December 27, 2010 at 04:22:28

Obama Year Two: Continued Betrayal and Failure (Part I)

By Stephen Lendman (about the author)

opednews.com

Last December, a two-part article discussed Obama's year one betrayal and failure, accessed through the following links:

click here

click here

In year two, the pattern continued, revealing domestic and foreign policies that:

-- outdid George Bush by exceeding his harshness, lawlessness, belligerency, and public trust betrayal;

-- maintained a 30 year agenda of shifting public wealth to the rich, as well as supporting capital, not public welfare, including targeting middle class households for destruction;

-- looted the nation's wealth, wrecked the economy, and consigned growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;

-- let hunger, homelessness, poverty, and those uninsured grow to unacceptable levels;

-- backed Wall Street's financial coup d'etat by greater Fed empowerment, as well as institutionalizing speculation, "too-big-to fail," super-wealth, and big money power;

-- plans new global monetary measures to control the world's money;

-- continued America's permanent war agenda by expanding imperial adventurism, increasing covert and overt aggression on new fronts with out-of-control military spending, exceeding the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;

-- became the latest war criminal Nobel Peace Prize recipient;

-- executed his first successful coup d'etat in Honduras against its democratically elected president, then backed the fascist regime replacing him;

-- failed attempting regime change in Iran;

-- continued providing military, economic and political aid to the world's most ruthless, corrupt despots;

-- maintained a longstanding policy of supplying Israel with annual billions, more on request, other add-ons and extras, interest-free loans, the latest weapons, munitions and technology, unrestricted US market access, free entry of its immigrants, and unbridled support for its illegal belligerence, occupation, and crimes of war and against humanity;

-- presides over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus, sacrificing due process, judicial fairness, and other civil liberty protections in the name of national security;

-- continued torture as official policy, extraordinary rendition to prison hellholes, and for the first time, targeted US citizens for assassination;

-- invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits by victims of rendition, torture, abuse, and those opposing warrantless wiretapping;

-- targets whisleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, environmental and animal rights activists, anyone challenging state power, and civil rights lawyers who defend them too vigorously called terrorists or threats to national security;

-- endorsed preventive detention without charge for those at Guantanamo considered dangerous, but no evidence allows prosecuting them;

-- expanded Bush administration spying and secrecy;

-- refused to prosecute its officials, suppressing proof of their culpability;

-- planned cybersecurity tyranny, threatening a free and open Internet, consumer privacy, and civil liberties; more on how below;

-- waged war on organized labor through fewer jobs, less pay, reduced benefits, and gutted work rules, including health and safety on-the-job protections;

-- tried controlling the media more aggressively than Nixon;

-- denied budget-strapped states financial help, forcing them to slash welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services when they're most needed;

-- continued to commodify public education, end government responsibility for it, and make it another business profit center;

-- promoted dangerous vaccines for a non-existent threat;

-- promoted health care legislation that rations care; enriches insurers, drug giants and large hospital chains; places profits above human need; and keeps a dysfunctional system in place; Peter Singer's July 15, 2009 New York Times article endorsed administration policy, headlined: "Why We Must Ration Health Care," saying it's essential to apportion a "scarce resource" to those who can afford it; others will get only what they can pay for;

-- on the pretext of improving food safety, enacted agribusiness-friendly House legislation, harming consumers, small farms and food producers without improving America's industrial food system; on November 30, the Senate passed its own version; more on that below;

-- wants so far not passed legislation to let corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by raising energy cost, while creating a speculative bonanza through a new carbon trading derivatives scheme;

-- cracks down harder on undocumented immigrants than George Bush, deporting a record number in FY 2010; others are held in over 300 detention facilities in nearly every state in the country, treated like criminals or terrorists; and

-- promoted a national ID card for all citizens and legal residents to be able to monitor them everywhere at all times.

Year two: Obama's destructive agenda continued.

Militarizing and Exploiting Haiti

An earlier article explained that Haiti is no stranger to adversity. Except for a brief time after its successful 1791 - 1803 revolution turning slaves into citizens and during Jean-Bertrand Aristide's tenure, it's experienced over 500 years of severe oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, occupation, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities from destructive hurricanes to powerful earthquakes, most recently on January 12. It devastated greater Port-au-Prince, killing up to 300,000, leaving around 1.5 million Haitians homeless with little aid and no help to rebuild.

Some countries reacted quickly, mostly a few Latin American ones, including Cuba and Venezuela. Washington did nothing, deploying marines and paratroupers instead, militarizing the country, obstructing, not providing aid, promising $1.1 billion, delivering none, planning only exploitation of Haiti's resources and cheap labor.

Haiti was opened for business, occupied to be plundered, its people on their own, sink or swim under circumstances assuring mass suffering, starvation, disease and for many, death. Only corporate interests mattered at a time of dire need.

Eleven months later, Haiti is still plagued by rubble everywhere, extreme deprivation, promised aid undelivered, none from Washington, 1.5 million without shelter in streets and other open spaces, and now raging cholera, and the aftermath of a sham election, institutionalizing coup d'etat rule.

Washington's imperial hand orchestrated it, denying Haitians any chance for real change. It represents another betrayal by a president showing contempt for essential needs, human rights, and basic freedoms, at home and abroad, even under the most dire conditions.

America's Permanent War Agenda

America glorifies wars in the name of peace, historian Gore Vidal titling his 2002 book, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," saying:

"Our rulers for more than a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own."

It's persisted mainly since Franklin Roosevelt goaded Japan to attack us. It then continued in Korea, Vietnam, numerous proxy wars, the Cold War until the Soviet Union's 1991 dissolution, and now Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and new wars to be launched at opportunistic times against unnamed enemies.

Obama is America's latest warrior president, talking peace, waging war, packaged as liberating ones for democracy, freedom, and justice against bogus threats, when, in fact it's an imperial agenda for wealth, power, and unchallengeable global dominance.

He lied calling Afghanistan a "war of necessity, not choice," doubled the force contingent since taking office, yet stays mired in an unwinnable quagmire. He also destabilized Pakistan, plans control over the Caspian Sea's oil and gas riches, as well as energy routes to secured ports for export.

He approved US military bases encircling Russia, China and Iran, obstructing their solidarity and cohesion. He promised change and delivered betrayal, nearing year three of his tenure. Like his predecessor, he aroused global anger, his agenda endangering everyone, including Americans, heading the country for tyranny and ruin.

Enacting Obamacare

An earlier article called March 21 a day of infamy when House and Democrat leaders bullied, bribed, cajoled, muscled, and jerry-rigged Obamacare to pass, despite most Americans opposing it with good reason. Ralph Nader called it a "pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world," costing double what other Western countries spend and delivering less, rationing care to enrich corporate providers while making a dysfunctional system worse.

Henceforth, junk insurance policies will leave millions underinsured. Costs will remain out-of-control. Insurers can still deny care by delaying, contesting, preventing or over-charging people from accessing it. Everyone must have coverage or be penalized if opt out, a provision many states are contesting. A Virginia federal judge just ruled it unconstitutional, a battle the Supreme Court will decide. Company-provided policies will be taxed as ordinary income, harming working households most of all.

Physicians for a National Health Program denounced it, saying the new law "will enrich and further entrench (private insurers, forcing) millions of Americans to buy" defective coverage leaving most worse off than before at a cost of hundreds of billions of tax dollars given predators to game the system for profit, the public losing out. Moreover, 23 million Americans will remain uninsured, "translate(d) into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering."

Obama's centerpiece domestic policy scammed the public with a package of expensive mandates, new taxes, and sweetheart deals, creating a fragmented, dysfunctional, unsustainable system, denying Americans what they urgently need - universal coverage, an expanded, improved Medicare for all, everyone in, no one out, what neither party or Obama delivered.

Capitulating on Financial Reform

Omitting real structural reforms, Democrats, Republicans, and Obama agreed on a patchwork of half-measures. Instead of restraining financial fraud, too-big-to-fail empowerment, an out-of-control Fed, and casino capitalism's ability to game the system with public money, it institutionalized business as usual. The Financial Times (FT) quoted a Wall Street banker saying "We are all breathing a sigh of relief here....we can live with this." Indeed so since Wall Street lawyers wrote it. The FT added: investors believe the "overhaul in financial rules would not have a significant impact on the industry's structure and profitability."

