How about: FOOL ME ONCE

Michigan woman,

Personally, I think you are asking too much from Nader. He did his best, tried so often and the "Left" not only shunts him but abused him. 71%, REPEAT! 71% "FR" Liberals still supporting Obama. Instead of pointing their fingers at the Dims and Obama, they turn their anger at the Repugs. Of course, even an idiot knows the Repugs are part of the problems. I believe the Dims especially, Obama must bear much of the blame. It is his watch and the decider.

Put another way: "Last I heard, corporations don't have a single vote."

Consider the possibility that this is because they don't need them.

But Nader is right, lefttown. Obama is begging Corporations to provide jobs to the unemployed. The corporations are, of course, not going to do it just because he is such a nice man. This is what Obama said today in his debt ceiling address: "We also need to give more opportunities for all those construction workers out there who lost their jobs when the housing boom went bust. We could put them to work right now by giving loans to private companies that want to repair our roads and our bridges and our airports, rebuilding our infrastructure. We have workers who need jobs and a country that needs rebuilding. An infrastructure bank would help us put them together."

In other words, Obama wants a **private** "Infrastructure Bank" to fund **private** companies to work on roads, bridges, and airports. A nice step towards the wholesale privatization of our roads, bridges, and airports. In the style of America's prisons and charter schools.

"Not long ago, he was yelling that the answer to all our financial problems was to get the rich to solve everything."

What, you mean like get them to pay their damn share of taxes?

I'm very suspicious of your post.

American Winter of Discontent

This president hasn't caved into Wall Street or others of their greed and megalomaic ilk, he's their man as Jeff Cohen so aptly pointed out in a recent article or at least so it seemed to me.

What do I know? Regardless another question arises. If this president so sharp at pleasing the owners, how come the bottom is falliing out for the whole country, we keep going to war with another country right as some thought we were at war with too many already? Do these owners really want to see this country go down when it's their cash cow? I tend to doubt that. Some of them may let their greed get ahead of their brains and all common sense, but most have enough sense to not want become Lemmings. What makes anyone think those who are doing so well are eager to jump off a cliff? Don't confurse the owners with the servants known as the Tea Party who simply end up getting used as pawns by these cynical types. The real Tea Party rank and file have a need for some facts as well as some common sense. But perhaps a good number of them aren't completly batty but really desparate to believe in something with the progressive side not really at all engaging with many working people in the first place with some noteworthy exceptions such as Wisconsin and Ohio. But we have a whole country where progressives haven't got out the facts and pushed the advantages of egalitarian values and how this goes back to such a s Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and others. All for one and one for all is old fashioned but it realy can mean quite a lot. Real values not some BS is what these people need. Obvioulsy the puritan strain has some of them too brainwashed, but others have some humanist tendencies. When I was growing up even some Protetant fundamentalist would talk of egalitarian values as being good and not just as an abstract. Some of these people are "living lives of quite desperation" as Ralph Waldo Emerson would so astutely put it and need the ear and consideration and compassion which are so much a part of true progressive values. We truly believe in what Thomas Paine said when he said "Power to the people." That was the slogan which helped launch this nation by launching a rebellion against a despotism. We're now engaged in a struggle against yet another hierarchal despotism. But despotisms aren't as tradtional as some want us to believe and haven't always been with us. Let's remember as Karl Marx put it just right that the state created capitalism, that as we now know con servatives created despotism a mere at most 10 millennia ago and maybe less out of at least 100 millennia of modern human existence. Thus despotism of today in the USA isn't in the least the norm. It's quite the contrary. They are the ones going against tradtional values. It was capitalism which destroyed the natural and extended family replacing it with a marketing unit called the nuclear family to have for those with the wares to sell to sell those wares to. Thus they nuked the real and natural famliy and ripped up the basic social fabric of communities. We are the defenders of such communities and such values even if we can't get back the extended family. We won't let them keep ripping apart the crucial social fabric which is the glue holding communities and all humanity together.

Nothing pleases a rich, white man so much as a black man saying "Yes, Massah." Kudos to Obama.

he, (o-our-prez)) was playing his role ever since he worked for the cia after columbia u...

empireisaracket.

