figured out how the game is played. And don’t like it.
First Obama continued Bush’s policy of giving the banksters money, and we protested feebly.
Then he expanded Bush’s wars, and we protested more loudly.
Now he’s going to force us to give trillions to the gangsters who run the “health insurance” companies (while they promise to behave nicely in return) and thinks we’re going to go along with it and it’ll get him re-elected.
He’s wrong.
Please, President Obama, step up and lead. We’d like some that “change we can believe in” that’s actually the real thing.
Kill the bill.
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90 Comments so far
Show AllEverybody knows what has to happen. Forbes made a list.
Unfortunately the world that I inhabit is populated with neoliberals and neocons who are addicted to their respective misinformation sources that never let the facts get in the way of a good story and provide a silver bullet solution for every problem.
Seeking information will only work for people who are willing to depart the delusional information sources and silver bullet mentality they have relied upon for the past 30 years.
While I hope that the scenario portrayed by this article comes to pass, I see little evidence of progress "on the ground".
Hounddog4, I hear you. I think it's over the heads of those who believe they must continue to "pick a winner" every four years.
A good article, good overview of history and then....
"Please, President Obama, step up and lead."
WHAT ????????? He is leading!!! In the wrong direction!!! This is what the whole article all about!!!!
This is one more proof that talking heads have no brain.
For example, Thom Hartmann could use his position to call for a viable third party, with a truly objective domestic and foreign agenda. Instead, it is just whining and whining and he will be supporting "Democrats" or "Republicans" in the end. What a shame!
"For example, Thom Hartmann could use his position to call for a viable third party, with a truly objective domestic and foreign agenda. Instead, it is just whining and whining and he will be supporting "Democrats" or "Republicans" in the end. What a shame!"
Even if Hartmann led all of us into the Socialist Workers Party, Obama is still going to be President for three more years. His entreaty to Obama is not out of line.
Hartmann is not a proselytizer; he is a journalist. He reports; it's up to us to act.
q
I find OB's points to be entirely correct. Entrities to Obama to "lead" are absurd. Obama IS leading, and leading BOLDLY - for the wealthy propertied class and the military-industrial machine!
Rather than ask him to lead, we need to use every monkey-wrench at out disposal to sabotage his leadership, while we develop and enlarge a coalition of viable political parties.
Evidently you never listen to Hartmann's radio show. And just as evident is your head-in-the-sand approach to solving problems. Hartmann constantly urges his listeners to get active, get involved, whether it's in the Dem party, the Green party, progressive organizations, and so on. He's a realist in the sense that Obama is in fact our president for at least three more years. So who do you WANT him to get us to urge to change? The effin janitor?
As for the 2-part system - which party was in control when civil rights was passed, voting rights, New-Deal legislation? The Dem party CAN be effective if, as Thom suggests, the progressives take over the party from within, just like the neocons have done with the Repub party.
I read that Huey Long was such a strong progressive that he made FDR look like a typical establishment weakling. I can't help but wonder what this nation would have been like with Huey Long succeeding Herbert Hoover. FDR was great but Huey Long sounded like the bolder deal.
RichM, you stunned me on the third paragraph. It is interesting that you said that what was offered was enough to keep the working class satisfied. I can see where there were signs of this. One case I can remember was some years ago on MSNBC where Jonathan Alter once asked the question as to what America would have been like if FDR hadn't gotten into the habit of always taking a permission slip from Congress or if FDR had fought harder on putting in strong pro-labor judicial nominees on SCOTUS. He was comparing Dubya's boldness to FDR's. Another case involved FDR opening the doors to Big Oil and the vested business interests when he signed the high taxation on cannabis act in 1937 which led to the ban on cannabis and forced dependence on petroleum on everything. I cannot believe that even the labor movement left out cannabis given its thousands of industrial uses I learned about. Still, I thought that the New Deal was more than just party loyalty.
Is it possible that Huey Long lost his life simply because the Democrats of that era in Washington actually feared that he was "too progressive" similar to today's Democrats calling Kucinich "too liberal" ?
Missed the point of what? Hartmann's article or OB's narrow-minded repsonse?
I don't believe that Hartmann has ever claimed to be a socialist. I just used the SWP because it's generally considered to be one of the most extreme alternative movements. Leave it to Rich to take everything literally as all Teabaggers do.