Indeed not by:

-- empowering a financial aristocracy;

-- letting Wall Street run the country;

-- institutionalizing fraud, speculation and bailouts;

-- leaving executive pay, bonuses and perks untouched;

-- letting credit agency scams continue;

-- permitting giant banks, insurers and other financial firms to get bigger; and

-- establishing a toothless Consumer Financial Protection Bureau along with other anti-reform provisions.

Bottom line: the worst of bad practices will continue, besides teams of lawyers devising ways around whatever regulations emerge. According to University of San Diego Law Professor Frank Partnoy, "Wall Street has always been very skilled at getting around rules, and this law will be no different," especially with its loopholes, half-measures, and overall weakness. Bankers got the best deal big money can buy. The public again was scammed.

Part II will conclude Obama Year Two: Continued Betrayal and Failure.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at Email address removed. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ .

I was born in 1934, am a retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama: The best thing that ever happened to the right

The best thing that ever happened to the right

By Julian Zelizer

• 
  

Reuters/Rick Wilking/Jim Young

When President Obama started his term in the White House in January 2009, many experts wondered whether conservatism would survive. Following almost three decades of conservative politics in the United States, the movement confronted a serious political crisis. With the collapse of the economy and a troubled war in Iraq, many of the ideas of the right -- such as deregulation and tax cuts -- seemed discredited. President Bush appeared to have become to conservatism what Lyndon Johnson had once been to liberalism, a symbol of the failures and excesses of a political era. Sen. John McCain’s lethargic campaign also revealed a vacuum of leadership within the GOP at a time when the divisions among conservatives were greater than the ideas that united them. In December 2008, the blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote that the "dreadful incompetence" of the Bush administration had "poisoned the Republican brand for more than one generation ..."

Yet it is fair to say that one of the major stories of Obama’s presidency has been the revitalization of conservatism. Within only two years, Republicans have regained control of the House of Representatives through a dramatic midterm election. There are now an abundance of Republicans, some old (Newt Gingrich) and some new (Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin), who are jumping over each other to campaign for president in 2012. Republicans have been able to join hands, despite their differences, by using President Obama as their foil. The president has filled a similar role as communism did during the Cold War. Perhaps most troubling to liberals, President Obama has been unable, and in some cases unwilling, to dismantle pillars of Bush’s policies. The extension of the Bush tax cuts was a major victory for conservatives, even as they gave way on unemployment benefits.

It is too easy to say that pundits simply exaggerated the crisis of conservatism. The problems facing the right toward the end of Bush’s presidency were very real and their ability to rebound was not inevitable.

• Continue reading

The first, and most obvious, factor behind the success of the right in recent years has been the stagnant economy. Poor economic conditions generate anger within the electorate. That unrest offered the right an opportunity to tap into opposition toward the president. They were also able to use the stagnant unemployment figures to raise questions about the effectiveness of Obama’s policies. Everything looks worse when seen through the prism of a 9.5 percent unemployment rate.

The second factor has been the ability of conservatives to pursue a strategy that the right had perfected since the 1970s: the combination of elite, organizational movement-building and grass-roots activism. Organizations such as Freedom Works have provided funding and offered organizational leadership to conservatives when they were demoralized. When grass-roots opposition emerged to President Obama’s healthcare plan these Washington-based organizations quickly moved to nurture the opponents and provide them the resources that they needed to make sure their anger did not dissipate. Unrest turned into a political movement.

The third factor was the fact that the conservative movement built an incredible infrastructure to propagate its ideas. The conservative movement never depended on any single president for its success. Since the 1970s, its goal had been to institutionalize conservative ideas to shift public debate to the right over the long-term and to offer a counterweight to liberalism even when there was a Democrat in the White House. The infrastructure included media outlets such as talk radio and Fox television. More recently conservatives have moved into the blogosphere with the creation of websites such as Breitbart.com and the Daily Caller. Conservatives, with the help of wealthy philanthropists, have relied on think tanks such as Cato and Heritage that have continued to produce slick and polished policy briefs in support of a conservative policy agenda. The right has used this infrastructure to paint President Obama as left-of-center, even a socialist, at the exact time that he was angering liberals with his ongoing compromises.

The final factor behind the rebound of conservatism has been its mastery of the legislative process. Congressional politics has proven to be one of the greatest sources of strength for conservatism. During the early 1980s, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich headed the Conservative Opportunity Society in the House, which used floor speeches and ethics investigations to weaken the entrenched Democratic majority. COS pressured Republican leaders like Robert Michel of Illinois to stop compromising with Democrats and play closer attention to the conservative movement. Once Republicans took over Capitol Hill in 1994, they used their base of power in the House and Senate to tie up the Clinton administration with investigations and block any efforts to push for expansive domestic legislation like healthcare. When President George W. Bush was in the White House, Republicans used their legislative power to aggressively push for their agenda, blocking Democratic participation in hearings and floor debates. When there was not enough support for the costly and regressive tax cuts in 2001, the GOP used the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster and "sunset" rules to overcome rules about cost. Since Democrats took over Congress in 2006, Republicans have remained generally united in Congress even as their programs remained unpopular and the enthusiasm of voters moved toward the Democrats. Sen. Mitch McConnell has been one of the silent architects of the conservative resurgence through his ability to keep Republicans in line. At the height of Obama’s popularity shortly after his election, almost all of the Republicans stood firm in voting against Obama’s economic stimulus.

While most experts thought that 2008 would usher in a new era of progressive politics, the reality has been that conservatism has seemed to enjoy the greatest boost. With all the comparisons to Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson, Obama has struggled through a similar experience as Jimmy Carter, who witnessed the rise of a conservative movement during his time in Washington.

The big question for the right is what happens next. Now that Republicans will control the House and will soon have their own candidates on the campaign trail, the ideas of the right will come under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. Speaker-to-be John Boehner will also have to avoid divisions within the GOP from emerging in the next few years as the party starts making choices about where to focus their energy as a majority in only one part of government. During the lame duck session, President Obama demonstrated that he still has the capacity to squeeze legislation out of Congress and that he can find ways to win some Republican suppport, while Republicans finally started to reveal some cracks during the votes over the repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and the START Treaty. As parts of the healthcare programs go into effect, some provisions might prove more popular than Republicans expect. Finally, the big unknown is the economy. Should recovery be underway in 2012, President Obama will receive an enormous boost going into 2012.

Nonetheless, most on the right and left agree that conservatives are in much better shape than anyone would have imagined two years ago. This is a story that not many people had predicted, and one that Democrats certainly didn't want in the history textbooks.

• Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University, is the author of "Jimmy Carter," "Arsenal of Democracy," and the editor of "The Presidency of George W. Bush." More: Julian E. Zelizer

Whitewashing Defeat: Obama’s Indecisiveness Defines His Presidency

by Ramzy Baroud / December 23rd, 2010

He may still possess the poise of a confident leader and an eloquent intellectual, but the presidency of Barack Obama is now suffering its most difficult phase to date.

Certainly, Obama cannot solely be blamed for all the factors that have stifled his country’s chances of recovery from the failures of the Bush era. But the man who promised the moon has now extended the abhorrent and morally unjustifiable tax cuts for America’s wealthiest class. The “sweeping” $858 billion tax bill was signed into law on December 17. It includes an $801 billion package of tax cuts, extending Bush’s tax break for the rich for two more years – at a time when the majority of Americans are reeling under the weight of a failing economy and persistently high unemployment.

Still, the tax bill was presented by the self-assured president as “real money that’s going to make a real difference in people’s lives.” The cuts will help stimulate an ailing economy, he claims, despite it being the rich who gambled with American wealth to increase their own, stimulating a market crash that led to millions losing their small investments and savings. All we know for sure is that the cuts will add a gigantic chunk to an already impossible deficit of $1.3 trillion, another Obama battle that is likely to be lost to the Republicans early next year.

But this concession, and its presentation as a victory for America’s middle classes says more about Obama’s style than the weakening of the Democrats since the mid-term elections. Even in his foreign policy management, Obama’s approach seems to teeter between giving face-lifts to ugly realities and postponing urgently needed action. The agent of change has become the quintessential American politician, who is more consumed with his chances of reelection than with bringing about the kind of long-term change that can really benefit his country, and the world at large.