Welcome to the "Club". :-)

Sorry Ali but this is mistaken, "I think his cowardice and lack of courage and fighting spirit might be due to the fact that he was raised by a single mother and did not have a father at home. "

He isn't a jelly fish, he is doing exactly what he intended or what the true rulers of the country wanted. They knew they had to neuter the opposition and the best way to do that is to get one of your own on the inside. So more like a cuckoo bird who lays its eggs in another bird's nest to be raised by them. The young cuckoo kills the bird's real offspring.

I know a lot of very strong people who were raised by single moms. You probably do too; you may not know it because people don't always talk about that. Sometimes not having a father in the home means taking on that role. There's a whole lot of us who can say, like Tom Petty, "I stand my ground."

Hey, it looks like paragraphs are back.

Ditto.

Here's the Obama con job explained with precision:

By Michael Hudson, June 27th:

"Mr. Obama’s scare tactics to get Democrats to vote for his Republican Wall Street plan"

The Wall Street bailout melodrama should be viewed as a dress rehearsal for today’s debt-ceiling non-crisis.

You know that the debt kerfuffle is as melodramatically staged as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”

This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now, ever since the President used almost the same words in his interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley.

Of course the government will have enough money to pay the monthly Social Security checks. The Social Security administration has its own savings – in Treasury bills. I realize that lawyers (such as Mr. Obama and indeed most American presidents) rarely understand economics. But this is a legal issue. Mr. Obama certainly must know that Social Security is solvent, with liquid securities to pay for many decades to come. Yet Mr. Obama has put Social Security at the very top of his hit list!

The most reasonable explanation for his empty threat is that he is trying to panic the elderly into hoping that somehow the budget deal he seems to have up his sleeve can save them. The reality, of course, is that they are being led to economic slaughter. (And not a word of correction reminding the President of financial reality from Rubinomics Treasury Secretary Geithner, neoliberal Fed Chairman Bernanke or anyone else in the Wall Street Democrat administration, formerly known as the Democratic Leadership Council.)

It is a con.

Mr. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save but them. This was clear from the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission, headed by avowed enemies of Social Security Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and President Clinton’s Rubinomics chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Mr. Obama’s more recent choice of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats be delegated by Congress to rewrite the tax code on a bipartisan manner – so that it cannot be challenged – is a ploy to pass a tax “reform” that democratically elected representatives never could be expected to do.

The devil is always in the details. And Wall Street lobbyists always have such details tucked away in their briefcases to put in the hands of their favored congressmen and dedicated senators. And in this case they have the President, who has taken their advice as to whom to appoint as his cabinet to act as factotums to capture the government on their behalf and create “socialism for the rich.”

There is no such thing, of course. When governments are run by the rich, it is called oligarchy. Plato’s dialogues made clear that rather than viewing societies as democracies or oligarchies, it was best to view them in motion. Democracies tended to polarize economically (mainly between creditors and debtors) into oligarchies. These in turn tended to make themselves into hereditary aristocracies. In time, leading families would fight among themselves, and one group (such as Kleisthenes in Athens in 507 BC) would “take the people into his party” and create a democracy. And so the eternal political triangle would go on.

This is what is happening today. Instead of enjoying what the Progressive Era anticipated – an evolution into socialism, with government providing basic infrastructure and other needs on a subsidized basis – we are seeing a lapse back into neo-feudalism. The difference, of course, is that this time around society is not controlled by military grabbers of the land. Finance today achieves what military force did in times past. Instead of being tied to the land as under feudalism, families today may live wherever they want – as long as they take on a lifetime of debt to pay the mortgage on whatever home they buy.

And instead of society paying land rent and tribute to conquerors, we pay the bankers. Just as access to the land was a precondition for families to feed themselves under feudalism, one needs access to credit, to water, medical care, pensions or Social Security and other basic needs today – and must pay interest, fees and monopoly rent to the neo-feudal oligarchy that is now making its deft move from the United States to Ireland and Greece.

The U.S. Government has spent $13 trillion in financial bailouts since Lehman Bros. failed in September 2008. But Mr. Obama warns that thirty years from now, the Social Security fund may run a $1 trillion deficit. It is to ward it off that he urges dismantling the plans for such payments now.

It seems that the $13 trillion used up all the money the government really has. The banks and Wall Street firms have taken the money and run. There is not enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare or other social spending that the Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans now plan to cut.

Not right away. The plan will be to “paper over” the current crisis by delegating the plans to a “Deficit Reduction Commission #2,” appointed from Congressional members.

Finally, we have “Change we can believe in.”