Hartmann is not asking us to beg for anything as most people who read the article understand. The fact is that Rich. OB, and the other trolls have seized on that one sentence to try to discredit the article. Karl Rove would be so proud of you!
I'm not liberal. I'm Progessive.
q
quickstepper -
[... OB's narrow-minded... Teabaggers... Rich. OB, and the other trolls ...
... Karl Rove...... I'm not liberal. I'm Progessive...]
A very good set of arguments...
I can guarantee you this much: Hartmann is doing more for socialism, for educating the sheeple, and pushing for liberal reforms, and standing up for justice, than you.
Hartmann is losing his focus. Go back and reread the article and stop and think for a moment the following. This administration has gleefully TRASHES socialism just like the Republicans, irritated the progressives by calling Ronnie Raygun who revived DISASTER CAPITALISM while badmouthing the 1960s and 70s, and is now becoming another Herbert Hoover that we tried to warn the voters about. This author knowing all this still writes a useless article apologizing for Obama and you want to say that Hartmann is doing more for socialism and liberal reforms? If he were, he sure as hell wouldn't be crushing his own efforts by writing that kind of an article. Some of Hartmann's articles can be great but this one doesn't pass a smell test. Hartmann still acts as if Obama is the last hope for progressives when there are better folks out there such as Nader, Mckinney, Sheehan, etc... who are not being given a chance.
You can be a perfectly good liberal and *still* seek to get rid of the Democratic Party rather than beg. We already have one fascist party. We don't need another one.
"Please, President Obama, step up and lead"
Ever notice after another long list of grievances, they beg?
It is like they suddenly hit a roadblock and go no further.
Talk about low information.
Check the knees of these Obama beggars, they're covered with callouses, the same material that covers the hearts of our corporate shills in government.
My exact thought when I finished this article.
Begging on your knees only makes you shorter, Thom.
The time is ripe for a tsunami of protest and civil disobedience. It's our Constitutional right to do so! When the US government ignores the will of the people - take a look at the polls - citizens are encouraged to take things into their own hands. What else can we do beyond begging?
Boycott this health care bill! Boycott Democrats! Stop falling for the scams! (Be prepared, more scams are just up their sleeves.)
A very good friend of mine is a Green Party coordinator. He's over 65. We need to get the younger generation into this party with their energy and brains. My friend would give up his political work in a day if he could pass it on to someone younger, dedicated, more energetic, and smart.
You're absolutely right. Hartmann is really off the wall when it comes to Obama. He spent the first hour of his show today whining and wailing about how Obama has disappointed him and let him down and then proceeded to say he hopes he gets re-elected in 2012! Is he a glutton for punishment or just completely irrational?
"Thom Hartmann could use his position to call for a viable third party, with a truly objective domestic and foreign agenda. Instead, it is just whining and whining and he will be supporting "Democrats" or "Republicans" in the end. What a shame!"
The only politician on his show with a regular weekly spot is independent Senator Bernie Sanders on Fridays.
And STOP the $LAUGHTER!
I agree with OB. Great article, Thom. But Obama is not going to kill the bill. It's HIS bill, exactly what he wanted.
Anybody who still believes Obama is part of the solution has been locked in a closet for the past year or has a serious case of denial.
As we repeated many times during the sixties: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem".
I'd extend the "being locked in the closet" back to the campaign!
I clocked out on Thom Hartmann when he wrote the article supporting, or tolerating, Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration ceremony.
I'm with OB and Emma, great article but no real solution. I agree to some extent we have "high information voters" again but they have no real choice, sooooooo.....?
Yea we'll hold Obama accountable and elect a Republican, what a joke, same old same old. As The Who said in "Won't get fooled again", "The new boss is same as the old boss..."
I for one won't be fooled again.
"Other than a few old lefties from the 60s who showed up for anti-Iraq-war protests, it mostly worked."