Obama’s handling of the shortly-lived peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s right wing government is another example of a striking failure followed by whitewash. Although he adamantly demanded a halt to Israel’s construction of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Obama soon began capitulating before an obstinate Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader, supported by much of the US Congress and backed by a strong Israel lobby in Washington, finally forced Obama into a humiliating retreat. Even a generous bribe to win a limited Israeli moratorium on settlement construction failed. Obama administration officials finally declared that the US would abandon its efforts to halt Israeli settlement expansion, effectively signaling an American exit from the ‘peace process.’

Instead of laying the blame squarely on Israel, the Obama administration delved into the same long-discredited rhetoric that only Palestinians and Israelis are capable of accomplishing peace without any outside intervention. That was the core message of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who argued that it was up to Israel and the Palestinian leadership to “settle their conflict”. It signaled a complete shift in US foreign policy, which Israel has naturally welcomed, for the US-financed military occupier prefers to be left to its own devices in this very unbalanced conflict.

Afghanistan is another example. The eagerly anticipated strategy assessment of the war in Afghanistan was released on December 16, with illusory talk of “gains” and warnings of al-Qaeda threats. It suggests that the US will continue to fight a pointless war for years to come, with no clear goals or end in sight.

“The unclassified version of the secret review said U.S. military operations have disrupted the Pakistan-based al-Qaida terrorist network over the last year and halted the momentum of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan,” reported the Kansas City Star.

What the review and much of the media fail to report is that the war on Afghanistan hardly concerns al-Qaeda, which is more widespread and mobile than ever. Its future operation does not hinge on the ongoing battles in Afghanistan either. One must also remain skeptical of the “gains” reportedly made in the south. Taliban is known for avoiding open warfare, a style they have mastered after nine years of practice. The recoil – if that is even the case – of the Taliban is probably temporary, and a spring resurgence is assured by past experiences. But what is most important to note is that the action of NATO and US soldiers, government corruption and the brutality of local militias have allowed the Taliban to extend its presence to northern provinces, including Kunduz and Takhar, which were, until recently, uncharted territories for the strong and resourceful Pashtun fighters.

According to an editorial in the Lebanese Daily Star, “Obama’s long-awaited Afghanistan strategy review amounts to little more than a whitewash of the seemingly intractable problems that have trapped the mighty American military in a quagmire.” Worse, this crisis is likely to be compounded. “The failures of General Stanley McChrystal, who resigned in June, and Richard Holbrooke, who died suddenly this week, are symbolic of the crumbling of the twin pillars, both military and civilian, of Barack Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy. The US has now…entered a violent stalemate,” wrote James Denselow in the British Guardian.

Obama’s response was yet another attempt to distance himself from the looming, if not ongoing, failure. US priority, he said, is “not to defeat every last threat to the security of Afghanistan, because, ultimately, it is Afghans who must secure their country. And it’s not nation-building, because it is Afghans who must build their nation.”

One would agree with the president were it not for the fact that the US invasion was what has impeded the security of Afghanistan, destroyed any chance of nation-building and installed a corrupt government. But Obama will not accept responsibility. His cautious assessments are emblematic of his overall political style: avoiding or perpetuating the problem, and distancing himself from it once failure is assured. This is as true of his domestic policy as of his foreign policy.

It is easy to see why Obama’s popularity has plummeted among those who once believed in his ability to bring change to a scarred and traumatized country. And his irresolute leadership has also empowered his political opponents, who will not cease to demand more from a feeble and ever-willing president.

Ramzy Baroud is an author and a journalist. His latest volume is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London). He can be reached at ramzybaroud@hotmail.com. Read other articles by Ramzy.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 23rd, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Afghanistan, Disinformation, Israel/Palestine, Obama

AlterNet.org

Posted by Tikkun Daily at 2:42 pm
December 17, 2010

Obama: A Tale of Betrayal

Posted by Tikkun Daily on @ 2:42 pm

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/12/17/obama-a-tale-of-betrayal/

Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

by Harold Jacobs

There recently has been a wave of commentary in the established media depicting Obama as being concerned more with appearance than specific substantive accomplishments, craving acceptance by the economic and political establishment, and unwilling to fight for what he professes to believe in. Some commentators point to Obama’s personality as the problem: he is viewed as far more peculiar and strange than envisioned by those who voted for him. But whatever Obama’s quirks or insecurities, they do not appear to be more acute than those of previous presidents, such as Nixon and George W. Bush, who nevertheless, for better or worse, governed with vigorous determination.

Supporters of Obama claim that given the political forces at play (the blanket opposition of the Republicans, the splits inside the Democratic Party, the power of outside vested interests, etc.), he has done the best he could, that is, he has acted in good faith in attempting to implement his campaign agenda. After the Democratic Party’s overwhelming defeat in the recent Congressional elections, Obama is said by his supporters to be in “learning” mode.

Another rationalization for Obama’s political behavior is that he is at heart a “pragmatist”. But pragmatists, rightly understood, have a moral center, a line that they will not cross. Even in the latter case, one has to critically examine the substantive nature of that line. If Obama is a pragmatist, he often has shown himself to be a morally vacuous one.

Many who voted for Obama hoped for a democratic renewal. They view him today as fundamentally a servant of corporate and financial interests. Although he projected himself as a liberal Democrat during the presidential campaign, he has governed as a moderate Republican. The appointments he made to key positions on his economic team, such as Summers and Geithner, powerful advocates of the radical deregulation policies that helped create the economic meltdown, support the notion that Obama is Wall Street’s president.

And it goes on from there: Obama expanded, in increasingly insidious ways, the national security state and, as a consequence, he broadened the legal foundation for fascism begun by Bush. For example, if Obama deems an American citizen to be a terrorist, he claims the right as President to order that person killed. No need for any due process of law. As for military spending, the Obama administration has far exceeded that of its hawkish predecessor.

On the domestic front, Obama signed a health care bill without a public option that will provide more than 30 million new “customers” to the private insurance companies but that does nothing to control the cost of insurance premiums. For most Americans, access to the bill’s positive provisions will remain dependent on the soaring cost of private health insurance.

Obama, once a professor of constitutional law, elected to make a mockery of the rule of law by not holding members of the Bush administration and the CIA responsible for such war crimes as murder and torture, and by not criminally prosecuting those corporate insiders responsible for the toxic mortgages and other financial instruments that led to the global economic collapse.

While the list of Obama’s betrayals could be extended, the Republican right-wing agenda is far more reactionary than most of Obama’s foreign and domestic policy initiatives. Consequently, those who once supported him are faced with a classic lesser-of-two-evils situation. If, as is likely, Obama runs again in 2012, it is unclear how many voters who once enthusiastically supported him will reluctantly vote for him again. Most likely those who do, will vote free of illusions about “change you can believe in,” knowing instead that they are lending legitimacy to the mere facade of democracy. For most Democrats, “hope” has turned into a defensive holding action.

But Obama’s credibility with even these voters is being further eroded for having negotiated a deal with the Republicans that allows for the Bush tax cuts to be extended for a further two years for the wealthiest Americans. That will exacerbate the exceedingly high rate of social inequality in the U.S., provide little or no stimulus to the economy, and add 700 billion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years. Most importantly, Obama has almost guaranteed that in the future the Bush tax cuts will become permanent and that pressure will grow for deficit reduction to come from significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or other social programs that the neediest Americans depend upon.

Obama’s mantra that he needs bipartisan support to get legislation passed is disingenuous. Given the Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House during the first two years of his presidency, what stands out is how little of his campaign mandate Obama implemented in a principled manner. Instead of keeping his word to the electorate, Obama operated as follows: for example, with regard to health care reform, he rhetorically claimed to support the public option, which had enormous public support, while at the same time making a deal behind closed doors with the insurance companies to scrap the public option. He never engaged in anything but a token attempt to mobilize the public and the Congress to support his rhetorical alternative. On this and other important issues Obama hid behind the claim that he needed a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to combat Republican obstruction, but he did next to nothing to pressure the Democratic majority in the Senate to change its rules of operation so that a simple majority could prevail.

In short, Obama failed to put up a real fight on a slew of vital issues he passionately supported as a candidate. This was not owing to a lack of political experience, but to a failure of political will. It has resulted in a loss of credibility with his base and much of the larger public. He appears so transparently weak and opportunistic that his presidential stature has been diminished, perhaps beyond repair.

Today, the political structure of the United States can most accurately be described as oligarchic rather than democratic. From 2002 to 2007, more than half of the nation’s income gains went to the richest 1 percent of households. This is a country of, by and for the rich, with a militaristic foreign policy based on permanent war and a corporate-dominated political duopoly gradually moving in a fascist direction. Obama, contrary to the expectations he raised as a candidate, has willingly collaborated in accelerating these tendencies. Tragically, Obama’s lasting legacy will have been to create a wave of cynicism and disillusionment and to have squandered a genuine opportunity for progressive social change.

Harold Jacobs taught sociology at SUNY New Paltz from 1971 to 2002, when he retired as Professor Emeritus. He has published extensively on the New Left, including a book on the Weather Underground. He has written for Tikkun since the very first issue, when he contributed “The Lesson of the Vietnam War” (download as pdf). He specializes in social movements, political sociology, social psychology, and sociological theory. He presently teaches “Great Books” classes at the University of California, Riverside campus extension in Palm Desert, CA.

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Published on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 by TruthDig.com

President Obama’s Christmas Gift to AT&T (and Comcast and Verizon)

by Amy Goodman

One of President Barack Obama’s signature campaign promises was to protect the freedom of the Internet. He said, in November 2007, “I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality, because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out and we all lose.”

Jump ahead to December 2010, where Obama is clearly in the back seat, being driven by Internet giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. With him is his appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, his Harvard Law School classmate and basketball pal who just pushed through a rule on network neutrality that Internet activists consider disastrous.

Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron told me, “This proposal appears to be riddled with loopholes that would open the door to all kinds of future abuses, allowing companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, the big Internet service providers, to decide which websites are going to work, which aren’t, and which are going to be able to get special treatment.”

For comedian-turned-senator Al Franken, D-Minn., the new rules on Net neutrality are no joke. He offered this example, writing: “Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn’t nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a tea party group in your area).”

AT&T is one of the conglomerates that activists say practically wrote the FCC rules that Genachowski pushed through. We’ve seen this flip-flop before. Weeks before his 2007 net neutrality pledge, then-Sen. Obama took on AT&T, which was exposed for engaging in warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens at the request of the Bush administration. AT&T wanted retroactive immunity from prosecution. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton told Talking Points Memo: “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

But by July 2008, a month before the Democratic National Convention, with Obama the presumptive presidential nominee, he not only didn’t filibuster, but voted for a bill that granted telecoms retroactive immunity from prosecution. AT&T had gotten its way, and showed its appreciation quickly. The official tote bag issued to every DNC delegate was emblazoned with a large AT&T logo. AT&T threw an opening-night bash for delegates that was closed to the press, celebrating the Democratic Party for its get-out-of-jail-free card.

AT&T, Verizon, cable giant Comcast and other corporations have expressed support for the new FCC rule. Genachowski’s Democratic Party allies on the commission, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn (the daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn), according to Aaron, “tried to improve these rules, but the chairman refused to budge, apparently because he had already reached an agreement with AT&T and the cable lobbyists about how far these rules were going to go.” Clyburn noted that the rules could allow mobile Internet providers to discriminate, and that poor communities, particularly African-American and Latino, rely on mobile Internet services more than wired connections.

Aaron laments the power of the telecom and cable industry lobbyists in Washington, D.C.: “In recent years, they’ve deployed 500 lobbyists, basically one for every member of Congress, and that’s just what they report. AT&T is the biggest campaign giver in the history of campaign giving, as long as we have been tracking it. So they have really entrenched themselves. And Comcast, Verizon, the other big companies, are not far behind.”

Aaron added: “When AT&T wants to get together all of their lobbyists, there’s no room big enough. They had to rent out a movie theater. People from the public interest who are fighting for the free and open Internet here in D.C. can still share a cab.”

Campaign money is now more than ever the lifeblood of U.S. politicians, and you can be sure that Obama and his advisers are looking to the 2012 election, which will likely be the costliest in U.S. history. Vigorous and innovative use of the Internet and mobile technologies is credited with helping Obama secure his victory in 2008. As the open Internet becomes increasingly stifled in the U.S., and the corporations that control the Internet become more powerful, we may not see such democratic participation for much longer.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2010 Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

December 22, 2010 at 17:03:29

Is Barack Obama the Problem?

By Robert Parry (about the author)

opednews.com

From Consortium News

Despite some recent victories like repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," many on the American Left are feeling a cumulative disgust toward President Barack Obama, not just for his generally timid policy choices but -- even more so -- for his failure to articulate and fight for progressive values.

After eight years of getting bullied by President George W. Bush -- and even longer by Fox News, talk radio and congressional Republicans -- many progressives, including many young voters, wanted a passionate advocate in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, himself a member of the American elite who treated his class with a knowing disdain. They got instead a silver-tongued conciliator who strives for the elite's blessings.

So, even as Obama ticks off his legislative accomplishments -- from helping women get a fair wage in his administration's early days to his Wednesday signing of a law repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" rules for gays in the U.S. military -- the President is not likely to gain much traction with his liberal "base" because he has failed to be what many of them hoped he would be: a battler.

While that estrangement will be difficult for Obama to overcome -- especially given this month's compromise with right-wing Republicans over extending Bush's tax cuts for the rich -- the other question in this troubled marriage between Obama and his angry "base" is whether Obama is entirely at fault.

Or does the Left deserve a share of the blame for its own failures, especially how it sat back over the past few decades as the Right moved ahead in media, think tanks and other elements of an ideological infrastructure? Should the Left be more self-critical about its tendency in recent years to be more a sideline critic than an on-the-field participant?

From some of his public comments, Obama seems to think so. At a Dec. 7 news conference, Obama lashed out at what he depicted as "sanctimonious" purists who preferred to see health-care reform go down to defeat over an insistence that a "public option" be included than accept passage of a purely private-sector approach.

"If that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then, let's face it, we will never get anything done," Obama said, with a flash of anger. "People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people.

"And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are, in the meantime, the American people are still seeing themselves not able to get health insurance because of pre-existing condition."

Familiar Contempt

Obama's criticism of critics from his "base" recalls the old adage that "familiarity breeds contempt." Much as FDR recognized and disdained the hypocrisies and shortcomings of his fellow members of the American elite, the ex-community organizer seemed to be reacting to tendencies among his progressive allies to dream big and accomplish little.

Instead, Obama chose to rack up legislative "victories," even at the cost of making compromises with conservative Democrats and the occasional Republican who would break party ranks.

Rather than shaking up the System, he sought to stabilize the Establishment. Instead of going after the Wall Street gamblers whose recklessness had pushed the country to the brink of a new depression, he bailed them out.

Instead of fighting for a larger stimulus package to help hard-pressed Americans who were losing jobs and homes, Obama let it be watered down with tax cuts to secure a few Republican votes. Later, he signed a law that imposed only modest reforms on Wall Street's ability to make another mess.

Similarly, he chose not to hold Bush and his neoconservative advisers accountable for war crimes. He didn't even support a fact-finding investigation into how the Bush administration had conned the nation into invading Iraq. He further pleased the neocons by escalating the Afghan War and expanding Bush's use of Predator drones to hunt down militants in Pakistan and Yemen.

Despite campaign promises about government transparency, Obama cracked down on whistleblowers who revealed government wrongdoing. He is letting his Justice Department devise novel legal strategies to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing leaked U.S. government documents.

Also, after having treated health-care reform as his top domestic priority, Obama walked away from a variety of other important issues, including climate-change legislation, union protections and immigration reform.

No Public Option

Even Obama's "signature" health-care law left the "base" frustrated because the process became so bogged down in futile efforts to woo Republicans, such as Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe; so compromised to appease insurance industry defenders like independent Sen. Joe Lieberman; and so convoluted to buy the votes of conservative Democrats, like Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Even though Obama claimed to support a "public" or government-run insurance option as the best way to create real competition for the insurance industry, he jettisoned it without a fight. He accepted an industry-friendly plan that tells Americans that they must buy private health insurance, an old-time Republican idea that ironically Republican state officials and GOP-appointed judges are now attacking as unconstitutional.