This is completely false. Worldwide millions of people marched against the Iraq war. Even in the US, the anti-war protests BEFORE the Iraq war were vastly bigger than any Vietnam protests until the late 60s. Keep in mind, the Vietnam war had been going on for TEN years before people began protesting it. South Vietnam was already a wasteland, destroyed by chemical warfare when people finally mobilized. What would Iraq have been had the population not mobilized beforehand? We limited what Bush and Blair could do! There was no chemical warfare, no neutron bomb (specifically designed for the Middle East), etc... Iraq was horrible. But, Vietnam was much, much worse, and the population did NOTHING until ten years after the war began.
But Iraq is still a "war" zone. It's not over. There's a decrease in violence (at least as far as American deaths) but don't fall into the trap of referring to it in the past tense. We are still there, we are still killing and being killed in spite of the focus being returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not to mention the itching that is going on over Iran. It is so complex and massive (and still growing) in the entire area that no amount of newly awake information voter is going to be able to comprehend or even imagine where to start in protest.
TarHeel77 says:
"Keep in mind, the Vietnam war had been going on for TEN years before protesting it." That statement is quite misleading because even though Kennedy had sent troops to Vietnam when he had taken office those soldiers were looked upon by the media back then, whether justifiably or not, as being "advisers" to the ARVN. The escalation did not begin until LBJ sent in U.S. troops which came ashore in Danang in March of 1965. It was then that the war finally seeped into the subconscious of most Americans and protests against the war began in earnest in 1968 and 1969.
But one can even go back much further than that. As Joe Allen points out in his book Vietnam: The [Last] War the U.S. Lost, the first stateside protest against the war in Vietnam occurred in New York City in 1947 when the Viet Nam Friendship Association [VNFA] organized a "Celebration of the Second Anniversary of the Independence of the Republic of Viet-Nam." As Allen notes the Student Peace Union [SPU] was instrumental in bringing the issue of the Vietnam War to the forefront of the peace movement. This originated NOT ten years after the Vietnam war began, as tarheel77 erroneously states, but in the year 1961. Overseas, in England, Bertrand Russell, a key figure in the nuclear disarmament movement, stated during that time period, that "the United States was conducting a war of annihilation in Vietnam." Allen writes of "The Easter peace marches took place in various U.S. cities, including Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York City." Teach-ins protesting the war began at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and which spread to more than one hundred campuses across the country, NOT ten years after the war began, but less than two weeks after the marines landed in March of 1965. The largest Vietnam Day teach-in was at the University of California at Berkeley on May 21-22, not TEN years after the war began, but in 1965. That protest attracted approximately thirty thousand people. In 1967, which was NOT ten years after the war had begun, more than one hundred thousand people marched on the Pentagon after having marched from the Lincoln Memorial. It almost goes without saying of the thousands of antiwar protesters who spoke out in the streets of Chicago during the infamous Democratic convention in 1968 which was NOT ten years after the war began.
"Kill the bill."
Yeah right - game, set, match.
Oh for pity's sake, stop begging this administration to listen ! The only only people they'll listen to are those with the biggest money bags. That administration never listened to the people before the election, they're not doing it now, and they won't even bother doing it. I am beginning to suspect that half the people who joined the tea bag and Palin rallies did so out of feeling totally rejected even as progressives and liberals. Until the electorate gets its voting straight year after year, our efforts will continue to get trashed and nothing we try to tell the pols in Washington will resonate. Even protests won't work since the police probably have upgraded security all these years.
So. . .
High Information Voters?
Ask 100 random people to explain the Patriot Act, FISA Laws, Military Commissions Act, the Authorization for Military Force, Commodity Futures Modernization Act or even to explain climate change.
Then ready yourself for more stuttering and stammering than Bob Newhart living outside in the cold.
Please put it on video because I need a good laugh.
Thom once again shows that the so-called 'progressive left' just doesn't get it. They got so lost in their Obama-worship that they're incapable of seeing that they were massively conned.
Far from doing any research on The One they've just followed along like idiots.
Thom: even a cursory examination of Obama's pitifully thin resume would have shown that, in one of his very few legislative efforts, he effectively killed healthcare reform in the Indiana State Senate and received glowing praise for his efforts from, wait for it... the insurance lobby. What in the world would lead you to believe that he would do anything different now?
Oh wait, of course: he made a speech full of vague generalities and banal cliches but he looked so cool that you thought "Wow! I could vote for the cool guy and even better, he's black, so I would be even cooler voting for the cool black guy."