In perhaps the ultimate irony, Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court might well strike down the private-sector mandate at the heart of the health-care law because it leaves Americans no option other than to buy a private commodity, a health insurance policy. In other words, it lacks a "public option." If that happens, Obama will have little to show for all his concessions to Sens. Snowe, Lieberman and Nelson.

In a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday, liberal columnist Harold Meyerson rated as mixed what he called Obama's two-year "progressive-reform period," much less impressive than the accomplishments of FDR and Lyndon Johnson but more substantive than those of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Meyerson noted, too, that Carter and Clinton had larger Democratic majorities than Obama had and did not face endless GOP filibusters. "In fairness to Obama, he, unlike his predecessors, had to overcome filibusters on virtually every bill," Meyerson wrote.

Meyerson also cited a key handicap that Obama had in common with Carter and Clinton.

"Unlike Roosevelt and Johnson, the three most recent Democratic presidents all suffered from a lack of left-wing street heat," Meyerson wrote. "What distinguishes Obama -- and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid -- is that they pushed through so much legislation despite the absence of legions demanding progressive change (though there was a very effective mass lobby, if not a mass movement, for repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell' ban)."

In other words, Meyerson recognized that the American Left has allowed its ability to rally the people to wither away. As late as the 1960s and the early 1970s, the Left could bring great pressure to bear for passage of landmark laws, ending racial segregation and providing medical care for the elderly.

However, during the late 1970s, the Left, which had held an advantage in media and think tanks, opted to downsize or decommission those institutions in favor of an emphasis on "local organizing."

The Right took a different course, investing billions of dollars in expanding its outreach to rank-and-file Americans. Over the next three decades, the Right waged a national "war of ideas" against a Left that had largely disarmed itself.

Reaganism's Triumph

Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" message was promoted via print publications, by a stable of well-paid newspaper and TV commentators, on AM radio stations across the country, and later on Fox News and the Internet. "Liberal" was turned into a dirty word that politicians had to avoid. Any suggestion that the government could help solve a national problem was denounced as silly socialism.

Even as Reagan's trickle-down economics failed to improve the lot of the average American -- though making the upper crust all the richer -- Reagan's supply-side theories remained dominant, resistant to any and all evidence.

In the 1990s, Clinton raised marginal tax rates on the wealthy and the nation enjoyed one of its most sustained periods of job creation, which came with the additional prospect of retiring the entire federal debt. However, after Bush managed to steal Election 2000 from Al Gore, the Republicans insisted on another dose of Reaganism, more tax cuts for the rich.

The strategy -- compounded by Bush's two wars paid for entirely by borrowing -- ended in an economic catastrophe, combining record federal deficits, failed banks, massive unemployment and home foreclosures.

Yet, the Right with its impressive propaganda capabilities has been able to beat back any sustained criticism of Reaganism. Millions of middle-class and working-class Americans continue to rally to economic theories that are devastating the middle and working classes.

Krugman's Question

On Monday, New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman examined the curious question of why so many people behave so irrationally.

"When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas," Krugman wrote. "Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything -- yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

"How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says "I don't think we need regulators,' about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed?

"How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations -- the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis -- did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

"The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don't work. But the response should be, what big-government policies?

"For the fact is that the Obama stimulus -- which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts -- was far too cautious to turn the economy around. " Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

"Now, maybe it wasn't possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that's true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics."

Though Krugman's column focused on the mystery of why failed economic ideas continue to prevail, the same point could be made about foreign policy, where neoconservatives and other hardliners remain dominant in the Washington policy debates despite the calamities that their strategies have brought down upon the nation.

To me -- " having worked in national news for more than three decades - " a big part of the answer is the media imbalance. The Right has invested so much; the Left so little; and the mainstream careerists understand where the jobs are and where they're not.

Perhaps because he writes for the New York Times, the normally gutsy Krugman shies away from noting the media elephant in the room. Instead, he laid more criticism at Obama's feet for failing to more effectively and consistently make the case against Reaganism and in favor of more government activism. Krugman wrote:

"To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn't, we're still -- perhaps more than ever -- ruled by 'zombie economics.' Why? Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president."

"President Obama has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

"None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist. But it helped empower bad ideas, in ways that can do quite immediate harm. Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy -- but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal. And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?"

Another Answer

Without doubt, Krugman is correct in his criticism of Obama's intellectual accommodations to the Right. But that is only part of the answer to the question that Krugman raises.

Why do the "zombie ideas" refuse to die? To a great extent, it is because those ideas are protected by a well-oiled political/media machine. The machine not only generates support for Reagan's "trickle-down" economics through right-wing media and think tanks, but also reaches into mainstream information outlets, such as the influential news channel CNBC.

CNBC's "free-market" anchors never wavered -- nor were they held accountable -- when their anti-regulatory ideology helped blow up the economy and cost many CNBC watchers much of their stock portfolios. After the hated Big Government rushed in with taxpayer dollars to put Wall Street back on its feet, the CNBC anchors quickly returned to demonizing government interference, especially anything aimed at helping the little guy.

One truism that I've learned about political and media survival in Washington is that it's always smart to shift toward where the power lies. In effect, that is what "practical" politicians and journalists do. They venture only as far as they feel they can without creating undue political or career risks for themselves.

American progressives may hate that fact. They may want Obama to be another FDR whatever the political risks. They may feel bitterly disappointed if they were enthusiastic supporters of Obama in 2008. Or they may gloat over the fact that they warned their friends that Obama was just another opportunist pol eager to sell out.

But sitting on the sidelines -- either in despair or in vindication -- is irrelevant to the larger picture of what the United States and the world needs.

The hard truth is that until the Left gets onto the field in a much more serious way and starts engaging the Right in its "war of ideas" -- including making major investments in media, think tanks and other means of getting information to the public -- politicians will continue to disappoint and embitter the Left. So will mainstream journalists.

As Harold Meyerson noted, a major difference between the big accomplishments of FDR and LBJ and the little steps taken by Carter, Clinton and Obama was "a lack of left-wing street heat."

And that heat won't be forthcoming until Americans routinely hear real facts about their situation as well as rational arguments about what they can do to change things.

http://www.consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

How Obama Sold the People's Farm

The Clinton Pivot: Obama Sells the Farm

by Jack Random / December 14th, 2010

If Barack Obama truly wanted to be a transformative president he would have pushed to break the senatorial filibuster at the very beginning of his term in office. As a former senator, he knew full well the power and inclination of a senate minority to obstruct all legislative initiatives.

There is not a syllable in the constitution that empowers a minority in the least democratic branch of government with an absolute veto over all legislative action. That usurpation of power was accomplished by senatorial rules of conduct, which are subject to change by a majority vote at the beginning of each congressional session.

Had the Obama administration been able to lower the filibuster threshold to 55 votes or required senators to hold the floor as they once did or limited its duration to 27 calendar days, the incoming president would have been empowered to usher in an era of progressive change, the very change for which the electorate thought it was voting. He surely could have passed Medicare-for-all with a ten or twenty-year phase in. He could have restructured the tax code and fully financed an emerging green economy. He could have rebuilt the nation’s infrastructure and established an interstate mass transit system, achieving something very close to full employment.

There is no end to what Obama might have accomplished had he been willing to take that first bold step. With the economy moving again, he might well have reversed his party’s fortune in the mid-term elections. But that bold president, the one that would have summoned the spirits of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, was nowhere to be found.

It was never what Barack Obama had in mind. It seems he was playing from the Bill Clinton handbook all along. Even now, as we approach a new session of congress, there is little talk of reforming the filibuster. With the Republicans taking control of the lower house perhaps we no longer think it important. But the lower house is closer to the people and closer to the next election. Any representative who refuses to extend unemployment benefits with the unemployment rate near ten percent will almost certainly guarantee the wrath of his or her constituency and an abbreviated tenure in Washington. No, the Senate will remain the leading source of obstructionism and the problem should be addressed. But that is not in the Clinton handbook.