Thom: you and the rest of the progressive left have completely blown your credibility with Obama. It's painfully apparent that you just can't think your way out of a paper bag. The best thing you can do now is just shut up until your brain starts working again.
You'll know that has happened when you listen to Obama speak and suddenly realize that he is completely full of crap.
craigdp and the rest of you that whine about Obama, and how the 'progressives' are such stupid idiots. Why don't you just... STFU!
I am sick to death of reading Obama is shitty-this and Obama is hypocritical-that on this left-wing site, like this was some Drudge site or a GOP shill site, and opinions from people who obviously hated the guy from the get go.
Even though, as Clintonista-lame as he is, and as bad as things are, he is still significant-times better than Walnuts 'MadBomber' McCain and Sarah 'DrillMeBabyDrillMe' Palin would have been. Their administration would have been a complete disaster for the nation and for progressive causes, and would have allowed the further consolidation of power by the Neo-Cons, Republicon-federates, Corpo-fascists and Rabid-Right. We are not going to convince those people of anything, and it seems a waste of time to try.
They must be driven from government. Even if it takes a far-less-than-ideal figure like Obama, who did drive the Bushites out at least. Which is something craigdp did not do and could not do. Nor anyone else who ran. It is as good as we could hope for at the time. And it is good enough, for the moment.
As Obama is finding out, even when these troglodytes are in the minority, not only will they not cooperate AT ALL, but they will try to run right over you as if they still had power, even after their smash-and-grab theft of the nation's wealth for the last two decades, which apparently left them unappeased. So they must be completely opposed by any means necessary- even if it means an Obama, who at least is driving the right-wingnuts crazy - consider the word Obamacare, used by the right as a clever cussword to stir up the wingnuts, though not FOR better health care.
That doesn't mean Obama is not a huge disappointment, nor that his policies should not be criticized and resisted (but he IS just following Ciintonista DLC politics from his Clintonista DLC advisors). And he should be definitely opposed in the coming elections.
But there is way way too much personal vendetta -all the time- from too many of the Obama-bashers to stand them anymore. Yeah, he ain't the messiah! We heard you. So STFU and get off Common Dreams. This is a leftist site, not a teabagger one. There will be no compromises or agreeing with the Rabid Right, or with Libertarians, or with faux-Fox "Populists" like the poisonous toad Limbaugh.
We are not gonna lean Republican or Libertarian or Populist to try to compromise with the Rabid Right, in order to get along with the stupid right-wingers, crafty corporatists and the teabag-for-brains crowd to maybe make them like us. They never will. They really want to destroy the nation, and replace the Constitution with a demagogue. Fuck'em.
And anyway THAT is EXACTLY what is wrong with "can't we all just get along?" Barack "let's-cut-the-baby-in-half" Obama.
I voted, like many if not most, AGAINST McCain and the NeoCon right, and Won. And I would do it again... but I would have been happier to vote for a better and -viable- choice... a choice that craigdp did not give me, nor anyone, in the last election. So give us a real choice (and be serious and don't give me any of that crap about voting for the flighty Nader or no-hope McKinney or for any of the candidates of the 40+ tiny splinter parties in America. May as well not vote... but that always gives the election to the assholes who do.)
Forget criticizing Obama, and give viable candidates, solutions, and commentary about events... or real revolution. But please, no more screeds about how shitty and hypocritical Obama is. We got it, and he has written you all off anyway.
So talk about SOLUTIONS or PROBLEMS... not more pointless diss'ing of Obama and how "the so-called 'progressive left just doesn't get it and were massively conned." We got it, and we kicked the Republicans and Rabid Right out of power. That is all. Too bad Mr. Appeaser Nice-guy Obama is not so ruthless as to do the same... to act in the belief that, no matter how half-assed the result, the Republican Neo-Con junta must be Destroyed. Never bargained with, never compromised with, never treated with 'understanding' or 'kindness' or 'fairness' -they are thugs. And Obama is only one step of progress; not that that is much, but it is one step anyway.
So, concerning Obama personally, STFU already!
Your take on Obombya is like a fella that shit himself being thankful he didn't step in dog shit.