Never was I so reminded of Slick Willy as when Obama with a passion rarely summoned in his presidency challenged his progressive critics to name a single instance where he has failed to keep his word: “Look at what I promised during the campaign. There’s not a single thing that I haven’t done or tried to do.”

While managing to project himself as an antiwar candidate, he never promised to withdraw all troops from Iraq. He promised to escalate in Afghanistan and that he has done.

Winning the support of organized labor, Obama promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act but it never reached his desk. He never promised to support Fair Trade but he appeared to support labor provisions in Free Trade agreements. He advocated exacting a price on those who export jobs but it has never made the Obama short list.

He advocated health care as a right rather than a responsibility but he never promised a public option. He never promised universal healthcare or that health insurance rates would be mediated. He did oppose an insurance mandate but few have held him accountable on that ground.

From Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to immigration reform and the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, Obama has always chosen his words carefully. Considered in context, his words are consistent with his actions. He never claimed to be progressive so he cannot be held accountable for failing to live up to what that label entails.

Obama ran as a pragmatist and he has governed in that fashion. What he does not seem to understand is that we don’t care how carefully he parsed his words. We don’t care if we were fooled by our own Audacity of Hope. We frankly don’t care if he is a man of his word or not.

We are living in hard times and we’d like to know he is out to help us. If the president truly believes his compromise on tax policy is in the public interest, fine. Let him state his case. We respectfully disagree and we’ll state ours.

Obama has made it clear he is not beholden to the left for having rallied to make him president. Neither are we beholden to him for having done so. While few of us would argue that he is worse than George W. Bush or John McCain, that’s a little like saying a plunge in freezing water is better than a dip in raw sewage.

From a pragmatic point of view, we could have chosen to rally around Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Why didn’t we? Because we knew what to expect from another round of the Clinton administration. We witnessed Bill Clinton’s pivot to the right after his party lost the mid-term elections. We witnessed welfare reform and bipartisan agreement on free trade (job exportation) and deregulation, all major Republican initiatives. Even after winning reelection, Clinton held to the right in a bold attempt to dominate electoral politics by eliminating the left from the equation. (In the end, he didn’t even have the guts to pardon Leonard Peltier. Yes, some of us still remember.)

We could not rally around Hillary because she showed no inclination to govern differently than her husband. We could not support a third-party candidate because the stakes were high and no candidate rose above the level of symbolism. We rallied to the Obama camp because he was perceived as antiwar and relatively progressive. It was better to gamble on the unknown than to stake our hopes on the highly improbable.

We did not want another Bill Clinton but it seems that is exactly what we got. We gambled and lost, but that does not mean we must sacrifice our voices and convictions by continuing to support a president that has not earned it.

The strangest thing about this sudden rightward pivot on tax policy is the urgency with which it was presented, as if the opportunity would be lost once a new congress was seated. As all must recognize by now this is an overwhelming Republican victory. (The president’s supporters can produce all the graphs and charts they want. The Republicans favor all the tax cuts. The president sold the farm for an extension of unemployment benefits.) Rushing the proposal through a lame duck congress before the Bush tax cuts expired was not only unnecessary but it also worked against the president’s interest.

Had the tax cuts been allowed to elapse the power would have shifted to the White House and a still Democratic Senate. A Republican lower house of congress could do absolutely nothing without Democratic consent. With unemployment near ten percent, there is not a working family in the nation that is not affected. With every vote against extending benefits, the Democrats could have rolled out ads in every district: Joe Worker lost his job when his plant was shipped to China. He took a job as a janitor and was laid off in the Great Recession. Now he’s lost his unemployment benefits. Congressman Right says he’s lazy. What do you say?

As for tax cuts for the middle class, how many times could the anti-tax party say no without losing all credibility?

The Republicans were playing a bluff and either the president was fooled or he did what he intended to do all along: the Clinton pivot.

The American two-party system functions to the extent that it does by managing a delicate balance between corporate interests and the public good. When the right goes too far by gutting that part of government that serves the public good, the left assumes power to restore the balance. When both parties represent essentially the same policies, balance is never restored. The result is a reversal of centuries of progress, an unraveling of the New Deal and the Great Society, a process that predictably ends with the decimation of Social Security, Medicare, public education, environmental protection, civil rights, labor rights and all regulatory agencies.

It is a prescription for disaster because it favors the rich to the detriment of the middle class. When the working people can no longer afford to purchase goods and the middle class is impoverished, the system no longer functions.

Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt. He never intended to be. He is a pragmatist, a man everyone can love once they get to know him. He is Bill Clinton without the personal charm.

It’s not all bad. There is something to be said for intelligence and good management. There is a reason the crash did not happen on his watch. Had Clinton been president instead of George W. Bush, I’m certain he would have acted long before the global economy was on the threshold of total collapse.

Nevertheless, the elements creating the conditions that inevitably led to systemic failure were put in place by Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, Barack Obama shows no inclination to make the necessary corrections.

Jack Random is the author of Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press) the Jazzman Chronicles, Volumes I and II (City Lights Books). The Chronicles have been published by CounterPunch, the Albion Monitor, Buzzle, Dissident Voice and others. Read other articles by Jack, or visit Jack's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 at 6:59am and is filed under Capitalism, Classism, Democrats, Disinformation, GWB, Obama, Tax

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Michael Brune

Why Is the Obama Administration Stalling on Both Air Pollution and Smog Standards?

Deciding not to move forward on these important rules is, in fact, allowing those polluters to move us backward.

December 13, 2010 |

Has someone discovered a way to travel back in time to the Bush administration? On Tuesday, the EPA asked for a one-year delay on new rules for air pollution from industrial boilers. The very next day, the agency announced it wants to wait for another half year before setting new standards for ozone smog. Both actions defy every kind of logic but one -- pandering to polluters and their scare-mongering political allies.

Barack Obama ran and was elected on a promise to protect Americans by cleaning up the air that we breathe every single day. But to clean the air, you have to get your hands dirty. If the polluters who are complaining today had gotten their way for the past 40 years, there never would have been a Clean Air Act, and millions more Americans would have been sickened or died. Many of these polluters -- and their allies in Congress -- have fought progress to improve people's health at every opportunity. We need our president to fight back.

Here's the good news. Investments in reducing pollution are cost-effective. That's right: by investing in modern pollution controls, we'll actually save lives and save money. By the EPA's own analysis, the overall financial benefit to our economy of taking action on soot, smog, and toxics pollution will far outweigh the cost. After you factor in all of the costs of allowing toxic air pollution to continue, as in this just-released report, it becomes obvious that not to act as quickly as possible is economically irresponsible.

But there's more to this issue than the economic analysis. The moral challenge the president and EPA administrator should answer is how much these delays will hurt ordinary Americans -- not corporate polluters. Again, by the agency's own estimate, putting off a decision on an ozone standard for six months means that between 2,000 and 6,000 more Americans will die unnecessarily.

Deciding not to move forward on these important rules is, in fact, allowing those polluters to move us backward. After eight long years of fighting to protect the environment from corporate interests during the Bush years, we aren't about to start retreating now -- under a president who pledged to stand up to polluters and to protect our health and improve jobs and local economies in the process.

President Obama hasn't yet renounced that pledge, and he still has opportunities during the next two years to move boldly and forcefully to fulfill it. If he does, Sierra Club members will go the distance to champion him in that fight for what's right. But you can't champion a fighter if he leaves the ring. Lace up your gloves, Mr. President, and get back in.

Michael Brune is executive director of the Sierra Club.

December 13, 2010 at 12:33:51

We Are So Screwed-- So Let's Not Take It Lying Down

By Rob Kall (about the author)

opednews.com

The Washington post is reporting a poll showing that 70% of Americans are supporting Obama's tax package, and that 31% of liberals specifically support continuing the tax cuts for the rich. I see this as two things-- one, WaPo is continuing to serve the power elite, just as CNN and the NY Times. Two, there are a lot of people who call themselves liberals who are dupes, supporting the duopoly-- people who use platitudes about patience and about progressives insisting on too much, having unrealistic expectations.

Please either read Chris Hedges new book, The Death of the Liberal Class, and or, listen to my interview with Chris. Rob Kall Podcast: Chris Hedges; Death of the Liberal Class and a Call For Rebellion

We are facing a time when liberals are again being attacked and marginalized. I won't use the word liberal anymore. Hedges has shown how liberals are used and worked by the MSM and the power elite We need to take tougher stands and that will mean standing up to weak spined Democrats and people who call themselves liberal and progressive who call for settling for Obama's chronic presidential Fail moments. We have to stop. We have to stop accepting the varieties of feces diarea on the menu and demand a menu with real, solid options, no pun intended. We're facing two years of conservative control of the house and the White House. Let's face it. Progressives are in a rough situation.

We're being attacked by the President and his surrogates in the mainstream media. We're being sold out by elected members of congress. We're being attacked by limp, spineless liberals who, like familial abuse victims keep going back for more, excusing their abusers.

it's time to stand up to the people who say they are liberal and then defend the worst right wing decisions. It's time to fight back when supposed Democrats tell us to accept what we've been given.

America, democracy, the bill of rights, our freedoms are all on the line. Fascists like Joe Lieberman and most of the Republican party, outside of Ron Paul and his supporters want to kill or jail Julian Assange. CNN likens Asssange to a criminal. So does worthless Obama co-failure Eric Holder, who could go down in history as worse than Alberto Gonzales.

I don't have a lot of answers. We need to keep asking a lot of questions, making a lot of noise and refusing to accept the weakness, the spinelessness, the caving in without negotiating, the acceptance of failure as good enough.

I get comments on facebook every day from liberals defending Obama's failure, defending his tax program. I don't take it anymore. During WWII there were people who helped sell the Warsaw Ghetto. There were people who tried to silence critics of the Nazis. They thought they were being reasonable, moderate helpers. They were enabling evil, enabling horrors.

I am not saying that the people defending Obama are in the same class as the Warsaw Ghetto defenders, but they are defending and enabling things that are very wrong.

We need to stay together and fight the failed Obama presidency. I am more convinced than ever that Obama is a failure that he must be a one term president. Look at Peter Orszag, his former OMB director. Now he's taking a multi-million dollar a year job with Citigroup, a company his policies had huge effects upon. We are screwed. We are being screwed. At least we can say it and call it and face it.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

December 11, 2010 at 23:27:34

The Assassination of America By The Coward Barack Obama

By David Michael Green (about the author)

opednews.com

Wow! What got into Barack Obama?!?!

This week we saw two behaviors out of him that have been completely absent for his entire presidency. Two attitudinal displays that many of us have been longing to witness for a couple of years now.

First, he's showing some real passion, campaigning hard for a big item on his policy agenda.

And, second, he's using some tough talk against the people who are in his way.

It's great to see. And many of us have long wondered why he never did this before, back when his health care bill was getting savaged, or when we needed someone pounding the bully pulpit to stand up for working people or the unemployed.

Yeah, it's great to see.

Except for one small caveat.

The passion he's finally showing is for a horrific piece of legislation, and the people he's dumping on are his own base.

How great is that, eh? The right can do anything they want to this president, say anything about him they want, personally or politically, and he can't be bothered to hold them remotely accountable for their monstrous excesses. But if the people who actually made him president get angry at being crapped on by their own guy for the umpteenth time, if they finally stand-up and just say no to another sell-out, if they shake their heads in wonder at the dude who once talked about "the fierce urgency of now", well then, by gosh, that right there unleashes his unbridled rage and contempt.

Truth be told, I think his mocking anger -" on full display at his press conference this week -" is driven by shame. Pardon the armchair psychology, but I think he's hiding from his own embarrassment. I think he knows that his mother would not approve of the sell-out he has become. I think he knows that the Barack Obama of just two years ago would not himself approve of the loser occupying his body today. I think he has to transmogrify his shame into rage, and then direct it at those who point out his failings in order to live with his sorry self.

I think, in short, that Obama knows that he is an astonishingly complete coward, a wimp of epic proportions. I think he knows that the product of his cowardice is the wreckage of millions of lives and his own presidency. And I think that is finally just too much to bear, so he has attacked those who, after two years of remarkable forbearance, have finally had enough out of him, and have finally said so.

Obama's actually worse than a coward. Most cowards can at least identify their tormentors. Not President Bendback Overa. How many times will Republicans unanimously oppose his legislation before he figures out that they're not his friends? How many times do they need to literally say out loud that they're committed to his political destruction before he believes that they're committed to his political destruction? How many times does he need to get his butt kicked by them before he stops further empowering these thugs?

And how many times does he need to completely fold and yield to their agenda before he realizes that he's a loser and a joke?

Can you imagine what the last two years have been like within the top echelons of the Republican Party? At first, they must have thought they were toast. They must have figured that they were fighting against the very extinction of the party. They must have known that Bush and Cheney and Rove had driven them to the edge of a cliff. And now here was this new guy, with a new politics, and a hungry and mobilized public rallying behind him. They must have known that if he wanted to, he could give them the final and fatal push over the edge. And he could do so just by telling a few basic truths, so long absent from American politics.

Then, imagine their shock and their stunned glee as they came to realize over time that what they had on their hands was just the opposite of everything they had feared. That Obama was an even weaker pansy than Carter or Clinton or Kerry or Reid. That he was even wimpier than that still, that he was hopelessly predisposed to bargaining with his enemies just for the sake of giving his legislation some sort of jive kumbaya, bipartisan, transcendent, hopey-changey bullshit patina. That you could string the guy along forever. That you could get anything out of him. That you could say anything about him. That he ultimately stood for nothing. That he liked you better than the legions of liberal dupes whom he had fooled into making him president, and for whom he had only sneering, supercilious contempt. Imagine Republican surprise and joy when the guy who looked potentially like the slayer to their former giant turned out instead to be their savior, the naval-gazing punk who snatched resuscitation and historic victory from the jaws of crushing defeat and near annihilation. Imagine their shock and awe when it turned out that the greatest gift the Republican Party ever got was a Democratic president, and not even because of some White House intern sex scandal.

This tax deal that Oweenie just agreed to is an abomination, and it never needed to happen. If you have any doubt about how bad it is, consider solely the fact that the Republicans are in favor of it. Look at Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the rest of them. These are not your grandfather's Republicans. These are predatory thugs. They have come to Washington to serve the interests of their oligarchic puppet-masters, and nowadays they are capable of taking any action, telling any lie, and savaging any opponent to fulfill that singular agenda. If these folks are for it -" and especially if it involves taxes -" you can safely bet any several of your bodily appendages that the legislation in question is purely evil. Don't worry, you'll emerge fully intact.

If GOP support is not a sufficient barometer of the true nature of this sick dog of a deal, consider that it was bad enough even to wake the somnolent Democrats in Congress out of their slumberous thirty year coma, causing them to rise up and flip a fat bird in the direction of their own Dear Leader. No doubt this new-found independence has something to do with the fact that he just led them over a cliff in last month's election debacle, his "leadership' bequeathing them a gift-wrapped defeat of proportions unseen for nearly a century. But I think there's more than that. Indicators suggest that Democratic members of Congress are actually genuinely furious with the president for the piece of crap he delivered to them, both because if its content and because of the arrogance with which he took them for granted, negotiating with the Yanomami cannibal warriors of the GOP instead, and assuming that members of his own party would have no choice but to go along for the ride. When one member of Congress was defending the president in a speech to his fellow Democrats this week, out of nowhere another actually blurted out, "Fuck the president". I don't think they're just posturing this time.

Nor should they be. This deal is sickening in every respect. And I'm sickened, too, when I hear nice, buttoned-down, safe little liberal sanitary napkin defenders of Obummer defend him by saying, "What did you want him to do? He didn't have the votes." Arrrrggggghhhhh!!!! As if the only two choices a president has are to take a lousy deal or take no deal. As if the president doesn't have the world's biggest bully pulpit with which to sway public sentiment and votes in Congress. As if the public didn't already overwhelmingly support ending tax cuts for the wealthy. As if Obama doesn't have, and hasn't had for two years, giant majorities in both houses of Congress. As if the visage of Republicans kicking the unemployed to the street in order to cater to billionaires couldn't be portrayed as exactly the plutocratic heartless greed that it actually is, if only the president were willing to say so, rather than legitimating these thieves instead through negotiations. As if caving into "hostage-takers" (Neville Quisling Obama's own term) doesn't just encourage them to come back for more. As if, worst case scenario, it isn't better lose on principle sometimes than it is to win in shame. As if thinking you're winning when you're actually badly losing isn't the worst case scenario of all. As if Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush would have just neatly folded their hands together, pursed their lips, noted their regret, and explained that, golly gosh, they just couldn't get what they wanted because the darned votes weren't there.