The Huffington Post was founded and is headed by Kenneth Lerer who also owns major PR company Robinson Lerer & Montgomery. Their site http://www.rlmnet.com says they "provided strategic communications counsel to senior management in every major industry, as well as to law firms, investment banks, LBO and private-equity firm" as well as this:
"Because changes in legislation, policies, and rules can profoundly affect their business goals, companies have a major stake in the development of governmental actions on a wide variety of issues."
So what do you think? A PR firm that specializes in having legislation passed to benefit corporations starts a news media source and it is the answer to corporate regulatory capture? Think again. If this generation is going to be the high information generation they have a lot more work to do than reading that asinine site.
A lot of lefty, liberal agendas are just as much about handouts to corporations as right-wing agendas. Big government is big government and it is partners with the big corporate world. The connections Hartmann draws between right-wing politicians and corporations could easily by made for left-wing politicians and policies including FDR and the New Deal which most real liberals, the socialists and communists of the time, recognized as nothing but a big corporate handout just like any healthcare bill would be. I don't agree with the politics of the communists but at least they were smart and could recognize a scam when they saw it. Any healthcare bill will be a scam.
The Huffington Post is, and always has been, faux left. Not only is it half tabloid, with celebrities providing much of the commentary and with numerous links to scantily-dressed celebrities and others, but it focuses on the social/cultural issues, increasing the animosity and division between the left and the socially conservative right, making the creation of a broad and potentially successful populist movement more difficult to achieve.
actually the huff looks alot like fox news with ads all over
the place and dis information all over the place. read it
once that was enough!
Well, I'm glad to hear CD readers don't think much of The Huffington Post because it truly is idiotic and although I might not agree with some of CD and progressive politics, I come here to read the news everyday for a reason. I think Hartmann needs to use better examples than Arianna Huffington for why this generation is so smart.
actually the huff looks alot like fox news with ads all over
the place and dis information all over the place. read it
once that was enough!
Hey Thom,
I'm in my sixties and my parents were born at the turn of the 1900's. I grew up with a whole different take on politics than kids even my own age.
It is telling that my local newspaper runs a weekly section on "FAITH" but there is nothing about labor, most major cities years ago had two papers one taking the labor view and on taking the business view.
Labor Day is just another 3-day weekend around here, nothing planned. We have to re-value labor and the only way to do that is to organize, again if we are to get the ear of the politicians.
From the article; “Air America was birthed and liberal talk radio is now heard coast-to-coast;”
Not actually true, out here in fly-over country there are 20 stations broadcasting Limbaugh for every one that broadcasts AirAmrerica. Here in Indiana there is not one station, even in Bloomington (home of Indiana University) that programs AirAmerica.
Except for a handful of college towns and a few tiny stations in mega-markets like Chicago there are no stations carrying AirAmerica.
Tom. Excellent article. I can only hope people are awake and paying attention to Obama's bait and switch. We'll see. I have e-mailed both of my Senators and Congressperson to tell them they will lose my vote if the public option and/or an expansion of Medicare is not included in the bill. There will definitely be a revolution if Americans are forced to buy insurance from for-profit companies.
I hope so, LaVonne, however in Massachusetts, where this has been tested, there was no revolution.
Well we are ahead of you here at Common Dreams, Mr. Hartmann, because a lot of us here have for weeks and in some cases months saying Obama will probably (or most likely) lose in 2012. And we have been virtually unanimous in saying this law is an abomination for months. Nice to see everyone catching up to Common Dreams, it’s better late than never.
With the advent of this unprecedentedly bad law, the progressives can't play games and hide behind Obama’s slick pimping anymore. Either they create a new party that is marketable (can't use "Socialist" or "Green" or “progressive” trashed by right wing propaganda words like that in the name of it) or they just remain corporate serfs. It’s either new party or fascism with medieval tendencies, one or the other.
And yes, even though I don't know the details, I am well aware that anti-democratic and unconstitutional state laws are designed to prevent third parties from getting on the ballot. But if you have a new organization that almost overnight has ten million or more followers, which you could achieve, those petty state laws would become irrelevant to a large degree, either because the new party could jump over all the hurdles in those anti-democratic laws, or because the new party would have enough legal clout to get those laws declared unconstitutional and tossed out.