Barack Obama is an utter failure as a president. In part, that is because his policies are almost entirely as regressive as any and all of George W. Bush's, and regressive policies have been ruining America for thirty years now. Now that the right has brought a once great country to its knees, more of the same is the absolute last thing we need, but that message somehow hasn't gotten to this supposedly Democratic president, who won election precisely on that principle.

But Obama is also a failure because he is a total coward. He fights for nothing. His view of the presidency as some sort of passive, dormant institution that does what it's told to by Congress and otherwise lays low, buffeted this way and that by the winds of circumstance, would have been an excellent fit for any of the benevolent, politically quiet, decades of the nineteenth century. It's a disaster for our time, however, when so much more is expected of presidents, and when the country is now faced with multiple crises.

His cowardice will almost assuredly make him a one-term president. That breaks my heart, I assure you. What's really disastrous, however, is what having such a punk at the helm of the country in this historical moment means for the 98 percent of us who aren't rich and connected. If the election of last month didn't make the point emphatically enough, far worse times are likely ahead of us in the coming years, and my guess is that there'll then be even worse times after that.

The extent of President Milquetoast's capitulations are now becoming the stuff of legend. In the last week alone, he gave us a remarkable record of multiple and thorough assume-the-position-full-on-presidential-reamings, one directly following the next, as his adversaries passed around his rag doll self between them. No wonder regressive New York Times columnist David Brooks declared it had been a good week for Obama.

He stood on the sidelines silently watching as the repeal of the noxious Don't Ask Don't Tell policy went down to destruction. Previously claiming that he opposed the policy and that it would be ended on his watch (despite his administration having gone to court in support of both DADT and the Defense of Marriage Act), it seemingly never occurred to him to get out and fight for its repeal. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that that's what you're supposed to do with the presidency.

Similarly, his embarrassing efforts to placate the Israelis sufficiently to get them to simply halt their colonialist project for a mere ninety days also blew-up in his face. He had promised to sell them a whole slew of fighter jets, but that was not enough. Then he promised to give them a whole bunch more for free, on top of the original ones. All in exchange for a whopping ninety days worth of a construction halt on an illegal project! This great ally of ours proceeded to laugh in the face of a president whom they fear about as much as Father Christmas. This week it was announced that the Obama administration (or, more accurately, the Obama administered) is now giving up its effort, and along with that goes their much-vaunted peace initiative. It seems never to have occurred to Obambi to actually turn the screws a little bit on the Israelis. Its not like he even needed to use sticks to get his way (god forbid a president should twist arms!). We give so much money and existential security protection to the arrogant Israelis that the president could have even gotten substantial leverage by simply denying them a few of the carrots already in the pipeline. But, gosh, that would be so, so... proactive.

Of course, the worst of it was the deal on taxes, which is so wrong in so many ways it defies words. But I'll try anyhow.

It is wrong, to start with, because this is no tax cut at all. None of them have been, since Reagan started doing this in the 1980s. In fact, if you borrow money in order to fund a tax "cut' -" and what the Republicans got from the president will require massive borrowing to finance it -" what you're really doing is a tax increase. You're still going to have to pay every penny back in taxes, but now you're also going to have to pay back a lot more pennies -" compounding annually -" as well, in the form of interest on those loans. Add it up and it's easy to see that net taxes go way up, not down. So why do the oligarchs want this so badly? Because what it really is is a tax transfer, from them to the rest of us, because it comes back at lower percentage rates for elites then it went out at in the form of tax-avoidance loans. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the president to be concerned about what this means for those of us who are not economic elites. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him to be concerned about what this means for our mountain of national debt that is approaching dangerous levels now. It doesn't even seem to have occurred to him to have publically offered the Republicans his acceptance of their beloved tax "cuts', contingent on them merely showing what expenditures from the federal budget they would cut to pay for them. Not only would this expose the GOP thugs as either deficit frauds or entitlement destroyers, but it would have had the huge political advantage of driving a wedge between the tea party and establishment camps within the GOP. But that would mean that the president might have actually won the battle, so we can't have that now, can we? And, of course, we didn't.

His stupid deal was wrong, secondly, because he held nearly all the cards. He had control of both houses of Congress. He had public opinion solidly behind ending tax rip-offs for millionaires and billionaires. He had the powerful deficit argument against these cuts, and the inability of his opponents to argue against it. He had solid public support for extending unemployment benefits, both on moral grounds and because of their excellent stimulative effect. And he had the default position in his favor. That is, if nothing happened, if they couldn't agree to a deal, if he refused to give in, Republicans lose, when the tax rates expire at the end of this year. With his veto pen, he could prevent them from getting the single thing they most crave in the entire universe for the next two years. He had everything, and all he had to do was show some spine. Oops -" I forgot. It's Barack Obama we're talking about here.

This thing was also wrong because the politics favored the president, and still he folded. On taxes, the only difference between his position and theirs was over tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. On unemployment, they are on record as saying that these meager payments to people suffering badly under George Bush's Great Recession just encourage laziness among recipients. He could have easily prevailed on these fights had he shown the courage to turn them into public relations battles. He could have done long-term damage to the GOP by showing them to be exactly what they are -" a destructive disease willing to do anything to the rest of us in order to better the already rich. Republicans have won politically over and over again by telling enormous lies, simply because nobody stands up to them and speaks the truth. Some political situations are more conducive to that than others (because, my god, they're such good liars), but few as much as this one. Allowing the GOP to paint itself as being precisely as heartless, greedy, deceitful and hypocritical as it actually is would have been a public relations bonanza far exceeding the one Newt Gingrich put on in his display of petulance that undid the party in the 1990s, if only Oworthless would have merely called their bluff. You know you're a sorry thing indeed when the likes of Bill Clinton makes you look weak and regressive by comparison.

Finally, this whole thing is tragically wrong because it is yet another major swing of the wrecking ball in the multi-decade effort to destroy the American welfare state. The fabulously wealthy just absolutely can't stand it that the rest of us should have some moderately decent quality of life instead of all that money getting crammed into their already overstuffed pockets. That's why these sociopaths have been trying for thirty years to unravel the New Deal and more. That means breaking unions, that means trade deals shipping decent jobs overseas, that means changing the tax structure in their favor, that means deregulation, and that means privatization. And what it also means is killing popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare the only way that seems possible: by creating a debt crisis that would give politicians plausible political cover for slashing these otherwise untouchable third-rail (you touch it, you die) benefits. It's bad enough to have Republicans work so hard toward that end. Now, in the age of Clinton and Obama, Democrats are every bit as culpable.

Barack Obama is the biggest political wimp to walk the global stage since Neville Chamberlain donned lederhosen and hoisted a beer with the Führer in Munich. Even Chamberlain had an excuse, though. Had the Nazis devoted their full attention to gobbling up Britain, it seemed reasonable at the time to imagine that they could well have succeeded. After all, France would later fall in a mere seven weeks. And, indeed, Chamberlain was canonized at the time for saving his country by means of what looked then like a politically adroit, if highly cynical, deal with the devil.

Obama has no such excuse. He's just a freaking coward, and his cowardice is killing this country. It must be stopped.

If we progressives have learned anything these last two dismal years, it is that an over-reliance on electoral solutions to our problems is a failed strategy, especially when you live in a country with a one-party two-party system. Now, more than ever, we must think of solutions outside the realm of conventional practice.

That said, there's no reason to ignore electoral politics at the same time we are acting elsewhere. The actions -" and, especially, the non-actions -" of this president have made a primary challenger to him coming from the left more than merely something to be contemplated in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his worthless nature.

It is now an absolute necessity.

Russ Feingold, are you listening? Your country is calling.

www.regressiveantidote.net

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), (more...)

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