So as far as I am concerned, there are no excuses for anyone in this fiasco including progressives. Progressives can never ever vote Democratic again (assuming they are not living under a bridge and unable to vote thanks to Obama) and they need to start a new party, such as for example New Democrat Party (US). Hint: start it before you are living under the bridge.
Priors & current home of NDP-US:
http://www.unity-progress.blogspot.com
A statue(as in Berlusconi's nemisis) to the head of Senators Lieberman, Inhoff and a few others would do more for Democracy in this country than anything a K street run administration, Congress and Senate can do.
WWII got America out of the Depression and that is Obama's plan with the escalation in Afghanistan. It is amazing that our politicos have learned nothing in the last 80 years.
"WWII got America out of the Depression and that is Obama's plan with the escalation in Afghanistan."
That is not true. No amount of war spending would have pulled a nation out of the Great Depression. WWII and the end of the Great Depression was a coincidence. The progressive populist policies shifting the favor from the ruling class to the working class along with public cooperation was what eventually ended the Great Depression. Reagan's out of control military spending pushed this country towards Great Depression but thankfully the Clinton administration had some nerve to slow down war spending. Thanks to Bush's war spending with Obama's to continue it, the next Great Depression is unfolding and this time no amount of war spending will do any magic. The Obama administration is making a grave error by escalating the war in Afghanistan.
"No amount of war spending would have pulled a nation out of the Great Depression. WWII and the end of the Great Depression was a coincidence. The progressive populist policies shifting the favor from the ruling class to the working class along with public cooperation was what eventually ended the Great Depression."
With all due respect, this is partially accurate and partially not.
"No amount of war spending would have pulled a nation out of the Great Depression."
True! Can't remember the numbers offhand, but military spending alone is a very poor investment of public dollars and produces far less return than investing in hospitals, public welfare programs and the like.
"WWII and the end of the Great Depression was a coincidence."
Not true. It was the rebuilding of Europe, which flattened cities and factories, destroyed economies, killed something like 35 million people and caused the largest migration in Europe's history, that ended the Great Depression. The IMF was created at Bretton Woods and through America's financial power the U.S. State Department was able to shape Europe and European finances the way they wanted. The European devastation coupled with American financial might put Americans to work making things for export to Europe. (That's why nations want huge exports of finished goods--it creates wealth.) One thing was absolutely tied to the other.
Using Afghanistan to rebuild the American economy? No way. There's nothing to rebuild.
"The progressive populist policies shifting the favor from the ruling class to the working class along with public cooperation was what eventually ended the Great Depression."
The ability of unions to extract a decent wage and benefits package (while American corporations were busy making money out of Europe) certainly created a healthy middle class. Hence those progressives wins, coupled with a ruined Europe, resulted in a very good standard of living in the U.S.
Too bad Reagan suckered so many Americans into confusing Republican dystopia with utopia.
their too stupid to do anything else so their
politicians. got a friend who works for bloomberg
in nyc. says their so stupid you have to take them
by the hand and bring them in when it rains because
their too stupid to come in by themselves. kind of
explains all of this doesn't it?
Speaking of being fed a load of crap in school, the statement "WWII got us out of the depression" is absolutely false.
Roosevelts work projects and social programs got us out of the depression.
Don't mindlessly repeat the biased messages that you "learned" in our corporate...er...public schools.
Oh Hartmann. Give it up!
I just feel facetious, so....
Stop second guessing obama already! You were wrong about it. You were duped by a silver tongued man of biracial origins.
If he were caucasian he wouldn't have won. End of discussion. He wouldn't have been elected. He looked different and spoke in complete sentences. After Bush. Everyone was thrilled with crumbs.
Americans thought a saviour was coming to deliver us from our evil.
Guess what???????? It doesn't work that way!
Grow up.
Excellent article Thom. Always educational as well as truth filled. Love it when I see those who see your name and tell you to "give it up". Fine, you got it buddy, we’ll give it up. Now I say to them, “Watch what you wish for.”
One point I'd like to differ with you on Thom.
A story most of us have heard many times over.
What should you do if you're on the highway and another car is headed straight for you and there's no way to get out of their way? Answer" Excellerate
Thom, I think we need to excellerate. All we're doing is nursing their corrupted system. The gangsters are well trained in knowing how to string us along, keep us where they want us so they can keep them on the path towards accomplishing their goals.